Chapelwood (The Borden Dispatches #2)(2)
Stalking them, as they have stalked others before.
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Which brings me to my recent resolution, and why I’m writing of it here.
Do I incriminate myself? Fine, then I incriminate myself. But I will incriminate the reverend, too. I will incriminate them all, and when my time comes, I will not go down alone. I will not go quietly. And I will not have the world believing me a fiend or a madman, not when I am doing God’s own work, in His name.
(If He should exist, and if He should see me—then He will know my heart, and judge me accordingly. I have tried to pray to Him, again and again. Or rather, I have tried to listen for Him, again and again. He does not speak to me, not so that I can hear it. It is one thing I envy the reverend and his followers: Their god speaks.)
(Or is their god the devil after all? For it is the devil who must make his case.)
This must be how the Crusaders felt, when tasked with the awful duty of war and conquest. A necessary duty, and an important one, to be sure. But awful all the same.
My duty is awful too, and I will not shirk away from it. I will confront it.
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I said before that they showed me too much, and they did. They invited me into their confidence because of my training and my aptitude for numbers; I’ve always had a head for sums, and I’ve worked as an accountant for the city these last eleven years. They needed a mathematician, a man who could see the vast tables and workings of numbers and read them as easily as some men read music.
I was flattered that they considered me worthy of their needs. I was proud to assist them, back when I was weak and eager to please.
I took their formulas, their charts, and their scriptures, and I teased out the patterns there. I showed them how to make the calculations themselves, how to manipulate the figures into telling them their fortunes. I believed—do you understand? I believed that the reverend had found a way to hear God speaking, and that when He talked, He spoke in algebra.
I was right about part of it. Someone is speaking to the reverend in proofs and fractions, but it’s not the God of Abraham. I don’t know what it is, or what else it could be . . . Some other god, perhaps? Is that blasphemy? No, I don’t think so. It can’t be, because the first commandment said, “Thou shalt have no other gods before me.” It did not say there were no other gods; it said only to eschew them.
Would that the reverend had obeyed.
Would that I had figured it out sooner, that I was hearing the wrong voice when I scratched my pencil across the paper, tabulating columns and creating the tools the church would need to hear the voices of the universe without my assistance. It is not so easy to live, knowing that I may have given the reverend a map to the end of the world.
So I will do what I can to thwart him. I will take matters back into my own hands, and take the formulas out of my head and commit them to chalkboard, to paper, to any surface at hand, and I will beat them at their own game.
It won’t be any true victory on my part. Too many innocent people will die for this to be any great triumph of justice and virtue; and they will die at my hand, because if they do not . . . they’ll die at the hands of the church, and worse things by far will follow. So I am to become a murderer, of a man or two. Or three. Or however many, until the reverend makes enough mistakes and attracts enough attention that someone, somewhere, rises up to stop him in some way that I can’t.
Or else until he succeeds.
I must account for that possibility, and I will write it in as a variable, when I compile my equations and build my graphs. This string of numbers will haunt me until I die, or until we all do.
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I have determined the reverend’s next target: an Italian woman who lives down by the box factory, and works there with her mother and sister. She is an ordinary woman, thirty years old and unmarried. Her hair is brown and her eyes are brown, too. She goes to Saint Paul’s on Sundays and Wednesdays, too, if her work and health permit it.
I will try to catch her on the way back from her confession, to leave her soul as clean as it can be. I will try to grant her that much, but if the reverend forces my hand, then I will have to take measures—so I can only pray that she prays, and prays often.
She’s done me no wrong, and her death will cause great sorrow, but it could be worse, and that’s what I must remember when I take my weapon and hide it in my coat. I must remember the equation written at the top of my slate in my hidden little flat, and I will tell myself as I strike that it is this woman tonight . . . or the whole world tomorrow.
It’s a terrible sum.
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Father, forgive me—for I know precisely what I’m doing.
Ruth Stephenson
BIRMINGHAM, ALABAMA SEPTEMBER 4, 1921
(LETTER ADDRESSED TO FATHER JAMES COYLE, SAINT PAUL’S CHURCH, BIRMINGHAM, ALABAMA)
I’ve been thinking about what you told me, about demons and God and everything else we can’t see—but still take for granted. You can’t be completely wrong, and I know that for a fact because I’ve seen it myself, and I’m so afraid I just don’t know what to do. You don’t know my daddy, sir. You don’t know what he’s like, or how he gets.
You don’t know what he’s gotten himself into, but I’m going to try to explain it, and maybe you can help me . . . since you did offer to try.
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It started back in January, when Daddy got caught pretending to be a minister so he could marry people, down at the courthouse. Our pastor saw him, asked what he was doing, and got a straight answer out of him, more or less. I’d give him credit for telling the truth except that he’d been caught red-handed, and he would’ve looked stupid for lying about it.