The Blackstone Chronicles - By John Saul Page 0,36

the walk toward her aunt’s house.

Taking his gift out of the backseat of the Volvo, Oliver strode past the Ward house and turned up the Hartwicks’ driveway. But as he neared the porte cochere he suddenly had the sense that he was being watched. Looking over his shoulder toward the Ward house, he saw that Rebecca still stood on the porch.

She was gazing at him, and even at this distance he could see the wistfulness in her face. But then he heard Martha Ward’s voice call her once again. A moment later Rebecca disappeared into the house.

Suddenly wishing very much that he were not going to the party alone, Oliver mounted the Hartwicks’ front steps and pressed the bell. Madeline Hartwick opened the door to greet him with a hug.

“Oliver,” she said. “How wonderful.” As she stepped back to let him in, her eyes flicked toward the house next door. “For a moment I thought you might be bringing poor Rebecca with you.”

Oliver hesitated, then decided to be as truthful as Rebecca would have been. “I asked her,” he said. “But she turned me down.” Though he tried to tell himself he was mistaken, Oliver was certain he saw a look of relief pass over Madeline Hartwick’s perfectly made-up face.

Chapter 2

Jules Hartwick leaned back in his chair and gave Madeline an almost imperceptible nod, the signal that it was time for Madeline to let her toe touch the button on the floor beneath her end of the dining room table. It would summon the maid who had been hired for the evening to clear the dessert plates while the butler—also hired only for the evening—served the port. The dining room had always been one of Jules’s favorite rooms in the house he’d grown up in, and into which he and Madeline had moved a decade ago, after his father, widowed for fifteen years, retired to a condo complex in Scottsdale. “It’s perfect for me,” the elder Hartwick had declared. “Full of Republicans and divorcées with enough money that they don’t need mine.”

Like all the rooms in the house, the dining room was immense, but so perfectly proportioned that it didn’t seem overly large even when the party, like tonight’s, was small. A pair of chandeliers glittered from its high-beamed ceiling, and the plaster walls above the mahogany wainscoting were hung with tapestries so luxuriously heavy that even the largest parties never seemed overly noisy. One wall was dominated by an immense fireplace, in which three large logs blazed merrily, and there was a sideboard built into the opposite wall, which served perfectly for the informal buffets that were this generation’s preferred way to serve. “So much less ostentatious than the staff Jules’s grandfather used to have,” Madeline was fond of explaining, never mentioning that economics might have something to do with the scaled-back festivities that were now the rule in the house. Still, every now and then—on occasions such as tonight’s—Jules liked to hire a full staff and do his best to roll the calendar back a generation or two. Tonight, he decided, had been a total success.

All the men save Oliver Metcalf had worn black tie, and, since no one had expected Oliver to appear in anything except his old tweed jacket, he didn’t seem the least bit out of place. The women were resplendent in their evening dresses, and while Madeline looked even more elegant than usual in a long black sheath set off by a single strand of perfect pearls, Celeste had stolen the limelight in a flow of emerald green velvet that was a perfect complement to her auburn hair. She wore a single stunning piece of jewelry: a small spray of emeralds set in gold that had belonged to Jules’s mother glittered near the heart-shaped neckline of her dress. Seated opposite her at the center of the long table, Andrew Sterling, Jules observed, had been unable to keep his eyes off his fiancée for more than a few seconds at a time. Which, Jules reflected, was exactly as it should be.

The rest of the party—all except one—seemed to be nearly as happy as Celeste and Andrew. Aside from Oliver Metcalf and Ed and Bonnie Becker, Madeline had invited Harvey Connally—“to represent the older generation, which I think gives a nice continuity to things”— and included Edna Burnham as the old man’s dinner partner. She’d also managed to persuade Bill McGuire to come out for the first time since Elizabeth’s death, and included Lois Martin as