The Blackstone Chronicles

Chapter 3

“Go all the way down by the garage,” Ed Becker told Bill McGuire. “My back’s already starting to hurt, and the closer we get to the basement stairs, the better.”
Bill McGuire glanced over at the attorney. “Still got a coal bin? Maybe we could just slide it right on down. At least then it’ll be in the right place when you decide to shove it in the furnace.”
“Very funny,” Becker groused. “But when I’m done, you won’t even recognize it.”
“Exactly my point,” the contractor taunted. He slowed the pickup to a stop about ten feet from the Beckers’ garage, and swung out of the cab just as the back door flew open and Ed’s five-year-old daughter, Amy, came barreling out, closely followed by Riley, a six-month-old Labrador puppy that Amy had managed to convince her parents was “absolutely the only thing I want for Christmas. If I can just have a puppy, I promise I’ll never ask for anything else again as long as I live so-help-me-God.” While the campaign had worked sufficiently well so that the puppy had, indeed, taken up residence in the Becker house, Amy’s father had yet to overcome the fear of dogs from which he’d suffered since he was his daughter’s age. As the comparatively nonthreatening eight-week-old ball of fluff that Riley had been upon arrival developed into the immensely menacing—at least to Ed Becker—forty-pound medicine-ball-with-feet that Riley now was, Ed had become increasingly wary of his daughter’s pet. Now, as Riley did his best to climb into Ed’s arms and administer one of his specialty soggy face licks, the attorney who had never quailed before the most irate judge or angry client cowered away from the puppy’s enthusiastic onslaught.
“Put him in the house, Amy,” Ed ordered, reaching for authority although his guts seemed to have turned to Jell-O.
“He won’t hurt you, Daddy,” Amy replied with enough scorn to make her father blush. “He’s just being friendly. He loves you!”
“Well, I don’t love him,” Ed muttered, now fending the dog off with both arms.
Riley, yapping happily and utterly unaware of the havoc he was wreaking on Ed’s intestines, kept leaping at Ed’s chest, enjoying the intricacies of this new game.
“Riley, down!” Bonnie Becker commanded as she thrust open the back door and joined the group around the pickup truck. The dog instantly dropped to the ground, though his entire body quivered with barely suppressed excitement as he gazed adoringly up at Ed. “Take him inside, Amy,” Bonnie told her daughter. “Can’t you see he’s scaring your father half to death?”
Ed’s embarrassed flush deepened as his daughter grasped the dog by the collar and began pulling him toward the house. Though the Lab, only a few inches shorter and no lighter than the little girl, could have dug in and refused to go, he happily submitted to his small mistress’s tugging. Child and pet disappeared back into the house, and Ed, his courage fully restored now that the puppy was nowhere to be seen, attempted to recover a little of his dignity. “I am not afraid of him,” he declared. “It’s just that he’s so big, he could hurt someone! He has to learn not to jump all over people!”
His wife nodded gravely. “You’re absolutely right,” Bonnie agreed. “Why don’t you train him?”
Ed attempted a scathing look, failed miserably, then flushed even redder when Bonnie giggled. “It’s not funny!” he insisted, though now his own lips were starting to twitch. “He could really hurt someone!”
“Oh, he really could,” Bill McGuire agreed, his expression deliberately deadpan. “I know I was scared out of my mind.” He winked at Bonnie. “Did you see the nasty way his tail was wagging?”
“And the way his lips curled back when he tried to lick Ed’s face,” Bonnie added. “That was pretty scary.”
“Oh, all right,” Ed groused, finally recognizing he was going to get no sympathy. “So when it comes to dogs, I’m a wimp. So sue me.” He went around to the tailgate of the truck, pulled it down, and began struggling with the big oak dresser. “You two going to help me with this, or would you rather just poke fun at me all day?”
“Poking fun sounds good to me,” Bill McGuire said. “How about you, Bonnie?”
“I always think poking fun beats hauling junk furniture around,” Bonnie agreed.
“It’s not junk,” Ed informed her. “It’s solid oak, and it’s at least a hundred years old, and—”
“And if it’s not junk, then how come they gave it to you?” Bonnie asked.
“Gave it to him?” Bill McGuire asked, the question popping out of his mouth before he’d bothered to think of the implications of Bonnie’s question. “Did he tell you we gave it—” Too late, he realized his mistake, then looked away so he could pretend he didn’t see Ed glaring at him.
“How much?” Bonnie asked, suddenly far more interested in the dresser than she’d been even half a minute earlier. Moving closer to the pickup, she eyed the battered oak chest like a prizefighter sizing up an opponent, then offered her opening gambit. “I can’t believe anybody would have the nerve to take money for this thing.”
“You just don’t know anything about antiques,” Ed parried, faking an offense as he tried to prepare his defense.
“Or Melissa Holloway,” Bill McGuire added, though he wasn’t certain whether his words would help or hinder his friend’s cause.
Bonnie arched an eyebrow. “Melissa, huh? It’s going to be even worse than I thought.”
“That’s hardly fair,” Ed began, hoping to edge his wife into an entirely different arena. “In fact, it has all the earmarks of a very sexist remark.”
Bonnie rolled her eyes. “It means I know Melissa, and frankly, if I had to place a bet on you or Melissa as a negotiator, I’m afraid I’d pick her. I love you very much, Ed, but I have a horrible feeling you paid a lot more than you should have for that dresser.”
Seeing the slimmest chance at escape, Ed darted toward the opening Bonnie had given him. “What do you think I should have paid?”
Bonnie eyed her husband, then the dresser, then her husband once more, calculating how much he might have paid. A hundred? Maybe two? Surely not any more. She decided to let him off the hook. “Four hundred,” she ventured, ready to repair his male ego by praising his shrewd bargaining when he proudly told her how much less he’d shelled out. When she saw him wince, she knew she’d guessed wrong.
“All right.” She sighed. “The truth.”
“A thousand,” Ed told her, unable to look her in the eye.
Bonnie flinched, but then remembered the terror in Ed’s eyes when they’d gone to pick up the puppy his daughter had wanted so badly. Moving closer to the truck, she pulled open one of the dresser’s drawers and touched the dovetail joinery. “You might actually have made a good deal,” she conceded. “When you get it restored, I’ll bet you can sell it for twice that.”
For the first time since he’d gotten out of the truck, Ed Becker relaxed. “See?” he told Bill McGuire. “Even Bonnie can see how good a piece it is.”
Ten minutes later, after Bill McGuire had unstrapped the dresser from the hand truck, helped Ed maneuver the heavy piece into his basement workshop, and headed back up the street to his own house, Ed began pulling the drawers out of the dresser, examining each one and assessing just how much work it was really going to take to bring the carved chest back to the beauty it had been a hundred years earlier.
It was in the fourth drawer that he discovered the mahogany box. Taking it out, he set it on top of the chest, then opened it as his wife entered the workshop. “My God.” He whistled softly. “When was the last time you saw one of these?” Lifting the stereoscope out of the box, he held it carefully in both hands, turning it over so he could examine it from every angle. “It’s perfect,” he said. “Look—there’s not a scratch on it.”
Taking the instrument from Ed’s hands, Bonnie held it up to her eyes and peered through the lenses, though there was no image to see. She tried working the focusing knob and the rack that would hold the cards, which moved easily along its track. And just as Ed had said, neither the brass fittings nor the leather and mahogany of which the stereoscope had been constructed bore any damage at all. With a little polish, the brass would gleam like new, and saddle soap would bring the leather back in just a few treatments. “Are there any pictures?” she asked.
“About a dozen,” Ed replied. “Why don’t you take it upstairs and show it to Amy? I’ll be up as soon as I get the rest of the drawers out.”
“Keep an eye out for treasure,” Bonnie admonished him as she started for the basement stairs. “Who knows? Maybe some loony hid a fortune in there!” Easily ducking away from the mock swing Ed aimed at her, she picked up the mahogany box and took both it and the stereoscope upstairs.
Twenty minutes later, when Ed found Bonnie in the living room with Amy, both his wife and his daughter were absorbed in looking at the pictures. As he came into the room, Bonnie was handing the stereoscope to Amy. “What about this one?” he heard her ask.
Amy held the stereoscope up and peered through the lenses. “My room,” she announced.
“Excuse me?” Ed asked. “What did she just say?”
“Her room,” Bonnie told him. “It’s what the picture’s of.”
Frowning, Ed crossed to the sofa where his wife and daughter were sitting. “What are you talking about?”
Bonnie looked at him. “It’s the strangest thing,” she said. “But all the pictures look like they’re of this house.”
Ed’s frown deepened. “But that doesn’t make any sense,” he began. “Why would they be—”
“I didn’t say it made sense,” Bonnie told him. “In fact, I think—” She had been about to say she thought it was very, very weird, but remembered just in time that Amy never missed anything either of them said. “I think it’s quite a coincidence,” she finished, pointedly glancing at Amy, who was still peering through the stereoscope’s lenses. “Let Daddy look,” she said.
Reluctantly, Amy passed the stereoscope to her father, and Ed held it up to his eyes. All he saw was a large room furnished in Victorian style. “This doesn’t look anything at all like Amy’s room,” he said.
“Not the way it is now,” Bonnie agreed. “But take a look at this one.” She lifted the card out of the stereoscope’s rack, replacing it with another. “Look at the fireplace, and the bookcases, and the windows and door. Don’t pay any attention to the furniture.”
Ed gazed through the lenses at the three-dimensional image of a Victorian living room, filled with overstuffed furniture, tables covered with knickknacks, and ornate lamps with heavily fringed shades. But as he looked past the furniture at the features of the room itself, he began to realize that it appeared vaguely familiar. Then, slowly, it came into focus in his mind.
Take away the intricately patterned wallpaper, remove the thick velvet drapes, add paint to some of the woodwork, and completely refurnish it, and the room in the picture would be exactly like the one in which he was sitting.
Bonnie put another picture in the rack, and Ed Becker quickly recognized an earlier incarnation of his own dining room.
She changed the picture again, and he saw the backyard, when the trees were smaller and the clapboards had been a darker shade than the pale gray they now were.
Finally he returned to the picture Amy had been looking at when he came in. Now he could see that it was, indeed, his daughter’s room. His daughter’s room as it might have been … when?
A hundred years ago?
Fifty?
He knew he had to find out.