The Blackstone Chronicles - By John Saul Page 0,95

“Stop that this instant! You’ll ruin it!”

The nurse glowered furiously at the patient as she wiped away the mess of spaghetti and tomato sauce that was still dripping down her brand new uniform. She’d bought it only last week and was wearing it for the first time that day. “You think you can get away with anything, don’t you?” she asked. “Well, you’re about to find out who runs this place, and it isn’t you.” Leaving the patient cowering in her bed, the nurse strode out of the room, returning a few moments later with an orderly and a doctor. While the orderly mopped the splatter of spaghetti off the linoleum floor, the nurse recounted the incident to the doctor. “I suppose if she won’t eat, it’s really none of my business,” she finished. “But I don’t have to stand for her throwing her food at me.”

The doctor, whose eyes had been fixed on the patient throughout the nurse’s recitation, smiled thinly. “No,” he agreed, “you certainly don’t. And it’s certainly time she began eating too, don’t you think?”

For a moment the nurse said nothing, but then, as she realized what the doctor was saying, she smiled for the first time since entering the room a few minutes earlier. “Yes,” she said, “I certainly do!”

With the aid of two more orderlies, the doctor and the nurse secured the struggling patient to her bed with thick nylon straps. When the woman was totally immobilized, the doctor instructed the aides to hold the patient’s mouth open.

As the woman moaned and struggled, then began to gag, the doctor inserted a thick plastic feeding tube through her mouth, down her throat, and into her stomach.

“There,” he said. “That should do it.”

Before he left the nurse to begin feeding the immobilized patient, he stooped down and picked up the soiled handkerchief from the floor. Holding it gingerly between his thumb and forefinger, he gazed at the elaborately embroidered initial and the perfectly worked lace. “Interesting,” he said, more to himself than to the nurse. “I wonder who she thought she was making it for.” Crushing the handkerchief into a shapeless mass, he stuffed it into the pocket of his white coat and left the room.

The woman in the bed tried to cry out, tried to beg him not to take away the beautiful handkerchief she’d spent so many weeks making, but the tube in her throat turned her plea into nothing more than an incomprehensible moan.

She never saw the handkerchief again.

A month later, when she was finally released from the bonds that held her to the bed, she waited until she was alone, then used the belt of her terry-cloth robe to hang herself from the clothes hook on the back of her door.

* * *

Still gazing at the handkerchief, the dark figure let his finger trace the perfectly embroidered R that had been worked into one of its corners.

The letter itself told him who its recipient must be.

All he regretted was that he couldn’t deliver it personally. Still, he knew how to guide the handkerchief to its destination, and who its bearer would be.…

Chapter 1

Oliver Metcalf had spring fever. There simply wasn’t any other way to describe it. The first symptoms had appeared early that morning, when he found himself lingering in his kitchen over an extra cup of coffee while he watched a pair of robins begin their courtship. It was the first morning that was warm enough to open the window, and the air was redolent with the musky smell of leaves that had been slowly decomposing under the winter’s finally vanished blanket of snow. Inhaling the scent of spring, he felt the first faint urge to take the day off. He ignored the urge, of course, since today was Tuesday, the deadline for putting this week’s edition of the Chronicle to bed, but the seductive sense of lassitude that had come over him as the birds’ songs drifted into his kitchen only increased a few minutes later as he set out down Harvard Street toward the village at the foot of North Hill. His pace, which he’d fully intended to keep aerobically brisk, had slowed to a leisurely stroll, and he kept pausing to admire the crocuses that were blooming everywhere, and the daffodil shoots that seemed to have shot up at least six inches just since yesterday.

By the time he came to Main Street, a stop at the Red Hen had seemed utterly imperative, and this morning’s fifteen minutes of