Chapelwood (The Borden Dispatches #2)(72)

I might actually be going insane.

I don’t want you to go insane, Ruthie. You deserve better than that. Of course, James Coyle deserved justice, and Birmingham deserved better leaders, and the mutilated dead deserved life or (at the very least) dignity after the fact.

Didn’t they? Don’t we all?

? ? ?

I don’t understand what is happening, I’ll be the first to admit it.

But something is coming, and it’s coming with purpose. It’s coming closer. Faster. Homing in on us, or that’s not quite it. It might be better to say that it’s focusing on us, adjusting its attention the way an astronomer tweaks the lenses on a telescope, all the better to bring the distance into sharp relief.

Whatever it is, we shouldn’t call out for its attention. We should hide from it, and pray that it passes us by, oblivious to us and all our efforts upon this anthill called Earth.

? ? ?

Look at these pieces, Ruthie. Puzzle pieces, and without a helpful box lid to show us what we’re meant to assemble. Chapelwood. Axe murders. The True Americans. Your father. Leonard Kincaid.

You.

And me, too, I assume.

See if your new friends can be of some help. The inspector and his consultant, that woman Lizbeth Andrew . . . there’s something odd about them, if only because they behave like civilized, sane individuals who yet retain some shred of decency. They don’t belong here, but they’re only visiting. They’ll leave, one day—soon, I should expect.

See if they can be persuaded to take you with them.





Lizbeth Andrew (Borden)




OCTOBER 4, 1921


I was flattered and frankly touched that Ruth showed me the letter George left her.

He’d slipped it into her mailbox slot overnight, it would seem. Upon finding it first thing this morning, Ruth was alarmed by the rattled tone, the rambling connections . . . It didn’t sound like him, she said. She insisted that something must be wrong.

So she ran to the post office down the street from her flat and used the phone there to call him—to no avail. No one answered at the Ward residence, and when she finally navigated the streetcars and residential blocks to reach his home in person, no one answered the door, either.

Eventually, Chief Eagan was able to rouse Mrs. Ward, who was uncommonly groggy for ten o’clock in the morning. It was the chief’s estimation that Mrs. Ward had been drugged the night before . . . probably by George himself, though he hated to suggest it—but the dose had been a gentle one that hadn’t harmed her. She’d gotten a most excellent night’s sleep out of it, and had no idea where her husband could have gotten off to.

“Which was probably the point,” I said to Ruth.

I was still holding the note, reading bits and pieces of it again and again. It reminded me all too much of another note, one I’d held and read in a similar fashion, years ago. It did indeed sound like a man who was slipping into madness.

“You think he drugged her so he could sneak out of the house without her knowing?” Ruth asked. She was not quite incredulous, but she clearly did not want to believe it.

Inspector Wolf was seated beside her on a long chaise in our hotel’s lobby. “Yes, I think that’s probably the case. He did it for her own good, I bet. If she didn’t know where he’d gone, then she couldn’t possibly tell anyone about it—even if she wanted to.”

“He’s obviously . . .” I didn’t say the rest, because I didn’t want to say it in front of Ruth. Instead I declared, “He’s obviously performing his own investigations, even though he’s no longer on the city payroll. If Nathaniel Barrett thought he was still poking his nose into the axe murders, you can bet he’d have Tom Shirley put a stop to it.”

Wolf shot me a glance that said he knew I must be fibbing. He was right, of course.

If anything was obvious (in my opinion), George was headed for Chapelwood. But to what end? To force some confession out of the reverend? To deliver his own brand of justice to Edwin Stephenson?

? ? ?

(Well, Wolf was right, yes. But he didn’t want to say anything about Chapelwood in front of Ruth any more than I did, otherwise she might feel like storming the place. Perhaps the place needed storming, but it did not need storming by her—or even by the bunch of us, not yet. We didn’t know what we’d find there: what resistance, what coercion, what crimes. What unholy, unhealthy conspiracy.

After all, when it all came down to it, we knew virtually nothing about that place except for its wealth, its secrecy, and its bigoted leanings that encompassed almost every human being except those masculine, Protestant, and white. We knew that it was ostensibly a church, occupying a large estate on the outskirts of town. Ruth was the only one of us who’d been there, and she’d already told us how little she’d seen of it.)

? ? ?

Ruth wasn’t sure how she felt about my fib, but ultimately she granted the chance that I might be correct. “I guess that’s . . . possible. He called it his ‘unfinished business’ after the election. But this room he’s talking about in the note . . . do you know what he means? Storage Room Six? Inspector, he says you met him there.”

Wolf nodded. “It’s in the basement of the civic building, and that’s where we met for the first time—the day after he lost the election, I think. For what it’s worth, I did notice a strange air about the place and an unsettling sense of being watched; but poor George, I must say—he struck me as positively cracked upon that first encounter. Or I should say instead . . . he sounded like the man who wrote this note, and less like the upstanding, normal sort of man who kept us company through your father’s trial.”