Chapelwood (The Borden Dispatches #2)(75)
“Me?” He sighed and settled back, leaning halfway against the seat and halfway against the door. There was quite a lot of him to lean, after all. “I was one of the cowards. I had my hunches, but not much more—not until the very end, you know. I was younger then, and the professor’s case was unprecedented . . . the kind of thing that comes along once in a hundred years. I was only allowed to participate on a provisionary basis; I could scarcely talk my superiors into a per diem and travel allowance, not even after the Hamilton murders. Too many people in the bureaucracy were too willing to write it off to coincidence.”
I shook my head in disbelief. “What a world, where such deaths are common enough to call coincidence.”
“I couldn’t agree with you more. And that said, I feel this is as good a time as any to apologize.”
“To me?”
“To you,” he affirmed. “I left you alone, to face whatever would come. It’s something that still bothers me in the wee hours of the morning sometimes. Even after all these years.”
“Really?” I wasn’t sure I believed him, but some petty, dark corner of my soul liked the idea of it.
“Really. You and your sister, and the doctor—Seabury, that’s right, that was his name—you had no idea what you were up against. Our office might have been able to help . . . but it chose not to, not until our help was no longer required. Or so we were forced to assume.”
He was finally on the verge of asking me what had become of Zollicoffer, I could see it then: the hesitation after the admission, a sidelong glance to check his apology’s reception. A gleam of curiosity, regarding a case never solved so much as concluded, as he’d so carefully put it. But he was too much of a gentleman, or there was still some cowardly residue left over from thirty years ago, I don’t know. But I wanted to tell him, because I’d never told anyone. Seabury and Emma had known, but both of them clutched that secret in their coffins.
So I gave Inspector Wolf the chance to hear it. I gave myself the chance to say it out loud, for the first time ever. “You want to know what happened that night, when Zollicoffer came around.”
He perked right up, but not so much as to be unseemly. “I’d very much like to know, yes. The folders are sealed and covered with dust in the farthest corners of our Boston storage facility, but for my own satisfaction, yes. I’d very much like to know.”
But drat the timing of it all—we had just pulled up to the civic building downtown, and our driver cleared his throat to attract our attention. “Sir, madam. We’ve arrived.”
It was just as well, and we both knew it. A good driver was as fine a vault for secrets as a good bartender, but we didn’t know this man, and at any rate . . . he’d heard enough already.
“Inside,” I told Wolf. “If the storage room is hungry for secrets, it can eat this one, too.”
He left instructions and money with the driver, telling the man how long to wait before leaving us to our own devices; and together we climbed the wide white stairs that led up to the civic building. It wasn’t so different in design from the courthouse, and indeed it gave me the same anxious feeling as we scaled the expanse between the street and the front doors.
“It’s bustling in here,” Wolf said. “And Ruth wasn’t wrong—there’s always the chance we’ll be recognized as allies of hers and George. I haven’t had any trouble so far, but then again, I haven’t been back to the civic center here since before the trial.” He left his fingers briefly on the oversized door handle and said, “Walk briskly, smile and make small talk with me, and behave as if you belong here as much as anyone else. No one’s likely to bother us.”
I nodded and said, “Of course,” with more confidence than I felt. In the back of my mind, I was always a little worried about being recognized for something worse than being a friend of Ruth’s; there was always the chance that some old fool might recognize my face from a newspaper picture or a magazine story. Was it likely? No. But neither was a storage room that ate evidence and drove men mad.
He took my elbow, smiled brightly, and ushered me inside.
Offices lined every hall, broken up by conference rooms and other brightly lit meeting spaces; and everywhere we saw men wearing suits and doing business, or carrying on arguments—while older men in nicer suits talked loudly on phones or to their underlings in the corridors, making sure everyone knew that they were busy, and they were in charge. Sharply dressed young women toted folders and coffee, and office boxes, and oversized purses, and clipboards from room to room, their button-toed shoes making a chatter of scuffs and scrapes on the brightly shining floor.
We passed an office with “Nathaniel Barrett” stenciled on the window, but I only glimpsed it as we hurried past—Wolf’s nattering about the weather leaving a dull hum in my left ear.
“This way,” he said, guiding me around a turn, and to a stairwell door marked “Exit Only.” Before I could protest, he’d opened it anyway and darted inside—drawing me behind him. The door shut, closing us inside a concrete space with a single fizzing lightbulb, and absolutely none of the hectic charm on display outside. “And now we go downstairs—where it’s going to get strange. Don’t let it bother you; I know where we’re headed.”
“Are we likely to run into anyone else?”