Lifelike

by Sheila A. Nielson

  “Her name was Elisabeth,” Aunt Victoria said, glancing at me in surprise.

  “Elisabeth Worthin.”

  Lisbet! Hide!

  Those were the words the dream girl had screamed at her terrified little sister.

  “It really was her.” I breathed out the words, barely above a whisper.

  “Pardon?” A worried furrow appeared between Aunt Victoria’s eyes as she gazed down at me. I considered making something up, then decided that it was time for some truth.

  “Rosalyn Worthin killed Emily Kensington,” I said.

  Aunt Victoria sat forward, her eyes searching my face with interest. “Why would Rosalyn want to kill Emily?”

  “Rosalyn was engaged to Xavier. If he inherited, as his wife, so would she.” I blinked slowly to myself as something else occurred to me. “According to Emily’s copybook, Xavier was always taking Emily riding or playing games with her. Rosalyn might have resented all that attention.”

  The all-consuming obsession Rosalyn secretly harbored for Xavier would have made sharing him difficult at best. I thought of the old picnic photo where Rosalyn was conspicuously absent from the adoring circle gathered around listening to Emily sing. As if Rosalyn couldn’t even stand to be near the girl.

  “One of the greatest motives for murder is jealousy,” Aunt Victoria agreed with a small nod. “But how could Rosalyn have done it? It was Xavier who promised Emily a ride the day she went missing.”

  I lowered my voice. “What if someone else told Emily that Xavier wanted to take her? Someone Emily would have believed when they said it was Xavier’s idea.”

  “Rosalyn.” Aunt Victoria sat slowly back. “I suppose that makes sense. But what about Xavier’s strange behavior afterward? Writing and destroying letters, pacing in his room, and such? All the kinds of things a guilty man might do.”

  I drew in a slow breath of surprise as one more puzzle piece locked into place. “If Xavier was writing letters, that means there was at least one other person he was communicating with—supposedly about the murder.”

  “You think those letters were to Rosalyn?” Aunt Victoria asked.

  To someone as gentle and sweet as Xavier, it would have seemed impossible. How could the girl he planned to marry do such a horrific thing and then allow him to take the blame for it? He must have written to Rosalyn privately, feeling the situation out, just in case he was mistaken. How he must have prayed he was wrong.

  I squeezed wads of bedding between my fingers as I continued to follow the train of thought aloud. “Matt told me that the night Xavier first met Rosalyn, a girl named Felicity Smithson was locked in a wardrobe to keep her from coming down to the dance.” Locked in, just like Rosalyn was as a child.

  Xavier had looked so appalled in my dream, as if he had realized, for the first time, who it was that locked Felicity in the wardrobe all those years ago.

  “Felicity was Xavier’s favorite,” I went on. “Rosalyn must have heard about her. Must have known that the only way she stood any chance of getting Xavier Kensington’s attention would be to—”

  “—take out the competition,” Aunt Victoria finished for me. We stared at each other. “Your theory even fits the rest of the story.”

  I narrowed my eyes, giving my aunt a puzzled look.

  “People always believed the fire that killed Xavier and Rosalyn was a murder-suicide,” Aunt Victoria explained. “But who is to say it wasn’t Rosalyn who killed Xavier, instead of the other way around.”

  I could feel my eyes widening in horror.

  Xavier was murdered!

  Aunt Victoria idly traced one finger over the faded pattern on my quilt. “If you’re right, then the whole situation was much more tragic than anyone ever suspected. Not only was an innocent person accused of the crime, but in the end he was killed by the very person who framed him for it.”

  It was too awful to even imagine. Xavier’s ghost haunting the halls of this museum for over a hundred years—hearing himself named a murderer again and again as people incorrectly told and retold his story, passing it on from one generation to the next.

  “I wonder if Margaret suspected Rosalyn,” Aunt Victoria said in a thoughtful voice. “It might explain why the bride was sealed inside a wall.”

  I thought of the creepy dolls in the basement cupboard. Margaret knew all right. That knowledge drove her mad. And Xavier’s spirit watched helplessly as it happened.

  Aunt Victoria leaned forward, resting her hands lightly at the edge of the bed. “Well, Wren. You have me completely convinced.” She paused a moment, scowling down at the floor deep in thought. “It almost makes me glad Rosalyn’s doll was stolen. I’m not sure I could stand to put it out on display with the others, knowing she could have been the murderer. There isn’t any real proof to support your theory, of course. It’s just that it feels…”

  “Like the truth,” I said.

  There was a soft knock at the bedroom door. Aunt Victoria and I turned to find Gabrielle standing in the doorway. “I came up to see what was taking you so long.” Her eyes moved from Aunt Victoria to me and then back again. “Is something wrong?”

  “Wren isn’t feeling well this morning,” Aunt Victoria said.

  Gabrielle’s gaze came to rest on me. She bit her lip, drawing it tightly beneath her teeth. Was she was thinking about what Matt had told her the night before? “You are a little on the pale side. There’s been a nasty flu bug going around lately. Maybe you caught it.”

  “Do you want me to bring you up something to eat?” Aunt Victoria said, tenderly brushing a stray, ginger-gold curl from my forehead. I nodded my head, too tired for talking anymore.

  “Rest for now.” Aunt Victoria got slowly to her feet. “I’ll be up with some food in a bit.”

  “Could you shut the door on the way out?” I asked weakly.

  All I needed was another visit from the nightmare-inducing bride doll.

  Chapter Thirty-Eight

  Scritch, scritch—scratch.

  The unobtrusive sound hung at the edge of my consciousness, like a stick dragging against the wall.

  Scriiiiiiiiiitch.

  I opened my eyes, straining to detect the source of the noise. The light had shifted quite a bit. How long was I asleep? Lifting my head, I surveyed the room uneasily. The bedroom door was still safely shut, but the closet door—stood wide open.

  Xavier!

  Panic turned my blood to ice-cold rivers. I attempted to sit up. The bedroom swayed in a dizzy dance as my weak body protested against the sudden movement. I grabbed the quilts on either side of me, trying to hold the world steady by sheer force of will.

  That’s when I saw the groom doll. He was back in the window seat, sitting with his legs out in front, hands resting on either side. His head had tipped a little to the left, as if listening with interest. I closed my eyes a moment, allowing a wave of adrenaline-fueled nausea to pass.

  “Don’t you ever do that again,” I said, putting one hand to my now pounding head. “I thought Rosalyn got you.” The groom doll continued to sit there like any normal inanimate toy.

  I wasn’t buying it.

  “You’re going to get yourself stuck inside that doll one of these days—you do realize that, right? Do you think Rosalyn spent all that time crawling on all fours inside the walls of this house for her health? Stop possessing that doll, Xavier.”

  And yes, that last sentence really did, in all seriousness, come out of my mouth.

  Xavier had probably drawn me another message in the dust of the window seat. My stomach lurched just thinking about the effort it would take to get myself over there.

  “This had better be worth it, Xavier,” I muttered. But I didn’t mean a word of it. I’d have gladly scaled Mount Everest if I thought a message from Xavier Kensington might be waiting for me at the top.

  My arms felt like they were made from badly-set jelly. Extracting myself from the masses of twisted quilts was much harder than I’d imagined. I tottered to my feet, swayi
ng unsteadily for a moment beside the bed.

  Just one step.

  Then two.

  I focused on the tiny form of Xavier’s doll, making my way carefully toward it. When I reached the window seat, I sank down beside the doll, careful not to smudge any of the dusty images he’d taken such pains to draw.

  Everything looked exactly as it had before, except, there were now tiny crosses squished in between each picture. And there at the end, he’d added one new drawing. A miniature heart with two horizontal lines in front of it.

  No—not lines—an equal sign.

  It was like an arithmetic problem. An equation made up of pictographs. A sum.

  My breath seized high in my throat as I stared down at the now familiar problem in disbelief. Xavier’s sum for love!

  First there was the picture of the butterfly that appeared the day I’d saved one out in the gazebo. Even now, the memory of its bright yellow wings fluttering up into the blue heavens put a warm glow in my heart.

  Kindness.

  Then there was the lion that had appeared not long after I’d chosen to roar at Darcy Flynn’s ghostly pair of glowing green lips hovering in the darkness, rather than run away in fear.

  Courage.

  The smiley face reminded me of the laughter Cassandra and I had shared together as we were locked up in the secret room, certain we would be trapped there for hours.

  Sense of humor.

  And that lone teardrop. Like the tears I cried the day Peter told me about his Cystic Fibrosis.

  Compassion.

  All together they equaled one thing. The key to Xavier Kensington’s heart.

  Xavier was in love all right, but not with Rosalyn, the girl who had betrayed and murdered him over one hundred years ago.

  He was in love with me.

  Me, Wren Farrow, a girl dying quietly by inches, deep inside where no one could see. No one except Xavier, the ghost of a boy, who’d suffered in silence for over a century. Who stood unseen beside me, lending me every tiny scrap of warmth and encouragement he could possibly give. A Georgette Heyer novel left on my bed, pleasant dreams to lure me to sleep at night, a broken music box that played a soothing song just at the right moment—they were all his gifts to me. Tokens of his love.

  I reached out and gently touched the doll’s cheek with one finger. It was cold and hard, with no life in it. The doll was not Xavier Kensington. It was merely a tool, his earthly link to this world. His soul, wherever it might be, was beyond my reach. I could sense him, and sometimes see his shadow or hear the distant echoes of his voice, but I could not touch him. He was dead. A mere phantom of the boy I had fallen madly in love with.

  My eyes burned and my throat ached as I fought the fierce new sorrow beginning to rage within me. As a ghost, Xavier was lost to me every bit as much as my family was.

  I picked up the groom doll and cradled him tenderly in my arms. His tiny blank eyes gazed unseeingly down and to the right. Xavier was trapped between the world of the living and the dead. A prisoner. And there was absolutely nothing I could do to help him.

  A scraping sound caused me to look across the room, just in time to see the bedroom door swing open on its hinges. Gabrielle came walking in, all her attention focused on the carefully balanced tray of food in her arms.

  “Oh good, you’re awake,” Gabrielle started to say as she glanced up. She caught sight of the doll in my arms and froze. Her beautiful, dark brown eyes widened slowly in disbelief.

  Instinctively I pulled the doll in closer to my shivering body. “I can explain.” My voice wobbled against the panic beginning to tighten its death hold around my throat.

  “That’s the groom doll,” Gabrielle whispered in hushed tones. “Where did you find it?”

  There was no point in lying now. “It was in the secret storage closet,” my voice sounded shallow and breathless, like I couldn’t quite get enough air into my lungs.

  Gabrielle narrowed her eyes. “You’ve had the groom doll in your possession all this time and you didn’t say a word?”

  “I just wanted to borrow it for a little while.”

  “Borrow it?” Gabrielle’s eyebrows shot up her forehead. “Did you happen to borrow the bride doll as well?”

  I felt the blood drain rapidly from my face. Horrified, I shook my head in denial. Gabrielle took a purposeful step in my direction, the plate and cup, rattled on the tray. I rose to my feet—a little too quickly. The world spun out of control a moment. I put out a hand to steady myself on the edge of the window seat.

  Gabrielle placed the tray of food at the foot of my bed and reached out one hand toward me.

  “Wren, give me the doll,” she said in a no-nonsense tone.

  No! I could not let her take my only link to the soul of the boy who loved me. Lips trembling, I shook my head at her, unable to speak. Behind Gabrielle, Aunt Victoria appeared in the open doorway. She looked at Gabrielle’s face dark with thunder, and then at me, clutching the doll to my chest.

  “What’s going on here?” Aunt Victoria asked quietly.

  “She has the groom doll. She found it in the secret room, and she’s been hiding it from us ever since,” Gabrielle said, gesturing angrily in my direction.

  Tears welled up in my eyes, blurring Aunt Victoria’s face like watercolors on a page. I fought so hard to keep my tears hidden from her, to spare her my suffering. Strength now spent, I couldn’t hold them back any longer.

  “Wren, honey. What’s wrong?” Aunt Victoria’s words fell soft as downy feathers. She took a step toward me. I staggered drunkenly away from her, putting the bed between us.

  “Ask her what she did with the bride doll,” Gabrielle said firmly.

  “I don’t have the bride doll!” I shrieked, losing all semblance of control. “I never wanted anything to do with the bride doll! I DIDN’T STEAL HER!”

  “We believe you, Wren,” Aunt Victoria said, putting out a steady hand toward me. She glanced sharply at Gabrielle. “Nobody is going to accuse you.”

  I started to cry in earnest then, horrible wracking sobs traveling up through me in waves. I clutched Xavier’s doll closer, feeling the weight of it, solid and reassuring within my arms. It felt so good to just let myself crumble apart, to not have to force my useless body to keep being strong anymore.

  “Please don’t take him,” I whispered, focusing only on Aunt Victoria. “You don’t understand how much I need him.”

  “Why do you need him, Wren?” Aunt Victoria asked calmly. “Help me understand why he is important to you.”

  I loosened my hold on the groom just a little, looking down into his face. “When he sits on my bedside table, I can sleep at night. When I look over and see him there, I don’t feel so hopeless and afraid. I talk to him during the dark times. He gives me strength when I have none left.”

  I glanced up at Aunt Victoria and saw that there were tears in her eyes, as well. Did she think I was losing it?

  “I know it sounds childish, crazy even, but I feel better when I have this doll close to me. The pain and exhaustion don’t seem so bad somehow,” I pleaded with her. “He feels like—”

  “He’s alive?” Aunt Victoria finished for me. I stared at her in stunned silence.

  “Is he the one who told you about Rosalyn?” Aunt Victoria’s unfaltering gaze pierced me through.

  She knew.

  Our discussion about Rosalyn being the murderer—all those times I’d acted jumpy around the bride doll—somehow, impossibly, they had all led Aunt Victoria to suspect the truth.

  “Rosalyn?” Gabrielle demanded of Aunt Victoria in confusion. “What are you talking about? Would somebody please start making sense around here? That doll is old and delicate and it needs to be protected.”

  “I’ll take good care of him,” I said, my voice rising with panic. “I won’t let anything happen to him. I won’t even need him much longer. When I’m gone you can have him back.”

  “When you’re gone?” Gabrielle snapped out angrily. “Like whe
n you go to college? That’s years away.”

  I looked straight into Gabrielle’s eyes. Silence stretched out between us as I struggled to form the words that I knew I needed to speak.

  “I have advanced leukemia,” I said. “You’ll have the doll back when I’m dead.”

  Saying those words aloud was like emptying a double-barreled shotgun into someone’s chest without warning. Gabrielle’s reaction was no different. At first she blinked at me in a daze, her eyes searching my face as her mind worked like crazy to come up with some possible explanation, other than the obvious, that I might say something so shocking. Then reality set in. Her eyes widened into two expanding seas of white—unnatural and distended.

  “That’s not funny, Wren” she said, her voice barely above a whisper.

  “Does she look like she’s joking to you?” Aunt Victoria’s words were fragile as china.

  Gabrielle’s gaze flitted from me, to Aunt Victoria, then back again in rapid succession—as if trying to find an escape from the truth. There was none.

  Like a flimsy house of cards, Gabrielle’s perfect posture collapsed in on itself. Her shoulders slumped forward, hunched against the pain, as her trembling hands crept up to cover her mouth. The tears came then, welling up in sickening silence, then trickling slowly down her cheeks. I saw then how much Gabrielle truly cared. She suffered as if my cancer was a part of her, tearing her apart from the inside out. I watched her soul bleed in quiet anguish and there was nothing I could do to stop it.

  “Matt warned me that something might be wrong,” Gabrielle whispered through her tears. “But why didn’t you tell me, Wren?”

  “All the treatments have been tried. All the surgeries and transplants have been completed. There’s nothing left to be done. What’s the point of making you suffer along with me?”

  “Because we love you,” Gabrielle said quietly. “Love should always be afforded the privilege of suffering with those we care about.”

  Aunt Victoria moved toward me. I clutched at Xavier’s doll in fear.

  “I have no desire to take the doll away, Wren,” Aunt Victoria said. “But I am concerned about how pale you are. Let’s get you back into bed.”