The Blackstone Chronicles

Chapter 2

Jules Hartwick leaned back in his chair and gave Madeline an almost imperceptible nod, the signal that it was time for Madeline to let her toe touch the button on the floor beneath her end of the dining room table. It would summon the maid who had been hired for the evening to clear the dessert plates while the butler—also hired only for the evening—served the port. The dining room had always been one of Jules’s favorite rooms in the house he’d grown up in, and into which he and Madeline had moved a decade ago, after his father, widowed for fifteen years, retired to a condo complex in Scottsdale. “It’s perfect for me,” the elder Hartwick had declared. “Full of Republicans and divorcées with enough money that they don’t need mine.”
Like all the rooms in the house, the dining room was immense, but so perfectly proportioned that it didn’t seem overly large even when the party, like tonight’s, was small. A pair of chandeliers glittered from its high-beamed ceiling, and the plaster walls above the mahogany wainscoting were hung with tapestries so luxuriously heavy that even the largest parties never seemed overly noisy. One wall was dominated by an immense fireplace, in which three large logs blazed merrily, and there was a sideboard built into the opposite wall, which served perfectly for the informal buffets that were this generation’s preferred way to serve. “So much less ostentatious than the staff Jules’s grandfather used to have,” Madeline was fond of explaining, never mentioning that economics might have something to do with the scaled-back festivities that were now the rule in the house. Still, every now and then—on occasions such as tonight’s—Jules liked to hire a full staff and do his best to roll the calendar back a generation or two. Tonight, he decided, had been a total success.
All the men save Oliver Metcalf had worn black tie, and, since no one had expected Oliver to appear in anything except his old tweed jacket, he didn’t seem the least bit out of place. The women were resplendent in their evening dresses, and while Madeline looked even more elegant than usual in a long black sheath set off by a single strand of perfect pearls, Celeste had stolen the limelight in a flow of emerald green velvet that was a perfect complement to her auburn hair. She wore a single stunning piece of jewelry: a small spray of emeralds set in gold that had belonged to Jules’s mother glittered near the heart-shaped neckline of her dress. Seated opposite her at the center of the long table, Andrew Sterling, Jules observed, had been unable to keep his eyes off his fiancée for more than a few seconds at a time. Which, Jules reflected, was exactly as it should be.
The rest of the party—all except one—seemed to be nearly as happy as Celeste and Andrew. Aside from Oliver Metcalf and Ed and Bonnie Becker, Madeline had invited Harvey Connally—“to represent the older generation, which I think gives a nice continuity to things”— and included Edna Burnham as the old man’s dinner partner. She’d also managed to persuade Bill McGuire to come out for the first time since Elizabeth’s death, and included Lois Martin as part of her ongoing plan to match Oliver with his assistant outside the office as well as in. When Jules suggested that perhaps Oliver and Lois spent enough time together at the Chronicle, Madeline had given him the kind of wifely look that informed him very clearly that while his banking skills might be excellent, he knew nothing about matchmaking.
“Lois and Oliver are perfect for each other,” she’d said. “They just don’t know it.”
Though Jules suspected Oliver’s interest in Lois ended at the office door, he’d kept his own counsel, just as he had when his wife decided to invite Janice Anderson to fill the seat across from Bill McGuire. Not that Jules didn’t like Janice. With a perfect combination of business acumen and a winning personality that made her immediately seem like everyone’s best friend, Janice had built her antique shop into a business strong enough to bring people to Blackstone from hundreds of miles around. It had been Bill McGuire who convinced her to move her shop into Blackstone Center as soon as the new complex was completed.
Tonight, though, even Janice’s sunny disposition didn’t seem to be working on Bill. The poor man appeared to Jules to have taken on an unhealthy gauntness since Elizabeth’s death two months ago. Still, he seemed glad he’d come, and on balance, Jules decided that Madeline had been right: if anyone would be able to take Bill’s mind off his troubles for a little while, it would be Janice.
“Shall we take the port into the library?” Madeline asked as the butler finished filling the glasses. “We found something in the attic last week that we’ve been dying to show off.”
“So that accounts for the library door being closed when we came in,” Oliver Metcalf said. He’d risen to his feet to help Lois Martin move her heavy chair back from the huge marble-topped table. The guests all followed their hostess out of the dining room and through the reception room where they’d gathered for drinks—then across the great entry hall that was dominated by a sweeping staircase that led to the second floor mezzanine.
While the dining room had always been Jules’s favorite, the library was Madeline’s. Its ceiling vaulted up two full floors, and the walls, save for the areas where family portraits hung, were lined with floor-to-ceiling bookcases, their upper shelves so high that to reach them required the use of a wheeled ladder hung from a polished brass guide rail at the top. For Madeline, though, the bookcases were not the room’s most distinguishing feature.
Directly above the double doors through which she had just led her guests was a minstrel’s gallery large enough to hold a string quartet, and paneled in mahogany linenfold. Tonight, in honor of her daughter’s engagement, she had hired a quartet, which was already playing softly when the company entered the room.
“Fabulous,” Janice Anderson told Madeline. “It’s like going back in time. I truly feel as if I’ve stepped into another century.”
“Just wait till you see what we found in the attic—something amazing from yesteryear,” Madeline promised her. “When the Center is done, of course we’re going to donate it, but for now we just couldn’t resist hanging it in here.”
She led them to the far end of the room, where a picture, covered by a black cloth, had been hung. When everyone had gathered around, she signaled to Jules to lower the lights until the only illumination in the room was provided by a spotlight on the picture. As an expectant hush fell, Madeline pulled a cord and the picture’s covering fell away.
From an ornately gilded frame, an aristocratic woman of perhaps forty gazed down on the room. She was wearing a dark blue dress of shimmering silk. Despite her elegant bearing and expensive clothing, her eyes gazed out from the canvas accusingly, as if she had resented having her portrait painted. Her hair was pulled severely back from her high forehead, apparently done in an elaborate twist at the back, and she stood beside a chair. The fingers of one hand clutched tightly to the back of the chair, while the other hand, though hanging at her side, appeared to be clenched in a fist.
“It’s your mother, isn’t it, Jules?” Janice Anderson asked. “But what a strange costume to have a portrait painted in. What is that she’s wearing?” Indeed, though the woman in the portrait wore an elegant blue dress, over it was a pale gray apronlike affair that looked to be made of a heavy cotton material.
“We think it’s her uniform from the Asylum,” Jules replied. His eyes were fixed on the portrait, and he was frowning deeply, as if trying to figure out why his mother appeared so angry. “Apparently she volunteered her services as a Gray Lady at some point. Oddly enough, though, I don’t ever remember seeing her wear that uniform. Until last week, I had no idea the portrait even existed.” He turned to Oliver. “Do you remember ever seeing my mother like that?”
But Oliver Metcalf wasn’t listening. The instant he’d seen the picture, a sharp pain flashed through his head, and a vision appeared in his mind.
The boy, naked and terrified, is shivering in the huge room.
His thin arms are wrapped around his body in a vain effort to keep himself warm.
The man appears, and the boy shrinks away from him, but there is no escape. The man holds a sheet in his hands—a wet sheet—and though the boy tries to slip past the man and dash from the room, the man catches him in the sheet as easily as a butterfly is caught in a net. In an instant the icy cold sheet engulfs the boy, who opens his mouth to scream—
*  *  *

“Oliver?” Jules Hartwick said again. “Oliver, is something wrong?”
Abruptly, the strange vision vanished. His headache eased and Oliver managed a small smile. “I’m fine,” he assured Jules. He looked up at the portrait once more, half expecting the pounding pain behind his eyes to return, but this time there was nothing. Just the painting of Jules’s mother in the uniform the volunteers at the Asylum had worn decades ago. Vaguely, he remembered reading somewhere how it had once been the fashion for people of means to have portraits done that reflected their professions or avocations. The costume, he ventured a guess to Jules, was Mrs. Hartwick’s way of proclaiming her service to the town.
“I suppose so,” Jules agreed. “But the weird thing is, I don’t even remember Mother volunteering. But she must have, mustn’t she?” He glanced up at the portrait again, then shook his head. “Easy to see why she put it up in the attic the minute it was done. But I think it could be kind of fun up at the Center, don’t you? Maybe we can find pictures of some of the other women, and make it the centerpiece of an exhibit. Call it ‘The Do-Gooders of Blackstone’ or something.”
“Jules!” Madeline exclaimed. “Those women took their work very seriously, and did a lot of good.”
“I’m sure they did,” Jules said. “But you still have to admit that Mother looks pretty unhappy about the whole thing.”
“I’m sure her expression had nothing to do with her work at the Asylum,” Madeline insisted. But then she relented, and a smile played around her lips. “Actually, she looks almost as disapproving as she did the day you married me.”
“Well, she got over that,” Jules said, slipping an arm around his wife as the quartet in the minstrel’s gallery began playing a waltz. “Marrying you was still the best thing I ever did.” Pulling Madeline close, he swept her across the library floor in a few graceful steps. A moment later the rest of the party had joined in the dancing.
The portrait on the wall, and Jules’s mother, were quickly forgotten as the party swirled on.
Rebecca felt as though she were going to suffocate.
The air in the room was thick with smoke from the rows of votive candles that lined the altar, and heavy with the choking perfume of incense.
The droning of Gregorian chants didn’t quite drown out the sound of her aunt’s voice as Martha Ward, on her knees next to Rebecca, mumbled her supplications and fingered the rosary beads she held in trembling hands.
An agonized Christ gazed down from the cross on the wall above the altar. Rebecca cringed as her eyes fixed on the trickle of painted blood oozing from the spear wound in his side. Feeling his pain as vividly as he must have felt it himself, she quickly moved her gaze away from the suffering figure.
It had been nearly two hours since they finished supper, and her aunt had led her here to beg forgiveness for the thoughts she had harbored during the meal. But how could Aunt Martha have known what crossed her mind when she caught a glimpse of the party going on next door? She’d barely had time to think at all before Aunt Martha, seeing her gazing out the kitchen window at the Hartwicks’ brightly lit house, had pulled the blinds down, taken her by the arm, and marched her into this downstairs room that served as her aunt’s private chapel.
It wasn’t really a chapel at all, of course. Originally it had been her uncle’s den, but shortly after Fred Ward left, her aunt had converted it into a place of worship, sealing the windows that once looked out on a lovely garden with curtains so heavy that no light penetrated them. Where there had once been a fireplace—which on a night like this might have blazed with crackling logs—there was now an ornate fifteenth-century Italian altar that Janice Anderson had discovered somewhere in Italy. Venice, maybe? Probably. Rebecca had found a book in the town library with a picture that showed a piece very much like Aunt Martha’s. For all Rebecca knew, it might be the very same one.
The pungent aroma of incense and smoking candles filled Rebecca’s nostrils and stung her eyes. Finally, when she was certain that her aunt was so far lost in her prayers that she wouldn’t notice her absence, Rebecca eased herself onto the hard wooden bench, the only furniture in the room except for the altar and the prie-dieu upon which her aunt often knelt for hours at a time. As soon as her knees stopped hurting enough that she trusted them to hold her, she slipped out of the chapel and up to her room.
After changing into her nightgown, Rebecca was about to turn back the coverlet on her bed when she heard the sound of an automobile engine starting, and went to the window. It had begun to snow, and the night had turned brilliant in the glow of the streetlights. Next door, the party was breaking up, and Rebecca easily recognized all the guests as they said their good-nights to the Hartwicks. Maybe, after all, she should have accepted Oliver’s invitation, she reflected. But it wouldn’t have been right—Madeline Hartwick meticulously planned every detail of her dinners, and the last thing she’d have been able to cope with would be the last-minute appearance of an uninvited guest.
Still, it would have been nice to have gone, and spent an evening with smiling people, and pretend that they were her friends.
That’s unkind, Rebecca told herself. Besides, Oliver is your friend!
As if he’d heard her thought, Oliver, who was seeing Lois Martin into her car, suddenly looked up. Smiling, he waved to Rebecca, and she waved back. But then, as first Janice Anderson and then Bill McGuire followed Oliver’s glance to see who he was waving at, she felt a hot surge of embarrassment and quickly stepped back from the window. If Aunt Martha caught her, she would spend the next whole week repenting in the chapel!
Going to bed, Rebecca turned off the light and lay in the darkness, enjoying the glow from beyond her window and the shadow play on her ceiling and walls. Soon she drifted into a sleep so light that when she came awake an hour later she was barely aware that she’d been sleeping at all. She listened to the utter silence in the house. No chants drifted up from downstairs, which meant that her aunt, too, had gone to bed. It must be very late, Rebecca thought.
What had awakened her?
She listened even more intently, but if it had been a noise that had startled her awake, it wasn’t repeated.
Nor had any strange shadows appeared on her ceiling.
Yet something had disturbed her sleep. After several minutes, Rebecca slipped out of her bed and went to the window, this time leaving the light off.
The night was filled with snow. It swirled around the streetlights, burying the cars in the street and covering the naked trees with a glistening coat of white. Next door, the Hartwicks’ house had all but vanished, appearing as nothing more than an indistinct shape, though a few of its windows still glowed with a golden light that made Rebecca think of long-ago winter evenings when her parents had still been alive and her family snuggled in front of the fireplace and—
A sudden movement cut into her reverie, and then, out of the shadows of the Hartwicks’ porte cochere, a dark figure appeared. As Rebecca watched, it went quickly down the driveway to the sidewalk, crossed the street, then vanished into the snowstorm.
Save for the footprints in the snow, Rebecca wouldn’t have been sure she’d seen it at all. Indeed, by the time she went back to bed a few moments later, even the footprints had all but disappeared.
As the grandfather clock in the Hartwicks’ entry hall struck the first note of the Westminster chime, the four people in the smallest of the downstairs rooms fell silent. The big, encased timepiece in the entry hall was only the first of a dozen clocks in the house that would strike one after the other, filling the house with the sounds of gongs and chimes of every imaginable pitch. Now, as the clocks Jules had collected from every corner of the world began marking the midnight hour, Madeline slipped her hand into her husband’s, and Celeste, on the sofa opposite her parents, snuggled closer against Andrew. None of them spoke again until the last chime had finally died away.
“I always thought the clocks would drive me crazy,” Madeline mused. “But now I don’t know what I’d do without them.”
“Well, you’ll never have to,” Jules assured her. “Actually, I’ve got a line on an old German cuckoo that I think might go nicely on the landing.”
“A cuckoo?” Celeste echoed. “Dad, they’re so corny!”
“I think a cuckoo would be fun,” Jules said. Then, sensing that not only was Madeline going to take Celeste’s side, but Andrew was too, he relented. “All right, suppose I put it in my den?” he offered in compromise. “They’re not that bad, you know!”
“They are too, and you know it,” Madeline replied. Rising from the sofa with, a brisk movement that conveyed to Andrew that the evening was at an end, she picked up Jules’s port glass, despite the fact that half an inch of the ruby fluid remained in it.
“I guess I’m done with that,” Jules observed.
“I guess you are,” Madeline agreed. She leaned down to give him an affectionate kiss on his forehead.
“I hope Celeste takes as good care of me as Mrs. Hartwick does of you, sir,” Andrew Sterling said a few minutes later as he and Jules stepped out into the snowy night.
“I’m sure she will,” Jules replied, throwing an arm around his prospective son-in-law’s shoulders. “Or at least she’ll come close. Nobody could take as good care of a man as Madeline takes of me.” His voice took on what seemed to Andrew an oddly wistful note. “I’ve been a very lucky man. I suppose I should count my blessings.”
They were at Andrew’s car now, and as Andrew brushed the snow off its windshield, he glanced quizzically at the older man. “Is something wrong, sir?”
For a moment Jules was tempted to mention the audit, then decided against it. He’d managed to get through the entire evening without talking at all about his worries at the Bank, and he certainly had no intention of burdening Andrew with them now. None of it, after all, was this young man’s fault. If there was blame to be borne, Jules thought, he would certainly bear it himself. “Nothing at all,” he assured Andrew. “It’s just been a wonderful evening, and I am, indeed, a very lucky man. I have Madeline, and Celeste, and I couldn’t ask for a better son-in-law. Get a good night’s sleep, and I’ll see you in the morning.”
As Andrew drove away, Jules swung the big wrought-iron gate across the driveway, then started back toward the house. But coming abreast of Madeline’s car, still free of snow under the porte cochere, he noticed that the driver’s door was slightly ajar. As he pulled it open in preparation for closing it all the way, the interior light flashed on, revealing a small package, neatly wrapped, sitting on the front seat. Frowning, he picked it up, closed the car door tight, and continued back into the house. Pausing in the entry hall, he turned the package over, looking for some clue as to where it had come from.
There was nothing.
It was simply a small box, wrapped in pink paper and tied with a silver ribbon.
Had Madeline bought it as a gift for him?
The pink paper was enough to put that idea out of his mind. Nor was his wife the kind of woman to leave a gift sitting in her car, not even concealed in a bag.
As he stood at the foot of the stairs, Jules realized that Madeline had not bought the gift at all.
No, she was the intended recipient of the gift, not the giver.
But who was it from? And why had it been left in Madeline’s car?
Without thinking, Jules found himself pulling the ribbon from the package, and then the paper. A moment later he’d opened the box itself and found himself looking at a small silver locket.
A locket in the shape of a heart.
His fingers shaking, he picked the locket up and opened it.
Where a picture might have been—should have been—there was nothing.
Nothing, save a lock of hair.
Closing the locket, Jules clutched it in his hand and gazed up the stairs toward the floor above. Suddenly an image came into his mind.
An image of Madeline.
Madeline, whom he’d loved for more than a quarter of a century.
Whom he’d thought loved him too.
But now, in his mind’s eye, he could see her clearly.
And she was in the arms of another man.
As he put the locket in his coat pocket, Jules Hartwick felt the foundations of his world starting to crumble.