Blindfold (16 page)

It was still early enough that her parents weren't home. Her mother had had a WOH meeting, and as he always did when her mother had meetings, her father was playing poker at a friend's house. There was no hard rock music coming from upstairs. Maggie's brother was out, too.

This was supposed to be my big night, she told herself bitterly, peeling off the black jacket and tossing it on the sofa, and now here I am, home at ten, and everybody else is out having fun. How did that happen?

She knew perfectly well how it had happened, He was stubborn, she was stubborn, neither of

them had given an inch, and here she was, all alone in an empty house.

I don't care, she thought, still stubborn, he should have told me the truth. I would have told him.

Oh, you would not, an inner voice argued. If Scout, the boy you had a mad crush on when you were thirteen, had been violently, viciously murdered, would you, at seventeen, have confided that gruesome fact to some person you'd only met a week earlier?

The thought of Scout's skull being bashed in by a blunt object made Maggie physically ill. She went immediately to the telephone by the door to call him, as if she needed to be reassured that he was still alive and breathing.

He wasn't home. At first his mother said he was home, but a few minutes later she returned to the telephone to tell Maggie he wasn't in his room. "I guess he went out," she said, sounding uncaring.

She'd been drinking, Maggie could tell. She did that once in a while now, since the divorce, and Scout wasn't very happy about it. But he didn't know what to do about it.

Wondering who he was out with... the guys? ... a girl? ... what girl? Maggie hung up the phone and went into the downstairs bathroom to take something for her upset stomach.

She dreaded calling Lane and Helen. They'd be horrified that she was home this early, and they'd need to know all the gory details of her evening at Picadilly. What was she going to tell them? The

truth? But it was really Whit's truth, wasn't it? If she told, she'd feel like she was reading from his diary or something.

But she had to call them to see if they needed a ride in the morning. She hadn't forgotten she intended to visit the sheriff, and she hoped they hadn't, either.

She'd just tell them she'd had a little disagreement with Whit. That wouldn't surprise either of them. They both knew she occasionally opened her mouth first and regretted later.

Only occasionally? the nasty little inner voice questioned sarcastically.

Deciding to call from her bedroom after she'd changed into her robe, Maggie climbed the stairs, wishing the house weren't so dark and empty, and went into her room.

She didn't see the package on her bed until she'd changed her clothes and dutifully hung the black dress in her closet. Then she flopped down on her bed. And there it was, sitting on the blue-and-white comforter.

It was wrapped in plain brown paper, addressed to her in black print, and had no return address. But there was a blue Post-It note on the front in her brother's hieroglyphical handwriting.

"This came for you. Secret admirer? Lucky you. n It was signed, simply, "D*

Maggie held the package in her hands, turning it over, then shaking it gently. Who would be sending her a present? Her grandmother would have put a return address on it.

I haven't had such great luck with people bringing me things lately, she thought, setting the package aside. Maybe 111 just wait until Mom and Dad get home to open this one.

But by the time she had called Lane and Helen, answering their questions about Picadilly in the most cryptic fashion and making arrangements to pick them both up in the morning, her curiosity about the package sent her fingers fumbling at the string. If it were a bomb, it would be ticking, and she didn't hear a sound in her room but the faint sigh of the night breeze outside her open window.

Off came the string.

Off came the paper.

Off came the lid of the box.

Tissue paper, slightly wrinkled and clearly not new, covered the contents. There was no card.

There should have been a card.

Maybe it was inside, beneath the wrinkled tissue paper. Probably was.

Her grandmother would have put the card on top, so that she would see it first thing.

Her hands were not shaking as she unfolded the tissue paper, because there was absolutely no reason in the world to be afraid. None at alL Someone had sent her something in a box, and she was going to open it just as anyone would open a package they'd received. Anything else would be sheer cowardice, and she was not, was not, a coward.

When she had uncovered the object lying deep within the tissue paper, she sat perfectly still, her eyes not veering away for a second, her breathing

deep and even. "I'm okay," she murmured, staring at the contents of the box, "I am perfectly okay, there is nothing the least bit scary about this, nothing at all. It can't hurt me."

Which was true enough. Inside the tissue paper lay nothing but a doll. A rag doll, its features embroidered on the round face, its hair orange. A soft, stuffed doll in a red dress and red-and-white-striped stockings, lying in the box on its back, its boneless arms folded limply over its chest.

Harmless. Dolls were perfectly, absolutely harmless. Couldn't hurt anyone, ever.

But they could send messages. Nasty messages. Messages meant to frighten, to intimidate. Meant to make the hands start shaking, after all, though they didn't want to, and the stomach roil and the little pulse at the temple start throbbing with alarm, no matter how concentrated the effort to keep it from doing that.

A doll could do all that if it was wearing a blindfold over its blank, black eyes. The blindfold, too, was black, amateurishly cut out of construction paper and taped to the round, soft little head. And a doll could send a nasty message if it had a thick, rough rope tied in a hangman's knot around its little neck.

Maggie was wishing she'd hidden it. What good was all this fuss doing? It didn't change anything, and it was giving her a headache.

"It's okay Mom, Dad," she said wearily. "It's just a joke, really. Someone the peer jury sentenced probably thought it was a terrific way to send a message. I mean, if you think about it, it's kind of funny. When my hair is wet, I do look a little like that." She managed a weak laugh.

No one echoed it.

"Some joke," her brother muttered. "Even my sense of humor isn't that gross."

"This blindfold ..." her mother murmured, "and that noose! It's horrid." She shuddered visibly and almost tossed the box at her husband, who caught it and said, "I think Donovan should see this."

"I'll take it to him." Maggie lay down on her bed and pulled up the comforter, hoping they'd take the hint. "I'm going to see him tomorrow." She didn't want to scare her parents further by telling them about Chantilly's threat, so she added, "To talk to him about that scale. But take the package downstairs, okay? I don't want it in my room overnight. Just put it by the front door. I'll get it in the morning."

Her mother stood beside the bed, looking down at Maggie. "Are you sure you're okay? It must have been horrible, opening that box, thinking it was a present, and then finding . . . that. Where did it come from?"

Maggie looked at her brother. "You left it on my bed. Who gave it to you?"

"No one. The doorbell rang while I was fixing a sandwich. By the time I got there, the package was just sitting on the porch. I didn't see anyone."

"You didn't see a plain old blue car pull away?" Maggie asked him.

"It was dark. Maybe I saw taillights. I don't remember."

"Mom, it was just a joke," Maggie repeated, wanting desperately to be alone.

Her mother nodded, looking unconvinced. "Did you have a good time at Picadilly?" she asked then.

"Yeah, it was great." To avoid any further questions on that subject, Maggie asked, "How was your meeting? So is it absolutely settled about the courthouse?"

Defeat showed in her mother's face. 'We're definitely razing it. Tearing it down, building a rec center on the site." She smiled at Maggie. "I'm sure your friends will be happy. I should have let you break the news to them. You'd be their hero. Heroine. But there was a reporter at the meeting, so I'm assuming the story was on the eleven o'clock news." Glancing at her watch, she said, "We missed it. A lot of Felicity residents, especially those under eighteen, must be rejoicing right about now." She asked again, "You're sure you're okay? You'll be able to sleep?"

If you people ever leave, I will, Maggie thought darkly. But she felt bad for her mother. All that planning, all that energy, all those meetings, and now the historical building she'd tried so hard to save was actually going to be history. Depressing.

And then to come home and find this ... "Yes, Mom, Til sleep. Don't worry, okay? I'm fine."

But when the room was empty, the door closed, the nasty little box and its contents on their way downstairs, sleep didn't come easily. If bad things really did come in threes, the way people said, this particular Friday was a terrific example. First the unnerving encounter with Chantilly Beckwith, then the disappointing evening at Picadilly, and last, but certainly far from least, that creepy little doll. Ugh. Someone had gone to a lot of trouble. You'd think people would have better things to do with their time.

Maybe tomorrow morning the sheriff would tell her they now had proof that both incidents at the courthouse had been absolutely accidental. "Nothing sinister about either one of them," he would say. "Just plain old bad luck, bad karma, bad timing." Which would mean that the broken gavel and the bloody scale and the ugly little doll had nothing to do with the other incidents. If the courthouse was no longer an issue, the sheriff could concentrate solely on who was torturing Maggie Keene.

Comforted by those thoughts, Maggie fell asleep.

But on Saturday, she never got the chance to ask the sheriff what he'd found out about the cave-in and the explosion, because when she, Lane, and Helen arrived at the courthouse, the sheriff wasn't in his office.

"He's already up on the roof," a deputy told them. "Seeing to it that the work crew takin' that statue down doesn't drop it straight down off the

roof and crush seventeen people standin' on the ground watchin'."

Disappointed, Maggie asked him if he knew anything about the investigation into the two disasters, but just then his phone rang. When he turned his back on the trio to answer, they knew they'd been dismissed.

They still had an hour before they had to meet the rest of the peer jury for the ceremony on the courthouse grounds, so they went to the food court at the mall. They ate and talked, Maggie trying as hard as she could to avoid the subject of her evening at Picadilly.

Impossible.

It was easy enough at first. She had showed them the doll and they discussed that for a while, both suggesting that James Keith or Chantilly Beckwith or both had sent it. Then, because they already knew about the cancellation of the courthouse renovation project and were delighted, Maggie kept them on that subject. They were already enthusiastically planning dances and parties and concerts at the new recreation center.

"It hasn't even been built yet," Maggie pointed out dourly. "And nothing's on the drawing board yet." It wasn't that she didn't want a rec center. She did. But she didn't think they should plan anything new until someone knew what had happened at the courthouse. Wasn't that more important than anything else? People had almost died.

The moment she'd been dreading came when, exhausting the subject of the rec center, Helen and

Lane insisted on hearing the details of her evening at Picadilly.

"Maggie/' Helen cried in exasperation, "if you don't tell us this very second what happened last night, you're going to be wearing this taco!"

Even then, Maggie was cautious about how much she shared. Whit had made it painfully clear that his relationship with Dante Guardino and the Miller girl was his business. If he wasn't willing to share it with her, he certainly wouldn't want Helen and Lane to hear about it.

"We had a little argument, that's all. Nothing major. You know me," she added with what she hoped was a nonchalant shrug. "I'm hard to get along with."

"No, you're not," Helen said loyally. "But," she added, "sometimes you take things the wrong way. Then you get defensive, and that mouth of yours goes into overdrive." She stared intently at Maggie. "Is that how you got last night? With Whit?"

"No!" Maggie said defensively, and then, hearing the tone in her voice, laughed ruefully. "Well, maybe. Anyway," sweeping her trash onto her tray to carry it to the can, "it's history, okay?"

Lane laughed, in better spirits now than she'd been in days. And Maggie knew why. "Please don't mention history. That's what almost lost us our rec center Thank goodness your mother came to her

senses."

When Helen said, "Come on, we'd better get going," Maggie found herself involuntarily recoiling at the thought of going back to the site of the exploit

sion. Going to the sheriffs office hadn't been difficult. It was in one of the "newer" wings, on the opposite side of the kitchen wing.

But the ceremony was taking place in the same area as the bazaar, which made it hard for her to leave the safety of the van when she reached her destination. She parked, but then she sat there, for what seemed like the longest time, battling the need to start the engine again and go back home. She could sit on the couch with her father and watch football, eat popcorn and chips, yell at the set when their team fumbled. She could forget all about the ancient old building with the hole in its basement ceiling and its first floor corridor, and no kitchen left to speak of. She could just go home. She was the one who had been tossed like a Frisbee by that explosion. No one would blame her if she didn't show up for the ceremony today.

No, no, no. Wrong, all wrong. She couldn't do that. Because if she did, she'd be a coward. The thought made her cringe. In the old western movies her dad was so fond of, which she occasionally watched with him, she'd be the character known as a "yellow-bellied, lily-livered coward." But thinking of the westerns reminded her of the antique scale, and her spine tingled.