"Oh! Joshua! Have you ever seen so much blood?"
Ben Glass looked to his playmate with a mixture or horror and outright fascination in his wide umber eyes. The breeze tossled uneven hanks of dirt brown hair, dotting them with snow. A moment later a hand slapped at the back of his head.
"Oy! Mom! That hurt!"
"Benjamin, you will show respect for the dead. I'll not have you speaking ill of this poor woman, now come along. This is not for us to see."
"Buuuut Moooooom!"
Bem hollered a bit as they walked away, his mum tugging at his ear all the way.
Joshua Gran watched them go, for a moment, but soon enough his pale green eyes return to the twisted body beside the yet to open bakery. People were beginning to gather. He grew more uncomfortable by the moment, suddenly fearing that perhaps one of the grown-ups would find a way to blame him for the young woman's death. The thin boy finally got up the nerve to do what he had wanted to do since they had found the body perhaps a half an hour before. He reached down and carefully drew closed her eyes.
"Gods, please take her to you that she may rest in peace."
And with that the young man was making his way through the growing crowd, unwilling to let them see how much this had effected him.
"By the All Mighty, Sven! What happned here?"
Martha Kingsforth sounded disgusted, but she too could not tear her eyes away from the scene of a lovely young woman twisted in ways that simple murder would not allow.
"Martha, you worry too much over things that are not your concern."
With that, the old man is half-dragging his wife away from the scene. For each that leaves it seems two more take their place.
"John, what do you think happened? She jump?"
The young lady is dressed in her Sunday best, a lovely little calico print frock of blue with matching headscarf. For the most part, the dress is unmarred, but the headscarf will never be the same. It has accepted the huge offering of blood which seems to be slowly creeping from the unseen wound in her skull. What remains is simply more than the scarf can absorb. It spills out in a horrid dark pool beneath her head.
"No. No way she jumped, Clyde. Look how far away she is from the building. If she'd jumped she would have landed in Bromn's flower bed. She's halfway into the street for crying out loud."
Sure enough, the girl was much too far away from the building to be a jumper. It seemed that she had been...thrown from the rooftop.
"Shame. Young thing. Pretty too. Reckon we should summon someone. Maybe the folks at the Rememdium will know what to do."
Slowly the crowd began to dispurse. Their curiosity sated for the time. Janice Fines remaind upon the road, with no one to tell her tale.