Chapelwood (The Borden Dispatches #2)(15)

I’ll put it this way: This is how I first realized we were up against something worse than a man the papers called “Harry.”

I knew it when Eagan came into my office after a particularly long day. He drew up a chair before my desk and dropped himself heavily into it, sighing as if he were letting all the air out of his body—and with it, the taint of whatever he’d seen or heard over the course of his duties.

I had a bottle of whiskey in my second drawer, and a pair of glasses beside it. I served us both a drink and we sat in companionable silence for a while, listening to the sounds of the city’s evening unfolding outside my window. Horses stomped and clattered on the side streets, and automobiles cranked and puffed up and down the lanes; storefront doors shut with the chime of a bell and the turn of a lock as they closed for the day; people called greetings to one another as the last of the streetlamps came on with a gassy hiss; and somewhere a block or two distant, a telephone rang.

“Must have been a hell of a day,” I finally said, in case he wanted to talk about it.

“Hell of a day, and you don’t know the half of it,” he replied, each letter seasoned with the Irish brogue he never quite lost in the American South. “Good way to put it, though. Hell of a day. These axe crimes, you know . . . I’ve never really seen the like of ’em—not so many like this, all in a bunch. And none of our witnesses ever see anything of any use to us.”

“Rogue negroes. Harry the Hacker.”

“Horseshit, all of it. But I’ve been keeping the latest here,” he said, patting his chest with one hand, and raising the glass to his mouth with the other. He swallowed. “Or in your office, if anyplace else. It can stay between us, can’t it? Because I’ll be damned if I know what to do with it.”

“From your lips to God’s ears, and no place in between,” I assured him. He didn’t really need the reassurance, I didn’t think. I don’t know why he asked for it.

He stared hard into the half-empty glass that he balanced on top of his knee. “This most recent one, the girl who got jumped last Saturday . . .”

“Jennie Heflin,” I supplied the name.

“I went to speak with her at the hospital, for the nurse sent word she was finally awake. And she was,” he mused. “She was awake. Her head was all shaved, and covered in stitches or bandages—as was a spot on her shoulder. She was all wrapped up like a little Egypt mummy. Her eyes were big as quarters, and her mouth was still swollen up from where she’d hit the curb when she fell.”

“But she lived.”

“But she lived. And she didn’t want to speak to me, hardly at all . . . but I was patient with her. She’s about Ellen’s age, so I sat with her like I would my own daughter and I waited, and with a little time and patience, she opened up. Except . . .”

“Except?”

He shook his head and finished the drink, but held the empty glass upon his knee without asking for another one. “Except I can’t say how much of her story had any grain of truth, and how much of it came from being hit so hard on the head, so many times. Four times,” he clarified. “Four hard strikes to the head, then the one to her shoulder—or her back, depending on how you measure it. Someone hit her hard, and nearly killed her. That can rattle a body, can’t it? And rattle a mind, too?”

“Absolutely.”

“That’s what I’ve been thinking, and telling myself over and over since I spoke to her. So this is what she told me: She said it was early evening—much like now—and that’s when they tend to strike, isn’t it?”

“Sure is,” I said, offering the bottle, even though he hadn’t asked for it. He seemed to need it, and he didn’t fight me—he just poured himself another slug, though he didn’t take a swallow just yet.

“She was walking home to her mother’s house, after working in the laundry on Ninth Street, bringing home supper from the Jew’s shop, ’cause it was right on the way. The weather was nice, and the night wasn’t too cool, and she was just thinking how pleasant it all was, when everything went dark.”

“You mean, she was knocked unconscious?”

“No—” He swung his head back and forth. “She said the lamp went out overhead, and so did the one at the other end of the street, and the one behind her—all at the same time, like a switch had been pulled. She looked up and saw the windows above her, in the flats and the hotels, they were all dark, too; she said she saw the outlines of the roofs and gutters up against the sky . . . but there weren’t any stars, either. No moon. No light from the sky or anyplace else, and she could only tell it was the sky at all because it was a different shade of black.”

“That’s . . .” I couldn’t find whatever word I meant to give him.

“That’s what I mean—” He fumbled, too. “Sounds to me like someone conked her on the head, and it happened so fast she didn’t feel it, didn’t know what it was or what had happened. But she insisted that wasn’t it—she insisted she was awake, and alive, and she was looking up at the sky but it wasn’t there anymore. Then she said she smelled something funny, something like the fish stalls down at the market, at the end of the day when the ice is melted and things are starting to stink. She said it snuck up on her, so strong that she could feel it—she told me she felt it,” he asserted. “Felt it crawling around her ankles as she stood there, stopped and staring up at the sky.”