Chapelwood (The Borden Dispatches #2)(51)

“And where shall we go next? To Chapelwood?”

“Not directly. First I want another word with Ruth, and I think you’ll want a word with her, too. Her father’s the man who murdered the priest, and conveniently enough for us, he’s on trial for the crime. Right this very moment.”

“But what does the trial have to do with the church? Or his daughter?”

He strolled off toward the car, and I went with him.

“Edwin Stephenson had recently been drawn into the Chapelwood congregation, and he dragged his family along with him. Ruth did not appreciate or approve of the place at all, which speaks well of her intuition, I’m sure. At any rate, there’s something knocking around in the back of my mind . . . something Lorino said, about Chapelwood having lost its offering. I think I know what that offering was, and I think Ruth may have more to tell us.”





Leonard Kincaid, American Institute of Accountants (Former Member)




SEPTEMBER 29, 1921


The math is broken. Or I am broken, and haven’t figured it out yet—I can’t tell which. It’s not that things aren’t adding up, because they are; it’s just that they’re adding up to things that don’t make sense. I’m not finding the numbers of Chapelwood’s next targets . . . instead, I think the equations are trying to tell me something else this time.

If algebra is the language of God, or the universe, or of space and time for all I know, then I wish I understood its syntax better. The grammar baffles me, and the sentence structure pulls me in circles.

? ? ?

I ran out of blackboard space.

Rather, I woke up and found my blackboard covered in numbers so small, handwriting so very tight, that at first I thought I’d simply fallen asleep and—in another dreamy daze—I’d laid the chalk on its side and scraped it across the slate. Upon closer inspection, I saw that I was mistaken. Tiny, tiny numbers, all over the place. Tiny columns and tables, only some of them running left to right, top to bottom. Some of them crossed on the diagonal, and some even overwrote the blackboard’s wooden frame. In those weird little places, the text was not sharp enough for me to read it.

I knew that I had written it. Even if I didn’t know my own script so well, there’s nobody else who comes or goes from this flophouse room, and I’ve paid it far enough in advance that even the proprietor can’t be bothered to check on me, unless I should cause trouble somehow. I never cause trouble, for him or anyone else. I never give anyone a reason to come inside, and I keep the door locked when I’m “home,” and when I’m not.

So the numbers were mine, drawn from my own brain when I was unaware. I wasn’t surprised by that simple fact—after all, I’d been pulling these numbers from thin air for over a year, using them to populate the equations I devised for the Chapelwood monsters. Some mornings I’d awaken to find them scrawled on notepaper left beside my bed, and some mornings I’d find them on the blackboard, or left upon my desk directly in pencil (on one odd occasion).

No, I was surprised by the sheer volume of it all, and likewise, I was surprised to see the pattern changed. These weren’t the neatly slotted digits that lined up nicely with my graphs; these were systems that swirled and dipped, broke apart and reassembled.

I traced them with my eyes, trying to determine what I was meant to see. I can read a formula like other men read Shakespeare—teasing out the truths and particulars from the empty spaces, and divining meaning from scant hints and puns.

(Yes, numbers can twist themselves into puns. Any crackpot numerologist could tell you as much.)

What do I see? What does this tell me?

I think it means interference. I see new chess pieces coming into play, two of them at least—and always that uncertain variable of Ruth Stephenson (or whatever her name is now), who escaped before they could take her, and before I had to kill her. She got away, and the thing that waits on the other side of the wall is none too pleased about it; it would send them after her again, and maybe it will in time . . . but for now, she’s too visible, too much in the public eye. After her father’s trial, I think. They might well settle upon her again, and then I’ll have to reassess her importance and safety in the scheme of the universal good.

Does that sound strange? Of course it does. Everything is, though, isn’t it?

Upon the blackboard, in the soup of numbers I left there in my sleep, I saw poetry . . . but it wasn’t the straightforward kind that makes cheap rhymes about the beauty of a woman or the freshness of spring. This poem is talking its way around something else. “Interference,” I said. Maybe “resistance” is a better way to put it.

But resistance to whom? To me? To Chapelwood?

I made myself a pot of coffee and pulled up a chair. I retrieved a pair of reading glasses I don’t often need from the top drawer, and I leaned forward with my face so close to the board that my breath left brief puffs of fog upon it.

I took it all in, and I let myself detach away from it . . . I closed my eyes and let my attention distance itself, in a faint approximation (or a reaching toward) of that mesmerized state which prompted me to produce the numbers in the first place. I retreated, trying to see the bigger picture instead of just the individual numbers, statistics, and symbols.

When I blinked myself back to alertness, I felt only a sense that I was no longer alone in my fight . . . but that it might not be a good thing, and I couldn’t understand why. The thought of an ally thrilled and delighted me! But it neither thrilled nor delighted the universe, so far as I could tell.