The Blackstone Chronicles

Chapter 4

Steve Driver was seriously worried. His worries had been multiplying exponentially since Wednesday morning when Charlie Carruthers had arrived at the Wagners’ to deliver their mail and discovered the door standing wide open and the house apparently deserted. It hadn’t helped that instead of calling him immediately, old Charlie had followed his instincts and gone into the house, where he’d found Clara Wagner barely alive in her wheelchair and Germaine crushed under the elevator. In helping old Clara out of the elevator—a perfectly reasonable thing to do—he might well have destroyed evidence of an intruder. Evidence that could have stopped the clacking tongues that were, increasingly, suggesting that Rebecca Morrison was somehow to blame.
For all intents and purposes, the young woman had simply vanished off the face of the planet. God knows, he and Oliver, Bill McGuire, Ed Becker, and a party of other volunteers from Blackstone and even the surrounding towns had searched into the night on Wednesday and again all day yesterday before giving up.
Driver himself was absolutely certain that Germaine Wagner’s hideous death had been a freak accident—though he still had no theory to explain why she’d been inside the elevator shaft in the first place—but he had no answers for those who were suggesting that Rebecca must have had something to do with it. After all, they asked, if she was innocent, why had she run away? Without doubt, some terrible scene had been enacted in Germaine’s bedroom, but all the evidence indicated that whatever struggle occurred there, Germaine had been alone. The county coroner—a woman with a genius for excavating even the faintest evidence of a fight—had found nothing to implicate Rebecca Morrison, or anyone else.
Nothing had been scraped from beneath Germaine’s fingernails; no telltale hairs or foreign fibers were found clinging to her clothes.
Which left Steve Driver, as well as everyone else in Blackstone, unable to account for Rebecca’s disappearance. If she was abducted by someone who had killed Germaine, how had the killer managed to leave no trace of his presence behind?
And if she killed Germaine herself and then fled, why had she taken nothing with her? And left the door standing wide open, a sure signal to the first person who saw it that something was amiss inside the house?
Still, Rebecca was gone, he had no leads, and every hour the gossip was getting worse. Now, as he walked from his office to the bank, he wondered how best to conduct this interview. Would it be better to do it right out in front of everyone, where a few people might either overhear his questions or read his lips? Or should he conduct this part of his investigation in private, thus leaving everyone free to speculate about the questions he’d asked? He knew that technically the conversation should take place in private, but he also knew that there was one certain truth in places like Blackstone: people who talked behind closed doors had something to hide, and their conversations were therefore fair game for speculation.
Still, better to follow the rules, even if it did cause more talk.
“I wondered when you’d be in,” Melissa Holloway said, rising from her chair as Ellen Golding showed him into the office Melissa now occupied in Jules Hartwick’s place. “And I suspect I know what you want.”
“Activity on Rebecca Morrison’s accounts,” Driver said as he lowered himself into the chair in front of Melissa’s desk. He handed her a copy of the court order he’d gotten that morning instructing the bank to give him its cooperation.
“None, as of yesterday afternoon,” Melissa told him.
“You already checked?”
Melissa nodded. “It struck me that if Rebecca were really trying to run away, she’d have to have some money. And she hasn’t touched a dime.”
“Nothing?” Driver asked. “Are you sure?”
“I’ll check again.” Melissa turned to her keyboard and typed rapidly. “But as of yesterday there hadn’t been any withdrawals of cash, any checks, or any bank-card transactions.” She fell silent for a moment as the screen in front of her came to life, then turned back to the deputy sheriff. “Still nothing.”
Nor, Driver knew, could Rebecca have had much cash on hand, for even if she’d been in the habit of squirreling money away at home, whatever she might have hoarded would have gone up in the flames that consumed her aunt’s house. In the few weeks she’d been living at the Wagners’, there wouldn’t have been time to build up any new reserves. “The truth of the matter is that I can’t really imagine Rebecca running away from anything, anyway.” Driver let out a sigh. “Knowing her, if she’d done anything to Germaine at all, she’d have called me herself.”
“Then what happened?”
“If I knew, I wouldn’t be here,” Driver observed sourly. “It just doesn’t make any damn sense. There isn’t any evidence of a break-in, and even if an intruder had managed not to leave anything behind, I can’t believe Rebecca wouldn’t have screamed bloody murder.”
“Or put up a fight,” Melissa added as Steve, shaking his head in a gesture of bewilderment and frustration, stood to end the interview. “Maybe it’s the curse Edna Burnham keeps talking about,” she went on, smiling as she rose to see him out of her office. Then, seeing the look on the deputy’s face, she quickly apologized. “It was just a joke,” she assured him. “But not a very funny one, huh?”
“No,” Steve Driver agreed. “Not a very funny one at all.”
The oak dresser was turning out to be a bigger project than Ed Becker had originally bargained for. A lot bigger. He’d come down to the basement right after dinner, expecting that within an hour or so he would have the dresser disassembled and all its hardware off. But after more than two hours, he was still wrestling with the top.
Of the eighteen screws that had secured the top to the dresser—a number Ed had initially regarded as a sign of “the kind of craftsmanship you just don’t see anymore”— he had so far succeeded in removing only eleven. By now the “craftsmanship” Ed had admired only a couple of hours earlier had become “the kind of overkill only an idiot would indulge in!” Until Ed had begun swearing at the screws, Amy had been playing Daddy’s helper, but then Bonnie summoned Amy upstairs, out of earshot of his four-letter imprecations. For the last half hour he’d been alone in the basement, with no one even to soothe his complaints. As he struggled with screw number twelve—whose recalcitrance was threatening to defeat him altogether—his mind was focused as closely on the work at hand as it had ever been on the most complicated of his legal cases, so when the door to the basement stairs opened, he didn’t hear it.
Thus it came as a complete shock to him when Riley’s forty pounds of pure canine enthusiasm struck him a full broadside.
Three things happened nearly simultaneously:
His head reflexively jerked up, smashing hard against the frame of the dresser.
He sprawled out onto the basement floor, smashing his left knee hard on the concrete.
The point of the chisel he was clutching in his right hand sank deep into the flesh of his left palm.
Any one of the three would have been enough to make Ed yell; the combination of them all, piled onto the frustration he was already fighting, made him explode with fury. “AMY!” he bellowed. “Get this goddamn dog out of here! Right now!”
A second later his daughter came charging down the stairs. “Riley! Here, Riley! Come on, boy!” Wrapping her arms protectively around the big puppy, who was now happily licking his mistress’s face, Amy glared at her father. “He wasn’t trying to hurt you. He was only being friendly.”
“I don’t care what he was trying to do!” Ed snapped, getting to his feet and clamping the fingers of his right hand over the deep gouge the chisel had dug in his left palm. “Just get him out of here. If you can’t control him, you can’t keep him!” As Amy led the dog upstairs, her chin trembling as she struggled not to burst into tears, Ed moved to the laundry sink, wincing, to wash the blood from his left hand. He was rummaging around for something to wrap around his injured hand when Bonnie came down the stairs.
“For Heaven’s sake, Ed, what happened down here? Amy’s crying and says you threatened to take Riley away from her!”
“Well, if she can’t control him—”
“She’s not even six years old, Ed! And Riley’s not even six months. Maybe you should learn to control your temper!”
Ed spun around. “And maybe—” But as he saw the anger in Bonnie’s eyes dissolve into alarm at the sight of the blood oozing from his left hand, his own rage drained away. “It’s okay,” he quickly assured her. “The chisel gouged me, but it’s not nearly as bad as it looks.” Then, as Bonnie found a clean rag to wrap around his injured hand, he tried to apologize. “I’m really sorry,” he said. “You’re right. Riley wasn’t trying to hurt me, and certainly none of it was Amy’s fault. I—”
“Let’s just get you upstairs and bandaged, all right?” Bonnie said. As they passed the dresser, she glared at it, already having decided that the damn thing was to blame for her husband’s bleeding hand. “Incidentally,” she said, “I think I know how the pictures got into the Asylum.”
“Come on.” Ed looked at her, surprised. “We just found them a few hours ago. How could you find out where they came from?”
“Edna Burnham, of course,” Bonnie told him. “While you’ve been downstairs playing with your toys—”
“They’re not toys,” Ed interrupted. “They’re tools—”
“Whatever,” Bonnie said. “Anyway, while you’ve been playing with them, I’ve been on the phone. And according to Edna Burnham, you had a rather unsavory great-uncle.”
In the back of Ed’s mind, a dim memory stirred. “Paul,” he said, more to himself than to Bonnie.
“You mean Mrs. Burnham’s right?” Bonnie asked, astonished. “Who was he? And what did he do?”
“He was my grandfather’s brother,” Ed said. “And I’m not sure what he did. But I sort of remember Mom telling me about him once—how if anyone said anything to me at school, I shouldn’t tell Grandpa. But nobody ever did, and I guess I forgot all about him.”
“But why was he committed to the Asylum? What was he supposed to have done?” Bonnie pressed.
Ed shrugged. “Who knows? They could have locked him up for anything, I suppose. Maybe he had a nervous breakdown.”
“Or maybe he was a mass murderer,” Bonnie suggested, her voice teasing. “After all, your fascination with criminal law had to come from somewhere.”
They were in the bathroom now, and Ed winced as Bonnie peeled the rag away from his wound and began washing it with soap and water. “Don’t you think if he’d killed someone, I would have heard about it?” But then an image of his grandparents came suddenly to mind: Stiff, emotionless people, the kind of New Englanders who never would have dreamed of airing any of the family’s dirty laundry, even in private. If they’d had such a relative, neither one of them ever would have mentioned it. Indeed, they’d have probably stopped acknowledging his very existence on the day he’d gone into the Asylum.
The bizarre idea Bonnie had planted stayed with him for the rest of the evening. What if she was right? Not that Uncle Paul was likely to have been a mass murderer, of course, but what if he had actually killed someone? Maybe he’d heard more about his uncle than he now consciously remembered.
As he and Bonnie went to bed a few hours later, he was still searching his memory for any other scraps of information about his all-but-forgotten great-uncle, but whatever he might have been told had long since slipped away.
Every eye in the courtroom was on him, and Ed Becker resisted the urge to strut with pleasure at the discomfort he was causing the witness.
A cop was sitting in the witness box, just the kind of cop Ed hated most: a detective sergeant, the sort who assumed that anyone who’d been arrested must be guilty, and who therefore concentrated on searching only for evidence that would lend credence to his preconceived idea. Well, it wasn’t going to work this time.
This time, the cop had gone after Ed’s own great-uncle, and it was Ed’s intention today to destroy not merely the detective’s case but his credibility as well. By the time Ed was done with him, the detective would never be willing to get on a witness stand again, at least not in any courtroom where Ed Becker practiced.
And this courtroom was one of Ed Becker’s favorites. Large and airy, it was in the corner of the building, and had four immense windows, all of which were open today to allow the sweet spring breeze to wash away the last of winter’s mustiness.
But even in the cool breeze, the witness before Ed Becker was starting to sweat. Like a predator on the attack, Ed had caught the scent of the detective’s fear.
Turning away from the witness for a moment, Ed gave his great-uncle Paul a confident smile, a smile designed to let Paul Becker know, along with everyone else in the courtroom, that for all intents and purposes the verdict was already won. When Ed was finished with this witness, the state would undoubtedly drop its case altogether. With another smile, this one accompanied by an almost fraternal wink to the jurors, Ed turned back to the witness.
“Isn’t it true that you have absolutely no hard evidence that a crime was even committed?” he demanded.
The witness’s expression turned truculent, his jaw setting angrily. “We found blood,” he said. “A lot of blood.”
“A lot?” Ed asked, his tone dripping with sarcasm. “What do you mean by a lot? A gallon? Half a gallon? A quart?” As the detective squirmed, Ed pressed harder. “How about a pint? Did you find a pint of blood?”
“Stains,” the witness said. “We found stains on the defendant’s knife, and on his bed, and on his rug.”
Ed leaned forward, his face coming so close to the detective’s that the witness pulled back slightly. “So you didn’t find a lot of blood,” Ed said, his voice deadly quiet. “All you found were a few stains.”
Suddenly, from a courtroom that Ed knew should be absolutely silent, tensed to hear what his next question would be, he sensed a stirring, followed by a ripple of laughter.
He spun around, searching for the source of the distraction.
And beheld his daughter’s dog walking down the aisle from the door, carrying something in his mouth.
A second later Ed recognized the object that Riley was carrying. It was a leg.
A human leg.
On the foot, Ed could clearly see a white sock and a patent leather Mary Jane shoe.
The other end of the leg, cut off midway up the thigh, was still dripping with blood.
As Ed watched in horror, Riley pushed open the low gate that separated the spectators from the court, turned, and went to the defense table. Rearing up on his hind legs and wagging his tail, the dog dropped the bloody leg on the table in front of Paul Becker, then trotted from the courtroom.
Silence now. Deadly silence. Ed felt every eye in the room on him; they were waiting to see what he would do.
“It doesn’t mean anything,” he began, but before he could finish, another murmur ran through the room, and Ed turned toward the back of the courtroom, though he knew he was making a mistake even by looking.
“Guess maybe we just found some more blood, lawyer,” he heard the witness say. Spinning around, he glared at the detective.
“It means nothing,” Ed said, but his voice sounded shrill, even to himself. “The dog could have found—” But now he heard the courtroom door swinging open and he pivoted again, to see Riley coming down the aisle once more.
This time, carrying it as if he were bearing the crown at a coronation, the huge puppy held a head in his mouth.
A child’s head.
A little girl’s head.
The head of the little girl that Ed Becker’s great-uncle Paul was accused of killing.
A great rage welled up in Ed Becker as he watched the Labrador puppy carry the head toward the table at which his uncle sat.
No!
He couldn’t let it happen!
Not when he was this close!
Not when he’d had the jury in the palm of his hand and the prosecution’s primary witness on the verge of admitting he had no real evidence at all.
His fury cresting, the lawyer charged toward the defense table and lifted the huge dog off his feet. With the animal still clutching the child’s head in his mouth, Ed carried him to one of the open windows and hurled him out. He was already turning back to face the courtroom when he heard the blast of an air horn, followed by a howl of pain that chilled his very soul. Whirling back around, he leaned out the window and looked down.
All that was left of the dog was a shapeless mass of black fur, stained scarlet by the blood that was now oozing from his mouth.
A few feet away, the head the dog had been carrying lay on the pavement, staring straight up. But it was no longer the face of the little girl his uncle was accused of killing.
It was his daughter’s face.
Amy’s face.
A howl now rising in Ed’s own throat, he turned away from the window, unable to look for even a second longer into his daughter’s accusing eyes. But suddenly everything in the courtroom had changed.
He was no longer on the floor before the bench.
Now he was in the witness box, and everywhere he looked, his daughter was staring at him.
Amy sat at the prosecution table, gazing at him with condemning eyes.
Amy was on the bench, clad in black robes, already judging him.
Amy was everywhere, filling every seat, standing at every door, watching him from every direction.
She knew what he’d done.
She had seen it.
And now she was charging him, and prosecuting him, and judging him, and finding him guilty.
He rose up. “No!” he cried. “No!”
Suddenly, Ed Becker was wide awake, sitting straight up in bed, his body covered with a sheen of sweat. “No!” he said once more, but already the dream was releasing him from its grip. He felt exhausted, and flopped back on the bed, his heart pounding, his breathing ragged.
“Ed?” Bonnie said, sitting up and switching on the lamp next to her side of the bed. “Ed, what happened? Are you all right?”
He was silent for a long time, but finally nodded. “I—I think so. It was just a bad dream.”
Bonnie propped herself up on one elbow. “Do you want to tell me about it?”
Ed hesitated, but already many of the details had slipped away from him and all he could really remember was the last moment, when everywhere he looked he’d seen Amy, staring at him, knowing what he’d done. “Go back to sleep, honey,” he said, wrapping his arms around his wife. “It was only a dream. Something about a trial, and I think I did something to Riley. I can hardly even remember it.”
Bonnie reached out and switched off the light, and within a minute Ed felt her breathing fall back into the easy rhythm of sleep.
But he lay awake in the darkness for a long time. And even in the darkness, he could still see Amy’s accusing eyes.