The Blackstone Chronicles

Chapter 1

Oliver Metcalf turned up his collar, huddled deeper into his old car coat, and glanced up at the sky, which was rapidly filling with rain clouds. It was Sunday, and he’d intended to spend the afternoon in the Chronicle office, catching up on the unending details that always managed to pile up until they threatened to overwhelm the newspaper’s small staff, no matter how hard they worked. He was wading through a sea of paperwork when, an hour ago, Rebecca Morrison had turned up with a shy smile and the suggestion that he give up his boring old work in favor of accompanying her out to the flea market that had taken over the old drive-in theater on the western edge of town. Her eagerness was infectious, and Oliver quickly decided that none of the bills and correspondence that had waited for his attention this long couldn’t wait a day or two longer. Now, however, as he shivered in the chill of the late March day, he wondered if he hadn’t made a mistake. They were still two blocks from the drive-in, and it seemed the sky might open up with a downpour at any moment. “How come they’re open so early? Aren’t they afraid they’ll get rained out?”
Rebecca smiled serenely. “They won’t,” she said. “It’s the very first day, and it never rains on the first day of the flea market.”
“That’s the Rose Parade,” Oliver corrected her. “And that’s on New Year’s Day, in California, where it never rains. Unless it’s flooding, of course.”
“Well, it’s not going to rain today,” Rebecca assured him. “And I like the flea market on the first day. It’s when all the things people find in the attic or the basement over the winter are for sale.”
Oliver shrugged. As far as he was concerned, one man’s junk wasn’t another man’s treasure at all: it just became someone else’s junk for a while. There was one item he’d been eyeing for years now—a truly ugly porcelain table lamp, embellished with strange vines that snaked up from its gilt-painted base and were studded with pieces of purple, red, and green colored glass meant to look like grapes. The lamp was topped by a hideous stained-glass shade—three pieces cracked, at last count—intended to suggest the spreading leaves of the vine. When lit, the light filtering through the leaf-form glass cast a shade of sickly green that made anyone within its glow look deathly ill. So far, Oliver had seen it on three different tables at the flea market, watched as it was sold no fewer than four times at the Blackstone Historical Society Auction, and even found it displayed for a couple of days in the window of an antique shop—not, blessedly, Janice Anderson’s. “Just promise me you won’t buy the grape lamp,” he asked.
“Oh, I already did.” Rebecca giggled. “I bought it two years ago. I was going to give it to someone as a joke, but the more I looked at it, the less funny it seemed. So I gave it to the Historical Society.”
“Did anyone buy it at the auction?” Oliver asked.
“You bet!” Rebecca said. “Madeline Hartwick snapped it right up! Of course, she only bought it because she knew I’d donated it and was afraid I’d be hurt if nobody bid on it.” Her eyes clouded. “Do you think she’s going to be all right?” Rebecca asked, her voice anxious.
“It’s going to take a while,” Oliver replied. Madeline was finally out of the hospital now, but still hadn’t recovered from the terrifying night when her husband, Jules, almost killed her, and succeeded in killing himself. She and her daughter, Celeste, were staying in Boston with Madeline’s sister. Oliver wondered if Madeline would ever come back to the big house at the top of Harvard Street.
The strangest thing was that no one yet knew exactly why Jules Hartwick had killed himself, nor had Oliver been able to fathom exactly what the banker had meant when he’d uttered his last words:
“You have to stop it … before it kills us all.”
Stop what? Jules had said nothing else before he’d died on the steps of the Asylum. Though Oliver had asked Madeline and Celeste what Jules could possibly have meant, neither woman had any idea. Oliver inquired of others as well—Andrew Sterling, who had been at the house that terrible night; Melissa Holloway at the bank; Jules’s attorney, Ed Becker. But no one had come up with an answer.
Only Oliver’s uncle, Harvey Connally, had even ventured a guess. “Do you suppose he thought there was some connection between what happened to him and poor Elizabeth McGuire’s suicide?” his uncle mused. “But that doesn’t make much sense, does it? After all, even though Jules and Bill McGuire are some kind of shirttail cousins, Jules wasn’t related to Elizabeth at all. From what I remember of her family, pretty much all of them were crazy, one way or another. But that didn’t have anything to do with Jules. His parents were steady as a rock, both of them.” The old man had sighed. “Well, I don’t suppose we’ll ever know, will we?”
So far, Harvey Connally had been proved right; no one yet had the slightest idea what had provoked Jules Hartwick’s sudden mental breakdown and suicide. Even the problems at the bank were getting straightened out, and though they weren’t all settled yet, nobody was saying that Jules had done anything illegal. Imprudent, perhaps, but the bank was in no danger of failing, and he’d been in no danger of being disciplined, either by the bank’s board or by the Federal Reserve auditors.
“I keep feeling like I should have done something,” Rebecca said, unconsciously slipping her hand into Oliver’s as they neared the outskirts of Blackstone and the sagging stockade fence that had once protected the patrons of the drive-in movie from the glaring headlights of cars passing in and out of town on Main Street. “Maybe instead of praying with Aunt Martha, I should have—” She faltered for a moment, then looked helplessly up at Oliver. “Doesn’t it seem like I should have done something?”
“I don’t think there was anything anyone could do,” Oliver told her, giving her hand a reassuring squeeze. “And I don’t think we’ll ever know exactly what happened that night.” He put on a bright smile and changed the subject. “So, are we looking for something special, or are we just browsing to see what people are throwing out this year?”
“I want to find a present for my cousin,” Rebecca told him.
“Andrea?” Oliver asked. “Do you even know where she is?”
“She’s coming home.”
“Home?” Oliver echoed. “You mean to your aunt’s house?”
Rebecca nodded. “She called Aunt Martha the day before yesterday, and said she didn’t have anywhere else to go.”
Oliver remembered the last time he’d seen Andrea Ward. It was twelve years ago, the day before her eighteenth birthday, and Andrea had been talking about nothing except getting away from her mother.
Her mother, and Blackstone too.
Oliver had been sitting at the soda fountain in the drugstore near the square when Andrea and a couple of her friends had come in. Barely even noticing he was there, they’d huddled together on the three stools at the soda fountain’s corner, and he was treated to at least one teenager’s view of Blackstone.
“I can’t believe I’ve survived this long,” Andrea had said, impatiently brushing her long mane of blond hair away from her face, only to groan in exasperation a moment later as it fell right back over her forehead. “And the first thing I’m going to do is get this cut off. Can you believe my mother actually thinks it’s a sin to cut your hair?” Then, with a brittle laugh, she proceeded to recite the long list of things Martha Ward had proclaimed sinful. “There’s dancing and drinking and going to movies, just for starters. And smoking, of course,” she added, lighting a cigarette with a defiant flourish. “And let’s not forget dating either. How am I supposed to find a husband if I can’t have a date?”
“Maybe she wants you to go to college,” one of her friends suggested, but Andrea only laughed again.
“All she wants me to do is pray, just like she does,” the girl declared. As she brushed her hair off her face again, Oliver had glimpsed how pretty she was, despite the heavy makeup she wore.
Or she would have been pretty, if she wasn’t so angry. But Andrea had been angry for a long time, and over the years her anger had manifested itself in clothes that showed off her figure a little too perfectly, and makeup that hardened her face rather than accentuated its beauty.
And though she was forbidden to date, she’d always been popular with Blackstone’s teenage boys.
Far too popular, according to Martha Ward.
Having heard Andrea’s diatribe, when she disappeared from Blackstone the next day, leaving nothing behind except a note saying she’d gone to Boston and was never coming back, Oliver hadn’t been surprised.
Martha Ward had been.
She’d been both surprised and furious. On the single occasion nearly three years ago, when Andrea had finally returned to visit Blackstone with her live-in boyfriend in tow, Martha refused to see her.
“I do not countenance sin,” she proclaimed. “Don’t come back until you’ve either married him or left him.”
Andrea had not been seen in Blackstone since.
“What happened?” Oliver asked now, as he and Rebecca turned onto the grounds of the old drive-in movie and surveyed the two dozen tables that had been set up—only a third of what there would be later in the spring and in the summer, when the weather had warmed and the tourists began coming through.
“Her boyfriend left her, and she lost her job,” Rebecca said. “I guess she really doesn’t have anyplace else to go. So I thought I’d try to find something to cheer her up.”
They meandered among the tables for a while, stopping now and then to wonder at some of the items that some people seemed to think other people might want. One of the tables was covered with tiny people constructed out of pebbles that had been glued together and painted with happy faces. PEBBLE PEOPLE, a small, badly lettered card on the table proclaimed. TO KNOW THEM IS TO LOVE THEM. To know them is to loathe them, Oliver thought, but kept silent, guessing that the elderly woman sitting hopefully behind the table had made the weird little humanoids herself.
Another table contained a collection of light-switch plates to which dozens of rhinestones had been glued, and yet another displayed religious icons constructed out of tiny shells.
None of it, they decided, was right for Andrea.
And then, sitting on a table that Janice Anderson was tending, they found it. Rebecca spotted it first, half hidden behind an antique picture frame that had a chip on it, thus disqualifying it from being displayed in Janice’s shop on Main Street. “Look!” Rebecca cried. “Isn’t it wonderful?”
Oliver looked curiously at the object in Rebecca’s hand. At first he wasn’t quite sure what it was. It seemed to be a dragon’s head, which Rebecca was holding by the neck. Two red eyes glared out from deep sockets. When Rebecca squeezed the dragon’s neck, Oliver saw a spark deep in its throat, immediately followed by a flame that shot out of its mouth.
“It’s a cigarette lighter,” Rebecca exclaimed. “Isn’t it perfect?”
“How do you know Andrea still smokes?” Oliver asked.
“Because I heard Aunt Martha telling her she couldn’t smoke anywhere in the house.” Rebecca’s expression clouded. “That’s why I want to give her this. She already feels terrible about the way her life is going, and now Aunt Martha wants her to feel bad about smoking too. At least I can let her know that I don’t disapprove of everything she does.” The flame died away as Rebecca eased her grip on the lighter. She held the lighter out to Oliver, and he reached out to take it from her, but the instant his fingers touched the metal of its snout, he reflexively jerked them away as if they’d been burned.
“Be careful!” Rebecca cautioned. With one fingertip she touched the dragon’s snout herself. It was barely warm. “He must have bitten you, Oliver,” she said. “It’s not hot at all.” Smiling, she dropped the cigarette lighter into Oliver’s hand.
Just as Rebecca had told him, the lighter now felt perfectly cool. But that was impossible: it had been burning hot just a second before. As he turned the strange object over, searching for its price, he wondered whether the odd sensation of heat he’d just felt was a sign—like the troubling headaches he’d been having—of something wrong. Very wrong. Lost in his disturbing thoughts, he barely noticed that Janice Anderson had finished with the customer she’d been waiting on and turned to them. At a nudge from Rebecca, Oliver recovered himself and held out the lighter. “How much for the dragon?” he asked.
Janice gazed blankly at the object Oliver was holding. “Are you sure this was on my table?” she said.
Oliver nodded. “Right there, next to that frame.”
Frowning, Janice took the cigarette lighter and examined it from every angle. There was a trade name stamped on the bottom, but it was far too worn to be legible. Though at first glance it appeared to be gold, she could see that the cheap plating was starting to peel away; and the “ruby” eyes were obviously glass, maybe even plastic. The question was, Where had it come from? She had no memory of having bought it, nor even of picking it up from the back-room clutter now spread out on the table in front of her. But then, surveying some of the other junk on the table, she realized she didn’t know where most of these bits and pieces had come from. Many were the odds and ends purchased in lots from estate sales. Others, she could have bought from any one of the dozens of people who had come into her shop over the last year, offering for sale treasure they’d found hidden in their attics. Usually, Janice simply turned them away, but now and then, when she sensed that someone was selling something out of desperate need, she would knowingly buy a worthless object, simply as a way of allowing its bearer to keep his dignity and pocket a dollar or two.
That, undoubtedly, was how the lighter had come into her possession, she now decided, even though she had no memory of it. But how much might she have paid for it? Five dollars? Perhaps ten? “Twenty?” she suggested, knowing there was no chance Oliver would agree to her first price. To her dismay, it was Rebecca Morrison who replied without a second’s hesitation.
“I’ll take it! It’s just the kind of thing Andrea will love!”
“For twenty dollars?” Janice Anderson heard herself say. “You will not take it for twenty dollars, Rebecca. It certainly isn’t worth more than ten, and if you ask me, seven-fifty would be closer to fair.”
“Great!” Oliver said. “How about five? Or would you like to counter at two-fifty?”
Janice tried to glare at him, but found herself laughing instead. “How about we stick to the seven-fifty my honest side thinks it’s worth?”
Before she could change her mind, Oliver paid for the dragon’s head lighter, and Janice wrapped it up for Rebecca in a piece of tissue paper.
“You really think your cousin will like it?” Oliver asked as they left the flea market a few minutes later.
“Of course she will,” Rebecca assured him. Her face was alight with pleasure at her find. “It really is just perfect for her.”
Oliver hoped that if Andrea shared his and Janice’s judgment about the aesthetics of the lighter, the young woman would be kind enough to keep her thoughts to herself.