But she continued. “After you left, I did not hear from my uncle. It worried me. One day a fisherman had been dragging the river with nets and pulled up a number of bodies. Seized with a premonition of dread, I went to the charnel house, where they were being kept until someone could determine where they had all come from.”

“Did you meet that horrible man? The one who looks like a weasel?”

She shook her head. “No. They said the man who ran it had disappeared not long after you left. I went to see the bodies, but I had been misled. It was not bodies so much as it was parts of bodies. Arms. Legs. Torsos. One body had the head and torso intact. Even its jacket was still in place. The face had been ravaged by its time in the river, bloated and picked at, unrecognizable and so horrible I will never forget it. But I knew the jacket. I reached inside and withdrew a tiny gold-filigreed book of scripture that my uncle always kept. The pages that he loved had dissolved in the water, leaving only the empty shell of it.”

She paused, looking haunted. “The empty shell of the book, the empty shell of my uncle. It was him.”

Mary stood, pacing the tiny room. “They would have assumed the parts were other bodies that had been decomposed until they came apart in the water. But my uncle’s condition prompted them to look closer. Because above where his ravaged face should have been, the top of his skull had been neatly, surgically sawed off.”

She finally stopped, looking at me with her chin raised. “They found all the bodies downriver from Victor’s residence, which had a chute running directly from the second story to the river. I know he is well connected, and I know how precarious my own situation is as a single woman. I already cannot collect on what is owed my uncle because men simply refuse to see me. If I were to accuse Victor of murder, I would lose any credibility left to me through my uncle’s name. So I cannot go after Victor without risking all I have left. That is why I looked for you. It was not easy. But I was determined. You know more than you had ever said.” Her lips twisted wryly. “And your presence here confirms it. So please, I beg of you. Tell me the truth. Tell me all of it.”