Murder in the Back Garden

By Janine L. Bourdo

Englishwoman Vera followed her love to the fiery trenches of WW1. Working as a nurse in the hospital trenches in France, she hoped to find him and persuade him to run away to America. She finds him, but he dies in her arms.

Vera turns to an American doctor, Frank Murray, for comfort, and ends up pregnant. He convinces her to marry him and go to live with his mother in Columbus, Ohio. The U.S. has not entered the war yet, and Columbus has many German immigrants. Vera is also quite uncomfortable with her new mother-in-law. Dortha. However, when Dortha is accused of murdering a neighbor, Vera believes she is innocent, and works to prove this. She also discovers that Frank, who is still serving in France, chose to go to war because he was on the run from secrets of his own.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Janine L. Bourdo
• Release date: Sep 5, 2013
• ISBN: 9781301490141

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MURDER IN THE BACK GARDEN

Janine L. Bourdo

Smashwords Edition 2014

Copyright 2013 Janine L. Bourdo

Cover Art by Joleene Naylor

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TABLE OF CONTENTS

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Chapter 8

Chapter 9

Chapter 10

Chapter 11

Chapter 12

Chapter 13

Chapter 14

Chapter 15

Chapter 16

Chapter 17

Chapter 18

Chapter 19

Chapter 20

Chapter 21

Chapter 22

Chapter 23

Chapter 24

Chapter 25

Chapter 26

Chapter 27

Chapter 28

Chapter 29

Chapter 30

Chapter 31

Chapter 32

Epilogue

About the author

Chapter 1

April 1916

I woke to the thump and roar of the bombs coursing through the blood in my veins. The canvas wall over me shook harder with each explosion and then rattled unceasingly. A bugle sounded above the din, and then a second – and a third - joined. The bodies would be coming in soon, muddy and blood-soaked.

I sat up, swung my legs over the camp bed. Cold iron bit into the bottom of my thighs. I reached for the stockings that hung over the stove that I had been too tired to light last evening. They were still wet. With sore and stiff fingers, I fumbled to fasten the sodden, itchy wool to garters, then swept up my white nurse’s cap, pinned it to my hair, untied the tent flap, and pushed it open. The lines of hospital marquees flickered before me with white and green lights reflected from the eastern horizon.

The bugles repeated their call. All hands needed. It was a big one. I waded through the mud between the canvas walls. My ward was busy. The night nurse was on the floor, scrubbing it yet again with cresol and water. The new girl, already with dark circles under her eyes, made up fresh camp beds. Our Yank doctor used forceps to boil a test tube full of syringes over a candle. In the distance, a train shrieked.

What needs done? I asked the nurse on the floor.

She looked up at me. We don‘t have any cradles left at all. One of the boys pinched some boards to make more. I think they’re by the linen cupboard.

I found the wood and began tying them together in a V shape, a bit of work which could be used to keep blankets away from feet, swollen and infected from exposure to the awful French mud.

The train’s howl came closer. We all lifted our heads, listening. The whistle blew again. It was time to go. Outside, nurses, doctors, orderlies ran through the shadowed, sloshing pathways. When I reached the staging area, the train had pulled in, and stretcher bearers began to dismount, their arms straight and stiff, staggering with their loads. The American doctor shouted an order to someone, perhaps me, but one of the Tommies already on the ground screamed over and over for his mother, and I couldn’t hear the order. Another man nearby moaned, adding a low, bagpipe sort of drone to the growing chaos. I moved to a soldier lying on his stretcher on the ground. Bomb lights flashed on the horizon, lit up the twin pools of his dark eyes. The earth shook, and was still shaking as I knelt and put my fingers to his throat. I waited a seeming eternity for the ground to still. There was no heartbeat. He was gone. Good night, may you sleep in peace. I whispered, and shut away his empty stare.

The next man was upright, his pain-drawn face leaning on one hand, bloody gauze wrapped around his calf. He tried to speak as I approached, but could only cough and choke at me.

I bent to listen more closely. He reeked of the rotten-sweet smell of French mud, and of another more ominous odor, something like one of moldering hay mixed with bleach. Chlorine.

Go on and see to another fellow, he wheezed. It’s just a bit of shrapnel, not even a blighty.

He meant it wasn’t enough of a wound to send him home to England.

But you’ve been gassed, I said.

He shook his head through a hacking spell. I just caught an edge of it. Those other chaps . . . He fluttered his arm.

My gaze ran over the stretch of ground by the train, its steam rolling into, and mixing with, fog in the bare light of earliest dawn. By now the ground was carpeted with men, lying, standing, kneeling, and women like me, wearing their Red Cross aprons and white caps, pointing, holding a hand, putting a cigarette to trembling lips. A man nearby lay on his side in a fetal position and gurgled red froth onto the canvas stretcher.

I turned back to the soldier I had been speaking with. Perhaps, you’re right. What can I do for you before I move on?

Nothing, Christ, nothing! He fell back onto both elbows with a sob.

I hurried to the one spitting up blood, fell to my knees, squeezed his hand, and said, I’m here. His eyes were glazed with pain and unseeing, his face, bright crimson with burns. A hollow, unearthly moan escaped from somewhere deep in his chest. The rotting hay smell was much stronger on him than it had been on the other man. Another, weaker, stream of froth reddened his teeth. In moments he would die, and all I could do now was be there, be his escort into oblivion.

He writhed, and made as if to moan again, but didn‘t have enough breath for it. I looked down. His raw fingers were short and stubby, one ring finger bent at unnatural angle. His swollen features were unrecognizable, but I knew the hand.

No! I cried, and jerked my eyes up, willing it not to be so. Smoke and flashing light drowned out the stars. No! All sound stopped, and it was if I was in a darkened room in England watching one of those flashing, silent motion pictures, black and white images on a wall. Doctors and nurses moved over the land. People bled. My vision blurred with the burning wet that had come into my eyes. I stooped to look at the man again. His bent finger was not a casualty of war. It had been broken long ago in an accident with a horse. This was the man I had come to France to find. Andrew! I cried, Andrew, I’m here! I followed you. I wanted to shake him, make him understand, make him see me with those blind eyes, but I understood how fragile he was and did not do so, only slid myself under his dear head, rubbed my fingers through his dark hair.

His chest heaved and rasped, and finally released a faint puff of air, and with it, his soul went. I ripped the wet tatters of shirt off his chest and ran my fingers over the bumpy ridges of his unmoving ribs. No! No!

*****

The next thing I knew, cold April rain was falling through the daylight, washing the gore-covered canvas of the stretcher. Andrew was gone.

The American, Doctor Murray, came out from one of the marquees and approached me. Miss Hamilton?

I turned my gaze to him, a sturdy, square-jawed man with clear blue eyes that were now dimmed by the curtain of gray rain between us. Yes?

They’ve prepared your acquaintance for burial. Will you come?

Come to watch that beloved form forever covered in sand and mud? Forever taken from me. I had never imagined living my life without Andrew. The fact that I was breathing even now seemed impossible. Surely the last hours had only been a horrible dream. No, I said.

He squatted and held out his hand, scarred, but clean in spite of the morning’s work. I had noticed this man, how his eyes would lift from white bone or a squirming mass of intestines, for slightest tick of a second, to study me, then turn back to his task.

Will you at least come inside?

Finally, I rose, and walked with him.

Chapter 2

November 1916

Although the seas during the eight day crossing to New York were rough, we, thankfully, did not have even one sighting of a U-boat. During the voyage, I ate little and stayed to myself, with the very real excuse of fearing a return of nausea. My first task after landing was to use my small supplies of both money and time to go to a millinery shop and buy a new hat, green, with a narrow rim and a jaunty feather dyed to match. Early in my time in France, my roommate and I had tired of the lice and the trouble of keeping long, thick hair, and had gone on a frenzy of cutting, leaving me now to meet my new mother-in-law with only a mass of mouse-brown springs attached to my scalp. Although there was really too little left to pin such a fancy hat to, I must make some kind of go at appearing to be respectable. I studied myself in the mirror of the New York hotel lobby. The hat didn’t feel as if it should belong to me, but I was going to have to transform myself, in only the next day or so, to the sort of woman who should belong to the hat.

The next day I moved among the crowds in the pink-columned railway station as a ghost, without the possibility of recognizing or knowing anyone. I listened to snatches of conversation that made old Queen’s English sound like a foreign language, and had the eerie feeling I had gone back two years in time. Trains in England these days were full of soldiers in uniform at home on leave, and stations contained weeping mothers and sweethearts. Here, men in suits carried sales cases and walked arm-in-arm with smug wives, or worked as porters and handed elderly women onto the train. All but a few individual Yanks had refused to help my tiny nation fight the Hun.

The morning sun shining into the window as we pulled away from the city again reflected part of my own image back to me. Thank heavens for gloves, for my hands that rested on my growing stomach were still as red and work-worn as those of any of my father‘s scullery maids. They also helped me to keep from losing the ill-fitting wedding ring I wore on one finger.

At first my illness and heavy work schedule had caused me to become even more slim than I had already been. I denied the presence of the child to my roommate, to Frank, later to the nursing sister, and even to myself. It was only during this journey, as the child began to move and to change my own body, that it was becoming at all real to me. The night before, sometime during broken sleep in the New York hotel, I had dreamed of a small boy in knee pants with his father’s blue eyes. Something seemed uncannily true about the dream. The child would be a boy.

Stations passed, Washington D. C., Baltimore, and smaller, quicker stops. Night came. Porters lit the lamps and, without fear of an airborne enemy, we blazed across the countryside with shades up.

Morning came. I went to the dining car, but was too on edge to eat anything. Instead, I sat watching the world fly by over a tepid, barely steeped cup of tea, seemingly the standard for refreshment in this country. It was a shame, because a decent cup of tea would be particularly helpful today.

The next stop was Cincinnati where I was to change trains. The wait there was two hours and a quarter, enough time to leave my trunk, explore a little, and push away the realization that I had nearly come to the end of the time to relax and settle into the new person I must become.

The day was cold and crystal clear. I pulled my overcoat tight and gazed up at the city on the hillside that loomed over the maze of tracks. Bare tree limbs made a sort of haze through which church spires and red brick homes emerged.

The red cap in the station had said that the river was close, only a few blocks in the other direction, and I could smell it, fishy and musty. I walked past train buildings and warehouses to reach it. Two steamships waited at docks, each with giant paddlewheels in the murky water. More brick buildings stood on the other side of the wide river. I’d never heard of Ohio before those tumultuous, fumbling days with Franklin Murray, and even then our conversations had been halting and spotty. It turned out that people were living and dying whole lives beyond the little worlds I had known in Glastonbury, London or even France. The time had come to find my place in a larger sphere, mother, wife, daughter-in-law to a stranger, American. I closed my eyes and fought to control the anxiety that once more threatened to flood over me. I could do this because I must do it. In four hour’s time, I would meet Dortha Murray, my mother-in-law, and my new life would begin.

*****

My eyes found her almost as soon as I stepped from the train in Columbus, a stout woman of about fifty years of age, not so stern as the picture Frank had shown me. Her large-brimmed navy hat was a little droopy and numerous years out of style, as was her shirt-waist and blue skirt. She seemed to be a very ordinary sort of person. She briefly studied a stylish, younger woman who passed her, then, for whatever reason, dismissed her. I wondered how Frank had described me in his letter. She turned, stared at me, and then, as I tried to arrange my mouth into a welcoming smile, started towards me. My fingers clenched.

She halted a few feet in front of me, scanned the skirt draped over my swelling figure, looked up again with blue eyes that unmistakably showed her to be a relative of Frank Murray, and advanced across the final steps between us. Vera?

Yes, I said, and held out my gloved hand. My tongue was dry and heavy. And you are Mrs. Murray?

Instead of taking my proffered hand, she held out both arms and leaned forward to fold me into an embrace against her soft bosom. Now that you and Frank are married, dear, she whispered into my ear, you must call me mother.

My head felt light with her perfume that smelled like a country garden, and I was so stunned that I had no idea how to respond. My family would never behave like this. Aunt Harriet and my cousins required a hand and a kiss on a cool cheek. My father barely looked at me, except for a conference now and then about some complaint Aunt Harriet had made. I didn’t remember my mother at all.

I dropped my arms, which I found I had half raised in meeting her. I’m sorry. I really couldn’t do that. My mother died when I was very young.

She drew away. Her face was flushed. Well, my name is Dortha at least, certainly not Mrs. Murray. I’m sure we’re going to be wonderful friends.

Chapter 3

The roar rocked through my body and then began again. Over and over. Wave on top of wave. Bombs exploding. I rose from my camp bed, opened the tent flap, and stepped out onto a high, windswept hill. On one side of me were empty sand dunes, and rolling, black seas. On the other, line after line of hospital marquees, and a dark column of men marching in from a blazing horizon. I ran down the hill to the first of them and touched his sleeve. Have you seen Private Bain? Private Andrew Bain?

Fire flashed in the caverns of his eyes. He staggered on in his tattered uniform without speaking.

Andrew! Andrew Bain! I called. The shadow men continued around me, silent and weary. Strangers.

A breeze ruffled my hair. I raised my hand to push the strands back to my temple. The whole earth lit up in a blinding flash. When my vision cleared, the line of battle had been replaced by the massive, uneven silhouette of a hillside. A lustrous path spiraled to the crest of it. A crumbling tower, like a blackened tooth, stood on top. Somehow, I had come home to England, to Glastonbury, and its famous tor.

In the old times, Andrew and I would clamber up the muddy path to the top of the tor at least once a week to sit in the arch of the tower, laughing, letting the wild winds tear our breaths away. His tanned and callused hand was always warm over my own, usually ink-stained, fingers. My governess was forever chiding me about my clumsiness with a pen. The hills and fields below us might be a soft and gentle mixture of greens, or now and then, white with a thin layer of new-fallen snow. Glastonbury had been the same for centuries, changing only with the seasons, probably was much the same even now, but both Andrew and I had changed. My childhood companion would never come home again, and so, neither would I.

*****

When I woke, my face was wet. I wiped my tears with my hand and sat up against the knobs of the brass headboard. The baby moved inside of me, soft, sleepy stirrings, then settled. There was no light, but after a week, I didn’t need it to know that the quilt over me had worn patches and uneven stitches, that a candle lamp stood on the wobbly bedside table, and that the chest of drawers opposite the bed still had some of Frank’s collars in the tray of the top drawer.

I took my kimono from the footboard, stood, and wrapped it around me as best as it would fit, then struck a match and lit the lamp. It shed a moving circle of light around my bare feet as I went to the hall and to the head of the stairs. With careful footing, places in the steps that creaked and groaned could be avoided. The house was small, much smaller than I had expected from the mother of a physician, and Dortha and I had no space to be separate from each other. I worried that she must become as weary of my company as I was sometimes weary of hers, but she was always polite to me in any case, never asking the questions that must be on her mind.

I made my way through the front room. Wilbur, the gray cat, joined me, weaving his silky body in and out of the hems of my nightdress and kimono. The clock on the bookcase said that it was 11:14, early. Usually it was the night trains that woke me, one just before midnight, and another at three. I blew out the lamp and set it on top of the bookcase. Wilbur followed me into the kitchen and out of the back door.

We sat down together on the second step leading from the porch. He wrapped his tail neatly around his two front feet. I buried my hand in his thick fur. The last days had been warm considering it was the end of November. One late pink rose still clung to a bush at the front of the house, but Frank had told me that the winters here would be harsher than the frosts and gentle snowfall of southwestern England.

Dortha’s back garden was nothing to look at, a narrow and weedy rectangle, a good deal longer than it was wide, which ended in a steep earthen embankment, a support for elevated train tracks. The sky above was clear and studded with brilliant stars that seemed so cold and distant.

It was particularly on these lone nights that my cravings for a Woodbine came on strongest, but I had smoked the last one in Cincinnati. People said American cigarettes were better. I found them much like the American people, rawer, more forward. They made my throat ache, and, at any rate, I was supposed to be a respectable woman now, bringing myself back into normal non-war life. During the day, knitting for the baby’s arrival helped me not to wish so much for a cigarette, but on these nights, how I longed for their warm, familiar comfort.

Suddenly, Wilbur tensed, crouched, and leapt away. A figure stood just beyond a hedge of scraggly roses that marked Dortha’s garden from the next one.

You haven’t seen a little dog, have you? a woman’s voice asked.

No, I haven’t, I said.

The woman walked through a thin spot in the hedge. She was fully dressed, as if for a nice outing, a neat silhouette with a knot of hair on top of her head, a little hat angled over her brow. I tucked my bare feet under me, acutely aware of being caught out in my nightdress and too small kimono, my wildly curly hair unpinned.

He’s a little dog, white, very shaggy.

I haven’t seen any dog at all.

She stepped closer. She had full lips, a turned-up nose. You aren‘t from around here, are you? What’s that accent? English?

Yes, it is. As little as I had spoken to outsiders in my time here, I had quickly learned that only a word or two was sufficient to mark me as some kind of outsider. I had been mistaken for Irish and even Polish. At least this woman was a little more educated.

The woman took several more steps. I could see clearly now that she was very smartly dressed indeed, much taller than I, and would have been quite pretty except for the spiteful pinch to the corners of her mouth.

Of course. She tossed her head back. I’ve heard of you, Frank’s new wife. Such a romantic story. Frank goes off to Canada to join the army and take care of the wounded in France. He meets an angel of mercy, falls in love, and marries her, and now, her gaze fell to my stomach, then rose to lock with mine, "they’re going to have a little one. Pretty quick for a kid, isn’t