Not bothering to ring the bell, Oliver tried the door and discovered that it was, as always, unlocked. “Locks were invented to keep honest people out,” Harvey had instructed him years ago. “They don’t do a damn thing to prevent dishonest people from getting in.” It was a maxim few people followed anymore; and in Blackstone, given the events of the past few months, it was a rare door indeed that was left unsecured for more than a moment or two, despite the utter lack of evidence that there was anything more than coincidence to the plague of death that had spread through the town. What had once seemed the quirky opinion of an old man trying to preserve old-fashioned ways now had the ring of prescient wisdom, Oliver thought as he stepped into the hall: none of Blackstone’s locks had yet kept anyone safe.
“Uncle Harvey?” Oliver called out as he closed the door behind him. Silence. He opened his mouth to call out again, but even as he was forming his uncle’s name, a cold chill of foreboding stopped him.
Something in the house was not right. He was about to start toward the kitchen, where his uncle habitually sat while he sipped his two cups of coffee and read the paper, when the old hall clock began striking the hour of ten. By this time, Harvey Connally would have finished his coffee and been at his desk, tending to the business of an elderly man: his stock portfolio and his correspondence.
Instead of turning into the dining room, Oliver moved past the base of the staircase to his uncle’s study. The door was open. Harvey Connally was sitting rigidly in the leather chair behind the desk, his face ashen, his lips stretched into a tight rictus of pain.
Oliver gasped. “Uncle Harvey? What is it? What’s wrong?” He moved quickly toward his uncle, his hand instinctively reaching for the telephone to summon help. Before he could lift the receiver, his uncle reached out and laid his right hand on the instrument, holding it firmly in its place.
“Not yet,” he said. His voice was strained, and Oliver could see the old man’s fingers trembling even as they held the receiver on its cradle. He was obviously in a great deal of pain, yet there was something in his voice that made Oliver abandon the idea of taking the telephone forcibly from his uncle’s grasp. As Oliver’s hands dropped to his sides, his uncle’s eyes, as clear and sharp as ever, despite the old man’s age and obvious pain, fixed on his. “Something was left for me this morning,” he said. His lips twisted into a grimace that was intended to be a smile. “I’m not sure what it means, but I have a feeling it wasn’t meant for me at all. I think it was probably meant for you.” His hand moved from the telephone to the polished mahogany box that still lay on his desktop. As Oliver automatically reached for it, Harvey Connally shook his head slightly and left his hand where it was, preventing Oliver from taking the box, just as a moment ago he’d prevented his nephew from lifting the telephone. “Not yet,” he said softly. Then he nodded to the chair opposite him. “Sit for a moment, Oliver.”
Oliver made no move toward the chair. “Uncle Harvey, you have to let me call Dr. Margolis. You look like you’re about to—” He abruptly cut off his words, but his uncle managed another smile. The piercing gaze did not waver.
“About to die?” he asked. “I think that’s exactly what I’m about to do, and if you do anything—anything at all—to keep me from it, I shall do everything in my power to make your life as miserable as possible for however much longer I live. I’m old, and I’m tired; I don’t mind dying. But before I go, I need to tell you something.”
Slowly, reluctantly, Oliver sank into the chair across from his uncle. The old man’s gaze remained fixed on him, and Oliver had an eerie feeling that his uncle was peering inside him, right to the depths of his soul. Finally, apparently satisfied by whatever he’d seen, Harvey spoke once more.
“I have always tried to do my best by you, Oliver,” he said. “I’m afraid I was not always successful, but I want you to know that I did my best, and that I never believed what your father told me. Never.” He fell silent for a moment, and cocked his head as if listening to words that were coming from a distant country, a place deep in the past. Then he shook his head and spoke again. “You were never a bad boy, Oliver. You were always as good as you knew how to be.” He paused, and now his eyes drifted to the mahogany box. “After I’m gone, you’re going to have to deal with what is in this box. I won’t try to tell you how to deal with it. You might choose simply to put it away somewhere. If you do, I advise you to put it where it cannot possibly ever again be found. If you choose to deal with it by opening the box, then I want you to keep one thing in mind.”
Once again Harvey Connally’s eyes fixed on Oliver’s, but this time they burned with an intensity greater than Oliver had ever seen before.
“I raised you to be a Connally, Oliver,” the old man said. “After your father died, and you were all I had left, I did my best to raise you as my own son.” He paused again, and Oliver could see him searching for the exact words he wanted to say. Then, wincing against the pain in his chest, he made his pronouncement: “It’s not your name that matters, Oliver. It’s what you are inside that counts. And deep inside, Oliver, I know you are not a Metcalf. You are a Connally. You may be of his issue, but you are not your father’s son!”
Suddenly, Harvey Connally’s head snapped back and his eyes opened wide in an expression of surprise. Clutching his chest, he slumped in his chair as Oliver rose to his feet and gathered his uncle into an embrace.
“No, Uncle Harvey,” he begged. “Don’t die! Please. You’re going to be all right. I’ll—”
Harvey Connally’s right hand closed on his nephew’s arm. “Remember, Oliver. A Connally! Always remember that I raised you to be a Connally!” His fingers tightened on Oliver’s arm, sinking deep into the younger man’s flesh, and then, with a deep gasp, he exhaled his last breath and his head sank down, his chin resting on his chest. As life slipped away from Harvey Connally, his grip on Oliver’s arm slowly relaxed and his hand fell away. For long seconds Oliver stood still, gazing at his uncle.
Even in death, Harvey Connally’s face retained its strength of character. Oliver studied that craggy, once handsome face—the face of the man who had been his only relative, his sole source of unconditional affection since the age of seven.
Always remember that I raised you to be a Connally!
Reaching down, Oliver gently closed his uncle’s blue eyes, the light inside them having finally faded. As he straightened, his glance fell on the mahogany box that still sat on his uncle’s desk. His first instinct was to open it and see what was inside, but even as he reached toward it, his uncle’s words echoed in his memory:
You might choose simply to put it away somewhere. If you do, I advise you to put it where it cannot possibly ever again be found.…
Oliver’s hand hovered over the box, then moved toward the telephone. Lifting the receiver from the hook, he dialed Philip Margolis’s private number. The doctor picked up the phone on the third ring. “It’s Oliver, Phil,” he said to Margolis. “My uncle has died. I’d appreciate it if you could come over. I’m at his house.”
Chapter 6
Silence at last hung over Harvey Connally’s house on Elm Street. For the last two hours, as first Philip Margolis and then Steve Driver arrived, the rooms had rung with the comings and goings that attended the business of death. After Dr. Margolis’s preliminary examination of the body, Harvey Connally’s remains had been carried out of the house, to be transported not to Broder’s Funeral Parlor but to Blackstone Memorial, where an autopsy would be performed.
“It’s not really a legal necessity,” the doctor had explained to Oliver, “but given recent events, I think you ought to let me do it. If I can say I did a thorough autopsy, and the cause of your uncle’s death was the massive heart attack it obviously appears to be, then that should put an end to any talk.” With a smile and shrug, he added, “Or at least keep it down to a dull roar, since there won’t be any way to shut Edna Burnham up short of a restraining order.”
Oliver managed a faint smile that co
nveyed his resignation in the face of the inevitable rumormongering the old lady would shortly be embarking on. “Somehow I don’t think even a court order would stop Edna from …” His voice trailed off, but he didn’t have to say any more. Even without Edna Burnham fueling the fire, there was bound to be speculation that there was more to Harvey Connally’s sudden death than appeared on the surface. That assumption had already been borne out by the crowd that had begun to assemble within minutes after Steve Driver’s arrival. Though no one inside the house was aware of the neighbors and passersby beyond the laurel hedge when Jeff Broder had arrived to discuss the funeral arrangements with Oliver, Broder reported that at least a dozen people were gathered on the sidewalk outside the gate. While the funeral director, whose family had been burying the dead of Blackstone for three generations, calmly went over the arrangements that Harvey Connally had made for himself several years earlier, Steve Driver went outside to try to clear the onlookers away.
He’d had no success.
Now, however, with Oliver’s uncle’s body gone, it seemed to Oliver as if the lodestone had been removed. By the time the last of those who had legitimate business at the house had left, the crowd too began to fall away. Their curiosity had been satisfied: they’d watched in somber silence as Harvey Connally left his house for the last time.
Oliver closed the front door after seeing Jeff Broder out. Left in the quiet of the house, he felt more alone than ever before in his life.
He began wandering slowly through the deserted rooms, acutely aware of the absence of his uncle.
After his father died, this house had been his home, at least during the times when he wasn’t away, first at boarding school or at summer camp, then at college. Every room contained memories. The kitchen, where he’d sat on a stool watching his uncle’s housekeeper, old Mrs. Perry, stir the pots from which magical aromas wafted into his nostrils. The dining room, where he and his uncle had sat eating the meals Mrs. Perry fixed, and talking over anything that came into Oliver’s mind. In the living room, the melodies Harvey Connally had picked out on the grand piano seemed still to hang in the air, and upstairs, in the room that had been Oliver’s, he could still summon the smell of a blossom-laden summer breeze drifting in through the open window as he lay in his boyhood bed. Now, of course, the room was tinged with mustiness, the scent of disuse and abandonment, for after Mrs. Perry died, his uncle decided to look after himself, pleading that he was far too old to accustom himself to a stranger in his house.
Finally, after Oliver had wandered restlessly through every other room in the house, he could no longer put off returning to the study, where the flat mahogany box still sat on the bookshelf where he’d put it after calling Phil Margolis.
He hadn’t mentioned the box to either the doctor or Steve Driver. The presence of yet another mysterious package would only become new grist for the gossip mill that was already grinding at full speed in Blackstone.
Nor had he yet opened it.
Now, as he touched its smooth surface, a strange shock ran through him, as if the case had been charged with electricity.
Had it happened before, when he’d picked up the box to move it from the desk to the bookshelf? He couldn’t recall. His uncle’s ominous words, swiftly followed by his sudden passing, had made the rest of the morning a blur for Oliver.
I never believed what your father told me. Never. The statement still echoed through Oliver’s head.
A moment later the strange sensation passed. He picked up the box, moved back to his uncle’s desk, and set it down.
As he gazed at it, he realized that it looked vaguely familiar. Examining it more closely, seeing the ornately worked medallion that was inlaid in the lid, he suddenly knew why it seemed familiar.
His father’s.
It had been his father’s.
But what could be in it?
He reached for it again, this time to open it, but just as his fingers touched the latches that secured the box’s lid, something stopped him.
Not here!
The voice was so distinct that Oliver, startled, found himself glancing around the room to see who had uttered the words. But the room, like the house itself, was empty save for him.
Home. Take the box home.
Again the words were so clear that it was hard for Oliver to believe they’d risen from his own mind. Nonetheless, he found himself obeying them. Picking up the box, he left his uncle’s house. But instead of leaving by the front door, he went out through the kitchen, down the driveway, then turned onto Harvard Street. The box, which for some reason he didn’t quite understand he’d slipped under his jacket, felt almost warm, its heat penetrating his thin shirt to his skin, though he knew the warmth could be nothing more than an illusion. Quickening his step, he strode up the hill, but as he came to the burned-out wreckage of Martha Ward’s house, he stopped.
Again, there was the strange sensation—almost a vibration coursing through him.
Standing stock-still, Oliver gazed at the charred remains of the house from which Rebecca Morrison had fled only a few short weeks ago. In his mind’s eye, but so vividly he could have been watching the fire itself, he once more saw the flames consuming it.
Suddenly, the sound of laughter penetrated his reverie. He spun around to see who was there.
The street and sidewalk were empty.
His heartbeat speeding, Oliver continued on his way up the hill, passing the Hartwicks’ but neither stopping nor even glancing at it. At the path that would lead him through the woods to the Asylum’s grounds, he left the sidewalk and, out of sight of Jules and Madeline’s house, felt his pulse begin to slow. Then the odd vibrating sensation vanished so abruptly and completely that he wondered whether he’d actually felt it or whether the disconcerting tingling had been nothing more than a result of the shock of his uncle’s death.
Just as he emerged from the trees onto the weed-choked grounds surrounding the Asylum’s hulking mass, it began again.
A heat radiating from the mahogany case. Hotter now, pulsing.
Drop it, he told himself.
Just let go of it, drop it, and walk away.
Or better yet, smash it underfoot and scatter the pieces—and whatever might be inside the box—across the field so they’d be plowed beneath the earth when the Blackstone Center project finally got under way.
Bury it under concrete. Put it where it cannot possibly ever again be found.
But instead of dropping the box, Oliver realized he was clutching it tighter, pressing it against his body as if at any second someone might try to snatch it from him.
He began walking again, picking his way across the grounds, but it was not toward his house that he was moving.
Instead, he drew closer and closer to the Asylum itself. With every step he took, his pulse quickened, until he could hear the sound of his own heart pounding in his ears.
He came at last to the front steps. He hesitated there, waiting for the familiar pain in his head to begin, quickly building until either he turned and fled to the sanctuary of his house or the blackness closed around him, felling him as surely as a blow to the back of the head.
Today, though, the pain did not come. Unable to stop himself, carried forward on a wave of foreboding and fear, he mounted the stone steps and reached out to grip the great latch on the door.
He paused then, and though his hand remained on the cold bronze latch, he gazed around as if taking a last look at a landscape he might never see again. He looked down the hill at the house he’d lived in for the first seven years of his life, and the last twenty-five.
For a moment—just a moment—Oliver thought he glimpsed a face in one of its windows, and he felt his heart quicken with anticipation until he realized it was nothing more than a trick of the light.
Then, out of the corner of his eye, he saw a flicker of movement. He whirled around, and as he turned, thought he saw a small figure disappearing into the woods.
A girl. A little girl, who lo
oked like—
Mallory?
Impossible. An illusion. It had to be no more than an illusion, just as the face in the window of his house had been a fleeting and cruel illusion, and not Rebecca at all.
Yet from somewhere—somewhere distant—he thought he could barely hear a child’s voice, his sister’s voice, calling out to him.
Calling for him to come to her?
Or calling a warning to him, to stay away?
A trick of the light, and now a trick of the wind? A whisper, and now, nothing but silence.
His hand tightening on the latch to the Asylum’s door, Oliver turned the knob and swung the heavy oak portal open.
Motes of dust hung thickly in the air inside, and the chill of the building’s interior seemed to reach out and draw him in.
Steeling himself against the whipping pain he still anticipated would lash through his head at any moment, Oliver moved through the shadowy interior of the building as if in a dream, not certain where he was going, or why, but knowing he would recognize his destination when he came to it.
His footsteps echoed in the emptiness of the building, but he was hardly aware of them, for his ears were filled with other sounds.
Ghostly sounds, out of the past.
Voices whispering, mumbling incoherently.
Terrified shrieks, floating from the floors above.
Hopeless moans, seeping up from beneath the floor, surrounding him.
Oliver moved from one room to another, until at last he came to the room that had been his father’s office. There he finally took the mahogany box from beneath his jacket, and set it gently on the floor.