Nancy Cleghorn is killed

Nancy Cleghorn’s killing is first presented through a newspaper report: two boys find her in Dead Stick Pond, where the water and surrounding marsh have already been damaged by industrial pollution. The discovery establishes a murder without an apparent motive, and its impact reaches beyond the investigation. For V. I. Warshawski, Nancy’s death makes an old friendship suddenly and irreversibly present tense.

Setting and Discovery

The morning after Nancy fails to answer her phone, Warshawski reads that two boys found her body around eight the previous evening in the posted area around Dead Stick Pond. The boys had gone there hoping to see a muskrat they had encountered before, despite restrictions and their parents’ warnings. At the water’s edge, they came upon a discarded boot. In a place where discarded boots were so common that there were about fifty for every animal, and in the darkness, they took several minutes to realize it was connected to a person.

The discovery occurs in a remnant of marshland described as Illinois’s last wetland for migratory birds. Dead Stick Pond had once been a significant feeding and resting ground, but PCBs had made it so polluted that little could survive there. Herons and other unusual birds, along with the occasional beaver or muskrat, still appeared amid the dead mills. The rare traces of wildlife and the many discarded boots place Nancy’s death in a landscape where both living creatures and human presence are shadowed by industrial damage.

What the Report Reveals

The newspaper reports that Nancy had been struck on the back of the head and apparently drowned after being left in the pond. The blow would eventually have killed her, but drowning was reported as the immediate cause of death. The account makes clear that her death was not an accident, although the police knew of no one with a reason to kill her.

Nancy had earned respect in the environmentally troubled community through her work at SCRAP. The report identifies her as a valued community member, not merely an unidentified victim at a polluted site. She was survived by her mother and four brothers; the article offers no further account of their response or of a suspect.

Warshawski’s Response

Warshawski reads the article while making coffee the next morning, then carries it to the living room and rereads it six or seven times. She learns nothing new from the repetition. The previous night, she had briefly wondered whether Nancy might have fallen under a train; on reading the news, she connects that thought with Nancy’s actual death. She knows intellectually that her thought did not cause what happened, but recognizes that this certainty has not reached her body.

Her grief is sharpened by the ordinary absence that preceded the news: Nancy had not answered her phone. Warshawski has known her since the age of six and had continued to imagine them as young together, as if that shared beginning could keep them from growing old. The killing breaks through that private, almost childlike expectation. Nancy’s death is at once a crime with no apparent explanation and the loss of a friend whose place in Warshawski’s life had seemed protected by their long history.