An hour later, as she worked the last thread into the design, then snipped its end away so deftly that it instantly disappeared into the pattern, she heard a sharp rap at the door, announcing the arrival of her maid. Setting the handkerchief aside, she drew her robe more tightly around her throat. “You may come in,” she announced.
The door opened and the servant appeared, bearing a silver tray upon which she could see a plate covered by an ornately engraved silver dome.
An afternoon repast.
Which meant that tonight would be the fancy-dress ball. She must begin thinking about a costume.
“What have you brought me, Marie?” the woman asked. “A pâté perhaps? Some caviar?”
The nurse’s hands tightened on the metal tray.
Pâté?
Caviar?
Not likely.
And not that it mattered either. Even if she’d brought half a pound of pâté de foie gras or a whole can of Beluga caviar, it wouldn’t be good enough for this one! She hadn’t eaten anything at all for a week. And how many times had she told the woman her name was Clara, not Marie? “It’s spaghetti,” she said as she bent at the waist, intending to set the tray down on the woman’s lap. “With some nice salad with oranges, and a roll.”
“Be careful!” the woman ordered, her voice sharp. “This robe was handmade for me, and if you stain it—”
“I know.” The nurse sighed, straightening again, the tray still in her hands. “I’ll be dismissed.” She eyed the rough terry-cloth robe the patient wore over her flannel nightgown, and wondered just what material the woman’s delusions had created. Silk? Ermine? Who knew? Or cared? “And if you spill it all over yourself, don’t try to blame me. It won’t be anybody’s fault but your own.”
The patient drew herself up, her eyes narrowing into slits of anger. “I will not be spoken to like—”
“You’ll be spoken to any way I want,” the nurse interrupted. “And if you’re smart, you’ll eat this.”
Finally setting the metal tray on the patient’s lap, she lifted the cover off the plate.
The silver dome lifted to reveal a tangle of worms writhing in a pool of blood, and a rat, its red eyes glaring balefully up at her. As she hurled the silver tray off her lap and flung it aside, the rat leaped away to scuttle across the floor, and the blood and worms cascaded down Marie’s uniform. Feeling no sympathy at all for the servant who had subjected her to such torture, the woman reached out to slap the hapless girl, but to her utter astonishment, the maid caught her wrist, immobilizing it in a grip so strong the woman was suddenly terrified her bones might break.
“How dare—” she began, but the maid cut in without letting her finish.
“Don’t ‘how dare’ me, Miss High-and-Mighty! I’ve had just about enough of your acting like I’m your servant. Look what you’ve done to my uniform! How would you like it if these were your clothes?”
Rendered speechless by the impertinence, the woman watched as the maid dropped her wrist, then reached out and snatched up the handkerchief she’d finished embroidering only a few minutes ago. As the woman looked on in horror from her bed, the servant pressed the fine linen square to her chest, using it to soak up the blood on her uniform.
“Stop that!” she demanded. “Stop that this instant! You’ll ruin it!”
The nurse glowered furiously at the patient as she wiped away the mess of spaghetti and tomato sauce that was still dripping down her brand new uniform. She’d bought it only last week and was wearing it for the first time that day. “You think you can get away with anything, don’t you?” she asked. “Well, you’re about to find out who runs this place, and it isn’t you.” Leaving the patient cowering in her bed, the nurse strode out of the room, returning a few moments later with an orderly and a doctor. While the orderly mopped the splatter of spaghetti off the linoleum floor, the nurse recounted the incident to the doctor. “I suppose if she won’t eat, it’s really none of my business,” she finished. “But I don’t have to stand for her throwing her food at me.”
The doctor, whose eyes had been fixed on the patient throughout the nurse’s recitation, smiled thinly. “No,” he agreed, “you certainly don’t. And it’s certainly time she began eating too, don’t you think?”
For a moment the nurse said nothing, but then, as she realized what the doctor was saying, she smiled for the first time since entering the room a few minutes earlier. “Yes,” she said, “I certainly do!”
With the aid of two more orderlies, the doctor and the nurse secured the struggling patient to her bed with thick nylon straps. When the woman was totally immobilized, the doctor instructed the aides to hold the patient’s mouth open.
As the woman moaned and struggled, then began to gag, the doctor inserted a thick plastic feeding tube through her mouth, down her throat, and into her stomach.
“There,” he said. “That should do it.”
Before he left the nurse to begin feeding the immobilized patient, he stooped down and picked up the soiled handkerchief from the floor. Holding it gingerly between his thumb and forefinger, he gazed at the elaborately embroidered initial and the perfectly worked lace. “Interesting,” he said, more to himself than to the nurse. “I wonder who she thought she was making it for.” Crushing the handkerchief into a shapeless mass, he stuffed it into the pocket of his white coat and left the room.
The woman in the bed tried to cry out, tried to beg him not to take away the beautiful handkerchief she’d spent so many weeks making, but the tube in her throat turned her plea into nothing more than an incomprehensible moan.
She never saw the handkerchief again.
A month later, when she was finally released from the bonds that held her to the bed, she waited until she was alone, then used the belt of her terry-cloth robe to hang herself from the clothes hook on the back of her door.
* * *
Still gazing at the handkerchief, the dark figure let his finger trace the perfectly embroidered R that had been worked into one of its corners.
The letter itself told him who its recipient must be.
All he regretted was that he couldn’t deliver it personally. Still, he knew how to guide the handkerchief to its destination, and who its bearer would be.…
Chapter 1
Oliver Metcalf had spring fever. There simply wasn’t any other way to describe it. The first symptoms had appeared early that morning, when he found himself lingering in his kitchen over an extra cup of coffee while he watched a pair of robins begin their courtship. It was the first morning that was warm enough to open the window, and the air was redolent with the musky smell of leaves that had been slowly decomposing under the winter’s finally vanished blanket of snow. Inhaling the scent of spring, he felt the first faint urge to take the day off. He ignored the urge, of course, since today was Tuesday, the deadline for putting this week’s edition of the Chronicle to bed, but the seductive sense of lassitude that had come over him as the birds’ songs drifted into his kitchen only increased a few minutes later as he set out down Harvard Street toward the village at the foot of North Hill. His pace, which he’d fully intended to keep aerobically brisk, had slowed to a leisurely stroll, and he kept pausing to admire the crocuses that were blooming everywhere, and the daffodil shoots that seemed to have shot up at least six inches just since yesterday.
By the time he came to Main Street, a stop at the Red Hen had seemed utterly imperative, and this morning’s fifteen minutes of gossip disguised as “networking” had somehow managed to stretch out to half an hour. Even then, Bill McGuire and Ed Becker were still at the counter when he left, postponing the start of their workday under the guise of a serious conversation regarding the financing for Blackstone Center and when it might finally come through. That Melissa Holloway, who had officially been appointed permanent president of the bank at the last meeting of its board of directors, had told them they could count on no approvals any earlier than June seemed to cut no ice with Bill and Ed. But then, it was that
kind of morning: today everyone seemed to prefer speculation over actual labor. When Oliver finally arrived at the Chronicle, it was more of the same.
“Everyone wants to know when you’re going to run a story about what’s been going on,” Lois Martin said as he opened the office door. “I just got another call—this time from Edna Burnham. She says everyone in town is talking, and it’s up to you to stop it.”
The temperature of Oliver’s pleasant springtime mood notched down to a wintry chill. He knew perfectly well what Lois was talking about: a day hadn’t gone by in the month since Martha Ward had burned her own house to the ground and perished in the flames that someone hadn’t called the paper demanding to know what—exactly—the connection was between the suicides of Elizabeth McGuire, Jules Hartwick, and Martha Ward. As far as Oliver could see, there was no connection at all.
A few odd coincidences, perhaps, but nothing more than that.
It was Edna’s contention, Oliver knew, that there was ominous significance in the fact that all three of the suicides had occurred shortly after a full moon. But the term lunacy had been around in one form or another for millennia, and given that all three of Blackstone’s tragic victims had been under one form of stress or another, Oliver wasn’t willing to call the full moon a causative factor for any of them. A trigger, possibly, but certainly no more.
Still, if Edna Burnham was demanding answers, it meant the talk was starting to get even more serious than Oliver had thought.
“Does she have a new theory, or is she just upset?” he asked.
Lois Martin hesitated before answering his question, and when she did, her eyes didn’t quite meet Oliver’s. “She’s wondering if it might not all go back to the Asylum somehow.”
“The Asylum,” Oliver repeated. “And did she say what put that idea in her mind?”
Lois’s eyes finally met his. “A few things, actually,” she said, picking up a pad on which she’d scribbled some notes when old Mrs. Burnham had called. The phone had been ringing off the hook when Lois arrived that morning. “First off,” Lois told him, “there’s the anonymous gifts. Edna claims to have heard whisperings about weird things that turned up, first at the McGuires’, then at Jules’s house and at Martha’s. She says no one knows where they came from.”
A look of disbelief came over Oliver’s face. “Come on! What kind of things?”
“Well, Bill McGuire was talking about a doll that showed up in the mail a few days before Elizabeth killed herself, and Rebecca told her about a gold cigarette lighter—”
“I know where that came from,” Oliver told her. “No mystery there. Rebecca and I found it at the flea market.”
“I know, I know.” She held up a hand to stop his protests. “Edna’s been doing some sleuthing of her own. She’s been over at the library, chatting with Rebecca. And it seems she asked Janice Anderson where she got it, and Janice has no memory of ever having seen that lighter before the morning Rebecca bought it.”
Oliver groaned. “I suspect Janice can’t remember where she got half the merchandise in her store,” he said. “And the stuff she was selling at the flea market was just junk. Besides, what about Jules Hartwick? What mysterious item supposedly showed up there?”
“There was a locket,” Lois replied. “Celeste found it on the lawn after the snow melted.”
“Which means that anyone could have dropped it sometime between December and three weeks ago, when Celeste and Madeline got back from Boston,” Oliver pointed out. “I would hardly call that conclusive evidence of anything.”
“Hey, don’t shoot the messenger,” Lois protested. “I’m just reporting what Edna Burnham said.”
“She said a great deal,” Oliver remarked dryly. “But what actually is she getting at? Does she think there’s some kind of curse on these things?”
Lois Martin shrugged elaborately. “You said it, not me.” She hesitated, but then decided she might as well tell him everything Edna had said. “She also said something about Rebecca having seen someone at the Hartwicks’ the night of the party—presumably the someone who left the locket, I suppose. Furthermore, Edna maintains that each and every one of the families who received these objects has some connection to the Asylum. Or at least did have, back when it was open.”
“Aha!” Oliver said, as if Lois had finally delivered incontrovertible proof of the ludicrous nature of Edna Burnham’s speculations. “Find me a family in Blackstone that didn’t.” Oliver’s eyes glittered with challenge. “The Asylum was the mainstay of the economy around here for years. Everyone in town had a relative working there, and half of them had relatives who were in the place, for God’s sake!”
Lois held up her hands as if to fend off his words. “Hey, I’m not the one you have to convince. It’s Edna—” She paused, then grinned with malicious enjoyment. “—and the hundred or so other people she’s probably convinced by now.”
“Oh, Lord.” Oliver groaned again. “What am I supposed to do? Write an article about some ancient evil that’s suddenly come forth from the Asylum to wreak havoc on us all?”
“Hey, that’s not bad,” Lois deadpanned. “I can see the headline now: ‘Beware the Blackstone Curse.’ ”
“How about this one instead,” Oliver shot back: “ ‘Beware the Unemployed Assistant Editor.’ ”
He was smiling as he turned and headed toward the rear of the building to the renovated office that Bill McGuire had finally finished last week. He busied himself readying the paper for the press, but try as he did to put Edna Burnham’s outrageous theory out of his thoughts, Oliver found himself coming back to it over and over again. As the day wore on, and Edna’s speculations kept popping unbidden back into his mind, he knew the idea must be churning around other minds in Blackstone as well.
Finally, shortly after noon, with this week’s Chronicle put to bed but his thoughts still restless, he gave up. “I’m going home,” he told Lois. “I might even go up to the Asylum and take a look around.” He managed a grin he didn’t quite feel. “Who knows? Maybe I’ll even find something that will prove Edna’s right.”
“Better if you can find something that proves she’s wrong,” Lois replied.
“More likely, I won’t find anything at all.”
Leaving the office, he thought about stopping into the library to see Rebecca Morrison, then remembered the dark glares he’d received from Germaine Wagner the last few times he’d turned up during working hours. Better to come back at closing time, when Germaine might not approve but at least would have no reason to object if Rebecca chose to let him walk her home.
Walk her home? He sounded like a high school kid. Obviously, the spring fever was back!
As he started up North Hill, Oliver found himself eyeing a few crocuses he might just steal for Rebecca later on in the afternoon. But then, when he came to the gates of the Asylum and stopped to look directly at the building, his good mood vanished.
Just the idea of entering the deserted building was enough to make his stomach cramp, and it wasn’t until he had turned away from the Asylum, walked back down the hill and entered his own house that the knot of pain in his belly began to ease. But his restlessness would not be tamed. He paced the living room, wandered into the kitchen, then back, feeling as though he needed to look for something—something that eluded him.
Almost unconsciously, his eyes moved to the ceiling.
Upstairs?
What was there to search for upstairs? There were only the three bedrooms and the bathroom. Nothing unusual to be discovered there.
Still, he found himself mounting the stairs, entering each room and pulling open the doors of the closets in all three bedrooms, looking for … what?
He’d been through these closets dozens of times—maybe hundreds—and knew exactly what was in each of them. Old clothes he hadn’t wanted to throw away, boxes of Christmas decorations, his luggage. But nothing from the Asylum.
Still, he searched each one a second time, then started back toward th
e top of the stairs, where he paused and found himself looking up once more.
The attic?
He couldn’t remember the last time he’d been up there. But as he regarded the old-fashioned, spring-loaded, pull-down ladder, it occurred to him that if there really were any old records around, they might just be up in the attic. Even if his own father hadn’t stored anything up there, some of the earlier superintendents might have.
Getting the step stool from the kitchen, he reached up and jerked the ladder down. The motion sent a shiver through his spine as the old springs squealed and groaned. With a flashlight in hand, he mounted the stairs, opened the trapdoor that was the attic’s only access, and climbed up into the space beneath the house’s steeply pitched roof.
An old-fashioned push-button light switch was mounted on a support post. When he pressed it, a bare bulb sputtered on, filling the area with a yellowish glow.
No more than five feet away was an oak filing cabinet and two old wooden fruit crates, faded, curling labels barely clinging to their sides. Opening the top drawer of the filing cabinet, he found a stack of leather-bound ledgers, each of them containing a full year of the Asylum’s bookkeeping, the entries noted in the kind of precise accountant’s handwriting that has all but disappeared since the advent of the computer.
The second drawer contained more of the same, and so did the fourth. The third drawer, either jammed or locked, wouldn’t budge.
He shifted his attention to the crates, testing the top of the first one. Free of nails, its surface was slightly warped and took no effort at all to lift away.
Inside the box were two stacks of file folders.