The Blackstone Chronicles - By John Saul Page 0,27

right,” she repeated as, without so much as a glance back through the glass of the French doors, she left the library and carried her doll back up to her room. “You’re mine now. Nobody’s ever going to take you away from me again.”

Bill McGuire sensed nothing amiss when he came back to the house an hour later. The sweet smell of chocolate chip cookies was wafting from the back of the house; Mrs. Goodrich was taking the last batch out of the oven as he entered the kitchen.

“Well, isn’t this good timing,” the old woman said as Bill helped himself to one of the cookies that were piled high on a platter on the table. “I was just going to take some up to Miss Elizabeth, but I’m not really sure my old bones could get me up there.”

“Don’t even think about it,” Bill told her. Putting half a dozen cookies on a smaller plate, he left the kitchen and went upstairs. As he was about to go into the room he and Elizabeth shared, though, he heard Megan singing softly.

Singing a lullaby.

Turning away from the master bedroom, he continued down the hall to his daughter’s room. The door stood wide open, and Megan was lying on her bed, propped up against a pile of ruffled pillows.

In her arms she held the doll.

When she saw her father standing in the doorway, the lullaby she’d been singing faded into silence.

“I thought we decided Sam could stay in the nursery for a while,” Bill said.

Megan smiled at him. “Mommy changed her mind,” she said. “She gave Sam back to me.”

“Are you sure?” Bill asked. “You didn’t just take her out of the crib?”

Megan shook her head. “Mommy said she knows Sam isn’t a real baby, and that she doesn’t want her anymore. She told me to take good care of her and always love her.”

As Bill listened to the words, a sense of uneasiness began to come over him. “Where is she?” he asked.

Megan shrugged. “I don’t know. After she gave Sam back to me, she went back in the nursery and closed the door.”

Bill’s uneasiness turned to fear. Telling Megan to stay in her room until he came back, he went to the nursery. Opening the door, he was greeted by a blast of cold air surging in through the open window.

The doors to both the bathroom and the master bedroom beyond stood wide open. “Elizabeth?” he called. “Elizabeth!”

Going to the window, he started to close it. Before he could pull it shut, however, his eyes fixed on the roof outside.

Some of the shingles appeared to be hanging loose.

As if something had disrupted them, and then—

“Elizabeth!” he shouted, then turned and ran from the room.

A few seconds later he was in the library, at the French doors. Through the windows, he saw his wife, and a moment later, as he cradled her lifeless body in his arms, a terrible howl of grief erupted from his throat.

Upstairs in her room, Megan smiled at her doll. And the doll, she was almost certain, smiled back at her.

Chapter 11

Bill McGuire was utterly unconscious of the icy chill in the air on the day he buried his wife, for he was far too numb to be aware of anything as insignificant as the weather. Bareheaded, he stood at the head of Elizabeth’s grave. Megan was on one side of him, holding on to her father with her left hand as she clutched the doll in her right, pressing it against her breast almost as if to prevent it from seeing the coffin that stood only a few feet in front of them. On Bill’s other side was Mrs. Goodrich, one of her hands tucked into the crook of his arm, her face covered by a thick veil. The old woman seemed to have shrunk since Elizabeth died three days earlier, and though she had continued to go through the motions of taking care of Bill and Megan, the spirit had gone out of her. Bill could not help thinking that the Christmas rapidly approaching would be her last.

Even the house seemed to have gone into mourning; a silence had descended over it, broken only by Megan, for whom, Bill suspected, the truth of what had happened had not yet sunk in. Each night, as he tucked her into bed, she looked up into his eyes and repeated the same words.

“Mommy’s all right, isn’t she?”

“Of course she is,” Bill assured her. “She’s with God, and