Maplecroft (The Borden Dispatches #1)(40)

“Entertain the unknown? I constantly do so. It comes with my job. I entertain it, in order to solve it and make it known.”

“That isn’t what I mean.” I went to the big bay windows that overlooked the water and the pier, and I drew back the canvas curtains. Light flooded in, and the place looked dusty and abandoned despite the added illumination.

“Are you asking if I believe in ghosts? Goblins? God?”

“There’s no need to bring sacrilege to the conversation,” I chided him.

“Indeed, no reason to bring religion into it at all. Given my preference, I’d skip the subject altogether. Now tell me, where are the living quarters?”

I accepted the shift in topic. It hadn’t been polite for me to broach the other one, anyway. “In this direction. Behind the curtain at the end of the counter.”

He brushed it aside, and recoiled, examining his hand. “It’s wet.”

“Everything feels wet in here, doesn’t it?” I ran my fingers over the slimy counter.

I wiped my fingers on my pants, and Wolf wiped his on the hem of his jacket. “When did it rain last?”

“Oh, it’s been a week or more. Last Tuesday, I believe. I can’t imagine why it’s so damp in here . . . but can’t you feel it? Something abominable and atmospheric.”

“Something unknown?” he asked with the lift of an eyebrow, and I wasn’t sure if he was teasing me or not, so I gave him a self-deprecating smile.

“If so, then it falls well within your job description.”

“Yours, too.” He grinned back, revealing his picket-straight, shell-white teeth. I half expected to see canines every time he flashed them, but no, they were ordinary and I was an imaginative old fool. This much was established.

“Mine, too, yes. I agree. Down the hall,” I directed, suddenly feeling odd about our lighthearted exchange. This wasn’t the place for it. Or maybe it was the best place for it, a feeble, mortal attempt to offset the terrible and unfathomable.

Every moment, I turned Ebenezer’s story over in the rear of my mind. Every moment, it played in the background of my everyday thoughts, my everyday actions. The sound he described, the floating boy, the stench . . .

That same stench rose as we slipped single file down the hall, toward Matthew’s bedroom. Much stronger than near the front of the store. “Last door on the right,” I said. I might not have bothered. He could’ve just followed the reek.

The floorboards creaked beneath our shoes, and they were spongy when we stepped on them, like they’d been waterlogged. But they had been, hadn’t they? If I believed Ebenezer at all, there’d been a great tide, flowing from the walls themselves, draining into nowhere. Lifting and drowning and killing.

I’d told him that I did believe. At the time, I’d meant it. In retrospect, I wasn’t so sure—but my heart went back and forth about it, seeking excuses and reasons, answers and logical explanations.

I found none. And I saw plenty of evidence to support the veracity of every frightful word he’d whispered in that courthouse room.

I followed Wolf down the dank hall, stinking of oceans and death; here we were, and this was the smell—just as Ebenezer described it—and the whole building was wet and cool, and the ceiling felt improbably low, and I could feel my heart hammering around in my chest because too much of it was true, too much already.

“Dear God Almighty,” gagged Wolf. He surrendered and whipped a handkerchief out of his pocket, and held it up over his nose. “It’s infinitely worse back here.”

If I’d had a handkerchief, I would have done the same. Matthew’s room was a wreck of soaked bedding, warped floors, peeling wallpaper, and moldering linens stained a bluish, greenish color.

I reached inside for a switch. There must be gas throughout the building—I was reasonably confident, for I knew there were lights in the store itself; but the place was too sodden, and the fixtures wouldn’t spark. No comforting illumination came to warm us, and we were left with the dingy murk that showed us almost nothing.

“One moment.” Wolf ducked past me, back into the store; he returned with a long stick. A cane? A tool of some variety? I didn’t notice. He used it to push back the lank, sticky curtains and give us something to see by, not that the daylight could show us much of note. With the morning sun streaming inside, we saw more clearly than at first, but there wasn’t anything new to encourage us.

We saw a room that looked like somehow, it’d been filled with a rancid tide. Oh, and there was blood, yes. A watered-down stain pooled along the bed, and along the floor—matching Ebenezer’s statement that Matthew had fallen half on the bed, half off it. And when I stepped back to the darkened hall I realized there was more diluted blood on the floor. We’d walked right through it.

Now that I knew it was there, I tiptoed around it as much as possible. And while Wolf made his inspection, I made mine.

I knew from Ebenezer’s testimony that the bloody stain left by Mrs. Hamilton was approximately thirty hours old. It was still half wet, like everything else—but unlike everything else, a gummy sputum was mixed with the froth that had surely spilled from her mouth. Quite a lot of it, really. It’s a wonder we hadn’t slipped and harmed ourselves.

I peered around the door’s jamb and saw Wolf cutting buckshot out of the far wall with a pocketknife, like a proper alienist. He dropped it into a glass vial and used a wad of cotton for a stopper. Then he pulled out a tape and measured the room—I offered to hold one end, for accuracy—and when he was finished recording the dimensions, he retrieved a sketch pad from his inner jacket pocket.