The Blackstone Chronicles - By John Saul Page 0,65

as he was concerned, one man’s junk wasn’t another man’s treasure at all: it just became someone else’s junk for a while. There was one item he’d been eyeing for years now—a truly ugly porcelain table lamp, embellished with strange vines that snaked up from its gilt-painted base and were studded with pieces of purple, red, and green colored glass meant to look like grapes. The lamp was topped by a hideous stained-glass shade—three pieces cracked, at last count—intended to suggest the spreading leaves of the vine. When lit, the light filtering through the leaf-form glass cast a shade of sickly green that made anyone within its glow look deathly ill. So far, Oliver had seen it on three different tables at the flea market, watched as it was sold no fewer than four times at the Blackstone Historical Society Auction, and even found it displayed for a couple of days in the window of an antique shop—not, blessedly, Janice Anderson’s. “Just promise me you won’t buy the grape lamp,” he asked.

“Oh, I already did.” Rebecca giggled. “I bought it two years ago. I was going to give it to someone as a joke, but the more I looked at it, the less funny it seemed. So I gave it to the Historical Society.”

“Did anyone buy it at the auction?” Oliver asked.

“You bet!” Rebecca said. “Madeline Hartwick snapped it right up! Of course, she only bought it because she knew I’d donated it and was afraid I’d be hurt if nobody bid on it.” Her eyes clouded. “Do you think she’s going to be all right?” Rebecca asked, her voice anxious.

“It’s going to take a while,” Oliver replied. Madeline was finally out of the hospital now, but still hadn’t recovered from the terrifying night when her husband, Jules, almost killed her, and succeeded in killing himself. She and her daughter, Celeste, were staying in Boston with Madeline’s sister. Oliver wondered if Madeline would ever come back to the big house at the top of Harvard Street.

The strangest thing was that no one yet knew exactly why Jules Hartwick had killed himself, nor had Oliver been able to fathom exactly what the banker had meant when he’d uttered his last words:

“You have to stop it … before it kills us all.”

Stop what? Jules had said nothing else before he’d died on the steps of the Asylum. Though Oliver had asked Madeline and Celeste what Jules could possibly have meant, neither woman had any idea. Oliver inquired of others as well—Andrew Sterling, who had been at the house that terrible night; Melissa Holloway at the bank; Jules’s attorney, Ed Becker. But no one had come up with an answer.

Only Oliver’s uncle, Harvey Connally, had even ventured a guess. “Do you suppose he thought there was some connection between what happened to him and poor Elizabeth McGuire’s suicide?” his uncle mused. “But that doesn’t make much sense, does it? After all, even though Jules and Bill McGuire are some kind of shirttail cousins, Jules wasn’t related to Elizabeth at all. From what I remember of her family, pretty much all of them were crazy, one way or another. But that didn’t have anything to do with Jules. His parents were steady as a rock, both of them.” The old man had sighed. “Well, I don’t suppose we’ll ever know, will we?”

So far, Harvey Connally had been proved right; no one yet had the slightest idea what had provoked Jules Hartwick’s sudden mental breakdown and suicide. Even the problems at the bank were getting straightened out, and though they weren’t all settled yet, nobody was saying that Jules had done anything illegal. Imprudent, perhaps, but the bank was in no danger of failing, and he’d been in no danger of being disciplined, either by the bank’s board or by the Federal Reserve auditors.

“I keep feeling like I should have done something,” Rebecca said, unconsciously slipping her hand into Oliver’s as they neared the outskirts of Blackstone and the sagging stockade fence that had once protected the patrons of the drive-in movie from the glaring headlights of cars passing in and out of town on Main Street. “Maybe instead of praying with Aunt Martha, I should have—” She faltered for a moment, then looked helplessly up at Oliver. “Doesn’t it seem like I should have done something?”

“I don’t think there was anything anyone could do,” Oliver told her, giving her hand a reassuring squeeze. “And I don’t think we’ll ever know exactly what happened that