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 ha
d 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.
Chapter 5
Oliver Metcalf was not sleeping well. Images were flickering all around him, as if he were in a carnival fun house gone dreadfully wrong: no matter where he turned, how he twisted, he could neither escape them nor see them clearly. But they frightened him nonetheless, for though they hovered around the edges of his vision, never coming into perfect focus, there was something familiar about all of them.
Painfully familiar.
He moaned with the effort just to see, the low guttural sound of a man exerting all the effort he can muster, to no avail. No matter how he tried, Oliver simply couldn’t get a grasp on the images that floated maddeningly around him like smoke drifting in mirrors.
Finally, his frustration culminated in a spasmodic contraction of nearly every muscle in his body, and he came abruptly awake. Even before he opened his eyes, he knew something was terribly wrong.
Every bone in his body was aching with cold.
His eyes blinked open and for a split second he felt certain he was still caught in the nightmare, for around him he saw none of the familiar sights to which he usually awoke. Instead of the wall of his bedroom and the budding branches of the maple tree outside, he was staring at the silhouette of the Asylum, etched against a leaden sky. He was not in his house, but outside it. Shaking off the last cobwebs of his uneasy sleep, Oliver slowly sat up, stretching first his arms and then his legs.
It was as he stood that he realized that not only did his limbs ache but his head did too. He braced himself against the great stab of agony that often followed the first telltale pang of one of his headaches, but the onslaught did not come. Instead, the dull ache in his head slowly ebbed away. He moved toward his house, but before going inside, felt an urge to look back just once at the Asylum. As his eyes scanned the dark building that loomed over his cottage—and his entire life—the strange images flickered once more through his mind.
But what did they mean? And why, since they were obviously embedded deep within his memory, could he not call them up as anything other than ghostly fragments of a past that seemed to be deliberately hiding from him? Turning away from the building at the top of the hill and closing the door firmly behind him, Oliver made his way to the kitchen and put on a pot of water for coffee.
As he waited for the water to boil, he glanced up at the clock: just after six A.M. Far too early to call Phil Margolis, even if the doctor would see him on a Saturday. But why call the doctor anyway? Whatever was causing his headaches was not a physical problem: the CAT scan had proved that.
No, it had to do with memories, and with the Asylum. And it had to do with his father.
As he poured the boiling water over the coffee grounds in his old-fashioned Silex, he remembered the case history he’d read a few days ago—a case history that had shown him just how little he’d really known about his father. Since then, he’d gone through most of the files he’d found in the attic, to discover they shared a sickening similarity. For years, patients in the Asylum had been subjected to the worst kinds of treatment, treatment that must have been utterly unbearable for them.
All of it done under his father’s supervision.
Oliver absently poured himself a cup of coffee and took small sips of the hot brew as he thought.
Almost against his will, he found himself going to the window and once more looking up at the grimy stone building. What else had gone on inside it? What was hidden behind its walls that was so horrifying it prevented him from entering the building? Even as the question formed in his mind, he knew who would have the answer.
Draining the rest of his coffee in two big gulps—gulps that threatened to scald his throat—Oliver pulled a jacket off the hook next to the door to the garage and got into his car before he could change his mind.
Five minutes later he pulled up in front of the big house on Elm Street, just a little west of Harvard, in which his uncle had spent his entire life. Harvey Connally had been born in the master bedroom on the second floor of the Cape Cod-style house, and often announced that he had every intention of dying in the same room. “A man can travel the world all he wants,” Harvey had been heard to say more than once, “but when he’s ready to die, he shouldn’t be far from where he was born.” Though there were those in Blackstone who thought Harvey Connally’s determination to die in the very bed in which he’d been born was a bit excessive, the old-fashioned sentiment was more typical of the town than not.
The house itself had become all but invisible from the street over the years, hidden behind a hedge that had been allowed to grow far beyond the basic demands of privacy. Whenever Oliver suggested that it be trimmed, though, his uncle shook his head. “After I die, you can do what you want with it. For now, I’ll just leave it alone. I’ve got no reason to see what’s going on outside it, and other people certainly have no need to look at me!”
Now Oliver opened the gate, then let himself into the house with his own key, calling out to his uncle as soon as he was in the foyer.
“In the library,” the old man’s reedy voice called back. A moment later, as Oliver entered the book-lined room—his uncle’s favorite in the house, and his own as well—Harvey Connally eyed him suspiciously. “A mite early for a social call, don’t you think?” he asked. “I don’t generally stir the martinis until the sun has set.”
“I wasn’t even sure you’d be up,” Oliver admitted.
“I’m always up by five these days,” Harvey replied. “An old man doesn’t need as much sleep as a young one,” he added pointedly. When Oliver made no reply, his uncle nodded to a silver tray that sat on a table in front of the wing-backed chair in which he was seated. “Help yourself,” he said.
As Oliver poured himself a cup of steaming coffee, he felt his uncle watching him appraisingly, and as Oliver sat down, the old man issued his judgment. “You look tired, Oliver. Peaked. As if you’re not sleeping well.”
“I’m not,” Oliver confessed. “And there’s something I need to talk to you about.” Though his uncle said nothing, Oliver was certain the old man’s posture changed, that he became wary. “It’s my father,” he went on. “I want to know—”
“There’s nothing you need to know about that man,” his uncle snapped, his eyes flashing with anger. “After he died, I raised you to be a Connally, not a Metcalf! Do you understand? A Connally, like your mother! Like me! The less said about the man who was your father, the better.” Harvey Connally’s gaze fixed on Oliver with an intensity that warned the younger man he was treading on ground even more dangerous than he had expected, but he went on anyway.
“I need to talk abo
ut my father,” he repeated. Choosing his words carefully, he told his uncle about the headaches he’d been having, and the strange half memories that seemed to accompany them.
“You should talk to Phil Margolis about this,” the old man growled, his eyes hooding as he pressed deeper into his chair, almost as if he was seeking protection from his nephew.
“I did,” Oliver said quietly. “And he hasn’t been able to find anything wrong. But there is something wrong, Uncle Harvey. There are things I can’t remember that I think I have to remember.”
The old man snorted impatiently. “When you get to be my age, you’ll know that some things are best not remembered.” His eyes remained fixed on Oliver like those of an old wolf staring down a younger one. But Oliver didn’t waver.
“I still need to know. I need to know what happened to my father. And I need to know what happened to my sister.”
Harvey Connally studied his nephew for several long seconds, as if taking his measure. Finally, he seemed to come to a decision. “Your father killed himself,” he said.
“I knew that,” Oliver replied. “But I don’t know why. Was it because he missed my mother so much?”
“I really have no idea,” Harvey said, his tone betraying his reluctance to discuss the matter at all. “I suppose it could have been that. I also suppose”—and his voice hardened—“it could have been because the trustees had decided to close the Asylum.”
Oliver felt his pulse quicken slightly. “I thought the decision to close the Asylum was made after my father died.”
Harvey’s head tipped slightly in assent. “There was no reason to tell you otherwise,” he said.
“They fired him, didn’t they?” Oliver asked. “The trustees found out what he’d been doing and fired him.”
Again Harvey Connally’s head tilted a fraction of an inch, but he said nothing more.
“And what about my sister?” Oliver said. “What happened to her?”
Harvey’s attention shifted away from Oliver, as he pondered something.
“Did my father have something to do with my sister’s death?” Oliver pressed.