The Blackstone Chronicles - By John Saul Page 0,162

father had told him he could touch the case, but never open it. Now, as the old man’s fingers traced the pattern of ivory and ebony that had been inlaid into the box’s mahogany lid, a profusion of memories was unleashed in his mind. He saw himself back in the bathroom of the house on Amherst Street where he’d grown up, his mother having refused to live in the enormous mansion on top of North Hill that his father had constructed for his first wife. Even seventy-five years later, he could smell the pungent odor of his father’s shaving soap; feel the steam rising from the washbasin as his father enjoyed his morning shaving ritual.

Could this actually be his father’s case?

But no. His father’s razor case had been adorned with a gold medallion set into the center of the lid, a medallion that was engraved with the same two ornately intertwined C’s with which everything Charles Connally owned had been monogrammed.

On this case there was only a simple ivory medallion.

Yet he was certain he’d seen it before.

Lifting the lid to expose a blue velvet lining, he gazed for a moment at the tortoiseshell handle of the straight razor that lay within, then picked the instrument up and opened its blade.

For just a second he didn’t understand what the brown stains on the gleaming metal were. But then, as he saw the two M’s etched into the tortoiseshell of the handle, he knew, in a rush of understanding that came at him like a gale force wind, exactly where he’d seen this case before.

It had belonged to his brother-in-law, Malcolm Metcalf. It had been a wedding gift from Harvey’s sister, Olivia. Harvey himself had helped Olivia select it for her fiancé.

As he stared at the brown stains on the razor’s blade, Harvey slowly understood their origin too.

Blood.

The blood of his niece, Mallory Metcalf?

Was it possible that after all these years, he was holding in his hands the long-missing instrument of Oliver’s sister’s death?

Why had it been delivered to him?

What was he being told?

And by whom?

For a long time Harvey Connally sat at his desk, the razor clasped in his suddenly palsied fingers. Over and over again he reviewed the pieces of the puzzle that he had gathered in his mind during the past weeks. Over and over again, the only face that emerged from the mists of the past was that of Malcolm Metcalf.

But he knew that wasn’t quite true, for on the day that Mallory had died—on the day that the razor Harvey was now holding had slashed across her throat and ended her life—there had been another person present.

A person for whom this instrument—this gift from the past—might hold far more meaning than it did even for him.

Laying the razor gently back in its case and snapping shut the mahogany lid, Harvey Connally came to a decision.

And picked up the telephone.

Chapter 4

It was a day in mid-March—not the worst of weather, but far from the best. Though for the last few days it seemed as if the harsh winds of winter had finally died away, they reappeared this morning, whipping out of the northeast with a chill that threatened to freeze the buds on the still-bare trees before they had a chance to open. The few tiny crocuses that had dared to poke their heads up so early in the year cowered in the cold as though trying to retreat into the safety of the scarcely thawed earth. Harvey Connally was getting ready to drive up to Manchester for a board meeting—it seemed there were more board meetings to attend every month—though he was sorely tempted to plead illness, build a fire in his library, and curl up with his worn copy of Billy Budd, to Harvey’s mind a far superior work to the more celebrated but nearly unreadable Moby-Dick. Harvey Connally, however, was not the sort to follow the tide of popular opinion. He had been brought up with a sense of duty as solid as the granite beneath the soil of New Hampshire, and even as temptation whispered to him, he knew he would turn away from its siren call.

Billy Budd would simply have to wait, perhaps even until next winter.

He was just about to leave the house when the extension telephone he’d had installed in the kitchen—a luxury to which he had quickly become accustomed—rang shrilly, with a tone that set off an alarm in Harvey’s mind. Though his keenly honed rationality told him it was