Star Chamber Brotherhood (5 page)

“I am receiving some very distinct impressions,” Linda began. “First, someone from your past will come back into your life and raise important unresolved issues. The nature of these issues is not being revealed to me, but I get a very clear sense that you will recognize this person and will understand what the issues will mean for you.
 

“Next, I am picking up the presence of three females, one of them a mature woman, a mother perhaps, and two of them younger, perhaps the woman’s daughters. The woman and the older daughter have passed to the other side. The younger daughter is still on this plane, but further information is being withheld from me. The message is coming through that, before you can learn more about your daughter’s situation, you must complete some business here in Boston. The two women who have passed over are asking to come through but something is blocking them until certain tasks are underway.”

Werner sat alert in his straight-backed wooden chair, his eyes wide and his mouth agape.

“Can you describe the blockage in more detail?” he asked. “Is there something I’m doing wrong?”

“No, that’s not it,” Linda replied, still in reverie. “The forces at work here are powerful, but not ill-intentioned. I sense that they may be your spirit guides, the team representing you, so to speak, on the other side. They are quite firm about this. Their point is that you have some duty so important that it takes precedence even over your family. It involves others who have already made a great sacrifice for a cause you share with them, a cause that reaches far into the past and extends far into the future. At some level, Frank, I believe you have already chosen this role as well as the duty that comes with it.”

Linda Holt opened her eyes and gave Werner an expectant smile.

“You must have questions, Frank. Please go ahead.”

“I don’t know where to begin. But, for starters, did you really get all that from the cards?”

“Not all of it, of course, but everything that came through is reflected quite clearly in the cards. There is no mistaking it, Frank. I don’t recall ever having so many big cards come up in one reading as consistently as they did in yours. Something big is about to happen in your life. And when it does, everything is going to change.”

Before Frank could answer, the Professor opened the door and poked his head into the room.

“I’ve been asked to summon you two to the next room,” he announced with a knowing smile. “The candles are about to be lit on a perfectly beautiful chocolate cake and I suppose we’ll all be expected to sing ‘Happy Birthday’ before any of us will be permitted to eat.”

Chapter 4

Thursday, April 12, 2029

Boston

Frank Werner stepped off the commuter train at Concord Station and drove from his mind the thoughts that had dogged him since meeting Dave Lewis the night before. It was just after three in the afternoon and the dense rows of bicycle racks were still full. Werner saw some interesting ones, too, bikes that looked as if they had lain neglected in garages and basements for years before being pressed back into service. What with gasoline rationing, ever-steeper road taxes, prohibitive tariffs on imported cars, and waiting lists for new Government Motors cars, only the wealthiest of commuters and privileged government officials still drove to work in the city.

Werner had not set foot in the town of Concord in nearly seven years. Not since his older daughter’s graduation from Concord Academy on a chilly late May morning, when parents and students alternated between joy at graduating from secondary school and sadness at the imminent death of their beloved Academy.
 

Two years earlier, the President-for-Life had announced his New Education Plan, which called for the assimilation of all private educational institutions above the kindergarten level into the public educational system. By then, the ranks of private secondary schools had already been reduced severely by attrition, owing to the dwindling supply of parents who could afford what amounted to an extra four years of college tuition during a time of wage controls, soaring taxes, and devastated net worths. And despite the hand wringing in intellectual circles across the land over the abolition of private education, the opponents of the President’s new plan could muster little public sympathy to preserve what most Americans considered an archaic privilege of the rich.

Werner also remembered his very first visit to Concord, when he and his wife had taken their older daughter, Justine, for her pre-admission tour and interview at the Academy. The town seemed the embodiment of early American ideals and traditions, with monuments to show for it. There was the Concord North Bridge, where the revolutionaries had fired the “shot heard around the world;” and then there were Ralph Waldo Emerson’s house, Thoreau’s Walden Pond, Louisa May Alcott’s Orchard House, the Old Manse, and many other lesser monuments to the colonial era and the seminal influence of Emerson, Thoreau, Hawthorne, the Alcotts, and their intellectual heirs.

The natural beauty of the town and its surrounding countryside had been carefully preserved, so that it was not difficult at times to imagine having stepped through a time portal into a bygone era. All this was possible because of the remarkable wealth the residents of Concord and their ancestors had accumulated over nearly four centuries. Its charm and history, meticulously preserved across many generations, had made Concord one of the most desirable residential enclaves in Greater Boston.
 

Werner crossed the street and continued past the row of shops that served Concord’s rail commuters until he reached Middle Street and turned right. He consulted his notebook and went on until he found 50 Middle Street, an imposing three-story Federal-style mansion painted white with black shutters and trim. He knocked and heard a woman’s voice answer. A moment later Nancy Widmer opened the door wearing a stylish beige wool suit with an open jacket trimmed with brass buttons. Though she was preparing to relocate, clearly he had not interrupted her while packing her dishes and chinaware.

Nancy invited Werner inside, and within moments he noticed that the dining room table had recently hosted a luncheon. Four empty wine bottles stood guard over the remains of the meal, and he noticed at least five or six empty martini glasses. Displayed on the sideboard was what he guessed to be her farewell present, a very wide oil painting depicting a row of seven women seated in a formal drawing room, each seen only from the waist down and each with her respective terrier seated on her lap or at her feet. Werner could not help but smile at the sheer joy reflected in the expressions of the well-tended canines.
 

“Oh, don’t mind the mess,” Nancy remarked casually as she led him back to the kitchen. “They stayed so long there was no time to tidy up.”

Nancy was an attractive and unusually energetic seventy-three-year-old, a woman who had formed countless friendships and acquaintances over the years, not only in Concord, but among Boston society at large and at her summer home on Islesboro, off the coast of Maine. She took enormous pleasure in entertaining her friends, visiting them at their homes and socializing with them at her downtown club. Since her husband’s death three years earlier, she had slashed her monthly expenses to the bone in order to maintain the house on Middle Street as long she could. Now, with the sale complete and the move to her daughter’s house in Western Massachusetts two weeks away, Nancy Widmer had invited Werner to bid on the purchase of nearly the entire contents of her amply stocked wine cellar. Despite the finality of such a move, Nancy seemed determined not to reveal even a trace of sadness or disappointment.

“No dogs today?” Werner asked her, surprised at the absence of barking from her twin Corgis.

“They’re spending the day with their doggie friends on Sudbury Street. But never mind the dogs. Come over here, Frank. I want to show you something.”

He followed her into the pantry. There he saw her slide the shelves into a recess to reveal a heavy steel door that led down a flight of stairs into a cellar. Though he had been to the house a half dozen times to pick up wines and spirits that Nancy had sold him from time to time, Werner had never before been admitted to the wine cellar.

“This house was built in 1820 with a small root cellar,” she declared. “The owners, who were radical Abolitionists, expanded the cellar in 1850 after the Fugitive Slave Act was passed, to hide slaves traveling north along the Underground Railroad.”

She pointed proudly to a small framed map showing the routes north to safety, a faded print showing ragged slaves on the run, and a laminated plaque with the lyrics of “Follow the Drinking Gourd,” a Negro Spiritual tune popular at the time.

“Did you know that the slaves used the stars for navigation in those days, Frank? They watched for the Big Dipper because it points to the North Star. I remember learning that song in grammar school. We all learned it. And to think that the slaves probably sang it right here in this house!”

Werner read the first stanza and was surprised when it sent a chill up his spine:

When the sun comes back,

And the first quail calls,

Follow the drinking gourd,

For the old man is waiting
 

For to carry you to freedom

If you follow the drinking gourd.

For the briefest moment an image of the Yukon tundra flashed through his head. His 2,000-mile trek from Kamas, Utah, to the Canol Road in the Yukon Territory had been the polar opposite of what the slaves had experienced. Unlike the Negro slaves marching toward freedom, every step had taken him further away from freedom and toward forced labor and premature death. More than a century and a half after the Emancipation Proclamation, he still could not comprehend how the Corrective Labor Administration had come into being and expanded so rapidly within just a few years. Even today shackled prisoners were trudging to their deaths in corrective labor camps throughout Alaska, the Yukon, and the Northwest Territories. Knowing this, and having survived it, was sometimes more than his mind could endure.
 

Nancy Widmer waited for Werner to read the lyrics, then led the way into the cellar. Nancy’s late husband must have paid a small fortune to the contractor who had converted the room into a temperature and humidity-controlled wine cellar, Werner thought. Along the far wall were floor-to-ceiling redwood wine racks, in both bin and column format, while to either side custom-built shelf units held sealed cases of wines as well as individual liquor bottles stored upright. And in the center of the room stood an antique walnut table for wine tasting and a pallet for stacking cases of spirits off the floor.

Werner moved closer to the shelves and inspected the loose bottles. To his delight, he found rarities that most casual drinkers did not know, but that to cocktail enthusiasts were worth their weight in gold: applejack, anisette, Brazilian cachaça, Campari, crème de cassis, Haitian rhum agricole, Kentucky rye, Lillet, maraschino liqueur, French vermouth and others, along with several spare bottles each of Angostura, Peychaud’s and orange bitters. He duly recorded the name and quantity of each on his inventory sheet.

Nancy noticed his concentration and soon returned to the kitchen to let him conduct his inventory undisturbed.

Next Werner turned his attention to the sealed cases of spirits: three full cases each of Crown Royal, Johnny Walker Black, Maker’s Mark, Mount Gay, Absolut, and Beefeater, plus partials. Obviously Mr. Widmer had entertained frequently, which was hardly unusual for a partner in an investment management firm. Judging by the quantities, Mr. Widmer had also been sufficiently canny to collect his supplies before they became scarce. Werner silently blessed the late Mr. Widmer, for it was just this sort of far-sighted hoarder who enabled Frank Werner to make his living.
 

 
Surveying the wines, Werner found only a few cases that would fetch a respectable price. These were mainly lesser-growth red Bordeaux and two cases of California reserve cabernets. Nancy had warned him in advance that she had already consumed or given to her daughter most of her husband’s better wines, and among the assorted bottles remaining in the racks, nearly all were everyday table wines. Being of pre-Unionist vintage, however, they were still in demand, and the wines alone had been well worth the trip. The fact that neither Nancy nor her daughter ever touched the spirits, was an unforeseen bonus.

When he had completed the inventory, Werner carried his clipboard upstairs to the kitchen, where he found Nancy Widmer preparing a pot of tea. She invited him to sit at the butcher’s block table in the center of the room.

“Your husband seems to have had excellent taste, Nancy. You should be pleased that you were able to enjoy the best of what he put away before your move to Northampton. All the spirits in the cellar are quite marketable and I can offer you a good price for them. As for what’s left of the wine, I can fetch a decent price for the five full cases, and I can sell whatever you want to leave me of the rest, but I’m afraid those aren’t worth much.”

He waited while she poured him a cup of tea, then continued.
 

“Overall, the market for wines has not been healthy this year. Part of the problem is the Unionist propaganda vilifying the Moneymen and their conspicuous consumption. I wish your wines would bring more, but I must defer to the market.”

Werner removed a summary sheet of his appraisal, pointing out to Nancy the number of bottles of each wine or spirit and indicating his offer per bottle. He used a pocket calculator to verify the total and then underlined the number at the bottom of the summary sheet.