The Blackstone Chronicles

Chapter 4

Ed Becker knew something had gone wrong the moment he walked into the bank that morning. Though there was only one customer at the tellers’ windows, there were whispered conversations going on everywhere, nearly all of which quickly died away as people became aware of his presence. At first he assumed that something had happened with regard to the audit, but when he glanced into the glass-fronted conference room in which the audit was taking place, the man and two women from the Fed were hard at work, each of them poring over a thick stack of computer printouts, just as they’d been doing for weeks. He was about to head for Jules Hartwick’s office when Melissa Holloway beckoned him to her desk.
“Was Mr. Hartwick all right last night?” she asked.
Ed Becker felt eyes watching him from every direction. “He was fine,” he assured the executive vice-president. “But I assume from the question that he isn’t this morning. Is he in his office?”
Melissa Holloway shook her head. “He was here for about ten minutes,” she told him. “First, he almost bit Ellen Golding’s head off and then he called me and ordered—”
“Ordered?” Ed Becker echoed. In all the years he’d known Jules, he’d never heard the banker utter any instruction in terms that could be construed as an “order.” Countless times he had heard Jules request that things he needed be done, but Ed had never witnessed even a hint of the kind of authoritarian behavior implied by the word Melissa Holloway had used.
Melissa shrugged helplessly. “I know. It’s not like Mr. Hartwick at all. But he ordered me to turn off the security cameras in his office—immediately—and have them completely removed by noon.”
Had it not been for the pallor of Melissa’s complexion and the worry in her expression, Ed Becker would have suspected she was pulling his leg. Obviously, though, she wasn’t. “And then he left?”
Melissa nodded. “Without speaking to anyone. And he didn’t speak to anyone when he came in either. Ed, he always speaks to everyone. It might not be more than a word or two, but he always has at least a ‘good morning.’ But not today. It was like—” She hesitated, floundering, then shook her head. “I don’t know what it was like. It was crazy!”
“What about the auditors?” Ed asked, lowering his voice so it would carry no farther than Melissa’s ears. “Could they have found something that might have upset him?”
“It’s the first thing I thought of, but none of them even said hello to him. I was hoping maybe you might know what’s going on.”
Before Ed could say anything else, Andrew Sterling came over, his face red, a vein throbbing in his forehead. “Do you have any idea what the hell is going on with Jules?” he demanded, his voice harsh.
Ed Becker braced himself. “What did he say to you?”
“Nothing. But I just got a call from Celeste. For some reason her father seems to think that—” He fell silent for a moment, and it was apparent to both Ed Becker and Melissa Holloway that he had to force himself to continue. “He seems to have gotten the idea in his head that Celeste’s mother is having an affair.”
“Madeline?” Ed Becker gasped. “Come on, Andrew. You’ve got to be kidding!”
“I wish I were. But it gets worse. It seems he thinks I’m the person she’s—” Again he went silent. This time, it was apparent Andrew wasn’t going to be able to finish the sentence at all.
“Jules actually said that?” Ed asked. When Andrew made no answer, Ed took a deep breath, then slowly let it out. “I guess I’d better go up there and see what’s going on.”
The gate at the foot of the Hartwicks’ driveway stood open. Madeline’s car was gone, so Ed pulled his Buick under the porte cochere and strode up the steps. Ringing the bell, he shivered in the cold as he waited for Jules Hartwick to open the door. When the banker hadn’t appeared after a full minute went by, he rang the bell again. When there was still no response, Ed went back to the Buick, pulled his winter coat out of the backseat and put it on, then went around to the back of the house.
Peering through one of the windows in the garage, he saw that Jules’s black Lincoln Town Car was inside. Of course, that didn’t necessarily mean that Jules himself was at home; like almost everyone in Blackstone, Jules walked to work unless the weather was truly horrible, and it had been Melissa Holloway’s impression that Jules had, indeed, walked down to the bank that morning. Mounting the steps to the large glassed-in back porch, Ed let himself though the storm door, then tried the back door.
Locked.
He looked for a bell, found none, and knocked loudly.
There was no more response from within than there’d been at the front door a few minutes earlier.
Leaving the back porch, Ed circled the house to the other side, past the breakfast room, then moved onto the broad terrace. There, sets of French doors, one at each end, led into the library and the large formal living room. He cupped his hands around his eyes in an attempt to peer into the shadowy rooms beyond the doors, but the shirred material covering the panes defeated his efforts.
He moved on around the house, his shoes now squishing with icy water and the bottoms of his pants heavy with snow. Rounding the far corner, he came to the protrusion next to the library that housed Jules Hartwick’s den.
Heavy drapes had been drawn over both the windows flanking the small fireplace that was the room’s dominant feature, and the windows were far too high for Ed to have seen through them even had curtains not covered them. He made his way around to the front door again and jabbed the bell three more times, but got no more response than before. Finally giving up, he returned to his car, got in, and started the engine. It wasn’t until he’d reached the street that he saw it: smoke curling from the chimney that vented the fireplace in Jules Hartwick’s den.
Ed Becker pulled back into the driveway, then sat staring at the drifting smoke. The den, he knew, was the one room in the house that neither Madeline nor Celeste ever went into. “I don’t have even the slightest desire to go in there,” he remembered Madeline saying a few months ago. “He has it exactly the way he wants it, and if he doesn’t mind the stink of those awful cigars he thinks I don’t know he smokes, so be it. He keeps the door shut, and I stay out. Which is fine, since I think we all need a place to go when we want to hide. I have my dressing room, and Jules has his den, and we share the rest of the house. It works perfectly.”
And it also meant that if there was a fire on the den’s hearth, then Jules was there.
Ed turned on his cellular phone and dialed Jules’s private number. On the fourth ring the answering machine came on. He listened patiently as Jules’s recorded greeting played through. When the machine beeped, Ed began talking. “You might as well pick up the phone, Jules. I’m outside, sitting in my car, and I can see the smoke from the fireplace. I don’t know what’s troubling you, but whatever it is, we can work it out. But I can’t do anything for you if you won’t talk to me.” He paused, giving the banker a chance to pick up the phone, but nothing happened. He began talking again. “I’m your lawyer, Jules. That means that whatever’s happening, I’m on—”
“You’re fired, Becker. Get out of my driveway.”
The harsh words erupted from the cell phone’s speaker, startling Ed Becker into silence for a moment. He quickly recovered. “What’s going on, Jules? What’s happened?”
“A lot’s happened,” Jules Hartwick replied. “But you know all about it, don’t you, Ed? Well, guess what? I know all about it too now. I know what’s going on at the Bank, and I know what Madeline’s been up to. And I know all about you. So just get off my property before I call the police.”
The cellular phone went dead, leaving Ed Becker staring at the Hartwicks’ mansion in stunned disbelief.
Twenty minutes later, with Jules Hartwick still refusing to answer either the door or the telephone, he finally gave up and started back down to the village. Somewhere, he was sure, there had to be someone who knew what had upset Jules so badly.
Unless, as Melissa Holloway had suggested, he’d just plain gone crazy.
*  *  *

“Oliver?” Lois Martin asked. Ed Becker had left the offices of the Blackstone Chronicle, having found out nothing more about what might be bothering Jules Hartwick than he’d known when he’d arrived half an hour earlier. Oliver had been sitting silently, head in hands, ever since. “Oliver?” Lois repeated. “Are you all right?”
The Chronicle’s editor and publisher pressed his fingers against his temples in a vain effort to stem the rising tide of pain. The headache had begun ten minutes ago, and was now threatening to overwhelm him not only with throbbing pain but with nausea as well. He leaned back in his chair and closed his eyes. The fluorescent light in the office, though no brighter than usual, was suddenly blinding him. “Have you ever had a migraine headache?” he asked.
“A long time ago,” Lois replied, grimacing at the memory. “I had a few when I was in college. Worst thing I’ve ever been through.” She lowered herself onto the chair that Ed Becker had vacated just minutes before, and regarded her boss worriedly. “You sure it’s a migraine?”
“My head throbs, the lights are killing my eyes, and I’m starting to feel queasy. It’s like someone’s driving a spike right into the center of my head.”
“Sounds like a migraine,” Lois agreed. “When did it start?”
“This one? Maybe ten minutes ago. But this is maybe the third or fourth one I’ve had in the last month.”
“Maybe you’d better go see Dr. Margolis.”
“Or maybe Jules Hartwick ought to,” Oliver countered. “Did you hear much of what Ed was saying?”
“I heard, but I can’t believe it,” Lois replied. “It just doesn’t sound like Jules. I mean, the whole idea of Madeline Hartwick having an affair is ludicrous! And even if there’s a major problem at the bank, Jules just isn’t the type to go off the deep end.”
“He’s not the type to fire his lawyer over the phone either.” Oliver sighed. “But he did it. What the hell is going on around here, Lois? Last month Elizabeth McGuire commits suicide, and now it sounds like Jules Hartwick is turning paranoid.”
Lois Martin frowned. “You’re not suggesting there’s any connection between the two, are you?”
Before Oliver could reply, another stab of pain slashed through his head. He felt his skin turn cold and clammy, and his stomach began to churn. “Is there anything going on you can’t handle?” he asked weakly when the wave of agony had receded to the point where he trusted himself to speak.
“There hasn’t been anything going on that I couldn’t handle for the last five years,” Lois told him. “Go see the doctor, Oliver. Or at least go home, close the curtains, and lie down for a while.” Oliver managed a nod and got shakily to his feet. “Can you drive?” Lois asked anxiously as Oliver used the desk to brace himself against the dizzy spell that struck him as he stood fully upright. “Maybe I better lock the office up for a few minutes and—”
“I’ll be all right,” Oliver assured her as the dizziness passed. He took a couple of experimental steps toward the front door, then managed a weak smile. “See? Perfectly steady.”
“Just be careful,” Lois cautioned as she helped him pull on his coat. “And call me when you get home. Otherwise, I’ll come up to your house and fuss over you like an old hen. You’ll hate it.”
“I’ll call,” Oliver promised.
Getting into his Volvo, he winced as the engine caught and surged into noisy life, but a moment later, as the motor settled down to its normal rough idle, the throbbing pain in his head eased slightly. Pulling out of the parking space in front of the Chronicle office, he drove down Prospect to Amherst and started up the long slope of North Hill. Though the road was slick with packed snow, the Volvo threatened to go into a skid only once, and less than five minutes later Oliver pulled through the gates of the old Asylum and turned left, onto the side road that led to his cottage.
He pressed the remote control as he approached, and the door to his garage drew fully open just as he pulled into it. Getting out of the car, he opened the door that led directly into the laundry room of his house, but as he reached for the wall button that would close the garage door, he caught sight of the Asylum itself, looming on the crest of the hill half a hundred yards away at the top of the wide, curving drive.
Something about it seemed somehow different.
Abandoning the garage, Oliver stepped out into the bright, late morning sunlight and gazed up at the old building.
Its steeply pitched copper roof was covered with a thick blanket of glistening white snow. For a fleeting second he was almost able to imagine the building as it must have been a century ago, when it had first been built as a private home. He tried to envision it at Christmastime, when brightly colored sleighs drawn by horses laden with silver bells would have come up the hill bearing women in furs and hugely bustled dresses, and men in top hats and morning coats, to call on Charles Connally, who had originally built the huge mansion as a gift for his first wife and a slap in the parsimonious face of his father, Jonas, who had never willingly parted with so much as a nickel of the fortune he had accumulated.
The glory days of the mansion hadn’t lasted long. The patriarch of the Connally clan had died only a dozen years after the mansion was completed, and when Charles’s wife died as well, the house was soon converted to the only other use it had ever known.
A shelter for the insane.
Or had it actually been little more than a prison?
Oliver had never been sure, though over the years he’d certainly heard plenty of stories from people who may or may not have known what they were talking about.
All he truly knew was that the imposing stone structure had always terrified him. Terrified him to the point where he’d been utterly unable to bring himself even to enter it. Yet this morning, with his head throbbing and his stomach churning, he found himself being drawn toward the long-abandoned building.
The cold of the morning forgotten, Oliver made his way through deep drifts and up the curving driveway toward the great oaken doors. A silence seemed to have fallen over North Hill, broken only by the sound of snow crunching beneath his feet.
Coming to the steps, he hesitated for a moment, then climbed up to the broad porch. He gazed for a moment at the huge wooden panels before reaching out to the great bronze lever that would release the latch.
As Oliver’s fingers touched the ice cold metal, another wave of nausea seized him, and his hand jerked reflexively away as if the hardware had been red hot. His gorge rising, Oliver turned away once more and lurched back down the steps.
Falling to his knees, he retched into the snow, then, gasping for breath, got back to his feet and stumbled down the hill to his house. Unwilling to stay outside even long enough to unlock his front door, he went through the garage and into the laundry room, slamming the door behind him.
His heart pounding, Oliver leaned against the washing machine and tried to catch his breath. Slowly, the nausea in his belly eased and his breathing returned to normal, and even the stabbing pain in his head began to recede. When the telephone rang, he was able to make his way into the kitchen and pick up the extension with trembling fingers.
“Oliver?” Lois Martin said. “Is that you?”
“I-it’s me,” Oliver managed.
“Thank God,” Lois breathed. “This is the third time I’ve called. If you hadn’t answered, I was going to come up there. Are you all right?”
“I’m fine,” Oliver said, though even as he uttered the words, he knew they were a lie.