The Blackstone Chronicles (24 page)

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 picture frame that had a chip on it, thus disqualifying it from being displayed in Janice’s shop on Main Street. “Look!” Rebecca cried. “Isn’t it wonderful?”

Oliver looked curiously at the object in Rebecca’s
hand. At first he wasn’t quite sure what it was. It seemed to be a dragon’s head, which Rebecca was holding by the neck. Two red eyes glared out from deep sockets. When Rebecca squeezed the dragon’s neck, Oliver saw a spark deep in its throat, immediately followed by a flame that shot out of its mouth.

“It’s a cigarette lighter,” Rebecca exclaimed. “Isn’t it perfect?”

“How do you know Andrea still smokes?” Oliver asked.

“Because I heard Aunt Martha telling her she couldn’t smoke anywhere in the house.” Rebecca’s expression clouded. “That’s why I want to give her this. She already feels terrible about the way her life is going, and now Aunt Martha wants her to feel bad about smoking too. At least I can let her know that
I
don’t disapprove of everything she does.” The flame died away as Rebecca eased her grip on the lighter. She held the lighter out to Oliver, and he reached out to take it from her, but the instant his fingers touched the metal of its snout, he reflexively jerked them away as if they’d been burned.

“Be careful!” Rebecca cautioned. With one fingertip she touched the dragon’s snout herself. It was barely warm. “He must have bitten you, Oliver,” she said. “It’s not hot at all.” Smiling, she dropped the cigarette lighter into Oliver’s hand.

Just as Rebecca had told him, the lighter now felt perfectly cool. But that was impossible: it had been burning hot just a second before. As he turned the strange object over, searching for its price, he wondered whether the odd sensation of heat he’d just felt was a sign—like the troubling headaches he’d been having—of something wrong. Very wrong. Lost in his disturbing thoughts, he barely noticed that Janice Anderson had finished with the customer she’d been waiting on and turned to them. At a nudge from Rebecca, Oliver recovered himself and held out the lighter. “How much for the dragon?” he asked.

Janice gazed blankly at the object Oliver was holding. “Are you sure this was on my table?” she said.

Oliver nodded. “Right there, next to that frame.”

Frowning, Janice took the cigarette lighter and examined it from every angle. There was a trade name stamped on the bottom, but it was far too worn to be legible. Though at first glance it appeared to be gold, she could see that the cheap plating was starting to peel away; and the “ruby” eyes were obviously glass, maybe even plastic. The question was, Where had it come from? She had no memory of having bought it, nor even of picking it up from the back-room clutter now spread out on the table in front of her. But then, surveying some of the other junk on the table, she realized she didn’t know where most of these bits and pieces had come from. Many were the odds and ends purchased in lots from estate sales. Others, she could have bought from any one of the dozens of people who had come into her shop over the last year, offering for sale treasure they’d found hidden in their attics. Usually, Janice simply turned them away, but now and then, when she sensed that someone was selling something out of desperate need, she would knowingly buy a worthless object, simply as a way of allowing its bearer to keep his dignity and pocket a dollar or two.

That, undoubtedly, was how the lighter had come into her possession, she now decided, even though she had no memory of it. But how much might she have paid for it? Five dollars? Perhaps ten? “Twenty?” she suggested, knowing there was no chance Oliver would agree to her first price. To her dismay, it was Rebecca Morrison who replied without a second’s hesitation.

“I’ll take it! It’s just the kind of thing Andrea will love!”

“For twenty dollars?” Janice Anderson heard herself say. “You will
not
take it for twenty dollars, Rebecca. It certainly isn’t worth more than ten, and if you ask me, seven-fifty would be closer to fair.”

“Great!” Oliver said. “How about five? Or would you like to counter at two-fifty?”

Janice tried to glare at him, but found herself laughing instead. “How about we stick to the seven-fifty my honest side thinks it’s worth?”

Before she could change her mind, Oliver paid for the dragon’s head lighter, and Janice wrapped it up for Rebecca in a piece of tissue paper.

“You really think your cousin will like it?” Oliver asked as they left the flea market a few minutes later.

“Of course she will,” Rebecca assured him. Her face was alight with pleasure at her find. “It really is just perfect for her.”

Oliver hoped that if Andrea shared his and Janice’s judgment about the aesthetics of the lighter, the young woman would be kind enough to keep her thoughts to herself.

A
ndrea Ward moved nervously through the house she had grown up in and wondered how so many years could have passed with so little evidence of change.

The same drab furniture stood in the living room with antimacassars to protect the arms and backs of the horsehair upholstery still in place, though Andrea estimated that there hadn’t been a guest in the house in at least twenty years.

Heavy curtains, the same ones that had hung at the windows when she was a child, still cut out all but the faintest rays of daylight, plunging the room into a deep gloom that obscured the fact that the wallpaper was faded and buckling, and the paint on the ceiling was peeling badly. It was dingier even than she remembered, in an even shabbier state of neglect, but otherwise exactly as depressing—and that was no surprise. Her mother never changed and nothing in her mother’s house ever changed. All was exactly as it had been on the day she left. Even the chapel, with its dense, incense-laden air and garish statuary. Once, Andrea recalled, it had been her father’s den, a cozy room with a thick shag rug, redolent with the inviting aroma of her father’s cherry-flavored pipe tobacco.

But no more. Though she had been only five, Andrea could still remember as clearly as if it had been yesterday the morning Mr. Corelli, who ran the junk store, had arrived with his truck. At first she’d thought he must be
looking for his daughter, Angela, who was her best friend back then. But she was wrong. Instead, Mr. Corelli carried all the furniture out of her father’s den and loaded it into his truck. Andrea had pleaded with her mother, begged her to make Mr. Corelli put the furniture back: her daddy would be angry when he came home and found his den empty. That was when her mother told her that her father wasn’t ever coming back.

“Even if he wants to, I won’t have him,” Martha had finished. “Your father is a tool of Satan, and I won’t have him in my house again!”

Within a week, Fred Ward’s snug sanctuary had been transformed into a retreat of another sort—her mother’s chapel, where the little girl prayed just as hard as Martha did, begging God and the saints for her father to come home. For a long time she daydreamed while pretending to be rapt in prayer—pastel fantasies of her father taking her away from her mother’s house, this cold, dark place that seemed to get darker and colder with every passing year. He would take her to live with him, in Paris, maybe, or in an orange grove in California, or on a sunny Caribbean beach.

But Fred Ward never did come back.

After Andrea ran away from Blackstone, she made an attempt to find him, searching the telephone directories in Boston and Manchester and even as far away as New York. But her resources were limited, and he seemed to have completely disappeared. Over the years, she had drifted from place to place, from one unsatisfying job to another, and into a succession of dead-end romances. Somehow, something always went wrong. Until, three years ago, she had met Gary Fletcher, who gave her a job as a waitress in the restaurant he managed. He was ten years older than she was. Handsome. Sexy. And in love with her.

Or so he said.

Until a month ago, when she’d told him she was pregnant.
She’d been sure that they’d finally get married, and move out of their apartment and into a house, and for the first time she’d have a real family.

That was when he told her he couldn’t marry her because of the simple fact that he’d never divorced his wife.

Andrea hadn’t even known he’d been married.

The next day, instead of filing for a divorce from his wife, he kicked her out of their apartment.

The day after that, he fired her from the only job she’d ever managed to hang on to.

And the day after that, he withdrew all her savings from their joint checking account.

Panicked, Andrea tried to get another job, but was turned down at every interview she pursued. She tried to find a place to live, but she had no money. There were no friends to turn to: Gary had been her whole life.

With nowhere to turn, there was nothing to do but to swallow what little pride she had left and go home to Blackstone to try to start her life all over again.

First she would find a job—any job.

Then she would go back to school—and this time not quit until she’d finished.

And the next man she got involved with was going to have to be a lot more honest than Gary Fletcher had been.

Not rich.