The Blackstone Chronicles - By John Saul Page 0,12

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.

Chapter 5

Elizabeth was holding her baby—a perfect, tiny boy—cradling him gently against her breast. She was sitting on the porch, in a rocking chair, but it wasn’t the porch of the house in Blackstone, nor, oddly, was the day nearly as cold as it should have been, with Christmas only three weeks away.

The summer mists seemed to part, and she realized where she was—back home in Port Arbello, on the porch of the old house on Conger’s Point, and it was a perfect July day. A cool wind was blowing in off the sea, and the sound of surf breaking against the base of the bluff was lulling her baby into a contented sleep. She began humming softly, just loud enough so her baby could hear her, but quietly enough not to disturb him.

“Rockabye baby,

In the tree tops,

When the wind blows,

The cradle will rock …”

The words died away to nothing more than a murmuring hum, and Elizabeth began to feel drowsy, her eyelids heavy. But then, just as the song faded completely from her lips, a movement caught her