The Blackstone Chronicles - By John Saul Page 0,85
me for so long.”
“But—”
“Please, Oliver? Just take us home?”
Five minutes later Oliver pulled into the driveway of Martha Ward’s house. Amazingly, the only outward signs of the fire from this side of the house were the damage to the lawn and shrubbery, which had been inflicted by the hoses the firemen dragged from the trucks into the house and up to the second floor.
“You’re sure you want to do this?” Oliver asked once again. “Even if the house is livable, it’s going to smell—”
But Martha Ward was already out of the car and striding toward her house. As she reached the steps to the porch she turned back. “Come, Rebecca,” she commanded.
Like a dog, Oliver thought angrily. She treats her like a dog.
But before he could say anything, Rebecca too had slipped out of the car, and a moment later both Martha and Rebecca disappeared inside.
Oliver knew he’d made a mistake as soon as he opened the door of the Red Hen. But he’d been so intent on satisfying the hunger in his stomach that he’d momentarily forgotten the equally strong hunger of the regular morning crowd who came to the diner to begin their day—not a hunger for the crullers and coffee for which the diner was famous, but a hunger for information.
“Information” was what they called it, since they were men. Their wives—far more accurately—would have called it “gossip.”
Either way, almost every voice in the Red Hen fell silent as Oliver entered, and nearly every eye shifted to fix expectantly on him. After scanning the faces, he chose the table where Ed Becker and Bill McGuire were involved in a conversation that was suspended only long enough to beckon him over. As Oliver slid into the booth next to the attorney, Bill McGuire looked at him questioningly.
“Andrea Ward died about half an hour ago.” he told them in answer to Bill’s unspoken question.
The contractor winced. “What the hell’s going on around here?” he asked.
Ed Becker signaled to the waitress for more coffee. “Nothing’s going on,” he said, and his tone was enough to tell Oliver that last night’s fire wasn’t all they’d been talking about.
McGuire shook his head dolefully as the waitress refilled his cup. “How can you say that?”
“Because it’s true,” the lawyer replied, then turned to Oliver. “Bill’s starting to sound like he thinks there’s some kind of curse on the town or something.”
“I didn’t say that,” McGuire interjected a little too quickly.
“All right, maybe you didn’t say it in those exact words,” Becker conceded. “But when you start trying to connect a bunch of things that can’t be connected, isn’t some kind of curse what you’re talking about?”
McGuire shook his head doggedly. “All I’m saying is that it’s getting really weird around here. First the bank gets in trouble and Jules goes nuts and kills himself, and now Andrea Ward comes home after years away and burns to death the next day.”
Though no one mentioned what had happened to Elizabeth McGuire, they didn’t need to. Her suicide, so shortly preceding Jules Hartwick’s, still hung over Bill like a specter, and though he hadn’t spoken her name, he didn’t have to.
“The fire was an accident, pure and simple,” Oliver told the other two men. But after he’d filled them in on everything he’d learned over the past few hours, Bill McGuire was still shaking his head doubtfully.
“A few months ago I might have believed it wasn’t anything more than Andrea falling asleep with a cigarette, but now …” His voice trailed off into a long sigh.
“Maybe it wasn’t an accident,” Ed Becker suggested. “Maybe Martha torched her.”
“Torched her?” Oliver echoed, recoiling from the word. “Jesus, Ed, maybe you did criminal law too long. Why on earth would Martha Ward want to kill her own daughter?”
“Well, you said yourself she didn’t seem to be too sorry Andrea had died. Didn’t you say something about it being God’s will?”
“ ‘Divine retribution,’ was the way she put it,” Oliver corrected him. “Martha’s a religious fanatic. You know she sees the hand of God in practically everything.”
“Sometimes people like that decide they are the hand of God,” Becker said pointedly.
“Come on, Ed,” Oliver said, lowering his voice and glancing around at the other patrons in the diner. “You know how gossip spreads around here. If anybody hears you, it’ll be all over town by this afternoon.”
“Let it!” Ed Becker said, leaning back and smiling mischievously. “Personally, I never could stand Martha Ward. Even when I was a kid, I always