He needed to go back home.

It was as if he were a cartoon character and a lightbulb had suddenly gone off above his head. That was exactly what he was supposed to do. Why hadn’t he seen it before? Everything he’d felt or experienced or heard about pointed in that direction. He’d just been too dumb to pick up on it. He needed to go back to Chicago, back to the house. The answer was there.

The answer to what?

He didn’t know.

He dropped Ken off at the County building, drove back to his own offices. Russ returned to the duping room and the tapes on which he’d been working, and Stormy had Joan make reservations for him on a flight to Chicago tomorrow.

He locked his office and watched Butchery once again.

The flight was booked for noon, with an open-ended return ticket, and he stayed late, instructing his employees on what they were to work on in case he was gone for more than a few days, going over the agreements and contracts that needed his immediate signature. It was nearly nine when he finally arrived home, and he turned on all the lights in the house before collapsing into a chair.

Even his house seemed creepy.

He was not sure that his old home in Chicago was still standing, but he assumed that it was and he wondered what it would be like as he absently sorted through his mail. In his mind, it looked just like the house in Butchery, a dark forbidding mansion, but it must have been repainted and remodeled since his childhood.

At least he hoped it had.

He stopped shuffling the envelopes in his hand, not breathing, certain that he had heard something, a knock from the back of the house, but it was not repeated and when he walked carefully through the rooms he saw nothing unusual.

Most of his mail was either bills or ads, but one envelope was postmarked Brentwood, California, and the name on the return address was Phillip Emmons. Phillip was an old writer friend from L.A., and Stormy opened the envelope, curious. It contained a cryptic yet tantalizing note stating that Phillip had been writing narration for a PBS documentary on Benjamin Franklin and had run across something in his research that he thought Stormy might be interested in.

“It’s an entry from Thomas Jefferson’s diary,” Phillip wrote, “and it concerns some sort of haunted doll. Thought you might like to see it.”

Haunted doll?