Strangers

from a blockhead."
        They laughed. He grabbed her hand again and kissed it. "That's the first real laugh I've had in weeks. We're a terrific team, Faye. We can face anything together, can't we?"
        "Anything," she agreed.
        It was Saturday, December 14, near dawn, and Faye Block was sure they would come out on top of their current problem, just as they had always come out on top before when they worked together, side by side.
        She, like Ernie, had already forgotten the unidentified Polaroid photograph that they had received in a plain envelope last Tuesday.
        

    11
        

    Boston, Massachusetts
        
        On an intricately crocheted doily, on the highly polished maple dresser, lay black gloves and a stainless-steel ophthalmoscope.
        Ginger Weiss stood at a window to the left of the dresser, looking out at the bay, where the gray water seemed to be a mirror image of the ashen mid-December sky. Farther shores were hidden by a lingering morning mist that shimmered with a pearly luminosity. At the end of the Hannaby property, at the bottom of a rocky slope, a private dock thrust out into the choppy bay. The dock was covered with snow, as was the long expanse of lawn leading back to the house.
        It was a big house, built in the 1850s, with new rooms added in 1892, in 1905, and again in 1950. The brick driveway curved beneath an enormous front portico, and broad thick steps led up to massive doors. Pillars, pilasters, carved granite lintels above doors and windows, a multitude of gables and circular dormers, bay-facing second-story balconies at the back, and a large widow's walk on the roof contributed to an impression of majesty.
        Even for a surgeon as successful as George, the house might have been too expensive, but he had not needed to buy it. He had inherited the place from his father, and his father had inherited it from George's grandfather, and his father had bought it in 1884. The house even had a name - Baywatch - like ancestral homes in British novels, and more than anything else, that inspired awe in Ginger. Houses in Brooklyn, where she came from, did not have their own names.
        At Memorial, Ginger never felt uncomfortable around George. There, he was a figure of authority and respect, but he seemed to have his roots in common stock like everyone else. At Baywatch, however, Ginger was aware of the patrician heritage, and that made George different from her. He never invoked a claim to privilege. That would not be like him. But the ghost of the New England patriciate haunted the rooms and corridors of Baywatch, often making her feel out of place.
        The corner guest suite - bedroom, reading alcove, and bath - in which Ginger had been settled for the past ten days, was simpler than many chambers in Baywatch, and there she was almost as comfortable as in her own apartment. Most of the pegged-oak floor was covered by a figured Serapi carpet in shades of blue and peach. The walls were peach, the ceiling white. The maple furniture, which consisted of various kinds of chests used as nightstands and tables and dressers, had all come off 19th-century sailing ships owned by George's great-grandfather. There were two upholstered armchairs covered in peach-colored silk from Brunschwig & Fils. On the nightstands, the bases of the lamps were actually Baccarat candlesticks, a reminder that the apparent simplicity of the room was built upon an elegant foundation.
        Ginger went to the dresser and stared down at the black gloves that lay upon the doily. As she had done countless times during the past ten days, she put the gloves on, flexed her hands, waiting for a rush of fear. But they were only ordinary gloves that she had bought the day she had been discharged from the hospital, and they did not have the power to bring her to the trembling edge of a fugue. She took them off.
        A knock sounded at the door, and Rita Hannaby said, "Ginger, dear, are you ready?"
        "Coming," she said, snatching her purse from the bed and taking one last quick glance at herself in the dresser mirror.
        She was wearing a lime-green knit suit with a creamy white blouse that had a simple lime-green bow at the throat. Her ensemble included a pair of green pumps that matched the suit, an eelskin purse that matched the pumps, a gold and malachite bracelet. The outfit perfectly complemented her complexion and golden hair. She thought she looked