Maplecroft (The Borden Dispatches #1)(7)

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I opened my mouth to tell her something. Anything. A consolation, a suggestion. I have no idea what might’ve spewed forth if I’d had the opportunity to speak, but I was interrupted by a voice from across the road.

A low voice, another woman. Steady and authoritative. Firm and reassuring.

It was the younger Borden daughter, Lizzie. She stood on the front porch watching her stepmother shudder and beg before me. With just enough subtle volume to carry the short distance between us, she commanded, “Mrs. Borden, come back inside.”

Abigail’s eyes widened yet further, until a seam of white showed all around her night-blackened pupils. Slowly she swiveled her head to look back at her house, at her stepdaughter.

The moon and the corner gaslight showed Lizzie in shades of gray, tinted yellow. She was motionless. She might have been an apparition, or a daguerreotype. I could not say that her face was blank, for that would be untrue; I should say instead that she did not appear conflicted. Even given the distance and darkness between us, I could see that she had come to some resolution.

(Though it’s easy for me to speak that way in retrospect, and it’s possible I did not perceive any of this. I may only be coloring the past with my knowledge of what was to come.)

I said, “Mrs. Borden?” and she pivoted to regard me once more, unblinking.

For a very short flash—only an instant—her features shifted, as if her old self had seized control in order to speak.

She told me then, in that narrow window between fright and madness, “We’re done for, you know. Whatever happens now, we won’t be saved.”

Then she backed away, nearly tripping over the top porch stair but catching herself at the last moment. She retreated without unlocking her gaze from my face until she reached the street, at which point she trudged back up to her own home and let Lizzie usher her inside.

As Lizzie closed the door, she too met my eyes. I saw only her certainty, and the moon’s cold reflection. And then nothing at all, as they both disappeared inside.

Confused and unaccountably afraid, I lingered, with the wind gusting into my own house, flapping the curtains and rattling the leaves on the young rubber plant that shivered in the hallway.

My wife called out, “Dearest?”

I didn’t answer. I didn’t know how.

I shut the door and locked it, then in a fit of lunatic whimsy, I pushed the potted plant in front of the door. It slid against it with the dragging, grating scrape of unfinished ceramics. And it did nothing to make me feel less afraid.





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The next morning, Abigail and Andrew Jackson Borden were found hacked to death. It’s a well-known story by now.

Lizzie was the closest thing to a witness, and she said almost nothing. She’d found them, yes. Her father downstairs on the couch, reclined as if he’d been napping and caught unawares. Her stepmother upstairs in the spare bedroom, sprawled facedown on the floor.

Before the house swarmed with police and investigators, reporters and curiosity seekers, I was summoned by the maid, who arrived in a firestorm of tears, wails, and blubbered protestations. She was an Irish girl; Maggie was her name—or that’s all I ever heard them call her. She tugged on my arm when I opened the door, and she drew me across the street, telling me everything between gasps and gulps.

And I went, with all the dread of the previous evening foremost in my mind, weighing down my feet as I plodded the few scant yards over to my neighbors’ bloody abode.

The day was bright and hot. The sun bleached out all the colors, and some of the details, almost as badly as the night had just a few hours previously. And there was Lizzie, standing on the front porch waiting for me. Her mouth was fixed in a grim line, and her eyes squinted against the brilliant light of morning.

Just above her feet I saw dark stains spreading in a violent red against the light brown shade of her dress. She would later say, before a judge and jury, that her hem had become bloody when she stood beside the corpses, attempting to examine or rouse them.

(And at that same trial, I would testify on her behalf. I would recall the brown dress, and I would swear that the blood on her clothes was consistent with a concerned, frightened woman who’d approached the Bordens with intent to assist them.)

As I approached she said, “Doctor Seabury, my father and Mrs. Borden are dead. Something has killed them.”





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Much difficulty followed.

I was called upon to testify, as were many others. I would speak again and again of her dress and the blood, and my neighbors bashed open with the thick, heavy blade.

Lizzie comported herself admirably. She remained ladylike and reasonable, and she answered the prosecutor’s questions so long as he asked them—always presenting a picture of calm cooperation, and only becoming slightly scrambled under the barrage of confusing questions. He worked hard to trip her, to compel her to incriminate herself.

She stuck to her story, and neither the witnesses nor the lawyers were able to rattle her into guilty confessions.

It was just as well. No one really wanted to believe she’d done it.

Was she physically capable of committing the murders?

No doubt. She was only thirty-two, and sturdily built. Her father was in his seventies. Her stepmother, although younger, was taken from behind, presumably by surprise.