The Girl in the Locked Room

by Mary Downing Hahn

  Jules’s friend picks up a stick and pokes at the ground. The first thing she finds is the ugly bald doll. “Look at this.”

  Jules makes a face. “Put her down, Maisie,” she says. “That doll scares me.”

  So the friend is named Maisie. That means she’s a girl. Unless boys have girls’ names and girls have boys’ names. Jules, for instance.

  “Not me.” Maisie examines the doll. “She must have come from the house. We should keep her.”

  “You keep her,” Jules says. “I don’t want her.”

  The girl watches Maisie lay the doll gently down in the weeds. Why does she want it? It’s ugly and ruined. Its eyes are gone, its hair is gone, its body is stained, and its legs and arms are falling off. Jules is right. The doll is scary.

  The girl can’t bear to look at it. She is sure she doesn’t want that doll. It’s dead.

  Jules sits in the weeds and watches Maisie dig in the dirt. She doesn’t help her.

  “Oh, look.” Maisie scoops up the little china dolls.

  The girl’s fingers itch to hold them. She has an idea that they’re all named Charlotte, but she doesn’t know why they share the same name. Such odd notions she has.

  She considers making the dolls talk again, but she doesn’t want to scare Jules, so she keeps quiet and watches Jules and Maisie divide the little figures between them. The girl wishes they’d share them with her. One for her, that’s all. Just one.

  Maisie says, “It’s hot. Did you say there’s a creek where we can cool off?”

  The girl watches them disappear into the woods. If only she could go with them. There’s something at the end of that path she longs to see. The trouble is, she cannot leave the locked room. She promised not to.

  Who made her promise? And why can’t she remember?

  She looks at the little dolls on the grass, their faces turned up to the sky, their bodies stiff and hard. The bald doll sprawls beside them. A few tufts of hair still cling to her head, and her empty eye sockets are dark holes in her cracked face.

  The girl turns away from the window. If she could, she’d run outside and gather all the little dolls and bring them back to her room. She’d play with them. She’d make them talk.

  The dead doll can stay where it is. If the girl had a shovel, she’d bury it so deep, no one would ever dig it up again.

  19

  Jules

  Sometime around midnight, when I was sure Mom and Dad were asleep, I led Maisie to the door that opened into the old house. We paused on the threshold and switched on our flashlights. For a moment we stood still and listened.

  The house was dark and silent. Nothing moved. Dim light fell through the windows in the parlor.

  Maisie took my hand, and we stepped into the shadows. In the darkness, the past reclaimed the house. No matter what Mom believed, I knew people had been murdered in these rooms. Blood had stained its floor. Silent screams hung in its air.

  Staying close to Maisie, I forced myself to take one small step and then another. Each step led me farther from the addition and deeper into the old house. No matter how light we were on our feet, the floor creaked under us.

  “Are you scared?” Maisie asked.

  I shook my head. Actually, I wasn’t as scared as I thought I’d be. Maisie made me braver—​she wasn’t afraid, so I wouldn’t be afraid either.

  Maisie swept the darkness with her flashlight. Its beam of light made the shadows jump and move. Drafts of night air crept across the floor and chilled my ankles. A shadowy shape scurried across the floor and disappeared into a hole. A mouse? A rat?

  I shivered and edged closer to Maisie. Upstairs, Lily was waiting. Perhaps she heard us tiptoeing through the house and knew we were coming to rescue her. For good luck, I touched the key in my pocket.

  We climbed the stairs to the second floor, stopping every time a step creaked under our feet. No one heard us, no one called out from the shadows. I tried to breathe slowly and evenly, but I couldn’t control the loud thumping of my heart. I’m not afraid, I told myself. I’m brave like Maisie. Lily is waiting. She needs us.

  At the bottom of the stairs to the third floor, Maisie touched my arm. Her fingers were so cold I jumped.

  “Your hand’s like ice,” I said.

  “It’s freezing in here.” She put her foot on the first step.

  The stairs tilted to one side and the hand railing was loose, so we climbed even more slowly than before. The steps groaned and wobbled, but we kept going.

  At the top, I leaned against a wall to catch my breath. Beside me, Maisie breathed hard. “I don’t like this place,” she whispered.

  “I don’t either.” I looked behind me into the darkness below. Cold sweat ran down my spine. My legs felt so weak I was afraid I’d lose my balance and fall down the stairs.

  Maisie turned as if to go back down. “This was a bad idea.”

  I grabbed her arm to stop her. “We can’t leave now. Lily needs us.”

  Maisie pulled away from me. “You can stay if you like, but I’m getting out of here.”

  I stared at her in disbelief.

  “Come on, Jules, let’s go!”

  “This was your idea, Maisie. You said nothing scared you.”

  “Well, I was wrong.” Maisie looked as if she were about to cry. “I’m sorry, Jules, but I can’t do this.”

  Just as I was about to follow her back to the addition, the sound I’d been dreading stopped me. “It’s the horses,” I whispered. “I hear them. They’re coming.”

  “What should we do?” Maisie grabbed my hand and held it tightly.

  “If we lock ourselves in Lily’s room, the men can’t get us.”

  “Are you sure?”

  “It’s always the same. The men go into the house, they come back out, and then they ride away. If they could get into her room, they’d take Lily and they wouldn’t come back.”

  Somewhere in the night, very close by, a horse whinnied and a man yelled.

  “There’s not much time, Maisie, come on!”

  We ran to the closed door at the end of the hall. My fingers shook so badly, I dropped the key. Maisie picked it up and handed it to me. She aimed the flashlight at the door while I poked the key at the keyhole. No matter which way I turned it, I couldn’t fit it into the lock. My heart banged like a demented thing and my breath came in gulps. It didn’t help that Maisie’s hands shook so hard she couldn’t hold the flashlight steady.

  “Hurry up,” Maisie begged. “They’re coming—​give me the key. Get out of the way, let me try.”

  As Maisie tried to push me aside, the key turned with a loud, grating sound. I grabbed the knob, but my hands were so sweaty and shaky I couldn’t get a good grip on it.

  “Hurry up, open the door!” Maisie cried. “They’re in the yard!”

  “Help me. It’s stuck.”

  Together we pushed against the door. It opened so quickly we tumbled into the room and sprawled on the floor.

  As soon as I’d locked the door behind us, the men came running up the stairs. “Let us in!” they shouted. “We know you’re in there!”

  Shaking with fear, Maisie and I cowered together, our arms around each other. The men had scared me when they were outside and I was safe in my bed, but to be this close to them reduced me to absolute terror. The wood groaned under their blows. The door shook in its frame. They’d break it down at any moment and find us.

  From outside, a woman cried, “Leave the girl be, come away, come away. You’ve got what you came for.”

  The men kicked the door, they cursed and swore, but the woman called again and again.

  “Fool of a woman,” one muttered. “Just wait till I get my hands on her. She’ll shut her mouth or I’ll shut it for her.”

  “We’ll be back,” the other yelled at the door. “You ain’t seen the last of us.”

  With that, they ran downstairs and out the back door. A few moments later they mounted their horses and rode away. Gradually their shouts faded
into the dark, and the night was silent.

  Maisie and I huddled together and gasped for breath. We were both crying.

  Maisie clutched at me with shaking hands. “Are they gone?”

  “Yes.”

  “Are you sure?”

  “I told you, Maisie, they won’t come back until tomorrow night.”

  Maisie wiped her nose with the back of her hand. “I’m scared to stay here. Let’s go back to your room.”

  “We don’t need to be scared now. Nothing’s here but Lily, just Lily.”

  Maisie took several deep breaths and peered into the darkness. The only light came from the moon. The rest of the room was hidden in shadows. She didn’t say anything, but at least she’d stayed with me.

  I groped in the dark and found the flashlight she’d dropped. Its beam lit an easel in the center of the room. Beside the easel was a table covered with art supplies—​a palette encrusted with dried paint, jars of brushes and pencils, bottles of turpentine, varnish, and ink, tubes of oil paint, sticks of charcoal, and stacks of drawing paper.

  If it hadn’t been for the thick gray fur of dust coating everything, I would have expected Mr. Bennett to return at any moment and finish the painting on the easel.

  “Jules!” Maisie gasped and grabbed my arm. “There’s someone over there, looking right at us.”

  I swung the flashlight and saw a man’s face peering at us from the shadows. I staggered back in fright and bumped into something that fell over with a clatter. A lot of other things followed it, hitting the floor like a row of dominoes.

  “It’s a painting,” Maisie cried in relief. “They’re all paintings.”

  Laughing like loud, silly kids, we saw dozens of paintings leaning against the walls. Several more lay on the floor where they’d fallen after I’d knocked over the first one.

  It was like being in an art gallery. Landscapes, animals, portraits. Dad was going to be so excited to know they were here, hidden in this house for over a hundred years, but still as beautiful as the day Henry Bennett painted them.

  “My mother does watercolors of flowers,” Maisie said, “but this is real art.”

  We stopped in front of a large painting of a girl sitting on a tree limb, her bare feet dangling over a stream. The sun backlit her hair and illuminated each strand so it haloed her face. Her father had caught the life in her eyes and dotted her nose with freckles. She was so alive, I almost expected her to speak to us.

  “This must be Lily,” Maisie whispered.

  “Yes,” I said, and I leaned closer. “Lily Bennett is sitting exactly where I’ve sat. Isn’t that amazing?”

  “Look at the doll she’s holding, Jules. It must be the one we found in the midden. I told you it belonged to Lily.”

  “It looked a lot better when it was new,” I said.

  “Are these her parents?” Maisie pointed at the portraits on either side of Lily. On the right was a woman, her face slightly turned toward a window. She wore a long lavender dress, and her dark hair was swept back into a loose twist.

  On the left was a man sitting behind an easel, peering around the back of a canvas, as if he were looking into a mirror and painting his reflection. He held a brush in one hand. His palette lay on the table beside him.

  “It’s Henry and Laura Bennett,” I said. “Without a doubt.”

  Behind us, I heard a faint rustling, as if we’d frightened a mouse. I looked at the wardrobe in the corner. The sound had come from there, I was sure of it.

  I glanced at Maisie to see if she’d heard anything, but she was still looking at the painting of Lily sitting on the tree limb.

  “Oh, Lily,” she whispered, “please don’t hide. Come out and talk to us.”

  20

  Lily

  The men are gone, but Jules and Maisie are in the studio. The girl wanted them to come, and here they are, but she’s afraid to let them see her. Her nightgown is tattered and yellow with age. Her hair is long and tangled. She has no shoes.

  The girl peeks through a crack in the wardrobe’s door. Jules and Maisie have stopped in front of a picture of the yellow-haired girl, the very picture she herself looked at just the other day. If only she knew who that yellow-haired girl is. Her name is on the tip of the girl’s tongue. That’s something people say when they forget things. She remembers an old woman saying, “Oh it’s on the tip of my tongue. Drat. Why am I so forgetful?”

  Who was that old woman?

  The girl returns her attention to the two friends. Maisie says something to Jules in a low voice.

  In a louder voice, Jules says, “Yes.” She leans closer to the painting. “Lily is sitting exactly where I’ve sat. Isn’t that amazing?”

  The girl trembles when she hears Jules say Lily. The name lingers in the air, it echoes in the girl’s head, sparks fly up—​Lily, Lily, Lily. Could it be her name? Could she be Lily?

  “Yes,” she whispers, “yes.” Jules has given her something she lost a long time ago. Her name. Lily.

  She hugs her name close to her heart and says it over and over. She mustn’t forget it again. A dam has broken, and her memories are pouring over it, filling her head with so many forgotten things. She is Lily. She’s six years old. She lives in Oak Hill. The doll in the painting is the one Jules dug up in the midden. The doll was new then, a birthday present from Grandmother Pettifer, the old lady who forgot things.

  How did her favorite doll end up in the midden? Who threw it there? Surely not Lily herself.

  And what happened to the doll to make her so ugly, so dead?

  Lily shivers. There’s something she knows but doesn’t want to know. It hides in the shadows with her, dark and dangerous. She keeps her back to it. She will not face it. But it reaches for her, it whispers. She plugs her ears with her fingers and keeps her mind focused on the girls. She will not listen to the story the darkness whispers.

  Jules tells her friend that the man and woman in the other paintings are Lily’s parents, Laura and Henry Bennett.

  More memories flood back. Mama’s and Papa’s faces float before her in the darkness, and Papa looks out from the portrait he painted of himself.

  At the sight of them, Lily feels a fierce stab of pain. She retreats to the back of the wardrobe and burrows into the rags of her mother’s dresses. She’s a mouse, tiny and helpless and all alone. She’s been abandoned. Left behind. Unloved. Forgotten.

  Why is she not with Mama and Papa?

  The voice in the dark speaks into her ear. She cannot block it out. She presses her fist to her mouth and sobs quietly. It’s not just sorrow she feels, it’s also rage. They locked her in this room and never came back. Her own mama and papa. She loves them so much, it hurts to remember them.

  Jules’s and Maisie’s voices interrupt her thoughts. They’ve found the drawings on the wall.

  “They tell a story,” Jules says.

  Yes, they tell a story. Oh, yes, they do. Like everything else Lily’s forgotten, the story comes back to her.

  21

  Lily

  The story those pictures tell begins on a sunny morning with the promise of a picnic. Usually Aunt Nellie prepares the food, but when Lily comes downstairs, Aunt Nellie isn’t in the kitchen. She hasn’t set the table for breakfast. Lily doesn’t smell bacon or freshly baked bread or coffee.

  “Where is Aunt Nellie?” she asks Mama. “Why isn’t breakfast ready?”

  Papa is standing at the window, his back to her. Mama is beside him. Lily’s question startles them. They turn and look at her, as if they’re surprised to see her.

  “It’s Nellie’s day off,” Papa says quickly.

  “But today is Saturday,” Lily says. “Aunt Nellie’s day off is Sunday.”

  “Aunt Nellie had something important to do,” Papa says. “So she asked to have today and tomorrow off.”

  Mama frowns at Papa, as if she wants to say something, but she reaches for Lily’s hand instead. Lily senses something between her parents—​a worry they aren’t sha
ring.

  “What did Aunt Nellie need to do?” Lily doesn’t like not knowing things. Surely if she asks enough questions, Papa will tell her where Aunt Nellie is. He must know. The cook is almost part of the family, not really an aunt, but like an aunt. Papa’s secretive air is worrisome.

  His face reddens. “For heaven’s sake, stop asking so many questions. I don’t know why she wanted two days off or what she planned to do. And stop calling her your aunt. She’s no relation to you.”

  Lily draws back, shocked at his tone of voice. Papa is never cross with her. Why must she stop calling Aunt Nellie her aunt? She should be quiet, but she hasn’t asked the most important question.

  She turns to Mama this time. “How will we have a picnic if Aunt Nellie isn’t here to fix the food?”

  Mama straightens the ribbon in Lily’s long hair. “Don’t worry. We don’t need Nellie. You and I will roll up our sleeves and put on aprons and do the cooking ourselves. Won’t that be fun?”

  Lily is puzzled. “Cooking is Aunt Nellie’s job. I’ve never seen you cook anything.”

  Out of the corner of her eye she sees Papa frown, probably because she forgot and said “Aunt Nellie.” Mama touches his sleeve, as if to say Be quiet, let her call the woman aunt if she wants to.

  Papa shrugs, but he doesn’t smile. He turns to look out the window, as if he expects to see someone approaching the house.

  Mama ties a huge apron around Lily’s waist. Aunt Nellie is a big woman, both taller and heftier than Papa. The apron Mama chooses for herself is also too big.

  While she and Mama begin to assemble ingredients, Papa fetches his drawing pad and sketches them at work. Neither Mama nor Lily has had much experience in the kitchen. They spill flour and sugar. A pot of melted chocolate tips over on the table, and Lily scoops it up with a spoon, which she licks clean. Mama drops three eggs. The yolks break and run into the whites.

  One of the eggs has blood in it, and Lily turns away. The blood means that the beginning of a baby chick was in that egg.