You'll Never Know Dear Read online

  Dedication

  For Franny and Jody

  Epigraph

  Sometimes a dream is your subconscious trying to sort out what happened when you were awake. Sometimes it’s the universe trying to tell you something. And sometimes it’s just a dream.

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Dedication

  Epigraph

  1

  2

  3

  4

  5

  6

  7

  8

  9

  10

  11

  12

  13

  14

  15

  16

  17

  18

  19

  20

  21

  22

  23

  24

  25

  26

  27

  28

  29

  30

  31

  32

  33

  34

  35

  36

  37

  38

  39

  40

  41

  42

  43

  44

  45

  46

  47

  48

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  Also by Hallie Ephron

  Copyright

  About the Publisher

  1

  Elisabeth Strenger peeled three boiled eggs under running water, dropped them into a chipped Blue Willow china bowl, and began to mash them with a fork. She took a quick puff on her cigarette, blew smoke out through the back window, and tapped ashes into the drain.

  “Don’t forget a titch of lemon.” The fluty voice that sailed in from the front porch through the open living room windows belonged to Lis’s mother, Sorrel Woodham. Everyone, including Lis, called her Miss Sorrel.

  “. . . A titch of lemon,” Lis sang back under her breath, directing her imitation at the dolls perched on a continuous row of shelves just below the kitchen’s beamed ceiling. Miss Sorrel had begun placing dolls there back in the day when she had no trouble hopping up on a chair to do so. Now Lis did the hopping for both of them, along with any light and heavy lifting that needed doing around the house.

  Miss Sorrel’s dolls stared ahead, impassive, miffed perhaps that Lis never lavished them with more than perfunctory attention. At one end of the shelf were Victorian dolls with bisque heads, creamy complexions, glass eyes, Cupid’s bow mouths, and stiff wigs. At the other end sat bald, celluloid baby dolls, placid and patient, their painted eyes forever open. Once a week Miss Sorrel supervised as Lis climbed from the chair to the table so she could give each doll a thorough dusting.

  The kitchen dolls were not Miss Sorrel’s best. Her Madame Alexander Alice in Wonderland with a hand-painted cloth face and yellow-yarn wig was tucked in beside a pair of rare Cherokee rag dolls in a pair of glass china cabinets in the dining room where the rest of her rarest and most valuable dolls resided. Also in a dining room cabinet was a shelf of porcelain dolls Lis’s mother had made herself—Miss Sorrel dolls, as they were known to collectors. Their bodies were soft, and the legs and arms unglazed bisque porcelain. But their heads were why the Miss Sorrel dolls were considered art, albeit folk art: each face was a carefully sculpted and painted portrait of a real child. The Miss Sorrel dolls were as valued for their eerily realistic features as for their scarcity. The first ones had been portraits of Lis and her sister, Janey.

  Though Miss Sorrel had long ago given up making Miss Sorrel dolls, she kept herself busy with “the projects”: temporary residents, aged and injured dolls that had been brought to her to be repaired and refreshed. Those were carefully wrapped in acid-free paper and tucked into plastic bins, each doll catalogued and shelved in the workroom at the back of the house. There, Miss Sorrel worked with her longtime friend and next-door neighbor Evelyn Dumont to gently restore them. The women went through mounds of Q-tips cleaning them. Restringing legs and arms, reweaving and sometimes replacing wigs, resetting glass eyes, de-stinking plastic bodies, and doing whatever else was needed while preserving each doll’s authenticity.

  Binty, Miss Sorrel’s aging Irish setter, wheezed hot doggie breath on Lis’s ankles. Miss Sorrel used to brush Binty and save the dog’s once rich, lustrous strawberry-blond hair to make wigs for dolls.

  Lis tossed Binty a crust of bread and turned her attention to chopping celery and green onion. Added them to the eggs along with mayonnaise, a shake of mustard, and yes, though she didn’t need to be reminded, a squeeze of lemon. She mixed it all together, added salt and pepper, then scooped a dollop onto a finger and tasted before assembling sandwiches, cutting them in quarters, and stacking them on a plate along with a half-dozen strawberries she’d picked up at the Piggly Wiggly. Local berries wouldn’t be in for another eight weeks or so.

  Lis took off her reading glasses, anchored them to the top of her head, and carried the plate out onto the porch. It was an unusually warm January day, warm enough to sit out. A spectacular pair of camellia bushes bloomed in the front yard, one loaded with hot pink blossoms and the other white. The ground beneath the bushes was thick with periwinkle. In a matter of weeks, the air would be heavy with the sweet scent of wisteria that would hang from the sinewy vines that draped gracefully across the front of the porch, and by May mosquitoes could be so thick that sitting on the porch would be a nonstarter.

  A police cruiser emblazoned with bonsecours police in peacock-blue lettering across the side slowed as it approached the house. Lis stepped across to block her mother’s view. The cruiser window rolled down and Deputy Police Chief Frank Ames waved.

  It wasn’t so much that Miss Sorrel didn’t approve of Lis’s seeing Frank, because she probably did, despite the fact that Frank was turning sixty and Lis was forty-six. He’d been a family friend since Lis was little, ever since he was a rookie on the police force. It was more that Lis cherished what little privacy she had in what was still a small town, living as she was under the same roof as her mother with her mother’s best friend, gossipy busybody Evelyn Dumont, right next door.

  The cruiser continued past as Miss Sorrel rocked gently in the glider and sipped sweet tea from a glass dripping condensation. With her powdered face, spots of rouge on each cheek, and lipstick carefully painted on, Miss Sorrel was starting to look like one of the porcelain dolls she so prized. That, despite the un-doll-like creases that ran from the corners of her lips down either side of her chin, the crinkles that radiated from the corners of her eyes, and the skin that had started to lose its grip on her fine-boned skull.

  Lis set the plate of sandwiches down on a metal TV table.

  “Lovely,” Miss Sorrel said. “Thank you, darling.”

  Darling. Never Elisabeth or Lis or Lissie. Safer not to risk Janey’s name popping out.

  Lis had been seven years old when her four-year-old sister Janey disappeared. One minute the two girls had been playing outside. Now stay in the yard. Lis supposedly watching Janey and resenting it. Be a good girl and do what Lissie tells you. Wondering why her brothers Davey or Sam or Michael never got saddled with babysitting. How come you always get to be the mommy? Bedding their doll babies in shoe boxes under their picnic-table house.

  A black-and-white puppy with floppy ears had scampered through the yard. Lis took off after it into the patch of woods behind the house until she lost sight of the white tip of its tail down by the creek. There she waded into the shallow water, turning over rocks, looking for frogs and yellow-spotted salamanders. She remembered thinking: Doll babies need pets.

  She’d tried to catch fish in her shoe but the water leaked out. Butterflies flitted past her grasp. When she returned with her arms loaded with forget-me-nots and Spanish moss to line their shoe box doll cribs, Lis assumed Janey had gone into the house, taking her doll with her. That meant precious minutes ticked by without anyone raising the alarm.

  Hope of finding out what happened to Janey had long ago faded, and yet still the shadow of her absence hung over the house, though the only physical reminders were photographs and Janey’s unaltered bedroom, with a single electric Christmas candle perpetually switched on in its front window.

  Miss Sorrel and Lis’s father, Wayne Woodham, whom everyone called Woody, had taken great pains to assure Lis that Janey’s disappearance was not her fault. But even then, Lis knew better. And if she had the power to lose Janey, then surely she had the power to bring her back. She used to stand in the upstairs hall with her hand on the doorknob to Janey’s room, imagining that it was a displaced magic bedknob from Bedknobs and Broomsticks. They had a videotape of the movie, and Lis would play and replay the bit where Angela Lansbury’s character casts a spell. Lis tried to repeat the syllables that sounded like gibberish: hell born hen bane, a-go-night.

  She’d hold on to the doorknob. Imagine it getting warm and glowing pink, her sister’s favorite color. Then she’d push open the door and there Janey would be, safe and sound, asleep in her bed.

  Even now, the incantation flew through her head whenever she was about to go into the room that would always and forever be Janey’s room.

  Lis learned a hard lesson: look away for a moment and the thing you cherish most in this world could be . . . would be . . . snatched from you. The real beneficiary of this hard-won wisdom was Lis’s daughter, Vanessa, whom Lis had smothered with vigilance. It had taken a supreme act of
will for Lis to look away as Vanessa biked up and down the block, or walked three doors down to play with her best friend, or waited for the school bus without Lis glued to her side.

  Now it took that same willpower for Lis not to think about what could happen to Vanessa living in that apartment in that not-great neighborhood outside of Providence, finishing a postdoc and working god-awful hours at that sleep lab. It helped a bit when Lis reminded herself that her daughter was poised on the cusp of the kind of career that Lis hadn’t known she could dream about.

  Lis tamped down the anxiety that flared whenever she thought about Vanessa. She’d texted her daughter earlier that morning, two hours ago. Two hours, that was about as long as it had taken for them to realize Janey was missing. It was all Lis could do to keep from texting Vanessa again. Poking at her until she got a response. Any response that signaled safe, for now.

  Miss Sorrel tucked a wisp of her white hair into the long braid she’d coiled in a figure eight, anchored at the nape of her neck, then reached across for a sandwich, knocking over the stack. “Oh dear,” she said, her hand fluttering over the plate. She’d been like that, jumpy, since yesterday. But that was to be expected. After all, yesterday was “Remembering Day,” the anniversary of the day Janey disappeared almost forty years ago.

  “Did you have a good night’s sleep?” Lis asked, handing Miss Sorrel a sandwich. “Anything bothering you, dear?”

  Miss Sorrel ignored the question and nibbled off a corner of the sandwich. Then another nibble and another, daintily licking her fingers when there was none left and reaching for another sandwich. Her appetite hadn’t flagged in the slightest even as she shrank. Then she sighed heavily and settled back into the glider, briefly admiring the cameo ring she always wore. The ring was carved with the delicate figure of a slender woman wearing a semitransparent gown. It had been Lis’s grandmother’s, and it was one of the few things of her mother’s that she hoped would one day be hers.

  For a few moments Lis and Miss Sorrel sat in companionable silence, broken only by the clip-clop of horses’ hooves. A horse-drawn wagon with tourists tucked in under carriage blankets moved slowly past. Miss Sorrel’s nostrils flared. That overripe barnyard smell and the curious gazes of tourists and their cameras were the price one paid for living in Bonsecours’s gracious historic district.

  “Momma, should we go inside?” Lis said.

  “Too late.” Miss Sorrel fanned the air with an open hand. “My sensibilities have already been”—she paused for a moment as a white compact car pulled up in front of the house, its front fender dented and trunk lid held down with a bungee cord—“assaulted.”

  The car sat there for a few moments, its engine wheezing before it shut down. The woman who climbed out wore tight jeans, a V-neck flowered T-shirt, and sunglasses. The getup said eighteen but the face said closing on thirty. With a practiced gesture she tossed back long dark hair that hung past her shoulders, leaned on the open car door, and gazed across at the house. At Lis and Miss Sorrel watching her from the porch.

  “She’s early, dammit,” Miss Sorrel said under her breath as she levered herself from the chair and waved. “Evelyn’s not even here.” Evelyn Dumont lived in the grand pink house next door on a big corner lot. The house had wide verandas in front on both floors, and narrow third-floor windows that seemed to peer out from below the eaves. Evelyn and Miss Sorrel had been making and repairing dolls together since before Lis could remember. Girlhood friends who were both now widowed, as they’d aged they’d grown more or less attached at the hip.

  “Miss Richards? Hello there,” Miss Sorrel warbled as she gestured to Lis to get rid of the sandwich platter. She adjusted the scarf around her neck. “Come right on up.”

  The woman, who looked far too unfinished to be Miss anything, reached into the backseat. She pulled a paper shopping bag and a Dunkin’ Donuts coffee cup from her car, straightened, and bumped the door closed with her hip. She tugged down her top, which had ridden up, exposing a roll of flesh bunched over low-riding jeans.

  Miss Sorrel’s typical clients were older women who arrived in church clothes, their injured or simply aging dolls swaddled in blankets or packed in boxes with tissue paper. Not this one. She was swinging that bag, oblivious to the coffee that was dribbling onto it from the cup as she climbed the steps to the porch. As Miss Richards approached the steps, Lis could tell the moment when her mother could actually see her because that’s when her expression soured from welcoming to eau de manure. And then, because of her excellent manners, her mother turned up the corners of her mouth in a bright smile that didn’t reach her eyes.

  Lis knew what was coming next. She went inside and sponged down the kitchen table. Then she lay down a yellow swaddle blanket and a fresh pair of purple latex gloves for her mother to wear when she examined the doll.

  Miss Sorrel and Miss Richards came in, followed by Binty. The low-ceilinged kitchen felt claustrophobic as it filled with Miss Richards’s cloyingly sweet perfume smell—gardenia squared. The woman set the bag on the table and shoved away Binty, who was trying to bury her nose in the woman’s crotch. Was that a tattoo on the small of her back? Lis only got a quick peek, but it looked like Harley-Davidson eagle wings.

  “Darling, would you get my logbook?” Miss Sorrel said.

  Lis walked through the passageway to her mother’s workroom. She flipped the light switch and banks of fluorescent lights that hung low over a pair of worktables tinked to life. On one table lay an aging hard plastic doll and a can of fixative, its chemical smell lingering in the air. From a drawer Lis pulled out the aging theme book in which doll repairs were carefully logged. She also picked up the digital camera. Every doll that came into the house was photographed and catalogued.

  When Lis returned to the kitchen, Miss Sorrel had opened the woman’s bag and was peering inside. Her face was so white that the spots of rouge on her cheeks stood out like a clown’s face paint.

  Lis set the theme book on the table and turned on the camera. Miss Sorrel looked across at her, startled. She cleared her throat. “Thank you, darling. I’ll take care of it.” She put out her hand and Lis gave her the camera. “Why don’t you take Binty for a walk? She’s been cooped up all morning.”

  In fact, Binty had been out most of the morning, and when Evelyn wasn’t there to assist Miss Sorrel with a client, Lis usually stayed and took notes. But Lis took her cue. She grabbed a plastic bag in case Binty had more business to do and hooked her hand in Binty’s collar.

  “We’ll be right outside. Give a holler if you need me,” Lis said.

  At the door she looked back. Miss Richards had taken off her sunglasses. The harsh light cast dark shadows around her eyes, and she seemed tense as Miss Sorrel pulled a baby doll from the bag and set it on the table. The curls in its wig were sparse. Its porcelain face was heavily soiled, and one of its arms was missing. Its once-white hand-embroidered dress was matted and torn, and its glass eyes were cloudy.

  Miss Sorrel normally turned down repair work on a doll that far gone. So why was she pulling on her gloves and turning the doll over and examining it so carefully, reverentially even?

  2

  Lis held open the door for Binty and followed the dog out onto the porch. The screen door slapped shut behind them. Binty hesitated at the top of the steps and whined. Lis picked the dog up and carried her down. Binty arched her neck and slurped Lis’s nose, then stutter-stepped to the curb and lowered her behind, her back legs trembling.

  Lis approached Miss Richards’s car. She ran a finger along the fender, leaving a white streak in a coating that was the color of the toadstools that grew in the yard where an oak had been blown over by Hurricane Charley. Lucky for Miss Richards, car inspections were considered government overreach in South Carolina, because that car would never have passed muster in New Jersey. The license plate said it all: POJNK. Was it a vanity plate or just serendipitous irony?

  Lis circled the car. There was a sticker on the back window. She lowered her glasses so she could see what it said. University of South Carolina. A student? Or maybe an employee.

  Lis sat on one of the wide porch steps. She gazed back at the house she’d moved back into when she’d split with Brad. Vanessa had just turned four. Since then Lis had grown more tolerant of her mother’s quirks and limitations, her perfect hair and calibrated judgments.