Chapelwood

by Cherie Priest

  As I explored, farther and farther into this underworld of junk, I detected some noise at the very edge of my hearing: a muttering, grumbling sound, accompanied by the rustle of paper. A swearword or two, and the wadding, crumpling noise of paper being crushed in someone’s fist.

  It grew louder as I pressed deeper.

  I erred on the side of feeling that this was a good thing, that there was some light at the end of this tunnel—or some revelation, some person, some reward for my troubles. I was beginning to wonder how far I could have possibly gone, thinking I must not be beneath the council building anymore, surely . . . when the way widened and the path deposited me into an open space.

  It was another hallway, but a proper one with perpendicular angles and nothing to clutter it, save a pair of small desks and an old icebox lying on its side. This landing was marked by a dozen doorways—some open, some closed—that ran its length, and conveniently enough, I was standing immediately before Storage Room Three. To the left I saw Two, and to the right I saw Four, so I made my way to the right until I reached number Six.

  Room Six did not have a door. It had hinges from which nothing hung.

  Beyond it, there was a man. He had his back to me. He was tearing through file drawers, picking some things out and leaving other things behind, swearing under his breath all the while.

  I cleared my throat and said, “I beg your pardon . . .”

  He stopped. Stood up straight, and turned around. “Now why would you do that?”

  Confused, I stammered, “I’m sorry? Why would I . . . do what?”

  “Why would you beg my pardon? You don’t need it. Nobody needs it,” he added with a mumble. “Anybody can do anything he wants around here, especially with regards to me. You can come on in, make yourself at home, put your feet up on the paperwork, pour yourself a drink, and light a match—and there’s not a damn thing I can do about it. So why the hell would you bother to beg my pardon?”

  “Ah,” I said, because I understood, or I thought I might. And because I needed a moment to muster a response.

  The man before me was in his early fifties. He was white, though he stopped just shy of appearing swarthy—with dark curly hair and bushy eyebrows to match; and the set of his cheeks made me wonder if there wasn’t some Spanish or Italian lurking in his family woodpile. A good-looking man, he was: stout without running to fat like myself, with muscled forearms holding his shirtsleeves rolled up and shoved back.

  I cleared my throat again. “George Battey Ward, I assume?”

  “Yes, and who wants to know?”

  “Simon Wolf. I’m an inspector from Boston, here to investigate your recent axe murders. And likewise the murder of Father Coyle, though that seems essentially solved already—and unlikely to conclude with any real justice.”

  My response surprised him. That was probably the best I could’ve hoped for, considering the man was radiating rage like a Franklin stove, and appeared on the very verge of opening fire on anyone who dared to speak with him. From what I knew of his week, I could hardly blame him.

  He took a moment, and rested his hands on his hips while he looked me up and down. “Boston?”

  “That’s right.”

  “What shit does Boston give?”

  “None,” I said. “But Coyle was my friend, and he thought the axe murders were worth a closer look. That’s why he sent for me,” I exaggerated only slightly. He’d tried to send for me, hadn’t he? It was only a tragedy of timing that found me in his hometown in the wake of his death. “I’m a specialist.”

  “You’re an axe murder specialist?” he asked with something perilously close to a smirk.

  “I’m a specialist in violent crime, particularly violent crime of the . . . decidedly strange variety. How well did you know Father Coyle?” I wanted to know, hoping that a series of pointed questions might calm him down, and reassure him that I meant business.

  He didn’t answer right away. “I knew him well enough to know he had an interest in . . . the decidedly strange,” he borrowed my wording. He sighed then, and wiped at his forehead with the back of his wrist. He closed his eyes, and opened them again. “I ought to tell you I’m sorry.”

  “I ought to tell you it matters, but I’m willing to skip all that, if you are.”

  That gave him something more like a smile, but it was not a happy one. It was the social smile of someone trying to convey that I’m not the one he’s angry with. “Consider it skipped.”

  I shook his hand when he offered it, stepping farther into the cramped storage room in order to do so. “This is quite the arrangement you’ve got. Does Barrett know you’re down here?”

  “I doubt it. How’d you find me?”

  “A fellow scraping your name off the door. He passed your location along like a secret.”

  He frowned thoughtfully. “That’s odd. I came in through the back, and let myself down the service stairs. I didn’t think anyone saw me . . . But I’ve been wrong before.”

  “Service people always have ways of noticing, without being seen. Regardless, you should be glad he treated the information so quietly. I don’t think he wished to expose you to his new boss. But tell me, is this where . . .” I looked around at the mounds of newspapers, magazines, chair legs, pencil stubs, damp-swollen law books, and everything else that made up the jumble of Storage Room Six. “. . . You hid the case files on the axe murders?”

  “‘Hid’ is a mighty strong word.”

  “The secretary at the police station suggested you’d removed the files for safekeeping a few weeks ago.”

  “Right, right. Well, that was no big secret.”

  “Why did you take them?”

  He shook his head and shoved at one of his shirtsleeves, adjusting the tuck of the cuff so it’d stay aloft. “I didn’t. Eagan’s the one who brought them to me; I just authorized the transfer. And yes, once I’d heard him out, I put them down here. I thought they’d be safe.”

  “From what? Or from whom, as the case may be?”

  “Barrett. Tom Shirley. The True Americans. Take your pick.” He turned around and hauled a heavy-looking box full of folders into the space between us. “Most of the details are here, but a few . . . just . . . aren’t.”

  “Someone found your stash?”

  “No, I don’t think so,” he said, kicking gently at the box. “I set up a few . . . not booby traps, exactly. But I left little tells around, so I’d know if anyone came by. None of it was disturbed. Then again, this basement has a way of eating things.”

  I offered a polite laugh, but it seemed only to confuse him. “I’m sorry—I liked your phrasing, is all.”

  “It’s not a matter of phrasing. Things disappear down here, and reappear—but different. Like they’ve been chewed up, digested, and shit back out again. Look around you.” He gestured so broadly that he nearly hit me in the chin. “Look at all these things, all of them broken and scattered. Parts missing, never to be recovered. It happens to everything down here eventually. I thought I’d have more time, is all.”

  I honestly couldn’t tell how serious he was, so I amicably hedged my bets. “Basements have a way of surprising us, don’t they?”

  “Basements, and everything else underground. Look, I’m not a madman,” he said with almost too much earnestness. “I’m just a local, and I’ve just spent enough time in these places, these in-between places . . .” His voice fizzled out.

  Gently, I said, “Now I really must beg your pardon, for I don’t understand your meaning.”

  His shoulders slumped and he stared down at the box. “What’s to understand? Things are decidedly strange, and getting more so all the time. It’s the little things at first—and you barely notice. By the time it’s staring you in the face, and you finally can’t pretend that it’s all in your head . . . it’s been happening, well, outside your head, too. For years.”<
br />
  He dropped to his knees, and urged me to do likewise—but I declined. I have a difficult time getting up and down from the floor, for pity’s sake. I was willing to watch from above.

  “Here, let me show you,” he offered, riffling through the box’s contents. “This is the case file for the attack on Joe and Susie Baldone.” His fingers flipped past various documents, photos, and notes. “But parts of it are missing. Not just pieces of paper—that’s not what I mean; that’s too easy to account for—but pieces of text, whole paragraphs that were typed out on my own machine, in my own office. By my own hands.” He sighed. “I typed this file myself, and now this page, you see? I might as well have done it up with invisible ink.”

  He passed me the page. I eyed it closely, holding it up to the solitary bulb that gave me all the light I could expect to use. Whether or not it’d once held much of note, now it held only a partial description of Susie Baldone, mother of one, assaulted in October of last year. A photo was clipped to the page, but it was so faded it told me almost nothing. I saw the shape of a smiling face, a woman’s outline in a pale-colored dress.

  “They’re vanishing, right in front of me.” The despair in his words echoed forlornly through the basement, where everything had a soft edge and nothing stayed forever.

  I didn’t know what to say about that, so I asked another question. “Can you tell me, please—what do Barrett’s people care about these files? Would they have destroyed them, or altered them in any way?”

  “I couldn’t say, but I had a terrible feeling about it all. Barrett asked too many questions, wanted too many liberties with the information.”

  “You think he’s mixed up in it somehow?”

  “Him, or the TAs, or somebody in his circle. I want to say it must be the Americans . . . they’re so peculiar, and the peculiarness spreads with them. Everything they touch, they leave some stain on it . . . and I can’t help but feel like this whole nasty business . . . it’s something of theirs. I wish I had a better way to say it, but I don’t.”

  “Far be it from me to disagree with you. What little I’ve read—”

  “What little you’ve read,” he interrupted, though not unkindly, “can’t possibly scratch the surface. They are so careful to keep the worst of it quiet, or unprovable at the very least. And like the best of their handiwork, I’ll be damned if I can prove any connection of theirs to any of this,” he said, waving his hand over the box.

  Silence filled in the space between us, and around us. The old building settled on its foundations, or maybe some door opened someplace, and that’s what explained the soft gust of air I felt tickling the back of my neck. The lightbulb flickered but stayed on. The box of documents on the floor between us performed no dramatic trick when George Ward picked it up and put it back onto its original pile.

  “Here’s the worst of it,” he told me. He wiped his hands on his pants and leaned back, almost sitting on the very things he’d worked so hard to protect. “Even if I could prove it—any of it. The least or the worst of it . . . if I had photographic evidence tying them to the recent horrors in Birmingham . . . it wouldn’t matter. Just like it doesn’t matter that Edwin Stephenson shot Father Coyle to death, and the whole world saw him do it, and he doesn’t even deny it. He’ll walk away from it clean, and the True Americans will walk away from their crimes, too. They always do,” he said with a catch in his throat. “And I’m afraid they always will.”

  I wanted to reassure him, but how? What could I say to a man already so defeated?

  Beside him was another box, of the same sort. It held a similarly sad stack of unfiled, unorganized briefs. I reached forward to flip through them, since they were sitting right there—and I’d come looking for such files, after all. “Let’s not think that way, George,” I said as I sorted through them. “Where there’s a will, there’s a way. And you’re not alone in this. I’m here to help you and . . .”

  My platitudes drew up short as my eyes settled on a sketch done in pencil on a rough sheet of newsprint-type paper.

  I lifted it out of the box and held it to the light, turned it over, turned it around, and drew it up to my face to give it a more thorough squinting at. I wasn’t entirely sure what I was seeing, but the realization was dawning, and I had the very strong feeling that things were about to leap from “decidedly strange” to “markedly weirder than even that.”

  “George . . . what is this?”

  “That box? I think it holds the loose file material—bits and pieces that were either scrambled in the transfer or never got stored correctly in the first place. A couple of boxes were dropped, shuffled around—you know how it goes. The stray bits in this one . . . we couldn’t find anywhere else to put them, I suppose.”

  “But they’re relevant to the axe murders?”

  “They ought to be. Why?”

  I showed him the image. It was a woman’s face, sketched by a talented hand. Her hair was long and her features were pretty; she was young and lovely, but she wasn’t smiling.

  He took it from me, and examined it himself. “Oh, yes. Her.”

  “Who is she?”

  He shrugged and handed it back. “We never did find out. One of the axe victims, Gaspera Lorino—he drew it, when we asked him what happened. But you have to understand, he was hurt pretty bad. He’ll never recover, not fully. This drawing, it could be anything. Anyone. An image he saw in a theater, or a photo from a newspaper story a dozen years ago. No one recognized her, and no one thought she had anything to do with the attack.”

  “Why not?”

  He shrugged again and leaned back, folding his arms. “We had witnesses: Two shopworkers from the neighborhood said they saw a pair of black men do the attacking. I don’t know if they were telling the truth or not, but surely it wasn’t some . . . some girl, leaping out of the shadows to subdue two grown adults, killing one of them.”

  “But on the bottom here—is this Mr. Lorino’s handwriting?”

  “I believe so.”

  I read aloud, “‘The gray lady.’” Then I asked, “He drew this when, precisely? Wait, never mind—here’s a date . . .” In the corner, scrawled in another hand: October 4, 1920. “He was attacked in October, I see.”

  “No, it was the end of September. He spent a while in the hospital before we could talk with him. When they finally let us in, he wasn’t any help, not that I blame him. You take a hit to the head like that, and it can really scramble your brains. Why are you so keen on that picture? Do you know her?”

  I ran my thumb over the edge of her hair. “Not exactly . . .” But I’d seen those eyes before. I’d seen that jawline, that hair. Not in the flesh, that I could ever recall—though I’d seen a dozen movie posters and at least one photograph where she was embracing another woman. “But I know who she is. Or who she was, I should say . . . because this was thirty years ago. She’d be in her fifties now, if she were alive.”

  “I’m sorry, come again?”

  “She’s dead.” I didn’t know it for a fact. No one did, and for all this time, I’d assumed that no one ever would. “I’m sorry, I don’t mean to be obtuse—but this takes me by surprise. It’s a new wrinkle in an old case, I’ll put it that way. Do you mind if I keep this, just for a few days? I’d like to show it to someone.”

  “By all means. I bet it’s safer with you than down here, waiting to get eaten by the basement.”

  I folded it, and tucked it neatly into my vest. “Thank you,” I said. “And thank you for your time, all of it. Now I must take my leave, if temporarily. I need to send a message.”

  “What about the case files? I thought you wanted to look at them?”

  “Oh, I do. Is it all right if I wander down here later this afternoon or evening?”

  “Anytime you like. It’s never locked. No one comes down here for anything, ever. Not unless they have to.”

  I laughed
nervously, because I certainly understood why no one would choose the basement for a cigarette break or a quick sip of coffee. I tried a light joke: “Everyone’s afraid of getting eaten, is that it?”

  “Probably,” he said, nodding, in all apparent seriousness. “Would you do me a small favor? Whatever you discover in your investigations, kindly keep it between us—and report it to me, rather than the new authorities. I wouldn’t ordinarily ask such a thing, I swear to you. I know it’s a betrayal of the public trust, and I know it’s not standard procedure anywhere, least of all a place like Boston—with better resources than we have, I’m sure.”

  Before he could continue, I said, “No, I understand perfectly. The new regime has untoward ties to the matter, or there’s an excellent chance that it might. I’ll happily keep the loop small. As small as you like.”

  “Excellent, thank you. I honestly do believe it’s for the best; and if you should learn anything, or have any questions, please come to me—I’ll answer what I can, and see if Eagan can’t be helpful as well. We know the city, and we’ve fought for the city, but the city let us down. Or maybe it’s the other way around.” He sighed.

  “You’re not finished yet,” I promised. “And I’m barely started.”

  I extricated myself with another handshake and a vow to return, and to keep my findings fairly private. I would’ve stayed longer and kept him company there, except for two things: one, the basement was beginning to feel oppressive, and I wanted away from it; and two, I had some phone calls to make.

  I’d ignored the universe long enough. It’d sent a message loud and clear, and it was my job to respond—both to the patterns at large, and to the Boston office, who’d no doubt want to hear about my pending plans. I needed them, anyway. I needed them because they could find me a phone number for Lizzie Borden with much greater alacrity than I could, since I was stuck in the wilds of Birmingham.

  I needed to speak with Miss Borden. I had something in my possession that was bound to be of great interest to her: a portrait of her former companion, the long-gone actress Nance O’Neil.