take it,” Elizabeth said, reaching for the package as Bill started down the steps. “Thank you, Charlie.”
“Just doing my job.”
The mailman touched his cap almost as if saluting, and Elizabeth had to resist the urge to return the salute. Contenting herself with a wave, she called a good-bye to her husband and went back into the house, quickly closing the door against the early December chill.
Taking the package back to the dining room with her, she stared at it, puzzled. Just as Charlie had said, it bore no other name but McGuire, and their address, written in neat, block letters.
There was no return address.
“ ‘Curiouser and curiouser,’ ” she quoted softly as she tore away the brown paper that enclosed the parcel. She was just opening the box itself when Megan came in.
“What’s that, Mommy? Is it for me?”
Elizabeth peered into the box, then lifted out a doll.
A beautiful, antique doll with blue glass eyes and long blond hair.
Save for the doll, the box was empty.
Her eyes went once more to the empty spot where the sender’s name should have been. “How strange,” Elizabeth said.
Chapter 2
Bill McGuire started down the hill toward the center of Blackstone. Elizabeth is right, he told himself. Whatever prompted Jules Hartwick’s call yesterday morning was no more serious than Jules claimed.
“We need to have a meeting,” Hartwick had explained. “And I think you should hold off on the project for a day or two, at least, until we can talk.”
Though Bill had asked any number of questions, trying to find out precisely what was on the banker’s mind, Hartwick refused to answer, saying only that he wasn’t ready to go into it yet; that Bill shouldn’t worry.
Meaningless platitudes that had triggered even louder alarms in Bill’s mind. How on earth could he not worry? Blackstone Center was the biggest project he’d ever taken on. He’d turned down two other jobs—one in Port Arbello, the other in Eastbury—in order to concentrate on the conversion of the old Asylum into the sort of commercial center that could revive what had been a slowly dying town. The Center, in fact, had been in large part his own idea. He had thought about it for more than a year before even suggesting it to the directors of the Blackstone Trust. The one person he’d talked to almost from the start was Oliver Metcalf, because he’d known that without Oliver’s support, the plan would never have gotten off the ground. A couple of tepid editorials in the Chronicle, and that would have been that. But Oliver was enthusiastic about the Blackstone Center from the very beginning, with a single major reservation.
“What about me?” he’d wanted to know. “Am I suddenly going to be living on the busiest street in town?”
Bill had already thought of that. Grabbing a pencil from Oliver’s cluttered desk, he’d quickly sketched a rough map to show that the most logical approach to the site was not through the front gates, but from the back, where the old service entrance had once been. Appeased, Oliver immediately backed the project, pushing for it not only in the paper, but with his uncle as well. Once Harvey Connally had been won over—albeit reluctantly—the rest was easy. By the day before yesterday, when the wrecker’s ball had made its ceremonial swing, puncturing the Asylum’s west wall in preparation for the expansion of the building, most of the opposition to the project had evaporated.
Bill McGuire, and his entire crew, had been all set to go to work the next day.
Yesterday.
But only hours after the ceremony, Jules Hartwick made his ominous call. “Hold off for a day or two,” indeed! “Not to worry”—fat chance of that. Bill McGuire was worried, all right. Worried nearly out of his mind.
Now, as he walked the three blocks down Amherst Street to the corner of Main, where the redbrick, Federal-style building that housed the First National Bank of Blackstone stood, he felt an anticipatory rush of fear. His nerves gave an additional jump when he spotted Oliver Metcalf at the bank’s door.
“You know what this is all about?” Oliver asked.
“He called you too?” Bill replied, trying to betray nothing of his ballooning sense that something very serious had gone wrong.
“Yesterday. But he wouldn’t say what it was about, which tells me that whatever it is, it’s not good news.”
“Did he tell you not to worry?”
The editor nodded. His eyes searched McGuire’s face. “You don’t have any idea at all what this is about?”