Chapelwood

by Cherie Priest

  • • •

  Here is what I think, Ruthie.

  Read this note, and don’t bring it down to the room, lest the room eat it up and then no one will ever see it except for you—and that’s a burden I won’t wish upon you, not for any reward. You should share this with those you trust. (Hell, you can share it with the world, for all I care.) But here is what I think. I need to convey it somehow, before I’m absorbed into the room as well, as surely as the notes and the pictures and the scraps of evidence, unraveled in front of my eyes.

  Here is what I think.

  It’s one part police work of the old-fashioned sort, one part conjecture, and one part the whispered voices made of silk, spinning a web in that room. (And nothing escapes the web. Nothing ever has, and nothing ever will except for you, if you go. You are the lynchpin, dear. The keystone.)

  I think the axe killer is one of the Chapelwood men, either by will or by compulsion. I think he hunts at the reverend’s behest, or command, or direction—I don’t know which. But he is one of theirs, I’d bet my life on it.

  And why would Chapelwood seek to kill so many of our citizens, in such a specific and strange manner? I don’t know, but there is strange geometry involved in their efforts—they view the world through maps made of numbers, and via instructions relayed through formulas and sums. I’m not sure how, and I don’t know exactly why, but the fellow whose death made the papers last week, Leonard Kincaid, he had something to do with it.

  I spoke with his former employers, at an accountant’s firm here in town. Kincaid was a good worker and a sane man, helping balance the city’s budget and manage its tax rolls until about eighteen months ago. His secretary (a Miss Josephine Engle, for the record) informed me that he’d attended some kind of religious camp meeting outside the city—she didn’t know which one, and she didn’t know what they were preaching that piqued his interest so strongly; but afterward, he’d become preoccupied with the prospect of communicating with God through math.

  I told her that sounded unlikely, and she agreed with me—but she also said that Kincaid was quite insistent on the point, and he’d always struck her as an eminently sane man. He’d declared that numbers were the language of the universe, and if God created the universe, then that’s how He would speak.

  As Miss Engle noted, the idea is so insidious because it tiptoes so close to logic.

  Shortly after catching a case of religion, as the young secretary put it, Kincaid quit the firm and vanished. Miss Engle attempted to visit him at home, in order to return some of the personal effects he’d left at the office . . . but she found the house empty, and for sale. She was never able to procure a forwarding address, and never able to return his belongings.

  I have those belongings now. I’m adding them to Storage Room Six, though I can’t say why. I ought to know better. I ought to bury them in a hole in the ground, for that would be more secure, wouldn’t it? Undoubtedly. But something compels me to stash them there, and so I carry the strange box with its strange contents and I deliver it to the basement, to the strange and hungry room.

  At this point, I feel like I’m feeding the place.

  Does that make sense? No, I’m sure it doesn’t. But, Ruthie, have you ever by any chance fed a stray cat? Some scraggly thing that roams around the block, darting in and out of yards, dodging dogs and horses and (these days) cars . . . if you have ever spotted such a thing, and offered it a scrap of supper, then you might know how I feel about the storage room.

  You only have to feed it once, and it will never leave you alone again. It will beg and beg and beg, and you will give and give and give, because it seems like there isn’t any choice. You know the thing now, and it needs you, and you can’t let it starve.

  • • •

  (Dare I pen something even crazier? I might as well. I tried “feeding” the storage room useless things, like old phone books, out-of-date newspapers, and Sears catalogs from a decade ago. Do you want to know what happened to them? Nothing, that’s what happened. They held no interest for Storage Room Six. It only wants material that matters. Specifically, it wants material that matters to the axe murders and to what Chapelwood members we’ve been able to identify. It positively hungers for it.)

  • • •

  Somehow, Leonard Kincaid, crucified to the flophouse wall, was part of Chapelwood and part of the axe killings, too. You can see it in the box, in the things he left behind. You can see it in the stars, if you look hard enough. You can hear it in Storage Room Six, when you close your eyes and open your ears and hold very still, and are willing to listen to voices that come from nowhere, everywhere, and all around you at once.

  I’m not strictly suggesting that you should.

  Or maybe I am. No doubt, I could use a measure of context or perspective on the matter. Some ordinary soul might step inside the storage room and conclude that it’s an ordinary place, stuffed with the ordinary detritus of civic workings, abandoned after a regime change. That inspector fellow, Wolf, he came down there—he saw the place. I don’t know precisely what he thought of it. Maybe he heard the whispers, maybe he did not. I should’ve asked.

  I might actually be going insane.

  I don’t want you to go insane, Ruthie. You deserve better than that. Of course, James Coyle deserved justice, and Birmingham deserved better leaders, and the mutilated dead deserved life or (at the very least) dignity after the fact.

  Didn’t they? Don’t we all?

  • • •

  I don’t understand what is happening, I’ll be the first to admit it.

  But something is coming, and it’s coming with purpose. It’s coming closer. Faster. Homing in on us, or that’s not quite it. It might be better to say that it’s focusing on us, adjusting its attention the way an astronomer tweaks the lenses on a telescope, all the better to bring the distance into sharp relief.

  Whatever it is, we shouldn’t call out for its attention. We should hide from it, and pray that it passes us by, oblivious to us and all our efforts upon this anthill called Earth.

  • • •

  Look at these pieces, Ruthie. Puzzle pieces, and without a helpful box lid to show us what we’re meant to assemble. Chapelwood. Axe murders. The True Americans. Your father. Leonard Kincaid.

  You.

  And me, too, I assume.

  See if your new friends can be of some help. The inspector and his consultant, that woman Lizbeth Andrew . . . there’s something odd about them, if only because they behave like civilized, sane individuals who yet retain some shred of decency. They don’t belong here, but they’re only visiting. They’ll leave, one day—soon, I should expect.

  See if they can be persuaded to take you with them.

  Lizbeth Andrew (Borden)

  OCTOBER 4, 1921

  I was flattered and frankly touched that Ruth showed me the letter George left her.

  He’d slipped it into her mailbox slot overnight, it would seem. Upon finding it first thing this morning, Ruth was alarmed by the rattled tone, the rambling connections . . . It didn’t sound like him, she said. She insisted that something must be wrong.

  So she ran to the post office down the street from her flat and used the phone there to call him—to no avail. No one answered at the Ward residence, and when she finally navigated the streetcars and residential blocks to reach his home in person, no one answered the door, either.

  Eventually, Chief Eagan was able to rouse Mrs. Ward, who was uncommonly groggy for ten o’clock in the morning. It was the chief’s estimation that Mrs. Ward had been drugged the night before . . . probably by George himself, though he hated to suggest it—but the dose had been a gentle one that hadn’t harmed her. She’d gotten a most excellent night’s sleep out of it, and had no idea where her husband could have gotten off to.

  “Which was probably the point,” I said to Ruth.

  I was still ho
lding the note, reading bits and pieces of it again and again. It reminded me all too much of another note, one I’d held and read in a similar fashion, years ago. It did indeed sound like a man who was slipping into madness.

  “You think he drugged her so he could sneak out of the house without her knowing?” Ruth asked. She was not quite incredulous, but she clearly did not want to believe it.

  Inspector Wolf was seated beside her on a long chaise in our hotel’s lobby. “Yes, I think that’s probably the case. He did it for her own good, I bet. If she didn’t know where he’d gone, then she couldn’t possibly tell anyone about it—even if she wanted to.”

  “He’s obviously . . .” I didn’t say the rest, because I didn’t want to say it in front of Ruth. Instead I declared, “He’s obviously performing his own investigations, even though he’s no longer on the city payroll. If Nathaniel Barrett thought he was still poking his nose into the axe murders, you can bet he’d have Tom Shirley put a stop to it.”

  Wolf shot me a glance that said he knew I must be fibbing. He was right, of course.

  If anything was obvious (in my opinion), George was headed for Chapelwood. But to what end? To force some confession out of the reverend? To deliver his own brand of justice to Edwin Stephenson?

  • • •

  (Well, Wolf was right, yes. But he didn’t want to say anything about Chapelwood in front of Ruth any more than I did, otherwise she might feel like storming the place. Perhaps the place needed storming, but it did not need storming by her—or even by the bunch of us, not yet. We didn’t know what we’d find there: what resistance, what coercion, what crimes. What unholy, unhealthy conspiracy.

  After all, when it all came down to it, we knew virtually nothing about that place except for its wealth, its secrecy, and its bigoted leanings that encompassed almost every human being except those masculine, Protestant, and white. We knew that it was ostensibly a church, occupying a large estate on the outskirts of town. Ruth was the only one of us who’d been there, and she’d already told us how little she’d seen of it.)

  • • •

  Ruth wasn’t sure how she felt about my fib, but ultimately she granted the chance that I might be correct. “I guess that’s . . . possible. He called it his ‘unfinished business’ after the election. But this room he’s talking about in the note . . . do you know what he means? Storage Room Six? Inspector, he says you met him there.”

  Wolf nodded. “It’s in the basement of the civic building, and that’s where we met for the first time—the day after he lost the election, I think. For what it’s worth, I did notice a strange air about the place and an unsettling sense of being watched; but poor George, I must say—he struck me as positively cracked upon that first encounter. Or I should say instead . . . he sounded like the man who wrote this note, and less like the upstanding, normal sort of man who kept us company through your father’s trial.”

  Ruth sighed. “His wife said he wasn’t sleeping well, and he was drinking more than he ought to. More than anyone’s supposed to, since our prohibition. But that’s not peculiar, is it? Considering the circumstances?”

  “Not at all, dear. Not at all.” I handed the letter back to her.

  “What should we do?” she asked.

  Wolf and I exchanged a look again.

  I let him answer. “First, Lizbeth and I will see you home. Your husband might want to know that you’re all right, since you left him in such haste this morning and haven’t yet returned. Then you’ll have a little rest, perhaps a tipple of your own, if there’s anything on hand. It’s been a difficult week for you, too, and you mustn’t jump to conclusions or leap into premature action.”

  “But—”

  “And meanwhile,” he asserted, “Lizbeth and I will see if we can track down George. Something’s sent him off the rails, and we should probably find out what—before he gets himself into trouble.”

  “What about the box? The one with the dead man’s things in it? It’s in that storage room, and I want to see it.”

  He patted her hand and said, “Yes, that’s where we’ll begin. George might have left some other hint or clue behind, and if that’s the case, we’ll let you know.”

  Ruth gave us both a pointed frown. “But I want to go, too. I want to see for myself.”

  I didn’t think it was a good idea, and I told her so. “No, dear—not while you’re still so very interesting to the newspapers. Everyone knows you now, Ruth; you’re famous here, most especially with the new commissioner and his regime. Barrett will be there, and perhaps Tom Shirley, and maybe even the reverend . . . there’s really no telling, but any given one of them might make trouble for you, if they see you.”

  “So? They’ll make trouble for you, too. Everybody saw you keeping me company at the courthouse.”

  She had a point, but Wolf waved it away with a flap of his wrist. “Oh, we were only in your background. No one has the slightest bit of interest in us. I’d be stunned if we were to be recognized.”

  “I wouldn’t,” she sulked. “You’re out-of-towners, and you’re friends of mine and George’s. Somebody’s noticed, I can promise you that. People around here, they notice everything—they’re always suspicious of everything and everyone they don’t know, and they gossip like hens.”

  But Wolf was unswayed. “That’s true everyplace, I assure you. It’s not a trait special to Alabama. We’ll be fine, and we’ll be happiest knowing that you’re safe at home while we brave the corridors of injustice on your behalf.”

  “That’s a funny way to put it, and I don’t like people doing things on my behalf. I want to do things on my own behalf.”

  “But surely you understand,” he pressed, less cavalier and more kindly, “that we’re less likely to be stopped, or detained on some trumped-up charge, or harassed out of the building . . . if we proceed without you. I’m an inspector, Ruth. Let me inspect, and let me do so while being confident of your security.”

  Finally, she gave up. I suppose she figured she might as well, as Wolf’s impenetrable wall of fatherly firmness stood in the way of any argument.

  • • •

  Wolf had a car at the ready, so we dropped her off and promised to report back by dinnertime, a promise which she reluctantly accepted—and vowed to hold us to. Once we’d seen her safely inside, we climbed back into the sedan.

  “Where to now, sir?” asked the driver.

  Wolf hesitated, giving me an uncertain look. “I suppose you want to see the mysterious storage room, too, don’t you?”

  “The sooner, the better—and you said it yourself: Right now, that’s our best hope for finding George, or finding out what he’s up to.”

  He nodded, and to the driver he said, “Kindly deposit us at the civic building downtown, if you please.” Then he leaned back into the padded seat, and said more quietly, just to me, “But it’s a worrisome place, he was right about that. The one time I visited . . .”

  “How bad can it possibly be?”

  “The one time I visited,” he repeated, still letting the thought dangle for a moment, “I left it hoping it was indeed the only time I would ever visit.”

  “That’s a sinister thing to say.”

  “It’s a sinister place. I didn’t want to oversell it too much in front of Ruth, but George has a point about it being unwelcoming and hungry. I can’t explain it with any precision . . . there’s a miasma down there, the whole basement, even—not just that particular storage room, though I do believe that’s where it’s concentrated most.”

  “And George had been spending so much time there. More time than anyone knew, it would appear—since he offered that little aside about trying to feed it like a stray cat.” I thought of my own strays, and I hoped they were well without me. I was certain they must be, for cats always have that competent way about them. They don’t need people in the slightest, so when they choose our
company, it’s such a pleasant surprise.

  “It can’t have been good for his mental state—and it won’t be good for ours, either. You should be advised of that before we arrive.”

  We rode on in silence for a bit, until it occurred to me to ask, “This storage room . . . it’s where you found the drawing of Nance, isn’t that what you said?”

  “Yes, that’s right.”

  “Was there any other sign of her? Anything else you might have noticed?” Because hope could not fail to spring eternal, even when it damn well knew better.

  “Not that I saw at the time, but I wasn’t there for very long. I didn’t spend long with the boxes and files; there’s plenty yet to be explored.”

  “Or maybe not, if George is to be believed. I’ve never heard of such a thing, have you? A room that consumes anything it holds, given time enough to do so?”

  He shook his head, but I could tell he was racking his brain trying to think of some corollary. “No, nothing springs to mind. George tried to explain it when I first found him there, and I wrote it up in my notes—then sent the packet back to Boston, in case anyone there might have any ideas. I do that every couple of days—mail off my findings, that is. I like to record my progress and report it, for the sake of posterity and the sake of my own safety, too. Should my investigations suddenly cease, along with any communication, the office there would know to send someone after me.”

  “A wise plan,” I agreed. I liked the idea of it: a paper trail to stand witness.

  • • •

  (I’ve left plenty of paper trails myself, but I’ve never had anyone to direct them toward—no one except for you, Emma, and that’s wholly an act of sentiment, since you’re gone. You’re beyond reading these things, and you might not have been interested in them anyway.