Free Maplecroft by Cherie Priest

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.
    The skin. The eyes. The lumbering, clumsy look—as if they lacked full control of their faculties, or their senses weresomehow dulled. Matthew’s condition was not yet as severe as Abigail’s had become, but I could see it in his face. I could see it in his shambling movements. A more severe case of the Borden problem was working its way into his body, into his blood.
    I fastened the front door with more precision than was necessary, and dashed upstairs to my office, where I kept notes, files, paperwork. Things to remind myself of patient histories, and records that might assist authorities in case of a plague.
    In Europe, physicians and civil servants have been tracking disease outbreaks for decades, beginning with the cholera epidemics in London. Records compiled by doctors, clergymen, postmen, and others have proven invaluable to the study of how sickness spreads, and my own interest in the subject had prompted me to collect such day-to-day details and write them down. I’d begun perhaps five years before, recording basic information and keeping it in files after reading about the efforts of a Dublin doctor to do the same in the slums of that city. I had no slums for the studying, but I had Fall River and I knew its population.
    I didn’t honestly believe that any of my short notations would ever be as important as London’s Ghost Map. No, certainly not. But I liked to think that one day my notes might benefit some researcher, somewhere.
    My drawers and files had fallen into disarray, relative to how neatly they were kept when my wife was alive. Such is the way of things, all order passing into chaos, given time enough. But even so, I soon found what I was looking for: a few sheets of paper stuffed into a folder, labeled “Ab. Bord.”—to distinguish her from Andrew but to preserve some measure of anonymity for the families whose well-being I observed.

•   •   •
    (Privately, I assumed that any serious researcher would have no difficulty teasing out the particulars of my patients; but I liked to think that my little abbreviations would at least give me some protection, if any of those patients were to learn of my notes and take objection to them.)

•   •   •
    My notes frustrated me. They were incomplete, and woefully so—through no one’s fault but my own.
    Upon my first visits with Abigail Borden, I had recorded everything from her temperature to her breathing rate, but as her condition deteriorated . . . it’s as I said before. I was paying less and less attention, for I was distracted by the family drama