at all.” Though it was an early Friday morning that promised a perfect spring day, even the bright sunlight couldn’t wash away the ominous aura that seemed to him to hang over the building. “I have an awful feeling we might all wind up taking a bath on this deal.”
Bill McGuire got out and slammed the door of his pickup truck. He barely glanced at the looming form of the building as he dropped the tailgate down and pulled the hand truck out of its bed. “You’ve been reading too many novels,” he told Becker. “It’s just an old building. By the time I’m done renovating it, you won’t even recognize it.”
“Maybe so.” Becker sighed as they mounted the front steps. He and Bill, along with others, had returned here on Wednesday, and again yesterday, to search the cold, dark rooms and every inch of the ten-acre grounds for Rebecca Morrison, with no success. Now he said, “I’m starting to wonder if Edna Burnham’s right and whatever’s going on around here has something to do with this place.”
As the contractor’s face flushed with anger, the attorney wished he’d kept his thought to himself. It was too late now. “Look, Bill, I’m sorry,” he said quickly. “I didn’t mean to imply that what happened to Elizabeth was—well …” He floundered, struggling to find a way to extricate himself from his gaffe, but decided anything more he might add would only make matters worse. “I’m sorry,” he said again. “I should have kept my mouth shut.” For a second or two he braced himself, thinking McGuire might take a swing at him, but then saw the anger drain from the contractor’s expression.
“Forget it,” McGuire said. “I don’t know why I still let it get to me. I mean, it’s not as if I’m not hearing those ugly whispers from everyone else in town. It’s not just Edna Burnham anymore.”
It was true. In the two days since Germaine Wagner’s body had been discovered crushed beneath the elevator in her own house, rumors had been sweeping through Blackstone like a virus, a contagion of fear and suspicion. Clara Wagner had been moved to a nursing home in Manchester only yesterday. Witness to her daughter’s hideous death, she had suffered a massive stroke that robbed her of language; Clara would never reveal the events of that awful night her daughter had died. Germaine had been quietly buried as soon as the coroner had finished the examination of the body. By her own request, found neatly filed among Germaine’s papers, there had been no funeral.
Steve Driver, the deputy sheriff, had searched every corner of Clara Wagner’s house with as much energy as the fire chief had expended in sifting through the ruins of Martha Ward’s place after it had been destroyed in a devastating conflagration a few weeks earlier. But his investigation proved equally fruitless.
There was obvious evidence of violence: nearly everything in Germaine Wagner’s bedroom was overturned, her bathroom mirror shattered, blood everywhere. But even the criminalist Steve had immediately called in from Manchester had found no signs that anyone but Germaine had been involved. Blood samples from the bedroom and bathroom, from the stairs, from the Oriental carpet on the floor of the great entry hall were the same: all were Germaine Wagner’s.
Most disturbing of all, Rebecca Morrison had disappeared. The only possible witness who might be able to describe these terrible events had vanished. Where was she—and was she in danger, if indeed she was still alive? Had Rebecca witnessed a dreadful accident—or a horrible crime? Had she fled in terror—or in guilt? Or had some unspeakable tragedy befallen her as well as the Wagner women? Searches of the town and the surrounding countryside had produced no trace of her, nor had appeals for information brought forth any clue. Even the Asylum had been combed, to no avail. Speculation burned like wildfire: Some said Rebecca had suffered a mental breakdown and turned on her benefactor. Others recalled that there was a dark side to Germaine Wagner’s generosity, and that while it was true that she had employed Rebecca and given her a home when Rebecca’s had burned down, she had also been treating Rebecca for years with the kind of patronizing attitude that no one but Rebecca would have tolerated for more than a minute.
Had Rebecca finally been pushed too far, into an act of cold-blooded murder from which she had fled?
Steve Driver found these whispered theories ridiculous. He’d known both Rebecca Morrison