Chapelwood (The Borden Dispatches #2)(79)

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Emma, do you think he was right?

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“I . . . I’m not sure how I feel about that. I hope you’re right, I suppose. I hope that no human being is capable of the things he did.” I stared at the floor, not saying the rest of what I meant.

But Wolf drew it out of me anyway. “By the end, let us say . . . by the end, he must not have been human. Does that make it easier?”

“Yes? No?” I shrugged. “Surely, given his activities, he deserved worse than any mortal hand could deal him.”

“Worse than what you did to him?” He broached the question carefully, almost whispering it.

I took a deep breath, and with it I said, “What I did to him was necessary, and barely even possible. I couldn’t have done it without Emma and Seabury, so we’re all three guilty—no matter how you divvy up the blame.” I took another deep breath, and it felt clean, almost. “I had a device in the basement: It was an industrial piece of equipment, mostly used on farms to dispose of carcasses that can’t be eaten or otherwise processed—a steam-pressure machine, full of hot lye and so forth. We trapped him inside it. There was nothing left of him in the end, nothing but a scream and some black-colored sludge.”

The confession hung in the air between us, lifted up on the currents of our breathing, the disturbances we made as we walked and moved and talked. It settled on the desk, the boxes, the floor, the papers. It coated the room like so much dust.

He cleared his throat, maybe due to the cloudy air, or maybe due to me—and what I’d said. “I always assumed you’d done . . . something. Creatures like Zollicoffer don’t just quit killing, once they’ve started. Someone has to stop them, and I’m glad you were able to.”

“As am I, though I wish . . .”

“Yes?” he prompted gently. I couldn’t bring myself to say it, so he filled in the rest with his impeccable intuition. “You . . . you wish it hadn’t cost you Nance O’Neil?”

I nodded, unable to muster any other response. I almost dug her sketched-out portrait from my bag—I almost held it up so I could stare at it, and grieve more concretely, or feed my guilt with stronger memories, for the years had sometimes left my recollections threadbare. I knew the upturn of her mouth, her eyebrows, her every crinkle of eyelids . . . or I believed I did, until I tried to summon them. I knew the sound of her voice, each note and each sigh, each laugh, every whisper. Until they were all whispers, and the rest was hardly more than a hum in my brain.

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Why couldn’t she have haunted me, Emma? Why did it have to be you instead?

You, I knew for all my life; I could no sooner forget the details of your presence than forget my own face. But Nance . . . I did not have her for so long, and I am old now, you see? If only she had haunted me, I’d have something left—her ghost as a souvenir, or is that obscene? I can’t tell. I honestly can’t tell.

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“Lizbeth?”

I shook my head, and dabbed at the corner of my eye. It was only a little tear, but I didn’t want it anyway. “I’m sorry, but I think it’s this place. It’s eating more than secrets and old paperwork. Maybe it’s eating my memories, too.”

“Then we should either leave immediately or stay long enough to ease your sorrow.”

“No,” I said quickly. “No, we should go. Those old memories are all I have of my Nance, and should they fade . . . there’s nothing left of the joy we knew. I’ll keep them, as many as I can, for as long as I can—even for all the sorrow they cause me—as payment for holding them close. Staying here . . . good heavens, I’m not sure why you’d suggest it.”

Flatly, he told me, “Because your protests sound like remorse, as opposed to nostalgia. It is a privilege to remember those we loved and lost; but what you’re doing is self-flagellation, my friend.”

Was he my friend? Would a friend suggest forgetting another friend?

Maybe he was only trying to be kind, if misguided. “Either way, I find some comfort in what remains. Or some . . . some reassurance? The universe is unfolding as it ought to, so long as I feel terrible for what became of her. I deserve to feel terrible. I deserve everything that happens to me, for all the rest of my years.”

He hesitated, on the verge of saying one thing, I think—but letting his curiosity drive him in another direction. “What did become of her, then? If you don’t mind my asking. I’ve always wondered. It’s always been an unfinished note in my files. She never reappeared, never acted in another play, never went home. Did she meet her end in the basement, too?”

“What a vulgar thing to ask.”

“Why? You’ve offered up more vulgar and sensitive information quite freely. If it’s a sensitive subject, I’ll let it go. As I’ve said before, it’s no business of mine, after all.”

“Indeed it isn’t,” I snapped, but it was already rolling through my head—that night, out on the water, after she’d escaped the basement . . . but into the arms of what? And where? I was half afraid that I couldn’t keep it all inside, and half afraid that everything I tried to recall was being devoured by that uncanny room. At least if I said it aloud, there’d be someone else to remind me later. Would voicing the truth lend it some kind of insurance?