A bucket of ashes

A bucket of ashes by P.B. RYAN Page A

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Authors: P.B. RYAN
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wouldn’t mind posting a reward for information leading to the identification and arrest of his wife’s killers, say a thousand bucks, but he turned me down. Said he didn’t have that kind of money, on account of his business had started foundering, said the bank was threatening to foreclose on both his beach house and his home in Boston.”
    “Then how can he offer three thousand dollars for Quinn’s capture?” Cyril asked.
    “It’s five thousand if they kill him, which is really what he’s looking for,” Bryce said. “Even one of the dumb bashers this handbill is aimed at can read between the lines, but the way it’s worded, Cunningham can claim that’s not really what he means. The first batch of these bills showed up the very day after Murphy’s body was identified, ‘cause I’d made the mistake of telling Cunningham that we’d be looking for Quinn now. So two weeks after he turns me down for the thousand, he’s offering five times that much to whoever kills Quinn. When I asked him where the money came from, he said he sold that case of nautical instruments to Cornelius Vanderbilt. He said it was enough money to dig him out of his hole, and then some.”
    “I thought that collection had sentimental value,” Nell said.
    “To the wife, not to him. In fact, he told me he loathed the sight of it, cause it was the reason his wife got killed, said he couldn’t wait to get it out of the house.”
    *   *   *
    “I’d like to see my brother,” Nell told Mr. Packer after the mortician finally agreed, with a churlish lack of grace, to cancel the sale of Jamie’s body and prepare him for burial in a fine walnut coffin, wearing a proper suit of clothes.
    “Right this way,” said the officious little toad as he ushered her and Cyril downstairs to a cryptlike basement redolent of death and carbolic.
    “Nell, are you sure you want to do this?” asked Cyril as Mr. Packer opened a door into what he called the “Cold Room” and stood waiting for them to enter. “It’s bound to be a very unpleasant sight.”
    “I’ve seen dead bodies before, if you recall. You should also recall that I have a fairly strong stomach.”
    “This is your brother, Nell, and people who’ve died this way...” He closed his hands over her shoulders and said, “If you see him like this, this is how you’ll remember him. You won’t be able to help it.”
    Nell wanted to argue with him—this was her only chance, after all, to view her last remaining family member before his body was committed to the earth—but she had to grudgingly admit that he was right about remembering. If only she could forget the sight of her mother’s desiccated face frozen in a grimace of agony after the bout of Asiatic cholera that had wrung the life out of her within the space of a single day.
    “Let me go in first,” said Cyril. “And then if it’s... not too bad...”
    Nell nodded at the floor.
    She sat on a little hard-backed chair at the bottom of the stairs listening to the hiss of the gas jets until he emerged from the room about five minutes later. Softly he said, “Jamie wouldn’t want you to see him like that.”
    Neither of them spoke as he escorted her out to the sunlit street and handed her up into his physician’s coupé. He settled next to her and unwrapped the reins from the brake handle, but then he just sat there, gazing down the road in a preoccupied way.
    “Cyril?”
    “I lost Charlotte,” he said without looking at her.
    Nell stared at him as it sank in. “She...?”
    “About a year and a half ago. It was cancer, but it was quick, thank God. They had to keep her in the psychiatric wing because... well, she’d become so delusional that they couldn’t handle her on a regular floor. But they kept her comfortable.”
    “Cyril.” Touching his arm, Nell said, “I’m so sorry. I had no idea.” She wondered why he hadn’t told her this yesterday, but it was a question she kept to herself.
    He flicked the reins; the

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