Blood & Ivy by Paul Collins

Author:Paul Collins
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
Published: 2018-06-27T16:00:00+00:00

AS A matter of fact, Dr. Woodbridge Strong was rather amused by the case, too.

A string of witnesses from grocers and blacksmiths to schoolboys were questioned in quick succession to establish that Dr. Parkman had been seen walking up North Grove Street and into the college at two-fifteen p.m. on November 23. The victim’s older brother, the Reverend Francis Parkman, gave a moving account of Webster telling him of the missing man’s visit to the college—and how the professor had, the reverend puzzled aloud, “no expression of surprise at the disappearance, and none of sympathy.” But these witnesses were a formality: nobody, not even Webster, contested the fact that Parkman had visited the college that day. Whether he had ever reemerged—whether he’d been murdered, and whether the body found there was his—were the real questions. And for those, the court needed Webster’s own professional peers. Dr. Jeffries Wyman, for instance, took the stand with a painstaking catalog of bones and a chart that showed just where all the recovered bone fragments could be found in a single body.

Then there was Dr. Woodbridge Strong.

“I am a practicing physician in this city, and have been since 1820,” he announced to the court, and he cast his mind happily back to his youth. He was the same age as George Parkman but as jolly in his sangfroid as his old friend George had been dour. “When I was a student with the late Dr. Nathan Smith,” Strong recalled, “I took every opportunity to practice dissection. One winter, in particular, I occupied most of my time in dissecting, sometimes from eight in the morning till twelve at night! I have had a subject at my table for three months together. In the pursuit of my anatomical studies, I have had considerable experience in burning up, or getting rid of human remains by fire.”

As it happened, Dr. Strong had seen Parkman on the day of his disappearance. Even if he hadn’t known him, how could he not notice a hatchet-chinned and bony fellow like that? Dr. Strong was a connoisseur of what he termed “out of shape” bodies—not in bad health, necessarily, just literally the wrong shape. “If I see a man with one shoulder higher than the other, I always notice it,” he explained to the jury. “If I see a woman in the street with a crook in her back, I always notice it.”

He also noticed the beauties of the body, he added drolly.

But that wasn’t why the prosecution had called him. He stood before the jury as an expert on just how to get rid of a human body; in fact, on how to do it with only an ordinary fireplace. He’d had plenty of experience in his very own offices as a physician.

“Once, in particular,” he explained enthusiastically, “I had a pirate given to me by the United States Marshal, for dissection. It being warm weather, I wanted to get rid of the flesh, and preserve only the bones. He was

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