The Blackstone Chronicles (44 page)

E
d Becker shuddered as he gazed up at the grimy stone facade of the Asylum. “Sometimes I wonder if the whole idea of trying to turn this monstrosity into something nice makes any sense at all.” Though it was an early Friday morning that promised a perfect spring day, even the bright sunlight couldn’t wash away the ominous aura that seemed to him to hang over the building. “I have an awful feeling we might all wind up taking a bath on this deal.”

Bill McGuire got out and slammed the door of his pickup truck. He barely glanced at the looming form of the building as he dropped the tailgate down and pulled the hand truck out of its bed. “You’ve been reading too many novels,” he told Becker. “It’s just an old building. By the time I’m done renovating it, you won’t even recognize it.”

“Maybe so.” Becker sighed as they mounted the front steps. He and Bill, along with others, had returned here on Wednesday, and again yesterday, to search the cold, dark rooms and every inch of the ten-acre grounds for Rebecca Morrison, with no success. Now he said, “I’m starting to wonder if Edna Burnham’s right and whatever’s going on around here has something to do with this place.”

As the contractor’s face flushed with anger, the attorney wished he’d kept his thought to himself. It was too late now. “Look, Bill, I’m sorry,” he said quickly. “I
didn’t mean to imply that what happened to Elizabeth was—well …” He floundered, struggling to find a way to extricate himself from his gaffe, but decided anything more he might add would only make matters worse. “I’m sorry,” he said again. “I should have kept my mouth shut.” For a second or two he braced himself, thinking McGuire might take a swing at him, but then saw the anger drain from the contractor’s expression.

“Forget it,” McGuire said. “I don’t know why I still let it get to me. I mean, it’s not as if I’m not hearing those ugly whispers from everyone else in town. It’s not just Edna Burnham anymore.”

It was true. In the two days since Germaine Wagner’s body had been discovered crushed beneath the elevator in her own house, rumors had been sweeping through Blackstone like a virus, a contagion of fear and suspicion. Clara Wagner had been moved to a nursing home in Manchester only yesterday. Witness to her daughter’s hideous death, she had suffered a massive stroke that robbed her of language; Clara would never reveal the events of that awful night her daughter had died. Germaine had been quietly buried as soon as the coroner had finished the examination of the body. By her own request, found neatly filed among Germaine’s papers, there had been no funeral.

Steve Driver, the deputy sheriff, had searched every corner of Clara Wagner’s house with as much energy as the fire chief had expended in sifting through the ruins of Martha Ward’s place after it had been destroyed in a devastating conflagration a few weeks earlier. But his investigation proved equally fruitless.

There was obvious evidence of violence: nearly everything in Germaine Wagner’s bedroom was overturned, her bathroom mirror shattered, blood everywhere. But even the criminalist Steve had immediately called in from Manchester had found no signs that anyone but Germaine had been involved. Blood samples from the
bedroom and bathroom, from the stairs, from the Oriental carpet on the floor of the great entry hall were the same: all were Germaine Wagner’s.

Most disturbing of all, Rebecca Morrison had disappeared. The only possible witness who might be able to describe these terrible events had vanished. Where was she—and was she in danger, if indeed she was still alive? Had Rebecca witnessed a dreadful accident—or a horrible crime? Had she fled in terror—or in guilt? Or had some unspeakable tragedy befallen her as well as the Wagner women? Searches of the town and the surrounding countryside had produced no trace of her, nor had appeals for information brought forth any clue. Even the Asylum had been combed, to no avail. Speculation burned like wildfire: Some said Rebecca had suffered a mental breakdown and turned on her benefactor. Others recalled that there was a dark side to Germaine Wagner’s generosity, and that while it was true that she had employed Rebecca and given her a home when Rebecca’s had burned down, she had also been treating Rebecca for years with the kind of patronizing attitude that no one but Rebecca would have tolerated for more than a minute.

Had Rebecca finally been pushed too far, into an act of cold-blooded murder from which she had fled?

Steve Driver found these whispered theories ridiculous. He’d known both Rebecca Morrison and Germaine Wagner for better than twenty years. He was unable to imagine Rebecca in the role of murderess. Moreover, she would never have been able to inflict the kind of wounds Germaine had sustained without injuring herself as well. The litter of broken glass in the bathroom alone gave the lie to that idea. Nor had he been able to find even a sliver of evidence that anyone except the three people who lived in the house were there that night.

Blackstone was pressing for answers, no one more so than Oliver Metcalf, and Driver had none, not a single
thing that made any sense. On Thursday evening Oliver had burst yet again into the deputy’s office, demanding a report of Driver’s progress. At a loss, and before he could stop himself, Driver sardonically suggested that maybe Germaine had been the recipient of the same kind of “gift” that had brought tragedy into three other Blackstone houses over the last few months. To his utter shock, Oliver Metcalf’s face paled.

“Oh my God,” Oliver whispered. “It was
my
fault. I gave Rebecca a handkerchief. It had an R embroidered on it.… I—I thought it would be perfect for her.”

“For Christ’s sake, Oliver!” Driver said, astonished. “I was kidding! Don’t tell me even you believe that crap Edna Burnham’s been spreading around!”

Though both men would have been willing to swear they’d been alone in the deputy’s office, the rumor of another “cursed” gift had swept like a plague through the town.

When the latest rumors had reached Bill McGuire, though, he’d dismissed them in disgust. Now he repeated to Ed Becker the same words he’d spoken to Velma Tuesday afternoon when he’d stopped in at the Red Hen for a piece of pecan pie and a cup of coffee after his tour of the Asylum with Ed and Melissa Holloway. “What happened to Elizabeth was a direct result of her miscarriage. It had nothing at all to do with the doll that showed up at our house. Megan still has the doll, and nothing’s happened to her, has it?”

“Of course not,” Ed Becker agreed. “And nothing’s going to either.”

Bill McGuire unlocked the Asylum’s huge front door. As it swung open, Ed Becker felt a chill as a mass of cold air rushed from the building. Unbidden memories of stories he’d read as a boy blossomed in his mind, and he shivered as he remembered that a mass of cold air in a room invariably presaged a ghostly presence.

Or merely a lack of heat in a big old building on a
warm morning
, he told himself as the chill passed as quickly as it had come. But when he stepped inside, it seized him again. The door closed, shutting the bright sunlight out, and the gloom closed around him like a suffocating shroud.

Suddenly he wondered if he really wanted the oak dresser they’d come to pick up.

“Getting to you?” Bill McGuire asked, grinning at the lawyer’s obvious discomfort. “Maybe you’d like to wait outside while I go up and get the dresser.”

“I’m fine,” Ed Becker insisted, hearing too late the extra emphasis that belied his words. “All right, so I think it’s a little creepy in here. So sue me.”

McGuire laughed. “Spoken like a true lawyer.” But then he too shivered, and found himself wishing he could just turn on the lights and wash the dark shadows from the rooms they were passing through.

Both men breathed a little easier as they came to the stairs to the second floor, if only because of the sunlight flooding through the windows behind the staircase. Yet even here they found a grim reminder of the building’s last use, for the thick metal grill that had been placed over the windows decades earlier still cast forbidding prison-bar shadows on the bare wood floor.

It was as Ed Becker came to the top of the stairs that the hairs on the back of his neck stood on end and goose bumps rose on both his arms.

He knew, as surely as he knew his own name, that he and Bill McGuire were not alone.

An instant later, as McGuire too froze, he heard a sound.

It was faint, barely audible, but it was there.

“Did you hear that?” McGuire asked, his hand closing on Becker’s forearm.

“I—I’m not sure,” Ed Becker whispered, unwilling to admit how frightened he was. “Maybe …” His words
died on his lips as he heard the sound again. This time there was no mistaking it.

Somewhere down the hall, in one of the long-abandoned rooms, someone—or
something
—was moving.

Ed Becker tried to swallow the lump of fear that blocked his throat.

The sound came a third time. It seemed to echo from one of the rooms on the left side of the wide corridor, halfway down the hall.

The room where the dresser is, Ed Becker thought, and his fear instantly notched a level higher.

Moving to the left so he was pressed protectively close to the wall, Bill McGuire began edging slowly down the corridor. Ed Becker followed hesitantly, his movement motivated less by bravery than by terror at the idea of remaining in the hall by himself.

As they drew closer to the room, they heard the sound yet again.

A scratching, as if something were trying to get through a door.

The door, which stood slightly ajar, suddenly moved.

Not much, but enough so that both of them saw it.

“Who is it?” McGuire called out. “Who’s there?”

The scratching sound instantly stopped.

Seconds that seemed to Ed Becker like minutes crept by, and then Bill McGuire, closer to the door than Becker, motioned to the lawyer to stay where he was. Treading so lightly that he created no sound at all, McGuire inched closer to the door. He paused for a moment, then leaped toward the door and hurled it all the way open. There was a loud crash as the door smashed against the wall, then Bill McGuire jumped aside as a raccoon burst through the doorway, raced past Ed Becker, and disappeared up the stairs.

“Jesus.” Ed Becker swore softly, utterly disgusted with himself for the terror he had felt only a moment ago. “Let’s get the damn dresser and get out of here before we
both have a heart attack.” Retrieving the hand truck from the landing, he followed Bill McGuire into the room.

The chest of drawers was exactly where it had been on Tuesday afternoon, apparently untouched by anything more sinister than the raccoon.

Five minutes later, with the dresser strapped firmly to the hand truck, they reemerged into the bright morning sunlight to find Oliver Metcalf waiting by the truck. As they loaded it into the back of the pickup without bothering to unstrap it from the hand truck, Oliver eyed the old oak chest.

“You actually want that thing?” he asked as Ed Becker carefully shut the tailgate.

“Wait’ll you see it after I’m done with it,” Becker replied. “You’ll wish you’d kept it yourself.”

Oliver shook his head. “Not me,” he said, his gaze shifting to the Asylum. “As far as I’m concerned, anything that comes out of there should go straight to the dump.”

Ed Becker looked quizzically at him. “Come on, Oliver. It’s only a piece of furniture.”

Oliver Metcalf’s brows arched doubtfully. “Maybe so,” he agreed. “But I still wouldn’t have it in my house.” Then: “You guys want a cup of coffee?”

Becker shook his head. “I promised Bonnie I wouldn’t be gone more than half an hour. Amy’s home from school with sniffles and driving Bonnie crazy. How about a rain check?”

“Anytime,” Oliver said.

Ed Becker and Bill McGuire got into the truck. As they drove away, Oliver caught one last glimpse of the oak dresser that stood in the truck’s bed.

And as the image registered on his brain, a stab of pain slashed through his head.

*  *  *

The boy stares at the hypodermic needle that sits on the chest, not certain what is about to happen, but still terrified
.

The man picks up the needle and comes toward the boy
.

Though the boy cowers back, he knows there is no escape. He does his best not to cry out as the man plunges the needle into his arm
.

Then blackness closes around him
.

By the time the pain in his head had eased and Oliver was able to start back to his house, the truck had disappeared down Amherst Street, as completely as the image had disappeared from Oliver’s memory.

R
ebecca Morrison had no idea where she was, no idea how long she’d been there.

Her last truly clear memory was of awakening from a nightmare to hear terrible noises coming from downstairs. She remembered leaving her little room in the attic, but after that her mind could provide her with only a jumble of images:

Germaine’s room. A broken lamp on the floor. Bright red bloodstains.

More bloodstains on the stairs. On the carpet.

And an arm.