The Blackstone Chronicles - By John Saul Page 0,48

away at the top of the wide, curving drive.

Something about it seemed somehow different.

Abandoning the garage, Oliver stepped out into the bright, late morning sunlight and gazed up at the old building.

Its steeply pitched copper roof was covered with a thick blanket of glistening white snow. For a fleeting second he was almost able to imagine the building as it must have been a century ago, when it had first been built as a private home. He tried to envision it at Christmastime, when brightly colored sleighs drawn by horses laden with silver bells would have come up the hill bearing women in furs and hugely bustled dresses, and men in top hats and morning coats, to call on Charles Connally, who had originally built the huge mansion as a gift for his first wife and a slap in the parsimonious face of his father, Jonas, who had never willingly parted with so much as a nickel of the fortune he had accumulated.

The glory days of the mansion hadn’t lasted long. The patriarch of the Connally clan had died only a dozen years after the mansion was completed, and when Charles’s wife died as well, the house was soon converted to the only other use it had ever known.

A shelter for the insane.

Or had it actually been little more than a prison?

Oliver had never been sure, though over the years he’d certainly heard plenty of stories from people who may or may not have known what they were talking about.

All he truly knew was that the imposing stone structure had always terrified him. Terrified him to the point where he’d been utterly unable to bring himself even to enter it. Yet this morning, with his head throbbing and his stomach churning, he found himself being drawn toward the long-abandoned building.

The cold of the morning forgotten, Oliver made his way through deep drifts and up the curving driveway toward the great oaken doors. A silence seemed to have fallen over North Hill, broken only by the sound of snow crunching beneath his feet.

Coming to the steps, he hesitated for a moment, then climbed up to the broad porch. He gazed for a moment at the huge wooden panels before reaching out to the great bronze lever that would release the latch.

As Oliver’s fingers touched the ice cold metal, another wave of nausea seized him, and his hand jerked reflexively away as if the hardware had been red hot. His gorge rising, Oliver turned away once more and lurched back down the steps.

Falling to his knees, he retched into the snow, then, gasping for breath, got back to his feet and stumbled down the hill to his house. Unwilling to stay outside even long enough to unlock his front door, he went through the garage and into the laundry room, slamming the door behind him.

His heart pounding, Oliver leaned against the washing machine and tried to catch his breath. Slowly, the nausea in his belly eased and his breathing returned to normal, and even the stabbing pain in his head began to recede. When the telephone rang, he was able to make his way into the kitchen and pick up the extension with trembling fingers.

“Oliver?” Lois Martin said. “Is that you?”

“I-it’s me,” Oliver managed.

“Thank God,” Lois breathed. “This is the third time I’ve called. If you hadn’t answered, I was going to come up there. Are you all right?”

“I’m fine,” Oliver said, though even as he uttered the words, he knew they were a lie.

Chapter 5

Madeline Hartwick turned off the interstate and slowed her Cadillac to precisely seven miles an hour above the posted speed limit. Another twenty minutes and they would be safely back in Blackstone, despite Celeste’s insistence this morning that driving down to Boston today was insane. Madeline had been determined; they were both far too upset to sit at home all day, worrying over Jules’s unprovoked outburst, and waiting tensely for him to return home from the bank.

“We’ll go down to Boston, do some shopping, and have a nice lunch,” she’d informed Celeste no more than ten minutes after Jules had left the house. Celeste had objected, but Madeline prevailed, and by the time they began browsing the shops on Newbury Street, Madeline had already convinced herself that Jules’s crazy accusations had undoubtedly been brought on by the pressure he was under from the audit at the bank; when he got home, it would all have been forgotten. Nor had she killed anyone with the Cadillac as Celeste