Free The Extinction Event by David Black

laced blow?”
    â€œI don’t think Robert’s father would poison Frank’s cocaine.”
    â€œWe don’t know that either, Five Spot.”
    â€œDo you think Robert’s father is capable of killing Frank?” Caroline asked.
    â€œWho knows?” Jack said. “I never met the man.”
    2
    Flanking the entrance to Keating Flowers’ place were two stone pillars topped by lion-headed grotesques, half Sphinx and half harpie. The left monster’s face was speckled by what must have been buckshot, courtesy of some passing hunters, tempted by either the target or hostility to the sign of aristocratic pretentions. The right-hand monster’s face, worn by weather, looked sad, its left eye as damaged as Jack’s right.
    Jack and Caroline turned off the road a few miles short of Great Barrington and bumped along the potholed drive, which had been paved in the past but hadn’t been kept up. Overhanging tree branches clawed at the car’s windshield and scraped along the car roof. After a mile or so, the road curved out of the woods and along the near side of a weedy lake. Across the water stood Flower’s Folly, the castle built by Keating Flowers’ maternal grandfather—and Robert’s great-grandfather—Artemis Flower, who had made a fortune in concrete. His great-great-great-grandfather, also named Artemis, had made the original family fortune quarrying Massachusetts marble for the new capital in Washington. He had bought the quarry, which was near Hadley, Massachusetts, thinking that Hadley would be the site of the new government. To this day Hadley, a town between Amherst and Northampton, has a green stretching as long as Pennsylvania Avenue.
    For years, the concrete business chugged along, making sundials and garden trolls and foundations. But, since 9-11, the business had boomed: The company couldn’t keep up with the demand for Jersey barriers to protect government buildings and businesses. Even the Mycenae Town Hall put up a wall of concrete as if expecting a terrorist attack in the Hudson Valley.
    The crenulated towers of the main part of the castle stood shadowed against the twilit sky. To the right, toward a jetty that extended into the water, the castle fell away in ruins. Jack and Caroline could see the fading light through arches and blind windows. As they drove in a long curve around the lake toward the castle, they skirted stone arches that looked like a miniature Roman aqueduct, bearded with ivy, flanked by dead trees. To the left, on a barren rise, a doe stood as still as a stencil. A wild turkey exploded from the underbrush, looking prehistoric, unlike the window cutouts Jack remembered from grade school. Somewhere ahead, they heard the chuck-chuck-chuck followed by an odd sound, almost like someone playing a musical saw, a mechanical noise on the verge of human speech, of some kind of woodpecker.
    â€œI can’t believe this is where Robert goes home every night,” Caroline said.
    â€œYou ever spend time with him outside of work?” Jack said. “Yeah, I can believe he lives here.” Jack looked around, nearly a three-sixty turn, and said, “A storm’s been coming all week. We should be visiting here in thunder and lightning.”
    They swung into a graveled drive that circled a huge stone wishing well decorated with chipped satyrs and nymphs. The castle loomed above them. Neither immediately opened the car doors.
    â€œI thought his family still had money,” Jack said.
    â€œThat doesn’t mean they’d spend it,” Caroline said. “You know what it would cost to keep up this pile?”
    â€œAs much as it costs your uncle to keep up Tabletops,” Jack said.
    3
    As they walked up the crumbling steps to the cathedral-size front doors, Jack said, “Ever since I was a kid, I’ve liked places like this. Too many Vincent Price movies.”
    â€œVincent who?” Caroline asked.
    The