backseat and put it on, then went around to the back of the house.
Peering through one of the windows in the garage, he saw that Jules’s black Lincoln Town Car was inside. Of course, that didn’t necessarily mean that Jules himself was at home; like almost everyone in Blackstone, Jules walked to work unless the weather was truly horrible, and it had been Melissa Holloway’s impression that Jules had, indeed, walked down to the bank that morning. Mounting the steps to the large glassed-in back porch, Ed let himself though the storm door, then tried the back door.
Locked.
He looked for a bell, found none, and knocked loudly.
There was no more response from within than there’d been at the front door a few minutes earlier.
Leaving the back porch, Ed circled the house to the other side, past the breakfast room, then moved onto the broad terrace. There, sets of French doors, one at each end, led into the library and the large formal living room. He cupped his hands around his eyes in an attempt to peer into the shadowy rooms beyond the doors, but the shirred material covering the panes defeated his efforts.
He moved on around the house, his shoes now squishing with icy water and the bottoms of his pants heavy with snow. Rounding the far corner, he came to the protrusion next to the library that housed Jules Hartwick’s den.
Heavy drapes had been drawn over both the windows flanking the small fireplace that was the room’s dominant feature, and the windows were far too high for Ed to have seen through them even had curtains not covered them. He made his way around to the front door again and jabbed the bell three more times, but got no more response than before. Finally giving up, he returned to his car, got in, and started the engine. It wasn’t until he’d reached the street that he saw it: smoke curling from the chimney that vented the fireplace in Jules Hartwick’s den.
Ed Becker pulled back into the driveway, then sat staring at the drifting smoke. The den, he knew, was the one room in the house that neither Madeline nor Celeste ever went into. “I don’t have even the slightest desire to go in there,” he remembered Madeline saying a few months ago. “He has it exactly the way he wants it, and if he doesn’t mind the stink of those awful cigars he thinks I don’t know he smokes, so be it. He keeps the door shut, and I stay out. Which is fine, since I think we all need a place to go when we want to hide. I have my dressing room, and Jules has his den, and we share the rest of the house. It works perfectly.”
And it also meant that if there was a fire on the den’s hearth, then Jules was there.
Ed turned on his cellular phone and dialed Jules’s private number. On the fourth ring the answering machine came on. He listened patiently as Jules’s recorded greeting played through. When the machine beeped, Ed began talking. “You might as well pick up the phone, Jules. I’m outside, sitting in my car, and I can see the smoke from the fireplace. I don’t know what’s troubling you, but whatever it is, we can work it out. But I can’t do anything for you if you won’t talk to me.” He paused, giving the banker a chance to pick up the phone, but nothing happened. He began talking again. “I’m your lawyer, Jules. That means that whatever’s happening, I’m on—”
“You’re fired, Becker. Get out of my driveway.”
The harsh words erupted from the cell phone’s speaker, startling Ed Becker into silence for a moment. He quickly recovered. “What’s going on, Jules? What’s happened?”
“A lot’s happened,” Jules Hartwick replied. “But you know all about it, don’t you, Ed? Well, guess what? I know all about it too now. I know what’s going on at the Bank, and I know what Madeline’s been up to. And I know all about you. So just get off my property before I call the police.”
The cellular phone went dead, leaving Ed Becker staring at the Hartwicks’ mansion in stunned disbelief.
Twenty minutes later, with Jules Hartwick still refusing to answer either the door or the telephone, he finally gave up and started back down to the village. Somewhere, he was sure, there had to be someone who knew what had upset Jules so badly.
Unless, as Melissa Holloway had suggested, he’d just plain