Maplecroft (6 page)

M
ARCH
17, 1894

Matthew Granger has been a patient of mine since the moment he was born. I delivered him on a Sunday night, late enough that we may as well call him a Monday’s Child. What’s the lore on that one? Monday’s Child is fair of face, isn’t that the way it goes? Nonsense, of course. Even if he’d been a good-looking boy, one shouldn’t read too much into these things.

Young Mr. Granger was not particularly handsome, though he wasn’t the sort to frighten horses with his homeliness, either. An ordinary lad, you could say. Neither large nor small, thin nor fat, smart nor dull.

His father died when he was very young and when he was
ten his mother passed away also. Following this, he was taken in by Ebenezer Hamilton and his wife, Felicity—the godparents, I believe. They keep a shop down at the waterfront, performing all sorts of odds-and-ends duties for the fishermen who work the waters. At Hamilton’s Ocean Goods and Supplies one can pick up stray parts for navigational equipment, find new nets and get old ones mended, acquire bait for more casual fishing, and pay a penny a pound for stray bits of wave- and sand-tumbled glass and shells from a barrel by the front door. These bits end up in decorative ponds and small aquariums, in water closets, and sometimes in jewelry, hair sticks, or other baubles . . . most often marketed to the tourists who visit the shores when the season is right.

Among Matthew’s many minor duties was this one: He was obligated to keep the barrel brimming with attractive sea detritus.

Often he could be spotted down on the rocks, either in bare feet or wearing soft, flat slippers. He moved between the boulders like a cat on a shelf, picking his way deftly, his eyes on the cracks where soaked sand had been washed by the tide, threading itself in thin white seams full of tiny treasures. To watch him, you’d swear he was a creature of the shore himself, moving from stone to sand to surf with such unwavering expertise.

Just a child still, really. Not a man yet, though nearing that cusp where people hesitated to call him “boy” but wouldn’t yet call him “sir.”

When his godmother summoned me, she did so without his knowledge. She asked it as a favor, offering to pay me in the freshest seafood she could barter. Dutifully I appeared in her shop, strung with its nets, its gleaming brass instruments both assembled and disassembled for restoration, and its barrels of
salt, stones, shells, floaters, linen scraps for sail patches, and every other thing a coastal shop might carry.

Mrs. Hamilton, stout of frame and white of hair, was frowning worriedly when I arrived.

After greeting me she said, “He’s out there now, like always.” And she wrung her hands together.

“Filling the barrel?” I asked, and glanced toward the door.

There it was, and overflowing. Literally—its contents spilled into drifts and hillocks across the creaking wood floor. Mrs. Hamilton had deployed a bucket to address the surplus, but it too was brimming. Likewise the mugs and the saucers were piled to heaping. It looked for all the world like there must be some leak in the ceiling through which these button-sized sea notions dropped in an unending trickle.

She told me, “Yes, that’s all he does now. It’s always been his favorite, you know—something he does when he’s bored, or taking a moment from working the till or stitching up nets.”

I crooked my chin toward the water. “The whole town knows to look for him there, out on the bay.”

“More now than ever. It’s strange,” she said, leaning forward and crossing her arms on the counter. “And I don’t like it.”

Uncertain of what, precisely, she did not like, I indicated the collection at the barrel by the door. “But he’s doing a very fine job.”

“Better than fine, or worse. I can scarcely get his attention for any other task. And I know,” she said with a shake of her head, beating me to my instinctive argument. “He’s a lad still, and lads behave oddly without any prompting. But this has gone on for some time, and it’s becoming more and more of a problem by the day.”

I sighed and set my bag down on the counter beside her. “Perhaps you’d better begin at the beginning. What exactly is
he doing that worries you? Apart from overfilling the stock barrel, which I can see for myself.”

She exhaled deeply and her chest sagged, squeezing an abundance of bosom forward, over her arms. “It began a month or two ago. First he was having a hard time with the nets—he wasn’t paying attention, and he was dropping stitches, tying them into the wrong kinds of knots. When he was finished with a net, it wouldn’t have held anything. It wouldn’t even spread for the throwing. I watched him work, and I tell you, his mind was elsewhere.”

“Again,” I said, “a common complaint when it comes to young men.”

“But you should’ve seen it—the look in his eyes:
There wasn’t one
. Thought it was in my imagination, I did, but no . . . I’m sure of that now. Over time it’s gone from a boyish lack of attention to something . . . something I can hardly bear. Sometimes when he looks at me, he looks right through me. He doesn’t see me! He doesn’t hear me.”

“He isn’t listening?”

“I know. This, too—it sounds like a boy being a boy, but—” She stopped herself, as if she’d meant to tell me one thing, and changed her mind, offering me another thought instead. “He’s listening, but not to
me
. He’s listening to something
else
.”

I frowned, and she frowned, too. Then she heaved her torso up from the counter and came to stand beside me. She laid a hand on my elbow and guided me to the window beside the front door. Its glass was scummed by years of salted air, but I rubbed the back of my hand to shine one corner of a pane, and I could see all the way to the coastline beyond the edge of the road, perhaps a hundred yards away.

“Watch him,” she murmured, standing very close beside
me. Her breath was low and rushed, as if she’d been running and was pretending otherwise. “Look at him, and you tell me what he’s listening to.”

I watched as she’d commanded. The details were unclear; I was too far away to see much more than a long-limbed fellow picking around on the rocks, his face pointed down and his dark, wild hair billowing in the ocean air that gusted off the inrushing tide. At first I saw nothing remarkable, merely the same lad I knew on sight, in his natural habitat, performing his usual task.

But the longer I looked, the odder it seemed—and it was nothing I could immediately pinpoint. I stared. And I thought I saw an unusual jerkiness to his movements. He lacked his usual grace, the ordinary leaping, climbing, and leaning that typically characterized his hunts. He moved more heavily, and slowly, too. He did not jump from rock to rock, but he slid down one and scaled the next. His hands hung from his arms like dead things, or like whole things without fingers. They were flat and immobile, like fish at a market stand.

“He’s listening,” his godmother breathed. “Look at him. He’s listening.”

Yes, he was. I could tell it from the tilt of his head; every time he turned or pivoted, every time he changed rocks or changed directions—dipping down to the same level and poking through the sand. No matter which way he turned, the crook of his neck aimed his head at the ocean.

“Perhaps,” Mrs. Hamilton urged, “you could have a word with him. Talk to him, please, Doctor. I’d feel better knowing you’d looked him up and down, even if you decide there’s nothing amiss, or nothing you can do.”

As I stood there, peering through the small, clear square of
windowpane with Felicity Hamilton’s labored breathing puffing against the back of my neck, I would have rather done anything else than to go talk to young Matthew. I wanted to turn, wish the woman a good day, and make an excuse or apology regarding some fictional patient requiring my immediate services.

But I did not. I gathered up my scraps of inner fortitude and forced a smile upon Mrs. Hamilton as I said, “Very well. I’ll do just that.”

She opened the door and saw me out, and when I looked over my shoulder she was still there, watching through the spot I’d smudged to clarity on her window, her nervous eyes darting back and forth between me and her ward.

I took a deep breath.

This was a simple thing—likely the simplest task I’d be asked to perform all day—and it should not have repulsed me so. On countless brief, perfunctory, casual occasions through the years, I’d exchanged more than a handful of words with the fellow out there on the rocks. That lad over there, picking his way between the tide-washed boulders and always moving so that his head was cocked toward the Atlantic . . . he was no stranger. I’d always known him to be the pleasant sort, relatively eager to please and optimistic that any errand might earn him an extra penny for his trouble.

So why did I feel such dread as I slowly trudged toward him?
He’s only a boy,
I told myself. A simple truth, and one so obvious that it scarcely needed any mention. What else would he be? What was I so afraid of?

I approached him, stepping along the walkway as long as I could, and then only tiptoeing off the planks and onto the sand. I made a show of wanting to keep my shoes clean. It was only a show, but it allowed me to keep some distance—and it kept me
off the rocks. I’m not as young as I once was, and I no longer cared to scamper along the boulders like some schoolchild. And this was one more thing I told myself, for show.

“Matthew?” I called.

I stood facing him, my feet half in the wet-packed sand, my toes jostling against the polished pebbles that collected up against the spot where the ocean ended. The wind came up fierce, whipping my coat and nearly stealing my hat. I held the coat shut with one hand and held my hat in place with the other, and I called out again, in case the wind had carried away my first attempt.

“Matthew?” I said it more loudly this time.

He stopped scanning the cracks between the rocks and allowed himself to slide down the slippery, shining-dark slope of a boulder the size of a pony; but he didn’t meet my eyes and he didn’t approach. He only stood there, waiting for heaven knew what, swaying against the buffeting wind.

“Matthew,” I tried again. “Dear lad, would you come over here for a moment, off the beach? I was wondering if . . . if I could talk to you. I wanted to . . . to ask you . . .”

He lifted his head to look at me, almost; but there was that tilt—that alarming, off-kilter tilt that kept his attention always to the open ocean beyond the rocks.

My brain scavenged frantically for logical, reasonable things to say about Matthew. I wondered if he didn’t have some kind of ear problem. He might’ve had an infection, or a fluid buildup, or some other kind of ailment residing therein, that seemed to so harshly alter his equilibrium.

“Matthew?”

He nodded, which seemed an odd response—as if he were confirming that yes, he was in fact Matthew. Ridiculous. Of
course I knew that. And he knew I knew it. What peculiar behavior was this, between two citizens who’d been acquainted for better than fifteen years?

“Matthew, could you come here, please?”

If someone had held me at gunpoint, I could not have explained why I was so reluctant to venture any farther onto the sand. I wriggled my toes inside my shoes, and the pebbles banked around the edges of the leather soles. But I couldn’t bring myself to do it, to venture any closer to the rushing, rumbling waves beyond the rocks.

Matthew only looked at me, or through me—past me, like he was looking hard at something just behind me. So effective was this gaze that I looked back to make sure I wasn’t blocking his view of something more interesting. But no. There was nothing behind me but the usual piers, shopfronts, passersby, and preening white gulls.

When I had finished double-checking and once I’d made myself certain that Matthew was, more or less, looking at
me
—I met his eyes again.

I shuddered. I took half a step’s retreat that almost sent me falling over the edge of the walkway planks, and I corrected myself in time to keep from harm. But I flailed. And when I had restored my body’s balance I clutched my coat more tightly across my chest. I released my hat, trusting it to remain affixed—or not caring if it abandoned me.

The young man was giving me that look, and it was a blinkless look that stared but saw nothing, and I’d seen it before. I knew that mindless set of the eyes and then, as the awkward moment stretched itself out long between us, I knew the cast of his skin. I thought of eggs, peeled and pickled in a pantry jar. I
imagined sourdough beginning to turn too sour; I pondered the waterlogged flesh of the drowned.

And I remembered Abigail Borden.

The similarity shocked me, though the boy was clearly in some stage of whatever had overcome Mrs. Borden. Or . . . well. It’s hard to phrase what I mean. She died by an axe; but something had been draining her, or sickening her, prior to her death. I can admit that now. I
must
admit that now.

It took me a moment to realize I was holding my breath.

I let it out with a whistle and a gulp.

What could I say? I had nothing to suggest, offer, or declare. The unhinged set of the boy’s jaw, the tone of his skin, the slack and loose look of his face . . . I’d seen it before, as certainly as I’d seen typhoid shared from person to person in a battle camp.

A word bubbled to the surface of my murky thoughts.

“Symptoms.” I said it aloud, letting the syllables slip out past my chilled, unhappy lips. The boy was displaying
symptoms
—of that I was certain.

But my God, symptoms of
what
?

I tipped my hat in his general direction, which caused him to budge not in the slightest. So I turned on my heel and left, trying hard not to hurry—lest it look like I was running away.

When I reached my home I shut myself inside it, leaning my back against the door as if I could hold at bay any contagion that the boy might’ve breathed toward me. It was ridiculous—perfectly ridiculous, and I knew it. But I also knew it was not my imagination that the two Fall River residents, Abigail Borden and Matthew Granger, were somehow connected.