The Blackstone Chronicles

Chapter 4

As he had often done before, Bill McGuire paused on the sidewalk in front of his house for no better reason than to gaze in satisfaction upon the structure in which he’d spent almost all his life. The house was a Victorian—the only one on this particular block of Amherst Street—and though Bill was perfectly well aware of the current fashion of turning houses such as his into pink, purple, or lavender Painted Ladies, neither he nor Elizabeth had ever been tempted to coat the old house with half a dozen colors of paint. Instead, they had faithfully maintained the earthy tones—mustards, tans, greens, and maroons—of the period, and the elaborate white trim, meant by the original builders to resemble lace that gave the house a feeling of lightness, despite its mass.
The house was one of only six on the block, and all of them had been as well taken care of as the McGuires’ Amherst Street, which sloped gently up the hill, eventually turning to the left, then back to the right, and finally ending at the gates of the old Asylum, could easily have been set aside as a sort of living museum of architecture. There was a large half-timbered Tudor on one side of the McGuires’, and a good example of Federal on the other. On the opposite side of the street were two houses that had been built early in the Craftsman era, separated by a large saltbox that, to Bill at least, appeared slightly embarrassed by the Victorian effusiveness of its across-the-street neighbor. Still, all six houses sat on spacious enough grounds and were surrounded by so many trees and shrubs that the block was unified by its parklike look, if not its architecture.
Today, though, as he gazed up at his house, with its profusion of steeply pitched roofs and dormer windows, Bill had a strange sense that something was not right. He searched the structure for some clue to his uneasiness, but could see nothing wrong. The paint wasn’t peeling, nor were any shingles missing. He quickly scanned the ornate trim work that he’d always taken special pride in keeping in perfect repair, but every bit of it looked exactly as it should. Not a spindle missing, nor a lath either split or broken. Telling himself his discomfort was nothing more than his own bad mood after the meeting at the bank, Bill strode up the brick pathway, mounted the steps that led to the high front porch, and went inside.
The sense that something was wrong grew stronger.
“Elizabeth?” he called out. “Megan? Anybody home?” For a moment he heard nothing at all, then the door leading to the butler’s pantry at the far end of the dining room opened and he saw Mrs. Goodrich’s stooped form shuffling toward him.
“They’re both upstairs,” the old woman said. “You might want to go up and talk to the missus. I think she might be a little upset. And I’m fixing some lunch for the whole family.” The old woman, who had been with Elizabeth since she was a child in Port Arbello, gazed at him worriedly. “You’ll be here, won’t you?”
“I’ll be here, Mrs. Goodrich,” he assured her. As the housekeeper made her slow way back to the kitchen, Bill started up the stairs. Before he was even halfway to the second-floor landing, Megan appeared, gazing down at him with dark, uncertain eyes.
“Why can’t I have my dolly?” she demanded. “Why won’t Mommy give her to me?”
“Dolly?” Bill repeated. “What dolly are you talking about?”
“The one someone sent me,” Megan said. Her eyes narrowed slightly. “Mommy won’t let me have her.”
At that moment Elizabeth, still dressed in the nightgown and robe she’d been wearing when Bill left the house three hours earlier, appeared behind their daughter, smiling wanly. “Honey, it’s not that I won’t let you have the doll. It’s just that we don’t know who it’s for.”
“Would one of you mind enlightening me about what’s going on?” Bill asked as he came to the top of the stairs. He knelt down to give Megan a kiss, then stood and slid his arm around his wife. The smile his kiss had put on Megan’s face disappeared.
“It’s for me!” she declared. “When you see it, you’ll know.”
“Come on,” Elizabeth said. “It’s in our room. I’ll show it to you.”
With Megan reaching up to put her hand in his, Bill followed his wife into the big master bedroom. On the old chaise longue, once his mother’s favorite place to sit and read, was the box the mailman had delivered this morning. Reaching into it, Elizabeth lifted out the doll, automatically cradling it in her arms as if it were a baby. “It’s really very beautiful,” she said as Bill moved closer to her. “I think its face must be hand-painted, and the clothes look like they were handmade too.”
Bill looked down into the doll’s face, which had been painted so perfectly that for the briefest of moments he almost had the feeling the doll was looking back up at him. “Who on earth sent it?”
Elizabeth shrugged. “That’s the problem. Not only wasn’t there any return address, but there wasn’t any card with it either.”
“It’s mine!” Megan piped, reaching up for the doll. “Why would anybody send a doll to a grown-up?”
Elizabeth, seeming to hold the doll a little closer to her breast, turned away from the little girl. “But we don’t know that it was sent to you, darling. It might be a present for the new baby.”
Megan scowled deeply and her chin began to tremble. “But the baby’s going to be a boy,” she said. “You said so. And boys don’t play with dollies!”
“We hope the baby is going to be a boy,” Elizabeth explained. “But we don’t know. And if you have a little sister, don’t you think she’ll love the doll as much as you do?”
Megan’s features took on a look of intransigence that almost made Bill laugh. “No,” she declared. “Babies don’t even play with dolls. All they do is eat and cry and wet their diapers.” She turned to her father, and her eyes opened wide. “Please, Daddy, can’t I have her?”
“I’ll tell you what,” Bill said. “Why don’t we put the doll away for a while and see if we can find out who sent it? Then, if it turns out it was meant for you, it’ll be yours. And if it turns out it was meant for the baby, we’ll wait until the baby is born, and if it’s a little boy, then the doll can be your first present from your little brother. How does that sound?”
Megan looked uncertain. “Where are we going to put her?”
Bill thought for a moment. “What about the hall closet, downstairs?”
Megan brightened. “All right,” she agreed. “But I get to carry her downstairs.”
“Sounds fair enough,” Bill agreed. He winked at Elizabeth. “After all, you’ve gotten to have it all morning. Don’t you think it’s only fair that Megan should get to carry it?”
For a moment he almost thought he saw hesitation in his wife’s eyes, as if she wasn’t quite ready to give up the doll, but then she smiled. “Of course,” she agreed. She knelt down and handed the doll to Megan. “But you have to cradle it, just like I did. Even though it’s not a real baby, you could hurt it if you dropped it, and it’s very valuable.”
“I won’t drop her,” Megan declared, holding the antique doll close to her chest just the way her mother had a moment earlier. “I love her.”
Together, the family went downstairs and opened the hall closet. “She’ll get cold in here,” Megan said. “We have to wrap her in a blanket.” She darted back up the stairs, returning a minute later with the small pink blanket that had first been in her crib, and since then at the foot of her bed. “She can use this,” she said, carefully wrapping the doll in the blanket. Then she surrendered it to her father, who put it up on the shelf, nested among the woolen ski caps, gloves, and scarves.
“There,” he said. “Now she’ll sleep until we find out who she belongs to.” But as they moved toward the dining room, where Mrs. Goodrich was putting their lunch on the table, he saw Megan turn back to look longingly at the closet.
He had a suspicion that before the afternoon was over, the doll would somehow have found its way from the closet to his daughter’s room.
That, however, would be something Elizabeth would have to deal with, since he himself would be in Port Arbello.
“Do you really have to go?” Elizabeth asked when he told her what had happened at the bank that morning and what he had to do now.
“If we want to eat, I do. I’m pretty sure I can still get the job. But I’m probably going to have to hole up in a motel for the night, putting together numbers so I can nail it down in the morning.” He glanced at his wife’s swollen belly, which seemed—impossibly—to have grown even larger just in the few hours he’d been gone. “Will you be all right?”
“I have a whole month yet before he’s due,” Elizabeth said, instantly reading his thoughts. “Believe me, I’m not going to deliver early just because you’re out of town. So go, do what you have to do, and don’t worry about Megan and me. Mrs. Goodrich has been taking care of me all my life. She can do it one more night.”
“Mrs. Goodrich is almost ninety,” Bill reminded her.
“She shouldn’t even be working.”
“Try telling her that,” Elizabeth replied, laughing. “She’ll eat you for supper!”
An hour later, when he was ready to take his overnight bag and portable computer out to the car, Bill’s earlier uneasiness returned. “Maybe I better not go,” he said. “Maybe I can do it all over the phone.”
“You know you can’t,” Elizabeth said firmly. “Go on! Nothing’s going to happen to us.”
But even as he drove away from the house, Bill found himself looking back at it.
Looking back, and still feeling that something was wrong.