Mrs. Broward certainly believed that she did this to the only copy of Mary MacLane’s memoir that she knew her daughter to have ever owned.
Of course, all of this was only spoken of later.
Perhaps you already know that when the story of Flo’s and Clara’s deaths reached the press, Mary MacLane herself, then staying nearby at a seaside hotel in Massachusetts, was asked to issue a statement. She’s reported to have said, “I wish I could have known those girls.” This was both uncharacteristically short for a Mary MacLane statement to the press in those days and the thing that the two of them no doubt would have wanted to hear the most from her.
Before we move on, one more thing about that copy of the book found with the bodies. It was handled by faculty and police, Pinkertons and even Flo’s and Clara’s bereaved family members (not one of whom claimed it as belonging to their kin). And then, not so long after, it was misplaced. Officially misplaced, anyway. Lost. Unable to be located when it was asked after by reporters who felt sure they’d missed something the first time they’d gone through it and who now wanted another look.
Even Principal Libbie Brookhants* herself could not find it. She was the school’s young if capable founder. She knew its grounds and buildings better than anyone else left alive, and she told those doubting reporters that she had made a point of looking for the copy in question in every place on campus that it might have conceivably ended up; it simply could not be found.
The book was gone.
This part won’t get more pleasant with my stalling so we might as well get on with it. And just so you know: the facts, such as they are, get foggier from here on out, too.
We know, based on where the girls were later found, that at some point Clara veered from the orchard path. Whether this was due to Charles’s gaining speed or some tactic meant to prevent that from happening, I cannot say, but it proved a fateful choice.
To be sure, that path had its own difficulties, but now a tangle of hailstorm-downed branches and thick undergrowth snagged at the soft fabric of Clara’s dress and tripped up her steps. When she was found, her skirt was clogged with thorns and twigs, shredded from the things in the understory that had caught her.
In fact, Clara seemed to forge directly into a section of woods that the Brookhants students called the Tricky Thicket, an area of bizarrely dense growth—the trees leafier, the brambles bramblier—fed by a hot spring. It was said that even in winter, even with snow otherwise all around, the ground in that patch stayed thawed and ferns grew lush and green, and ripe blackberries might be found.
Perhaps thinking it would provide her with cover, Clara now much more slowly made her way through this thicket. And if she’d also been looking backward, every so often, checking on Charles’s unhinged approach, then that too would have hindered her speed.
Though they’d left the path, the two cousins were now close enough to the orchard, to Flo, that she would have heard their shouts. Or screams. It’s likely that this was why she came running toward them, hoping for Clara but finding Charles first. When that stupid man was brought from the woods, he had a black eye and a bleeding face swollen from more than stings alone.
“She charged me like a drunken bear,” he told a reporter from the Providence Daily Journal. He was talking about Flo, who, he said, had attacked him. In an interview given from his sickbed he called her “a real she beast. More animal than girl. She had something in her hand, a stone or stick.” He also said that her actions toward him had proved him right, and that what he’d previously told Clara about Flo was now made undeniably true. “That girl was no lady! She was a ruffian bastard—some foreign-born devil who exerted her depraved influence over my cousin. Clara was only too female-minded to see it.”
When asked why he had been chasing his cousin in the first place, Charles had said, as if obvious: “We had not finished our conversation to my satisfaction. And before we could do so she openly defied me, playing up to her schoolmates. I knew that her mother, my beloved aunt, would want me to correct that sort of insolence at once. So I did.”
Charles explained that during her weekend at home, Clara had been issued an ultimatum regarding her family’s expectations for her future comportment at Brookhants: if Clara wanted to continue to attend the school for her senior year, and to graduate with her class, she would immediately discontinue her friendship with Florence Hartshorn and cease all activities related to The Story of Mary MacLane. (And as you now know, Mrs. Broward apparently believed that even continuing to possess a copy of that book was an activity related to it.)
Wretched Charles might have admitted that Flo attacked him, but why and how she did so was as unclear (and speculated about) in 1902 as it is today. Was it only to interrupt his pursuit of Clara? Or did Flo witness something else between them? Something worse? And when did she do it, exactly—before the yellow jacket attack or while it was already underway?
Because in the end, Readers, the yellow jackets are the thing. I told you that at the start.
What Clara did, in the middle of the Tricky Thicket, was step over a fallen log and directly into a ground nest of them. And this particular ground nest was of a size not only unusual, but seemingly impossible for a northern state like Rhode Island.
Yellow jacket colonies in places as far north as New England are supposed to last only one season. They can’t overwinter, because the region is too frozen and food scarce for anyone but the queen, fed fat off the sweets of her minions, to survive. In places like Florida, warm even in January, it’s not so unusual for ground nests to continue season after season—for decades, sometimes, with dozens of queens ordering around thousands of workers—the cycle of birthing and feeding, eating and building, churning along without pause. But that’s not supposed to be the way in Rhode Island, which has a winter with snow and cold and frozen ground.
Just not in the Tricky Thicket.
And so here it was: a yellow jacket nest to build your nightmares from, its paper chambers stretching in underground layers until it was almost the size of three of Charles’s cars parked in a row. And Clara’s foot, slipping off the edge of a mossy log, landed in the uppermost layer of the nest’s papery frame, where it promptly sank and sank, up to her knee it sank, wrenching her to a stop. She would have had only moments to comprehend what had happened, why the ground had given way, because now the yellow jackets were coming, furious and streaming up from the rip like a rattling chain shot into the sky.
Remember that a yellow jacket is not a honeybee. A honeybee has a barbed stinger that lodges in flesh, which means that it can sting you only once before it leaves that stinger in you and dies.
But a smooth-stingered yellow jacket can and will sting you multiple times.
And thousands of vengeful, broken-homed yellow jackets stinging you multiple times?
Charles later said that he heard his cousin’s screams, but there was simply no time to reach her: Clara was swallowed up by the swarm at once, as if she now wore a writhing mummy wrap of yellow jackets, a pulsing black-and-yellow outline that smothered her until she was now them.
At some point Flo must have charged toward Clara, presumably to help her, and was at once wrapped in her own cloak of yellow jackets. And Charles—of course, fucking Charles—ran away. But not before pushing his now-useful driving goggles over his eyes. The goggles and the running away did not prevent him from being stung, nor did they keep him from swelling with hives and passing out on the path leading back to the school. But they did help to keep him alive.