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

not think so.
    “An army man?”
    Again, she was not sure. “He might very well have had a military bearing,” she conceded, “but he remains unfortunately dim in my mind.”
    But what Mrs. Loss did recall was that “the child” seemed “a very nice girl” with fine manners and airs. She ordered a glass of lemonade and bowed smartly upon taking her leave.
    Mrs. Loss remembered her particularly because she had on a dress similar to one that had belonged to Mrs. Loss’s sister-in-law, recently deceased. Looking back, Mrs. Loss now presumed this girl to have been Mary Rogers.
    There was more.
    Later that night, Mrs. Loss told Hays, she recalled having heard screams. At first she thought it to be her middle son, Ossian, whom she had sent to drive a bull to a neighboring farm. Fearing he hadbeen gored, she took to the road, following the track all the way to the neighbor’s barn. There she found her boy none the worse for wear, and thinking nothing more about the screams, so many people having come across the river and enjoyed themselves that day due to the heat wave, she took him firmly by the arm and returned to the roadhouse.
    During Hays’ interview with Mrs. Loss, Adam Wall, the local stagecoach driver who had picked Hays up at the wharf and brought him to the inn, came into the roadhouse for some warranted refreshment, the day being as hot as it was, ninety-three degrees.
    Overhearing the conversation, Mr. Wall intruded, eagerly offering that he had viewed the corpse of the dead girl the Wednesday of her discovery on the riverbank. He told Hays he had recognized her straightaway as a young woman he had picked up at the Bull’s Head Ferry and brought to Mrs. Loss’s roadhouse only a few days before, on Sunday. He remembered upon dropping her off that there had indeed been packs of hoodlums roaming the woods and enclaves that afternoon particularly. He especially remembered one gang who had invaded the little mud shanty next to Mrs. Loss’s, seized all the cakes, and ate them, refusing to pay anything and threatening anyone who dared interfere.
    According to Mr. Wall, the gang remained about the shoreline until dark, when they departed in a hurry by rowboat, but not before dragging the daughter of a family, over for a day’s outing, out of their boat and having their way with her despite the protestations of her father.
    Mr. Wall told Hays he had not personally witnessed the abduction of the daughter, but this is what he had heard, although from whom he could not remember. Hays, noting the slow manner in which Mr. Wall’s eyes rose to meet Mrs. Loss’s eyes, immediately knew the source of this tidbit of gossip to be her.

9
In a Clearing
    A week later, in the tepid middle days of September, word reached Hays that Mrs. Loss had come forward to Bennett at the Herald with a remarkable revelation.
    Her two younger sons, she recounted, Oscar and Ossian, aged nine and twelve respectively (Charlie was the eldest at fifteen), had been playing in the woods near her home, north of the old Weehawken ferry dock. In a clearing they had come across a variety of discarded clothes, gloves, handkerchief, and parasol, the lot of it inhabited by crawling bugs of the type that fester in wet discarded articles.
    These found articles themselves were much mildewed and moldy, trampled down, she said, in a thicket near a cove in the woods. The parasol and handkerchief had the initials MCR embroidered on them, leaving no doubt to whom they belonged.
    Hays traveled immediately to Mrs. Loss. The clothing, the parasol, the gloves, alleging to be Mary Rogers’, were all laid out in the downstairs bar at Nick Moore’s House.
    “Why, my good woman, were these articles not left in place?” Hays demanded upon viewing them exhibited in this manner.
    Mrs. Loss shrank back from his anger, and said in her defense she was fearful someone not connected to the case would find them and remove them.
    “Not likely, considering they have remained