Acceptable Risk (9 page)

“There must be enough stuff in here to fill several railroad cars,” Edward said. “How far back in time does it all go?”

“Right back to Ronald Stewart’s time,” Kim said. “He’s the one who started the company. Most of it is business-related material, but not all of it. There’s some personal correspondence as well. My brother and I used to sneak up here a few times when we were kids to see who could find the oldest dates. The problem was that we weren’t really allowed, and when my grandfather caught us he was furious.”

“Is there as much down in the wine cellar?” Edward asked.

“As much or more,” Kim said. “Come, I’ll show you. The wine cellar is worth seeing anyway. Its decor is consistent with the house.”

They retraced their steps down the main stairways and returned to the formal dining room. Opening a heavy oak door with huge wrought-iron hinges, they descended a granite stairway into the wine cellar. Edward understood immediately what Kim meant about its decor being consistent with the house. It was designed as if it were a medieval dungeon. The walls were all stone, the sconce lighting resembled torches, and the wine racks were built around the walls of individual rooms that could have functioned as cells. They had iron doors and bars over the openings into the hall.

“Somebody had a sense of humor,” Edward said as they walked down the long central hall. “The only thing this place lacks is torture devices.”

“My brother and I didn’t see it as funny in the slightest,” Kim said. “My grandfather didn’t have to tell us to stay out of here. We didn’t want any part of it. It terrified us.”

“And all these trunks and things are filled with papers?” Edward asked. “Just like the attic?”

“Every last one of them,” Kim said.

Edward stopped and pushed open the door to one of the cell-like rooms. He stepped inside. The wine racks were mostly empty. The bureaus, file cabinets, and trunks were pushed against them. He picked up one of the few bottles.

“Good Lord,” he said. “This is an 1896 vintage! It could be valuable.”

Kim blew derisively through pursed lips. “I sincerely doubt it,” she said. “The cork is probably disintegrated. No one has been taking care of them for half a century.”

Edward replaced the dusty bottle and opened a bureau drawer. Randomly he picked up a sheet of paper. It was a customs document from the nineteenth century. He tried another. It was a bill of lading from the eighteenth century.

“I get the impression there isn’t much order here,” he said.

“Unfortunately that’s the case,” Kim said. “In fact there is no order whatsoever to any of it. Every time a new house was built, which had been fairly frequent up until this monstrosity, all this paperwork was relocated and then returned. Over the centuries it got completely mixed up.”

In order to make her point, Kim opened a file cabinet and pulled out a document. It was another bill of lading. She handed it over to Edward and told him to look at the date.

“Well, I’ll be damned,” he said. “Sixteen hundred and eighty-nine. That was just three years before all the witchcraft nonsense.”

“It proves my point,” Kim said. “We just looked at three documents and covered several centuries.”

“I think this signature is Ronald’s,” Edward said. He showed it to Kim and she agreed.

“I just got an idea,” Kim said. “You’ve got me interested in this witchcraft phenomenon and particularly in my ancestor Elizabeth. Maybe I could learn something about her with the help of all these papers.”

“You mean like why she’s not buried in the family burial plot?” Edward asked.

“That and more,” Kim said. “I’m getting more and more curious about all the secrecy about her over the years. And even whether she truly was executed. As you pointed out, she’s not mentioned in the book you gave me. It’s pretty mysterious.”

Edward gazed around the cell they were in. “It wouldn’t be an easy task considering the amount of material,” he said. “And ultimately it might be a waste of time since most of this is business related.”

“It will be a challenge,” Kim said as she warmed to the idea. She looked back in the file drawer where she’d found the seventeenth-century bill of lading to see if there were any more contemporary material. “I think I might even enjoy it. It will be an exercise in self-discovery, or, as you said in relation to the old house, an opportunity to connect with my heritage.”

While Kim was rummaging in the file cabinet, Edward wandered out of the cell and deeper into the extensive wine cellar. He was still carrying the flashlight, and as he neared the back of the wine cellar he switched it on. Some of the bulbs in the sconces had blown out. Poking his head into the last cell, Edward shined the flashlight around. Its beam played across the usual complement of bureaus, trunks, and boxes until it stopped on an oil painting leaning backwards against the wall.

Remembering all the paintings he’d seen upstairs, Edward was curious as to why this one deserved such ill treatment. With some difficulty he managed to work his way over to the painting. He leaned it away from the wall and shined the light on its dusty surface. It appeared to be a painting of a young woman.

Lifting the painting from its ignominious location, Edward held it over his head and carried it out of the cell. Once in the hallway, he leaned it against the wall. It was indeed a young woman. The décolletage it displayed belied its age. It was done in a stiff, primitive style.

With the tip of his finger he wiped the dust from a small pewter plaque at the base of the painting and shined the light on it. Then he grabbed the painting and brought it to the cell where Kim was still occupied.

“Take a look at this,” Edward said. He propped it against a bureau and illuminated the plaque with the flashlight.

Kim turned and looked at the painting. Sensing Edward’s excitement, she followed the beam of the flashlight and read the name.

“Good heavens!” she exclaimed. “It’s Elizabeth!”

Enjoying the thrill of discovery, Kim and Edward carried the painting up the stairs and into the great room, where there was adequate light. They leaned it up against the wall and stepped away to look at it.

“What’s so damn striking about it,” Edward said, “is that it looks a lot like you, especially with those green eyes.”

“Maybe eye color is the same,” Kim said, “but Elizabeth was far more beautiful, and certainly more endowed than I.”

“Beauty is in the eye of the beholder,” Edward said. “Personally I think it is the other way around.”

Kim was transfixed by the visage of her infamous ancestor. “There are some similarities,” she said. “Our hair looks similar and even the shape of our faces.”

“You could be sisters,” Edward agreed. “It certainly is an attractive painting. Why the devil was it hidden away in the very back of the wine cellar? It’s far more pleasing than most of the paintings hanging in this house.”

“It’s weird,” Kim said. “My grandfather must have known about it, so it’s not as if it were an oversight. As eccentric as he was, it couldn’t have been that he was concerned with other people’s feelings, especially not my mother’s. He and my mother never got along.”

“The size looks pretty close to that shadow we noticed above the mantel in the old house,” Edward said. “Just for fun, why don’t we carry it down there and see.”

Edward lifted the painting, but before he could take a step, Kim reminded him about the containers they’d come to the castle to find. Edward thanked her and put the painting back down. Together they went into the kitchen. Kim found three plastic containers with lids in the butler’s pantry.

Retrieving the painting from the great room, they started for the old house. Kim insisted on carrying the art work. With its narrow black frame, it wasn’t heavy.

“I have a strange but good feeling about finding this painting,” Kim said as they walked. “It’s like finding a long-lost relative.”

“I have to admit it is quite a coincidence,” Edward said. “Especially since she’s the reason why we happen to be here.”

Suddenly Kim stopped. She was holding the painting in front of her, staring at Elizabeth’s face.

“What’s the matter?” Edward asked.

“While I’ve been thinking she and I look alike, I just remembered what supposedly happened to her,” Kim said. “Today it’s inconceivable to imagine someone being accused of witchcraft, tried, and then executed.”

In her mind’s eye Kim could see herself facing a noose hanging from a tree. She was about to die. She shuddered. Then she jumped when she felt the rope touch her.

“Are you all right?” Edward asked. He’d put his hand on her shoulder.

Kim shook her head and took a deep breath. “I just had an awful thought,” she admitted. “I just imagined what it would be like if I were sentenced to be hanged.”

“You carry the containers,” Edward said. “Let me carry the painting.”

They exchanged their loads and started walking again.

“It must be the heat,” Edward said to lighten the atmosphere. “Or maybe you’re getting hungry. Your imagination is working overtime.”

“Finding this painting has really affected me,” Kim admitted. “It’s as if Elizabeth were trying to speak to me over the centuries, perhaps to restore her reputation.”

Edward eyed Kim as they trudged through the tall grass. “Are you joking?” he asked.

“No,” Kim said. “You said it was quite a coincidence we found this painting. I think it was more than a coincidence. I mean, when you think about it, it is astonishing. It can’t be purely by chance. It has to mean something.”

“Is this a sudden rush of superstition or are you always like this?” Edward asked.

“I don’t know,” Kim said. “I’m just trying to understand.”

“Do you believe in ESP or channeling?” Edward asked.

“I’ve never thought much about it,” Kim admitted. “Do you?”

Edward laughed. “You sound like a psychiatrist, turning the question back to me. Well, I don’t believe in the supernatural. I’m a scientist. I believe in what can be rationally proved and reproduced experimentally. I’m not a religious person. Nor am I superstitious, and you’ll probably think I’m being cynical if I say the two are related.”

“I’m not terribly religious either,” Kim said. “But I do have some vague beliefs regarding supernatural forces.”

They reached the old house. Kim held the door open for Edward. He carried the painting into the parlor. When he held it up to the shadow over the mantel, it fit perfectly.

“At least we were right about where this painting used to hang,” Edward said. He left the painting on the mantel.

“And I’ll see to it that it hangs there again,” Kim said. “Elizabeth deserves to be returned to her house.”

“Does that mean you’ve decided to fix this place up?”

“Maybe so,” Kim said. “But first I’ll have to talk with my family, particularly my brother.”

“Personally, I think it’s a great idea,” Edward said. He took the plastic containers from Kim and told her he was going to the cellar to get some dirt samples. At the parlor door he stopped.

“If I find Claviceps purpurea down there,” he said with a wry smile, “I know one thing that information will do: it will rob a bit of the supernatural out of the story of the Salem witchcraft trials.”

Kim didn’t respond. She was mesmerized by Elizabeth’s portrait and lost in thought. Edward shrugged. Then he went into the kitchen and climbed down into the cool, damp darkness of the cellar.

As usual, Edward Armstrong’s lab at the Harvard Medical Complex on Longfellow Avenue was the scene of frenzied activity. There was the appearance of bedlam with white-coated people scurrying every which way among a futuristic array of high-technology equipment. But the sense of disorder was only for the uninitiated. For the informed it was a known fact that high science was in continual progress.

Ultimately it all depended on Edward, although he was not the only scientist who was working in the string of rooms affectionately referred to as Armstrong’s Fiefdom. Because of his notoriety as a genius, his celebrity as a synthetic chemist, and his prominence as a neuroscientist, applications for staff, doctorate, and postdoctorate positions greatly outnumbered the positions that Edward had been able to carve out of his chronically limited space, budget, and schedule. Consequently, Edward got the best and the brightest staff and students.

Other professors called Edward a glutton for punishment. Not only did he have the largest cadre of graduate students: he insisted on teaching an undergraduate basic chemistry course, even during the summer. He was the only full professor who did so. As he explained it, he felt an obligation to stimulate the young minds of the day at the earliest time possible.

Striding back from having delivered one of his famous undergraduate lectures, Edward entered his domain through one of the lab’s side doors. Like an animal feeder at a zoo he was immediately mobbed by his graduate students. They were all working on separate aspects of Edward’s overall goal of elucidating the mechanisms of short- and long-term memory. Each had a problem or a question that Edward answered in staccato fashion, sending them back to their benches to continue their research efforts.

With the last question answered, Edward strode over to his desk. He didn’t have a private office, a concept he disdained as a frivolous waste of needed space. He was content with a corner containing a work surface, a few chairs, a computer terminal, and a file cabinet. He was accompanied by his closest assistant, Eleanor Youngman, a postdoc who’d been with him for four years.

“You have a visitor,” Eleanor said as they arrived at Edward’s desk. “He’s waiting at the departmental secretary’s desk.”

Edward dumped his class materials and exchanged his tweed jacket for a white lab coat. “I don’t have time for visitors,” he said.

“I’m afraid this one you have to see,” Eleanor said.

Edward glanced at his assistant. She was sporting one of those smiles that suggested she was about to burst out laughing. Eleanor was a spirited, bright blonde from Oxnard, California, who looked like she belonged with the surfing set. Instead she had earned her Ph.D. in biochemistry from Berkeley by the tender age of twenty-three. Edward found her invaluable, not only because of her intelligence, but also because of her commitment. She worshiped Edward, convinced he would make the next quantum leap in understanding neurotransmitters and their role in emotion and memory.