Dangerous and Unseemly

Chapter 6

Chapter 6

Week 3, Instructor Calendar, February 1896

Apparently a great deal of effort is involved in extricating a body from a frozen pond, a fact that Concordia and others on campus wished they need never have learned. After the unusually warm day, the ice wasn’t strong enough at that end to withstand a man’s weight, but there was still plenty of it to hamper efforts to get a boat through. A team of policemen and firemen, with ropes, ladders, and hooks, worked into the evening before successfully pulling the unfortunate lady’s body from the water.

The faculty, shaken by the discovery, kept the students inside their cottages, away from the scene, until the body was taken to the city morgue. President Richter had the sad task of informing Miss Lyman’s family and meeting her brother there.

Later, at a hastily called faculty meeting, a bedraggled-looking Arthur Richter returned from the morgue with more sad news.

“It looks as if Miss Lyman’s death was not an accident. It was a deliberate act to end her own life,” he said, his voice hoarse from a bad case of laryngitis. He sat down, absent-mindedly rubbing a scratch along his temple.

“Is that what the police believe?” Miss Hamilton asked, amid background murmurs of shock and distress.

“That’s not yet what they are saying officially,” the president said, struggling to project his voice into the room, “but I spoke with the chief of police. Miss Lyman’s boots were not clad in steel runners for skating, and a fabric sash from the skirt she was wearing was tied around one ankle. He hypothesizes that she was trying to weigh herself down in the water, but after her death, the sash snagged on something sharp and broke off the weight. The coroner found a wound to her head, where she struck one of the rocks, as she…went under,” he finished, with a shaky breath and a fit of coughing.

The poor man, Concordia thought. To be ill, and dealing with such tragedy, too.

“But there was no note in her rooms,” Miss Hamilton protested. “I looked for one myself in her quarters, before we found her. I was trying to determine if she had a family emergency.”

Richter cleared his throat and squeaked, “I wondered that, too. The police chief said suicides don’t always leave notes.”

Concordia felt a twist of pity for Miss Lyman, but wasn’t shocked by the news. It had seemed unlikely that Miss Lyman’s death was an accident. The bursar had been missing since the early morning of the chapel incident, but had attended supper the night before. That meant she must have gone out on the pond in the middle of the night.

Although Concordia hadn’t known Ruth Lyman very well, it seemed far-fetched that the bursar would have gone skating in the middle of a frigid night, and alone. Even if she had accidentally fallen in, wouldn’t someone have heard her cries for help? And now, the sash found around her ankle made suicide a clear conclusion.

And in turn, suicide suggested that Miss Lyman’s feelings of guilt over the college’s financial problems had proved too much for her to bear.

Much like an embarrassing relative one does not like to acknowledge, the shaky financial status of Hartford Women’s College was a condition that could only be ignored for so long. The problems had begun with the stock market crash—dubbed the “Panic of ‘93”—three years before. The resulting run on the banks had plunged the entire country into the worst economic depression it had ever suffered. Even now, there was still debate about whether President Cleveland’s opposition to the free coinage of silver had prolonged the depression, or had, as he asserted, saved the financial viability of the Treasury.

It was common knowledge that Hartford Women’s College had shared in the misery, sustaining heavy losses, and that President Richter felt responsible for advising the trustees to invest college funds in railroad stocks just before everything had spiraled out of control.

From there, it was said, the college had suffered additional financial setbacks: unpaid invoices, inexplicable money transfers that could not be tracked satisfactorily, a sold parcel of college-owned land that did not fetch the price originally thought. Although the bursar had done her best in such a crisis, accounting books were ill-kept during that chaotic time, when emergency funds had to be moved quickly. Concordia had heard the board of trustees was still trying to untangle the mess, even as the college struggled to pay its current bills.

No one had blamed the bursar, although there had been talk of hiring an outside accountant. Now, of course, someone would be taking over the dead woman’s former responsibilities.

Poor Miss Lyman. Could this have driven her to act so desperately?

But that led to more questions. Why go to the pond to end it all? And why now?

The students and staff grappled with these questions over the next week, as discussions, conjectures, and regrets circulated. The police interviewed staff members close to Miss Lyman. Concordia was glad she was not among that group. She had never spoken at length with a policeman before, and the thought made her a little uncomfortable. Even the sight of the two uniformed men on the college campus this week seemed strange. It was an unsettling reminder that all was not as it should be.

At a school as closely knit as Hartford Women’s College, there are very few secrets, and soon Concordia learned the gist of the police interviews.

It seemed that several close associates of Miss Lyman had reported noticing a recent moodiness and preoccupation in the lady; even Arthur Richter, when pressed, had reluctantly acknowledged that he’d wondered if the bursar was suffering from melancholia, but had dismissed the idea.

What could we have done for her? seemed the current refrain on everyone’s lips. A memorial service was held, in which only praise was spoken; nothing about her mistakes or struggles, or suspicions of the mishandling of funds.

In that manner, Miss Lyman’s death was pronounced an unfortunate suicide and quietly pushed out of the way, questions unanswered. And yet, Concordia was uneasy. She never liked unanswered questions.