Chapelwood (The Borden Dispatches #2)(78)

“Never mind the flair, take note of the fact: This is our first tangible connection between the axe murders and Chapelwood.”

“If, in fact, Mr. Kincaid—”

“Oh, come now,” he interrupted me in his excitement. “Why else would his box have wound up here? Why else would the record already be fading?” He held up the calendar again, with its ghostly script surely growing more ghostly by the hour. “And the names of the first two victims, right alongside what looks like some sort of equation, doesn’t it?” he asked, but he didn’t hand it back to me. He didn’t really want or require a second opinion. “I think it looks like an equation,” he assured himself. “And remember what George’s letter said, about the secretary? She said he was going on about talking to God with numbers. Oh, it fits together so nicely, doesn’t it?”

“You must be right. There’s too much here to write it all off as a coincidence.”

He bounced on his heels while he scrutinized the calendar. “I can’t figure out why God would tell him to kill people, but then again, I’ve never been able to figure out God at all, so that goes to show you what I know.”

“There’s no telling who . . . or what . . . was talking to him with those numbers. We have no idea where he got them, or how he went about interpreting them.”

He lowered the calendar and settled back into his shoes. His eyes grew suddenly serious. “You’re absolutely right. The simplest explanation is that he went mad, but that’s only somewhat likely. A man can be both mad and correct.”

“He can be driven mad by being correct, too—or so I’d wager. Maybe the truth didn’t set him free, but it drove him insane.”

Wolf gave me that intent, thoughtful stare that I’d come to recognize. “I’ve seen it happen before. But it’s not a given, is it? That’s not what happened to you when you brushed up against something this huge, this strange.”

? ? ?

Ah. So it was time.

I hope you won’t think less of me, Emma. But I had to tell someone, you understand? Please understand. I hope you understand.

Nance would.

? ? ?

I sighed and leaned back against the dust-covered desk, halfway sitting upon it. “No, that’s not what happened to me. I think? I assume? I’ll tell you the truth,” I added, before he could respond with some polite demurral. “Sometimes I’m not entirely certain.”

“But that’s a good sign, isn’t it? If you were well and truly daft, you’d never wonder about it.”

“Seabury never wondered,” I said softly. “He spiraled and spiraled and spiraled, gently at first and then swiftly, like a paper boat headed down a drain. But he never quite went completely mad . . . and I think that was the worst of it. He’d spend an hour telling you about the starfish and moon, and the tides, and the monsters with their cunning plans . . . but then he’d brighten up, and ask after the basement renovations or my volunteering at the Humane Society. He never quite left me entirely. He only wandered far enough away that he . . . he couldn’t find his way back in the dark.”

“You miss him.”

“Yes, I miss him. Even after all these years. I’ve had so few close friends, and he shared two of the greatest secrets of my whole life.”

“Two?” he asked, one eyebrow perking with curiosity.

I looked down at the boxes, at the decaying details of other people’s lives and deaths; I gazed around the damp, musty room that smelled of mildew and sorrow, and hunger. If any room ever ate secrets, then yes. It was this one.

All right, then I would speak it aloud here, and nowhere else. Not ever again.

“Two,” I confirmed. “He knew what happened to Zollicoffer . . . and he knew what became of my father and stepmother, as well. He knew everything, and he took it all to his grave. My sister did, too, of course, but that was different. That was blood, and we needed each other.”

I gave him a sidelong look, watching his face to see what it might tell me. It said that he was thinking, but I did not see any indication that he was judging. “I won’t ask after your parents, for it’s no business of mine, except for this: Were their deaths . . . somehow connected to Zollicoffer and the havoc he wrought?”

I nodded. I had to. My neck felt loose and my head was so heavy with the weight of it all.

“I don’t know how it began, exactly. I don’t know whose fault it was, or what brought it about. There were these stones . . . ,” I said, then realized that we’d be there all afternoon and all night, too, if I tried to tell him everything. “It’s a long story. But they came from the ocean, and they were somehow kin to the sample my sister found on the beach, on that one clear day all those years ago . . . when she still felt well enough to stroll if the air was nice. She sent it to him, and it changed him. I think it changed her, too. She was never the same after she picked it up. Her health failed faster, and more precipitously. But it did the opposite to the professor, didn’t it?”

“I beg your pardon?”

“It didn’t make him weak,” I explained myself. “It made him strong.”

“No, it made him different. I think . . . and mind you, this is only my theory of the most feeble conjecture . . . I think it killed him, and replaced him with something else. By the end, he wasn’t human anymore. I doubt he even noticed.”