My Mistress’ Eyes are Raven Black by Terry Roberts

Author:Terry Roberts
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Turner Publishing Company
Published: 2021-02-15T00:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER THIRTY-FOUR

After the closing prayer, Nurse Taylor asked me to stay for a few minutes so she could ask my advice about something. Ethel Adams and Scottie Phillips offered to walk with Lucy back to the nurses’ quarters, which felt to me for a brief moment like a setup, as if someone was in danger.

But Lucy leaned toward me as everyone stood. “I’ll be fine,” she whispered. “See you later.” And then she was gone, chatting and giggling with the girls as the three of them left together.

As soon as we were alone, Taylor came to stand beside me. She reached out to grasp my elbow and told me how upset she was by what had happened to Thompson. “You are a man of the world, Mr. Robbins, an investigator from the government. Can you shed any light on how poor James Thompson … ?”

“Ended up floating in the lagoon?” She nodded sorrowfully.

“Somebody put him there, of course. Stole his body out of the morgue, presumably at night, attached him to something heavy, and dumped him in the water where it would be covered by the fill. Brilliant, really, if you want to get rid of a corpse.”

“But why?” Her tone was sad and plaintive.

It struck me again that either this woman really was a Christian saint or she was a brilliant actress, almost as if there were a half dozen personalities swimming around behind that benevolent mask. She could go from plucking out Jews and cutting off Gypsies to this troubled state of mourning for a fellow human being … all without blinking an eye.

I shrugged my shoulders. If she was involved, I’d only told her what she already thought I knew. And if she wasn’t, then it didn’t hurt to deliver just a few volts of electricity to her saintly self-assurance. Either way, I didn’t need to tell her anything more. “I don’t know,” I muttered. “The salt water will have erased anything the body might have told us.” And then—since she seemed wound up by her little prayer meeting—I decided to ask a few questions of my own. “Did James Thompson have a family?”

She shook her head sadly, and an honest-to-God tear crept out from under one eyelid. “Yes, but they were way out west. Idaho, I believe. He hadn’t been in touch with them for years. It seems that he was alienated from them in some way.”

“So they won’t send for the body?”

Again, the sad shake of the head, and she reached up to wipe the tear away, in case I’d missed it.

“And he’ll end up in the potter’s field on Hart Island?”

“I don’t know. I suppose so.”

She had to be lying. Of course she knew. “It’s sad, isn’t it,” I said, “to think that a boy from Idaho, the heartland of America, will end up in the same grave with all the human refuse that washes up here. End up with all those nasty people you were talking about. There ought to be something we can do about it.

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