Maplecroft (The Borden Dispatches #1)(17)

I approached him, stepping along the walkway as long as I could, and then only tiptoeing off the planks and onto the sand. I made a show of wanting to keep my shoes clean. It was only a show, but it allowed me to keep some distance—and it kept me off the rocks. I’m not as young as I once was, and I no longer cared to scamper along the boulders like some schoolchild. And this was one more thing I told myself, for show.

“Matthew?” I called.

I stood facing him, my feet half in the wet-packed sand, my toes jostling against the polished pebbles that collected up against the spot where the ocean ended. The wind came up fierce, whipping my coat and nearly stealing my hat. I held the coat shut with one hand and held my hat in place with the other, and I called out again, in case the wind had carried away my first attempt.

“Matthew?” I said it more loudly this time.

He stopped scanning the cracks between the rocks and allowed himself to slide down the slippery, shining-dark slope of a boulder the size of a pony; but he didn’t meet my eyes and he didn’t approach. He only stood there, waiting for heaven knew what, swaying against the buffeting wind.

“Matthew,” I tried again. “Dear lad, would you come over here for a moment, off the beach? I was wondering if . . . if I could talk to you. I wanted to . . . to ask you . . .”

He lifted his head to look at me, almost; but there was that tilt—that alarming, off-kilter tilt that kept his attention always to the open ocean beyond the rocks.

My brain scavenged frantically for logical, reasonable things to say about Matthew. I wondered if he didn’t have some kind of ear problem. He might’ve had an infection, or a fluid buildup, or some other kind of ailment residing therein, that seemed to so harshly alter his equilibrium.

“Matthew?”

He nodded, which seemed an odd response—as if he were confirming that yes, he was in fact Matthew. Ridiculous. Of course I knew that. And he knew I knew it. What peculiar behavior was this, between two citizens who’d been acquainted for better than fifteen years?

“Matthew, could you come here, please?”

If someone had held me at gunpoint, I could not have explained why I was so reluctant to venture any farther onto the sand. I wriggled my toes inside my shoes, and the pebbles banked around the edges of the leather soles. But I couldn’t bring myself to do it, to venture any closer to the rushing, rumbling waves beyond the rocks.

Matthew only looked at me, or through me—past me, like he was looking hard at something just behind me. So effective was this gaze that I looked back to make sure I wasn’t blocking his view of something more interesting. But no. There was nothing behind me but the usual piers, shopfronts, passersby, and preening white gulls.

When I had finished double-checking and once I’d made myself certain that Matthew was, more or less, looking at me—I met his eyes again.

I shuddered. I took half a step’s retreat that almost sent me falling over the edge of the walkway planks, and I corrected myself in time to keep from harm. But I flailed. And when I had restored my body’s balance I clutched my coat more tightly across my chest. I released my hat, trusting it to remain affixed—or not caring if it abandoned me.

The young man was giving me that look, and it was a blinkless look that stared but saw nothing, and I’d seen it before. I knew that mindless set of the eyes and then, as the awkward moment stretched itself out long between us, I knew the cast of his skin. I thought of eggs, peeled and pickled in a pantry jar. I imagined sourdough beginning to turn too sour; I pondered the waterlogged flesh of the drowned.

And I remembered Abigail Borden.

The similarity shocked me, though the boy was clearly in some stage of whatever had overcome Mrs. Borden. Or . . . well. It’s hard to phrase what I mean. She died by an axe; but something had been draining her, or sickening her, prior to her death. I can admit that now. I must admit that now.

It took me a moment to realize I was holding my breath.

I let it out with a whistle and a gulp.

What could I say? I had nothing to suggest, offer, or declare. The unhinged set of the boy’s jaw, the tone of his skin, the slack and loose look of his face . . . I’d seen it before, as certainly as I’d seen typhoid shared from person to person in a battle camp.

A word bubbled to the surface of my murky thoughts.

“Symptoms.” I said it aloud, letting the syllables slip out past my chilled, unhappy lips. The boy was displaying symptoms—of that I was certain.

But my God, symptoms of what?

I tipped my hat in his general direction, which caused him to budge not in the slightest. So I turned on my heel and left, trying hard not to hurry—lest it look like I was running away.

When I reached my home I shut myself inside it, leaning my back against the door as if I could hold at bay any contagion that the boy might’ve breathed toward me. It was ridiculous—perfectly ridiculous, and I knew it. But I also knew it was not my imagination that the two Fall River residents, Abigail Borden and Matthew Granger, were somehow connected.

The skin. The eyes. The lumbering, clumsy look—as if they lacked full control of their faculties, or their senses were somehow dulled. Matthew’s condition was not yet as severe as Abigail’s had become, but I could see it in his face. I could see it in his shambling movements. A more severe case of the Borden problem was working its way into his body, into his blood.

I fastened the front door with more precision than was necessary, and dashed upstairs to my office, where I kept notes, files, paperwork. Things to remind myself of patient histories, and records that might assist authorities in case of a plague.