Chapelwood (The Borden Dispatches #2)(7)

Most of the time, even I forget.

But the rest of the time, when I wake up drowsy in the middle of the night and wander downstairs for a drink of water or to stretch my legs after a nap . . . I look toward that blank space and I’m momentarily confused. It’s times like those that I worry for myself, afraid that my own mind is starting to slide like Doctor Owens’s did. Or worse yet, like Doctor Zollicoffer’s.

But I’m not a doctor of any sort. Perhaps the madness will leave me alone, then, if it exclusively pursues those who aspire to higher degrees.

? ? ?

So I took your room, and now it’s an office—a fairly ordinary one, considering. To be sure, some of the books and papers are strange, but who cares? No one ever sees them but me. I’ve got a desk in there now, and I’ve moved your bed out into the spare room past the water closet. It took me all afternoon to do it by myself, but the damn thing is heavy as hell and I wanted it out.

Then I was sad that I’d moved it, because the room didn’t smell so much like you anymore. These days, it barely smells like you at all—there’s just a whiff of you, once in a blue moon . . . a tiny current will carry you back to me, a hint of that lavender perfume you always liked, or the jasmine soap you preferred. A note of your own personal chemistry, the scent of your hair carried to me light as can be, out of nowhere . . . and there you are, like you’d never left.

It’s always you, and never Nance.

I’ve sniffed the whole house for her, on more than one occasion—closing my eyes and following my nose up and down the halls, all over the guest room where she last stayed, and all over my room, where she stayed more often. But there’s nothing at all, only me, and sometimes one of the stray cats, and then that last ghost of you trailing behind, saying you’d told me so, all along.

It doesn’t matter. I miss you both terribly.

In my heart there are a pair of holes, one shaped like each of you. No cat can fill it, and no one else even tries.

But I’ve done it again, haven’t I? I’ve forgotten about the newspaper.

I receive one from Atlanta, a city so far distant that it may as well be in another country—and come to think of it, for a brief stint in the sixties, it was. Sherman may have burned it down, but it’s coming right along so far as I can tell. Its newspapers are good, if that says anything in its favor. They cover events well outside the city, in other parts of the short-lived Dixie and beyond it, too.

But obviously, it was not the Atlanta Journal that landed on my doorstep . . . it was our own gazette—and our own gazette has run a story that I first spied in the Southern paper. Thus the connection in my mind. I made it immediately, and you’ll understand why. Here’s the pertinent bit of text:

Still no leads in an ongoing crime wave in Birmingham, Alabama, perpetrated by an armed assailant the locals have dubbed “Harry the Hacker.” To date, some eight people have been assaulted, six of them fatally—by an unknown man with a hatchet. The victims include city residents of every stripe: business owners, pedestrians, and young revelers out for entertainment.

Harry the Hacker . . . that might actually be as bad as the nursery rhyme some fool composed about yours truly. And dubbed by the locals? I strongly doubt it. That handle stinks of a junior journalist who wants to sell papers, and it’s bound to work.

But whatever facts our local source has noted are dated and incomplete. The fuller story (or some version of it) is available through the Atlanta Journal, and I’ve recently mailed a request to receive the Birmingham paper of record as well. Not purely due to some morbid fascination with axe murders, I hope you believe me when I say that much . . . but because I want the details that were left out of our local coverage. The Fall River Gazette mentions the story only as an afterthought, a blurb of nationwide interest to fill a few column inches when nothing else is going on.

From what I’ve gathered via the Georgia rags, the case is much stranger than a set of simple assaults that fit a general pattern. There’s talk of weird churches, anti-Catholic demonstrations, and eschatological street corner preachings. All this, in the midst of a city already plagued by the Ku Klux Klan—a group more sinister and suspicious than most people have any idea, and their public face is troublesome enough without any secret agenda hiding beneath their ridiculous robes. I tell you, they’re stranger than the Freemasons and not half as well thought out, but they’re radical, blind believers of awful things.

I don’t enjoy researching them, not in the slightest, but how am I to confront evil if I can’t accurately identify it?

This is what I’m trying to say: Something about the case feels familiar to me. Or maybe “familiar” isn’t the right word . . . but I do recognize it, something about the details, something about the things left in between the cracks of what’s reported. There’s a shape to it that frightens me, even as it occurs a thousand miles away.

After what happened here in Massachusetts back in the nineties, is a thousand miles enough distance to feel safe? No, I shouldn’t think so. Not a thousand. Not a million, either.

I wouldn’t feel safe on the moon.

So I’ll watch the matter, and I’ll collect my newspapers, and I’ll tack my clippings up around your old bedroom and we’ll see how big the story grows. Maybe the whole thing will peter out and nothing will come of it, and that’s an eventuality devoutly to be hoped for. But in case it doesn’t . . . in case it spreads, and sprawls, I should really keep an eye on it.