Murder in Morningside Heights (A Gaslight Mystery) Read Free Page A

with her were left behind?” He didn’t add that the killing had been much too personal. Thieves didn’t stab people in the face. Frank sighed. “Can I take a look at the body?”
    “Sure. I’ll get Herman to take you down.”
    The dead room was as grim as its name, dark and dank and chilly on this wintry day. They ran cold water over the corpses to keep them fresh, even in February, so the sound of dripping water added to the bleakness. He didn’t have to look far to find Abigail. Her lush white body stood out among the bloated and battered carcasses of the other dead. Seeing her lying there, completely exposed, was an abomination.
    “Even with the cuts, she was a looker,” the young man named Herman said, leering. “Wouldn’t mind a piece of that when she was alive.”
    Frank gave him the glare he usually reserved for uncooperative criminals to frighten them into submission. It worked pretty well on Herman, too. He scurried away guiltily.
    The wounds were worse than Frank had imagined. The eye, of course, was awful, but the other wounds were vicious, too, jagged and deep and probably inflicted by someone ina rage. If she had survived, she would have been scarred. Had that been the killer’s original intention?
    He checked her hands and saw that she’d tried to ward off the blows that had killed her, but bare hands weren’t much help against a determined assailant with a weapon.
    Even a woman could have done this.
    With a sigh, he realized he’d just doubled his number of possible suspects.
    *   *   *
    S ince he still had most of the afternoon left, he decided to take the elevated railroad up to Morningside Heights to look at the place where Abigail had been murdered and see if he could speak to the person in charge of the college. Would that be a dean or something? Frank realized how very little he knew about higher education.
    He managed to get a hansom cab to carry him from Bellevue on First Avenue all the way over to Ninth Avenue, where he could catch the El up to Morningside Heights. The nine-block journey over to the El station took far longer than the ninety-block trip uptown to the Normal School on the El, since the El didn’t have to stop for traffic at every intersection.
    The trip gave Frank plenty of time to consider the various methods of transportation available in the city. His in-laws kept a carriage, which meant they had to keep horses and servants to tend the horses and drive the carriage. The electric trolleys were a big improvement over the old horsecars that used to carry passengers up and down the city, but they were always overcrowded and either too hot or too cold, depending on the season. They were still talking about a train system that would run underground, but Frank would believe it when he saw it. Meanwhile, he amused himself by watching the buildings flashing by outside the train andcatching glimpses of the people living and working behind their windows.
    He stepped out of the station at 118th Street into another world. Here trees graced the streets and traffic moved at a leisurely pace. Houses sat behind neatly tended front yards guarded by wrought iron fences. In summer, it would seem like the country, and even now, in the dead of winter, Frank could feel the relative peacefulness.
    He’d been right. No thieves were stabbing young girls to death in broad daylight here, or even in the dead of night. He found the Normal School easily enough. In fact, no thieves or any other miscreants could get within a hundred feet of the building without being seen. It sat in the middle of what had been a field not too long ago, its U-shaped grandeur even more impressive because no other buildings competed with it. The entrance was columned and Frank stepped inside the impressive doors unchallenged. Inside, the entryway stretched upward to the domed roof three stories above, where a stained glass skylight filtered the feeble winter sun. An impressive staircase gave access to the floors