The Blackstone Chronicles - By John Saul Page 0,135

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