What Alice Knew by Paula Marantz Cohen Page B

difficult, given the climate at the moment.”
    William looked down at the body again. “What happened to her?” he asked.
    “Suicide,” said Abberline succinctly.
    “How do you know?”
    “All the standard indicators: the disposition of the body, the knife found there.” Abberline pointed to a spot where a mark had been made on the ground. Nearby, one of the officers was holding what looked like a medium-sized kitchen knife wrapped in a rag. “And of course, she’s tried it before.” He motioned to the scar on the woman’s wrist.
    “I see all that. But the method seems so unusual.”
    “Not really, among these people, sadly enough,” noted Abberline, “though it’s more the women who do it. The men drink themselves into a stupor and stumble under a carriage or fall off a bridge, but the women tend to be more efficient. It’s a gruesome death, and it takes a sort of nerve. One almost has to admire them for it.”
    “But why did she do it?”
    “Why? Not hard to find an answer to that. Because life got too hard, too much poverty and hopelessness. Look at the neighborhood. They say she wouldn’t bring herself to do what so many of the others do—sell herself to live. So this is what comes of it. It’s a sad state of affairs that when they can live by their bodies, they die at the hands of a lunatic killer, and when they can’t, they die by their own hands.”
    The wagon had arrived to take the corpse to the mortuary, and several of the officers turned the body over. A kerchief was placed around her neck to hide the wound, and the woman was moved gingerly onto the cart. Something about her ethereal beauty inspired reverence and caused even the coarse officers to handle her gently and arrange her clothing carefully around her.
    Several onlookers were speaking to Abberline, explaining that the woman, Jenny Stoddard was her name, was a ladylike sort of person, but too sad for this world. “There was the death of the first child,” said one large matron with a gruff but not unkind manner. “She cried for months—too long to mourn a child. Then, when another came, we thought she’d rally, but she didn’t. If anything, it made her worse, reminded her of the other one she’d lost. She did what she could for him at first, but her heart wasn’t in it, and then she just stopped caring. The husband wasn’t a bad sort, but he had no patience for her weeping. He took off. After that, she tried to do away with herself, but her boy found her, and they patched her up. But now, she done it, and it’s just as well. He won’t be no worse off with her gone than he was with her here, poor soul.”
    “Where’s the child?” asked William, though as soon as he asked, he wished that he hadn’t.
    The woman pointed to one of the doorways, where a boy stood watching. He looked about ten, though he was undernourished, and William imagined he was probably a year or so older. His face was drawn and expressionless, but his eyes looked perceptive, and for a moment William thought he saw something like relief in them. Was it a relief to have his mother, perennially sad and useless, finally gone out of this world?
    Looking at the boy made William’s throat constrict. The thought of his own beloved and pampered child dead, and of this child, so neglected and impoverished, alive—what did it mean? Whose will was behind it? On what basis could William cling to the spiritual belief of which he had spoken to Abberline? Wanting to leave the scene, he nonetheless found himself walking over to where the boy was standing. “It’s your mother there, I hear,” he said gently, feeling it best to be direct.
    The boy looked at him a moment before speaking. “She wanted to do it, and she done it,” he finally said.
    “I’m sure she’s in heaven and at peace,” said William.
    “I dunno ’bout that,” said the boy. “But she won’ be crying no more. That’s somethin’.”
    “And what about you? What will you do with her