Chapelwood (The Borden Dispatches #2)(87)

I didn’t hit the sidewalk, not like I’d expected. I didn’t feel some bone-breaking collision, or even some squeezing sense of forcing myself back inside my own skin. It was as simple as opening my eyes and staring up at the clear blue sky, and seeing only a few clouds, and a few people chattering worriedly because I was lying there on my back outside the drugstore, not saying anything and not answering anybody.

But there was another voice—a voice that cut through everything else. It made my stomach cramp up, to hear it so close. It was right beside me, right above me. It was touching me, if a voice can do that.

It was my daddy’s voice, at its scariest: It was being calm, and reassuring. So that meant it was lying.

Not lying to me, because Daddy never cared about calming or reassuring me. No, he was talking to the people who wanted to help me, and he was saying that I was just fine; don’t worry—he was my father, and I had little fits like this sometimes, but he’d take me home and take care of me.

I tried to sit up, but I was already sitting up, already being lifted up under my armpits. (He isn’t a big man, but he’s wiry and much stronger than he looks.) He was apologizing for any disturbance I might have caused, but promising that everything would be all right once he got me home and safe. He’d just put me to bed, and when I woke up, all would be well.

I was stumbling, not really at home again in my body, not yet. I couldn’t walk, and my eyes wouldn’t focus like they ought to. I’d seen the sky and all its cotton white clouds clear enough, but looking around all I could see were blurry faces and the shifting shapes of the storefronts as I staggered past them, my head dropping and lifting, my daddy pulling me along.

“No.” I said it like a command, but it came out just a funny-shaped breath too soft to call a whisper. “No.” I tried again, but it wasn’t any stronger.

Daddy had a car waiting nearby; I guess it was parked on the street outside the store, because we didn’t go any farther than thirty or forty feet, I wouldn’t think. It confused me. Daddy never had a car of his own. He said we couldn’t afford one, and that was probably true, but he had one now—some kind of touring car, something shiny and dark, and I knew he definitely couldn’t afford that one, so he’d borrowed it from someone, or maybe he even stole it. It gleamed in the sun, some scrap of reflection hitting me in the face and blinding me all over again, just as I was starting to get my vision back.

It wasn’t fair.

It wasn’t fair that he wrestled me inside, and someone was already sitting there waiting for me. An extra set of hands pulled me up by the shoulders and Daddy folded up my legs like a fresh-pressed shirtsleeve and stuffed me inside so he could shut the door. I blinked, and almost felt better—because the other person in the car was my momma. But that was no good, and I knew it. I knew it even before she brought the cloth down over my face and pressed it there, and I breathed something wet and sweet, and the last thing I saw was her face, wearing the same weak smile as always before. The last sound I heard was her voice, lying to me about how everything was going to be all right, and just fine. She couldn’t even make up something new. She just ran with whatever Daddy’d told her to say.

Just like always before. Just like forever.





Lizbeth Andrew (Borden)




OCTOBER 4, 1921


By dinnertime, Leonard Kincaid’s self-portraits were dry and much easier to inspect. Our initial impressions held true—there was something hovering at his waist, or just below it . . . and this fuzzy black mass rose up higher and higher in each subsequent image. In the final frame, it had reached his neck; and though Simon insisted he could detect a swirling pattern of fingers, or tentacles, or some similar shape, I was not so confident. The lines were too grainy. I refused to see things that weren’t there, purely because they fit the shape of a pattern I liked.

(If that isn’t too ungenerous of me to think.)

We left them all in a row on the inspector’s chest of drawers and headed down to the dining hall for the afternoon meal. The proprietress served it up a bit earlier than I’m accustomed to taking it, and she called it “supper” instead of “dinner,” but the spread was outstanding. Simon positively beamed at the offerings, and if he’d been wearing a belt, he would’ve loosened it upon sight of the veritable bucket of mashed potatoes, accompanied by corn bread, biscuits, beans with bacon fat, buttered corn on the cob, rice with sugar or gravy, baked apples, plus two pitchers of sweet tea and the three different pies on the sideboard.

But our feast was interrupted before we reached that sideboard, when Pedro Gussman arrived—as breathless and frantic as ever I saw a man. (I had not yet laid eyes upon Mr. Gussman, though I’d heard about him and assumed the best of him, courtesy of his wife and Simon—who spoke well of him. But his identity was confirmed almost immediately.)

He burst into the hall in his work clothes, still splattered with paint. He launched immediately into his plea: “Inspector, you have to help me! It’s Ruth—she’s gone!”

Simon whisked his napkin from his lap and flung it onto the table. “Missing? We only just saw her a few hours ago. I believe she was headed home.”

“She never came home.” He pulled his hat off his head and wrung it like a rag. “Or if she did, she turned around and left again.”