Maplecroft (The Borden Dispatches #1)(95)

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Nance looked up when the lightning flashed again upstairs, though this time I hadn’t heard the thunder that preceded it. It flashed and sizzled, and Maplecroft smelled like ozone and fire. It crackled through the house, the loudest white you’ve ever seen.

The lights went out. The lights came on again.

The cooker was empty. And Nance was gone.





Lizzie Andrew Borden


MAY 7, 1894

Nance was gone, and I stood there—wondering if my eyes had deceived me, or if I’d finally succumbed to the madness of Fall River, or if perhaps I was simply mistaken about what had occurred.

I tumbled forward—nearly toppling into the cooker myself—but I found no sign of her. The lye and its accompanying chemicals did not simmer or writhe with bubbles as if they’d been disturbed, they only swirled and hummed with the motion of the motor, spinning and whirring, ready to devour anything that might fall. This flytrap of a machine. There in my floor. It was empty, except for the liquids that do its job.

Nance had gone somewhere else.

I flung myself toward the far wall, where the switch controlled the gaslights—and I twisted it hard enough to break the knob, but the light didn’t brighten and Nance was still gone.

Corner to corner I scanned the room and saw only the usual bits of equipment, paraphernalia, tables, stools, glass vials, books, burners, measuring cups and spoons, scraps of notepaper, lists of trials and errors. In the corner, a broom. Against the wall, my axe. No, not the axe after all, for it was upstairs. I hadn’t known she’d be coming down here again, so I hadn’t brought it.

I’d been so afraid for her that I’d forgotten to arm myself.

“Lizbeth.” Doctor Seabury called to me, and I was startled—I’d looked right past him. He was there, but I hadn’t noticed him. You see? Such things are possible after all.

“She can’t be gone,” I insisted to him, not answering his summons except to give him some indication that yes, I was still in possession of my senses. “There’s no way out of the basement except up the stairs, and out the exterior cellar doors, but they’re locked.” I could see the barred fastener from where I stood. It had not been disturbed. “Did she . . . did you . . . did she push past you? Shove you aside?” It didn’t hurt to ask.

“No,” he told me gently. “No, Lizbeth. We lost her.”

Exasperated, I spit—“Through the walls? Like some kind of ghost?”

“Through the walls, past them—I surely don’t know and can’t say. But she’s left this place.”

I clapped my hands over my mouth, then changed my mind and pressed them over my breasts instead. Holding myself down. Holding my horror inside, so I did not scream it out. Quietly, with only what little whispered breath I could spare—lest it all fly forth at once—I said, “He was telling her to do something awful to us. To you, me, and Emma. She was fighting him. That’s what she meant.”

“That’s one reading of the situation,” he replied, more coldly than necessary, in my opinion.

“It’s the only thing that makes sense!” I shouted back at him. Not shouting was too hard.

“Sense has long ago gone out the window here, my dear. She’s gone. That’s the main thing. She neither did anything awful to us, nor did she fling herself into the cooker—that’s all we know for certain.”

“Then we have to go looking for her!”

Now he was exasperated with me; it showed in his eyes. He tried to steady his voice, to lend at least one of us some sense of calm or control. “Lizbeth, if she is trying to protect you by leaving . . . would you undo her efforts by chasing her?”

“Yes!” He was right. Sense had gone out the window, or perhaps out through the walls, like a ghost.

I pushed past him, since she had not. I ran up the stairs, two at a time, noisy as a horse on a boardwalk.

She had to be out there somewhere. I ignored Emma, who did her best to get my attention, wondering what was going on; I saw her standing by the landing in the foyer, holding the stair rail for support. Amazing how she can stand, walk, and even yell when she feels motivated enough. Amazing how that’s always when I’m in the middle of something important.

I left her where she was.

The doctor could fill her in, or help her out, or whatever it was she required on that occasion. I had problems of my own. I had to go find Nance.

I grabbed my axe as I dashed out the door, and I carried it around the side of the house in the dark—no, in the intermittent light, flashed from above, cracking the clouds apart like eggs.

It was almost enough to see quite clearly, tumbling from corner to corner across the sky. Flickering, sometimes, unlike the flash one automatically thinks of when one considers lightning. Farther south, I think they call it “heat lightning,” though what that means—and what difference there might be—I haven’t any idea.

Behind the house I went, determined to see if the cellar door had been breached, and to double-check that I had not been distracted by madness downstairs—but no. It remained stubbornly affixed, and locked from within as I knew it must be.

My heart no longer beat; it clenched and unclenched behind my ribs, so tightly, so forcefully, that I almost felt I couldn’t breathe.