Probably, I bring up Nance too much.
Probably, you’re sick of hearing about her.)
• • •
“It’s a safety measure more than a plan,” he continued. “Besides, once the case is finished—or as finished as some of them ever get—it’s helpful to see the whole thing laid out from beginning to end. Sometimes I can see patterns after the fact . . . details that seemed insignificant may add up or line up to spell something important.”
“How many cases have you solved?” I asked, afraid that it might verge on impoliteness—since it might imply his efforts were not uniformly successful. But I was too curious to restrain myself.
“More than I’ve abandoned due to lack of evidence,” he answered quickly, without sounding insulted in the slightest. Then, more slowly, more thoughtfully, he added, “But solving a case . . . it doesn’t always mean that an answer to a riddle has been found, or that a great truth has been revealed. As often as not, a solution is little more than a conclusion—the ability to say, ‘This is what happened.’ Or even, ‘I don’t know what happened, but here is the mechanism by which it operated.’ It’s rarely quite so simple as the detective stories would lead you to think.”
“Maybe not, but the prospect charms me. The idea of a community like yours . . . an organization that at least attempts to address the things others may dismiss.” Suddenly I sat up straighter, and with a gasp. Two ideas had collided in my brain with such velocity that I was stunned they hadn’t met before.
“Lizbeth? Was it something I said?”
“That’s what you were doing in Fall River,” I noted. “You were there about Zollicoffer.”
He was puzzled; you could see it in the zigzag lines of his forehead. “You knew that already. You knew it at the time.”
“No, that’s not what I mean. You investigated that case, those deaths, that man . . . because none of it was natural, not in the traditional sense.”
“You are correct.” He nodded, still uncertain as to why this had unnerved me so. He must have assumed I’d figured it out already . . . and to some extent I had. But given all the excitement, I hadn’t really stopped to consider . . . so I asked him, “The Zollicoffer case. Do you consider that one . . . solved?”
“It’s as I told you, ‘solved’ is a slippery term at best. I believe I called that one ‘concluded.’ After my last visit to Fall River . . . shortly thereafter, that is, if you’ll excuse me . . . erm . . .”
“Go on,” I prompted. I wanted him to ask about it. I’m not sure why.
Likewise, I’m not sure why he was so reluctant.
He arched an eyebrow toward the back of our driver’s head, as if to remind me that we weren’t alone. Cautiously, he said, “We’d suspected that Zollicoffer’s course of action would lead him to Fall River—but we did not have anything firm to base it upon until it was . . . to be frank . . . entirely too late to do anything about it. I had some grand ideas about rushing into your town, lending a hand, saving the day, and so on . . . but there wasn’t time. Certainty came to us in increments, you see. And”—he shifted in his seat so he could better face me, and lend the impression of earnestness—“that was one of my great complaints, with the way the case was handled. Everyone was so afraid that we’d predict the wrong path and miss the monstrous fellow altogether . . . that no one wanted to make a decision on the matter. No investigator would stand up and say, ‘I believe the professor will next strike here,’ because what if he turned out to be wrong? It was a coward’s handling of the matter, from top to bottom.”
“What about you?”
“Me?” He sighed and settled back, leaning halfway against the seat and halfway against the door. There was quite a lot of him to lean, after all. “I was one of the cowards. I had my hunches, but not much more—not until the very end, you know. I was younger then, and the professor’s case was unprecedented . . . the kind of thing that comes along once in a hundred years. I was only allowed to participate on a provisionary basis; I could scarcely talk my superiors into a per diem and travel allowance, not even after the Hamilton murders. Too many people in the bureaucracy were too willing to write it off to coincidence.”
I shook my head in disbelief. “What a world, where such deaths are common enough to call coincidence.”
“I couldn’t agree with you more. And that said, I feel this is as good a time as any to apologize.”
“To me?”
“To you,” he affirmed. “I left you alone, to face whatever would come. It’s something that still bothers me in the wee hours of the morning sometimes. Even after all these years.”
“Really?” I wasn’t sure I believed him, but some petty, dark corner of my soul liked the idea of it.
“Really. You and your sister, and the doctor—Seabury, that’s right, that was his name—you had no idea what you were up against. Our office might have been able to help . . . but it chose not to, not until our help was no longer required. Or so we were forced to assume.”
He was finally on the verge of asking me what had become of Zollicoffer, I could see it then: the hesitation after the admission, a sidelong glance to check his apology’s reception. A gleam of curiosity, regarding a case never solved so much as concluded, as he’d so carefully put it. But he was too much of a gentleman, or there was still some cowardly residue left over from thirty years ago, I don’t know. But I wanted to tell him, because I’d never told anyone. Seabury and Emma had known, but both of them clutched that secret in their coffins.
So I gave Inspector Wolf the chance to hear it. I gave myself the chance to say it out loud, for the first time ever. “You want to know what happened that night, when Zollicoffer came around.”
He perked right up, but not so much as to be unseemly. “I’d very much like to know, yes. The folders are sealed and covered with dust in the farthest corners of our Boston storage facility, but for my own satisfaction, yes. I’d very much like to know.”
But drat the timing of it all—we had just pulled up to the civic building downtown, and our driver cleared his throat to attract our attention. “Sir, madam. We’ve arrived.”
It was just as well, and we both knew it. A good driver was as fine a vault for secrets as a good bartender, but we didn’t know this man, and at any rate . . . he’d heard enough already.
“Inside,” I told Wolf. “If the storage room is hungry for secrets, it can eat this one, too.”
He left instructions and money with the driver, telling the man how long to wait before leaving us to our own devices; and together we climbed the wide white stairs that led up to the civic building. It wasn’t so different in design from the courthouse, and indeed it gave me the same anxious feeling as we scaled the expanse between the street and the front doors.
“It’s bustling in here,” Wolf said. “And Ruth wasn’t wrong—there’s always the chance we’ll be recognized as allies of hers and George. I haven’t had any trouble so far, but then again, I haven’t been back to the civic center here since before the trial.” He left his fingers briefly on the oversized door handle and said, “Walk briskly, smile and make small talk with me, and behave as if you belong here as much as anyone else. No one’s likely to bother us.”
I nodded and said, “Of course,” with more confidence than I felt. In the back of my mind, I was always a little worried about being recognized for something worse than being a friend of Ruth’s; there was always the chance that some old fool might recognize my face from a newspaper picture or a magazine story. Was it likely? No. But neither was a storage room that ate evidence and drove men mad.
He took my elbow, smiled brightly, and ushered me inside.
Offices lined every hall, broken up by conference rooms and other brightly lit meeting spaces; and everywhere we saw men wearing suits and doing business, or carrying on arguments—while older men in nicer suits talked loudly on phones or to their underlings
in the corridors, making sure everyone knew that they were busy, and they were in charge. Sharply dressed young women toted folders and coffee, and office boxes, and oversized purses, and clipboards from room to room, their button-toed shoes making a chatter of scuffs and scrapes on the brightly shining floor.
We passed an office with “Nathaniel Barrett” stenciled on the window, but I only glimpsed it as we hurried past—Wolf’s nattering about the weather leaving a dull hum in my left ear.
“This way,” he said, guiding me around a turn, and to a stairwell door marked “Exit Only.” Before I could protest, he’d opened it anyway and darted inside—drawing me behind him. The door shut, closing us inside a concrete space with a single fizzing lightbulb, and absolutely none of the hectic charm on display outside. “And now we go downstairs—where it’s going to get strange. Don’t let it bother you; I know where we’re headed.”
“Are we likely to run into anyone else?”
“No,” he said, leading the way. “Unless we feel like hoping and praying that George has been stuck there, and we won’t have to go looking for him after all.”
“There must be a more direct route to the basement,” I observed. I dodged a lone strand of cobweb that dangled from the lightbulb cage at the next landing, and tried to ignore the dirty light and the dusty smell.
“An elevator, shared by the whole building.”
“For three stories and a basement?”
“Modern technology,” his voice echoed up in his wake. “Any excuse for it, I suspect. But if we took the elevator, we might be called upon to explain ourselves to other passengers—or to the fellow who operates it. I don’t know about you, but I would just as soon skip that social nicety.”
He stopped at the bottom, partly to let me catch up and partly because he didn’t want to go any farther. His whole posture shouted his reluctance to proceed: His face had gone red and tight, his breathing shallow, his shoulders squared against whatever awaited us. But he was being brave for me, the dear man. He needn’t have bothered. I’d been in more frightening places, and more frightening positions than this one—standing before a half-dark labyrinth of office furniture, crates, and bookcases.
We took in the scene together, until he felt he’d hesitated long enough and to do so any longer would make him look less manly. “There’s a pathway,” he promised. “Straight back, through here.”
Once again he played tour guide, leading me between tall hedgerows of unneeded items that no one wished to throw away. In some places the passage became tight, and Wolf had to shimmy himself sideways to fit. In other spots, we both were compelled to duck when mop handles and lawn-care tools formed a menacing canopy overhead.
The air felt different down there. It was musty, yes—but that wasn’t the core source of the weirdness. It was dark except for the sparse electric lights, and the place never saw sunlight or felt ventilation, so the smell of old paper and damp was no surprise; but there was something else to it, something cold and almost slimy in its feel . . . like the air left a sheen upon my skin, as if it were fog or a seaside mist.
“Almost there,” he pledged.
“It’s all right. I’m keeping up just fine.”
“Are you . . . do you sense anything . . . unusual?”
I wasn’t sure how to answer, so I was honest. “Yes, but I couldn’t describe it if you held a gun to my head.”
“Fair enough,” he muttered. “I couldn’t, either.”
Eventually the path widened, and we were deposited at a cleared area—a juncture where a series of rooms branched off from the main space, all in a row. They were each numbered, and at least two of them had contents that spilled outside their doorless entryways. Another one appeared empty, and I couldn’t see the rest.
“Six is over here,” directed Wolf. “It looks like George left a light on for us.”
Down on the right, there it was—and yes, there was a pale orange glow that expanded from the doorway. “Are you sure there’s no one else inside . . . ?” I asked, but it was a dumb question. He didn’t know any better than I did, so I called out softly instead: “Hello? Is anybody there?”
No one replied, so we approached the ugly light. I rapped on the doorframe for good measure, and again I asked, “Hello?”
Wolf poked his head around the side. “We’re alone, more or less.”
“Well, it doesn’t feel that way.”
“Yes, I know. Welcome to Storage Room Six.”
I didn’t feel too mightily welcomed, I don’t mind telling you, Emma. That room didn’t welcome; it trapped. I could sense it all the way down to my toes that I was standing in a spider’s parlor. Or no, nothing so nice as a parlor—even one that lures on behalf of an arachnid. This was more like a cell.
It lacked the typical prison trappings of a bucket and a sink, but there was a cot laid out along one wall. The cot had linens upon it that were not folded, but were not dirty, either; and the attendant pillow bore the impression of a man’s head.
(I’ll say it was a man’s head, because there were smudges of hair oil still left upon it.)
“Was George sleeping here?” I wondered aloud.
“His wife didn’t mention that he’d been missing any evenings at home, but then again, she didn’t notice she’d been drugged and abandoned this morning, either. She might have missed a great deal, from not paying attention—or from writing off his more unusual behavior to the stress of the election, and then the Stephenson trial.”
Wolf approached a desk that was covered in cardboard boxes, and I roamed the rest of the smallish space, dragging my fingertips across items small and large, leaving trails in the dust. Boxes were piled as far as the ceiling, and one even leaned a corner against the lightbulb’s cage—giving the whole ceiling an askew appearance. The floor was poured cement, and it was scattered with paper clips and wadded-up balls of paper and little black dots that I was forced to conclude must be mouse droppings. The walls were painted that bland taupe color you used to see on hats; its glossy paint felt damp to the touch.
• • •
Standing there, staring at my fingertip—wondering if it was wet or merely cool—I had the most terrible flash of memory: I was standing in my basement at Maplecroft. I was not basking in the glow of a dull caged light, but the brighter gaslamps I’d installed . . . and I was not imagining or wondering at the damp. I knew it like I knew my own breath, my own skin. The walls had always wept down there, too. They were always collecting small rivulets of dew, puddling on the floor.
But I shook it off. I did not have a basement anymore, not at Maplecroft. I had sealed it off, closed it up, and put a new kitchen wall across the place where its entry used to be. There was no basement. I was not home. The wall was not really wet, it was only cool, and it was only a trick my mind played upon itself.
• • •
“Lizbeth? Lizbeth, are you all right?”
He sounded worried, so I snapped my head up and said, “Yes, don’t be silly. I thought I smelled something odd, that’s all,” I lied outright. “I was trying to place it—don’t mind me. So this is Storage Room Six, and these are the boxes over here—aren’t they? The ones with the axe murder files? The ones where you found Nance’s picture?”
The look on his face said he didn’t believe me, but I didn’t care. I wasn’t enthralled by the sinister forces of old memories, and that was the important thing. “These are the boxes, yes. George brought them here for safekeeping, for all the good it did him. You know, I hate to say it, but I think he might have been right about the room eating his evidence.” He pushed his spectacles up the bridge of his nose. “There was more than this, I’d swear to it.”
I joined him at the desk. The boxes held old folders, yes . . . but the cases weren’t so old, were they? “These look like they’ve been here a hundred years, rather than . . .” I checked the date on the nearest one. “E
leven months. Look at the foxing, here and there—just like an old book, or an old lithograph. Look at how faded the ink is on this page.”
“Perhaps George was coming at it from the wrong angle, and something about this place ages things prematurely,” he suggested. Then he shrugged. “Though the result is the same anyway. Things vanish. Information is lost.”
“Only the useful information, according to him.” I indicated a stack of phone directories and last month’s newspapers—undoubtedly the ones he mentioned in his note to Ruth. “Those look just fine. There’s not even a coat of dust upon them.”
“One way or another, it’s all as weird as can be. Look,” he said, abruptly adjusting the conversation, “here’s Gaspera Lorino’s file—or the file related to his attack, at least.”
He handed it to me. I strained to read the fuzzy light gray type. “His wife was killed, and he was maimed. Last word here says he was still unconscious. No one saw the need to update the files to reflect his recovery, then.” But then I flipped to the next page, and was less confident. “Or . . . or else those are some of the details taken by the room.”
The next sheet was almost blank, but not quite. The corners had gone brown, and the lines of type were almost inkless, nearly absent except for the indentations where the typewriter keys had pressed against the paper.
“Maybe it was on that page.” Wolf sighed, then brightened. “Wait, this box is new—these must be the personal effects he collected from the crucified accountant.”
“What a shame, that the poor man will be remembered that way.”
“It could be worse. He could be remembered as . . .”
“Yes?”
He didn’t respond immediately. He was pushing things around in the box. “He could always be remembered as an axe murderer.”
“I’m sorry, come again?”
“No, I didn’t mean . . . not like you,” he corrected awkwardly.