Read The Formula for Murder Online
Authors: Carol McCleary
Tags: #Fiction, #Mystery & Detective, #Women Sleuths, #Historical, #Historical mystery
The Formula for Murder
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G
ENEVIEVE
J
.
F
OXEY
M
C
C
LEARY
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.”
N
ELLIE
B
LY
CONTENTS
Part IV: The Laboratory of Dr. Lacroix
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. W
ELLS
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.
