The Bohemian Murders Read Free

thin. And his eyes were definitely not jolly: They were dark, round, too small for his face, and constantly jumped around in a nervous manner.
    I said, “How do you do. I am Fremont Jones, temporarily the lighthouse keeper at Point Pinos. The rescue team hasn’t brought the body in yet.” I inclined my head toward the water, meanwhile stroking the horse’s neck and feeling the tiny quivers of abating exertion beneath his smooth, warm skin. The horse regarded me with an eye of liquid jet, as if he understood that my stroking was as much to calm myself as him. I have heard tell thathorses are not intelligent, but that is hard to believe when you look into their eyes.
    Dr. Bright made a grunt of acknowledgment and moved off toward the place where I’d been standing before his arrival. He was bandy-legged, I noticed, and walked with an odd little hitch in his gait. His hair was so thick and heavy that the breeze off the bay barely stirred it, whereas my own reddish-brown topknot was blowing down strand by strand. He put his black bag on a rock and waited, jiggling up and down with impatience. I heard him mutter something that sounded like “Come on, come on!”
    They did come on, and it was a sight I might wish to forget, but I know I will never be able to as long as I live. A brawny man in hip boots came striding through the surf with the drowned woman in his arms. Her dark hair was hanging down like a dripping curtain and her scarlet dress was sodden. White silk stockings trailed in tatters from her legs; one shoe was missing. The sky behind the man with his tragic burden was streaked with long rose ribbons and the sea was turning purple as the sun went down.
    A small crowd of people, alerted by the horn on the firehouse that summons the ocean rescue, had begun to gather but they kept a respectful distance and an equally respectful silence. I stood apart, still stroking the coroner’s horse, but I went forward when I heard Dr. Bright say, “Put her down right here. After I’ve done a brief examination, we’ll want the people to come forward, see if somebody can identify her.”
    Good luck, I thought as nausea rose in my throat, for the one shoe was not all that was missing. So was half her face. I looked away, into the stricken eyes of the man who’d carried her.
    “The fishes been at her,” he said. Someone in the front row of bystanders heard, repeated, and a murmuring rippled through the crowd.
    “How—” My voice broke. I tried again. “How long do you suppose she has been in the water?” There was not much odor; the body was not decomposed, merely … eaten. Somehow I found that hard to bear; it mademe feel inside as if my spine were a blackboard and someone was scraping his fingers down it.
    “Not long,” said Dr. Bright, “thirty-six hours at the outside, I’d guess, but I’ll know more when I get her back to the laboratory. It’s a shame about her face, though. Be that much harder to get an identification.”
    “The, um, the dress is distinctive,” I said. That was my final contribution. I couldn’t bear to look anymore at that poor woman. What I had not seen at first was that the bodice of her red dress had been ripped open—by a large fish, or an angry person before she fell into the water, who could tell?—and the fish had eaten away at the one breast thus exposed. They had nibbled at her fingers and at the toes of her shoeless foot. But the dress was indeed distinctive and I guessed it would have been expensive because it looked like velvet. I certainly wasn’t going to touch it to find out for sure. I further guessed that her underclothes would be even more informative, for the inch of petticoat that showed beneath the hem of her dress was quite fine. That is, where the sharp teeth of the fish had not pulled the lace into tatters.
    Somehow one does not think of fish as having teeth. But obviously some species must—the proof was there on the sandy ground before me. I moved back a few