The Blackest Bird by Joel Rose Read Free Book Online Page A

trussed.)
Mary Rogers had not died. She was in hiding, and the body was not the body of Mary at all, but of another, as yet unidentified.
    The first possibility struck him as the strongest. Mary’s death was related to some band of local riffraff. Both coroners seemed to corroborate the facts. Mary Rogers’ body had been violated by several men, perhaps as many as three, perhaps more. On any given summer Sunday afternoon numbers of hooligans were about, rowing over from Manhattan or taking the steam ferry.
    Once again Hays went over the facts. On the Sunday, the last day Mrs. Rogers was to see her daughter alive, Mary left the Nassau Street address at 10 a.m. Church was out, and at that hour many people were on the street. She was a beautiful young woman, well known from her employ at Anderson’s. Hays judged tens if not hundreds of people must know her by sight.
    Someone must have noticed her.
    He called Sergeant McArdel into his office and ordered him to dispatch a constable each to the Evening Signal and New York Mercury to wrest the names of those individuals mentioned in the newsprints’ columns who claimed to have observed Mary.
    As a result, an umbrella maker from Rose Street was questioned who said he had seen a girl who may have been Mary shortly after ten that Sunday morning in Theatre Alley, a short lane off Ann Street, leading to the stage door of the Park Theatre. There, he said, the girl ran into the arms of a waiting gentleman, greeting him as one might a lover, and then repairing with him up the alley in a northerly direction to an ultimate destination, the witness swore, he knew not where, nor, when pressed, could hope to know.
    An accounts clerk at the New York Bank, out for an early Sunday morning promenade, was also ferreted out and detained. He said he saw Mary, or a girl meeting Mary’s description, on Barclay Street. She was heading in the direction, he remembered, of the Hoboken ferry, whose station was at the extreme west end of that street.
    Additionally, a contingent from the Day Watch dispatched to canvass the ferry quay found a young man who concurred with earlier testimony, saying he, too, saw Mary, or, again, a girl who looked like Mary, boarding the ferry with a “dark-complexioned man.” Other passengers vouched similarly, attesting they remembered the fellow. Two among them, daily riders, agreed he may have been a military man, a naval or army officer.
    On Old Hays’ orders a force was sent across the river to Hoboken, tramping the bank south to Jersey City and north to Weehawken.
    A German woman, Mrs. Frederika Kallenbarack Loss, proprietress of Nick Moore’s House, an inn near to where the body had been found, reported the presence that Sunday of a group of some fifteen ruffians who had rowed over from the city in two small boats, and had proceeded to cause havoc all afternoon long. Mrs. Loss also revealed that same afternoon a young woman of Mary’s description had patronized her establishment.
    Word was immediately sent to Hays of Mrs. Loss’s recollection. Balboa drove the high constable to the ferry wharf, and he was on the next boat over, standing the journey at the rail, gazing north at the wide scope and magnificence of the Hudson. Upon landing at Hoboken, Hays was immediately taken by stage north to the Nick Moore House.
    Hays found Mrs. Loss to be an immigrant woman, although not a recent immigrant, he thought, from the traces of her accent. She was decidedly big-boned and strong-featured, her hair a yellow color, streaked by almost imperceptible strands of gray and pulled back in a loose bun. Her eyes were unsettling and icily blue.
    Mrs. Loss recounted to Hays (smiling almost coquettishly) the fateful day of what was presumed to be Mary’s murder:
    A girl had come into the inn on the arm of a gentleman. Once more agreeing with other witnesses, the man was again described as dark-complexioned.
    “Could he have been a navy man?” Hays asked.
    She was not sure. She did