The Rose Conspiracy (53 page)

“You were about to take a nap?”

“I had gone two weeks without a solid night's sleep…handling a very demanding, very complicated trial…grabbing a few hours here or there each night, not much more. The case ended. We won. Wonderful. Great. I was exhausted. It was Beth's recital that day. Rather than driving them to the recital myself, I said I needed to lie down for a few hours. But I would meet them at the recital auditorium…in time.”

“In time for Beth's recital.”

“Yeah, of course, obviously,” Blackstone blurted out. “Jim, look—you're the one with the MD degree, you're the psychiatrist. I'm just the one who never bothered to finish my PhD in psychology. Why don't you simply give me your brilliant psychiatric deduction, then? Just tell me!”

“Well, it seems to me,” Koesler said quietly, “ that the driving force in your internal struggle now is the fact that you didn't drive them. Marilyn did. The route she took just happened to lead her into the path of an oncoming car. But you, J.D., who believe you are the one who has to be right all the time, you knew a different route. And I am guessing you feel you would have taken them on that different route—your route, a better route, a safer route—maybe even a quicker route, less traffic, that's why you would have preferred it. But there was a problem…the fact that you needed sleep. So Marilyn ended up leaving first, doing the driving. She took her route, not yours. The accident happened. And you haven't forgiven yourself for not being there to take care of your family. Not saving them from disaster. So the enemy of those you loved the most, in your view, ended up being sleep. Sleep—your need for sleep, then,
somewhere on a feeling level, has been proven to be your mortal enemy. Or so you believe.”

Blackstone had stood up from his chair. His face was red, and his neck veins were bulging. Then he exploded.

“Why did I need sleep that day—why that day? Why? You tell me that! It is an absolute fact, beyond debate, that I would have taken a different route. It is absolutely assured that I would have thereby averted their deaths. It is beyond any reasonable doubt that my selfish desire for sleep was the cause of the catastrophic deaths of my wife and my daughter—and that…and that…is true beyond any scintilla of a shadow of a doubt. Now…you tell me to try and fix that, Jim…because…there is no fixing that.”

Blackstone turned to the door, still standing, and covered his face with one hand. He stood there motionless for several moments.

When he had regained his composure, he pulled something out of his pocket and tossed it on Koesler's desk.

It was a twenty-dollar bill.

“Keep the change,” Blackstone said as he walked out the door.

CHAPTER 64

I
n the Staffordshire farmland of England, the sun was just beginning to rim the horizon. In the early light, a group of geologists, engineers, excavators, and botanists were standing in an open field, in a semicircle around a mammoth hole that had been opened in the ground. Off to the side there was a collection of earth-digging equipment and several trucks.

In the middle of the group, leaning on a walker, was Lord Magister Dee.

They were all gazing down into the space, where below, several men were excavating the bottom of the area. The dirt was being hauled up to ground level by a bucket-and-pulley system. They had been working from the day before and through the night.

Lord Dee was clutching an area map and a photocopy of an entry made in a late 1600s journal of Dr. Robert Plot.

Then Dee heard the voice of his chief archaeologist from down in the pit. The voice came over the walkie-talkie that Dee's personal secretary was holding up next to his ear so he could hear.

“Lord Dee, we are now clearing the floor, sir. Trying to be careful…though I must say that this is much too rushed for my liking, frankly. We are dealing with a several-hundred-year-old underground structure—a room of some kind. It could be of great historical significance. But I feel, honestly, that we are being pressed too quickly to clear it.”

“As long as I'm the one paying the bills here,” Dee yelled back into the walkie-talkie, “you will press ahead with as much speed as…you…can…can…muster.”

Then he added, “I bought this field, and I hired all of you. You work for me. Please try…try…try to…remember that.”

“I think we are getting close, sir,” his personal secretary said enthusiastically.

Dee nodded. He knew he was now very close to completing the task he had been pursuing for decades. He thought back to how he had been brought to this final, consummating chapter.

When he learned how the Vinnie Archmont case had ended, Dee bribed a courthouse official to send him a copy of the Horace Langley note. Dee steadfastly refused to believe that the note was a fake or that its message had been invented by Horace Langley, Vinnie, and Victor Cheski to fool him into buying it for millions, despite the mounting evidence they had been out to defraud him from the beginning.

After Lord Dee had reviewed the Langley note, he quickly deciphered it and gained immediate access to the records in the Ashmolean Library, where he then reviewed every journal and diary written by Dr. Robert Plot, Elias Ashmole's curator and disciple.

In one journal entry, he found that Plot had written down a precise description of a farmer's field for some reason. The page was intriguing because Plot had decorated the page with drawings of roses and crystals.

That was when Dee proceeded to consult an old book he had in his extensive personal library of Masonic literature.

The book was an old, massive volume entitled
History of Freemasonry and Concordant Orders.
It had been written in 1890 and had a thick brown-leather cover with the Freemason's insignia embossed on the front, and it smelled of mustiness and aged paper.

Lord Dee had flipped through it until he got to the very last section of the book. Then, at page 872, he read something that took his breath away.

It was an excerpt from Dr. Plot's
History of Staffordshire,
first published during the reign of King Charles II of England. And it contained the astonishing tale of a “countryman” who happened on a strange structure while digging a trench in his field. As the story went, the man broke through to a staircase that led downward a considerable depth to an underground room.

What Dee read had lit up his mind like a roman candle. Dr. Plot had said of the seventeenth-century discoverer,

Overcoming his fear and summoning his courage, noisily with his feet he descended the remainder of the stairs; the light grew brighter, until at last, at another turn, he came upon a square chamber, built on large hewn ancient stones. The pavement was flagged, the roof lofty, and in the centre of the groin, was a rose exquisitely carved in some dark stone.

But now a voice broke through into Lord Dee's thoughts. It was the chief archaeologist.

“We've uncovered the floor, sir,” he said on the walkie-talkie. “It appears to be a floor made of stone. Large stones. Like huge flagstones.”

“Wonderful, wonderful!” Dee exclaimed. “Do you see anything else?”

“Say again?” the archaeologist called back.

“I said…do…you…see…anything…else?”

“Not yet…we are clearing the stone floor.”

“To the center!” Dee cried back. “Go to the very center of the room.”

“Righto.”

Several minutes went by. Dee could hear the sound of brushes sweeping dirt against stone over the walkie-talkie.

Then a voice. Then several voices, talking now very excitedly.

“Lord Dee!” the archaeologist called up. “There is something here.”

“What is it, man—speak! Tell me!”

Then a few moments went by and more sounds of sweeping and brushing.

“Lord Dee,” the man called up, “there is a design on the stone in the very middle of the room…something carved into the stonework…give me a minute…”

Several agonizing minutes went by. Then his voice again.

“Lord Dee, I have illuminated the design so I can see it clearly.”

“Tell me exactly!” Dee called back.

“It appears to be a design of a red flower or a rose, inlaid into a stone tile.”

“This is it!” Dee cried out. “Anything else?”

“Just the design in the stone.”

“Break the tile—dig under the rose design, man, do it…now…do it now!” Lord Dee cried back.

“You want me to break the tile, sir? Are you sure? This is very old…it could be a Restoration-period structure, Lord Dee.”

“Hang the Restoration, man, break the tile!” Lord Dee cried out. “And tell me what is underneath—but carefully…oh, very carefully, find what is hidden there…buried, I am sure of it…buried beneath the rose crystal design.”

There was the sound of hammering and shattering and the prying of stone out of the place where it had rested in darkness for hundreds of years.

And then a voice.

“Lord Dee.”

“Yes, man, tell all…tell it all to me, hold nothing back,” Dee was saying, almost out of breath, gasping.

“I have completely removed the stone tile with the design of the rose.”

“Yes? Yes?”

“And have revealed what is under it.”

“Tell me now, sir, now, tell me!” Dee exclaimed, clutching his hands together.

“Underneath the rose stone, sir—”

“Yes?”

“There is nothing, Lord Dee. Nothing, I am afraid, but dirt.”

J.D. Blackstone had been unaware of the Staffordshire expedition, or that at that very moment, as he drove his Maserati over to the storage unit, Lord Dee, on the other side of the ocean, was receiving the empty news that his decades-old pursuit of esoteric and secret truth had yielded only dirt and stench.

It was early evening on the East Coast. There, at the storage facility in a back alley of the Georgetown area, Blackstone leaned out of the window of his car to punch in the gate code that would give him entrance.

He drove over to the metal storage unit marked 308 and parked his car. He walked to the door and fit a small key into the lock. It had not been opened for years and he had to jiggle the key several times. Then the key turned.

I have to do this,
he was thinking to himself.

So he rolled up the steel door, clicked on the flickering fluorescent light overhead, and the dusty contents of the storage unit were revealed.

He did not know exactly what he was doing there or why he felt compelled to come.

Blackstone walked among the stacked boxes, randomly opening them. One was a collection of Marilyn's cooking books. Another contained Beth's school papers and report cards and projects she had done for classes. And her music books.

In another box he found an album of photographs of Marilyn and Beth and himself.

In the far corner were plastic bags of their clothing, carefully packed by him after their deaths.

Here were the accumulated traces of the lives that had once been a part of his but were now gone, the only physical evidence that these people whom he had loved had once actually been, but now were no more.