by Kat Shepherd
Tanya nodded and took the flyer.
Maggie trailed her hand lightly along the top of the sofa, taking in the decor of the house. “Wow, you have so many cool collections.” Maggie craned her neck to follow the line of seashells on the walls near the ceiling. “Tanya says you’re an artist. Do you use parts of your collections in your art?”
“It’s funny you should ask that,” Mrs. Fogelman replied. “The sculpture I’m working on is a freestanding mosaic that’s a combination of collection pieces and found objects. Would you like to see it?”
Maggie raised her eyebrows, and her gaze quickly met Tanya’s. “Sure,” they both said at once. Maybe the two girls could get Mrs. Fogelman to tell them more about Mary Rose while they toured her studio.
Mrs. Fogelman stopped at the bottom of the staircase. “Kira!” she called up. “I’m taking the girls to my studio out back. Would you like to join us?”
There was a pause. Finally, a faint No could be heard drifting down the stairs. Mrs. Fogelman shrugged and stroked the silver and amber pendant around her neck. “Kids,” she said simply, and breezed down the hallway to the back door.
Just as Mrs. Fogelman was about to step outside, Tanya stopped her. “Don’t you want shoes?” Mrs. Fogelman stared at her uncomprehendingly for a moment. Tanya pointed at the artist’s bare feet. “It’s cold outside.”
“Well, it’s only a short walk, but I suppose you’re right,” Mrs. Fogelman agreed. She pulled on a battered pair of ankle-length red cowboy boots and walked into the soggy yard, squelching through the muddy turf. “The sculpture is nearly finished,” she said when they reached the bright blue door in the studio’s brown-shingled facade. She turned back and pointed to a dirt-streaked tarpaulin in the yard. “I’m going to put it there, where the fish pond used to be.” She pulled out a set of keys and unlocked the door. “I never had any luck with that dreadful pond. I couldn’t seem to keep those fish alive, the poor dears. I would come out in the morning and find them belly-up in the lily pads. Eli was sure there must be a fungus in the water or some kind of disease, so we finally just tore it out.”
The girls followed Mrs. Fogelman into the studio, and both couldn’t help gasping when they saw the light-soaked space. The studio was a converted garage, and Mrs. Fogelman had replaced the original garage door with one that was made of frosted glass. Several skylights in the roof ensured that the room was bathed in a diffuse silvery light, even in the late afternoon of an overcast winter’s day. More of Mrs. Fogelman’s wild paintings leaned against the walls in stacks, and a variety of mosaic sculpture pieces stood nearby. A twirling metal mobile hung from the ceiling, the winglike pieces covered in bright coats of enamel.
There were several twisted metal sculptures clustered together in a corner near a large oil painting of a bleak winter landscape. They looked very different from the other work in the room, and Maggie cautiously touched one. “Those were Eli’s,” Mrs. Fogelman explained. “He left them to me when he died last month. We had very different artistic styles, but we loved collaborating. I still can’t believe he’s gone.”
“I’m so sorry,” Tanya said.
Mrs. Fogelman’s eyes filled with tears, but she waved them away. “Motorcycle accident. But that was my Eli, always a reckless one. He wouldn’t have it any other way.” She walked to the center of the room, where a canvas drop cloth covered something that was roughly the size of a small fountain. “This was our final collaboration, and I’ve almost completed it. I just need to mount this inside the basin and add a few finishing touches.” She bent over and reached both hands into a wooden crate to retrieve a black glass orb with a milky sheen. “Isn’t it marvelous? It’s an antique gazing globe Eli found at an estate sale in town.” She returned the globe to the crate and looked up at the girls. “I can think of no better way to honor Eli’s memory than to complete the work we began together.” She swept the drop cloth off the sculpture with a flourish. “I call it Unburied Past.”
The sculpture was made of twisted metal and concrete that swirled and curved upward to support a shallow stone basin with a deep recess in the center. Although it still wasn’t finished, much of it was already encrusted with chips of mosaic tile and mirror bits that reflected blue, silver, and creamy white. Shiny black metal wove through it in molten veins that seemed at once to catch the light and drink it in. Tanya knew enough about art to understand that what she was looking at was something extraordinary. “It’s beautiful,” she said, but she found that she didn’t really mean it. In fact, something about the artwork repulsed her. Tanya didn’t carry strong opinions about art either way, so she wondered what it was that she found so unappealing.
She took a step closer and studied the sculpture. Then she realized what bothered her. The twisting base was sculpted to look like grasping arms, rising up from the earth and clawing at the stone bowl. It made her think of the rotting arms of the lusus naturae bursting from the ground and grasping at the girls, trying to pull them back through to the Nightmare Realm. She cast a sideways glance at Maggie, wondering what she thought of it.
“This is amazing,” Maggie said. “Why aren’t you going to sell it? That’s how artists make a living, right?”
Mrs. Fogelman ran a hand lovingly over the sculpture. “Ah, that’s the curse of being an artist. Every time you sell something, it’s like giving up a part of yourself.” She picked up the drop cloth and placed it gently back over the sculpture. “Sometimes pieces that I’ve sold come to visit me in dreams. Those were the ones I know I should have kept.” Her eyes blazed, and she put a protective hand atop the covered work. “Unburied Past is far too precious to share. I could never part with it!” She moved her body to block it from the girls, as though she thought that one of them would try to take it from her.
Tanya’s eyes met Maggie’s. The artist was giving off an intense energy. “So I guess it will kind of become your own family heirloom to pass down,” Maggie said finally. “That’s neat. Kind of like the doll that you gave Kira. She said it used to belong to your aunt?”
Mrs. Fogelman’s eyes looked fuzzy for a moment, and then they cleared. “Oh, you mean Mary Rose?” She chuckled. “Yes, that old doll has been passed down from aunt to niece for generations. My own niece, Amanda, wasn’t much for dolls, of course, so I saved it for her daughter, Kira. If that doll could talk, what marvelous tales she would have to tell of all the adventures she’s had with the little girls in my family.”
“Aunt to niece, huh?” Maggie asked. “Why not mother to daughter?”
“It’s a funny thing. None of us who inherited Mary Rose grew up to have any daughters of our own. No children at all, in fact. So it was a lucky thing we had Mary Rose.” Mrs. Fogelman gazed into the distance, and her eyes grew cloudy with memory. “There were times when Mary Rose felt like the daughter I never had.” She shook her head. “That must sound strange, I suppose.”
Tanya felt the hairs on her arms stand on end, and she and Maggie looked at each other. “Um … no. Not at all,” Tanya said slowly. Mrs. Fogelman was an adult. How could a doll feel like a daughter to her?
“I was so happy when Amanda had a little girl. Otherwise the tradition would have died out completely, and that would be the end of Mary Rose.”
“Wow,” Maggie said. “How old is Mary Rose? Where did she come from?”
“Oh, goodness,” Mrs. Fogelman said. “I’m not sure, exactly. The first little girl to have her was my great-great-great-aunt, Elee Stone. That must have been right around the town’s founding, I suppose. The Stones were one of the town’s most prominent families at the time. Her father had the doll made especially for her.”
Tanya and Maggie exchanged another look. Interesting. “That’s cool,” Maggie said. “Are there any other stories in your family about Mary Rose?” Mrs. Fogelman tilted her head and stared at Maggie, her eyes narrowing slightly.
“If there are, I don’t remember any of them,” Mrs. Fogelman said briskly. “I loved Mary Rose dearly, but for the life
of me I can’t recall a single thing I used to do when I played with her.” She opened the door and ushered the girls back outside. “Now, run along to the house! I’m sure Kira will be wondering where you’ve gotten off to.” Before the girls could reply, they heard the studio door close and lock behind them.
CHAPTER
10
WHEN THE GIRLS got back to the house, they found Kira upstairs in the doll room. She was rocking Mary Rose in her arms and singing quietly to herself. She had pulled a high chair into the center of the room and seated a few rows of dolls in front of it. Tanya noticed an empty bowl and spoon on the little table in the corner, and her mouth went dry.
“Hey, Kira. This is my friend Maggie that I was telling you about.”
Kira barely looked up. “Oh. Hi.” She placed Mary Rose in the high chair and pointed it so it faced the rows of dolls on the floor.
“Tanya says your favorite color is hot pink, same as mine,” Maggie tried.
“Yeah, I guess,” Kira answered, her voice listless.
“I brought a really fun experiment to do,” Tanya said, “and your auntie Dot said we can order pizza for dinner. Plus I brought a really cool book of stories we can read before you go to bed.”
“Bedtime stories?” Kira scoffed. “I read Jasmine Toguchi books by myself all the time. I don’t need anyone to read to me like I’m a baby.”
“Okay, well, my dad still reads to me every night, and I’m in seventh grade,” Tanya replied. “But it’s fine if you don’t want to.”
Kira scowled. “Good. Because I don’t want to.” She picked up a little silver hairbrush. “I just want to stay here and play with Mary Rose.”
“Is that Mary Rose?” Maggie asked. “I’ve heard a lot about her. She’s so pretty. Can I hold her?”
Kira’s eyes narrowed with suspicion, and she stepped protectively in front of the doll in the high chair, just like Mrs. Fogelman had done with the sculpture in her studio. “Why do you want to hold her?”
“I like dolls. I have a lot of them at home, too,” Maggie said. She held out her hands, and Kira reluctantly passed her the doll. Mary Rose’s cheeks looked pinker than Tanya remembered. Her blue eyes seemed brighter, her lips rosier. The rest of her was still as white as marble.
“Wow, she’s so heavy,” Maggie noted. “What’s she made of?” She peeked under the doll’s dress. “Oh, she has a cloth body.” She turned it over and felt around the back. “It’s kind of lumpy. Is there something else stitched in here?”
Kira snatched Mary Rose out of Maggie’s arms. “You can’t play with her anymore. She’s mine.”
“All right, you don’t have to get huffy about it,” Maggie said. She pulled out her phone. “How about if I take a picture of you and Mary Rose? It might be fun to send to your parents or your friends back home.” Kira faced the camera and cradled the doll, her face stony. “Don’t you want to smile or anything?” Kira just stared. Maggie took a few steps closer and zoomed in to snap a few close-ups of Mary Rose.
“I think Mary Rose looks tired,” Tanya said. “Maybe we should let her take a nap while you play downstairs.”
“You’re just saying that because you don’t like her,” Kira muttered. She ran the silver brush over the doll’s glossy golden hair.
“Well, I like her, and I think she looks tired, too.” Maggie held out her hand. “Let’s give her a rest, and we’ll come back up later.” She patted the daybed. “Should we put her right here so she has a comfy pillow?”
“No,” Kira said. She slipped the doll into the high chair. “Mary Rose says she wants to be here.” She looked at the dolls on the floor and adjusted the chair so it faced them exactly. Then she followed the two older girls out of the room.
Once downstairs, Kira’s mood grew lighter, and soon she was laughing and joking with Tanya and Maggie as they wrote silly messages to one another in the invisible ink they had made out of lemon juice. Kira wolfed down her pizza at dinner, and when she heard that Maggie had a YouTube channel, she insisted on seeing every one of her videos.
“Is that Tanya in a chicken outfit?” she shrieked, pointing at the screen. Tanya’s cheeks grew warm when she saw herself flapping and wiggling in the yellow costume.
“It sure is,” Maggie answered with a smirk.
“Were you embarrassed?” Kira asked.
“I sure was,” Tanya answered.
A short time later, Tanya snuck a look at her watch and breathed an inward sigh of relief. It was already bedtime, and Kira hadn’t once asked to go back upstairs to the doll room. “Time to brush your teeth and change into pjs.”
“Do I have to?” Kira whined.
“You do,” Tanya answered. “But Maggie and I can come upstairs with you if you want.”
“No, I can do it.” Kira hopped off her stool at the kitchen counter and stretched. “I’m gonna wear my unicorn nightgown to bed. The unicorns have rainbow manes and gold horns.”
“That sounds fabulous,” Maggie said. “I can’t wait to see it when you come back down.”
Kira disappeared upstairs, and Tanya turned to Maggie. “You were awesome, Mags. I knew you were the perfect person for this. Thanks for being here; I didn’t feel scared at all.”
“Are you kidding? You don’t have to thank me. It was super fun!” Maggie flipped her hair behind her shoulder. “But it’s true that I am both awesome and perfect, so thanks for noticing.” Tanya laughed, and Maggie pulled out her phone and scrolled through the pictures she had taken. “You had me all set to meet some kind of demon spawn, but everything went pretty smoothly. Mary Rose looks like a normal doll to me, and Kira’s a cute kid.”
Tanya looked at the pictures and shuddered. Mary Rose just looked so lifelike, somehow. “Everything seemed fine to me, too, but wasn’t it kind of weird that Kira took the doll away from you when you wanted to see what was inside it? And how she got all possessive about even letting you hold Mary Rose in the first place?” She passed the phone back to Maggie.
Maggie sent the photos over to the others, along with what Mrs. Fogelman had told them about the doll’s history. “I guess so, but I don’t know, T. Lots of kids get weird and possessive about their toys. I don’t think you’ve ever let me touch your chemistry set.”
“A chemistry set is not a toy!” Tanya said. She caught herself and laughed. “What I meant is that it’s dangerous. That’s why I don’t let you touch it.”
Maggie shot her the side-eye. “Uh-huh.”
Tanya tossed the squeezed lemons into the compost and closed the cabinet door. “Then it was probably my imagination after all, just like I thought at first.” She rinsed the juicer in the sink and tucked it into the dishwasher. “I knew it! A haunted doll is just way too ridiculous to be true, right?”
“You’re probably asking the wrong person,” Maggie said. “After all, I believed in supernatural stuff way before we ever met the Night Queen.” She gathered up the pizza plates and carried them over to the sink. “But my mom always says to listen to your gut. What is your gut telling you?”
“I’m a scientist,” Tanya answered. “We don’t draw conclusions based on our guts; we base them on existing data.”
“Yeah, but look at everything that’s happened to us over the last few months. Isn’t it possible that some things just can’t be explained scientifically?”
“No.” Tanya’s voice was firm. “The world has rules. And one of those rules is that everything has to have a logical explanation. That’s why we have methods and experiments. That’s why we have math formulas. That’s why we use evidence.”
Maggie sighed. “Fine. So what does the evidence tell you, then?”
Tanya folded her arms. “Well, there isn’t much,” she admitted. “Mostly just the dreams.”
“Maybe those really are just a coincidence?” Maggie said hopefully. “I mean, wouldn’t it be great if, just once, something in this spooky town actually turned out to be normal?”
Tanya’s face clouded with doubt. “Sherlock Holm
es doesn’t believe in coincidences. Besides, what about the blood? Where does the blood go?”
Maggie slumped. “Oh, yeah. I forgot about that. We’ll have to get a closer look at that doll after Kira goes to sleep. I did feel something lumpy in there.”
Tanya finished loading the dishwasher. “Where is Kira? She should have come back down by now.” She dried her hands on the dish towel. “Let’s go get her settled in bed.”
Kira wasn’t in her bedroom. She wasn’t in the doll room, either. Tanya heard Kira’s voice drifting down the hallway, and she followed it to Mrs. Fogelman’s bedroom. “Kira? I don’t think your auntie Dot would want you in here.”
There was no answer from inside the room, but Tanya could see a crack of light showing from under the door to the master bathroom. She opened the door to find Kira planted on the floor talking to Mary Rose. The little girl was dressed in her nightgown, and her hair was wet. A crumpled towel was piled in the corner, and a layer of baby powder covered the floor. “Whoa, this is a total mess. What happened?”
“I always take a shower before bed,” Kira answered.
Tanya surveyed the room’s wreckage, mentally calculating how long it would take to clean everything up. “I thought you had your own bathroom.”
Kira pointed to the shower. “I like Auntie Dot’s shower better. It has a bench in it.” She picked up Mary Rose, who was covered in powder. “Mary Rose likes it better, too. See? She likes to sit right here.” She plopped the doll down on the vanity between the two sinks, and a cloud of powder puffed up and misted the mirror.
