We gave up and planned to retreat to the hotel, but on our way to the car a young man in a patrolman’s uniform came trotting up to us.
“Ma’am.” He tipped his hat at Lizbeth. “Sir.” He bobbed his head at me.
“Can we help you?” she asked him. It was a silly question, but a sociable one, and I suppose she felt the need to say something.
He checked over his shoulder, saw no one, and whispered, “This is for Chief Eagan.” He slipped me a folded note.
“You’d like me to . . . deliver this to him? Is that what you mean?”
He shook his head. “No. I’m giving it to you because you’ve stood with him. Excuse me, and good afternoon to you both.” With that, he ducked back into the station.
I glanced at the note and tucked it into my vest pocket, and strolled away with Lizbeth at my side—as if our departure had not been interrupted.
“What is it?”
“An address,” I replied.
“Whose?”
“Let’s find out, shall we?”
Twenty minutes later we found ourselves at a flophouse on the south side of town. The district was seedy, but I’d seen far worse; and if Lizbeth was put off by it, she hid her revulsion quite admirably. The front face of the building was flat and made of wood siding, covered in peeling gray paint that might once have been the color of custard. Its windows were intact, if swollen with damp, and all of them were open.
No one greeted us or stopped us at the door, and the room number we’d been given was upstairs on the second level—so that’s where we went.
Lizbeth, being somewhat more nimble than I, scaled the steps more swiftly than I did. She reached the door first and stood before it, pausing to wait. Finally I joined her, and stood beside her—catching my breath. We listened to the sounds of men coughing, a couple fighting, a dog barking, and a badly maintained automobile chugging by . . . but that grew tedious in only a few seconds, so my companion reached for the knob and turned it.
The knob swiveled easily, and the catch released. Lizbeth lifted an eyebrow at me, then used her free hand to knock—loud enough to announce us, but not so loudly that anyone down the hall might ask us what we were doing.
“Hello?” she called. I did not join her, or offer to go first in any pseudo-chivalrous fashion. A woman knocking and saying hello was surely less threatening than a man of my size doing likewise, so let her take the lead.
No one answered. We looked both ways and saw no one to interfere, so we let ourselves inside with a slow creep forward . . . punctuated intermittently by Lizbeth’s continued efforts to make our presence known in a discreet, pleasant fashion.
Within moments, we stopped bothering with the civilized charade.
“Oh God,” she said. “This is Leonard Kincaid’s room.”
I swallowed hard, gazing at the smudged and dripped shape upon the wall, outlined in the rough shape of a hand-drawn cross. A day or so ago, it was red. Now it was rusty brown, and drawing flies. The room smelled exactly like it looked: dirty, and as if something had died there. “Well, we were asking after him, weren’t we? That nice patrolman must’ve overheard us.”
She withdrew a lavender handkerchief from a pocket and held it up over her nose. “How . . . thoughtful of him to send us here.”
“He was only trying to help, I’m sure.”
“I know, but . . . but . . . isn’t there someone who cleans this sort of thing? The landlord, if no one else. Wouldn’t you think?”
“But it only happened last night, or yesterday . . . I forget what the newspaper said. Perhaps the police forbade it, until their investigation was concluded. Besides, I can’t imagine anyone is beating down the door, hoping to land the living space for himself.”
“You say that as if the landlord has any intention of telling prospective tenants what occurred here.”
“Good point, madam. He’ll probably empty the place and throw a fresh coat of paint on the walls. It’ll hide both the blood and the odor. Well, while we’re here . . .” I returned to the front door and shut it quietly. I turned the dead bolt, not to prevent interruption, really—but to buy us time, in case of it. “Let’s not dally, but let’s be thorough. You never know what the police might have missed or ignored entirely.”
She went to his bed, which was made up as neat as anything you’d find in a hospital, and sat upon the edge while she went through his nightstand drawers.
As for me, I went to the desk pushed up against a wall, with a large slate board mounted above it. The board itself had been wiped clean. Resting on the tray at the bottom, I spied a large gray eraser chock-full of white dust, but whether the police had cleared away the chalk marks, or the killer himself . . . I couldn’t say. The desk’s top two drawers were empty, but the middle one on the left held a roll of old newspapers wrapped in a rubber band. Upon inspection, they were not entire periodicals—but clippings that were slapped together.
“Did you find something?” Lizbeth asked.
“For a moment, I thought so.” But the excerpts didn’t relate to the axe murders, for that would’ve been easy, wouldn’t it? “I appear to have been mistaken. It’s just a loose assortment of stories and advertisements, and if they’re related to one another in some way, I don’t see it offhand. There’s also . . . a small flask and two little glasses, another tome or two relevant to accounting, and half a pack of the office stationery he once used at work. How about you?”
“Mr. Kincaid occasionally enjoyed a pipe of tobacco and a sip of bathtub gin. He also sharpened his pencils to a very fine point, and wore them down to nubs.”
“That says plenty about him,” I murmured, returning my attention to the desk. I found a box of unused chalk, a very nice pen, and some lined paper with an assortment of numbers and formulas jotted across the top sheet. (The rest were blank.)
I looked up and saw an empty box in the corner. It resembled the sort a postman or an office secretary might use, and indeed might have been either one of those things. It would hold the dregs of evidence well enough, I decided—so I tossed in the newspaper clippings, stray sheets of lined paper, and everything else, and suggested that Lizbeth do the same should she find anything promising.
She sighed in my general direction. “I’m beginning to fear that George, or the investigators, beat us to the punch. At least we had a chance to see the highlights, before the storage room gets around to eating everything for good.”
“Check under the bed and in his drawers,” I suggested. “I’ll poke my head inside the icebox and the cupboards.”
She grinned at that, and agreed. Between us, I didn’t think we’d need another ten minutes to scour the place in earnest. The modest flat was not large at all, barely two rooms—a bedroom with a washroom, and a combination kitchen/living area/everything else so cramped that I could have packed the whole thing into my own office back in Boston. With room to spare.
We’d be best served to hurry, anyway.
The cupboards were lined with cans of vegetables and jars full of rice, beans, and pasta. I found a variety of sauces and tins of crackers, peanut butter, and the like—all of it organized with an architect’s precision. Or an accountant’s, as the case may be. “A precise fellow, this Kincaid. Everything so organized and tidy.”
“He even folded his socks,” Lizbeth informed me.
I wasn’t surprised.
The icebox handle stuck, but I wrestled it open anyway. The door popped ajar, and a cool, damp gasp of air escaped when the seal was broken. Inside it was wet, for the ice had melted (as ice is wont to do), but it still held a bottle of milk, and a box of something else, too. It looked like the kind of thing you’d take home from a restaurant—made of stiff waxed paper. I opened it up, expecting to find leftovers, but instead I retrieved a stack of photos tied up in twine.
The whole batch was soggy and unpleasant to the touch, but the
images weren’t yet lost. “I’ve found something. Maybe.” Or so I announced to my companion, who’d finished her examination of Leonard Kincaid’s worldly personal belongings.
“Oh, good, because I didn’t find a thing. I was afraid this was all for naught.”
“It might be still. These photos are decidedly waterlogged.”
“Why would he keep them in the icebox?”
I shrugged, and looked back into its dark, dank depths. “It’s a safe, insulated place. In case of fire, not much else would be likely to survive. I suppose he thought he was protecting them—and he surely didn’t plan to be murdered before the ice block melted.”
“No doubt. But tell me,” she urged, coming closer to look inside for herself. “It’s lined with . . . what? Lead, do you think?”
“Lead, asbestos. Anything to insulate it. This is a cheap model,” I noted. It was built into the kitchen cabinetry, a permanent part of the flophouse structure. It ought to be considered a feature, no doubt—despite the poor construction and a latch already falling to rust. “It might have sawdust in between its walls, for all I know.”
“I bet it’s lead,” she said firmly. “Vintage lore says lead can protect almost anything.”
“From what?”
“From almost anything else. Let’s take those back to the hotel and hang them up to dry. There’s . . . look.” She indicated one of the slippery scraps. “He wrote something on the back.”
I turned it over. “Not in pen, I hope.” But there was already a smudge of black ink on my fingertips to suggest I wouldn’t be so lucky as that.
“Some of it’s in pencil. Here, don’t try to pull them all apart just yet; let’s take them back to the hotel, and take our time with them. We’ve seen all there is to see here. We should go before someone throws us out.”
She was right, and we withdrew to sequester ourselves in my room—indecency be damned. We ran a line of string between the foot-end posts of my bed, and with the help of a few stray paper clips, soon all fourteen photos were strung up to dry. They grew brittle as the moisture left them, and their images were washed out to varying degrees, but the progression was clear enough.
“I daresay we gaze upon the visage of Mr. Kincaid himself,” I declared.
“Over a span of . . . how long, do you think? These might be dates, written on the back . . . but it’s hard to tell. Well, no—here’s one, clear enough: January 18, 1921.” She crawled up onto my bed and dangled her feet over the side so she could see the back of the photos more intimately.
“What else does it say? I think your eyes might be better than mine. I’m a tad farsighted in these spectacles, but wildly nearsighted without them. Everything in life involves a trade-off, after all.”
She drew it closer with the very edges of her fingernails, careful not to touch or damage anything further. “Something about . . . a shadow, I think. But I’m not sure I see any kind of shadow in the image, just some water staining . . . ? Where did he take these, anyway? Did you see a camera in his flat?”
Upon reflection, I did not. “No, but the police might have retrieved it and sent it off to be examined by a technician. If he did keep one on hand, there might have been film inside it. Ah, over here, yes, look at this one—it’s quite clear: These were taken inside the flat, in front of the blackboard. He used it for a background.”
“Did he have help, do you think? Can one take one’s own photo so easily?”
“There’s a simple switch on a cable with a button,” I said, now peering as intently as possible at the other portraits—all the same, just a shot of Leonard from the waist up, standing in front of that blackboard. “If you could see his hands, I’m sure you could see him holding it, and snapping the picture that way. This was not a man with friends or coconspirators; that much is obvious from his home—if nothing else of use was gleaned there. You know, I’m not entirely sure this is all . . .” I ran my finger thoughtfully along the bottom of each photo, scarcely touching them at all. “This isn’t water damage. Not all of it.”
“On the back of this one I can make out some of the writing. ‘I can’t be the only one who sees it.’ That’s what it says.”
“Which one?”
“Here.” She tapped one of the first in the series. I say it was a series, but really I only hung up the photos in the order they were stacked. Lizbeth continued. “And I think I see the word ‘shadow’ again. Do you see a shadow?”
“I might see a shadow disguised as water damage. Here, around his waist, at the very edge. I expect he would’ve loved to take a full-length shot, but lacked the room to set one up in that tiny hole of a place. I thought it was only the water at first, but it doesn’t crest the white border at all. It must be part of the image.”
She scooted off the bed. It was quite tall, and she landed with a short hop. “Let me see . . .”
“I think if we scan these from left to right . . . I think we got the chronology correct after all. There’s something around him.”
“Yes . . . There it is,” she muttered. “You can barely see it here at first . . . but by the end it’s quite clear. Or quite hazy, depending on how you think of it. He wondered if anyone else could see this dark fog, or if it was even real—so he took these photographs, trying to find out. Oh, that poor man . . .”
“That poor man? This fellow who apparently axe-murdered heaven knows how many people?”
“That poor man,” she asserted, “who feared he was going mad, and fought against delusion with science—with a camera, trying to find evidence that might counter his confusion and terror. That poor man who was crucified to the wall of that dark little flat, by parties unknown.”
“Your well of sympathy goes deeper than mine.”
“My intuition, too, perhaps. I’m a woman, after all. Supposedly, ours is exceptionally keen.”
“And what else does your intuition tell you about this man, these photos? That he was some kind of victim?”
She nodded. “Yes. Whatever terrible person or thing may have driven him, it claimed him in the end, didn’t it? And no one had any ill to speak of him, if George can be believed. There’s more to this, that’s what my intuition says. Rather, it screams. This man and his numbers, his theories . . .”
That offhanded remark of hers reminded me of the papers, with their penciled notes. “His numbers and theories, yes. Are you any good at mathematics?”
“Average or better. It wasn’t a favorite school subject, but I performed well enough.”
“Then you’ve outstripped me. I’ve never had a head for it myself.” By then, I was sorting through the box with its meager offerings. “So tell me, do these equations mean anything to you?”
She took the lined paper from me and gave it a cursory examination. “No, I’m afraid not. This is well above my skill level. I don’t even recognize half these symbols . . . but the numbers are enormous, I can see that much. He’s jotting down figures to the thirtieth or fortieth power—digits with hundreds of zeroes at the end. Whatever this refers to, it must have been positively cosmic in scale.”
“Cosmic . . . ,” I echoed, because the word sounded correct when I wrapped my tongue around it. “There is something cosmic about it all, isn’t there? All these churches, every last one of them is looking up to the sky. It’s not like the good old days, when you dug temples out of the earth and talked to snakes. Wait. I actually know of churches where snake handling is practiced . . . hmm . . .”
“I don’t believe churches typically think of prayer as space exploration, but I’d agree with the sentiment,” she granted.
“It’s an absolute fact, and I’ll not settle for hearing it called ‘sentiment.’ If there’s any God out there, He’s someplace we can’t reach Him. Otherwise, all this nonsense would be put to rest with a quick interview and a sip of holy wine.”
“You’re tragically blasphemous, dear In
spector.”
“Says the woman who studies the dark arts in her spare time.”
“Hardly,” she said, but it was half for laughs, and half to defuse the awkwardness I sensed was brewing within her. “An interest is scarcely the same thing as a devoted study, though one day I do hope to perform a proper séance.”
“As opposed to an improper one?”
“I . . . I might have asked for Emma, but I didn’t do it in the usual prescribed fashion. I was one part afraid of failing, and one part afraid of succeeding. Besides, such an appointment with the dead is probably best left to the professionals.”
“Speaking of, have you ever been to Lily Dale?” I asked her quickly, for the question sprang to mind and flew out of my mouth in an instant. Lily Dale probably wasn’t the nearest spiritualist community to Fall River, but it was near enough—and quite famous.
“I haven’t yet had the pleasure. Perhaps after this little adventure of ours.”
“As a tourist, I hope—and not as a drop-in at a séance.”
She laughed then, and I think it was genuine. I adored her sense of humor, which was almost as awful as mine. “From your lips to God’s ears, as they say. Though if I ever do meet some untimely end, I hope you go looking for me.”
“Why is that?”
“The obvious, is all,” she said, giving one last look at the line of photographs drying on the string at the foot of my bed. “In case there’s another side, and no heaven or hell to be found there. Should that prove the case, I’d enjoy having a friend to chat with.”
“Then it’s a deal,” I vowed. “But you must promise me the same: Should you eventually learn of my untimely passing, I want you to try to reach me. Go to Lily Dale and seek me out for that incorporeal chat, and I’ll gladly get the conversation rolling. Let’s say this, shall we? We’ll need a secret phrase between us, something a charlatan couldn’t manufacture by way of guesswork or research. What should we use as a signal—if one of us is dead and reaching out for contact?”
“Nance,” she said quickly. Then she changed her mind, just as fast. “No, wait. Not Nance. That’s too obvious, and someone might guess it through patience or research. How about, instead . . .” Something unhappy and unpleasant crossed her face . . . perhaps a memory that caused her pain. It wasn’t painful enough to stop her, though. “Let us speak of the ocean . . . Let’s talk about starfish, shall we?”
Chapelwood Page 26
