The Blackstone Chronicles - By John Saul Page 0,19

I was going to say,” Megan protested, but by now her father was on his feet and had come around the end of the table to lift her out of her chair.

He held her high up over his head.

“I don’t care what you were going to say,” he said, swinging her low, toward the floor, then lifting her up once again. “All I care about is that you take as good care of your mommy as you do of your dolly. Can you do that?” Megan, overcome by giggling, nodded, and Bill set her down on the floor. “Good. Now run along and let me talk to your mother for a minute.” When she was gone, Bill dropped down next to Elizabeth. “You’re sure you’ll be all right?” he asked.

“I’ll be fine,” Elizabeth assured him. “You do what you have to do. Megan and Mrs. Goodrich will take care of me.”

Rising from her chair, she walked with him to the door, kissed him good-bye, then stood watching until his car had disappeared around the corner. But when he was finally gone and she’d shut the door, she slumped against the wall for a moment, afraid she might collapse to the floor without its support. A moment later she heard Mrs. Goodrich behind her, clucking worriedly.

“Now you get yourself back upstairs and into bed, young lady,” the housekeeper said, reverting to the same no-nonsense tone she’d used years ago, when she felt Elizabeth wasn’t behaving in a manner she considered quite proper. “The best thing for you is a good long rest, and there’s nothing in this house I can’t take care of.”

Too tired to do anything but agree with Mrs. Goodrich’s command, Elizabeth mounted the stairs. But when she reached the door of the master bedroom, instead of going inside, she paused, gazing down the hall toward Megan’s room, whose door stood slightly ajar. Though she heard no sound coming from her daughter’s room, something seemed to be drawing her to it. A moment later she was standing in the doorway gazing at the doll, which sat on Megan’s bed, propped up against the pillows.

It seemed to be gazing back at her. Something in its eyes—eyes that now seemed so lifelike she could hardly believe they were only glass set in a porcelain head—reached out to her, touched a nerve deep inside her, took hold of her. Elizabeth picked the doll up, cradled it in her arms, and walked slowly back to her own room, closing and locking the door behind her.

Sitting down in front of the mirror above her vanity table, she put the doll in her lap and began, brushing its hair, humming softly. As the brush moved gently through the doll’s hair in a soothing rhythm, the numbness within Elizabeth began to lift and the pain began to ease. When the brushing was finally done, Elizabeth moved to the chaise, stretching out on it, the doll resting on her breast, almost as if it were nursing. Warmed by the morning sun streaming though the window, and comforted by the doll resting against her chest, Elizabeth drifted into the first peaceful sleep she’d had since losing the baby.

Bill McGuire was starting to wonder if anything was ever going to go right again. Since the day Jules Hartwick had told him the Blackstone Center loan was on hold, it seemed as if everything that could go wrong, had. Worst of all, of course, had been Elizabeth’s miscarriage. After Megan’s birth they’d been told it was unlikely that Elizabeth would be able to conceive again, and they had all but given up hope of a second child when Elizabeth discovered back in April that she was pregnant. “But it’s going to be tricky,” Dr. Margolis told them. “And this will definitely be the last.” So now it was over, and though Bill still felt a terrible sense of emptiness and loss, the agony of that first night when he’d come back to Blackstone to find that his son had been born dead had already begun to dull.

He knew he was going to survive it, and that somehow he would carry Elizabeth through the loss as well.

As if the loss of his son were not enough, it seemed the gods were somehow conspiring against him. He had raced home from Port Arbello thinking he’d won the condo project. But yesterday he’d received a call from the developer to tell him that the contract—the contract he’d counted on to carry him through