Chapelwood (The Borden Dispatches #2)(37)

“Here’s the worst of it,” he told me. He wiped his hands on his pants and leaned back, almost sitting on the very things he’d worked so hard to protect. “Even if I could prove it—any of it. The least or the worst of it . . . if I had photographic evidence tying them to the recent horrors in Birmingham . . . it wouldn’t matter. Just like it doesn’t matter that Edwin Stephenson shot Father Coyle to death, and the whole world saw him do it, and he doesn’t even deny it. He’ll walk away from it clean, and the True Americans will walk away from their crimes, too. They always do,” he said with a catch in his throat. “And I’m afraid they always will.”

I wanted to reassure him, but how? What could I say to a man already so defeated?

Beside him was another box, of the same sort. It held a similarly sad stack of unfiled, unorganized briefs. I reached forward to flip through them, since they were sitting right there—and I’d come looking for such files, after all. “Let’s not think that way, George,” I said as I sorted through them. “Where there’s a will, there’s a way. And you’re not alone in this. I’m here to help you and . . .”

My platitudes drew up short as my eyes settled on a sketch done in pencil on a rough sheet of newsprint-type paper.

I lifted it out of the box and held it to the light, turned it over, turned it around, and drew it up to my face to give it a more thorough squinting at. I wasn’t entirely sure what I was seeing, but the realization was dawning, and I had the very strong feeling that things were about to leap from “decidedly strange” to “markedly weirder than even that.”

“George . . . what is this?”

“That box? I think it holds the loose file material—bits and pieces that were either scrambled in the transfer or never got stored correctly in the first place. A couple of boxes were dropped, shuffled around—you know how it goes. The stray bits in this one . . . we couldn’t find anywhere else to put them, I suppose.”

“But they’re relevant to the axe murders?”

“They ought to be. Why?”

I showed him the image. It was a woman’s face, sketched by a talented hand. Her hair was long and her features were pretty; she was young and lovely, but she wasn’t smiling.

He took it from me, and examined it himself. “Oh, yes. Her.”

“Who is she?”

He shrugged and handed it back. “We never did find out. One of the axe victims, Gaspera Lorino—he drew it, when we asked him what happened. But you have to understand, he was hurt pretty bad. He’ll never recover, not fully. This drawing, it could be anything. Anyone. An image he saw in a theater, or a photo from a newspaper story a dozen years ago. No one recognized her, and no one thought she had anything to do with the attack.”

“Why not?”

He shrugged again and leaned back, folding his arms. “We had witnesses: Two shopworkers from the neighborhood said they saw a pair of black men do the attacking. I don’t know if they were telling the truth or not, but surely it wasn’t some . . . some girl, leaping out of the shadows to subdue two grown adults, killing one of them.”

“But on the bottom here—is this Mr. Lorino’s handwriting?”

“I believe so.”

I read aloud, “‘The gray lady.’” Then I asked, “He drew this when, precisely? Wait, never mind—here’s a date . . .” In the corner, scrawled in another hand: October 4, 1920. “He was attacked in October, I see.”

“No, it was the end of September. He spent a while in the hospital before we could talk with him. When they finally let us in, he wasn’t any help, not that I blame him. You take a hit to the head like that, and it can really scramble your brains. Why are you so keen on that picture? Do you know her?”

I ran my thumb over the edge of her hair. “Not exactly . . .” But I’d seen those eyes before. I’d seen that jawline, that hair. Not in the flesh, that I could ever recall—though I’d seen a dozen movie posters and at least one photograph where she was embracing another woman. “But I know who she is. Or who she was, I should say . . . because this was thirty years ago. She’d be in her fifties now, if she were alive.”

“I’m sorry, come again?”

“She’s dead.” I didn’t know it for a fact. No one did, and for all this time, I’d assumed that no one ever would. “I’m sorry, I don’t mean to be obtuse—but this takes me by surprise. It’s a new wrinkle in an old case, I’ll put it that way. Do you mind if I keep this, just for a few days? I’d like to show it to someone.”

“By all means. I bet it’s safer with you than down here, waiting to get eaten by the basement.”

I folded it, and tucked it neatly into my vest. “Thank you,” I said. “And thank you for your time, all of it. Now I must take my leave, if temporarily. I need to send a message.”

“What about the case files? I thought you wanted to look at them?”

“Oh, I do. Is it all right if I wander down here later this afternoon or evening?”

“Anytime you like. It’s never locked. No one comes down here for anything, ever. Not unless they have to.”

I laughed nervously, because I certainly understood why no one would choose the basement for a cigarette break or a quick sip of coffee. I tried a light joke: “Everyone’s afraid of getting eaten, is that it?”