Chicago, Illinois.

November 22, 1933.

Thomas Ahern had been summoned to Houses of mourning a thousand times before.

In his years as an undertaker, he had learned to steal himself against the grief of the living and the silence of the dead.

But nothing in his long experience had prepared him for what awaited in the basement surgery of the dreary old mansion at 3406 West Monroe Street.

The call had come late on the evening of November 21st, not from the police,

not from the coroner's office. The family itself had telephoned, requesting his services with a

peculiar urgency. A death in the house, they said. Would he come at once? The November wind cut

through the streets of Chicago's west side as Ahern approached the gloomy three-story dwelling.

The house loomed against the night sky like something from a gothic tail.

Its windows dark, its Victorian trim weathered by decades of Chicago winters.

This was the home of Dr. Alice Lindsay Winecoup, a name well known in medical

circles, a woman of impeccable reputation who had practiced medicine in this city for more than

30 years. Dr. Weinacoup herself met him at the door, a woman of 62 years. Her face betrayed

nothing of whatever horror lay within. With a calm that observers

would later describe as unruffled poise, she led the undertaker through the darkened parlor,

past furniture shrouded in the gloom of financial decline, toward a door that opened onto a narrow

staircase descending into the basement.

Down they went, into the bowels of that house of secrets.

The basement had been fitted out as a surgery, an examination room where Dr. Weincoop conducted her medical practice.

An operating table dominated the center of the room, surrounded by the instruments of the physician's trade.

Upon that table, shrouded beneath a blanket, lay the still form of a young woman.

...