Chapelwood (The Borden Dispatches #2)(12)

These axe murders appear at a glance to be clear and boring as day—small shop owners and assorted pedestrians, often of immigrant stock? terrorized as part of some thuggish racket. Then, after the first few deaths, the demographic broadened to include young couples . . . particularly young couples whose skin tones weren’t quite the same. Another easy guess, not worth too much time: The Klan has not so much a toehold as a choke hold on the city, and likewise it has a grudge against such mismatched unions. The math added up neatly enough. The Birmingham murders were (are?) hardly of sufficient caliber to involve our Quiet Society.

But then I got word today of another death, more mundane even than those that preceded it: a man shot to death, in front of witnesses. A priest, standing on the steps of Saint Paul’s. Murdered in cold blood, for reasons yet unclear.

I knew that priest. His name was James Coyle, and we investigated a case together, back around the turn of the century. He was a good, decent man—levelheaded and prone to calm, methodical processes. He was not by any means the sort of fellow you’d expect to find gunned down by an enraged madman with a personal vendetta. I simply can’t fathom it.

Then I got further word from . . . oh, let’s not call Drake a “superior,” for he’s more like a traffic director than a manager.

Suffice it to say that I heard from our resident traffic director that we’d actually received several letters from this same priest over the previous month asking us to investigate the axe murders in his city. I was irate—these letters were addressed to me! And I’d never laid eyes on them! But then I calmed myself, for it was true that I’d been out of the office most of that time, peering into a potential poltergeist pestering people in Providence.

I’m sorry, I don’t mean to be funny. (It wasn’t funny at all.)

What I mean to say is that I was out of the office, and the letters were rerouted through a secretary who handles such things in the absence of operatives like myself. He’s a different sort of traffic director, you might say. It’s his job to open letters and packages to check for anything untoward, and also to prioritize requests and appeals. When I cornered the lad about his handling of the priest’s letters, he trembled and told me precisely what I said above: The only unusual element in the axe murders . . . was the presence of the axe. There was no indication that this was something for the Quiet Society to investigate.

I hated him, because I knew he was right.

If I’d been the fellow processing the copious mound of correspondence we get in a month, and if I’d read about the Birmingham case with half my brain turned on . . . then I probably would have done the very same and disregarded it as a strange case, but not a weird one.

I collected the letters that remained—only two had yet been spared from the fire, and the second of those arrived after the good man’s death. The first was a general recounting of the more recent deaths by hatchet, and the second was more of a personal note. It had not yet been opened, so I sliced it with my desktop blade and read:

I wish you’d send me some reply, but I understand how much you travel, and how much you must have to read in the homebound intervals. I almost fear you’ve not received these missives at all, and perhaps they’ve been dragged into some hole, lost by the postal service, forgotten by your clerks . . . but I have faith that the important parts will find you yet. I must have faith. And I must impress upon you, things here are odder than they seem—far odder than the papers would lead you to believe. I fear for the safety of this city, and for my own safety, too, yes. Bad things are coming together, and it’s sickening my soul to watch them join forces against us.

It isn’t just the Klan, though God knows they’re bad enough; but there are others like them, the “True Americans,” they call themselves, the “Guardians of Liberty.” Also there is a church, if one could be so gauche as to call it that. I’ve known many fine Baptists in my day—men with whom I could chat and cooperate for the greater good—but this is nothing like that. This is something altogether weirder and worse, and it calls itself Chapelwood. Between this unholy triad, they will see Birmingham burned to the ground. Or worse.

I’m afraid, Simon. For everyone. Please come, won’t you? I’m afraid, and I am too alone to save everyone who might need saving.

He signed the letters “JC,” as a gentle, sacrilegious joke between us. Jesus Christ or James Coyle, either way the initials worked and that’s one reason I liked him—one thing we had in common: a propensity in private toward inappropriate humor. (Though I prefer to think of it as a finely honed sense of ironic awareness. Is that different? I don’t know.)

I held the letter in my hands and rubbed those initials with my thumb, marveling that he was dead already before his handwriting ever reached me—this fine man, assassinated on the steps of his own church, by a madman who . . .

. . . who I knew nothing about.

I had only the Huntsville office’s descriptor to go on, and it wasn’t much. Mad, and a man. That was the whole sum of what I knew.

But I would learn more, goddammit.

I packed myself some paperwork of the official variety—the kind that opens doors and loosens tongues—and I went down the hall to Drake’s office. He sat within it, tired and old-looking, with a glass of scotch in one hand and a pen in the other. He took a sip of the former and asked me what I wanted.