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  GENEVIEVE J. FOXEY MCCLEARY

  A strong woman who has the courage to change and a heart of gold, My sister …

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  Sometimes we have an opportunity in life and don’t see it until later down the road. I have been given a very wonderful opportunity to write about Nellie Bly, and for this I shall always be grateful to Linda Quinton, Bob Gleason, Tom Doherty, and Harvey Klinger.

  I would also like to extend my thanks to Katharine Critchlow, an incredible young lady who was very helpful with The Formula for Murder, and Whitney Ross, who is constantly coming to everyone’s rescue. Thank you, Whitney.

  I wish I had the names of each of the people in the Production department, because each and every one of you has done an incredible job with all my Nellie novels and I am eternally grateful. And my copy editor, NaNá Stoelzle—thank you for doing such a great job.

  Michelle Mashoke-Anderson, a young business lady here on Cape Cod, has helped me in more ways than one. Thank you, Michelle.

  Karen Vail, an enormous thank-you for constantly being in my corner. What would I do without you? Again, thank you!

  There are three newspaper reporters to whom I am very grateful for being here on Cape Cod—Melanie Lauwers, Laurie Higgins, and Kathleen Szmit. Thank you!

  There is also the Cape Cod Writers Center that all writers here on the Cape are very lucky to have. I would personally like to thank Moira Powers, Nancy Rubin Stuart, and Kevin Summons, for all your hard work and dedication to helping authors, especially me! Thank you!

  And I can’t forget the Cape Cod Community Media Center, which is constantly promoting authors. I want to thank each and every one of you for your dedication and having me on your show. And a special thanks to Shirley Eastman—the beautiful lady who “interviewed” each Nellie book. Thank you. You have a fabulous gift for making a person feel relaxed in front of the camera.

  And very, very important, I shall always be forever thankful to all the bookstores that have Nellie on their shelves and all the people who have read my Nellie books: “Thank you a million times. Nellie and I are internally grateful.”

  NELLIE BLY

  CONTENTS

  Title Page

  Copyright Notice

  Dedication

  Acknowledgments

  Epigraph

  Part I: London

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Epigraph

  Chapter 4

  Epigraph

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Epigraph

  Chapter 14

  Epigraph

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Epigraph

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Part II: Bath, England

  Epigraph

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Epigraph

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Epigraph

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Chapter 33

  Epigraph

  Chapter 34

  Chapter 35

  Chapter 36

  Epigraph

  Chapter 37

  Chapter 38

  Chapter 39

  Chapter 40

  Chapter 41

  Chapter 42

  Part III: Dartmoor

  Epigraph

  Chapter 43

  Chapter 44

  Chapter 45

  Chapter 46

  Chapter 47

  Chapter 48

  Chapter 49

  Chapter 50

  Chapter 51

  Chapter 52

  Chapter 53

  Chapter 54

  Chapter 55

  Chapter 56

  Chapter 57

  Chapter 58

  Chapter 59

  Part IV: The Laboratory of Dr. Lacroix

  Epigraph

  Chapter 60

  Chapter 61

  Chapter 62

  Chapter 63

  Chapter 64

  Chapter 65

  Chapter 66

  Epigraph

  Chapter 67

  Chapter 68

  Chapter 69

  Historical Note

  Footnotes

  Forge Books by Carol McCleary

  About the Author

  Copyright

  We must not allow the clock and the calendar to blind us to the fact that each moment of life is a miracle and a mystery.

  —H. G. WELLS

  PART I

  London

  1

  Journal of Nellie Bly, 1890

  Before I went to England early in the year, I had heard tales of the haunted moors of Dartmoor, that bleak, windswept land where strange creatures are said to roam on moonless nights, but nothing prepared me for murder and science gone mad as men tempted the heavens by trying to create in a test tube that which only God possesses the right to do.

  What I came to witness in these dark days was men of science crazed by their demented dreams of creating something no other mortal has done. It wasn’t the first time murder and madness was born in scientific experiments. And like the question of the chicken and the egg, I wonder—is it the science that drives men mad? Or do the scientists taint their formulas with a bit of their own insanity?

  Was Mary Shelley’s Victor Frankenstein insane to have brought the dead back to life with powerful jolts of electricity—or did the monster he created drive him mad when it became murderously uncontrollable?

  Victor Frankenstein warns another ambitious man of the dangers of trying to achieve what no one else has ever accomplished, calling his success a serpent that has stung him: “Do you share my madness? Have you drunk also of the intoxicating draught? Hear me; let me reveal my tale, and you will dash the cup from your lips!”

  I have no doubt Victor Frankenstein would say that Mr. Stevenson’s ambitious Dr. Jekyll actually was the murderous beast rather than the alter ego he created with a potion, the violent Mr. Hyde.

  Be what it may, the matter that was to draw me into the dark side of science in the tors and crags of the moors began, appropriately enough, in a place of the dead.

  2

  London, 1890

  I shiver as I leave a gloomy London day behind me and step into a dank morgue near the banks of the River Thames. This small branch of Her Majesty’s Coroner’s Office is on a wharf near London Bridge in that area called the Pool, the busiest part of the biggest waterfront in the world.

  The breath of the dead in this examining room has a sharp edge to it, smelling like paint thinner poured over ice. Blocks of ice are scattered about the room, lowering the temperature to slow down decomposition of the bodies, with the
runoff from the ice and blood slipping through slats in the wood floor.

  After the first attack on my nose, another smell is apparent, hidden under the prickly acidic tang of cleaning fluid—death, a bouquet of decomposing flesh, blood, and body fluids.

  In a curious way, the chill air accented by the scent of blood and flesh remind me of a visit I made to a meatpacking plant in Pittsburgh when I went undercover to investigate the conditions. Comparing an animal slaughterhouse with an examining room for the dead is a gruesome thought; usually I’m not this morbid, but the unstirred cold air full of strange smells has awakened the dark side of my imagination.

  My name is Nellie Bly. I’m a crime reporter for The World, Mr. Pulitzer’s newspaper in New York City. I came to London and this chamber of death not for a news story but to lay to rest a dear friend.

  The room had been washed down recently, probably moments before I stepped in because the slated wood floor is still wet. The narrow openings on the floor permit whatever comes out of the bodies to flow into the river and back to the sea. The thought of human essence returning to the ocean is a comforting one since some say that life began in the sea, but as I stand for a moment to let my eyes adjust to the gloom of the windowless room, the smell of the Thames—poisoned by the noxious wastes of man and machines—rises to become a dominant stench in the room.

  “The river stinks worse than the dead,” Inspector Abberline says. “Sorry. That was badly thought out, wasn’t it.”

  The Scotland Yard inspector, who I met the previous year when I was in London following a lead on a murder case,1 gives me a look of concern as he hands me a vinegar-scented nosegay meant to stun my sense of smell.

  I put it in my lace hankie but don’t put it up to my nose. I am here for a dear friend and I don’t want my senses muted.

  Butcher-block slabs are set out in two rows, a dozen on each side, like beds in a hospital ward. Wood is a cheap but an unfortunate choice for morgue tables because it stains. White sheets, many stained with blood and other body fluids, are tossed haphazardly over bodies not being worked on.

  Inspector Abberline had entered before me to “prepare” the room for my visit—covering the naked dead lest they offend my fragile feminine constitution. I could have told him that I had already seen things in my life that no woman—or man—should have seen.

  From the appearance of the bodies that are not covered, most of them had been pulled from the river already in an advanced state of decomposition. Like New York City’s waterways, the Thames is not a gentle environment for human flesh. One wonders how the poor fish survive.

  I’m grateful that most of the bodies are sheeted, hiding the cruelties of man, machine, or that done by their own hand. I have been in morgues where bodies are left uncovered, lined up like dead fish ready to be gutted.

  A woman dressed in widows’ black from bonnet to shoes is sitting next to a male body on the first slab in the room. Her head drifts down and then jerks back up as she fights dozing off. A bell tied to the man’s wrist tells me that she’s his wife or other close relative there for “the waiting.” The procedure occurs when the morgue attendants are not entirely certain that the man is dead. Rather than risk burying him alive, the bell is placed on his wrist for twenty-four hours. If it rings, he will be transferred to a hospital rather than the cemetery.

  My heart goes out to the woman. She is a lonely figure, full of hope that has little promise.

  Two tables down from her an attendant wearing a white cloth apron is scrubbing a male body, dipping his bloody rag into a bucket and bringing it back, bloodred water flying off the rag as it is pulled out of the pail, splashing on the floor and draining through the slats into the river.

  Against the back wall are wood shelves with knives, scalpels, saws, and other medical instruments and supplies. A small cart next to it is piled high with dirty, bloody rags and clothing.

  As a crime reporter I have been in morgues before, so as my eyes sweep this room I recognize that it’s not a fully functional coroner’s examination room, despite some of the “tools of the trade” on the shelves. Rather than doctors with saws and knives cutting into bodies or testing vials of blood for poisons in a hunt for a cause of death, I see only Dieners, morgue assistants, whose duties are to handle and clean the bodies.

  Inspector Abberline catches my look at the Dieners and reads my thought. “If there’s a serious issue about the cause of death, the body is taken to the central morgue for examination. Most of the poor souls in here gave up the ghost voluntarily or were hastened to their maker by a blunt instrument in a dark alley, so there’s no reason for further investigation.”

  Kind man that he is, he avoids using the word suicide. But that is why I am in this chilly purgatory that is a temporary repose for bodies fished out of the river before finding a permanent place six feet under.

  Something about the Dieners with their white cloth aprons stained with blood is familiar to me, but my thoughts are too crowded with keeping my feelings under control to put it together. The cloth aprons are something of a puzzle because the morgue attendants I’ve seen in the past had worn rubber ones.

  “The remains of Hailey McGuire are at the end of the line,” Inspector Abberline says.

  The remains of Hailey McGuire.

  A few weeks ago I knew a lovely young woman with that name, full of life and spirit. The spirit has escaped for what I hope is a better place and now her name is simply the inscription on a morgue toe tag attached to a “body” that constitutes the “remains” she left behind.

  I can see at a glance that almost all of the bodies in the room are male, which is to be expected for a morgue on the docks. I imagine mostly sailors, fishermen, and dockworkers, along with an occasional prostitute, are brought here. Hailey was none of these, but people driven to end their lives not infrequently find their way to water.

  Hailey. Suicide. How sad that is. How hard it is to believe.

  The inspector gives me another concerned look and gently takes my arm. “We’re almost there.”

  I give him an “I’m okay” smile as we make our way down the path of the dead.

  A gruesome thought that comes to mind is unavoidable: One day the gray corpse of Nellie Bly, linked to the name by only a toe tag, will be an empty carcass in a place like this. I just hope my spirit will have moved on to what I sincerely pray is a better place and not hot as hell—if you know what I mean.

  The inspector hadn’t wanted me to view the body, not even after it is transferred to a funeral home. “These cases where the body has been in water are best laid to rest with a closed casket viewing,” he’d said. But I feel that I would be cowardly if I avoided seeing my friend and holding her hand as I say good-bye. She has no one else.

  We pass a man, who I take from his mackintosh and high rubber boots to be a fisherman, as he bends over a male body, perhaps that of a shipmate whose last port of call was Davy Jones’s locker. The fisherman is putting coins on the eyelids of his mate.

  “Paying toll to the ferryman,” Inspector Abberline says.

  I know the superstition. “A payment to Charon, the boatman who ferries the souls of the dead across the River Styx in the Underworld, is how my mother explained it to me when my father died. I was six and an old friend of his bent over the coffin before it was lowered into the ground to place coins on my father’s eyes.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  I can only nod my head in thanks for I still miss my father dearly and the memory of his interment hits me hard as I see the fisherman placing the coins. It had been a rainy gray day with a deep-bone chill in the air, not unlike the funeral atmosphere I find today in London. Seeing the cold, stiff pallor on my father’s face scarred me, making it difficult for me to deal with death.

  The coarse, brutal man my poor mother married in desperation to keep us children fed after my father’s untimely death had made the scar a permanent open wound when he forced me to watch a cow being slaughtered when I was a young teenager.
“I’m making you tough,” is what he said. But I knew he was being cruel and mean because he found pleasure in playing the bully.

  I try to put aside those bitter memories as we come to a covered body on the last slab in the line.

  A Diener wearing a fouled white apron stands by on the other side of the table waiting for us. He’s overweight, with large jowls that quiver as he purses his lips. He slaps a fly off his cheek and looks to the inspector for permission to remove the sheet.

  My knees start shaking and my heart jumps into my throat.

  3

  Just a few weeks ago I was in Manhattan covering a story about the sex trafficking of young girls from the Orient when Mr. Cockerill, the managing editor of Mr. Pulitzer’s newspaper, called me into his office.

  “You need to sit down,” was the first thing he told me. This proclamation, coming in the tone that something was desperately wrong, alarmed me. My first thought was that something had happened to my mother, who lives with me.

  “Hailey McGuire committed suicide.”

  He had been right. I needed to be sitting when I heard the news.

  Hailey was not just a dear friend, but a young woman who, like me, had struggled hard to get a job in the male dominated world of newspaper reporting. A product of an orphanage, without even a high school diploma, Hailey had been destined for work as a household servant or worse, the terrible life of a prostitute. Having fought tooth and nail to break into reporting, and having left high school myself before completion because of a heart problem,2 I empathized with Hailey’s struggles.

  Actually, I was the person who first directed her toward working as a reporter after watching her testify at a court trial I was covering two years ago.

  The criminal case was against a man who owned a service that referred household servants. He was accused of raping a young girl who had applied for servant work. Hailey had also applied through the agency and testified in court that the man had indecently touched her and she had fought back to avoid being raped.