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Overview
Massachusetts, 1897: Bertha Mellish, “the most peculiar, quiet, reserved girl” at Mount Holyoke College, is missing.
As a search team dredges the pond where Bertha might have drowned, her panicked father and sister arrive desperate to find some clue to her fate or state of mind. Bertha’s best friend, Agnes, a scholarly loner studying medicine, might know the truth, but she is being unhelpfully tightlipped, inciting the suspicions of Bertha’s family, her classmates, and the private investigator hired by the Mellish family doctor. As secrets from Agnes’s and Bertha’s lives come to light, so do the competing agendas driving each person who is searching for Bertha.
Where did Bertha go? Who would want to hurt her? And could she still be alive?
Edmund White Award–winning author Katharine Beutner takes a real-life unsolved mystery and crafts it into an unforgettable historical portrait of academia, family trauma, and the risks faced by women who dared to pursue unconventional paths at the end of the 19th century.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781641295710 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Soho Press, Incorporated |
| Publication date: | 05/07/2024 |
| Pages: | 360 |
| Sales rank: | 177,456 |
| Product dimensions: | 5.50(w) x 8.20(h) x 1.20(d) |
About the Author
Read an Excerpt
1
That morning Agnes was drawing the cracked pelvis of a beaver. She had found it in the woods near Upper Lake, where the men had been searching for Bertha. Usually she could collect only chipmunk bones or rabbit or squirrel. She’d never drawn a beaver before.
The men were still searching for Bertha. Agnes had wondered, briefly, what else they might find in the ponds. Perhaps there were other girls who had vanished in the College woods, other bones tangled in the roots of the pines along the grassy edges of the water. The bow of the clavicle, the bowl of the pelvis. She had wanted to see. But it was habit now to keep to herself, to appear as unobjectionable as possible. Mute as the white cross hung upon her wall and banal as the cross-stitched hymns beside it. She’d been spared freckles and red or black hair; hers was dark brown like soaked wood and lay flatter against her head than was fashionable. She and Bertha simply scraped their damp hair back after a washing—because dowdiness was permissible, even godly. Dowdiness had been a shield for them both.
Agnes had a narrow room on the third floor of Porter Hall, a slim little desk and chair designed for the ministers’ daughters who thronged the College. Bertha had fit these chairs well. Agnes herself was not narrow. She was a broad spare girl of twenty, trim but tall and square-shouldered and square-hipped. She never drew self-portraits, though she was a fine draughtswoman in the anatomical mode. She did not wish to look at herself long enough to see the truth of her body, how its overlapping rectangles would sit like bare fenced pastures on the page: Agnes Sullivan, all enclosure.
The girls on her hall usually left her alone, as they had left Bertha alone, because they disliked her almost as much as they had disliked Bertha. They still disliked Bertha, in the midst of their fluttering about her mysterious fate. Their dull antipathy did not bother Agnes. Being alone meant that she could concentrate on her work. But Agnes could not trust, any longer, that she would be left alone. Not after what she had done.
There were certain things Bertha had told Agnes that she might still need to do.
Bertha had said: You must lie. No one knows anything, no one can prove anything. Just us. So you can’t—you can’t give in. You must go on. Be strong.
Bertha said, as she kissed Agnes’s hand: I don’t want you to leave college. But you might have to.
And Agnes said: No. I won’t.
Bertha had been missing for one full day. Agnes bent closer to her sketch. Her pencil feathered in a shadow on the page: the fissure in the beaver’s bone, where its strength had failed.
While Agnes drew, the Reverend John Hyrcanus Mellish and his older daughter, Florence, stood outside the president’s office in a dark anteroom with thick red carpets that made the place feel muffled, like a silent cavern of some massive body. The building, Mary Lyon Hall, was massive, too—another collegiate Gothic cathedral of rough red stone with a grand clock tower that pierced the gray sky. Florence found herself struggling to breathe inside its bulk. She had been struggling to breathe since the telegram arrived.
Florence and her father had taken the train up from Killingly through Worcester shortly after dawn. The Reverend had dozed against the window while Florence sat straight beside him in miserable anticipation, her stockinged knees thick lumps under her skirt, and drummed her heels against one another to keep blood moving in her feet. They’d changed trains again in Springfield, in a station astringent with the smell of urine even in the chilly weather. A filthy boy had tried to lift Florence’s purse and cried when she shoved him back, and Florence had thought, Nobody is getting what he wants today.
Despite the cold she had taken off her gloves and spent the last hour of the journey picking at the base of her left thumbnail until it bled—an old, bad habit to keep panic at bay. Even in the dim light of the anteroom, now, she could see a brown dapple on the green fabric of her glove.
Mrs. Mead opened the office door herself: a sturdy older woman in a black gabardine dress and a starched blouse with a fringed lace collar that nearly touched her prominent ears. Her gaze was clear and cold. She couldn’t have been more different from delicate Mrs. Ward, who had been the College’s president in Florence’s time. Florence remembered waiting outside Mrs. Ward’s office on a sunny May morning, preparing to make her apologies for her departure from Mount Holyoke after only one year. She had blamed her mother’s poor health, and Mrs. Ward, a trusting soul, had been most understanding.
“Miss Mellish, Reverend Mellish, come in,” Mrs. Mead said, shortly, and waited for Florence to settle her father in a chair. “I am very sorry for your distress. I will tell you all I know.”
There wasn’t much to tell and Mrs. Mead made short work of it. She described the dragging of the lakes and the teams of searchers in the woods: men were walking the banks of the Connecticut River in case Bertha had gone out on one of her long hikes alone and tumbled in; the police were finding a Parrott gun to fire over the water, to raise the corpse with the force of its concussion. Mrs. Mead said “the corpse” quite calmly, with no gulping or quavering. “Of course,” she added, and here she seemed to warm, the way an iron warms in fire, “there is still reason to hope that she has not drowned—that we will find her alive, soon.”
As they exited the building, the crisp air forced a gasp from Florence’s lungs. It was not a sob. She would not allow that.
Her father tugged at her elbow.
“I want to look over the campus,” the Reverend said, his gaze tracking up Prospect Hill, the promontory that stretched along the College’s eastern border. From there, you could command a view toward both Upper and Lower Lake, surveying the manicured trees and impressive structures of the freshly expanded campus. She knew what he wanted. He was hungry to discern Bertha camouflaged like a dryad among those trees and buildings. Desperate to search her out, drag her away from the College, just as Florence had once been dragged away.
“She’s not here,” she whispered, knowing he wouldn’t hear.
But it was easier to obey than to argue, most of the time. They made their slow way to the bridge across the brook at Lower Lake, and with each step Florence heard Mrs. Mead’s voice. The corpse, she thought, the corpse.
Even in her time at the school they’d told the story of the Lady of Lower Lake, a senior so distraught over her failing grades that she’d flung herself to a hanging death from this bridge while stabbing a dagger into her own heart. As a young woman Florence had thought this tale comically baroque, especially its coda—the voice of the dead girl echoing from beneath the bridge when a classmate crossed it. Help me, the girl had cried, I’m down here, while her body cooled in the pond water.
As they crossed the bridge now Florence felt as if her whole body had opened wide like the bell of an ear trumpet, attuned to every sound. A kind of listening that stalled the breath. Once Florence had been practiced at this kind of listening. She had imagined, more than once, how Bertha would sound when pleading for help and what she would do to rescue Bertha. She’d spent the train ride from Killingly rehearsing those visions in new detail. Over and over she’d enfolded that conjured-up Bertha in her arms, smelled the grassy tang of sweat along her hairline, squeezed her fierce little body—and in every fantasy Bertha would finally struggle free of Florence’s arms and pat Florence’s cheek and smile, just as she had as a baby.
But no sounds came from below the bridge. Just absence, Bertha’s absence, echoing.
Florence’s father was a husk beside her. He clung to her round arm and puffed weak steam into the air as they ascended the slope. Once he had been an imposing man, though he had never been the sort of minister who thundered from the pulpit. Instead he’d merely looked at you with those flat brown eyes, looked and put his hand on your shoulder, and pressed a firm thumb into the divot below your collar-bone. He had been compelling.
On this campus he drew eyes only because he was a man and Bertha’s father. In the hours since they’d learned that Bertha was gone, the young women of Mount Holyoke had begun creeping around the cold campus with books clasped to quivering bosoms. The girls directed polite smiles at the Mellishes, but their eyes showed wide and white as Florence and the Reverend passed by. She could almost hear their silent prayers: for Bertha’s safety, of course, but really to ward off loss and threat. That Sunday’s mandatory prayer meeting would have an unusual fervency and more clutching of hands than was common. At church, Bible study, their YWCA sessions—all day the girls would pass tremors from palm to clammy palm.
Florence and her father limped up the walk to the grand gazebo at the top of the hill, another addition. Empty now, but big enough for ten girls to picnic under its shingled roof, or twenty if they were cozy. Florence had heard a girl call it the Pepper Box. The Reverend leaned against the gazebo’s steps to catch his breath, and Florence turned away to look out over the campus. The morning sun softened the harsh shapes of the new buildings. If she had not been compressing an endless shriek in her belly all would have appeared tranquil and safe. The boathouse, the two tree-lined avenues and winding gravel paths, the wrought iron lampposts, the few streets of South Hadley past the College gates—and then the woods rolling endlessly into the distance, and Bertha lost somewhere within them.
2
The message from Mrs. Mead arrived at the rooming house at nearly eleven that night. They’d turned down the late supper the lady owner, Mrs. Goren, had tried to press upon them. In her small still room, Florence had been trying to read a book of poems and feeling her attention skitter off the page. The peal of the doorbell startled her up and into her father’s room, where Mrs. Goren hand-delivered the message and hovered to hear its brief contents: Some news, come quickly.
The Reverend lectured through the short carriage ride back to campus. He was trying to tell Florence that she should not worry overmuch. Bertha’s disappearance was a matter of faith, like any trial. “Florence,” he said, “if God wills that she be found, she will be found. We must not fail in our duties because our afflictions increase. God blesses the open-hearted.”
Florence was no defiant agnostic, as Bertha was. Bertha liked to flash her eyes covertly at Florence during John’s tirades about the Satanic malignancy he saw in modern society and the duties of a faithful congregation. Bertha liked to question her father endlessly on what she called “dogma”; Florence preferred to think of God as a light so powerful not even the Reverend’s sins could blot it out. But to hear her father make himself a martyr, to cast Bertha as a sacrifice in service of his piety—
“We are not living in a parable, Father. She’s in danger. She could be sick. Someone might have taken her. I won’t fold my hands in prayer when I could be searching—”
“Bertha,” John said out of shocked habit, used to rebuking the other daughter for irreverence, then caught himself. “That is—Florence—”
“Don’t speak to me,” she said, quietly, and tucked her gloved hands away when he fumbled to take one in his own.
The anteroom was empty, their footfalls deadened by its thick carpet. Mrs. Mead looked up as they entered her shadowy office. She was alone; she was frowning. “Reverend, Miss Mellish. I won’t waste your time with pleasantries. A report has just come in of a girl in Boston, at the City Hospital, calling herself Bertha Miller. I have no other information. If you can travel to Boston now, the police there will take you to her.”
Dread and relief thrashed around in Florence’s chest like a pair of stunned fish. “Of course,” she said, “we’ll leave—”
“No.” John looked to Mrs. Mead. “I will go alone. Dr. Hammond will be here soon. He will direct you.”
Henry Hammond, their family doctor, was the first person her father had contacted when the telegram arrived from the College about Bertha’s disappearance. The Reverend had ordered the bewildered delivery boy to go next to Hammond’s house, to deputize the doctor to seek out the South Hadley sheriff while they went straight to campus. Florence had been left to pack furiously while John sat reading his Bible, seeking what guidance it could offer in the case of a lost child. Now she was to stay here under Hammond’s direction while her father went to rescue Bertha?
Florence’s feelings were scattered and terrible, like the mess of little foul creatures that scuttle out from an overturned log on the forest floor. She had to go to Boston. She had to.
“You’ll need me to help.” Her throat clotted. “Bertha will need me.”
“Florence,” the Reverend Mellish said. “No.”
“I must know if—”
“Florence.”
She looked to Mrs. Mead for support, but the woman’s expression was opaque—no motherly comfort to be found. Florence wanted to howl. But instead she stood with eyes downcast beside her father as he made arrangements with Mrs. Mead to travel alone.
Florence accompanied the Reverend to the tiny Holyoke station to catch the three a.m. Boston & Maine and half lifted him up the rail coach’s narrow steel steps with the help of the timid young policeman who’d driven them. The skies were black as tar and the platform dim and quiet, lantern-lit.
She returned to the rooming house and tried to rest. In her rattled dreams circled specters of Bertha’s face: A Bertha with bared teeth and wildcat eyes, like her uncle David in the asylum just before his death. A Bertha, anguished, with some criminal’s hands on her dear body. A white-faced Bertha whose closed lids were sluiced with stream water and hair thickened with a coronet of muddy leaves.