Chapelwood

by Cherie Priest

  I took the back ways and the alleys when I could, for when people reappeared on the landscape I realized that I didn’t want their attention at all, and I very much preferred being invisible. I must have been quite a sight, in my pale blue cotton suit and everyday shoes—out for a dash around the streets of Birmingham. It must have been a thing to behold, this middle-aged man huffing and puffing, then finally running up the stairs and over to the door that signified safety.

  I fumbled for my keys, found them, inserted the right one into the slot.

  It turned. I twisted the knob. I pushed the door with my shoulder and flung myself inside—then leaned back against the door to shut it again, and to hold it closed against everything out there that might wish to do me harm.

  But it was no good. The smoke had followed me, for one thing. And Reverend Davis was waiting for me, for another.

  GRUESOME MURDER AT FIFTH STREET FLOPHOUSE

  Birmingham Post October 1, 1921

  Last night around ten p.m. at the Fifth Street flophouse sometimes known as Little Neil’s, a maintenance man discovered the body of a resident, Leonard Kincaid. Foul play is all but certain, as the corpse was discovered affixed to the wall in a mock crucifixion, his hands and feet nailed to the building’s studs. His death was actually brought about by blood loss, for he suffered significant head wounds and a gash at his side, in what was clearly some sacrilegious effort at a Christ-style pose. The coroner supposed that he’d been dead several hours by the time he was discovered, for his body was nearly cold and there’d been time enough for the neighbor downstairs to detect a spreading, dark stain upon his ceiling.

  No motive has been proposed, for it would seem that Mr. Kincaid had neither friends nor family, nor foes to speak of, either. He had scarcely spoken to any of the other residents at the flophouse, and was orphaned some time ago. According to the building’s manager, no one knew him well enough to have an opinion of him.

  No suspects have been named at this time, and if the police have any suspicions, they haven’t made them public. The new police chief, Thomas Shirley, has likewise declined to answer any questions as to whether this new and ghastly murder bears any relation to the hatchet killings of recent months. It would seem that little is known at this time, except that room 209 will not be rented out again anytime soon—and the police have yet another appalling death on their hands, likely produced by yet another creative killer.

  What kind of unholy fiend would draw a cross upon a wall and crucify a man upon it? Some suggest that it’s the handiwork of a mentally unbalanced person or persons, while others propose that it might represent some weird retaliation from the papist community, given the recent restrictions upon them. But why would they single out Kincaid? For that matter, why would anyone?

  Mr. Kincaid, formerly an accountant working for the city of Birmingham, had quit his job and all but vanished sixteen months ago. It would seem he’d been living at Little Neil’s ever since, though his friends and former coworkers seemed unaware of whatever circumstances must have brought him to such a place in life. He was a lifelong Baptist with no ties to any known Catholic or anti-Catholic group, though his former employer suggested that he may have once attended the church of Reverend A. J. Davis out at the old Chapelwood Estate, and the beliefs espoused there are somewhat shrouded in mystery.

  When contacted for comment, the reverend admitted that Mr. Kincaid had once attended services there, but denied that he’d been in attendance in the prior year. He also denied that any mystery surrounds his church, which he describes as a “strictly Christian service for those who seek to follow the Good Book to the very best of their understanding.”

  Police continue to seek information on Mr. Kincaid and his activities, associates, and habits. If you or someone in your household can contribute to the investigation, please approach the downtown station and inquire after Chief Shirley, as he would very much like to hear from you.

  Inspector Simon Wolf

  OCTOBER 1, 1921

  The newspaper rested beside my plate; I hit it with the back of my hand, which still held my forkful of carefully speared sausage. “Can you believe this? Crucified to the wall, and the reporter still feels compelled to note the likelihood of foul play. I’m reasonably confident that it’s impossible to crucify one’s own self.”

  Lizbeth sat across the table from me, slowly chewing her breakfast while scanning her copy of the daily rag of note. She did not look up when she asked, “How would you get the last nail in?”

  I nearly choked, but only laughed with a full mouth instead. “You’re wonderful, you know,” I informed her, and I meant it.

  She smiled demurely, and took another bite of scrambled egg. She swallowed, and said, “You’re not so bad yourself, Inspector.”

  “Thank you, madam.” I squinted again down at the newspaper article, focusing on that second-to-last paragraph. “And you noted the bit about Chapelwood, I trust. What do you make of it? He wasn’t hacked to death, except perhaps in the very broadest sense.”

  “How do you figure that? Even in the very broadest sense?”

  “He was stabbed, apparently. Not such a far stretch from hacking to stabbing. Big metal blade at work, and so forth.”

  “It’s still a stretch,” she said, but I didn’t feel like she was really arguing with me. She wasn’t wrong, anyway. “But at this point, I wouldn’t put anything at all past the Chapelwood gang. It’s hard to see precisely what they’re up to, no matter how hard you look at them. Axe murders, religious coercion, and . . . and what else, do you think? Whatever they’re up to, it’s enormous and oddly shaped. If there’s a pattern to it . . .” She sighed, and retrieved her napkin from her lap. She left it on the table. “I’ll be damned if I can see it, and I surely don’t understand what Nance or I have to do with it.”

  Mrs. Becker chose that moment to appear, and I thought she was only present to clear the plates and see us off—but she came to me with a strange look on her face. “Inspector?”

  “Yes, ma’am?” I replied, for I was picking up on the local linguistic quirks.

  “There’s a phone call for you. At the desk, you know—that’s the only phone we’ve got, anyway. It’s George Ward.”

  “You don’t say?” It was my turn to deposit my napkin. I stood and pushed my chair back into place. Lizbeth rose, too, wearing a worried expression. “Is it Ruth, do you think? I hope she’s all right.”

  She accompanied me to the phone, then hovered at the other end of the hotel desk.

  I accepted the receiver from Mrs. Becker, who then discreetly retreated to the office . . . where she was out of sight, but surely not out of hearing range.

  “Hello, George?” I asked.

  He didn’t offer any similar preamble. “The jury’s reached a verdict. They’re going to read it in an hour.”

  “You can’t be serious. They only closed the arguments yesterday.”

  “They’re reading it in an hour, with only a few hours of deliberation—if that much. Yes, I’m serious.” George sounded worse than serious, in my opinion, but it wouldn’t have made anything better to point it out. “They’re going to turn him loose, Inspector.”

  I’m not sure why, but I told him, “Stay calm, George.” He already sounded calm. Resigned, anyway. Maybe I wasn’t saying it to him, but to myself—because God knew I could feel a hot, angry flush rising up in my belly. “They might surprise us. It’s not settled yet.”

  “It’s settled. It’s been settled since before it got started. We always knew they were going to turn him loose.”

  “Don’t borrow trouble, George.”

  “Don’t get your hopes up, Inspector.”

  My hopes weren’t up at all, and they were sinking by the second. “We’re on our way, as soon as I can summon a car.” I hung up, and said to Lizbeth, “The jury’s coming back in. They’ve reached a verdict.”

  �
��Since when?” she demanded. “They only had yesterday afternoon, and . . . and . . .” She glanced at a clock on the wall. “The past hour, perhaps? Oh dear, oh no. That can’t be good.”

  “We don’t know anything for certain, not yet.”

  “Yes, we do, and false hope won’t help anything—we both know that.”

  “False hope, false justice, false sense of security,” I muttered as I dialed for the car service that had worked so well for me thus far. “James deserved better.”

  “So does Ruth,” she said.

  I was told the car would be around in twenty minutes, and it turned out the dispatcher was underselling their speed by fully four minutes. Not that either Lizbeth or I was complaining. We fidgeted outside on the front porch, waiting without speaking much. I think we were both anxious to get this over with, whatever it was.

  We both knew that Edwin Stephenson was going to walk free. It was only a matter of time, a matter of forty-five minutes—once we were both seated in the sedan, and Lizbeth was holding on to her hat, lest the wind make off with it.

  Maybe that was what spurred our sense of urgency: the thought that these were the last safe minutes Ruth was likely to have. Once her father was free, would he come for her next with his gun? Would he come for anyone else? I had no way of knowing how deep his resentment ran, or how likely he was to pursue vengeance. A normal fellow might take the break of having gotten away with murder, and consider himself blessed. Stephenson wasn’t a normal fellow, though. He was a Chapelwood fellow, and a True American, and probably a Klansman, if one delved deeply enough into his past activities. He was definitely a killer of priests and a beater of women, a charlatan of the clergy who preyed on starry-eyed young couples outside the courthouse. I knew absolutely nothing to recommend him.

  We pulled up to that same courthouse where he’d performed his phony wedding ceremonies, and stepped onto the very same sidewalk where he’d presented himself as a man of God and a friend to marriage’s bureaucratic processes. We stepped across it quickly and went to the stairs; at the top, George Ward was waiting for us, with Ruth standing beside him as if she wished to hide behind him, or cling to him like a kitten—but had just enough dignity to restrain herself from all the silly things that outright terror might prompt her to do otherwise.

  Lizbeth trotted up the steps, and I was close on her heels. She rushed to the girl and took her hands. “Everything will be fine,” she assured her, but it was too earnest and her eyes were too serious to convince anyone, even herself. “Everything will be just fine,” she repeated, then addressed George Ward. “We’re in time, aren’t we?”

  “In time to hear that monster go free? You’ve got another ten minutes, at least.”

  “What will happen?” Ruth asked. “Once they let him go?”

  My heart nearly broke for her, but I couldn’t lie. “Not much, I expect. He’ll go home to your mother; you’ll go home to your husband. And Father Coyle will stay right where he is, but there’s nothing to be done about that.”

  “It isn’t fair,” she whispered, her voice choked with tears. “They’re going to let him go, like he didn’t do anything at all.”

  “That’s not set in stone, not yet,” Lizbeth argued determinedly. She released the young woman’s hands and gave her a quick, motherly hug. “We must have a little faith.”

  George Ward said drolly, “Oh, I’ve got faith as far as the eye can see. Faith that they’ll cut the jackass loose with a pat on the back and a hearty handshake.”

  “That isn’t what I meant,” she griped.

  “I know. And I want to say, I appreciate the effort and the indignation . . . but around here, these days, all the good intentions in the world won’t amount to shit.”

  We heard the call of a bailiff, so we rallied ourselves to head inside.

  As we entered the foyer, I scanned the scene for some sign of Chief Eagan, but spotted none. When I asked after him, George said he’d tried to reach him, but it was such short notice that he’d failed to do so. The chief didn’t have a telephone, he told me. George had sent a messenger after him, and that was all he could do.

  Everyone filed into the courtroom, and again, we took up our positions at the rear of the chamber. It was only then that I spied Edwin Stephenson, looking smug and impatient beside Hugo Black. Reverend Davis was there, too—right behind the defense, seated on the front row as if it were his rightful due. Maybe it was. He was the man who bought and paid for the verdict, wasn’t he?

  Or was it the True Americans? I don’t know—the money trail became so convoluted the closer you looked. Come to think of it, even at a distance it really just appeared to be one big pot of money, shared among bigots and fools, doled out to bolster their terrible causes.

  At any rate, he was instrumental in the proceedings, and his position behind the defendant all but announced as much.

  I realized, as I sat back there—staring across the room at the back of the reverend’s head—that I was doing it too: I was assuming that James’s killer would go free, like it was a given. But I’d tried to be positive, hadn’t I? I’d tried to assume the best, and not conclude that this small-city, backwater judicial system could be so useless and corrupt?

  I wanted to give Birmingham credit, if only because James Coyle loved the place and believed it was worth serving; I wanted to hope for the best because of men like George Ward and Chief Eagan, and fierce young women like Ruth Gussman. I wanted to put my faith in the court system Massachusetts shared with Alabama, even after all this time—and even after these damn idiots had fought a war to extricate themselves from the binds that tie the states together in unity.

  I wanted to think better of those men than I did.

  They did not make it easy for me.

  The jury foreman stood, and the judge asked him if they’d reached a verdict, and the bailiff took the little piece of paper over to the judge for him to read.

  The judge wore a pair of spectacles pushed up on his head. He drew them down to sit on his nose, adjusted their fit, and read the verdict to himself, and then aloud: “We the jury find the defendant, Edwin Stephenson, not guilty by reason of temporary insanity.”

  As if this weren’t bad enough, the audience broke into applause.

  Lizbeth took Ruth’s hand and squeezed it; Ruth squeezed back. George Ward said, “Goddamn,” very softly, under his breath. It wouldn’t have mattered if he’d shouted it, for no one would’ve heard it over the consensus of delight.

  “Well”—Lizbeth sighed—“at least we aren’t surprised.”

  “Let’s get out of here,” Ruth suggested. She rose to her feet, and we rose with her, exiting the courtroom with ease. Everyone else had already flooded forward to congratulate Stephenson, so there was no one left to block us there at the rear.

  We hadn’t gotten far, though, when the tide shifted and everyone spilled out behind us. A reporter had joined the fray, and there—a woman in a blue dress with the same nose as Ruth. Her mother? I guessed correctly, for she was immediately pushed beside Edwin and asked her opinion by the fellow with a notepad.

  “How do you feel, now that your husband has been exonerated?”

  “I . . .” She looked frightened, but generally pleased. I suppose she wasn’t accustomed to having anyone ask her what she thought about anything. “I . . . I thank the Lord, of course. I’ll be glad to have him home again.”

  “And you, sir?” the newspaperman asked, pointing his pencil at Edwin. “Have you anything you’d like to say? To your daughter, perhaps?”

  Ruth cringed.

  Stephenson smiled, and it was the ugliest thing I’d ever seen on any man’s face. “First of all, I’m happy to be free, and I thank God that the men of the jury were able to see the truth of the situation. And second, to my wayward daughter Ruth . . .” He paused and searched the crowd for her. When he found her, that grin of his got even more gru
esome. “I’d tell her she’s forgiven, for all her transgressions—against her parents, and against her Lord and Savior.”

  I wondered if such a sentiment might make Ruth cry or turn away, but no. Ruth looked like murder. No, she really did—and I thought all the better of her for it. I felt like murder, too, and it wasn’t even my miserable father who’d done the deed.

  The notebook-toting man followed Edwin’s gaze straight to Ruth, and turned his attention to her. “Mrs. Gussman!” he called, for he was ten yards away and there were twenty people between us all. “Would you care to respond?”

  “Not in the slightest,” she snapped. She turned on her heel, pushed open the front door, and walked right out.

  Lizbeth and George went after her, but I lingered behind as the reporter shrugged and returned his attention to the Stephensons.

  “And what will you do now?” he asked. “Go home, have a hot meal?”

  Edwin shook his head. “No, I think it’s time for a change. All this trouble, it’s made me want something more, something better for myself and my wife—since my daughter won’t keep our company no more.”

  The reverend came to join them then. He put one hand on Edwin’s shoulder, and answered the rest. “Mr. Stephenson is on the verge of being ordained as a minister in our church out at Chapelwood. As such, he and his family are welcome to reside there, on the grounds of the old estate. There’s plenty of room, and we have a handful of other ministers living on site already.”

  “So you can tell Ruthie—” Edwin leaned forward and tapped the reporter’s notes with his index finger. “You tell her she can have the house if she wants it. We won’t need it no more, and she can take it as a sign that all’s forgiven, and I guess . . . if she wants . . . I might be just a little sorry about how things happened between us. I hope she’s happy.”