Chapelwood (The Borden Dispatches #2)(6)

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I would like to think—and I know you don’t wish to hear this, Emma—but I would like to think that if anyone was going to haunt me . . . that it would be Nance.

God, just writing her name.

I shouldn’t have done it. I’ll cross it out. After all this time, it’s still too awful. No, after all this time, the worst part is not even knowing how awful it really is. For all I know, she isn’t even dead.

That’s not true, though, is it? In some form or another, she’s definitely dead. Or she’s so far gone, so far removed from me that she might as well be dead. I can only hope and pray that wherever she is, whatever became of her . . . she’s happy, or free from pain at the very least. I can only hope, if there’s any God of any merit whatsoever out there, that He’d grant her that much.

But what do I know of God? Not a damn thing.

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Wait. I was going to write about the newspaper, and I almost completely forgot to.

The newspaper, it makes me think of you. Remember how you received so many of them, and so many periodicals, from so many places? Every time I collect the paper, and every time the mailman comes, I think of you.

I still order papers from out of town. I still order magazines, though not the technical ones you always preferred, with all the diagrams and Latin in them. I am but a layman, from a biology standpoint. That was always your field of expertise, my sister.

The things I order these days are either more mundane, or much more strange.

On the one hand, I gather gossip and follow the goings-on of the suffragettes and their continued push for women’s rights. On the other, I order religious treatises from many different faiths, I follow their conferences and their research, and I keep up with where they stand on a variety of issues. (There’s more overlap between the two than you might expect.)

On a third hand, someone else’s hand, perhaps, I’ve become terribly interested in the spiritualism movement. Do I agree with every jot and tittle of their sprawling and flexible views? Not at all. But the fact that their tenets sprawl, and are flexible . . . that’s meaningful to me. Almost as meaningful as their admission that many things happen that are unexplainable by science, or traditional (Christian, one must qualify) religious inquiry.

I know precisely what you’d say to it all—something about me taking my superstitious inclinations too far, right off the deep end. That’s what you’d tell me, if you were here.

Well, you’re not. And if you were, we’d only quarrel about it anyway.

So I watch with interest—and without interference—what becomes of their little enclaves such as Lily Dale in New York, and Cassadaga in Florida, Sunset in Kansas, Chesterfield in Indiana, Pine Grove in Connecticut, Etna in Maine, and so forth, and so on. In some ways, they are so progressive! And in others, I am not so certain. But that’s to be expected, isn’t it? Balance, always balance.

Regardless, I appreciate the broad scope of their search for meaning. I like the way they don’t stick to the usual paths in pursuit of truth. Heaven knows the usual paths never got me anywhere, though in the name of balance I should add that the unusual paths mostly brought me sorrow.

One day, I mean to visit one of these camps.

I’ll do it quietly—it shouldn’t be hard. No one recognizes me anymore; thirty years will do that to a woman. That’s one small grace granted by Father Time, in my case if none other. I am not anonymous here in Fall River, but should I leave, no one elsewhere should have the faintest idea who I used to be, and what I did (or did not) get away with.

The question then, I’m sure you’re asking yourself . . . is why I’ve stayed.

I wish I had a decent answer, but you know I don’t. I have instead a host of indecent answers, each one more frail and ridiculous than the last. I stay because this is my home, and it always has been, despite everything. I stay because I love this house, even without you in it. I stay because you’re buried here, and Doctor Owens is buried here. I stay because Nance left me here, and what if she were to return only to find me gone?

I stay because I like the cats.

The point is, I stay.

You probably thought I wouldn’t. You probably thought that once I was free of you and your infirmity, I’d take to the wind like a dandelion seed. But then again, you were always wrong about that one thing—I never thought you were a burden. You were my beloved sister and dearest friend. I wish I could’ve convinced you of it.

I wish even in my head, right now as I natter in this journal as if you’ll ever read it, that I could not hear you arguing with me. In my head, you’re waving Nance in my face, and it’s unkind of you, really. I wish you wouldn’t.

Maybe it’s not the house you haunt. Maybe it’s me.

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As I mentioned, I turned your bedroom into my office. After I walled up the basement, that is.

I couldn’t stand to be down there anymore, not after everything that happened; and once Zollicoffer was gone, the monsters stopped coming. So I emptied the basement of all the books or notes that might be of some use to someone, somewhere, and dragged the other contents out into the yard to burn them with the fall leaves. I would’ve burned the basement itself, if I thought I could’ve done so without destroying Maplecroft altogether—so I settled for sealing everything shut from the outside, and having some discreet handymen remove the door in the kitchen. They replaced it with a wall of such fine quality you’d never know there was once a passageway there.