The Blackstone Chronicles - By John Saul Page 0,53

wires, the phones throughout the house had already gone dead.

Chapter 7

The last wire jerked free from the panel next to the control unit. Jules Hartwick stepped back, breathing hard, staring at his handiwork, listening to the silence that had descended on the house.

What had they thought he’d do? How big a fool did they take him for? Even as he sat in his den all day, he’d been able to hear them. Hear them as clearly in his own mind as if they’d been in the room with him.

Talking about him.

Laughing at him.

Plotting against him.

But he’d outsmarted them. Now he was in control, and they had no one to talk to but each other.

Who had they been calling?

The traitor, Andrew Sterling?

The quack, Philip Margolis?

Or someone else?

There were so many of them out there.

Enemies.

They weren’t just in his home and in his Bank.

They were all over town. Watching him. Whispering about him.

And plotting. Always plotting.

How long had it been going on? How long had they all been able to fool him, making him think they were his friends? Well, it was all over now. Everything was crystal clear, and finally he was in control of his own life again. And it would stay that way.

Jules left the laundry room, careful not to turn off the lights, not to offer his enemies any darkness in which to hide. He moved through the basement, turning on every light until the warren of dusty rooms beneath the house was free from any shadows in which his enemies might lurk. Then, satisfied that no lights remained unlit, he went back up to the kitchen. There, too, he turned on every light, filling the room with a brilliant glow.

From the huge rack above the carving counter, he chose a knife with a ten-inch blade, honed to razor sharpness by years of perfect care. Its smooth haft, carved from ebony nearly a century earlier, fit perfectly in his hand, and as his fingers tightened on it he felt the strength of the hardwood seep from the weapon into his body. Fingering it now as he’d fingered the locket a few minutes earlier, he left the kitchen and moved through the butler’s pantry and into the dining room, still turning on every light he found, washing the house free of any dark corners in which his enemies might conceal themselves.

Moving as silently as a wraith, Jules Hartwick prowled the main floor of his house, banishing the darkness from its rooms as the locket he carried with him had banished reason from his mind.

Madeline and Celeste listened to the silence of the house.

When the phone had suddenly gone dead in Madeline’s hand while she was waiting for Philip Margolis’s answering service to come back on the line, she’d assumed that the connection had merely been lost by the service itself. But when she pressed the redial button and nothing happened, her impatience with the incompetence of the answering service gave way to fear. Surely she was wrong!

Jules was upset, but he wouldn’t cut the phone lines—would he?

She stabbed at the buttons that should have connected to one of the other lines that came into the house. None of the lights came on. There was a deadness to the silence in the receiver that told her the phones were no longer working at all. She slammed the handset back onto its cradle. Her thoughts darted first one way then another, like mice in a maze.

Raise the window and call for help?

She cringed at the mere thought of the kind of talk that would cause. If the problems at the bank were bad now, they’d be ten times worse by tomorrow, when everyone in town would know that Jules had gone—

She cut herself off, refusing to use the word “insane” even in the privacy of her own mind. Jules was under a strain—a severe strain—but he was not insane! Therefore, whatever had upset him could be dealt with. She could deal with it. Taking a deep breath to steady her nerves, she turned to Celeste. “Stay here,” she instructed her daughter. “I’m going downstairs to talk to your father.”

“Are you crazy?” Celeste asked. “Mother, he’s cut off the phones! You don’t know what he’ll do next.”

Madeline steeled herself against the fear that was creeping through her, knowing that if she gave in to it even for a moment she would lose her courage entirely. “Your father won’t hurt me,” she said. “We’ve been married for twenty-five years, and there’s never been