“Megan can get along without the doll for now,” she said. “And it will only be for a day or two.” She smiled at him, then moved close, putting her arms around him. “I can’t explain it, really,” she whispered, her lips close to his ear. “It just makes it easier for me. Can’t you understand that?”
Bill’s arms closed around her and he wished there were something—anything—he could do to ease her pain. “Of course I can understand,” he replied. “If it makes you feel better, there’s no reason you can’t keep the doll in here for a little while. I’m sure Megan will understand.”
In the hall outside the nursery, Megan scowled angrily. Her father hadn’t taken the doll away from her mother after all.
In fact, he’d told her she could keep it.
And Megan didn’t understand.
She didn’t understand at all.
Chapter 9
The moment Bill awakened, he knew Elizabeth was no longer beside him, but as the big clock downstairs began to strike midnight, he still reached out to his wife’s empty place in the hope his instincts might have betrayed him.
They had not. The bed was empty, the sheets almost as cold as the room itself.
He lay in bed for a moment, trying to decide what to do. The evening had not been easy for any of them. First he’d had to try to explain to Megan that right now her mother needed the doll more than she did. “Mommy’s sick,” he’d told her. “And she needs the doll to take care of her.”
“But she’s always sick,” Megan had protested. “And I need Sam to take care of me!”
“In a few days,” he’d promised, but he could see the doubt in Megan’s eyes, and when Elizabeth finally came down for supper, the three of them sat tensely at the table. Megan, usually full of chatter about what she’d been doing all day, barely spoke at all, and Elizabeth was utterly silent.
After dinner he’d tried to interest his wife and daughter in watching a videotape, but Megan quickly retreated to her room, and although Elizabeth sat beside him on the sofa in the library, he knew she wasn’t paying attention to the movie. Finally, a little after nine, they both came up to bed.
While he stopped in to kiss Megan good night, Elizabeth went directly to their room. He told himself she’d sensed Megan’s anger and was simply giving her daughter some time to get over it, but deep inside he suspected that Elizabeth had simply not been able to consider Megan’s feelings, any more than she’d been able to concentrate on the movie.
“Mommy doesn’t love me anymore, does she?” Megan had asked when he’d gone in to say good night. Her voice was quavering, and though he couldn’t see her face in the shadowy room, he’d tasted the saltiness of tears when he kissed her cheek.
“Of course she loves you,” he’d assured her. “She’s just not feeling well, that’s all.”
But Megan had not been consoled. “No, she doesn’t,” she insisted. “She just loves Sam.”
He’d tried to assure her that things would be better tomorrow, when the two of them would go and find a Christmas tree, but even that hadn’t cheered Megan up. When he left her room, she’d already rolled over, turning her back to him.
Things had been no better with Elizabeth. She was already in bed, and though he knew she wasn’t asleep, she hadn’t responded when he tried to cuddle her close to him. At last he’d given up, contenting himself with lying next to her and holding her hand, determined to stay awake until he heard her breath drift into the steady rhythms of sleep.
But he hadn’t been able to stay awake, and now he’d awakened to find himself alone.
The last gong of the hour struck, leaving the house in silence. Then he heard the squeak of the rocking chair. Slipping out of bed and putting on the thick woolen robe Elizabeth had given him two Christmases ago, he went through the bathroom into the nursery.
Elizabeth was sitting in the rocking chair she had rescued from the attic and painted pale blue.
Once more, she was humming a soft lullaby to the doll, as she had when he’d come home in the afternoon.
But tonight she was doing something else as well.
The pale skin of her bare breast gleamed in the moonlight, and he could see the doll’s head pressed firmly against her nipple.
He went to her and knelt beside the rocking chair. “Come back to bed, darling,” he whispered. “You’re so tired, and it’s so late.”
For a moment he wasn’t sure she heard him, but then she turned her head and smiled at him. “In a minute,” she said. “I have to finish feeding the baby, and then put him down for the night.”
Though she’d spoken the words softly, in a voice so sweet it broke his heart, they still sliced through him like tiny knives.
“No, darling,” he said. “It’s not a baby. It’s just a doll.” He rose to his feet and reached down as if to take the doll from her, but she shrank away from him, and he saw her arms tighten. “Elizabeth, please,” he said. “Don’t do this. You know it’s not a—”
“Don’t say it!” she commanded, her voice rising. “Just go back to bed!”
“For God’s sake, Elizabeth—” he began again, but once again his wife cut his words off.
“Leave me alone!” she shouted. “I didn’t ask you to come in here! And I know what I’m doing! I can take care of my baby!” She was on her feet now, and there was a look in her eye that frightened Bill.
“It’s all right,” he said, forcing his voice back to a gently soothing tone. “Of course you know what you’re doing, and of course you can take care of the baby. It’s just late, that’s all. I thought maybe I could help you.”
“I can do it,” Elizabeth said, her voice taking on an edge of desperation. “I can take care of my baby. I know I can. Just leave us alone and we’ll be fine.” Her eyes met his now, beseeching him. “Please? Can’t you just leave us alone for a little while?”
Suddenly Bill felt utterly disoriented. Was his wife losing her mind? What should he do?
Take the doll away from her? No! That would only make things worse.
The doctor. He should call Dr. Margolis. Dr. Margolis would know what to do. “All right,” he said, taking care to keep his voice perfectly level. “I’ll go back to bed, and you take care of—” He faltered for a moment, but then managed to finish the sentence. “—the baby. And when he’s gone to sleep, you’ll come back to bed. All right?”
Elizabeth nodded, sinking back into the rocking chair. His throat constricting as a sob formed in his chest, Bill turned and hurried back through the bathroom, carefully closing the door behind him. But instead of going back to bed as he’d told Elizabeth he would, he went downstairs to the desk in the library, and the telephone.
After the twelfth ring he finally heard the sleepy, and faintly annoyed, voice of Dr. Margolis.
An hour later Elizabeth was back in bed, the pills the doctor had given her already taking effect. “I’ll be all right,” she said as she began to drift into sleep. “Really I will. All I need to do is take care of my baby and I’ll be all right.” Then, as Bill kissed her gently, her eyes closed.
Leaving Mrs. Goodrich to watch over Elizabeth, Bill led the doctor down to the library, where he poured each of them a shot of his best single-malt scotch. “I don’t know about you, but I really need this,” he said, handing Margolis one of the glasses, then draining half the other.
“I’m not sure it’s as bad as you think it is,” the doctor observed, taking a sip of the whiskey, rolling it around in his mouth, then swallowing it.
“For God’s sake, Phil! She thought the doll was a baby. Our baby!”
The doctor’s brows arched slightly. “She’s had a terrible shock, Bill. I don’t think any man can truly understand how hard it is for a woman to lose a baby. Especially when she knows there’s no chance of having another one, and she thought she was long past any danger.”
“But to fantasize that a doll is—”
“But isn’t that what little girls do all the time? Don’t they pretend their dolls are
real babies?”
“It’s hardly the same thing.”
“Isn’t it?” Margolis countered. “Why not? The way I see it, Elizabeth is in so much pain right now that she simply can’t deal with it. So tonight she projected all her maternal feelings—the ones she’s been storing up, ready to shower on your son—onto the doll. I suspect it was far more an emotional release than a true delusion.”
“And you don’t think I should be worried?” Bill asked, hope mingling with his doubt.
“Of course you should be worried,” the doctor replied. “Hell, if you weren’t worried, I’d be more concerned about you than about Elizabeth. All I’m saying is that I think right now you need to cut Elizabeth a lot of slack. I suspect that by morning she’ll be feeling a lot better. But even if she wants to pretend the doll is her baby for a day or two, where’s the real harm? Right now she’s got hormones raging through her, causing all kinds of confusion, and she’s in just as much turmoil emotionally as she is chemically. Let’s just give her another day to calm down, and then take another look at how she’s doing. Deal?”
Bill hesitated, but as he turned Margolis’s words over in his mind, he began to see their wisdom. Finally he took the doctor’s outstretched hand. “Deal.”
In her room, Megan lay in her bed, watching the shadows on the ceiling. She’d been awake a long time, listening through the nursery door, hearing every word her mother and father had said.
And now, as she lay gazing at the dark shapes above her, she heard another voice.
The voice of the doll.
But tonight it wasn’t calling out to her.
Tonight it was whispering.
As it spoke, Megan listened, and began to understand what she must do.
Chapter 10
The next morning dawned bright and clear, with no trace of the slate gray overcast that had gathered like a shroud over Blackstone nearly every day of the past week. Leaving Elizabeth to sleep as long as she could, Bill was dressed and at the desk in the library by six. By eight, when Megan came in to report that Mrs. Goodrich was going to throw his breakfast away if he didn’t come to the table right now, he’d reached the conclusion that if he and Elizabeth were reasonably careful about what they spent, they might just make it through until Jules Hartwick’s problem at the bank was cleared up. At the worst, only a small loan would be needed, and there was far more than enough value in the house to secure whatever loan might become necessary. Then, as he and Megan were finishing breakfast half an hour later, the phone rang and the need for a loan suddenly evaporated.
“I’m wondering if you might have any free time,” Harvey Connally said. It was clear in the old man’s voice that he was aware of the problems with Blackstone Center.
“Depending on the project, I might be able to work you in,” Bill replied.
“I thought you might,” Connally observed dryly. “Here’s the deal. My nephew Oliver has been wanting to do some remodeling down at the Chronicle. Seems he’s decided he needs a private office, and I thought it might make a nice Christmas present for him.”
“It would make a nice Christmas present for me too,” Bill said.
“Always like to spread the cheer around.” Connally chuckled. “Hate to see anyone get their holidays ruined. Why don’t you meet me down at Oliver’s little place in about an hour?”
As Bill hung up the phone and went back to the dining room, the load of worries he’d been carrying for the last few days seemed just a little lighter.
Megan watched from the front porch until her father had disappeared down Amherst Street, then she went back into the house, closing the door silently behind her. In her mind she could still hear the doll whispering to her, just as it had last night.
“Go to the kitchen,” the doll’s voice instructed. “See what Mrs. Goodrich is doing.”
Obeying the voice, Megan moved through the dining room and the little butler’s pantry, and pushed open the kitchen door. Mrs. Goodrich was sitting at the table, mixing a large bowl of batter.
“No tasting,” the old woman warned as Megan reached a finger into the bowl, scooping out a large dollop of dark brown dough studded with chocolate bits. “Well, maybe just one,” the housekeeper amended as the lump of dough disappeared into the little girl’s mouth. “But that’s enough,” she added, rapping Megan’s knuckles lightly with a wooden spoon as she reached for a second helping. “Now, you just stay out of my way for half an hour, and then we’ll start getting the Christmas things out. And this year you can set the crèche up on the mantel all by yourself.”
Snatching one last morsel of the batter, Megan left the kitchen.
“Half an hour,” the voice in her head said. “That’s a long time.”
As the voice whispered to her, Megan went upstairs and paused outside her parents’ bedroom. The door was closed, but when she pressed her eye to the keyhole, she could see that her mother was still in bed.
Megan waited, watching. After a full minute had passed, she decided that her mother was still asleep. Moving farther along the hall, she passed the door to the big linen closet, then went through the next one.
The nursery was filled with morning sunlight, and as Megan gazed around at the new wallpaper and all the new furniture her parents had bought for the baby, she wondered if maybe she shouldn’t listen to the doll after all, if she should ignore the voice. But even as the thought came into her mind, she heard the voice whispering to her once again.
“This room is much nicer than your room,” it said. “They didn’t buy you new furniture.”
Megan carefully closed the door, then crossed to the crib.
The doll lay beneath the pink and blue blanket. Its head was turned so that it seemed to be looking directly at her.
“Pick me up,” the doll commanded.
Megan obeyed.
“Take me to the window.”
Cradling the doll, Megan walked over to the window.
“Open the window.”
Setting the doll down, Megan raised the window as high as she could. Then, still following the instructions being whispered in her head, she picked up the doll and crept out onto the roof that pitched steeply away from the gabled window. Holding on to the sill with one hand, she laid the doll as far from the window as she could.
The doll slid on the wet shingles of the roof. Megan’s heart raced as it tumbled closer to the edge. Then its skirt caught on the rough edge of one of the shingles and it came to a stop six inches from the rain gutter and the straight drop to the flagstone terrace below.
Pulling herself back into the nursery, but leaving the window open, Megan ran through the bathroom and into her parents’ room.
“Mommy!” she cried. “Mommy, wake up!” Rushing to the side of the bed, Megan began shaking her mother. “Mommy! Mommy!”
Elizabeth jerked awake, the voice of her baby still echoing in her ears. Even after she opened her eyes, the voice persisted. Finally, through the haze of sedatives, Elizabeth recognized it.
Megan.
“Honey?” she said, struggling to sit up as her daughter tugged at her. “What is it? What’s wrong?”
“The baby,” Megan told her. “Mommy, something’s wrong with the baby. Come on!”
The baby! Then it hadn’t just been a dream—her baby really had been calling to her. Throwing the covers back, Elizabeth climbed out of bed and stumbled through the bathroom to the nursery.
The crib was empty!
“Where is he?” Elizabeth cried, her voice rising as panic welled up in her. “What’s happened to him?”
“He’s outside, Mommy,” Megan said, pointing to the open window. “I tried to stop him, but—”
Elizabeth was no longer listening. Rushing to the window, she peered out into the bright morning sunlight.
There, lying on the shingles only a few inches from the edge of the roof, was her baby. How had it happened? How had he gotten out there?
Her fault.
It was all her fault! She never
should have left him alone. Never!
If he tried to turn over—tried to move at all—surely he’d fall.
Elizabeth leaned out the window, reaching as far as she could, but her baby was just beyond her reach. Gathering her nightgown around her hips, she crept out onto the steep roof, hanging on to the casement of the window.
“Help me,” she told Megan. “Just hold on to my hand.” As Megan came close to the window and gripped her mother’s wrist in both her hands, Elizabeth released her grip on the casement.
“Now,” the voice whispered in Megan’s head.
Obeying the voice without question, Megan let go of her mother’s wrist. Elizabeth began to slide, her bare feet finding no purchase on the wet shingles. A second later her right foot caught in the rain gutter. For an instant she thought she was going to be all right. Reaching out, she snatched up the doll, but it was already too late. Her balance gone, and with nothing to catch herself on, Elizabeth pitched forward, plunging headfirst onto the flagstone terrace, the doll clutched protectively against her breast.
Leaving the window wide open, Megan left the nursery, made her way down the stairs, then ran through the living room to the library. Unlocking one of the French doors, she stepped out onto the terrace.
Her mother lay sprawled on her back, her head twisted at a strange angle, blood oozing through her blond hair.
In her arms was the doll, still pressed protectively against her breast. Squatting down, Megan carefully pried her mother’s hands loose from the doll, then cradled it against her own chest.
“It’s all right, Sam,” she whispered to the doll as she took it back into the house, quietly closing and relocking the French door. “It’s all 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.