The Blackstone Chronicles Read Online Free

Center was the biggest project he’d ever taken on. He’d turned down two other jobs—one in Port Arbello, the other in Eastbury—in order to concentrate on the conversion of the old Asylum into the sort of commercial center that could revive what had been a slowly dying town. The Center, in fact, had been in large part his own idea. He had thought about it for more than a year before even suggesting it to the directors of the Blackstone Trust. The one person he’d talked to almost from the start was Oliver Metcalf, because he’d known that without Oliver’s support, the plan would never have gotten off the ground. A couple of tepid editorials in the
Chronicle
, and that would have been that. But Oliver wasenthusiastic about the Blackstone Center from the very beginning, with a single major reservation.
    “What about me?” he’d wanted to know. “Am I suddenly going to be living on the busiest street in town?”
    Bill had already thought of that. Grabbing a pencil from Oliver’s cluttered desk, he’d quickly sketched a rough map to show that the most logical approach to the site was not through the front gates, but from the back, where the old service entrance had once been. Appeased, Oliver immediately backed the project, pushing for it not only in the paper, but with his uncle as well. Once Harvey Connally had been won over—albeit reluctantly—the rest was easy. By the day before yesterday, when the wrecker’s ball had made its ceremonial swing, puncturing the Asylum’s west wall in preparation for the expansion of the building, most of the opposition to the project had evaporated.
    Bill McGuire, and his entire crew, had been all set to go to work the next day.
    Yesterday.
    But only hours after the ceremony, Jules Hartwick made his ominous call. “Hold off for a day or two,” indeed! “Not to worry”—fat chance of that. Bill McGuire was worried, all right. Worried nearly out of his mind.
    Now, as he walked the three blocks down Amherst Street to the corner of Main, where the redbrick, Federal-style building that housed the First National Bank of Blackstone stood, he felt an anticipatory rush of fear. His nerves gave an additional jump when he spotted Oliver Metcalf at the bank’s door.
    “You know what this is all about?” Oliver asked.
    “He called you too?” Bill replied, trying to betray nothing of his ballooning sense that something very serious had gone wrong.
    “Yesterday. But he wouldn’t say what it was about, which tells me that whatever it is, it’s not good news.”
    “Did he tell you not to worry?”
    The editor nodded. His eyes searched McGuire’s face. “You don’t have any idea at all what this is about?”
    McGuire glanced in both directions, but they seemed to be alone on the sidewalk. “All he told me was to hold off on the Center project. You can guess how that made me feel.”
    “Yes,” Oliver said with an ironic smile, “I certainly can.”
    Together the two men entered the bank, nodded to the tellers who stood behind old-fashioned frosted-glass windows, and made their way to Jules Hartwick’s office at the back.
    “Mr. Hartwick and Mr. Becker are waiting for you,” Ellen Golding told them. “You can go on in.”
    Bill and Oliver exchanged another glance. What was Hartwick planning to tell them that required the presence of his lawyer?
    Jules Hartwick was on his feet as they entered the walnut-paneled office, and he came around from behind his desk to greet both men with no less warmth than ever. The gesture did nothing to ease Bill McGuire’s sense of foreboding. He’d learned long ago that a warm handshake and a friendly smile meant absolutely nothing in the world of banking. Sure enough, as Hartwick retreated around his desk and lowered himself into his deeply tufted red-leather swivel chair, his smile faded. “I don’t suppose there’s any easy way to tell you this,” he began, looking from Bill McGuire to Oliver Metcalf, then back again.
    “I assume