The Blackstone Chronicles (30 page)

“How’s she doing?” he asked, but even as he uttered the question, the expression on the doctor’s face told him all he needed to know.

“I don’t see how she can hold out much longer,” Margolis said. He looked carefully at Oliver. “What about you? How are you feeling? Any more of those headaches?”

Oliver shook his head.

“Well, there’s nothing in your CAT scan to worry about. I was going to call you later this morning. I had a friend up in Manchester take a look at your pictures, and he couldn’t find anything wrong. Says you’re perfectly normal.” The doctor forced a tired smile. “ ’Course, he doesn’t know you as well as I do, does he?”

Before Oliver could reply to the weak joke, an alarm sounded from beyond the double doors and Margolis hurried out. Oliver sank back onto the sagging Naugahyde sofa, then restlessly stood up and walked outside. Now, as he turned to go back into the waiting room, he saw Rebecca Morrison emerging through the double doors. Her eyes were red, and tears stained her cheeks. Hurrying back into the waiting room, he put his arms around her and held her close. “It’s over?” he asked quietly, though he already knew the answer. He felt her nod, then she pulled back a little and looked up into his face.

“It was so strange,” she said. “First she was breathing,
and I thought she was going to be all right, and then she wasn’t. She just stopped breathing, Oliver. Why do things like that happen?”

“I don’t know,” Oliver said quietly. “It was just a terrible accident.” He gently smoothed a lock of hair back from Rebecca’s forehead, then brushed a tear from her cheek. “Sometimes things happen—” he began. Martha Ward’s voice interrupted him.

“Things do not just happen,” she declared. “There is such a thing as divine retribution, and it has been visited upon Andrea. God’s will has been done. Rebecca, it is time for us to go home.”

Oliver felt Rebecca freeze in his arms, then pull away from him.

“Yes, Aunt Martha,” she said softly. “I’m sure Oliver will take us.”

Nodding curtly to Oliver, Martha said, “You may take us home,” then turned and without looking back strode out into the morning sun.

Rebecca was about to follow her, but Oliver held her back.

“What’s going on?” he asked. “Does she even realize what’s happened?”

Rebecca nodded. “She thinks Andrea was punished for getting an abortion. But I don’t think God would do something like that, do you?”

Oliver shook his head. “And I don’t think you ought to be living with her anymore, either. Isn’t there some other place you can go? You could come and stay with me. I’ll—”

“It’s all right, Oliver,” Rebecca said. “I can’t leave Aunt Martha now. She doesn’t have anyone else, and she’s been so good to me for so long.”

“But—”

“Please, Oliver? Just take us home?”

Five minutes later Oliver pulled into the driveway of Martha Ward’s house. Amazingly, the only outward
signs of the fire from this side of the house were the damage to the lawn and shrubbery, which had been inflicted by the hoses the firemen dragged from the trucks into the house and up to the second floor.

“You’re sure you want to do this?” Oliver asked once again. “Even if the house is livable, it’s going to smell—”

But Martha Ward was already out of the car and striding toward her house. As she reached the steps to the porch she turned back. “Come, Rebecca,” she commanded.

Like a dog, Oliver thought angrily. She treats her like a dog.

But before he could say anything, Rebecca too had slipped out of the car, and a moment later both Martha and Rebecca disappeared inside.

Oliver knew he’d made a mistake as soon as he opened the door of the Red Hen. But he’d been so intent on satisfying the hunger in his stomach that he’d momentarily forgotten the equally strong hunger of the regular morning crowd who came to the diner to begin their day—not a hunger for the crullers and coffee for which the diner was famous, but a hunger for information.

“Information” was what they called it, since they were men. Their wives—far more accurately—would have called it “gossip.”

Either way, almost every voice in the Red Hen fell silent as Oliver entered, and nearly every eye shifted to fix expectantly on him. After scanning the faces, he chose the table where Ed Becker and Bill McGuire were involved in a conversation that was suspended only long enough to beckon him over. As Oliver slid into the booth next to the attorney, Bill McGuire looked at him questioningly.

“Andrea Ward died about half an hour ago.” he told them in answer to Bill’s unspoken question.

The contractor winced. “What the hell’s going on around here?” he asked.

Ed Becker signaled to the waitress for more coffee. “Nothing’s going on,” he said, and his tone was enough to tell Oliver that last night’s fire wasn’t all they’d been talking about.

McGuire shook his head dolefully as the waitress refilled his cup. “How can you say that?”

“Because it’s true,” the lawyer replied, then turned to Oliver. “Bill’s starting to sound like he thinks there’s some kind of curse on the town or something.”

“I didn’t say that,” McGuire interjected a little too quickly.

“All right, maybe you didn’t say it in those exact words,” Becker conceded. “But when you start trying to connect a bunch of things that can’t be connected, isn’t some kind of curse what you’re talking about?”

McGuire shook his head doggedly. “All I’m saying is that it’s getting really weird around here. First the bank gets in trouble and Jules goes nuts and kills himself, and now Andrea Ward comes home after years away and burns to death the next day.”

Though no one mentioned what had happened to Elizabeth McGuire, they didn’t need to. Her suicide, so shortly preceding Jules Hartwick’s, still hung over Bill like a specter, and though he hadn’t spoken her name, he didn’t have to.

“The fire was an accident, pure and simple,” Oliver told the other two men. But after he’d filled them in on everything he’d learned over the past few hours, Bill McGuire was still shaking his head doubtfully.

“A few months ago I might have believed it wasn’t anything more than Andrea falling asleep with a cigarette, but now …” His voice trailed off into a long sigh.

“Maybe it wasn’t an accident,” Ed Becker suggested. “Maybe Martha torched her.”

“Torched
her?” Oliver echoed, recoiling from the word. “Jesus, Ed, maybe you did criminal law too long. Why on earth would Martha Ward want to kill her own daughter?”

“Well, you said yourself she didn’t seem to be too sorry Andrea had died. Didn’t you say something about it being God’s will?”

“ ‘Divine retribution,’ was the way she put it,” Oliver corrected him. “Martha’s a religious fanatic. You know she sees the hand of God in practically everything.”

“Sometimes people like that decide they
are
the hand of God,” Becker said pointedly.

“Come on, Ed,” Oliver said, lowering his voice and glancing around at the other patrons in the diner. “You know how gossip spreads around here. If anybody hears you, it’ll be all over town by this afternoon.”

“Let it!” Ed Becker said, leaning back and smiling mischievously. “Personally, I never could stand Martha Ward. Even when I was a kid, I always thought she wasn’t just holier-than-thou. She was just plain mean. What I can’t figure out is why Andrea came back at all.”

“No place else to go, according to Rebecca,” Oliver replied. He was about to tell them about the abortion Andrea had had yesterday, but stopped himself as he remembered that it was the miscarriage Bill’s wife, Elizabeth, had suffered that led to her suicide, just days after losing their baby son. “I, on the other hand,
do
have places to go,” he announced, sliding out of the booth. “And so does Bill, unless he’s planning to drag the remodeling of my office out until all the problems at the bank are cleared up.”

McGuire smiled for the first time that morning. “Finally figured it out, huh? Well, just don’t tell your uncle, okay?”

Oliver eyed the contractor sardonically. “You think he
hasn’t figured it out too? Why do you think he keeps coming up with new ideas every couple of weeks? Come on. Let’s go figure out a whole new idea about what my office is going to look like, just on the off chance that Melissa Holloway gets the bank straightened out and you can finally get to work on the Center. And let’s not talk about curses or dire plots, all right? I’m a journalist, not a fiction writer.”

The two men hadn’t been gone more than a minute before the Red Hen was once again buzzing with low voices, each of them passing on whatever scrap of Oliver’s conversation they’d overheard.

Finally, Leonard Wilkins spoke. A crusty seventy, he had run the drive-in theater for thirty years before it closed and the grounds were given over to the flea market.

“You ask me,” he said, “I think we should be keeping an eye on Oliver Metcalf.”

“Come on,” someone else said. “Oliver’s solid as a rock.”

“Maybe so,” Wilkins replied. “But we still don’t know just what it was that happened to his sister back when they were kids. Lately, since the trouble around here started, it seems to me that boy’s been acting strange. And I heard from my Trudy that he was talking to Phil Margolis about headaches the other day. Bad headaches.”

After only the shortest of pauses, the buzz in the diner resumed.

But now they were no longer talking about the fire that had killed Andrea Ward.

Now they were talking about Oliver Metcalf.

I
t wasn’t just the look of the room, though that was bad enough. The bed—the one Rebecca had slept in nearly every night of the last twelve years—was a sodden, blackened ruin. Even from the doorway—Rebecca hadn’t yet found the courage to actually go into the room—she could see that the fire must have started in the bed and spread from there. She shuddered as she imagined Andrea falling asleep, a cigarette between her fingers. The cigarette must have dropped onto the coverlet, slowly burned its way through the blankets, sheets, and pad, and eventually burrowed into the mattress itself.

But why hadn’t Andrea awakened? Wouldn’t she have begun choking on the smoke filling the room? Or had she just gone from sleep directly into unconsciousness, utterly oblivious to what was happening to her? She must have, or surely she would have awakened as the fire had spread out from the bed, crawling across the carpet, then climbing up the curtains around the windows. The paint on the window frames was badly charred, and the wallpaper hung in scorched shreds. Everything in the room would have to go, and the paper and paint peeled down to the bare wood.

It was the smell that truly made Rebecca shiver. The terrible smell that was nothing like the friendly odor of a fire burning on a hearth. This was an odor she would never forget. From the moment she and her aunt had come back into the house, it filled her nostrils, every
breath bringing back the memory of awakening in the middle of the night and realizing that the house was on fire.

Though Martha Ward objected, Rebecca had gone through every room of the house save the chapel, opening the windows as wide as she could and propping open all the doors to prevent any of them from blowing shut and cutting off the breeze. The cold air was eliminating at least the worst of the acrid smell. She’d stripped her bed, and her aunt’s too, and put the linens into the big washing machine down in the basement, but even as she began the first batch of laundry, she’d known that it was going to be endless. Every piece of clothing would have to be washed, every stick of furniture cleaned. Every rug would have to be taken to the cleaners. Even then, she was certain the smell would remain, which meant that every time she entered the house, the whole terrifying scene from last night would come back to her like a nightmare from which she would never escape.

She was still standing at the door to Andrea’s room, willing herself to go in, when she heard her aunt calling to her from downstairs: “Rebecca? Rebecca! This house won’t get clean by itself.”

Rebecca was about to turn away from the door to Andrea’s room when something caught her eye.

Something that glittered in odd contrast to the charred blackness of the room.

Something that was almost hidden beneath the bed.

Even as she went into the room to pick the object up, she knew what it was.

The cigarette lighter she’d given Andrea the day before yesterday, in the shape of a dragon’s head.

Wiping away the worst of the soot, she turned the shining object over in her hands. The dragon’s red eyes glared up at her, and though there were still some smudges of soot on the creature’s golden scales, it seemed undamaged by the fire.

When she pressed the trigger in its neck, a tongue of flame immediately appeared.

“Rebecca? Rebecca! I am waiting for you!”

Her aunt’s commanding voice startled her, and Rebecca scurried out of the ruined room and down the stairs. Martha was waiting in the foyer, a bucket of soapy water at her feet. She handed Rebecca a rag. “Start here. I shall start in the kitchen.”

Rebecca glanced at the soot-stained paper on the walls. “It will ruin the paper, Aunt Martha.”