The Blackstone Chronicles (23 page)

“Let me see it,” she whispered. “Let me hold my baby.”

The doctor, his back to her, handed something to the nurse. “It’s better you don’t,” he said. “Better for both of you.”

The nurse left the room, and she heard her baby’s wails fade away into the distance
.

“No!” she cried out, but her voice was pitifully weak. “I have to see my baby! I have to hold it!”

The doctor finally looked at her. “I’m afraid I can’t let you do that. It would only make it much harder for you.”

She blinked. Harder? What was he talking about? “I—I don’t understand—”

“If you don’t see it, you won’t miss it nearly as much.”

“Miss it?” she echoed. “What are you talking about? Please! My baby—”

“But it’s not your baby,” the doctor said as if talking to a small child. “It’s being given up for adoption, so it’s better that you not see it at all.”

“Adoption?” she echoed. “But I don’t want to give—”

“What you want doesn’t matter,” the doctor informed her. “The decision has been made.”

Now a new kind of pain flooded over her—not the sharp pangs of the contractions, which, as violently as they’d seized her body, had quickly dissipated. This was a dull ache that she felt taking root deep within her, which she knew was never going to fade—a spreading coldness that would grow inside her cancerously, filling her with despair, slowly consuming her, leaving her no avenue of escape. She could already feel it uncoiling inside her, and someday, she knew, there would be nothing left of her at all
.

There would be nothing left but the pain of knowing that somewhere there was a baby who belonged to her, whom she would never nurse, never hold, never see
.

Left alone in the operating room under the cold, merciless lights, she began to cry
.

No one came to comfort her
.

When she awakened the next morning, she was back in her room, and though her blanket was wrapped close
around her, it did nothing to protect her from the icy chill that had spread through her body
.

Though she felt utterly exhausted, something drew her from her bed to the window. The landscape beyond the bars was no less bleak than the Asylum’s interior: naked gray branches clawed at a leaden sky. Only a wisp of smoke that curled from the chimney of the incinerator behind the Asylum’s main building disturbed the cold, silent morning. She was about to turn away when a movement caught her eye—a nurse and an orderly emerging from the Asylum and walking toward the incinerator. It was the same nurse who had been in the operating room yesterday, and the orderly was one of the two who had strapped her to the gurney
.

The nurse was carrying an object wrapped in what looked like a small blanket, and even though she could see nothing of what was hidden within the blanket’s folds, she knew what it was
.

Her baby
.

They weren’t putting it up for adoption at all
.

She wanted to turn away from the window, but something held her there, some need to see exactly what was going to happen, even though the scene had already played itself out in her mind. In the next few moments, as she stood shivering with cold and desperate fear, the scene she had just imagined unfolded before her eyes:

The orderly opened the access port of the incinerator, and the flames within the combustion chamber suddenly flared, tongues of fire licking hungrily at the iron lips of the door. As she watched, the nurse unfolded the blanket
.

She beheld the pale, still form of the child she’d brought into the world only the day before
.

A scream of anguish built in her throat, erupting in an agonized wail as the orderly closed the incinerator door, mercifully blocking her view of what had been done to her baby. As they turned away from the incinerator, both the nurse and the orderly glanced up at her window, but
if they recognized her, neither of them gave any sign. A moment later they too vanished from view
.

For a long time she remained at the window, gazing out at the lonely, lifeless landscape that now seemed a perfect reflection of the coldness and emptiness inside her
.

Her own fault
.

All her own fault
.

She should never have told her parents about the baby, never have let them bring her here, never have let them make the decisions that should have been hers
.

And now, because of what she’d done, her baby was dead
.

At last she turned away from the window, and now her body, as well as her spirit, felt numb. As if in a dream, she left her room and went to the dayroom. Seating herself in one of the hard, plastic-covered chairs, she stared straight ahead, looking at no one, speaking to no one. Hours passed. Sometime late in the afternoon a nurse came into the dayroom and placed a small package in her lap
.

“Someone left this for you. A little girl.”

It wasn’t until long after the nurse had gone that she finally opened the package. She peeled the paper away. Inside was a small box. She opened the box and gazed at the object inside
.

It was a cigarette lighter
.

Made of a gold-colored metal, it was worked into the shape of a dragon’s head, and when she pressed a trigger hidden in its neck, a tongue of flame shot out of the dragon’s mouth
.

Click. There were the flames that had shot hungrily from the mouth of the incinerator. Click. The fire leaped and consumed her baby
.

She held the flame to her arm, and though her nostrils quickly filled with the sickly smell of burning flesh, she felt nothing
.

No heat
.

No pain
.

Nothing at all
.

Slowly, methodically, she began moving the dragon’s flame over her skin, letting the fiery tongue lick at every exposed piece of her flesh, as if its heat could burn away the guilt that was consuming her
.

As the rest of the patients in the dayroom silently watched, she burned herself—arms, legs, neck, face—until at last there was no more flesh to torture
.

The dragon, its flame finally extinguished, was still clutched in her hand when the orderlies finally came and took her away
.

Within the hour, her own body had joined her baby’s
.

The dark figure’s gloved hand closed on the dragon, and he smiled.

It was time.

Time for the dragon, after nearly half a century hidden in this dark lair, to emerge once more into the world beyond these cold stone walls.

O
liver Metcalf turned up his collar, huddled deeper into his old car coat, and glanced up at the sky, which was rapidly filling with rain clouds. It was Sunday, and he’d intended to spend the afternoon in the
Chronicle
office, catching up on the unending details that always managed to pile up until they threatened to overwhelm the newspaper’s small staff, no matter how hard they worked. He was wading through a sea of paperwork when, an hour ago, Rebecca Morrison had turned up with a shy smile and the suggestion that he give up his boring old work in favor of accompanying her out to the flea market that had taken over the old drive-in theater on the western edge of town. Her eagerness was infectious, and Oliver quickly decided that none of the bills and correspondence that had waited for his attention this long couldn’t wait a day or two longer. Now, however, as he shivered in the chill of the late March day, he wondered if he hadn’t made a mistake. They were still two blocks from the drive-in, and it seemed the sky might open up with a downpour at any moment. “How come they’re open so early? Aren’t they afraid they’ll get rained out?”

Rebecca smiled serenely. “They won’t,” she said. “It’s the very first day, and it never rains on the first day of the flea market.”

“That’s the Rose Parade,” Oliver corrected her. “And that’s on New Year’s Day, in California, where it never rains. Unless it’s flooding, of course.”

“Well, it’s not going to rain today,” Rebecca assured him. “And I like the flea market on the first day. It’s when all the things people find in the attic or the basement over the winter are for sale.”

Oliver shrugged. As far 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 night.” He put on a bright smile and changed the subject. “So, are we looking for something special, or are we just browsing to see what people are throwing out this year?”

“I want to find a present for my cousin,” Rebecca told him.

“Andrea?” Oliver asked. “Do you even know where she is?”

“She’s coming home.”

“Home?” Oliver echoed. “You mean to your aunt’s house?”

Rebecca nodded. “She called Aunt Martha the day before yesterday, and said she didn’t have anywhere else to go.”