Maplecroft (The Borden Dispatches #1)(54)

They’ve forced her back to bed, and lashed her foot to the post like a hobbled horse. (Like Matthew, before he went mad and murderous.)

Mrs. Williams lives around the corner from the Hamiltons’ store and she’s called for the police twice in the last week, confident that there’s someone moving around inside the shop, someone trying to break down the walls and come through the building itself, trying to get out, out, out. Last night she was found on her front lawn, beneath the big oak in the yard, covered in blood. She stood in her nightdress, muttering about how she’d opened everything, she’d broken the windows and it could get out now, couldn’t it? It would quit asking her now, wouldn’t it?

I treated her cuts, and when I cleaned them I saw they were sliced in patterns, not the ordinary patterns of a window’s shattered shards, but in horizontal lines, back and forth, very deep. It didn’t match her story, but what could I say? Still she spouted nonsense, unless it wasn’t nonsense. I gave her an opiate and sent her to sleep at her sister’s house, at the other side of town.

There’s more.

Several more I ought to mention here, and they all feel like a pattern, or part of one. But someone is knocking at the door, and it’s the kind of knock that says to come now.





Lizzie Andrew Borden


APRIL 25, 1894

I should’ve known something untoward was going on when I started sleeping better. Suspiciously better. Ordinarily I snap awake in the morning, shortly after dawn, no matter how late the previous evening has kept me working; but these last few nights, I’d drop to sleep and stay that way until seven or eight, and most recently, all the way to nine o’clock.

It was foolish to pretend that nothing was afoot or amiss, and it was more foolish still of me to pretend that Nance had nothing to do with it. She’s the only new variable in the household.

No, that’s not quite true.

There’s Doctor Seabury. His knowledge of what we do here—even if it was, at first, a rudimentary understanding of what we’re up against—that’s new, and it counts for something. But up until this evening, I could not have asked him to drop everything and come sit beside me, and listen to my tales of woe as if he had nothing better to do.

Now I know.

I’ve been looking at this all wrong.

This is the highest priority, for me, for Emma, and for him—for anyone who has any inkling of what’s going on. I know it is. It must be. But progress on the matter has been so slow, and escalation had appeared to plateau until recently. My God, I’d become almost complacent about it.

About them. The creatures with the shark-white skin and glass-needle teeth.

But there have only been a few, and no new visitations since that one I killed in the middle of March. No new visitations of any kind except . . . well, Nance, and that’s not the same.

Yet it’s not unrelated, either. She came, and she caused this new escalation, but that’s my fault. Mine entirely. I should’ve sent her right back home on the same train she arrived in. I should’ve thrown her luggage out on the lawn and told her to make her way back to the city. I should’ve pushed her away, chased her away, thrown her away if it came to that.

I didn’t. And look what it’s gotten me.

Look where it’s gotten us.





? ? ?


I awoke to Emma’s bell, but I awoke slowly and unhappily. I wasn’t ready. I was dreaming of Nance, and there was silk. Silk dresses? Sheets? Something soft and luxurious, something that flowed and billowed. Something dry and smooth, but soft as mist. I can’t recall, but wherever it was, whatever the dream was about . . . I didn’t want to leave it.

But the bell rang and rang and rang, with all of Emma’s strength, and I was compelled to answer it.

I tried to rise out of the covers, and I stumbled, falling to all fours. My head was swimming. I was swimming, my arms and legs made of some slippery, uncertain substance. Still stuck in the dream, they were. That’s where I was swimming, I guess, wherever the world was made of silk sheets and quiet.

I forced myself to climb up, using the bed itself for support. And I realized then what I should’ve noticed immediately: Nance wasn’t there. Her side of the bed was empty, and when I placed a hand on the indentation her body had made in the comforter, I found no warmth to suggest she’d only just left me.

And then it all fell into place.

My wobbly brain, my sleep growing longer by the night. Her fixation with the cellar door, all talk of lovers’ bargains aside. Lies, and treachery. She’s been drugging me, testing the dose to see what would send me deepest to sleep, and keep me there longest. She’s been waiting for us to move Emma back upstairs, so that Emma wouldn’t catch her by accident, or see her as she slipped downstairs to the door.

Perhaps oddly, I understood all of these things even before I noticed that the key was gone.

Sometimes it’s funny, the way the mind works. How it assembles the minor pieces before the major ones arrive, solving the mystery in reverse, before all the clues are provided. It could’ve been the drugs—whatever she’d used against me. Some syrup or serum. Something that hid the big things but let me see the little ones.

I slapped my hand against my chest, where the cellar key usually hung on its chain. No, it wouldn’t be there. It’d be on the dresser. I stumbled to the dresser, my feet still refusing to cooperate with me, not fully. I felt a moment’s jolt of relief, even as Emma’s bell still rang, because there it was—the chain with the attendant key I always wore against my breasts.