Maplecroft (The Borden Dispatches #1)(113)

Nothing was clean.

Nothing was finished. Everything was merely over.





Inspector Simon Wolf


JULY 4, 1895

BOSTON, MASSACHUSETTS—EIGHTH STREET OFFICE POST-FIELD REPORT

It is true that my initial reports were sparse; but given the deaths across the state prior to the Fall River Event, my attention and my resources were stretched perilously thin. Even a man of my size can’t reach from the northern boundary to the ocean—not when scores of grisly murders lingered on the docket, each incident demanding investigation and assessment. If I had been allowed to proceed directly to Fall River, once it became clear that this was the locus of whatever occurred, I might have been able to offer a better understanding of how and why so many have died in the stretch between August of 1892 and May of 1894.

As things stand, all I could do was send warning to my contacts there. I gave them all the time to ready themselves that I could. If you’d allowed me to raise a few good men to assist at Maplecroft, they might have been readier still.

Maybe a small force would’ve changed the outcome there, and maybe not. But it was cruel of you to prevent me from giving it a try.

I realize that some of my superiors would quarrel with my dates, but I will insist with my dying breath that Abigail and Andrew Borden were the start of this. Perhaps not the center of it, no, but a catalyst of some kind. Somehow, they were the first.

I cannot say for certain, as I was not present for their murders or the subsequent trial—though I’ve studied the court transcripts forward and backward. I’ve found nothing to contradict my conclusions, and plenty to support them. I know the captain calls the details “circumstantial,” but he’s mistaken, and I believe he might’ve been behind the sincere and deliberate effort to keep me away from that setting, even in the wake of the Hamilton case.

He thought I was on the wrong track, and wasting resources. He was mistaken about that, too. Now, I suppose, he’s making an effort to save face.

I won’t have it.

I was forced to lobby vehemently to address Ebenezer Hamilton with any specific authority, and this should not have been the case. No permission ought to have been required. I should have set off without questions or bureaucracy standing between myself and the answers we needed.

The present hierarchy is worse than inconvenient: It is incompetent. I can scarcely believe the organization took so long to classify these crimes as falling within our jurisdiction, when they were so clearly beyond the understood geometry of mankind.

Due to our consistent, solid, reproducible results, we have enjoyed the indulgence of the Boston law enforcement for this long—but the day may come when they realize what we are, and what we do. If we delay too long (as in this Fall River catastrophe), or fail too much (and greatly did we fail in this particular matter) . . . then the day may come when we are revealed as being too strange for them. They will blame us for the very horrors we seek to solve and remedy. They will cast us out like witches—and that’s if we’re lucky.

But I digress.

Something tells me you’ll stop reading there and begin swearing aloud, calling for Miss Ellen to seek me out and fire me on the spot . . . but you really shouldn’t. After all, I’m about to answer the laundry list of questions you put forth, in the wake of my initial response—wherein you called my research “incomplete” and my notes “full of holes.” Of course it was incomplete and aerated; I was given neither the time nor the support to provide the fuller picture you ostensibly desired. If you actually wanted to see the scope of this thing, you should’ve left me to my own devices.

I have always performed best that way, and you damned well know it.





? ? ?


With regard to Nance O’Neil, actress and woman of dubious moral fiber: No trace has yet been found, and I’d be astonished if that ever changes. I know her manager does not wish to hear my recommendation, but he can get in a very long line, I suppose—because here it is: She ought to be declared dead, and perhaps have a memorial plaque installed upon some theater house, somewhere, if people really cannot let it go.

The girl is gone. Whatever came for her, took her—and won’t likely be persuaded to give her back.

According to the Borden sisters, she’d been ailing for some time before she vanished. Sleepwalking! That was their feeble explanation, and they had no plans to tell me the truth; that much was clear. And what could I possibly do about it? Argue? Threaten? Hardly a gentleman’s response to the younger Borden’s clear and authentic anguish. Besides, she may not really know. Being a witness to something and fully understanding it are hardly the same thing.

For that matter, it wouldn’t be a chivalrous response to the elder sister, either, though Emma lends the impression that she’s almost glad to be rid of Miss O’Neil. Whatever happened in that house, to that girl, wherever she’s gone . . . Emma knows as much of the answer as anyone (however little that may be), but she’ll speak of it no sooner than Lizzie.

Regardless of this bond of silence, Emma has no further interest in remaining in her sister’s care. When last I spoke with her, she was in the process of moving out . . . undertaking the endeavor despite (or because of) a precipitous decline in her already meager strength. Apparently, she’s made arrangements for herself at a health care facility in Providence. She offered no explanation for this, and Lizzie declined to supplement my understanding beyond a vague suggestion that Emma required more intensive care than she could provide at Maplecroft.