by Maddie Day
I frowned. Nails screeched with a mighty complaint as I ripped down a satisfyingly large piece of wall all in one piece and tossed it behind me. I brainstormed with myself about what type of object someone would want to hide and keep hidden. Money stolen from a bank. Photographs that could get someone in trouble. Looted jewelry, even, or drugs. A book. A stolen library book. I snorted. This was getting ridiculous.
None of it made sense to me. I worked on prying a section near the floor but the nails wouldn’t loosen. I put my whole body into it, legs apart, both arms on the bar. When the lath finally came away, I fell back onto my rear end and the crowbar flew out of my hands. The heavy metal grazed my right cheekbone on its way by.
I cried out, then sneezed hard from the plaster dust. I patted my cheek with the back of my work glove and checked the glove. At least the injury wasn’t bleeding, but it smarted. Great. Show up for a romantic date with a big bruise on my cheek. I stood and checked my phone. Only four-thirty.
“Back to work, Jordan,” I told myself. “Make use of the time you have.” I knew I’d be too tired tomorrow afternoon to do anything except collapse. I didn’t expect to get all that much sleep tonight.
I pried and pulled and pried and pulled, the pile of rubble behind me growing steadily. I welcomed the version of physical work after my days spent cooking and waiting tables. Demolition used my upper back and arm muscles, as well as my abs and quads when I did it right. It wasn’t quite as good a feeling as a long bike ride, but it came in a close second.
When the light from outside grew dim, I flipped on the overheads and kept going. I was almost to the corner and really wanted to finish this wall. Then I would have only one more to go. I still needed to shovel the rubble out the window into the Dumpster. My cheekbone didn’t hurt anymore, thank goodness. I worked around the window, with only three feet left to the corner. This section of the upstairs must have been Maude’s room. It was wallpapered in a pink and blue striped paper like the kind a teenage girl might pick out.
Dragging the ladder over, I was about to put my foot on the first rung when I stopped. The wallpaper was less faded up to about four feet high, as if a small cabinet or dresser had stood there for many years. The way the light shone on it revealed a small square shape at about waist height that stuck out about half an inch. What was that? Another hidden door? If it was, it had been designed for dolls, not people. I pushed aside the ladder, grabbed a corner of wallpaper, and tore. To my surprise it wasn’t glued to the middle of the wall and came right off.
The shape was a small door, as I had thought. It was about a foot square, with tiny hinges on the left side. A small hole in the opposite side showed where a knob must have been screwed in. I hurried over to my tools to get a screwdriver, but in my haste I tripped on a piece of board and went sprawling. I swore as my hands scraped along the floor in an attempt to rescue myself. It worked, in a way. I didn’t hit my face again and managed not to fall on my knees. My phone fell out of my breast pocket where I’d slid it earlier. I picked it up and swore again. It was six-fifteen. Yikes! How had that happened? I glanced at the little door, dying to find out if anything was in there. I quickly grabbed a screwdriver, dashed over to the door, and pried it open. My hand went to my mouth. A book lay in a shallow cupboard. On top of it sat a doll. A doll with a grotesque grin and a long straight pin stuck into her neck.
Chapter 54
I clattered down the front steps of the restaurant, hair still wet, bag in hand, to Abe’s old VW camper. I was ten minutes late, but I’d texted him that I would be. I wasn’t sure I’d ever taken a faster shower. Good thing I’d prepacked my bag.
“I’m sorry I’m late,” I said in a rush after I closed the passenger door. I leaned over to kiss him and tasted a mix of coffee and peppermint.
He laid his hand along my right cheek to pull me in for seconds and I winced.
“Did I hurt you?” He sounded bewildered.
“No, I hurt myself this afternoon. Had an unfortunate meet up with a flying crowbar.”
He switched on the overhead light and peered at my face. “Ouch. You poor thing.”
“I’ll be fine.” I smiled at him as I buckled myself in with the lap belt, all the vehicle had. My rushing around had damped down my excitement about the evening, but the anticipation was rising up again.
He turned off the light and started the engine. “So you squeezed in more demolition today?” He headed through town.
“I did. It’s so satisfying. I was trying to finish ripping out the front wall and totally lost track of time. I’d just realized how late it was when I found something incredible in the wall. Something creepy. That’s why I’m late.”
“All’s well that ends well, as my Grampy used to say. So tell me what you found.”
“A little cupboard set into the wall that was papered over. Inside, I found a book and a doll. It was a doll with a really odd face and a big pin sticking into her neck.”
“Like a voodoo doll?”
“I guess. I’ve never seen one before.”
“I have, when I went to New Orleans a few years ago,” Abe said. “They’re usually sort of small handsewn cloth figures with Xs for eyes and mouths.”
“This isn’t like that. It’s a girl’s doll, and not a baby doll, either. It must have a name, but I wasn’t interested in dolls when I was little, so I don’t know what kind it is.”
“What was the book?” Abe asked as we turned onto Route 46.
“It said Diary on the outside, but I didn’t have time to even open it. The room had been Maude’s, I think, so it was must be her diary and her doll. Neither looked like an antique. I brought both of them, though. We can look together later if you want.”
“Explore a mysterious find with my best girl? Can’t think of anything else I’d rather do. Well, almost anything.” He laid his warm, strong hand on my knee with a promise of that other anything.
We rode in comfortable silence up and down hills on the curvy state route. I thought about what we might read in the diary. Had Maude written about boys, slumber parties, and teenage angst? Maybe she’d expressed doubts and fears about being adopted and had jotted down thoughts of finding her birth mother. Or perhaps she dwelt on her schoolwork and world affairs.
I thought she was about forty, forty-five, which would put her teen years in the late 1980s. It would be fun to peruse the diary. I wrinkled my nose. Or should I simply hand it over to her unread? The presence of the doll complicated things. I wanted to see if she’d written about it.
Abe slowed and turned onto a smaller road, darker and without any houses dotting the sides, but it was well-paved. “Did you bring your crossword puzzle, too?”
“Oh, shoot.”
“What?”
“I was in such a rush I forgot to bring the puzzle. And I didn’t get the champagne out of the fridge, either. Darn it.” I turned sideways to look at him.
He laughed. “Great minds think alike. I have a bottle of bubbly in the cooler in the back.”
“You do? Perfect. We’ll just have to have a second celebration later.”
“Twist my arm, baby.”
“You know, besides the obvious pleasure of getting away with you, it’s awfully nice to get away from thinking about Charles’s murder. It’s really been on my mind all the time. Maybe forgetting the puzzle was my subconscious at work.”
“You can use a break, then. Happy to provide it.” He slowed and began peering at the side of the road. “The drive is along here.”
Rain began to fall, at first only dotting the windshield and then letting loose a torrent, as if a giant was throwing out the bathwater.
“Looks like it’s going to be a real frog strangler,” he said.
“A what?”
“A frog strangler. You know, a gully washer.” He pronounced washer with an R sound like many Hoosiers did—the word war followed by sher. “It’ll be raining old women and sticks.”
I could hear the grin in his voice. “I love the ex
pressions around here. I’ll bet you learned those from your Grampy.”
“Bingo.” Abe wrenched the wheel to the right all of a sudden and we began bumping down a decidedly unpaved road. After a few teeth-jarring minutes, he pulled up to a low structure the headlights showed to be a log cabin.
“It’s a real log cabin,” I exclaimed. “I’ve never been inside one and I’ve always wanted to see what they’re like.”
“I’m afraid we’re going to be soaked getting from here to there. It’s about ten yards. I’ll start up the woodstove once we’re in.”
I looked out at the rain. “It’s just water, right?”
“Absolutely.” He pulled a flashlight from under the seat and switched it on. I flipped up the hood of my rain jacket after he did the same, and clutched my small duffle to my chest.
“Ready to make a break for it?” he asked.
“After you.”
Chapter 55
I rubbed my hands above the woodstove, which was beginning to broadcast heat. The stove featured glass in the door, so we could watch the logs burning. Our rain jackets dried on a rack on the other side of the stove. The cabin was a delight, furnished with sturdy simple furniture, lamps casting a warm yellow glow, and a braided rug in front of the stove. It was open to the kitchen at the back where Abe worked on our dinner.
I moseyed over and perched on a stool at the counter facing him. “This is a great place.”
“Grampy built it by hand. We’ve fixed it up over the years, adding insulation and wall board, for example, and electricity. But it still has that feeling of being a log cabin, don’t you think?”
“Absolutely.” A utility porch extended off the kitchen with a door to the back of the house. A long bow hung from a peg on the wall of the porch. A quiver of arrows hung from the next peg. A bright orange hat occupied the next peg, and a heavy camouflage jacket the following one. Several pairs of snowshoes were on a shelf above the pegs. Narrow skis leaned against the wall.
Abe reached into the fridge. “Ready for a drink?”
“You better believe it.” I watched him pour Prosecco into two jam jars.
“The finest of bubblies in the simplest of glasses. That’s how we roll out here in Brown County.” He handed me one and raised his.
“Happy birthday,” I said before clinking my glass with his. “Mmm.” I savored the smooth fizzy drink as it went down. “So what are you cooking?”
“Sorghrum pork chops and mushrooms on fusilli with sautéed asparagus.”
“That sounds fabulous, Abe. You said you learned to cook from your father.”
“You bet. The O’Neill men like to eat well.”
“Does Don cook, too?”
“Yep.” Abe set out a basket filled with crackers, a dish with a dark spread, and a bowl of tiny marinated mozzarella balls. “Have some munchies.” He added a tiny glass full of toothpicks next to the cheese.
I dipped a cracker in the spread. “Tapenade?” I popped it in my mouth.
“Exactly. Homemade, too, from three kinds of olives.” He grinned. The dimple split his cheek and a strand of his wavy walnut-colored hair hung down on his forehead.
I swallowed my bite and held out my arms. “Come here, you.”
After he came around the counter, I pulled his face in for a long deep kiss. “I like you,” I said when we came up for air.
“Mmm. More.” He pulled me up to standing and we dove in for another kiss, body to body.
I was lost to lust, weak knees and all.
He pushed back a few inches and held me by the shoulders, looking straight into my eyes. “How hungry are you?”
“For you?” My breath came so quickly I was almost panting. “I thought you’d never ask.”
He took two quick steps to the stove and turned off the burners. “Dinner can wait.” As he led me to the long couch in front of the woodstove, the sound of the rain falling outside quieted to the tapping of frozen drops.
Chapter 56
I watched Abe—rosy cheeked and tousled—finish cooking. From my perch on the stool, I was feeling equally rosy cheeked and tousled. When dinner was ready, he set the round table with placemats and candles. The sorghrum-mushroom sauce, which included sautéed shallots, was exactly the right topping for lightly grilled pork, and the asparagus was perfectly done.
It was eight-thirty by the time we got to the diary. We’d finished the champagne and half a bottle of pinot noir, and sat on the couch nestled under a western-design fleece blanket in front of the woodstove. The tapping of ice needles continued outside.
“I hope the frozen rain won’t be a problem in the morning,” I said.
“If it is, it is. We have plenty of sand and salt in the shed, in case we need it, but I think it’ll likely change back to rain later on.”
I slid out from the colorful blanket and rummaged in my duffle, coming back with three items. I laid the doll and diary on the end table next to me and handed him the tissue-paper wrapped wall hanging before snuggling in again. “Happy birthday.”
“You didn’t have to give me anything, Robbie.” He looked pleased, nonetheless, as he carefully peeled off the sticker and opened the package. He held it up. “I love it. Handmade, right?”
“Jo Schultz weaves them. I thought the colors looked like you.”
He leaned over and kissed my cheek, then sat back. “It’ll have a place of pride on my wall. My bedroom wall, I think.” He winked at me. “What else you got there?”
I hated to spoil the moment with the doll and the diary. Now I wished I hadn’t brought them. “We can look at those things another time.”
“No, I’m curious. Let’s see.”
“Okay.” I laid the diary on his lap and then lifted the doll, about nine inches tall, in front of us. She had the look of a teenager, but not the extreme figure of a Barbie doll. Her wide black-rimmed blue eyes looked almost scared with thin raised eyebrows, and her smile was tentative. She had long blond hair flowing straight back from her high forehead and wore bell-bottoms, green go-go boots, and a multi-colored shirt. It was the heavy needle ending in a black pearl sticking out from her neck that was the alarming part.
“What do you want to bet that needle isn’t part of the original packaging?” Abe asked. He turned the doll over and then faced her front again.
“Right. And why was she in that cupboard?”
Abe got a faraway look in his eyes. “I used to have these books about a tiny Indian who lived in a cupboard.”
“I read the first one, too. Loved it.”
He lifted the diary. “Shall we read about the Girl in the Cupboard?”
“I wonder if it’s Maude’s diary.”
“One way to find out.” He opened the book and we began reading together.
The first dozen pages were indeed about the normal concerns of a teenage girl. Complaining about her hair, saying that Joey, a boy she liked, smiled back at her in geometry class, talking about going to the mall with her girlfriends. We read silently together, occasionally pointing to a funny passage or a sad one. One page was nothing but a curlicued heart in red ink with MS + JB inscribed inside and the two names spelled out below.
“Maude Shultz and Joey Beaton,” I read. “Do you know any Beatons around here?”
Abe shook his head.
The next page was filled with all versions of Maude’s imagined married name—Mr. and Mrs. Joseph Beaton, Maude Beaton, Mrs. J. Beaton, and more, written in various experiments in handwriting style.
“She’s quite the dreamer,” Abe said. “What is she, fifteen, sixteen?”
I flipped back to the first page, marking our place with my finger. “She didn’t put a year on it, but she’s got to be in high school if she’s taking geometry. Between fourteen and eighteen, I guess.”
“Who gets married that young?”
“Nobody, but I remember having a crush on a boy at that age and writing the same kind of thing.”
The name Lovey started appearing on the pages more regu
larly.
“That’s an odd name. It sounds like a nickname, an endearment,” he said. “I’ve never met anybody named Lovey.”
“I wish Adele were around. I could ask her. She knows everything about everybody.”
One entry read, Dear Diary. That idiot Lovey—who names their daughter Love, anyway—she’s always tagging along. I know we used to be friends, but I don’t like her anymore. You think she’d get the message. The next read, Pathetic Lovey asked if she can come over and study after school. I told her no way. She started crying. Double pathetic.
I looked at Abe. “She’s really cruel to that girl.”
“Isn’t that a trademark of adolescent girls? I mean, I wasn’t one, and I only have a son, but to hear several of Sean’s friends who are girls talk?” He whistled. “They’re only in middle school but boy, can they be cutting to each other.”
We continued reading.
“Ooh, look at this one.” I pointed to the page.
I can’t believe it. Joey ate lunch with Lovey today. And looked like he was enjoying it. She probably begged him and he felt sorry for her.
“What was that about?” I asked.
“If Maude is as cruel as she sounds, could be this Joey dude doesn’t actually like her and is trying to get to know a girl who isn’t so mean.” Abe frowned.
Christmas cards were pasted on the next few pages, with notes from an aunt and a couple of friends. We reached a page where the writing switched from a blue ink to a heavy black pen, maybe even a marker, and everything was in printed capital letters. Across the top of the page was written L’S SCHEDULE. ADDRESS. PHONE. A class schedule, a street address, and a phone number followed.
“L must be Lovey,” I said. “If Maude doesn’t like her so much, why is she writing down all her information?”
