The Beautiful Cigar Girl by Daniel Stashower

Author:Daniel Stashower [Stashower, Daniel]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
ISBN: 9781440620485
Publisher: Penguin Group USA, Inc.
Published: 2007-12-03T16:00:00+00:00

XII

The Murder Thicket

ON THE AFTERNOON OF AUGUST 25, 1841, a widow named Frederica Loss sent her two younger sons—Charles, age 16, and Ossian, age 12—to collect sassafras bark from a nearby grove. Mrs. Loss was the proprietor of an establishment called Nick Moore’s Tavern, a roadhouse near the shore of Weehawken, New Jersey, a short distance north of Elysian Fields. In addition to a small number of guest rooms, the Loss inn offered light refreshments, cakes, and liquor for sale to visitors whose wanderings took them beyond Castle Point and Sybil’s Cave.

The two boys, named Kellenbarack after their father, who no longer lived with the family, took a path that led some four hundred yards from the house along an unused carriage route. The trail ran down toward a river dock known as Bull’s Ferry, winding past a dense thicket where the boys often played games of hide-and-seek. It was an unsightly tangle of beech trees and briar shrubs entwined along a stone wall, forming a thick canopy over a cramped interior space. Inside, four craggy boulders served as a crude grouping of stools and benches.

As Mrs. Loss’s sons neared the thicket that afternoon, a flash of white caught the eye of Ossian, the younger boy. Pushing his head through an opening, he saw a piece of cloth lying on one of the rocks. He scrambled through the tangle of branches, closely followed by his brother, Charles, and snatched up an unfamiliar garment. “Hello,” he called, “there’s somebody has left their shirt.” As the older boy examined the fabric, he realized that he was holding a woman’s petticoat. Looking around, he noticed several other items of female clothing. A silk scarf was draped across another of the boulders, and hanging across the interior branches were strips of fabric that appeared to have been torn from a white dress. As he gathered up the garments and handed them to his brother, Charles made another discovery: A ladies’ parasol and handkerchief were wedged into a gap between one of the boulders and a tree trunk. Carrying the two items back through the opening of the thicket, he examined them in the sunlight. The delicate silk of the parasol was partly rotted from lying on the damp ground, and the handkerchief was badly stained. Even so, Charles could make out a pair of initials delicately embroidered along the hem: “M.R.”

The two boys bundled up their discoveries and carried them back to their mother. Mrs. Loss examined each article carefully, then folded up the torn and discolored pieces of clothing and placed them in a drawer. Seven days would pass before she took them out again. No convincing explanation for this delay was ever offered. Perhaps at first Mrs. Loss failed to draw a connection between the items and the missing cigar girl. Possibly she hoped that the reward money would continue to increase as the authorities grew more desperate. When pressed, she would only say, according to later newspaper accounts, that she had

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.