The Blackstone Chronicles - By John Saul Page 0,66

night.” He put on a bright smile and changed the subject. “So, are we looking for something special, or are we just browsing to see what people are throwing out this year?”

“I want to find a present for my cousin,” Rebecca told him.

“Andrea?” Oliver asked. “Do you even know where she is?”

“She’s coming home.”

“Home?” Oliver echoed. “You mean to your aunt’s house?”

Rebecca nodded. “She called Aunt Martha the day before yesterday, and said she didn’t have anywhere else to go.”

Oliver remembered the last time he’d seen Andrea Ward. It was twelve years ago, the day before her eighteenth birthday, and Andrea had been talking about nothing except getting away from her mother.

Her mother, and Blackstone too.

Oliver had been sitting at the soda fountain in the drugstore near the square when Andrea and a couple of her friends had come in. Barely even noticing he was there, they’d huddled together on the three stools at the soda fountain’s corner, and he was treated to at least one teenager’s view of Blackstone.

“I can’t believe I’ve survived this long,” Andrea had said, impatiently brushing her long mane of blond hair away from her face, only to groan in exasperation a moment later as it fell right back over her forehead. “And the first thing I’m going to do is get this cut off. Can you believe my mother actually thinks it’s a sin to cut your hair?” Then, with a brittle laugh, she proceeded to recite the long list of things Martha Ward had proclaimed sinful. “There’s dancing and drinking and going to movies, just for starters. And smoking, of course,” she added, lighting a cigarette with a defiant flourish. “And let’s not forget dating either. How am I supposed to find a husband if I can’t have a date?”

“Maybe she wants you to go to college,” one of her friends suggested, but Andrea only laughed again.

“All she wants me to do is pray, just like she does,” the girl declared. As she brushed her hair off her face again, Oliver had glimpsed how pretty she was, despite the heavy makeup she wore.

Or she would have been pretty, if she wasn’t so angry. But Andrea had been angry for a long time, and over the years her anger had manifested itself in clothes that showed off her figure a little too perfectly, and makeup that hardened her face rather than accentuated its beauty.

And though she was forbidden to date, she’d always been popular with Blackstone’s teenage boys.

Far too popular, according to Martha Ward.

Having heard Andrea’s diatribe, when she disappeared from Blackstone the next day, leaving nothing behind except a note saying she’d gone to Boston and was never coming back, Oliver hadn’t been surprised.

Martha Ward had been.

She’d been both surprised and furious. On the single occasion nearly three years ago, when Andrea had finally returned to visit Blackstone with her live-in boyfriend in tow, Martha refused to see her.

“I do not countenance sin,” she proclaimed. “Don’t come back until you’ve either married him or left him.”

Andrea had not been seen in Blackstone since.

“What happened?” Oliver asked now, as he and Rebecca turned onto the grounds of the old drive-in movie and surveyed the two dozen tables that had been set up—only a third of what there would be later in the spring and in the summer, when the weather had warmed and the tourists began coming through.

“Her boyfriend left her, and she lost her job,” Rebecca said. “I guess she really doesn’t have anyplace else to go. So I thought I’d try to find something to cheer her up.”

They meandered among the tables for a while, stopping now and then to wonder at some of the items that some people seemed to think other people might want. One of the tables was covered with tiny people constructed out of pebbles that had been glued together and painted with happy faces. PEBBLE PEOPLE, a small, badly lettered card on the table proclaimed. TO KNOW THEM IS TO LOVE THEM. To know them is to loathe them, Oliver thought, but kept silent, guessing that the elderly woman sitting hopefully behind the table had made the weird little humanoids herself.

Another table contained a collection of light-switch plates to which dozens of rhinestones had been glued, and yet another displayed religious icons constructed out of tiny shells.

None of it, they decided, was right for Andrea.

And then, sitting on a table that Janice Anderson was tending, they found it. Rebecca spotted it first, half hidden behind an antique