The Blackstone Chronicles (5 page)

“I’m hearing rumors that there might be a problem with Blackstone Center,” she said in the professional whisper with which she could silence rowdy high school students from seventy feet away.

Oliver’s mind went over the possibilities. He supposed that Germaine had seen him go into the bank with Bill McGuire and immediately assumed the worst. The assumption
would have been typical of her. Or someone else had seen them and told Germaine.

More likely, Germaine was on a fishing expedition, looking for a juicy tidbit to take home to her mother. Old Clara Wagner, wheelchair bound, hadn’t been out of the house in at least a decade, but she loved a good piece of gossip even more than Germaine.

To say nothing at all to Germaine was tantamount to guaranteeing that whatever rumor she passed on would henceforth have his name attached to it (“I asked Oliver Metcalf point-blank, and he did
not
deny it!”), so he decided the best thing to do would be to send her off in the wrong direction. “Well, I know Bill’s been pretty busy with some other projects,” Oliver said. “I suspect that once he gets them wound up, he’ll be pitching into the Asylum full-tilt.”

Germaine pursed her lips suspiciously. “It seems to me that leaving equipment idle up there is something Bill McGuire wouldn’t do,” she replied, her sharp eyes boring into him. “He’s never been one to waste a dime, Oliver.”

“Well, I’m sure he knows what he’s doing,” Oliver said. Then, before the librarian’s cross-examination could continue, he rushed on. “Actually, the Center project is the reason I came by. I’m thinking of running a series on the history of the building.”

The librarian fixed on him darkly. “I would have thought you’d have all the material you need right in your own house,” she observed, “given who your father was.”

Suddenly, Oliver felt like a little boy who’d come to school without his homework. “I’m afraid my father didn’t keep much in the way of memorabilia,” he said.

The librarian’s eyes narrowed slightly, and her already narrow nostrils took on a pinched look. “No, I don’t suppose he would have, would he?” There was a coldness in her tone that made Oliver flinch, but he tried to pretend that neither the look nor the words affected him.

Just as he’d tried all his life to pretend that looks and words such as Germaine Wagner’s had no effect on him.

“It’s only gossip, Oliver,” his uncle had told him over and over again. “They have no more idea of what really happened than anyone else. The best thing to do is simply ignore them. Sooner or later they’ll find other things to talk about.” His uncle had been right. As the years had gone by, fewer and fewer people gave him that curious look, or tried to ask him thinly veiled questions about what had
really
happened to his sister all those years ago. But of course Oliver had never known any more about it than anyone else. By the time he’d come home from college and gone to work for the paper, it had all but been forgotten.

Except that every now and then, with people like Germaine Wagner, he still found that a look could slice open old wounds, a tone of voice could sting. But there was nothing he could do about it; like Oliver himself, the Germaines of this world were going to have to go to their graves still not knowing the truth.

“I really don’t remember that much about my father,” he said carefully now. “Which, I suppose, is part of why I’m here. I thought that maybe now that the Asylum’s finally going to be put to a good use, it might be time for me to write up a history of how it came to be here in the first place.”

“Caring for the mentally ill was a perfectly good use for the building,” Germaine replied. “My mother was very proud of her work there.”

“As she should have been,” Oliver quickly assured her. “But it’s been so long since it was closed that I really don’t know much about it myself. And I suspect that whatever historical material still exists is upstairs in the attic here. I thought I’d see what I could find.”

He waited as the librarian pondered his request. Germaine Wagner, over the years, had come to think of the contents of the library as her personal property, and tended
to consider so much as a one-day-overdue book as a personal affront. As to letting someone paw through the boxes and boxes of old documents, diaries, and memoirs that had migrated into the library over the course of the eight decades since it had been built, Oliver suspected that she would take his request as an invasion of her privacy.

“Well, I don’t suppose there’s any real reason why you shouldn’t be able to see what’s there,” Germaine finally said in a sorrowful tone as if she was already regretting having to make the admission. “I suppose I could have Rebecca bring down whatever we have.”

As if the librarian’s mere mention of her name was enough to summon her, a girl appeared from the back room.

Except that she wasn’t a girl; not really. Rebecca Morrison was in her late twenties, with a heart-shaped face that radiated a sweet innocence, framed by soft chestnut hair that fell in waves from a part in the center. Her eyes, slightly tilted, were a deep brown, and utterly guileless.

Oliver had known her since she was a child, and when he’d had to write the obituary after the automobile accident that left sixteen-year-old Rebecca an orphan, tears had streamed down his face. For weeks after the fatal car crash, Rebecca hovered between life and death. Though there were many people in Blackstone who had fallen into the habit of referring to her as “Poor Rebecca,” Oliver was not among them. It had taken months for the girl to recover from her injuries, and while it was true that when she emerged from the hospital her smile was sad and her mind was slower, to Oliver the sweetness that imbued Rebecca’s personality more than made up for the slight intellectual damage she had suffered in the accident.

Now, as she smiled at him, he felt the familiar sense of comfort her presence always gave him.

“Oliver wants to see if there is any information about the Blackstone Asylum in the attic,” Germaine Wagner
briskly explained. “I told him I wasn’t certain, but that perhaps you could look.”

“Oh, there’s a whole box of things,” Rebecca said, and Oliver was sure he saw a flash of disapproval in the librarian’s eyes. “I’ll bring it down right away.”

“I’ll help you,” Oliver immediately volunteered.

“You don’t have to,” Rebecca protested. “I can do it.”

“But I want to,” Oliver insisted.

As he followed Rebecca to the stairs leading up to the mezzanine and the attic beyond, he felt the librarian’s eyes following him, and had to resist the urge to turn around and glare at her. After all, he thought, most of her problem undoubtedly stemmed from the simple fact that in her whole life, no man had probably ever followed her up the stairs.

Ten minutes later a large dusty box filled with file folders, photo albums, letters, and diaries was sitting on one of the immense oak tables that were lined up in two precise rows in the front of the library, close by the windows. Oliver settled onto one of the hard oak chairs, reached into the box, and pulled out a photo album. Setting it on the table in front of him, he opened it at random.

And found himself staring at a picture of his father.

The photograph had been taken years ago, long before Oliver had been born. In it, Malcolm Metcalf stood in front of the doors of the Asylum, his arms folded across his chest, scowling straight into the camera almost as if he were challenging it.

Challenging it to what? Oliver wondered.

And yet, as he stared at the black-and-white photograph, he felt a shudder take form inside him. As though it were Oliver himself who had brought forth Malcolm Metcalf’s piercing look of disapproval.

But, of course, it was the unseen photographer upon whom his father had fixed that look; he had not wanted the camera any closer to the Asylum than it already was.

In the photograph, Malcolm Metcalf was guarding the doors of his Asylum against the prying eye of the camera.

Oliver flipped the pages quickly, as if to escape his father’s stern stare, when suddenly an image seemed to leap forth from the pages of the book.

Blinking, and shaking his head, Oliver quickly flipped back through the pages, searching for the picture.

Only there was no such picture in the book.

A
s he had often done before, Bill McGuire paused on the sidewalk in front of his house for no better reason than to gaze in satisfaction upon the structure in which he’d spent almost all his life. The house was a Victorian—the only one on this particular block of Amherst Street—and though Bill was perfectly well aware of the current fashion of turning houses such as his into pink, purple, or lavender Painted Ladies, neither he nor Elizabeth had ever been tempted to coat the old house with half a dozen colors of paint. Instead, they had faithfully maintained the earthy tones—mustards, tans, greens, and maroons—of the period, and the elaborate white trim, meant by the original builders to resemble lace that gave the house a feeling of lightness, despite its mass.

The house was one of only six on the block, and all of them had been as well taken care of as the McGuires’ Amherst Street, which sloped gently up the hill, eventually turning to the left, then back to the right, and finally ending at the gates of the old Asylum, could easily have been set aside as a sort of living museum of architecture. There was a large half-timbered Tudor on one side of the McGuires’, and a good example of Federal on the other. On the opposite side of the street were two houses that had been built early in the Craftsman era, separated by a large saltbox that, to Bill at least, appeared slightly embarrassed by the Victorian effusiveness of its across-the-street neighbor. Still, all six houses sat on spacious
enough grounds and were surrounded by so many trees and shrubs that the block was unified by its parklike look, if not its architecture.

Today, though, as he gazed up at his house, with its profusion of steeply pitched roofs and dormer windows, Bill had a strange sense that something was not right. He searched the structure for some clue to his uneasiness, but could see nothing wrong. The paint wasn’t peeling, nor were any shingles missing. He quickly scanned the ornate trim work that he’d always taken special pride in keeping in perfect repair, but every bit of it looked exactly as it should. Not a spindle missing, nor a lath either split or broken. Telling himself his discomfort was nothing more than his own bad mood after the meeting at the bank, Bill strode up the brick pathway, mounted the steps that led to the high front porch, and went inside.

The sense that something was wrong grew stronger.

“Elizabeth?” he called out. “Megan? Anybody home?” For a moment he heard nothing at all, then the door leading to the butler’s pantry at the far end of the dining room opened and he saw Mrs. Goodrich’s stooped form shuffling toward him.

“They’re both upstairs,” the old woman said. “You might want to go up and talk to the missus. I think she might be a little upset. And I’m fixing some lunch for the whole family.” The old woman, who had been with Elizabeth since she was a child in Port Arbello, gazed at him worriedly. “You’ll be here, won’t you?”

“I’ll be here, Mrs. Goodrich,” he assured her. As the housekeeper made her slow way back to the kitchen, Bill started up the stairs. Before he was even halfway to the second-floor landing, Megan appeared, gazing down at him with dark, uncertain eyes.

“Why can’t I have my dolly?” she demanded. “Why won’t Mommy give her to me?”

“Dolly?” Bill repeated. “What dolly are you talking about?”

“The one someone sent me,” Megan said. Her eyes narrowed slightly. “Mommy won’t let me have her.”

At that moment Elizabeth, still dressed in the nightgown and robe she’d been wearing when Bill left the house three hours earlier, appeared behind their daughter, smiling wanly. “Honey, it’s not that I won’t let you have the doll. It’s just that we don’t know who it’s for.”

“Would one of you mind enlightening me about what’s going on?” Bill asked as he came to the top of the stairs. He knelt down to give Megan a kiss, then stood and slid his arm around his wife. The smile his kiss had put on Megan’s face disappeared.

“It’s for me!” she declared. “When you see it, you’ll know.”

“Come on,” Elizabeth said. “It’s in our room. I’ll show it to you.”

With Megan reaching up to put her hand in his, Bill followed his wife into the big master bedroom. On the old chaise longue, once his mother’s favorite place to sit and read, was the box the mailman had delivered this morning. Reaching into it, Elizabeth lifted out the doll, automatically cradling it in her arms as if it were a baby. “It’s really very beautiful,” she said as Bill moved closer to her. “I think its face must be hand-painted, and the clothes look like they were handmade too.”

Bill looked down into the doll’s face, which had been painted so perfectly that for the briefest of moments he almost had the feeling the doll was looking back up at him. “Who on earth sent it?”