The Blackstone Chronicles (46 page)

“It’s not junk,” Ed informed her. “It’s solid oak, and it’s at least a hundred years old, and—”

“And if it’s not junk, then how come they gave it to you?” Bonnie asked.

“Gave
it to him?” Bill McGuire asked, the question popping out of his mouth before he’d bothered to think of the implications of Bonnie’s question. “Did he tell you we
gave
it—” Too late, he realized his mistake, then looked away so he could pretend he didn’t see Ed glaring at him.

“How much?” Bonnie asked, suddenly far more interested in the dresser than she’d been even half a minute earlier. Moving closer to the pickup, she eyed the battered oak chest like a prizefighter sizing up an opponent, then offered her opening gambit. “I can’t believe anybody would have the nerve to take money for this thing.”

“You just don’t know anything about antiques,” Ed
parried, faking an offense as he tried to prepare his defense.

“Or Melissa Holloway,” Bill McGuire added, though he wasn’t certain whether his words would help or hinder his friend’s cause.

Bonnie arched an eyebrow. “Melissa, huh? It’s going to be even worse than I thought.”

“That’s hardly fair,” Ed began, hoping to edge his wife into an entirely different arena. “In fact, it has all the earmarks of a very sexist remark.”

Bonnie rolled her eyes. “It means I know Melissa, and frankly, if I had to place a bet on you or Melissa as a negotiator, I’m afraid I’d pick her. I love you very much, Ed, but I have a horrible feeling you paid a lot more than you should have for that dresser.”

Seeing the slimmest chance at escape, Ed darted toward the opening Bonnie had given him. “What do you think I should have paid?”

Bonnie eyed her husband, then the dresser, then her husband once more, calculating how much he might have paid. A hundred? Maybe two? Surely not any more. She decided to let him off the hook. “Four hundred,” she ventured, ready to repair his male ego by praising his shrewd bargaining when he proudly told her how much less he’d shelled out. When she saw him wince, she knew she’d guessed wrong.

“All right.” She sighed. “The truth.”

“A thousand,” Ed told her, unable to look her in the eye.

Bonnie flinched, but then remembered the terror in Ed’s eyes when they’d gone to pick up the puppy his daughter had wanted so badly. Moving closer to the truck, she pulled open one of the dresser’s drawers and touched the dovetail joinery. “You might actually have made a good deal,” she conceded. “When you get it restored, I’ll bet you can sell it for twice that.”

For the first time since he’d gotten out of the truck, Ed
Becker relaxed. “See?” he told Bill McGuire. “Even Bonnie can see how good a piece it is.”

Ten minutes later, after Bill McGuire had unstrapped the dresser from the hand truck, helped Ed maneuver the heavy piece into his basement workshop, and headed back up the street to his own house, Ed began pulling the drawers out of the dresser, examining each one and assessing just how much work it was really going to take to bring the carved chest back to the beauty it had been a hundred years earlier.

It was in the fourth drawer that he discovered the mahogany box. Taking it out, he set it on top of the chest, then opened it as his wife entered the workshop. “My God.” He whistled softly. “When was the last time you saw one of these?” Lifting the stereoscope out of the box, he held it carefully in both hands, turning it over so he could examine it from every angle. “It’s perfect,” he said. “Look—there’s not a scratch on it.”

Taking the instrument from Ed’s hands, Bonnie held it up to her eyes and peered through the lenses, though there was no image to see. She tried working the focusing knob and the rack that would hold the cards, which moved easily along its track. And just as Ed had said, neither the brass fittings nor the leather and mahogany of which the stereoscope had been constructed bore any damage at all. With a little polish, the brass would gleam like new, and saddle soap would bring the leather back in just a few treatments. “Are there any pictures?” she asked.

“About a dozen,” Ed replied. “Why don’t you take it upstairs and show it to Amy? I’ll be up as soon as I get the rest of the drawers out.”

“Keep an eye out for treasure,” Bonnie admonished him as she started for the basement stairs. “Who knows? Maybe some loony hid a fortune in there!” Easily ducking away from the mock swing Ed aimed at her, she
picked up the mahogany box and took both it and the stereoscope upstairs.

Twenty minutes later, when Ed found Bonnie in the living room with Amy, both his wife and his daughter were absorbed in looking at the pictures. As he came into the room, Bonnie was handing the stereoscope to Amy. “What about this one?” he heard her ask.

Amy held the stereoscope up and peered through the lenses. “My room,” she announced.

“Excuse me?” Ed asked. “What did she just say?”

“Her room,” Bonnie told him. “It’s what the picture’s of.”

Frowning, Ed crossed to the sofa where his wife and daughter were sitting. “What are you talking about?”

Bonnie looked at him. “It’s the strangest thing,” she said. “But all the pictures look like they’re of this house.”

Ed’s frown deepened. “But that doesn’t make any sense,” he began. “Why would they be—”

“I didn’t say it made sense,” Bonnie told him. “In fact, I think—” She had been about to say she thought it was very, very weird, but remembered just in time that Amy never missed anything either of them said. “I think it’s quite a coincidence,” she finished, pointedly glancing at Amy, who was still peering through the stereoscope’s lenses. “Let Daddy look,” she said.

Reluctantly, Amy passed the stereoscope to her father, and Ed held it up to his eyes. All he saw was a large room furnished in Victorian style. “This doesn’t look anything at all like Amy’s room,” he said.

“Not the way it is now,” Bonnie agreed. “But take a look at this one.” She lifted the card out of the stereoscope’s rack, replacing it with another. “Look at the fireplace, and the bookcases, and the windows and door. Don’t pay any attention to the furniture.”

Ed gazed through the lenses at the three-dimensional image of a Victorian living room, filled with overstuffed furniture, tables covered with knickknacks, and ornate
lamps with heavily fringed shades. But as he looked past the furniture at the features of the room itself, he began to realize that it appeared vaguely familiar. Then, slowly, it came into focus in his mind.

Take away the intricately patterned wallpaper, remove the thick velvet drapes, add paint to some of the woodwork, and completely refurnish it, and the room in the picture would be exactly like the one in which he was sitting.

Bonnie put another picture in the rack, and Ed Becker quickly recognized an earlier incarnation of his own dining room.

She changed the picture again, and he saw the backyard, when the trees were smaller and the clapboards had been a darker shade than the pale gray they now were.

Finally he returned to the picture Amy had been looking at when he came in. Now he could see that it was, indeed, his daughter’s room. His daughter’s room as it might have been … when?

A hundred years ago?

Fifty?

He knew he had to find out.

S
teve Driver was seriously worried. His worries had been multiplying exponentially since Wednesday morning when Charlie Carruthers had arrived at the Wagners’ to deliver their mail and discovered the door standing wide open and the house apparently deserted. It hadn’t helped that instead of calling him immediately, old Charlie had followed his instincts and gone into the house, where he’d found Clara Wagner barely alive in her wheelchair and Germaine crushed under the elevator. In helping old Clara out of the elevator—a perfectly reasonable thing to do—he might well have destroyed evidence of an intruder. Evidence that could have stopped the clacking tongues that were, increasingly, suggesting that Rebecca Morrison was somehow to blame.

For all intents and purposes, the young woman had simply vanished off the face of the planet. God knows, he and Oliver, Bill McGuire, Ed Becker, and a party of other volunteers from Blackstone and even the surrounding towns had searched into the night on Wednesday and again all day yesterday before giving up.

Driver himself was absolutely certain that Germaine Wagner’s hideous death had been a freak accident—though he still had no theory to explain why she’d been inside the elevator shaft in the first place—but he had no answers for those who were suggesting that Rebecca must have had something to do with it. After all, they asked, if she was innocent, why had she run away? Without doubt,
some terrible scene had been enacted in Germaine’s bedroom, but all the evidence indicated that whatever struggle occurred there, Germaine had been alone. The county coroner—a woman with a genius for excavating even the faintest evidence of a fight—had found nothing to implicate Rebecca Morrison, or anyone else.

Nothing had been scraped from beneath Germaine’s fingernails; no telltale hairs or foreign fibers were found clinging to her clothes.

Which left Steve Driver, as well as everyone else in Blackstone, unable to account for Rebecca’s disappearance. If she was abducted by someone who had killed Germaine, how had the killer managed to leave no trace of his presence behind?

And if she killed Germaine herself and then fled, why had she taken nothing with her? And left the door standing wide open, a sure signal to the first person who saw it that something was amiss inside the house?

Still, Rebecca was gone, he had no leads, and every hour the gossip was getting worse. Now, as he walked from his office to the bank, he wondered how best to conduct this interview. Would it be better to do it right out in front of everyone, where a few people might either overhear his questions or read his lips? Or should he conduct this part of his investigation in private, thus leaving everyone free to speculate about the questions he’d asked? He knew that technically the conversation should take place in private, but he also knew that there was one certain truth in places like Blackstone: people who talked behind closed doors had something to hide, and their conversations were therefore fair game for speculation.

Still, better to follow the rules, even if it did cause more talk.

“I wondered when you’d be in,” Melissa Holloway said, rising from her chair as Ellen Golding showed him
into the office Melissa now occupied in Jules Hartwick’s place. “And I suspect I know what you want.”

“Activity on Rebecca Morrison’s accounts,” Driver said as he lowered himself into the chair in front of Melissa’s desk. He handed her a copy of the court order he’d gotten that morning instructing the bank to give him its cooperation.

“None, as of yesterday afternoon,” Melissa told him.

“You already checked?”

Melissa nodded. “It struck me that if Rebecca were really trying to run away, she’d have to have some money. And she hasn’t touched a dime.”

“Nothing?” Driver asked. “Are you sure?”

“I’ll check again.” Melissa turned to her keyboard and typed rapidly. “But as of yesterday there hadn’t been any withdrawals of cash, any checks, or any bank-card transactions.” She fell silent for a moment as the screen in front of her came to life, then turned back to the deputy sheriff. “Still nothing.”

Nor, Driver knew, could Rebecca have had much cash on hand, for even if she’d been in the habit of squirreling money away at home, whatever she might have hoarded would have gone up in the flames that consumed her aunt’s house. In the few weeks she’d been living at the Wagners’, there wouldn’t have been time to build up any new reserves. “The truth of the matter is that I can’t really imagine Rebecca running away from anything, anyway.” Driver let out a sigh. “Knowing her, if she’d done anything to Germaine at all, she’d have called me herself.”

“Then what happened?”

“If I knew, I wouldn’t be here,” Driver observed sourly. “It just doesn’t make any damn sense. There isn’t any evidence of a break-in, and even if an intruder had managed not to leave anything behind, I can’t believe Rebecca wouldn’t have screamed bloody murder.”

“Or put up a fight,” Melissa added as Steve, shaking
his head in a gesture of bewilderment and frustration, stood to end the interview. “Maybe it’s the curse Edna Burnham keeps talking about,” she went on, smiling as she rose to see him out of her office. Then, seeing the look on the deputy’s face, she quickly apologized. “It was just a joke,” she assured him. “But not a very funny one, huh?”

“No,” Steve Driver agreed. “Not a very funny one at all.”

The oak dresser was turning out to be a bigger project than Ed Becker had originally bargained for. A lot bigger. He’d come down to the basement right after dinner, expecting that within an hour or so he would have the dresser disassembled and all its hardware off. But after more than two hours, he was still wrestling with the top.

Of the eighteen screws that had secured the top to the dresser—a number Ed had initially regarded as a sign of “the kind of craftsmanship you just don’t see anymore”— he had so far succeeded in removing only eleven. By now the “craftsmanship” Ed had admired only a couple of hours earlier had become “the kind of overkill only an idiot would indulge in!” Until Ed had begun swearing at the screws, Amy had been playing Daddy’s helper, but then Bonnie summoned Amy upstairs, out of earshot of his four-letter imprecations. For the last half hour he’d been alone in the basement, with no one even to soothe his complaints. As he struggled with screw number twelve—whose recalcitrance was threatening to defeat him altogether—his mind was focused as closely on the work at hand as it had ever been on the most complicated of his legal cases, so when the door to the basement stairs opened, he didn’t hear it.