The Blackstone Chronicles (62 page)

The battering went on and on, until, too weak to stand any longer, the prisonlike wall of the Blackstone Asylum collapsed.

Oliver Metcalf at last was free.

T
he white clapboard Congregational church, with its high steeple and brass bell, had stood guard over Blackstone for more than two centuries. Now, as the bell began to toll the hour of four, nearly all the citizens of Blackstone left their homes and began moving slowly toward the cemetery, as if drawn by the stately, mournful gong, inexorably, like iron filings to a magnet. They came from all directions, from the “College Streets” of Harvard, Princeton, and Amherst, north of the square, and from the less grand thoroughfares that lay in a grid to the south. As ancient custom dictated, they congregated briefly in the square itself, neighbors greeting neighbors, lifelong friends chatting quietly for a few minutes before gathering into larger groups that moved west toward the white picket fence that surrounded the graveyard.

It had been three days since Harvey Connally had died; three days since Oliver Metcalf had carried Rebecca Morrison out of the Asylum.

Three days since Oliver had taken the controls of the wrecking ball and smashed the wall of the Asylum itself.

Three days in which more rumors had crept through the streets of Blackstone, moving from house to house, passed from lip to ear in whispers so quiet that the words
could barely be understood. Where the tale began—which mouth first uttered the words—no one could say, for it is never possible to trace a rumor back to its first seed. But by four
P.M
. on this cloud-darkened afternoon, when it was finally time to lay Harvey Connally’s body to rest, there was barely a soul in Blackstone who had not heard the story. A legend was taking root.

A legend about a man who, throughout his entire lifetime, the town had honored and held in great esteem.

A man who, in death, was taking on a new role, a role he would undoubtedly continue to play through the decades—perhaps even centuries—to come.

Harvey Connally, the rumor proclaimed, had been the one who delivered the gifts, and with them the curse on half a dozen of Blackstone’s oldest families, including his own.

“It’s crazy,” Bill McGuire said when someone—he could no longer remember exactly who—had first whispered it to him. “Harvey could never have done such a thing.” But by the end of the day, when he’d gone into the library to gaze upon the portrait of his aunt—her face suddenly appearing to him so similar to that of the doll with which his daughter still slept every night—he’d wondered. Bill McGuire knew little about that aunt, except that she’d been killed in a boating accident years earlier—long before he was born—after some tragedy had befallen her own child.

The details of that tragedy had never been explained to him.

Harvey Connally, though, would have known his aunt, and known what happened to her.

He could even have known if the doll had once belonged to her, or to her child.

Bill McGuire couldn’t be sure, and though he still insisted that the doll had nothing to do with Elizabeth’s death, doubt had been planted and was beginning to grow. Though Bill didn’t want to believe the whispers about Harvey Connally, neither could he deny them outright. Today, as he moved toward the cemetery for the burial service, he found himself hoping that somehow, at this final moment before Harvey Connally was laid to rest, the truth might somehow be revealed.

Perhaps, Bill thought, he might simply
feel
something. Something that would tell him that the evil that had settled over Blackstone was finally coming to an end with Harvey Connally’s interment.

Though she hadn’t yet talked to Bill McGuire, Madeline Hartwick, with Celeste at her side, was attending the service in the cemetery for much the same reason as the contractor. She had heard the whispers about Harvey Connally only yesterday, when she had come back from Boston, where she was staying with Celeste in the small apartment they had found. Throughout a sleepless night, the first she had spent alone in the house in which Jules had terrorized her on the last night of his life, Madeline paced the chilly rooms of the mansion at the top of Harvard Street, returning time after time to the portrait of Jules’s mother that she had hung on the library wall the fateful evening of the engagement party.

As she gazed at the portrait of Louisa Hartwick, she
clutched in her hand the locket that Celeste had found in the melting snow a few weeks after Jules died.

The locket that Madeline had finally opened, and discovered was engraved—in letters so tiny she’d needed a magnifying glass to read them—with twin monograms: LH and MM.

It hadn’t taken Celeste long to guess what names the monograms stood for: Louisa Hartwick and Malcolm Metcalf. With the guess had come the knowledge of why the portrait of her husband’s mother, wearing the apron of a volunteer at the Asylum, had been hidden away in the attic: her husband’s mother must have had an affair with Oliver Metcalf’s father.

And Harvey Connally, brother of Malcolm Metcalf’s wife, must have found out.

Had he found the locket after all these years, and left it in her car that night, knowing it would send her husband into a paranoid rage?

But how could he have? Until that night, Jules had shown no signs at all of paranoia. But might Harvey Connally have known something about her husband’s family that she did not? Might it not even be possible that some grudge, long forgotten by anyone except himself, might have been festering in Harvey Connally for years, and now, as his life drew to a close, he’d decided to try to even the score?

Madeline Hartwick, like Bill McGuire, had not quite been able to dismiss the words she’d heard about Harvey Connally, and though she didn’t yet believe them, neither could she disbelieve them.

So she too had come to the service not only because
Harvey Connally had been a part of her life for so many years but because she was hoping for some kind of sign.

A sign that could lead her to the truth.

As the questions and rumors had passed from one set of lips to another, more and more small facts had been remembered about Harvey Connally.

One person reminded another that there were few secrets in Blackstone that Harvey Connally hadn’t known; few families to whom, one way or another, he wasn’t somehow related.

Hadn’t he been a trustee of the Asylum, and in that capacity had he not known everything that had gone on there?

Hadn’t his father
built
the Asylum, so Harvey would have known every room, every hidden passage, every dark niche?

What about Ed Becker? By the time of Harvey Connally’s interment, everyone in town had been reminded that Ed’s great-uncle had disappeared into the Asylum. It had been either that or spending his life in prison. Something about a girl who disappeared, wasn’t it?

The stories had passed from house to house, been discussed in the Red Hen, whispered about in the library.

No one knew who first remembered hearing a rumor that years ago Martha Ward’s sister had died in the Asylum, having burned herself so badly with a cigarette lighter that nothing could be done to save her.

A lighter like the one Rebecca had bought from Janice Anderson?

It wasn’t long before at least three people were willing
to swear that they could now remember seeing Harvey Connally lurking near Janice’s table just before Oliver and Rebecca bought the lighter Rebecca had given to her cousin Andrea. Though it had happened weeks earlier, their memories of Harvey’s sinister presence there grew clearer with every telling, until no one in Blackstone questioned that the old man had been at the flea market that day.

Even the handkerchief that Oliver had given to Rebecca had been ascribed to Harvey. How many times had he been in Oliver’s house? Couldn’t it have been he who left the embroidered square in the attic for Oliver to find? He would have known that Oliver would give it to Rebecca. After all, didn’t it have her initial worked perfectly into its intricate design?

By the third day, when the time had finally come to inter Harvey Connally’s remains in the mausoleum his father had built, the tendrils of the legend had crept through Blackstone like a spreading vine, wrapping every citizen so tightly in its grip that only a few were still in doubt.

The most vocal of those was Edna Burnham.

She was the last to enter the cemetery behind the Congregational church that afternoon, and as she came through the gate and threaded her way slowly to the corner of the graveyard in which generations of Connallys had been buried, the mourners fell silent. Edna walked steadily, her head high, and the crowd parted before her as if submitting to her silent will.

Little Megan McGuire, her left arm wrapped tightly around her doll, shrank closer to her father as the old woman paused, looking down at her with eyes that seemed to cut right through her. When the old woman
reached out as if to stroke her doll’s hair, Megan’s mouth tightened into a deep scowl. “Don’t touch her,” she said, wrenching away from the old woman. “Sam doesn’t like to be touched.”

Edna Burnham’s fingers jerked back as if they’d touched a hot iron, but then she moved on, passing Bill McGuire and Mrs. Goodrich without speaking a word.

A few steps farther on she came to Madeline Hartwick, her daughter Celeste on one side of her, Andrew Sterling on the other. Most of the employees of the bank were clustered around Andrew and the two surviving Hartwicks. Once again Edna Burnham paused, searching their faces as if looking for something, but giving no sign as to whether she had found it. When Madeline Hartwick extended her gloved hand to Edna, the old woman took it, but still no words were exchanged.

As she moved on, Edna Burnham surveyed the silent crowd with a look both haughty and accusing. Everyone who watched had the uneasy feeling that she was searching for people who weren’t there, for there was nothing left of Martha Ward’s family except for Rebecca and Clara Wagner, who was slowly dying in her room at the nursing home and would never return to Blackstone again.

Edna barely glanced at Bonnie and Amy Becker as she passed them. At last she came to the marble structure in which Charles and Eleanor Connally, along with their daughter and granddaughter, had long ago been interred.

Harvey Connally’s bronze coffin, bare of flowers, stood in front of the open door of the crypt; soon it would rest inside, where Harvey would sleep eternally next to his sister, Olivia.

At the head of the coffin, Lucas Iverson stood with an open Bible in his hand, though he needed no prompting to recite once more the prayers that would accompany Harvey Connally’s soul to his Maker.

At the foot of the coffin stood Oliver Metcalf.

Next to him, her hand in Oliver’s, stood Rebecca Morrison.

The crowd waited in silence as Edna Burnham drew close, finally stopping only a few feet from Oliver.

Her eyes fixed on Oliver for a long time, and the mourners seemed to hold their breath as they waited in tense anticipation to hear what she might say to the man about whom she had been whispering for months—the man whose reputation she had done her best to ruin.

Oliver, his face expressionless, met her granite stare, knowing that whatever she said in the next few moments would be passed from one person to another until there was no one in Blackstone who hadn’t heard.

But Edna still bided her time, turning at last to Rebecca Morrison.

Rebecca Morrison, who had once humiliated her in public and now stood next to Oliver Metcalf, one of her hands in his, her face revealing nothing, her eyes clear. In her free hand she held the handkerchief Oliver had given her the day before she’d disappeared.

As she gazed first at Rebecca, and then at Oliver Metcalf, it came to Edna Burnham that the truth of what had happened inside the Asylum three days ago was never going to be revealed to her, at least not by Oliver or Rebecca.

The only other person who might have been able to tell her lay dead inside the coffin that stood in front of the mausoleum. As Lucas Iverson, the hand that held his
Bible trembling, opened his mouth to begin the service, Edna Burnham silenced him with a glance. Her gaze shifted back to Oliver. She gave him a hard appraising look, then turned to Rebecca.

The silence lengthened like a cold shadow creeping over the crowd as the citizens of Blackstone waited.

Then, as if coming to a decision, she nodded her head. “It’s over,” she said, resting her hand on Harvey Connally’s coffin. She looked up to the Asylum, still looming atop North Hill. Though her voice rose only slightly when she spoke again, it carried easily to every corner of the cemetery. “It’s time we put the past to rest.” She stepped back and bowed her head as Lucas Iverson finally began to intone the last words that would be spoken over Harvey Connally.

“Ashes to ashes, dust to dust …”

As the prayer went on, the eyes that had been fixed on Harvey Connally’s coffin shifted one by one toward the dark silhouette of the building that stood atop North Hill.

Empty at last, one of its walls shattered by the blows Oliver Metcalf had struck three days ago, it had lost its air of domination. Weakened and forlorn, stripped at last of the power it had held over Blackstone for so long. Everyone who listened to Lucas Iverson’s prayer knew that Edna Burnham had, for once, finally spoken the truth.

The past, along with Harvey Connally, was finally being buried.

But it was only Oliver Metcalf who noticed the date that had been engraved on the door of his uncle’s crypt.

April 24, 1997.

Until this very moment, he’d forgotten what day it was that his uncle had died.

The date of his mother’s death.

The date of his own birth.

His birthday
.

His forty-fifth birthday.

And the day that he had finally been released from the torture of his past.

That, he knew, had been his uncle’s final gift to him.

As he stared at the date, he felt Edna Burnham standing rigidly beside him. It was only then that he realized he was not the only one staring at the date on the door of Harvey Connally’s crypt.