You'll Never Know Dear: A Novel of Suspense Page 6

  “Do you think maybe Grandma Sorrel took her best dolls upstairs?” Vanessa said. She knew she was grasping at straws, but she gave Evelyn the flashlight and crossed back through the passageway to the main house and up the stairs. She looked in her mother’s bedroom, then Grandma Sorrel’s bedroom, then the big bedroom her uncles had shared, and finally the tiny one she’d slept in growing up. She checked in every drawer and closet, in every shelf and crawl space, and under every bed.

  There were dolls and doll parts everywhere. Rag dolls. Plastic dolls. Rubber dolls. Dolls with faces made of wizened apples and others with bodies made of corn husks. But none of them were the dolls that had been so special that they’d earned a spot in one of the china cabinets.

  Vanessa stood in the upstairs hallway outside the closed door to Janey’s room, the one room left to check. Grandma Sorrel was the only person who ever went in there. Vanessa had to force herself to open the door and step past the threshold. She’d always been haunted by the idea that the woman who would have been her aunt might rise from her grave and try to return home. She’d imagine a spectral figure knocking on the inside of the bedroom door in the middle of the night, desperate to get out of that room; or rising up out of the drain while Vanessa was in the tub; or emerging like a finished porcelain doll from Grandma Sorrel’s kiln.

  But there was no ghost in Janey’s room. Nor was there any sign of the missing dolls. The only thing on the pink quilted bedspread was a plump brown kangaroo who’d pitched over onto his nose. Vanessa checked the closet, which was filled with little girls’ dresses. A pair of plastic bins on the closet floor were filled with dolls, but they were Janey’s dolls. Toys, as opposed to collectibles. Vanessa reached for an oversize boy doll wearing red overalls, its wide-eyed manic expression like a ventriloquist’s dummy. Its wiry red hair smelled of dust. Janey might have been the last person to touch it before it got piled in the bin. Vanessa dropped the doll back into the box.

  She took a final look around the room with its always-on light in the window. Righted the kangaroo so it could survey its surroundings.

  Vanessa went back downstairs. In the dining room she picked up the damaged doll that might have been Janey’s from the floor where she’d dropped it. She smoothed its pinafore and set it in the otherwise empty china cabinet.

  Robbed. That was the only explanation. They’d been robbed by burglars who bypassed a silver tea service and tray that were sitting in plain sight on the dining room table. By burglars who’d known just which dolls were worth taking and where to find them.

  9

  “Did you find them?” Evelyn asked, looking up from the kitchen table where she was writing when Vanessa returned. She had a dark streak of soot across her forehead. She took one glance at Vanessa and added, “I didn’t think so. I’m making a list to take to the police.” Evelyn rotated the piece of paper so Vanessa could see. Ideal composition Shirley Temple. Baby Dionne Quint. The list went on for twenty entries. So far. “There should be photographs of all these filed in the workroom. Miss Sorrel has always been meticulous about record keeping. At least she’ll be able to collect on her homeowners.”

  “Seems weird that the dolls are all that got taken,” Vanessa said.

  “The most valuable ones,” Evelyn corrected.

  “A robber knows which ones are valuable?”

  “Anyone even remotely connected to the world of dolls would know about your grandmother’s collection. She was president of UFDC, for heaven’s sake.” Vanessa must have looked puzzled because Evelyn added, “United Federation of Doll Clubs. We went to the convention together every year. Gave workshops. She used to write a column for Doll News and she often wrote about her own dolls. Posted pictures. You don’t need to be a genius to guess that she’d keep her best under glass and on display.”

  Suddenly Vanessa felt dizzy and chilled. She sank down in a kitchen chair and closed her eyes.

  “Are you all right?” Evelyn asked.

  “It’s . . . I . . . Actually, I’m not feeling all that great.”

  Evelyn pressed the inside of her wrist to Vanessa’s forehead, waited a few moments, then wrapped her hand around Vanessa’s wrist, taking her pulse. She lifted Vanessa’s chin and looked into her eyes. “Honey, when did you last have something to eat?”

  Vanessa tried to remember. A donut and a pair of antacid tablets on her way from the airport.

  Evelyn was already at the refrigerator. She poured a glass of orange juice, placed it in front of Vanessa, and started a piece of bread in the toaster. “I’ll take the list and pictures to the police later today so they can follow up expeditiously.”

  As Vanessa drank her juice, she wondered if expeditiously involved an assist from Officer Frank, or if Evelyn’s pedigree as the former police chief’s wife gave her entrée enough.

  “But as soon as she’s strong enough to take the bad news,” Evelyn went on, “we should run my list by Miss Sorrel. She’ll know if I missed any.” She took the empty juice glass to the sink. “And no more work for you around here until you’re steady on your feet again. I’m sure it’s just low blood sugar. I’ll clean out the kiln and make a start putting things in order out back.”

  The toast popped up and Evelyn slapped it on a plate. She took a jar of peanut butter and some grape jelly from a cabinet, slathered some on the toast, and slid it in front of Vanessa. Grape jelly had always been Vanessa’s favorite.

  “You eat that and then go upstairs and go to sleep.” Without missing a beat, Evelyn pulled a chair over to the sink, climbed up on it, and reached for the curtains. “I’ll just take these down and run them through the washer and see if the living room curtains need a wash, too, and . . .”

  As Evelyn went on, enumerating the cleanup chores, Vanessa let her voice flow over her. Evelyn loved having to take charge. But Vanessa’s hand shook as she lifted the toast to her mouth and took a bite, chewed, and tried to swallow. For the moment at least, she enjoyed the sensation of being taken care of.

  It took only a few minutes and the rest of the toast for Vanessa’s head to clear. She helped Evelyn carry a load of curtains next door to wash. On the way back, she stopped at her car to get her suitcase and took it up to her bedroom. Under the rapt gaze of two shelves of dolls, she put the suitcase at the foot of her bed, opened it, and pulled out her mother’s Miss Sorrel doll. This was the very first Miss Sorrel doll ever made. It was a portrait of her mother at five or six years old, its dress embroidered by Evelyn, its wig made of Vanessa’s mother’s dark hair.

  Evelyn left, and Vanessa spent the next several hours scrubbing kitchen walls and counters. Then she vacuumed the entire house, only taking time out to eat a tuna casserole she found in the freezer. It was barely ten o’clock that night when she fell into bed, beyond exhausted. There was still a huge amount of cleaning to be done, but at least she and Evelyn had gotten a start.

  Normally she felt cozy and safe, alone in the house and tucked into bed in this room that had once been called the “sewing room.” But tonight she felt spooked. The walls of the room felt as if they were closing in around her, and Vanessa was startled by the occasional creak or thump that normally she’d have written off as the house timbers and its cranky heating system coming to terms with one another. The dolls are having a party, Grandma Sorrel used to say.

  As tired as Vanessa was, she couldn’t seem to close her eyes and calm her mind. She could feel her mother’s Miss Sorrel doll staring at her from the bureau. She got out of bed and picked up the doll. Cradling it, she looked out onto the dark empty street. A scraping sound close by sent her heart into overdrive. The windowpane rattled and there was the sound again. It was the twisted, bare wisteria branches, rubbing against the sill.

  She crept out into the hall. The doors to her mother’s and grandmother’s empty bedrooms were open. Light seeped from under the closed door of Janey’s room. Continuing downstairs, she made a circuit of the house, checking that every window was latched and all the doors locked. She turned on
the front porch light and, for good measure, turned on the light in the dining room. She opened the china cabinet and set Lis’s doll on the shelf beside the damaged doll. At least there’d be two Miss Sorrel dolls to greet Grandma Sorrel when she came home.

  Vanessa crouched so she was at eye level with the dolls. What had Grandma Sorrel been doing in her workroom in the middle of the night? Why had Vanessa’s mother been downstairs, too? Why would either of them have turned on the kiln? And what did any of that have to do with the robbery and the return of this mangled doll that might or might not have been Janey’s?

  Well? She waited, but neither doll had answers for her. She stood and pressed the cabinet doors shut.

  10

  The beeping of alarms and clattering of carts in the hospital hallway interrupted Lis’s sleep. On top of that, she couldn’t stop thinking about the doll that woman had brought them. Its cracked face and cloudy eyes haunted her. Miss Sorrel had recognized it immediately, certain that it was Janey’s doll.

  Janey’s doll. Janey’s doll. Janey’s doll. After all these years, it was the first thread of evidence that Janey hadn’t simply gone up in smoke.

  When Lis woke the next morning, it felt as if she’d been chewed up and spit out. Her head ached, and the thought of breakfast made her gag. There was a tin of candy and a magazine on her tray table along with a note from Vanessa saying she’d be back that morning.

  She didn’t remember Vanessa leaving, but she dimly remembered waking up to find Frank asleep in the chair beside her bed. She wondered if his visit had been a dream. Then she noticed a vase filled with pink roses and baby’s breath that had appeared overnight on the windowsill alongside the flowers from Cap’n Jack.

  She smiled. There was no card, but she knew the roses were from Frank. He always gave her pink roses, ever since the first single pink rose he brought when he took her out on their first real date. Never mind that they’d been necking on her porch for months or that he’d picked the rose from Evelyn’s garden. In the years since, on the rare occasion when he gave her flowers (sentiment wasn’t his strong suit; dependability was), they were always pink roses.

  Lis pressed a button to raise the hospital bed and struggled to lift her head. Gray light seeped in between the slats of the window blinds. The other bed in the room was empty. Her mother must have been taken again for special treatment.

  Lis sat up and dangled her legs over the edge of the bed. The room started to spin, and her heart galloped in her chest. She unhooked the oxygen mask from the tank beside the bed and inhaled, then lowered her head between her knees and breathed deeply.

  This time when she sat up, the world stayed anchored. She got to her feet and managed to reach the bathroom. When she came out, a nurse was waiting for her. Young and fresh faced, like she’d just started her shift. Lis was used to the routine. Pulse. Blood pressure.

  “My mother?” Lis asked. “Where is she?”

  The nurse slipped a thermometer into Lis’s mouth. “Your mother is in intensive care,” she said.

  Lis held the thermometer. “What?”

  “She’s stable right now.”

  Stable? What did that mean? But before Lis could ask, the nurse took the thermometer and read it. Tucked it into her cart. As she tapped on a computer tablet, she said, “The doctor will fill you in. Let me get you some fresh water.” She picked up the orange plastic pitcher from Lis’s bedside table and disappeared into the bathroom. When she came back out, she put the pitcher on the table. “Try to rest. The doctor will be here any minute.”

  Dismissed. The cart clattered as the nurse pushed it out of the room. Lis lay back and closed her eyes. What wasn’t the nurse telling her? They wouldn’t have moved her mother to intensive care unless she’d suffered a setback. Was it serious? Life-threatening?

  Lis saw herself sitting at her kitchen table reading the morning paper, Binty at her feet, the chair across from her empty. She’d be able to read the bridge column first, do the crossword puzzle, decide which TV show to watch. She could go back to buying whole milk. Stop dusting the dolls.

  But she wasn’t ready to lose her mother, and not this way. Miss Sorrel would have found it too abrupt and unseemly.

  The nurse’s “any minute” stretched to twenty and Lis was struggling to put on her bathrobe and fighting back another wave of nausea, determined to find out for herself how Miss Sorrel was doing, when there was a polite tap at the door and Dr. Allison came in with Vanessa trailing behind. Dr. Allison had been their family doctor forever. With his silver hair and trademark red bow tie, he had a calming presence.

  “How is she? Where is she?” Lis said.

  Dr. Allison pulled a chair up to the side of the bed and took Lis’s hand between his. Vanessa stood at his side looking pale and worried. “Last night your mother suffered a mild heart attack. We’re monitoring her in intensive care.”

  “Heart attack?” Lis repeated. Miss Sorrel had pain in her joints from arthritis and occasionally an upset stomach. Her heart had never been a problem.

  “As I say, it was mild. It’s not an uncommon complication after carbon monoxide poisoning.” As the doctor spoke, he took Lis’s pulse. “It looks like she was exposed to it longer than you were. Maybe she was closer to the source? And, of course, she’s older and more vulnerable. We expect her to make a full recovery. With a little luck, she may even be home in a few days.

  “You, however,” he said, shining a light into one eye and then the other, “are recovering nicely.” He listened to her chest, then stood back and appraised her. “How are you feeling?”

  Lis caught Vanessa’s anxious look. “Better,” she said.

  Lousy was closer to the mark, but she didn’t want to alarm Vanessa. Besides, she had to get home and figure out how to track down the woman who’d brought them the doll. Could it be Janey’s? Lis had given up long ago on finding her sister, but Miss Sorrel hadn’t, not even for a moment.

  “Better,” Dr. Allison repeated, giving her an amused look. “Nauseated?”

  She nodded.

  “Short of breath?”

  She inhaled and coughed.

  “All to be expected. You just need time to convalesce. But there’s nothing that we can do for you here that you can’t do for yourself at home.” He glanced at Vanessa. “With a little help.”

  Was her daughter ready to step in for however long it took for Lis to feel like she could do for herself? How many more days would it be before Miss Sorrel was able to come home? And what if Lis didn’t recover as quickly as the doctor seemed to expect? Evelyn would always be right next door, of course, but what if Evelyn had her own health crisis, or . . . Lis tried to take a deep breath but her chest hurt.

  One of Miss Sorrel’s favorite sayings came back to her: Don’t worry about the mule, just load the wagon.

  “Can I see my mother now?” Lis asked.

  Dr. Allison nodded. “Get dressed and get your things together. Then Vanessa can wheel you over. In the meanwhile, we’ll put together the paperwork so you can go home.”

  11

  “You just try getting out of that wheelchair before I get back to collect you and I’ll shoot you myself,” Vanessa said before she planted a kiss on Lis’s head and left her in the hospital’s loading zone, a bag with her belongings piled in her lap. Even outside Lis could feel the hospital’s odors—Clorox and plastic and sweat—clinging to her as she waited obediently for Vanessa to return with the car.

  Doctor Allison had said Miss Sorrel would make a full recovery, but seeing her mother lying in the ICU, pale and unresponsive (sedated, according to the nurse on duty) on a ventilator with tubes snaking through her nose, had done little to reassure Lis. At least the monitor beside the bed beeped steadily and traced out a reassuringly consistent pattern. She’d hated leaving her mother to wake up with no familiar face beside the bed, so it had been a blessing when Evelyn showed up and took her place.

  A man holding flowers and balloons rushed past her into the hospital. A si
ren screamed nearby and moments later fell silent. That must have been an ambulance arriving to the emergency entrance around the corner. Was that where they’d wheeled her and her mother in . . . could it have been just two days ago? Lis searched her memory, but all she remembered was how dizzy and weak she felt when she woke up in the ER, so light-headed that just lifting her head made her start to black out. She’d been shocked when the doctor told her she was suffering from carbon monoxide poisoning. Even more shocked to find out that she and her mother would have died if the kiln hadn’t blown up and brought a fire rescue truck.

  She remembered the night before. How Evelyn had come over and examined the doll that the woman driving that old junk car had brought them. How she and Miss Sorrel had stayed up late examining the doll. Arguing. Their voices carried up to Lis’s bedroom. Lis hadn’t been surprised to hear Miss Sorrel puttering about in her own bedroom late that night. Or later still when she woke up and heard her going downstairs. It wasn’t until Lis got up to go to the bathroom and saw her mother’s bedroom door open that she thought she’d better check.

  Lis had gone downstairs. The house was quiet. Dead silence. She’d gone into the kitchen. The lights were on but Miss Sorrel wasn’t there. The light in the passageway to the workroom was on, too. Then . . . next thing she remembered, she was waking up in the ER, feeling like she had a cinder block on her head, and there was Vanessa sitting at her bedside looking like an angel who hadn’t had a wink of sleep in days.

  A car horn tooted and Vanessa pulled up. She helped Lis into the car. Lis gritted her teeth as Vanessa buckled her in the same way Lis had done for Vanessa when she was three years old. The “new car” smell in the rental car was nauseating, and Lis nearly lost it waiting for Vanessa to start the engine so she could roll down the window.

  “You okay, Mom?” Vanessa said, sliding Lis a sideways glance.

  Lis winced and nodded, though she felt anything but okay. She wasn’t about to turn around and go back.