Chapelwood (The Borden Dispatches #2)(36)
“‘Hid’ is a mighty strong word.”
“The secretary at the police station suggested you’d removed the files for safekeeping a few weeks ago.”
“Right, right. Well, that was no big secret.”
“Why did you take them?”
He shook his head and shoved at one of his shirtsleeves, adjusting the tuck of the cuff so it’d stay aloft. “I didn’t. Eagan’s the one who brought them to me; I just authorized the transfer. And yes, once I’d heard him out, I put them down here. I thought they’d be safe.”
“From what? Or from whom, as the case may be?”
“Barrett. Tom Shirley. The True Americans. Take your pick.” He turned around and hauled a heavy-looking box full of folders into the space between us. “Most of the details are here, but a few . . . just . . . aren’t.”
“Someone found your stash?”
“No, I don’t think so,” he said, kicking gently at the box. “I set up a few . . . not booby traps, exactly. But I left little tells around, so I’d know if anyone came by. None of it was disturbed. Then again, this basement has a way of eating things.”
I offered a polite laugh, but it seemed only to confuse him. “I’m sorry—I liked your phrasing, is all.”
“It’s not a matter of phrasing. Things disappear down here, and reappear—but different. Like they’ve been chewed up, digested, and shit back out again. Look around you.” He gestured so broadly that he nearly hit me in the chin. “Look at all these things, all of them broken and scattered. Parts missing, never to be recovered. It happens to everything down here eventually. I thought I’d have more time, is all.”
I honestly couldn’t tell how serious he was, so I amicably hedged my bets. “Basements have a way of surprising us, don’t they?”
“Basements, and everything else underground. Look, I’m not a madman,” he said with almost too much earnestness. “I’m just a local, and I’ve just spent enough time in these places, these in-between places . . .” His voice fizzled out.
Gently, I said, “Now I really must beg your pardon, for I don’t understand your meaning.”
His shoulders slumped and he stared down at the box. “What’s to understand? Things are decidedly strange, and getting more so all the time. It’s the little things at first—and you barely notice. By the time it’s staring you in the face, and you finally can’t pretend that it’s all in your head . . . it’s been happening, well, outside your head, too. For years.”
He dropped to his knees, and urged me to do likewise—but I declined. I have a difficult time getting up and down from the floor, for pity’s sake. I was willing to watch from above.
“Here, let me show you,” he offered, riffling through the box’s contents. “This is the case file for the attack on Joe and Susie Baldone.” His fingers flipped past various documents, photos, and notes. “But parts of it are missing. Not just pieces of paper—that’s not what I mean; that’s too easy to account for—but pieces of text, whole paragraphs that were typed out on my own machine, in my own office. By my own hands.” He sighed. “I typed this file myself, and now this page, you see? I might as well have done it up with invisible ink.”
He passed me the page. I eyed it closely, holding it up to the solitary bulb that gave me all the light I could expect to use. Whether or not it’d once held much of note, now it held only a partial description of Susie Baldone, mother of one, assaulted in October of last year. A photo was clipped to the page, but it was so faded it told me almost nothing. I saw the shape of a smiling face, a woman’s outline in a pale-colored dress.
“They’re vanishing, right in front of me.” The despair in his words echoed forlornly through the basement, where everything had a soft edge and nothing stayed forever.
I didn’t know what to say about that, so I asked another question. “Can you tell me, please—what do Barrett’s people care about these files? Would they have destroyed them, or altered them in any way?”
“I couldn’t say, but I had a terrible feeling about it all. Barrett asked too many questions, wanted too many liberties with the information.”
“You think he’s mixed up in it somehow?”
“Him, or the TAs, or somebody in his circle. I want to say it must be the Americans . . . they’re so peculiar, and the peculiarness spreads with them. Everything they touch, they leave some stain on it . . . and I can’t help but feel like this whole nasty business . . . it’s something of theirs. I wish I had a better way to say it, but I don’t.”
“Far be it from me to disagree with you. What little I’ve read—”
“What little you’ve read,” he interrupted, though not unkindly, “can’t possibly scratch the surface. They are so careful to keep the worst of it quiet, or unprovable at the very least. And like the best of their handiwork, I’ll be damned if I can prove any connection of theirs to any of this,” he said, waving his hand over the box.
Silence filled in the space between us, and around us. The old building settled on its foundations, or maybe some door opened someplace, and that’s what explained the soft gust of air I felt tickling the back of my neck. The lightbulb flickered but stayed on. The box of documents on the floor between us performed no dramatic trick when George Ward picked it up and put it back onto its original pile.