The Blackstone Chronicles (55 page)

But it was more than that, Oliver suspected. Bonnie, like so many other people in town, had become convinced that somehow, in some way she didn’t understand, an evil force had invaded Blackstone.

There was that word again.
Evil
The same word that had popped into his mind when he’d encountered Megan McGuire a few moments ago. But the word hadn’t simply come into Oliver’s mind this time. It was the word that Bonnie Becker herself had used to describe the events that had resulted in her husband’s paralysis, and almost killed her and her daughter as well.

It wasn’t just the house Bonnie Becker wasn’t coming back to.

It was the town too.

“My family is in Boston and all my friends are here,” she’d said. “I don’t have any reason to go back to Blackstone.” She’d hesitated, but then finished the thought. “And frankly, I don’t understand why anyone would stay there, after everything that’s happened.” Then she had whispered the word once more. “Evil. Something evil is going on there.”

Now, in the warmth of the April morning, Oliver Metcalf
shivered slightly, as if a chilly presence had touched him. Of course, it couldn’t possibly be true, but on the other hand …

He found himself counting the tragedies that had befallen his friends:

The suicide of Jules Hartwick, which he’d witnessed himself.

The burning of Martha Ward’s house, in which Martha had perished and Rebecca had nearly been killed.

And the horror perpetrated in Germaine Wagner’s house—Germaine’s body crushed beneath the elevator, her elderly wheelchair-bound mother trapped inside the cage and felled by a massive stroke—the night Rebecca had vanished.

Oliver knew that it wasn’t just Bonnie Becker who was whispering about a curse that had befallen Blackstone. The rumors were rampaging through the town like a disease, and everywhere he went, he could feel everyone watching everyone else, as if searching for some sign—some mark—that would tell them who might be next.

There were explanations—reasonable explanations—for everything that had happened in Blackstone. There had to be. And he would find them.

But of one thing he was certain.

There was no evil, no curse. Things like that simply didn’t exist.

And yet, as he continued down the hill into the village and started across the square toward the
Chronicle
office, he found himself turning to gaze back at the Asylum, looming above the town as it had for nearly a century. And he found himself thinking once more about the outrages that he now knew had been practiced within its
walls.
That
was evil—evil that cloaked itself in the guise of medical science.

If such an evil could prevail, an evil that could turn the Hippocratic oath to acts of unspeakable horror, then perhaps evil
did
exist and could inhabit other forms, take on other unknowable black shapes.

Turning away from the Asylum’s brooding stare just as he’d turned away from Megan McGuire’s gaze a few minutes ago, Oliver tried to put the unsettling idea out of his mind.

He couldn’t.

The seed was planted. Already, it was starting to grow.

B
y the time Harvey Connally had entered his ninth decade, he’d discovered two truths: the first was that what most people thought of as the wisdom that comes with age was in reality little more than the realization that most things, if left to their own devices, will take care of themselves. That first truth had led directly to the second one: that very little ever needed to be done right away, and that it was therefore always best to think things over carefully before taking any action. Thus, when he found the package sitting on his front porch that morning, resting next to his copy of the
Manchester Guardian—
which, though in his opinion not nearly as good a paper as his nephew’s
Blackstone Chronicle
, at least had the virtue of coming out on a daily basis—he chose to ignore the plainly wrapped box, at least for the moment. Retrieving the newspaper, he left the package on the porch while he went to the kitchen, fixed himself the first of the two cups of coffee he always drank in the morning—the stingy ration of caffeine that was all that Phil Margolis approved—and perused the
Guardian
. He avoided the editorial page since editorials had the habit of arousing enough outrage in him to bring on a stroke. With his second cup of coffee, though, he folded the
paper and finally allowed his attention to turn to the package that still lay on his front porch. He’d noted that it bore no stamps, and no address, so he knew it must have been delivered sometime during the night.

Harvey Connally did not approve of people skulking about in the dark, leaving anonymous packages on other people’s front porches. Yet the moment he’d seen the parcel, he’d immediately thought of Rebecca Morrison’s claim that she’d seen someone in Jules Hartwick’s driveway the night before he killed himself. He recalled the package that had been delivered to the McGuires’ a few days before Elizabeth died. “Gifts” that Edna Burnham had declared to be the harbingers of evil.

Harvey Connally had no more patience with harbingers of evil than he had with skulkers in the night.

Whatever had happened to all those people, he was certain, had more to do with their own failings than with evil being visited upon them from some unknown source.

And yet …

And yet
led Harvey Connally to an unaccustomed third cup of coffee. As he savored every forbidden sip of it, he found himself pondering the idea of Divine Retribution. It was a concept in which Harvey, at least until recently, had put no faith whatsoever. However, over the past few weeks, as he’d watched tragedy strike one after another of Blackstone’s oldest families, he’d begun to wonder.

Every family to whom one of the mysterious “gifts” had been delivered had some connection to the Asylum, and each of the tragedies had contained elements that eerily paralleled events that had occurred in Blackstone’s past. Harvey had first noted such an uncanny parallel when Jules Hartwick had disemboweled himself on the steps of the Asylum. Though everyone had agreed that it
was the investigation of the bank by the Federal Reserve that triggered Jules’s breakdown and suicide, Harvey had instead focused on the insane jealousy Jules had exhibited toward his wife that day.

The same raging jealousy, in fact, that Harvey remembered Jules’s father exhibiting half a century ago when Hartwick had become convinced that his wife was having an affair with Malcolm Metcalf. But the elder Hartwick hadn’t killed himself. Instead he had merely warned his wife that if the affair continued, he would divorce her, and make the reason for the divorce public. He had promptly banished the portrait of Louisa in her Gray Lady apron—which Harvey now suspected she intended as a gift to her lover—to the attic. And that had been that. Louisa had never again gone anywhere near the Asylum. When Malcolm Metcalf died, the Hartwicks had been conspicuous by their absence from his burial.

After making that connection, Harvey had begun to listen carefully to everything that had been said about the recent deaths in Blackstone. One by one, he began putting the pieces together. He remembered the child to whom Bill McGuire’s great-aunt Laurette had given birth, a child who had disappeared into the Asylum one day, never to be seen again. It hadn’t been long before Laurette, despondent at the loss of her child, had drowned while vacationing at Cape Cod. Her death had of course been attributed to an accident, but Harvey had long ago concluded that even if Laurette hadn’t planned to die, neither had she done anything to save herself. Elizabeth McGuire’s loss of her baby son and subsequent fatal fall seemed to Harvey a circumstance far too eerily similar to be merely coincidental.

As the months went by, each new tragedy stirred a
memory within Harvey Connally. At last, he’d become convinced that Blackstone’s misfortunes were, indeed, connected to the Asylum. It was as if the sins of the fathers were being visited on the sons; as if the hand of God was finally reaching out to strike down the descendants of those whose transgressions had been hidden away within the Asylum’s cold stone rooms.

Divine Retribution.

Except that Harvey Connally’s mind, trained in the rigors of rationalist thought, wouldn’t accept the idea of Divine Retribution. While the rest of Blackstone buzzed with speculation and gossip, Harvey Connally kept his own counsel, listening, always listening, but contributing nothing to the gushing torrent of rumor that flooded the town. Instead he quietly processed each item of news or speculation through his own mind, analyzing every theory he heard, discarding the most outlandish ideas, and filing away the bits and pieces that he couldn’t dismiss, as if they were the jagged parts of a complicated jigsaw puzzle and the picture would come clear once he had all the pieces gathered and sorted.

But it had not come clear. For no matter how he tried to fit the pieces together, the only shape that ever emerged, superimposed upon Harvey’s mental image of Blackstone’s historical landscape, was a fuzzy vision of Malcolm Metcalf, a man who had been dead for nearly half of Harvey Connally’s life.

But Harvey did not believe in ghosts any more than he believed in Divine Retribution.

When he finished the third cup of coffee, he slowly returned to the front porch, stooped stiffly down, and picked up the package. Holding the parcel carefully, he took it to his study, set it on his desk, and examined it
from every angle. Finding no clue as to its origin, nor anything that he would consider a distinguishing mark, he momentarily entertained the idea of calling young Steven Driver, but dismissed the thought almost immediately: there was far too great a possibility that the sheriff’s deputy would, on the pretext of protecting him, confiscate the contents. That issue decided, Harvey Connally carefully opened the package, doing as little damage to the paper in which it was wrapped as he could. As the wrapping fell away, the old man found himself gazing at an object of a kind he hadn’t seen in years.

He recognized it instantly. It was an old-fashioned razor case, very much like the one his father had owned when Harvey was a boy. Instinctively, he reached out to caress the box, just as he had when he was a small boy and his father had told him he could touch the case, but never open it. Now, as the old man’s fingers traced the pattern of ivory and ebony that had been inlaid into the box’s mahogany lid, a profusion of memories was unleashed in his mind. He saw himself back in the bathroom of the house on Amherst Street where he’d grown up, his mother having refused to live in the enormous mansion on top of North Hill that his father had constructed for his first wife. Even seventy-five years later, he could smell the pungent odor of his father’s shaving soap; feel the steam rising from the washbasin as his father enjoyed his morning shaving ritual.

Could this actually
be
his father’s case?

But no. His father’s razor case had been adorned with a gold medallion set into the center of the lid, a medallion that was engraved with the same two ornately intertwined C’s with which everything Charles Connally owned had been monogrammed.

On this case there was only a simple ivory medallion.

Yet he was certain he’d seen it before.

Lifting the lid to expose a blue velvet lining, he gazed for a moment at the tortoiseshell handle of the straight razor that lay within, then picked the instrument up and opened its blade.

For just a second he didn’t understand what the brown stains on the gleaming metal were. But then, as he saw the two M’s etched into the tortoiseshell of the handle, he knew, in a rush of understanding that came at him like a gale force wind, exactly where he’d seen this case before.

It had belonged to his brother-in-law, Malcolm Metcalf. It had been a wedding gift from Harvey’s sister, Olivia. Harvey himself had helped Olivia select it for her fiancé.

As he stared at the brown stains on the razor’s blade, Harvey slowly understood their origin too.

Blood.

The blood of his niece, Mallory Metcalf?

Was it possible that after all these years, he was holding in his hands the long-missing instrument of Oliver’s sister’s death?

Why had it been delivered to him?

What was he being told?

And by whom?

For a long time Harvey Connally sat at his desk, the razor clasped in his suddenly palsied fingers. Over and over again he reviewed the pieces of the puzzle that he had gathered in his mind during the past weeks. Over and over again, the only face that emerged from the mists of the past was that of Malcolm Metcalf.

But he knew that wasn’t quite true, for on the day that
Mallory had died—on the day that the razor Harvey was now holding had slashed across her throat and ended her life—there had been another person present.

A person for whom this instrument—this gift from the past—might hold far more meaning than it did even for him.

Laying the razor gently back in its case and snapping shut the mahogany lid, Harvey Connally came to a decision.

And picked up the telephone.