The Blackstone Chronicles (56 page)

I
t was a day in mid-March—not the worst of weather, but far from the best. Though for the last few days it seemed as if the harsh winds of winter had finally died away, they reappeared this morning, whipping out of the northeast with a chill that threatened to freeze the buds on the still-bare trees before they had a chance to open. The few tiny crocuses that had dared to poke their heads up so early in the year cowered in the cold as though trying to retreat into the safety of the scarcely thawed earth. Harvey Connally was getting ready to drive up to Manchester for a board meeting—it seemed there were more board meetings to attend every month—though he was sorely tempted to plead illness, build a fire in his library, and curl up with his worn copy of
Billy Budd,
to Harvey’s mind a far superior work to the more celebrated but nearly unreadable
Moby-Dick.
Harvey Connally, however, was not the sort to follow the tide of popular opinion. He had been brought up with a sense of duty as solid as the granite beneath the soil of New Hampshire, and even as temptation whispered to him, he knew he would turn away from its siren call
.

Billy Budd
would simply have to wait, perhaps even until next winter
.

He was just about to leave the house when the extension telephone he’d had installed in the kitchen—a luxury to which he had quickly become accustomed—rang shrilly, with a tone that set off an alarm in Harvey’s mind. Though his keenly honed rationality told him it was impossible for that bell to have a different ring in an emergency than under normal circumstances, he nevertheless felt a faint foreboding as he picked the receiver off the hook and held it to his ear
.

“Harvey? Is that you?”

Harvey Connally recognized the voice coming through the line instantly, though it was far louder than usual, and quavering badly. As badly, in fact, as it had quavered the night four years ago when it informed him of the death of his sister
.

“I’m here, Malcolm,” he replied, nothing in his voice betraying the knot of apprehension that had already clutched his belly
.

“I need you, Harvey. I need you to come to my office right away.”

Harvey Connally did not ask why Malcolm Metcalf needed to see him at that very minute, for there were things—many things—one simply did not discuss on the telephone. His brother-in-law’s strained urgency told Harvey that this was one of those things. “I’ll be there in five minutes,” he said. Without another word, he pressed the telephone’s hook with his forefinger as he glanced at his watch. Dialing the operator, he asked for a number in Manchester, explained that he was unavoidably detained in Blackstone, and promised to make it to the board meeting if it proved at all possible. The man he was talking to—his roommate at Dartmouth twenty-odd years ago—asked no questions, knowing that only the most
dire emergency could prevent Harvey Connally from keeping a commitment. His calendar cleared, Harvey left his house through the kitchen door, got into the DeSoto he’d purchased three weeks before, backed out of his driveway, drove along Elm Street to Amherst, turned left, and started up the hill toward the Asylum
.

Harvey Connally hated the Asylum
.

He hated every part of it, and always had
.

Hated the building, although his own father had built it
.

Certainly, he hated what went on there, convinced in his own mind that there had to be better ways to treat the mentally ill than by the use of the therapies dispensed within the blackened stone walls of the building that had become his brother-in-law’s domain
.

Most of all, Harvey Connally hated his brother-in-law, though nothing in his demeanor, actions, or words had ever betrayed the true depth of his feelings. Indeed, the only words he had ever spoken that might have revealed how he felt were said to his sister shortly before she married Malcolm Metcalf

“I just want to be sure you’ve thought this through and are certain he’s the right man for you,” Harvey had told Olivia the morning after she and Malcolm announced their engagement. When Olivia assured him that she’d thought about it very carefully and was deeply in love with Malcolm Metcalf, Harvey considered the matter closed. He had not resigned his position on the Board of Trustees of the Asylum—an action that would have revealed his feelings—but as a trustee, he had removed himself from discussion of any matter relating directly to the director of the Asylum on the grounds of a conflict of interest between his roles as trustee and as the director’s brother-in-law. Even after Olivia’s death, Harvey had
kept his feelings to himself, and Malcolm Metcalf, despite his reputation not only as a psychiatrist but as a perceptive, sensitive, and intuitive human being, had no clue that Harvey Connally hated him
.

Which was exactly as Harvey Connally intended it
.

As he parked the DeSoto in front of the Asylum, Harvey gazed up at the hideous facade and tried yet again to understand his father’s motives in having built this immense edifice. Far larger than any other house ever built in Blackstone, the construction of this building had been an act of ostentation previously unknown in Blackstone, and totally out of character for Charles Connally. That he had turned it into a hospital for the mentally ill only a few years after having built it was just as out of character, and though Harvey Connally had spent a good deal of time searching for clues as to his father’s motivations for both those peculiar actions, he’d never found answers to any of his questions
.

Unconsciously taking a deep breath as he pulled the heavy front door open, Harvey stepped into the gloomy foyer, and wondered—not for the first time—how anyone could be expected to recover from an illness, mental or physical, within these cold, forbidding confines. He passed through the waiting room, and avoided looking directly at the group who huddled there—three shamefaced, obviously embarrassed people whose eyes were averted from his. The action told Harvey more than he wanted to know: they were either about to commit one of their relatives to his brother-in-law’s care, or already had
.

He made his way to Malcolm Metcalf’s office. The latest of the director’s secretaries—they never seemed to last more than a few months, and Harvey had long since
given up trying to remember their names—waved him directly into the room
.

His brother-in-law was pacing the floor, his face ashen
.

“What is it, Malcolm?” Harvey Connally asked. “What’s happened?”

Malcolm Metcalf’s mouth worked for a moment, and finally he managed to stammer a word or two. “Mallory …” he said. “Oliver—”

Harvey glanced around the room, but saw no sign of either his niece or his nephew. Then he saw Malcolm Metcalf’s eyes flick toward the bathroom that adjoined his office. Frowning, Harvey went to the door and pulled it open
.

Red
.

There was red everywhere
.

It was smeared on the white-painted walls, and on the tiled floor
.

There was a towel, also stained bright red, lying in a sodden heap next to the sink
.

A movement, so faint he almost missed it, caught Harvey’s attention, and he turned to see his four-year-old nephew cowering in a corner, his face as white as his father’s and streaked with tears, his arms wrapped around his knees
.

His thin form was naked, and his pale skin was also streaked with red
.

And then, for the first time, Harvey Metcalf saw the bathtub
.

Huge, sitting on four claw-foot legs, it was filled nearly to the rim, the water a ghastly pink
.

Submerged in the bloody water, also naked, facedown, was a body
.

Oliver’s twin sister, Mallory
.

His reason abandoning him, Harvey Connally followed the instincts that took him in two great strides from the door to the tub, where he leaned down and, plunging his arms into the gruesome liquid, lifted his niece from the water. Laying her on the floor, he turned her over to begin artificial respiration, then froze in horror
.

More than a wound, the slash extended from one ear almost to the other. The child’s throat had been laid open in a gash that had almost separated her head from her torso
.

Harvey Connally’s gorge rose in a hot flood that threatened to choke him as he stared at his dead niece, and a terrible vision flashed before him
.

It was a vision of Mallory—heart-faced like her mother, with soft blond curls framing her gentle features. But instead of laughing as she so often had, her mouth was open in a dreadful, silent scream, and her eyes were wide with terror
.

And from the dark, gaping wound in her throat, blood gushed in great crimson gouts as her heart quickly pumped her life away
.

Onto the walls
.

Onto the floor
.

Into the water in which she’d been bathing
.

The vision, mercifully, vanished as quickly as it had come, and Harvey Connally, knowing it was far too late to do anything for his niece, scooped his nephew from the corner. As Oliver sobbed and shook in his arms, Harvey returned to the office where his brother-in-law still stood bracing himself against the wall
.

“What happened?” Harvey demanded, his voice low, almost dangerous. “Tell me what happened.”

“Accident,” Malcolm gasped, barely able to speak. “It was—”

“An accident?” Harvey Connally repeated. “For God’s sake, Malcolm, how could you—”

Malcolm Metcalf’s mouth worked spasmodically for another moment before he was able to produce any other words. Then: “Oliver,” he whispered. “It wasn’t me, Harvey. It was Oliver.”

Harvey Connally’s eyes narrowed. “How?” he demanded. “Tell me how!”

Still holding his shivering, sobbing nephew, Harvey listened as Malcolm Metcalf brokenly described what he had seen
.

“They were in the tub. They loved to take baths together. And I was in here. And then I heard something. A sound—oh, God, Harvey, you can’t imagine it. It was like—I don’t know—a gurgling, like water going down a drain. I called to them, but—” He fell silent for a moment, then went on, “I went to the door to see what was going on. And I saw her! Oh, Lord, Harvey, I saw her die. She was in the water, and her neck was cut, and she was bleeding.” Malcolm Metcalf was sobbing now, choking on his words as he struggled to get them out. “She was hanging on to the edge of the tub. I tried to help her, tried to stop the bleeding with a towel. But it was too late. She was already dying, and …” His words trailed off
.

“And what about Oliver?” Harvey Connally asked. “Where was he?”

Malcolm Metcalf hesitated, as if wishing he didn’t have to speak the words. But finally, reluctantly, they
came: “Gone,” he whispered. “When I realized there wasn’t anything I could do for Mallory, I looked for Oliver. He—He’d gone down my private stairs, the ones that used to be the service stairs, and I found him.”

“Where was he?” Harvey asked. Almost protectively, he held his nephew tighter
.

There was a long silence, then Malcolm Metcalf finally spoke again. “Hiding,” he said so softly that Harvey could barely hear him. “He was in one of the treatment rooms downstairs.” He paused again, then: “My razor’s missing,” he went on, his voice dull. “I suppose Oliver must have been playing with it, and he and Mallory must have gotten into a tussle.” He shook his head, his eyes welling with tears. “It was an accident,” he said. “I can’t believe it could have been anything else! But Oliver was so scared, he ran away and hid the razor. You can’t blame him. He—He’s just a little boy, Harvey. It was an accident.”

For a long time Harvey Connally gazed into his brother-in-law’s eyes. Then he slowly lowered his nephew to the floor and knelt down so his face was level with the little boy’s. “Is that true, Oliver?” he asked. “Is what your father said true?”

Oliver Metcalf, his eyes huge, his face ashen, his whole body shaking with terror, gazed into his uncle’s face
.

O
liver pushed open the gate in front of his uncle’s house and brushed past the overgrown laurel hedge. Unless something was done this year, its branches would soon block the entrance. Not, Oliver was sure, that his uncle really cared if the gate became impassable. More and more, Harvey Connally had retreated from the life of the town, content, it seemed, to be by himself in the company of his memories. It seemed to Oliver that over the past few months, his uncle had withdrawn nearly completely from the community in which he’d lived his entire life. Oliver was uncertain as to whether Harvey Connally’s self-imposed isolation was a natural result of his advancing years or a reaction to the series of tragedies that had befallen the town. The truth, he thought as he climbed the steps of his uncle’s front porch, lay somewhere in between.