Read Online The Girl with a Clock for a Heart: A Novel by Peter Swanson - Free Book Online Page A

opposite, that holding the money would give Liana an incentive to meet him later. He remembered how she said giving him the money was important to her, that she didn’t want to be in his debt.
    The four-story brick apartment buildings of Boston slowly transformed into the leafy suburbia and single-family elegance of Newton. MacLean lived up the hill from Nonantum, one of the town’s thirteen villages. George took a right on Chestnut Street and wound past the sleepy lawns and faux-Tudor mansions till he found Twitchell. MacLean’s was the first gated property he came to. Pulling up to the speaker box, he could see a Georgian mansion squatting on a sloping lawn. George rolled down his window. Somewhere out of sight he could hear the sound of a lawn mower, and he could smell the sharp acidity of cut grass in the thick air.
    A tinny female voice from the speaker asked, “Name, please?”
    “George Foss.”
    He waited a moment, and the ornate metal gates began to swing in. He took a deep chest-expanding breath, causing the dull ache in his side to erupt into a sharp twinge. The image of Donnie Jenks rose up in his mind like a shark fin cresting the surface of the sea. Would Donnie be at the house? It seemed possible.
    He pulled up next to a landscaping van near the front entrance. He could now see the ride-on mower making a tight circle around a towering maple on the east side of the house. The presence of the gardener made him feel better. If either MacLean or Donnie was planning on burying him in the garden, they wouldn’t do it in front of witnesses, would they?
    The mansion was brick and trimmed in white, with freshly painted black shutters and a black front door. Before George got a chance to ring the doorbell, the door swung inward soundlessly. A young woman greeted him. She was probably in her midtwenties, wore a tan cotton skirt and a dark blue polo shirt, and had her streaky blond hair tied severely back in a ponytail. George initially wondered if she was MacLean’s daughter, but her manner, even the way she opened the door, was the officious clipped style of the professional personal assistant. “Mr. Foss,” she said.
    “That’s me.”
    “Come in. He’s expecting you.”
    George stepped inside. MacLean’s house, from the outside, seemed ostentatious, but it was nothing compared to the opulent interior. The foyer was easily twice the size of an Olympic swimming pool, an oblong of intricate molding and white marble. A twisting wooden staircase led to the second-floor balcony. Above the foyer hung a Chihuly sculpture, twisted tubes of multicolored glass, spreading out like an anemone under the sea. George had seen one like it at a casino in Vegas. The white walls were hung with other splashy pieces of art, abstracts in bright neon colors.
    “Chihuly,” George said to the assistant and raised his eyes toward the sculpture. She looked up but didn’t seem impressed by his knowledge of the art world.
    “Mr. MacLean will be right down. Wait in here.” She led him to a white doorway a couple of hundred yards of marble away. “Can I get you anything while you wait?”
    “No thanks,” he said, and she peeled off silently on espadrilles.
    George entered the room. It looked like a library, but it had no books. It was windowless and wood-paneled, with leather furniture and several upright globes, some of which looked genuinely antique. The room was in such a completely different style from the foyer that George actually turned back to make sure he hadn’t dreamt the previous space. It was unsettling, like walking through a Miami drug lord’s entryway to find yourself in Lord Wimsey’s secret den. Framed maps lined the wall, including one that was old and yellowed enough to have one of those sea monsters rearing out of the ocean. George was studying it when two men entered the room.
    The first man was older and appeared to be MacLean. He was a fit-looking man in his sixties with thick white hair that had