Previously: Booth shoots Lincoln and breaks leg in escape.Stanton goes to Seward’s house when he hears of the stabbing. Someone tries to shoot Andrew Johnson. Gabby runs away from the basement in the rain. Lincoln friend Ward Lamon tries to find him.
His eyes wide and vacant, Lafayette Baker stumbled through the basement billiards room one last time, looking for any telltale signs that three people had spent the last two and a half years in the room. He walked behind large wooden crates in the corner and saw a couple of rumpled blankets. This is where the crazy man must have slept, Baker told himself. No one should see the blankets on the floor. He picked them up and walked over to the middle of the room where the butler Cleotis knelt to scrub the bloodstains.
“These need to be laundered and put away.” Baker stuck the blankets in the butler’s face.
“Yes, sir. Of course, sir.” Cleotis took them and laid them aside. “Don’t worry, sir. By morning, all will be back the way it should be.”
“No,” Baker replied, a numbness in his voice. “Nothing will be the way it should be ever again.” He flinched as he saw Cleotis smiling. He wondered how the butler could find it within himself to smile at him, knowing what he really was deep in his dark, cankered heart.
“Now, you go do what you have to do with the soldier boy’s body, and then I recommend you get a good night’s sleep. A heap of sleep does the soul good.”
“Thank you, Cleotis.” Walking into the hall, he stopped to avoid bumping into the pregnant woman who was wiping his puke from the floor.
“Thank you for cleaning up this,” Baker mumbled. “What was your name?”
Phebe stood and began to walk away. “Don’t thank me. It’s my job.”
“And your name?”
“And why would a fine white man like you want to know my name?” Phebe asked in a tired voice.
“I—I just want to thank you,” he replied, his voice barely above a whisper. Baker realized he had never bothered to ask anyone’s name before so he could thank them personally, but this night he found thanking people important.
“I already told you,” she said as she walked into the kitchen. “You don’t have to thank me. It’s my job.”
As Baker walked outside, he put on his hat and turned up his collar as he headed for the carriage. Squinting, he thought he saw President Lincoln looking into the back of the carriage at the body. He retreated a few steps. By now, the president ought to be dead, he told himself. The man in the long coat and top hat scurried down the driveway, disappearing in the dark rain. It was not Lincoln after all, Baker realized, but the crazy man from the basement. Why did he come back? Now he knew Adam Christy was dead. The crazy man was someone else Stanton would want him to kill, and he did not want to kill anyone again in his life. Too many people had died already.
Mounting the carriage, Baker took the reins and commanded the horses to move. His mind was blank as the carriage clacked down the street. He did not know if he was going to dump the body in the Potomac, as he had done with the two imposters, or bury it out in the countryside. Baker shook his head. That would be like burying himself. With all this blood on his hands, he was not ready for Judgment Day.
Death. How do people deal with death? Baker had never given it any thought at all throughout his life. Most of the time he just walked away and let someone else deal with the body. After riding through the rain another couple of blocks, Baker’s mind wandered to all the thousands of soldiers on the battlefields. Most of them disappeared into graves dug exactly at the spot where they had died, but a few somehow found their way into wagons and then onto trains where they made the long journey home for burial.
How could the families stand to see the decaying corpses in their wooden coffins? They were not decaying, Baker reminded himself. A new process kept the bodies from rotting. They called it embalming. President Lincoln’s personal guard Elmer Ellsworth underwent the new procedure after he was shot and killed in Alexandria, Virginia, earlier in 1862. Then Lincoln’s son Willie endured the same process. Rumors had it Lincoln went to the tomb often, had the coffin opened so he could run his fingers through Willie’s hair. Even the imposter, Baker heard gossips say, had gone to the tomb to look at the boy’s body. But that report was just gossip.
If those bodies could be preserved, then Adam Christy could be kept looking life-like, at least until Baker resolved his feelings about this tragic situation. What was the name of the doctor? Baker wrinkled his brow. He had to remember him. After all, he was the father of modern embalming. An etching of his face had been in the newspaper. He was from New York and became rich in the 1850s perfecting his techniques. The doctor came to Washington after the beginning of the war. The Lincolns requested his services for Ellsworth and Willie. His reputation was made.
“Holmes,” Baker muttered. “Dr. Thomas Holmes.” He clicked the reins, hastening the horses to turn on another street at the next corner. Memories began to flood back. Baker had actually been to his office before. Stanton wanted to make sure the son of an important Republican senator was properly preserved before the body went home. In a few minutes, Baker pulled the carriage up to the portico of Dr. Holmes’ office. Kerosene lamps still flickered in the windows.
A servant answered the door when Baker knocked.
“I need to see the doctor. It’s an emergency.”
“The doctor is terribly busy right now.”
A voice called out from the back. “Who is it, Jeffrey?”
“The man says it’s an emergency.”
“Then show him in.”
Baker followed Jeffrey into the doctor’s office. His eyes fixed on a table where a thin young man lay with a thick tube inserted in his chest. More death. His nostrils flared from the unpleasantly acrid odor of the embalming fluid. Dr. Holmes, wearing a white stained operating robe, walked toward him.
“It must be an emergency to come out in a storm like this.” He wiped his hands on a towel.
“It—it’s my son,” Baker lied. He became acutely aware of rain copiously dripping from his nose. He wiped his face with his coat sleeve.
“Where is he?”
Baker turned to point toward the door. “He’s in the back of my carriage. Out there.”
“My goodness, we can’t allow that,” Holmes replied. “Jeffrey, get some help and bring the boy in.” He reached for two tea towels on a washstand and handed them to Baker. “You look terrible, sir. Please take off your overcoat and dry yourself.”
“Thank you, sir.”
“How long has your son been dead, Mr.—I’m sorry, what is your name?”
Baker blinked. He did not want the doctor to know who he really was. “Christy,” he blurted out.
He patted his hair with the towel over his face to give himself more time. “Abraham Christy. My son, Adam shot himself in the face less than an hour ago.” Baker shook his head. “I knew right off he was dead. No need to go to a hospital. And I don’t want the authorities involved. No damn government.”
“Sir?”
“He’s—he was a soldier. A deserter.” Baker’s minds raced as his eyes wandered around the room. “He couldn’t take it anymore. He had seen too much. He killed too many other young men. He didn’t see any other way out.”
Jeffrey and another assistant carried the body in and placed it on a table next to the other corpse. They removed the cover. Baker winced again as he saw the gunshot wound to the mouth.
Holmes walked to the table to take a closer look, lightly touching Christy’s lips. “I’ve seen worse.” He looked at Baker. “We don’t want his mother to see him like this, though, do we, Mr. Christy?”
“No, sir.” Baker shuffled his feet. “His mother is in California. That’s why I got him to you as fast as I could. I figure the sooner you can start on him the less—less bad he will look when he finally gets home.”
“He’ll look just like he’s sleeping.” Holmes bent over more closely. He left the table and came to Baker. “California, you said. That’s going to require quite a bit of the fluid. It’s my own concoction, part arsenic, mercury and zinc salts. Three dollars a gallon. Then there’s the evisceration of the organs. That has to be done tonight to keep the body from decaying. I’ve had a long day. This has to be worth my time.”
“Any price. I’ll pay it. I know you’re the best. Everyone knows you did a good job on the Lincolns’ little boy.” Baker stopped abruptly when he realized he mentioned the president’s name. Considering what was happening across town at Ford’s Theater, he did not want any connection between himself and President Lincoln.