You'll Never Know Dear: A Novel of Suspense Page 5

  Evelyn said, “I knew it would take a while for you to figure out what’s what, so I went ahead and made some calls. The glass people are coming tomorrow to fix the windows and an electrician will be by to deal with the power situation. Someone’s coming to handle the propane, too. Then we’ll see what all else needs doing.”

  Tears pricked at Vanessa’s eyes as she thought about everything that needed to be done. “Thank you. I don’t know what we’d do without you, Evelyn.”

  Officer Frank said, “I’m sure Lis and Miss Sorrel will be relieved to hear that things are under control. Damaged property and boarded-up windows are always a temptation. Wouldn’t want street people thinking they can move in.”

  Vanessa took in the pristine stately homes across the street and on either side. “Is that a problem?”

  “You’d be surprised.” He paused. Gave her a long look. “Or maybe not.”

  Vanessa felt her face flush. Did her long straight hair, jeans, and over-the-knee boots say city girl, and worse, Yankee? Then she realized Officer Frank had probably heard from her mother about the “very dangerous” part of Providence where Vanessa was living. The one time Lis had visited she hadn’t been able to see beyond the nearby warehouses and factory buildings that the city hadn’t yet figured out how to transform.

  Evelyn stepped up to Officer Frank. Her forehead came up to his chin. “Thanks for stopping to check on us. I know Lis would be most appreciative, you keeping a watchful eye.” She let her hand float gently down until she was touching his arm.

  Office Frank took a step back. “You staying here at the house?” he asked Vanessa.

  “I was planning to.”

  “Be careful, you hear? Your grandma’s been using that kiln for decades and all of a sudden it blows up on her?” He shook his head. “Arson investigator didn’t find anything suspicious. Just turned up too high. But still, it doesn’t sit right.” He gave her a business card. “You call me right away if anything else feels off.”

  Like what? Vanessa tried to take the card but he held on.

  “Promise me you’ll call. Any time.” When she nodded, he let go of the card and strode off to his car.

  “You have a blessed day,” Evelyn called after him.

  “Workin’ on it,” he called back.

  After Officer Frank had driven off, Evelyn said to Vanessa, “Don’t know if you know, but he’s sweet on your momma. Has been for a very long time. She thinks folks don’t know, but we just don’t let on. Nice for Lis, don’t you think? Especially at her age?”

  Bless her heart, that was Evelyn’s version of a compliment. “Nice that he was watching over them,” Vanessa said.

  “Doing his job and we do appreciate it, don’t we?” Evelyn winked. Then her face turned somber. “You talked to your grandma? I imagine she’s relieved you’re here.”

  If she’d been relieved, that hadn’t been evident. “She was upset. She tried to tell me something. Something about, ‘she came back.’”

  “She came back?” When Evelyn blinked, a little mascara smudged into her eyelid. “Did you ask her what she meant by that?”

  Well, of course I asked her. Vanessa swallowed what Evelyn would rightly have taken as sass. “I tried to, but there wasn’t time. The nurse shooed me out.” She pictured her grandmother struggling to communicate, the strained tendons in her neck and wrist. “She also said something about a girl. That she had to find the other one.”

  “The other what?”

  Vanessa spread her hands. “I thought she meant the other girl. She said you’d know.”

  “Hmm.” Evelyn folded her arms and wrinkled her brow. “Keep in mind, she’s not herself.”

  Vanessa could still see Grandma Sorrel’s face with that familiar stubborn expression. Maybe she’d been a little confused and anxious, but she’d been herself.

  “Mercy. Maybe it was about that doll.” Evelyn’s gaze shifted to the house.

  “What doll?”

  Evelyn’s look darkened. “We’d better go inside. I’ll show you.”

  7

  Vanessa found the house key Grandma Sorrel kept under a green-and-blue Majolica garden seat by her herb garden while Evelyn closed Binty into a chain-link enclosure behind the house. When Vanessa opened the door to the kitchen, a powerful stench drove her back. It wasn’t just smoke; there was a layer over it like burnt rubber.

  Holding her breath, Vanessa stepped into the dark entryway that Grandma Sorrel called her mudroom. Once upon a time, she had imagined this dark, closetlike room that connected the house to Miss Sorrel’s workroom as her portal to Narnia. Now she wondered if the coats that hung on hooks on the opposite wall would ever be wearable again.

  Vanessa held her hand over her mouth as she made her way into the kitchen. A layer of soot had settled on every surface. The linoleum floor was streaked with footprints. The walls were stained a yellowish brown near the ceiling. A broom and dustpan leaned against the wall alongside a collapsed black plastic garbage bag. She reached over the sink and opened the window. A chilly breeze wafted in. Everything in the room, especially the dolls lined up on the shelf that ran all around the room, would need to be washed and aired out in the sun.

  Evelyn briskly moved past Vanessa and began filling the sink with soapy water.

  “Thanks for being here,” Vanessa said. “I don’t know what I’d do.” She had to admit that Evelyn was practical, capable, and efficient, a source of emotional ballast when she wasn’t trying to boss you around.

  “Pfff. You’d have figured it out. Now you just set yourself down, ’Nessa dear. First I need to show you something so you’ll understand.” Evelyn opened a drawer and pulled out a file folder bulging with what looked like newspaper clippings. She set it on the table and opened it. The clipping on top was a fresh, crisp classified ad. Circled in red marker were the words: LOST DOLL $5K CASH REWARD.

  The text ran above a photograph of a porcelain doll. The phone number listed was Grandma Sorrel’s. The ad had run in the Charleston Post and Courier two days ago.

  Vanessa shuffled through the pile of clippings. There had to be at least fifty classified ads, each of them offering a reward for the same pictured doll. They’d run in Columbia’s daily, The State, the Atlanta Journal Constitution, the Charleston Post and Courier, and more. The earliest one was dated 1988. Back then the reward had been $100.

  Vanessa gave Evelyn a questioning look.

  “Your grandmother had to do something,” Evelyn said. “She used to say you could hide a plug in a socket and the police would be asking you where to look. And we knew for sure that once Buck was gone, no one on the force would make finding Janey a priority.” Buck had been Evelyn’s husband, the longtime chief of police. Vanessa’s grandfather’s best friend. Vanessa had seen pictures in the family photo album of Woody and Buck casting off lines together from the flybridge of one of Woody’s Charters’s boats.

  Evelyn added, “So she started posting that advertisement. Once a year. Every year. On the anniversary of Janey’s disappearance.”

  Every year? “How did I not know about this?”

  “She didn’t want you to know. It was upsetting each time, posting that ad and then waiting.”

  “Did anyone respond?”

  “For that reward? Lord a mercy, every year a passel of ’em would turn up on her doorstep with some pitiful doll, hoping to pass it off as Janey’s.” Evelyn leaned her back against the sink. “But Miss Sorrel knows her doll babies, and she always said when Janey’s doll came back, she’d know her. When she comes back. Not if.” Evelyn clamped her lips shut and her eyes misted.

  Vanessa looked through the ads again. All of them were published on January 23, Remembering Day. On that day, every year, Grandma Sorrel closed herself up in Janey’s bedroom and emerged hours later looking pale and drawn. For supper she’d cook Janey’s favorites—crispy fried chicken and banana pudding laced with chunks of graham cracker—and set a place at the table for Janey. Vanessa had hated Remembering Day.
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  “Yesterday,” Evelyn said, “the doll came back.”

  “Janey’s doll?” Vanessa said. She shivered. She could hear Grandma Sorrel’s hoarse voice and see her anxious face through the clear shell of the hyperbaric chamber—She came back.

  Evelyn paused. “That’s what your grandmother thought. I’ll show you.” She snagged the most recent classified ad from the folder and gestured to Vanessa to follow her into the dining room.

  The background of the dining room’s cabbage-rose wallpaper had turned gray. Grandma Sorrel’s silver tea service sat, dulled by a layer of soot, on a stately Chippendale sideboard. As always, dolls were everywhere. Small dolls were tucked between Grandma Sorrel’s cherished Blue Willow china on shelves hanging from the wall. Larger dolls nestled in cradle-like baskets on the floor or hung from the walls and ceiling like ripening hams. They’d all need to be cleaned.

  Evelyn headed to the fireplace. She drew her finger through a thin coating of soot on the top of the fireplace mantel and frowned. On the mantel sat a battered porcelain doll with a cracked face, one arm, and milky eyes. Evelyn held up beside it the classified ad with its grainy black-and-white photograph of Janey’s doll. “What do you think?”

  Vanessa looked back and forth between the photograph and the doll. The doll in Janey’s arms was the right size. It had on a similar long white dress and what was left of its blond hair was tied with a thin ribbon. But the resolution was nowhere near sharp enough to see whether the doll in the picture had a dimple like the one on the mantel, and the wig on the real doll was too threadbare to make a comparison.

  “What do you think?” Vanessa said.

  Evelyn took the doll, cradling it in her arms like a real baby. She touched the embroidery on its dress. “It’s my cross-stitching.” She turned up the bottom of the doll’s bare foot. “And there’s the sorrel leaf.” Lightly she traced one of the cracks that radiated from the doll’s forehead. She fingered the bits of blond hair and the thin pink satin ribbon. The doll’s cloudy eyeballs gave it a haunted look. “Poor baby,” Evelyn said, pressing the doll against her shoulder and rubbing its back.

  Vanessa half expected the doll to burp. “Can it be repaired?” she asked.

  “She”—Evelyn said, setting the doll gently on the mantel—“can be. Somewhat. The eyes can probably be cleared. The dress cleaned, hair added. But the face. Porcelain.” Evelyn tsked. “It can be patched, but I’m afraid it will never be perfect.” She picked up the framed Christmas photograph and wiped it with a dish towel, then set it back on the mantel beside the doll. There in front of the tree stood her mother’s three older brothers, uncles whom Vanessa had rarely met. Beside them were Lis and Janey. Whenever Vanessa thought of Janey, this was the image that came to mind, the fair-haired two-year-old standing in her pajamas with her thumb in her mouth and a brand-new baby doll in her arms.

  “It could be Janey’s,” Evelyn said. “I can tell by the mark on the foot that it’s an early Miss Sorrel doll. But you know, we made a lot of dolls, back in the day. Of course I want it to be the one. Your grandmother, bless her, reckons it is. And once she sets her mind.” Evelyn tilted her head and peered closely at the doll. “But I’m not sure. Janey’s doll was only the second portrait doll your grandmother made, but it was somethin’ else. Expressive. Exquisitely painted. This was once a nice doll.” Evelyn made a sour face. “But something about the head. It seems somehow . . . unfinished.”

  Vanessa couldn’t see past the age and damage. “Who brought it?” she asked.

  “A woman about your age, your grandma said. I didn’t meet her, but I gather she was”—Evelyn’s nose wrinkled—“rude and nasty. Sashayed in and then left in a huff when Miss Sorrel asked her where she got the doll. Sorrel was beside herself, but what could she do? She couldn’t force the woman to tell her.”

  Of course Grandma Sorrel would have been distraught. She still was. Vanessa could hear her rasping voice coming through the handset of the hyperbaric chamber. Have to find her.

  Evelyn squeezed Vanessa’s arm and then headed to the kitchen. Vanessa barely registered her calling out from the other room, something about taking down the curtains and washing them. She was thinking about the dream she’d had in the sleep lab last night.

  It had just been a dream. Still, how weird was it to get woken up from a dream about Grandma Sorrel with a call telling her that she and her mother had been hurt? Vanessa knew it was human to search for meaning where there was none, but she suddenly wanted more than anything to go back into that dream, unwrap that bundle, and get a good look at what Grandma Sorrel had been trying to give her. Had it been a baby, or a doll molded in the image of a little lost girl?

  Vanessa picked up the doll, intending to clean it and shelve it in a china cabinet where her grandmother kept her own collection of Miss Sorrel dolls along with the other dolls she cherished most. Protected. Behind glass.

  That’s when she noticed that the door to one of those china cabinets was ajar. It was only as she pressed it shut that she realized. Every one of its shelves had been emptied.

  8

  The battered Miss Sorrel doll fell from Vanessa’s grasp. “Evelyn,” she called out. “Evelyn!”

  “What on earth?” Evelyn appeared in the doorway.

  Vanessa pointed to the empty china cabinet. “Did you move Grandma’s dolls?”

  Evelyn did a double take. “Oh . . . my . . . heavens. Of course I didn’t.” She shook her head as her gaze traveled from shelf to shelf and on to another glass-fronted china cabinet on the adjacent wall. Its shelves were also empty. “Her Jumeau Bébé. Her Madame Alexanders. All the German bisques.”

  “And all her Miss Sorrel dolls,” Vanessa added.

  Evelyn shot her a panicked look. “Maybe they’re in the workroom? Maybe she was working on them when . . .”

  Vanessa raced through the kitchen. She groped for the light switch in the dark passageway to the workroom. But when she flipped it on, nothing happened.

  “Here.” Evelyn came up behind her and handed her a flashlight.

  Vanessa switched the beam on. She could hear Evelyn’s shallow breathing close behind her as they moved through the passage into the workroom. With its windows boarded over, the workroom was nearly pitch-black. Vanessa took shallow breaths. She could feel the scorched scent clinging to her as she ran the flashlight beam quickly from wall to wall.

  Parts of the spacious room seemed untouched. Hand-labeled plastic bins, now coated with soot, were still intact on shelves where Miss Sorrel stored dolls that were being repaired. None of the missing dolls were on the worktables or underneath, or in a pair of gray metal file cabinets that stood undamaged in a corner.

  In a far corner, plaster had been blown away and lath was hanging from the ceiling. The kiln’s door was hanging by a single hinge. Vanessa ran the flashlight beam across the floor. Behind the kiln lay a length of battered steel tubing. “What’s that?”

  “May I?” Evelyn took the flashlight from Vanessa and shined the beam over the top of the kiln, then back on the tubing. “The flue pipe.”

  Officer Frank had said that the kiln wasn’t venting properly. But it wasn’t like Grandma Sorrel not to check the vent. Setting the kiln too high was a rookie mistake, not one she’d make. Vanessa flashed the beam across the ceiling until she found the once-white, round plastic casing of the smoke alarm. A little door in it hung open to reveal the empty battery compartment. Grandma Sorrel would never have failed to replace batteries in the carbon monoxide detector, either.

  As if reading Vanessa’s thoughts, Evelyn said, “You haven’t seen your grandma in a while, have you?”

  That stung because it was true. Vanessa hadn’t even come home for Christmas. All she knew about Grandma Sorrel’s state of mind was what she’d gathered from weekly phone calls.

  Evelyn handed the flashlight back to Vanessa. If the missing dolls were in the workroom, they weren’t in plain sight. A horrifying thought occurred to Vanessa. Had the kiln, once used to
fire porcelain dolls, been used to cremate her grandmother’s most treasured? Was that why the temperature had been turned up so high? Could you even fit so many dolls inside? How long would it take, and how much evidence would be left behind?

  She shifted the flashlight beam to the interior of the kiln. Gingerly she reached in and touched the tile lining. It was still warm, but barely. She pulled out a shelf and dumped a mound of blackened chunks and ashes on the floor. Crouched and picked out a few of the larger pieces of what looked like porcelain. Possibly a doll’s arm. A foot. She turned one of the pieces over. On the bottom she could just make out the impression of a sorrel leaf. “Grandma Sorrel still uses the kiln?” she asked Evelyn.

  “Occasionally. These days we get most of the spare parts we need off the interweb. That’s your grandmother’s department. But yes, sometimes she needs to use the kiln, and bisque can shatter during firing. Once one piece shatters, it can set off a chain reaction. Who knows how long that was in there.”

  “But she cleans out the kiln after she uses it, doesn’t she?” That was a chore Vanessa used to help with. Miss Sorrel had impressed upon her the danger of an unclean kiln. Anything overlooked could explode when the kiln heated up again, damaging whatever was in there being fired.

  Vanessa flashed the light inside the kiln again. Her eye caught on a semitransparent blob of glass fused to a piece of base metal. She reached in and pulled it out. Vanessa knew what it was, or what it had been. Eyes. And eyes didn’t get fired; they were set into a doll after the head was fired, so these melted glass eyes had to have come from a finished doll.

  Still, the amount of detritus in the kiln didn’t begin to suggest it had been used for cremating thirty or forty dolls. One or two seemed more likely.