The Blackstone Chronicles (34 page)

By the time he came to Main Street, a stop at the Red Hen had seemed utterly imperative, and this morning’s fifteen minutes of gossip disguised as “networking” had somehow managed to stretch out to half an hour. Even then, Bill McGuire and Ed Becker were still at the counter when he left, postponing the start of their workday
under the guise of a serious conversation regarding the financing for Blackstone Center and when it might finally come through. That Melissa Holloway, who had officially been appointed permanent president of the bank at the last meeting of its board of directors, had told them they could count on no approvals any earlier than June seemed to cut no ice with Bill and Ed. But then, it was that kind of morning: today everyone seemed to prefer speculation over actual labor. When Oliver finally arrived at the
Chronicle
, it was more of the same.

“Everyone wants to know when you’re going to run a story about what’s been going on,” Lois Martin said as he opened the office door. “I just got another call—this time from Edna Burnham. She says everyone in town is talking, and it’s up to you to stop it.”

The temperature of Oliver’s pleasant springtime mood notched down to a wintry chill. He knew perfectly well what Lois was talking about: a day hadn’t gone by in the month since Martha Ward had burned her own house to the ground and perished in the flames that someone hadn’t called the paper demanding to know what—exactly—the connection was between the suicides of Elizabeth McGuire, Jules Hartwick, and Martha Ward. As far as Oliver could see, there was no connection at all.

A few odd coincidences, perhaps, but nothing more than that.

It was Edna’s contention, Oliver knew, that there was ominous significance in the fact that all three of the suicides had occurred shortly after a full moon. But the term
lunacy
had been around in one form or another for millennia, and given that all three of Blackstone’s tragic victims had been under one form of stress or another, Oliver wasn’t willing to call the full moon a causative factor for any of them. A trigger, possibly, but certainly no more.

Still, if Edna Burnham was demanding answers, it meant the talk was starting to get even more serious than Oliver had thought.

“Does she have a new theory, or is she just upset?” he asked.

Lois Martin hesitated before answering his question, and when she did, her eyes didn’t quite meet Oliver’s. “She’s wondering if it might not all go back to the Asylum somehow.”

“The Asylum,” Oliver repeated. “And did she say what put that idea in her mind?”

Lois’s eyes finally met his. “A few things, actually,” she said, picking up a pad on which she’d scribbled some notes when old Mrs. Burnham had called. The phone had been ringing off the hook when Lois arrived that morning. “First off,” Lois told him, “there’s the anonymous gifts. Edna claims to have heard whisperings about weird things that turned up, first at the McGuires’, then at Jules’s house and at Martha’s. She says no one knows where they came from.”

A look of disbelief came over Oliver’s face. “Come on! What kind of things?”

“Well, Bill McGuire was talking about a doll that showed up in the mail a few days before Elizabeth killed herself, and Rebecca told her about a gold cigarette lighter—”

“I know where that came from,” Oliver told her. “No mystery there. Rebecca and I found it at the flea market.”

“I know, I know.” She held up a hand to stop his protests. “Edna’s been doing some sleuthing of her own. She’s been over at the library, chatting with Rebecca. And it seems she asked Janice Anderson where she got it, and Janice has no memory of ever having seen that lighter before the morning Rebecca bought it.”

Oliver groaned. “I suspect Janice can’t remember where she got half the merchandise in her store,” he said. “And the stuff she was selling at the flea market was just junk. Besides, what about Jules Hartwick? What mysterious item supposedly showed up there?”

“There was a locket,” Lois replied. “Celeste found it on the lawn after the snow melted.”

“Which means that anyone could have dropped it sometime between December and three weeks ago, when Celeste and Madeline got back from Boston,” Oliver pointed out. “I would hardly call that conclusive evidence of anything.”

“Hey, don’t shoot the messenger,” Lois protested. “I’m just reporting what Edna Burnham said.”

“She
said
a great deal,” Oliver remarked dryly. “But what actually is she getting at? Does she think there’s some kind of curse on these things?”

Lois Martin shrugged elaborately. “You said it, not me.” She hesitated, but then decided she might as well tell him everything Edna had said. “She also said something about Rebecca having seen someone at the Hartwicks’ the night of the party—presumably the someone who left the locket, I suppose. Furthermore, Edna maintains that each and every one of the families who received these objects has some connection to the Asylum. Or at least did have, back when it was open.”

“Aha!” Oliver said, as if Lois had finally delivered incontrovertible proof of the ludicrous nature of Edna Burnham’s speculations. “Find me a family in Blackstone that
didn’t.”
Oliver’s eyes glittered with challenge. “The Asylum was the mainstay of the economy around here for years. Everyone in town had a relative working there, and half of them had relatives who were
in
the place, for God’s sake!”

Lois held up her hands as if to fend off his words. “Hey, I’m not the one you have to convince. It’s Edna—” She paused, then grinned with malicious enjoyment. “—and the hundred or so other people she’s probably convinced by now.”

“Oh, Lord.” Oliver groaned again. “What am I supposed to do? Write an article about some ancient evil that’s suddenly come forth from the Asylum to wreak havoc on us all?”

“Hey, that’s not bad,” Lois deadpanned. “I can see the headline now: ‘Beware the Blackstone Curse.’ ”

“How about this one instead,” Oliver shot back: “ ‘Beware the Unemployed Assistant Editor.’ ”

He was smiling as he turned and headed toward the rear of the building to the renovated office that Bill McGuire had finally finished last week. He busied himself readying the paper for the press, but try as he did to put Edna Burnham’s outrageous theory out of his thoughts, Oliver found himself coming back to it over and over again. As the day wore on, and Edna’s speculations kept popping unbidden back into his mind, he knew the idea must be churning around other minds in Blackstone as well.

Finally, shortly after noon, with this week’s
Chronicle
put to bed but his thoughts still restless, he gave up. “I’m going home,” he told Lois. “I might even go up to the Asylum and take a look around.” He managed a grin he didn’t quite feel. “Who knows? Maybe I’ll even find something that will prove Edna’s right.”

“Better if you can find something that proves she’s wrong,” Lois replied.

“More likely, I won’t find anything at all.”

Leaving the office, he thought about stopping into the library to see Rebecca Morrison, then remembered the dark glares he’d received from Germaine Wagner the last few times he’d turned up during working hours. Better to come back at closing time, when Germaine might not approve but at least would have no reason to object if Rebecca chose to let him walk her home.

Walk her home?
He sounded like a high school kid. Obviously, the spring fever was back!

As he started up North Hill, Oliver found himself eyeing a few crocuses he might just steal for Rebecca later on in the afternoon. But then, when he came to the gates of the Asylum and stopped to look directly at the building, his good mood vanished.

Just the idea of entering the deserted building was enough to make his stomach cramp, and it wasn’t until he had turned away from the Asylum, walked back down
the hill and entered his own house that the knot of pain in his belly began to ease. But his restlessness would not be tamed. He paced the living room, wandered into the kitchen, then back, feeling as though he needed to look for something—something that eluded him.

Almost unconsciously, his eyes moved to the ceiling.

Upstairs?

What was there to search for upstairs? There were only the three bedrooms and the bathroom. Nothing unusual to be discovered there.

Still, he found himself mounting the stairs, entering each room and pulling open the doors of the closets in all three bedrooms, looking for … what?

He’d been through these closets dozens of times—maybe hundreds—and knew exactly what was in each of them. Old clothes he hadn’t wanted to throw away, boxes of Christmas decorations, his luggage. But nothing from the Asylum.

Still, he searched each one a second time, then started back toward the top of the stairs, where he paused and found himself looking up once more.

The attic?

He couldn’t remember the last time he’d been up there. But as he regarded the old-fashioned, spring-loaded, pull-down ladder, it occurred to him that if there really were any old records around, they might just be up in the attic. Even if his own father hadn’t stored anything up there, some of the earlier superintendents might have.

Getting the step stool from the kitchen, he reached up and jerked the ladder down. The motion sent a shiver through his spine as the old springs squealed and groaned. With a flashlight in hand, he mounted the stairs, opened the trapdoor that was the attic’s only access, and climbed up into the space beneath the house’s steeply pitched roof.

An old-fashioned push-button light switch was mounted on a support post. When he pressed it, a bare bulb sputtered on, filling the area with a yellowish glow.

No more than five feet away was an oak filing cabinet and two old wooden fruit crates, faded, curling labels barely clinging to their sides. Opening the top drawer of the filing cabinet, he found a stack of leather-bound ledgers, each of them containing a full year of the Asylum’s bookkeeping, the entries noted in the kind of precise accountant’s handwriting that has all but disappeared since the advent of the computer.

The second drawer contained more of the same, and so did the fourth. The third drawer, either jammed or locked, wouldn’t budge.

He shifted his attention to the crates, testing the top of the first one. Free of nails, its surface was slightly warped and took no effort at all to lift away.

Inside the box were two stacks of file folders.

And something else.

Neatly folded on top of one of the stacks was a piece of cloth. Picking it up, Oliver gingerly unfolded it, then took it over to hold it under the light.

It was a handkerchief made of linen, and though he wasn’t an expert, it looked as though the lace around its edges was handmade. In addition to the delicate lace edging, a pattern of flowers in colors so pale he could hardly discern them had been embroidered into the material, forming an intricate wreath all around the handkerchief’s perimeter and spreading out to encircle an ornate symbol that had been worked into one corner. For a moment Oliver wasn’t sure what the symbol was, but then, when he turned the handkerchief over and discovered that the other side was as flawlessly embroidered as the first, he understood.

The symbol was actually two R’s worked carefully back to back, so that each side of the monogrammed handkerchief would be exactly the same.

No right side.

No wrong side.

Refolding the handkerchief, he put it back into the
crate, then hefted the wooden box itself and carefully inched his way down the ladder. After going back for the second crate, he closed the trapdoor, folded the ladder back up against the ceiling, then took the boxes into one of the spare bedrooms and began unpacking their contents onto the bed. Just as he’d hoped, they turned out to be old patient files.

For the rest of the afternoon, his fascination growing as he read, Oliver pored over the old files, marveling not only at the strange diagnoses that had been made in the early days of the Asylum but at the cruel treatments that were prescribed.

Bed restraints had been commonplace.

Straitjackets had been ordinary.

Even detailed accounts of ice-water baths and prefrontal lobotomies were recorded with no more emotion than might have been used in lab reports describing the dissection of an insect or the interaction between two chemicals.

His revulsion growing with every page he read, Oliver slowly began to understand his horror of the Asylum, even after all the years that had gone by since it was closed down.

A torture chamber.

That was what it had been. A place of unspeakable sadness and pain.

Even now he could imagine the screams that must have echoed inside the building.

Screams, he suddenly realized, that he surely would have heard when he was a child, living here, in the superintendent’s cottage, no more than fifty yards away. Yet he had no memory of them.

But shouldn’t he have heard the agonized howls that would have clawed through his open windows on summer nights, ripping into his dreams, turning them into nightmares?

The answer came to him as quickly as had the question: the records he had found were far older than he, Oliver realized, and when his father had taken over the Asylum, the inhumanity must have ended.

The solution brought no satisfaction, however. For if the horrors that had taken place within the Asylum’s walls had truly ended when his father became superintendent, then why couldn’t he bring himself to go into the building?

Other memories! There must be other memories, too horrible for him to face!

Suddenly unwilling to delve any deeper into the files, Oliver replaced them carefully in the crate. As he did so, he spotted the handkerchief again and picked it up, marveling anew at the perfection of the work, and wondering who had sewn it. Most likely not a patient—such delicate work required skill and concentration hard to imagine in someone mentally disturbed.

Surely, he thought, it must have been made by one of the staff members, filling the endless empty hours of the night shifts.

He held its soft fabric in his fingers, and once more his eye fell on the double-sided R that had been worked so cleverly into one corner.