Maplecroft

by Cherie Priest

  Together we approached Hamilton’s Ocean Goods and Supplies, the store which the Hamiltons had kept, and within which they’d lived (in the back rooms, apart from the business front).

  The main entryway was closed off with rope, more for show than for restraint. A sign hung from the rope, announcing that the shop was “Closed Indefinitely,” with the subsequent admonition, “Do Not Enter Without Police Approval.”

  But as Wolf put it, “My approval is somewhat more official than mere police permission. So I’ll see to the knot.”

  “But you’re a policeman, aren’t you?”

  “Something like that.”

  “I meant no offense, of course,” I said, fearing I might have caused some all the same.

  He waved away my concerns. “None taken. Our offices work in close conjunction. Fine men, the Boston police. But no, I’m not one of them. Good heavens, it’s a devil of a knot.”

  I wasn’t sure what he meant, but I did not inquire further. Instead I said, “I have a penknife, if you think it’d help . . .”

  Before I could finish the offer, he’d released the informal barrier with a determined pinch of manual dexterity. “Thank you, but I’ve finally got it.” He fished about in his pocket for a key, given to him by the sheriff, I assumed. Or maybe it came courtesy of some other authority, as he implied. He found the key, retrieved it, and inserted it into the lock. “You’ve been here before—is that correct?”

  “Everyone in town has been here, at one time or another. It’s a local institution. Or it was, I’m sorry to say.”

  The door unfastened, and he pushed it open. “There’s always a chance that someone will reopen it. Some family member or another. But the Hamiltons had no children . . .” It wasn’t a question; he was merely recalling the facts as he’d heard them. I wondered who’d filled him in on all the peripheral details. “A brother, or cousin, perhaps.”

  “Ebenezer had a brother, but he was a mariner and I only met him once. He was older, too. For an old man who’s spent his life upon the sea . . . it might be a good retirement, to operate a shop such as this,” or so I thought aloud. “Then again, perhaps he’s lost his taste for living on solid ground. Some of them do, you know. They take to the ocean, and never find comfort elsewhere.”

  “I’ll ask Mr. Hamilton when I speak to him next. That poor man . . .” He might’ve said more, but we both stepped inside, where the store was dark and strangely cool. Both of us went quiet; we milled about in the entryway, beside the overflowing barrel of sea glass. It drew my eye, even when I consciously decided that I must look elsewhere.

  Nervously, I said, “Bit of a chill in here.”

  “Bit of a smell, too. Did Mr. Hamilton mention it?”

  “Yes, he did. Compared it to the stomach contents of a beached whale. And he ought to know—for he helped discard one. It was the talk of the shores last summer.”

  Wolf nodded. “The bowels of a rotting whale. That sounds about right.” He flinched, like he’d prefer to pinch his nose, but it wouldn’t be manly.

  “It is terrible,” I agreed, though it wasn’t quite the veritable wall of stench I’d been guaranteed. It was more of an undercurrent in the chilly, damp air. Something riding the humidity, as if the very mist itself was the source of the odor.

  It felt like some strange trespass, to visit the store under these circumstances. Closed for business, perhaps for good. Dark and quiet, with no Felicity Hamilton behind the counter, no Matthew to refill the odds-and-ends barrel. No Ebenezer on the pier just outside, spreading out nets and sails to dry in the sun, later to be repaired. I wondered sadly what would become of the stock, of the store, of the building itself.

  “Can you imagine . . .” I murmured, scanning the room.

  “I can imagine many things,” he replied. “But what precisely do you have in mind?”

  “Can you imagine buying a business or home like this, knowing what took place here? For generations, schoolchildren will accuse it of being haunted. You can rest assured of that.”

  “Children and adults alike—it’s not as if we ever outgrow our darker fears. Let’s not pretend we’re all so reluctant to entertain the unknown.”

  “Do you?” I asked bluntly.

  He faced me, and even in the low light I could see how quizzically he regarded me. He was thinking about his answer. He didn’t know me well, and wasn’t sure of what might turn my opinion, or so I gathered.

  “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.

  How he could stand to remain in that filthy, stinking room, I had no idea, but somehow the man had acclimated to breathing without his handkerchief. More power to him. I left him to sketch what he found important, and returned to the storefront area, which only felt grim and sad—rather than murderous and unsettling.

  I stood in the middle of the room, staring down the two aisles of products and back again at the counter, and the register, and the faint tracks my fingers had left in the slime that coated everything. From a certain angle, I could even see our footprints on the floor, when the light hit them just right. The whole place was tainted with something, and I was seized with the impulse to dash home and run myself a bath.

  But I could do that later.

  I kept my breathing shallow, lest I suck in any more of the disgusting air than I absolutely had to . . . and I strolled about, trying to be an observant and useful partner to Wolf, but mostly just wanting to take off my clothes and fling myself into the nearest supply of clean water.

  I wandered to the door, and to the window beside it. The glass was murky, like everything else, and when I ran the side of my thumb along the nearest edge of the pane, it came away black. Almost as if it were the stain of old soot, or the residue of a place where men too often smoked. But that was a silly thought, wasn’t it? Smoke and fire, in a place all but destroyed with damp. It wasn’t quite right, and I knew it.

  I can only talk my way around these things. There is so little that can be precisely said. The room was chilly, perhaps sixty degrees. (I wished for a thermometer, but didn’t have one handy and didn’t see one in the store.) The bloodstains were approximately three square feet, and four square feet, respectively. Wolf’s measuring tape would tell us more firmly.

  • • •

  (Edited to note—my guesses were good. I was only half a foot off in one case, and a quarter foot in the other.)

  I am at such a loss, without numbers to enter and symptoms to record. Unless that’s what I’m doing, in this roundabout way, as I keep these journals and record the day’s proceedings. I might be thinking about the situation too broadly.

  Wolf has his own notes, of course. I might ask to see them, in order to better flesh out my own research.

  • • •

  To return to my point, I stood by the door, by the window. And again I looked down into the barrel of odds and ends that Matthew so diligently filled, unto his last days. Same as before it was overflowing, with the excess deposited into buckets, jugs, and cups. No longer a barrel of goods—the goods had overtaken the space, and now acquired other spaces nearby in which to collect, and to spread.

  The goods had become a veritable colony.

  • • •

  What a strange thing to write down. I’m not certain why I’ve done so, but there it is. That was what I thought, and how I felt. That’s what I remember of it, and the rest is frankly foggy, but I need to stay on my toes and record it all to the best of my ability, so I don’t forget it later.

  I stood there, by the barrel, by the colony of glittery glass bits and shimmering shells, and I felt distinctly like I was forgetting something . . . forgetting everything, slowly. Like as I lingered, my attention was being drained from my body, a very slow leak, as from a balloon, and my awareness was sinking, dropping, falling.

  Oddly, I was not particularly worried by this. I was only interested in the glint of the light on the pretty rocks, and the clicking sound they made when I put my hand into the barrel, gently so I wouldn’t cut myself on any sharp edges. Clicking together, the pebbles and stones and glass. Clicking like crab claws, or beads on a necklace.

  Clicking like a necklace.

  But that doesn’t make any sense, does it? Maybe not. Still, that was what sprang to mind, and something about the randomness of it all made me cling to it. It was too specific and weird to lack meaning.

  I might’ve mulled this over further—or then again, I might’ve stood there all night, my fingers running through the barrel’s contents, drawing little furrows, making tiny mounds and digging little holes—except that Wolf joined me once again, having finished his examination of Matthew’s bedroom.

  He said my name, loudly. He insisted that it was the third attempt to rouse my attention, and he asked if I was all right, but of course I was all right. Of course he didn’t call my name thrice. I’m confident he must have been mistaken.

  No, that’s not so. I’m not confident of anything, and the thoughtful look on his face suggested that I would dismiss his concern at my peril.

  “Of course I’m all right,” I said in response, shoving my hands into my pockets, and clenching, unclenching my fists. My hands were cold from playing with the barrel’s lifeless, brittle contents.

  “I should hope so, because we’ve one stop left before I can return you to your routine, Doctor. I could’ve done this much of the trip myself, though I was happy for the company; no, sir, I need you for the funeral home. I want you to tell me about the bodies.”

  “Ah.” It was all I could think to say.

  My hesitation likewise gave him pause. “Ah? Is there . . . some reason you’d prefer to bow out?”

  “No, no, that’s not it,” I said quickly. “I’m sorry—I only had a moment of moral confliction.” I reached for the door and opened it, letting the real world, the real ocean air, breathe into the store.

  “Moral confliction? Of what sort?”

  “I’m terribly curious, that’s all. I do indeed want to see them,” I asserted, and this was true. “But it would be unseemly to get too excited about it, don’t you think?”

  “Not at all.”

  “Are you certain?”

  He shut the door and locked it behind us. “We should always be excited about the pursuit of truth.”

  We stood there, taking in the sun, and together, I believe, we were both relieved at the normalcy of the morning on the shop’s narrow stoop. With the door closed, there was no sign of what had gone on within.

&nbs
p; None but the warning sign, that is.

  It dangled from the rope, reminding me that I was wrong, and that I could pretend all I wanted that it was a beautiful day, and all was right with the world. But I was completely wrong.

  The funeral home was only a few blocks to the north, so we walked the distance together. I led the way at Wolf’s request, but I got the distinct impression that he knew the general location already. He was obviously a man who came to every situation prepared.

  I wondered how prepared, and I frowned, but to parlay the act into something less vague I returned to his last comment. “You don’t think it’s strange at all?” I asked him. “You think it’s well and good that we should grow giddy over the corpses of friends?”

  “They’re not my friends,” he noted. “And I said nothing about ‘giddy.’ But I have no doubt that the deceased Hamiltons were fine, upstanding citizens, so yes, I am all the more interested in their remains, that we might find the justice they so richly deserve.”

  “But what justice is there, when a malady is at fault? One can hardly prosecute an infection.” I scoffed at the very idea. “Matthew was ill—desperately so, and I can’t speak as to the nature of his affliction. I did my best to treat him, but his condition was beyond my abilities.”

  “Beyond anyone’s but God’s?” Wolf asked. He looked up at me with a tiny gleam in his eye.

  “Beyond anyone’s,” I said carefully.

  “Filthy atheist,” he replied.

  It was meant to sound like a joke, so I laughed—but the laugh was awkward. “My beliefs have no part in this case. And you were the one who wished to abandon the topic of religion. If I recall.”

  “But if I’m to understand correctly, you believe that Matthew was sick, and that Ebenezer acted in self-defense when his godson threatened his wife’s life. You have faith, is what you mean.”

  “That’s . . . not the same thing.”