Chapelwood

by Cherie Priest

Before we could trip over each other any further, I said, “That’s not what I was suggesting. What do you mean—you think Mr. Kincaid killed all those people?”

  “Here’s his desk calendar,” he said, relieved to be off the hook, I imagine. “Over here, look—the names are fading, but what do you see?”

  I squinted down at the chicken-scratch handwriting. “I see . . . Bes . . . Besley? Is that what it says? Kincaid’s penmanship was terrible.”

  “Besler, I’d bet you a small fortune. And the next one, what do you think that other name says, there—under the June 22 listing?”

  “It’s another ‘B’ I think . . . Baldone? Is that right?”

  “Do those names ring a bell?” he asked, clearly thinking they ought to.

  But I didn’t recognize either one. “I’m afraid they don’t.”

  “Besler and Baldone were the first two victims—or the first two universally agreed-upon victims, as there were undoubtedly others—of Harry the Hacker.”

  “What a stupid name.” I put my own hand into the box and pushed the items around to see them better. I found a desk clock that folded into a travel case, a nameplate still in its holder, three pens, a copy of Vern and Hightower’s Legal Guide to Civic Accounting in the Modern Era, two old issues of Life magazine, three or four bus tokens, a white coffee mug, and a pair of reading glasses in a silk sleeve.

  “It looks like you’ve located the only useful thing in the bin,” I noted.

  “George didn’t say it’d all be helpful; he just said we’d find what we needed.” He flipped the calendar’s pages, looking for any other items that might be important—and by luck or by design, a small bulletin slipped out.

  I caught it before it could hit the floor.

  It was printed on light blue paper, and the front read, “Give Me That Old-Time Religion!” I held it up for Wolf to see. “Get a gander at this, would you? ‘The Reverend A. J. Davis hosts three days of song, sermons, and celebration at the old county fairgrounds, starting March 5, 1919! Come one, come all—bring the family, and share the Glory of God with kids and grandparents alike!’ Well—” I paused. “The author surely has a flair for exclamation points.”

  “Never mind the flair, take note of the fact: This is our first tangible connection between the axe murders and Chapelwood.”

  “If, in fact, Mr. Kincaid—”

  “Oh, come now,” he interrupted me in his excitement. “Why else would his box have wound up here? Why else would the record already be fading?” He held up the calendar again, with its ghostly script surely growing more ghostly by the hour. “And the names of the first two victims, right alongside what looks like some sort of equation, doesn’t it?” he asked, but he didn’t hand it back to me. He didn’t really want or require a second opinion. “I think it looks like an equation,” he assured himself. “And remember what George’s letter said, about the secretary? She said he was going on about talking to God with numbers. Oh, it fits together so nicely, doesn’t it?”

  “You must be right. There’s too much here to write it all off as a coincidence.”

  He bounced on his heels while he scrutinized the calendar. “I can’t figure out why God would tell him to kill people, but then again, I’ve never been able to figure out God at all, so that goes to show you what I know.”

  “There’s no telling who . . . or what . . . was talking to him with those numbers. We have no idea where he got them, or how he went about interpreting them.”

  He lowered the calendar and settled back into his shoes. His eyes grew suddenly serious. “You’re absolutely right. The simplest explanation is that he went mad, but that’s only somewhat likely. A man can be both mad and correct.”

  “He can be driven mad by being correct, too—or so I’d wager. Maybe the truth didn’t set him free, but it drove him insane.”

  Wolf gave me that intent, thoughtful stare that I’d come to recognize. “I’ve seen it happen before. But it’s not a given, is it? That’s not what happened to you when you brushed up against something this huge, this strange.”

  • • •

  Ah. So it was time.

  I hope you won’t think less of me, Emma. But I had to tell someone, you understand? Please understand. I hope you understand.

  Nance would.

  • • •

  I sighed and leaned back against the dust-covered desk, halfway sitting upon it. “No, that’s not what happened to me. I think? I assume? I’ll tell you the truth,” I added, before he could respond with some polite demurral. “Sometimes I’m not entirely certain.”

  “But that’s a good sign, isn’t it? If you were well and truly daft, you’d never wonder about it.”

  “Seabury never wondered,” I said softly. “He spiraled and spiraled and spiraled, gently at first and then swiftly, like a paper boat headed down a drain. But he never quite went completely mad . . . and I think that was the worst of it. He’d spend an hour telling you about the starfish and moon, and the tides, and the monsters with their cunning plans . . . but then he’d brighten up, and ask after the basement renovations or my volunteering at the Humane Society. He never quite left me entirely. He only wandered far enough away that he . . . he couldn’t find his way back in the dark.”

  “You miss him.”

  “Yes, I miss him. Even after all these years. I’ve had so few close friends, and he shared two of the greatest secrets of my whole life.”

  “Two?” he asked, one eyebrow perking with curiosity.

  I looked down at the boxes, at the decaying details of other people’s lives and deaths; I gazed around the damp, musty room that smelled of mildew and sorrow, and hunger. If any room ever ate secrets, then yes. It was this one.

  All right, then I would speak it aloud here, and nowhere else. Not ever again.

  “Two,” I confirmed. “He knew what happened to Zollicoffer . . . and he knew what became of my father and stepmother, as well. He knew everything, and he took it all to his grave. My sister did, too, of course, but that was different. That was blood, and we needed each other.”

  I gave him a sidelong look, watching his face to see what it might tell me. It said that he was thinking, but I did not see any indication that he was judging. “I won’t ask after your parents, for it’s no business of mine, except for this: Were their deaths . . . somehow connected to Zollicoffer and the havoc he wrought?”

  I nodded. I had to. My neck felt loose and my head was so heavy with the weight of it all.

  “I don’t know how it began, exactly. I don’t know whose fault it was, or what brought it about. There were these stones . . . ,” I said, then realized that we’d be there all afternoon and all night, too, if I tried to tell him everything. “It’s a long story. But they came from the ocean, and they were somehow kin to the sample my sister found on the beach, on that one clear day all those years ago . . . when she still felt well enough to stroll if the air was nice. She sent it to him, and it changed him. I think it changed her, too. She was never the same after she picked it up. Her health failed faster, and more precipitously. But it did the opposite to the professor, didn’t it?”

  “I beg your pardon?”

  “It didn’t make him weak,” I explained myself. “It made him strong.”

  “No, it made him different. I think . . . and mind you, this is only my theory of the most feeble conjecture . . . I think it killed him, and replaced him with something else. By the end, he wasn’t human anymore. I doubt he even noticed.”

  • • •

  Emma, do you think he was right?

  • • •

  “I . . . I’m not sure how I feel about that. I hope you’re right, I suppose. I hope that no human being is capable of the things he did.” I stared at the floor, not saying the rest of what I meant.

  But Wolf drew it out of me anyway. “By the end, let us say . . . by the end, h
e must not have been human. Does that make it easier?”

  “Yes? No?” I shrugged. “Surely, given his activities, he deserved worse than any mortal hand could deal him.”

  “Worse than what you did to him?” He broached the question carefully, almost whispering it.

  I took a deep breath, and with it I said, “What I did to him was necessary, and barely even possible. I couldn’t have done it without Emma and Seabury, so we’re all three guilty—no matter how you divvy up the blame.” I took another deep breath, and it felt clean, almost. “I had a device in the basement: It was an industrial piece of equipment, mostly used on farms to dispose of carcasses that can’t be eaten or otherwise processed—a steam-pressure machine, full of hot lye and so forth. We trapped him inside it. There was nothing left of him in the end, nothing but a scream and some black-colored sludge.”

  The confession hung in the air between us, lifted up on the currents of our breathing, the disturbances we made as we walked and moved and talked. It settled on the desk, the boxes, the floor, the papers. It coated the room like so much dust.

  He cleared his throat, maybe due to the cloudy air, or maybe due to me—and what I’d said. “I always assumed you’d done . . . something. Creatures like Zollicoffer don’t just quit killing, once they’ve started. Someone has to stop them, and I’m glad you were able to.”

  “As am I, though I wish . . .”

  “Yes?” he prompted gently. I couldn’t bring myself to say it, so he filled in the rest with his impeccable intuition. “You . . . you wish it hadn’t cost you Nance O’Neil?”

  I nodded, unable to muster any other response. I almost dug her sketched-out portrait from my bag—I almost held it up so I could stare at it, and grieve more concretely, or feed my guilt with stronger memories, for the years had sometimes left my recollections threadbare. I knew the upturn of her mouth, her eyebrows, her every crinkle of eyelids . . . or I believed I did, until I tried to summon them. I knew the sound of her voice, each note and each sigh, each laugh, every whisper. Until they were all whispers, and the rest was hardly more than a hum in my brain.

  • • •

  Why couldn’t she have haunted me, Emma? Why did it have to be you instead?

  You, I knew for all my life; I could no sooner forget the details of your presence than forget my own face. But Nance . . . I did not have her for so long, and I am old now, you see? If only she had haunted me, I’d have something left—her ghost as a souvenir, or is that obscene? I can’t tell. I honestly can’t tell.

  • • •

  “Lizbeth?”

  I shook my head, and dabbed at the corner of my eye. It was only a little tear, but I didn’t want it anyway. “I’m sorry, but I think it’s this place. It’s eating more than secrets and old paperwork. Maybe it’s eating my memories, too.”

  “Then we should either leave immediately or stay long enough to ease your sorrow.”

  “No,” I said quickly. “No, we should go. Those old memories are all I have of my Nance, and should they fade . . . there’s nothing left of the joy we knew. I’ll keep them, as many as I can, for as long as I can—even for all the sorrow they cause me—as payment for holding them close. Staying here . . . good heavens, I’m not sure why you’d suggest it.”

  Flatly, he told me, “Because your protests sound like remorse, as opposed to nostalgia. It is a privilege to remember those we loved and lost; but what you’re doing is self-flagellation, my friend.”

  Was he my friend? Would a friend suggest forgetting another friend?

  Maybe he was only trying to be kind, if misguided. “Either way, I find some comfort in what remains. Or some . . . some reassurance? The universe is unfolding as it ought to, so long as I feel terrible for what became of her. I deserve to feel terrible. I deserve everything that happens to me, for all the rest of my years.”

  He hesitated, on the verge of saying one thing, I think—but letting his curiosity drive him in another direction. “What did become of her, then? If you don’t mind my asking. I’ve always wondered. It’s always been an unfinished note in my files. She never reappeared, never acted in another play, never went home. Did she meet her end in the basement, too?”

  “What a vulgar thing to ask.”

  “Why? You’ve offered up more vulgar and sensitive information quite freely. If it’s a sensitive subject, I’ll let it go. As I’ve said before, it’s no business of mine, after all.”

  “Indeed it isn’t,” I snapped, but it was already rolling through my head—that night, out on the water, after she’d escaped the basement . . . but into the arms of what? And where? I was half afraid that I couldn’t keep it all inside, and half afraid that everything I tried to recall was being devoured by that uncanny room. At least if I said it aloud, there’d be someone else to remind me later. Would voicing the truth lend it some kind of insurance?

  Perhaps.

  So I told him, “But in all honesty, I don’t know where she is. I don’t know what happened to her. She had been . . . changing, as if preparing to abandon the land in favor of the ocean, and whatever weird ‘mother’ awaited her there. And then she disappeared, shortly before Zollicoffer arrived—so I can’t say that he took her, or killed her, or that he stole her away from me. If it were as simple as that, surely she would’ve returned upon his passing.”

  “One would think. Then I apologize, from the bottom of my belly—which is infinitely larger than my heart. I did not mean to . . . it’s . . . well, such a painful subject. I should’ve let it lie.”

  I sighed heavily, both at his apology and his attempt at endearing levity. This wasn’t the time or place, but he was making an effort to placate me. “It’s all right, Simon. Consider yourself forgiven, if perhaps . . . when all this is finished, you and your organization might lend your expertise to the matter.”

  “I volunteer every spare moment of my own, and my office,” he said gallantly. “I don’t know if we can help you solve that mystery or not, but by heaven and math alike, we will try.”

  “Thank you, and now let’s leave this place. Take the box with you, if you think it might tell us more—but nothing is safe when stored here, not in containers, and not in the skulls of little old women like myself.”

  “Very good, yes. Absolutely,” the inspector said decisively. “We really must see about finding George, anyway, and keep him out of whatever trouble he’s courting.”

  “Do you think he’s gone to Chapelwood?” I asked. It was only the most logical of questions, but it left a bad taste in my mouth.

  “I think that’s as good a guess as any, but we can’t charge headlong over there demanding his return. We might be wrong, for one thing. For another, he’s a grown man—free, white, and twenty-one, isn’t that the expression?—and he can come and go as he likes, even into peril.”

  “Just like us,” I observed dully. I gave one last glance to the revival tent flyer, the accounting books, the sad and dusty place where George must have come to sleep, to research, and perhaps to forget. “But there are still souls left to save, and I’ve failed so many in my time.”

  He put a hand on my shoulder, an awkward little pat of reassurance. Then he picked up the box of fading evidence. “Don’t talk that way. No one’s finished yet except for James Coyle. The rest of us still have a fighting chance—and we must make the most of it.”

  Inspector Simon Wolf

  OCTOBER 4, 1921

  I strongly doubt I will ever solve the mystery of Nance O’Neil, but I do not regret promising Lizbeth the effort. You never know. The Quiet Society might learn something new.

  Or it might only waste a great deal of time and money. What of it? We waste time and money all the time. We may as well waste it toward a good cause—toward easing the suffering of a lonely old woman, and exploring the possibilities beyond Zollicoffer, beyond the ocean.

  I’ve always known there was somet
hing beyond him. But what?

  I may well need to learn to live with never knowing. I don’t like the idea. I don’t know how my friend has done it all these years.

  • • •

  After leaving the basement together, Lizbeth and I retreated upstairs to try our luck at the civic offices, in case there were further records we might get our hands upon. But Nathaniel Barrett was not present, and I couldn’t decide if I was glad or not, so I ended up erring on the side of “pleased that I didn’t have to shake his hand again.” Mostly we were ignored, apart from a few curious stares, but in the background we heard whispers. Word was getting around: The two fancy out-of-towners were friends of the Stephenson girl (no, the Gussman woman) and therefore enemies of the True Americans, and so forth, and so on.

  We left before the balance shifted from idle chatter to threat. There probably wasn’t anything useful left to be found there anyway. If the storage room hadn’t eaten it, it was no doubt hoarded by men who’d never let us touch it . . . or otherwise it had surely been destroyed.

  So, that luck tried, and found to be lacking . . . I suggested the police.

  “What might we find there?” Lizbeth asked.

  “I’m very curious about the death of Mr. Kincaid. Perhaps my badge can get us a peek at whatever evidence they collected in the wake of his ‘suspicious’ death by crucifixion.”

  But by the time we arrived at the station, some tipping point had been reached—some critical mass of gossip and group information had found us out—and it was made entirely clear that we could expect no further assistance from any authorities. I suppose word might have spread by phone, except that no one else knew our next stop—so instead, the chilly reception we received at the station must have been the result of one truly outstanding grapevine. The receptionist could scarcely be persuaded to acknowledge our presence, much less the badge. She only repeated, “I’m sorry, but it’s a local investigation—and no outside assistance is required. Or preferred, either. I can’t help you, and neither can anyone else.”