by Jeff Strand
“I know,” Donnie said, suddenly irritable. The spot wasn’t coming off, and he didn’t like people hovering over him while he worked on something as delicate as this. But the more he worked on the spot, the more troubling it became.
Then it hit him what the spot was.
He flinched away from it.
“What’s wrong?” Frank said.
Donnie didn’t answer. He stood up and went to the little dead girl’s picture on the sideboard on the opposite side of the room. The doll she was holding, the clothes were different, but that little spot just below the eye, that little dark stain, it was the same.
“Ugh,” Frank said, covering his mouth again. “That’s ghastly.”
“It’s the same doll,” Donnie said. “Look at the little crimson stain below the eye.”
“It’s in black and white,” Herb said. “How can you tell that’s crimson?”
“Look at the cracked veins around the girl’s eyes. Those aren’t crow’s feet. Not at her age. That girl died of consumption. She was probably coughing up blood to the very end.”
“Oh,” Frank said. He shivered. “Ghastly.”
“Yeah,” Donnie agreed.
“What do you want to do?” Herb asked.
“I have to take it with me,” Donnie said. “I know an expert in Raleigh. I can stop there on my way home to Greensboro. I’ll let you know what I find out.”
“Definitely,” Herb said. He squeezed Frank’s hand again, his grin a mile wide. “This could be a major score.”
* * * * *
Before leaving Wilmington, Donnie stopped off at a small diner for an early lunch. He’d taken quite a few pictures of the doll with his iPhone, and after ordering a Diet Coke and a hamburger, he emailed them to Marty Wright, a doll expert he sometimes worked with, and waited to see how long it would take her to call him back.
The waitress didn’t even have time to bring him his drink.
“Please tell you have that with you?” Marty said. “You didn’t let the dynamic duo take it, did you?”
“Relax. I have it in the car. You saw the maker’s mark, right?”
“Oh, I saw it. I can’t believe the condition. It was like it was never played with.”
Donnie smiled. She was on the hook alright, and it was in deep. “So, you don’t mind if I come see you today?” he said.
“Stop teasing me. Just get here.”
“It’ll take me about two and a half hours.”
“I’ll be waiting.”
He heard the purr in her voice and he felt a sort of hunger stirring inside him. At 36, Marty Wright was among the best in the business. Auction houses and museums from all over the world paid handsomely for her services. He’d once seen her take a representative from Lloyds $143,000 above his initial valuation on a Victorian era closed-mouth bisque head doll, despite the mountain of documentation and research he’d brought with him. She was confident, unrelenting in negotiations, and very beautiful. She was single, too. Donnie’s wife hated her.
Still smiling, he hung up.
After lunch, he called his wife.
“Are you coming home to me?” she said.
“I’m headed back that way,” he said. He felt suddenly tired. This trip to Wilmington was his third road trip this week, and it was only Thursday. It’d be good to start the weekend off early, knowing that he’d just made a score that could leave him sitting pretty for months.
The diner was just off the 40, and midday traffic was roaring by. Donnie leaned on the side of his Subaru, waiting while a heavy truck lumbered by, belching black diesel smoke into the air. When it was gone he told Abigail about the doll and about what it may be worth. He hadn’t said anything to Marty about the little dead girl in the picture, or the blood stain on the doll, but he told Abigail.
“Oh God,” she said. “That’s horrible.” A pause. “I bet you took pictures, didn’t you?”
He laughed again. “Guilty.”
“God, you’re a sick man.”
“Yeah, but I’m your man.”
She huffed. “I suppose that means you have to stop in Raleigh on the way home.”
“To see Marty, yeah.”
She grumbled under her breath.
“Don’t be like he said. She is the expert on this stuff.”
More grumbling.
“Don’t be jealous. She’s not half the woman you are.”
“Are you kidding? She’s gorgeous.”
“Abby, she’s got nothing on you.”
“You mean like killer legs and big tits? Yeah right, she’s got nothing on me.”
“Come on,” he said.
“Whatever.”
“Are you mad at me?”
“No, stupid. Just missing you. Hurry home, okay?”
They said their goodbyes and Donnie hung up. He popped the hatchback and shifted some of the boxes he’d taken from the attic so that the doll wouldn’t get any direct sunlight during the car ride to Raleigh. It was a nice June day, very few clouds, and not too hot, but the windows would act like magnifying glass and superheat anything left inside. He’d have to ask Marty for a storage box, he told himself, as he made a little nest for the doll in some of the dresses he’d taken from the attic.
It was then that the little dead girl’s picture shifted and slid out from under the clothes beneath the doll, and suddenly her dead face was staring up at him.
Donnie gasped, his breath hitching in his throat.
He stared at the girl, trying to swallow the lump that had formed in his throat, unable to move. His heart was hammering in his chest. For a while, during lunch, the initial unease he’d felt after first encountering the photo had faded and he’d even laughed about it with Abigail on the phone. But now, looking at her picture like this, unexpectedly, he was frozen. So much care had been taken to surround her with dignity, with pious goodwill. But to Donnie, the effect was not kind, not loving, but monstrously misguided and eerie. He could no more leave his gaze upon her than he could upon the sun, and yet he couldn’t look away.
Sometime later he became aware of the heat of the sun on the back of his neck.
He shivered and looked around. The parking lot was filling up, the lunch crowd rolling in, though nobody seemed to be paying him much mind.
Donnie looked back at the little dead girl, her straight, oily black hair pulled back over her ears, her little pale hand resting on her belly. He closed his eyes and caught his breath, then cradled his face in his hands and wiped away the cold sweat that had collected there.
He let out a long breath, and threw one of Marianne Staples’ dresses over the girl’s picture. Then he tossed his iPhone in with his day bag, got in his car, and headed for Raleigh.
* * * * *
Three hours later, he had the doll laid out on the glass coffee table in front of Marty Wright’s black leather couch. She sat beside him in a knee-length gray skirt and clingy white top. Their hips were touching. “This is just amazing,” she said. She looked stunned. Delighted, but stunned.
“I couldn’t believe it either,” Donnie said. “Even covered in all that dust I knew it was a Mueller.”
“Oh, it’s a Mueller all right. There’s no question about that.” Marty straightened the doll’s clothes and whistled. “It’s in almost perfect shape. Original clothes. The craftsmanship is simply...there just aren’t words. Mueller did such powerful work.” She shook her head in admiration. “Wow. Donnie, you hit it out of the park on this one.”
“You think so?”
She held his gaze. Out of the corner of his eye, he was aware of how the fabric of her blouse strained at her breasts, at the well-muscled curve of her calves, the strappy sandal dangling from her toes.
He cleared his throat. “Any idea how much it’s worth?” he asked.
She sat back and crossed her legs toward him, her sandal dangling inches from his knee. “I think you could take anything you wanted,” she said.
He forced himself not to look at her legs. “I told
Herb and Frank it might go as high as $130,000.”
“Easily,” she said. One of her bangs fell down over her face. She let it stay. “I’d have to do a proper prospectus on it before I could tell you for sure, but I bet you could make that the opening bid at auction.”
“The opening bid?”
“It’d be a steal at that price.”
Donnie swallowed. His face felt hot. His palms were sweating.
“How long would it take you to do that?” he managed to say.
“The prospectus?”
He nodded.
“That depends on how thorough you want me to be?” she said, her voice was a silken purr. Her eyes flashed. She touched his knee. “Certainly overnight.”
He looked at her hand. He couldn’t stop swallowing. Donnie was happily married, but if he was honest with himself, he didn’t know what he’d do if she kept coming on to him like this. It felt like the room was spinning.
“Look, Marty I...”
Unexpectedly, she took her hand away and leaned forward to examine the doll. “The prominence is going to be your problem,” she said. Her voice was suddenly clipped, businesslike.
He looked at his knee where her hand had been. “I...what?”
“The prominence,” she repeated.
She seemed like a whole different person. It was like she’d flipped off a light switch. Donnie gaped at her, not at all sure what was happening. Was she playing with him? Had he made her mad? He couldn’t tell. But she was looking at him now, waiting for him to answer. His mind raced to catch up with what she had just said.
“But, the daughter...we found the doll in her attic.” He was babbling. Come on, he thought. Get it together. He said, “I don’t understand.”
Marty lifted the doll with all the care she would use on a real baby and held it out at arm’s length. “So beautiful,” she muttered.
“I’m still lost, Marty. What’s the problem with the prominence?”
She continued to stare at the doll. “You have no idea what you have here, do you?”
“I...I guess not.”
She took the doll over to a stack of white storage boxes and moved boxes around until she found one that fit. She put the doll inside and adjusted its clothes and smoothed its hair, fussed over it like a nervous mother.
“It’s a Mueller,” she said at last. “That’s a sure deal. And it’s the cleanest one I’ve ever seen, too. But if you could show that Mueller made it for his own child, well, then it wouldn’t be a rare doll at all, would it?”
“It would be a one of a kind,” he said.
“Exactly,” Marty said. “Collectors of Mueller’s work claim that every doll is made with love akin to magic. I don’t know of any other doll maker who inspires that kind of admiration among collectors. They’re like a cult. If you could prove that he made this for his daughter, well, there wouldn’t be any love greater than that, would there?”
He shook his head.
“And looking at this doll, I can believe what all those collectors have been telling me over the years. I can feel it. Can you feel it?”
The corner of his mouth twitched. “Sure,” he said. “Yeah, I feel it.”
She brought the doll, now in its box, back to the table and put it in front of him. It stared up at him. Just like a little girl in a coffin, he thought. He shivered, forcing himself to look away from the bloodstain on the doll’s cheek.
Marty was beaming at him. Not flirting, but excited, eager. “That doll could be worth millions, Donnie.”
He felt like the air had been knocked out of his lungs.
“Millions?” he repeated.
“If you can prove the prominence,” she reminded him.
He sat there, his mind reeling with the idea of that much money in his bank account. He and Abigail could pay off the house, buy new cars. He could retire, take her to Venice, London, the Bahamas. Donnie’s pulse raced.
Abruptly, his casino eyes cleared and again a darkening unease clouded his mind.
“What is it?” she said. “You okay?”
“Yeah.” He looked at the doll again, at the bloodstain. Somewhere in the back of his mind a small voice was telling him to stop, don’t go any further, but he forced it down. Millions of dollars, he thought. He said, “What if I told you I had a picture that could prove he made it just for his daughter?”
She huffed. “Then I’d kick you in the knee for not showing it to me the minute you walked in the door.”
He tried to smile, but couldn’t quite pull it off.
“It’s here,” he said.
He had a large plastic bin he was using to transport all the stuff from his car up to here. Donnie dug the little dead girl’s picture out of that and handed it to Marty.
“That’s Sally Staples, I believe. The sister of the woman whose attic I was exploring this morning.”
Marty’s face blanched. Her lips parted in horrified shock. “This is...dreadful,” she said. Her voice was hushed. She closed her eyes. Donnie watched her breasts rise and fall with her breathing. She opened her eyes again, and one hand slowly came up to cover her mouth.
Probably because she’s noticed the blood, he thought.
“Marty?” he said.
She extended the picture out to him. “Please take that back,” she said. “Put it away. Cover it or something. Please.”
“That’s why I didn’t show the picture right away. I...I knew that...”
He trailed off there, not sure what else he could say. The picture had affected him too. He wasn’t surprised that it creeped her out, but he hadn’t expected anything as severe as this. Her hand was still over her mouth, but it was her eyes he noticed. They were wet, shining with horror and dismay. He was pretty sure she was about to cry.
“Look, Marty—”
She cut him off with a wave of her hand.
“Just put it away,” she insisted.
“Sure. Okay, sure.”
He slipped the picture back into the bin and pulled a dress over it. When he turned back to Marty she was over by her desk, taking out a bottle of scotch and a tumbler. She poured with a shaky hand, the neck of the bottle clanking against the rim of the glass.
Marty sipped her drink. She wouldn’t look at him. Her lips were pursed tightly together, like she was trying to keep herself from trembling.
“Marty, we don’t have to use this picture. I’m sure there are other ways to prove the prominence.”
She put her drink down. She shook her head. “No,” she said.
“No?” he said, and waited. Nothing. “Marty, I know this is—”
“No,” she said. She looked at him. “No. Take it away, Donnie. I don’t want any part of this.”
“Marty, don’t be—”
“No!” she said. “Take that doll out of here. I won’t have any part of this. I won’t.”
“But, Marty, you said millions...”
“It could be billions, I don’t care.” She stared at him. “This isn’t about money. Do you...do you know what you have there?”
Donnie felt confused by the repeated question. He shrugged. “No, I guess not.”
“Donnie, I beg you, take that doll back where you got it. Put it back in that attic with that dead girl’s picture and...and...”
She was stumbling over her words, uncertain of what to say.
“But Marty, what’s wrong? Talk to me.”
“I’m cold,” she said. She looked miserable. She shivered, hugging herself. “Donnie, a toy becomes something magic in the mind of a child. We forget that as adults. We grow old and they become objects to us, something our kids love, and that we love because our kids love them. But there’s a separation there. Our love is conditional on our children loving them. Do you see? We’ve changed, not the toys. The toys are the same as when we loved them as kids. They’re still magic. It’s us. Something inside us ossifies. We get hard, or busy, or callous...I don’t know. But we lose something. We forget that toys have power.”
; He almost smiled. He would have, if she weren’t so obviously scared. “Marty, don’t you think you’re overreacting. I know it’s creepy, but, I mean, come on. This is a once in a lifetime score for us.”
She shook her head again. “No. No, toys are powerful, Donnie. And dolls are the most powerful of all. A child, a little girl, puts her heart into them. They are the beginnings of motherhood and all the power that goes with that. They become more than toys. It’s primal. It’s an atavistic thing, Donnie. I think Mueller understood that. In fact, I’m sure he did. I look at that doll, and at the way that dead girl is holding that doll, and I know that Mueller understood the power a doll represents. Call me stupid, I don’t care, but I will not have any part of this.” She stared at him, eyes burning with emotion. Then her voice softened as she went on: “And Donnie, if you’re smart, you won’t either.”
Donnie didn’t know what to say. He looked at her and shrugged.
“Just go,” she said. “Please, Donnie. Go. And take all that with you.”
“You’re serious?”
She nodded.
“Okay,” he said. He shook his head. “Marty, I’m sorry.”
She scooped up her drink and downed it, her eyes closed. She didn’t open them while he packed up the storage bin and made his way to the door. He paused there, waiting for her to say something, to look at him even, but she never opened her eyes.
“Maybe next time,” he said, and closed the door behind him as he left.
* * * * *
Two years earlier, while on his fifth road trip in four days, Donnie had been using his iPhone to get directions to a hotel in Harrisburg. There was a convention there, and he was late. It was raining. Morning rush hour traffic. He was trying to figure out what exit to take when his Subaru drifted into the oncoming lanes. There’d been a horn, an 18-wheeler that looked like the side of a building filling up his windshield, and a lucky last second cutback into his own lane. After that he made himself a promise not to use his phone while driving. But his visit to Marty Wright had confused him. Actually, if he was honest with himself, it made him angry. He needed to calm down, to hear a comforting voice. He called Abigail and told her about his visit, leaving out the parts about Marty’s dangling sandal and her straining blouse and her hand on his knee. But he told her the rest.
