by Karen White
The words dried in my throat as I smelled singed tar and ashes, the edges of the tarp seeming to melt into rubbery, reaching fingers. I watched the men lower the pallet to the ground, then slowly remove the tarp. Don’t! someone shouted, but the voice came from inside my head and nobody else heard. I opened my mouth to make the men stop, but it was too late. The turret of the dollhouse had already been revealed, the tarp slowly being pulled away inch by inch, like some bizarre burlesque show.
“It’s exquisite,” Sophie whispered beside me, but I hardly heard her. I was too busy trying not to choke on the stench of burning tar.
“The house looks so familiar,” she continued. “I wonder whether it was built as a replica of a real house.”
Amelia shook her head. “I have no idea. It’s had a lot of owners, so chances are it might not even be originally from Charleston. I’m sure we can find out. Jack’s pretty good at that.”
Everyone who’d gathered around the dollhouse to admire it now stepped back as Jack approached with Nola. I could tell that she was trying very hard to pretend that she didn’t particularly care that at the advanced age of thirteen she’d been given the first dollhouse she’d ever owned, or that it was probably one of the few gifts she’d ever received. Because I could see her eyes, and they were the eyes of a girl who never expected anything good to happen to her and had just realized that it could.
I felt my mother watching me and I turned my head. Her eyes were narrowed in concentration, and I knew she could smell the acrid scent heavy in the early-summer night. She stepped forward, and before I could stop her she reached out her hand to touch the curling eave of the old dollhouse, and the air screamed.
CHAPTER 5
I stood in the doorway to Nola’s room and watched as she carefully unwrapped each doll figure from old newspaper, standing them on the wraparound porch of the dollhouse one by one. There was a father, a mother, an older brother, and a younger sister. They were all blond and blue eyed, except for the daughter, whose chestnut hair hung down her back, and wire-framed glasses hid dark brown eyes. There was even a dog, a shaggy-looking mix between a golden retriever and a sheepdog. Each human figure was carved from wood and dressed in Victorian clothing, their stares vacant. I only hoped that the voices I’d begun to hear right after my mother fainted were a temporary thing.
“Are you sure you want the dollhouse in your bedroom?” I asked, remembering the acrid scent of smoke and my mother’s reaction to it when she touched it. She’d actually fainted, right there in my garden, and I had to tell everybody that she had low blood sugar. My father had taken her home immediately, but before she’d left she’d told me that she’d seen only a bright flash of white light.
Nola looked at me long enough for me to see her roll her eyes. “I don’t want to hurt Amelia’s feelings. She’s pretty nice, even if she is old.” She carefully moved the dog to be beside the boy, and I had the oddest sensation that that was where it belonged. “I mean, how clueless do you have to be to give a teenager a dollhouse?”
I noticed how she called everybody by their first name, as if she were afraid to acknowledge any familial relationships such as “father” or “grandmother.”
I pressed on, not completely sure that the dollhouse should be in her bedroom, especially at night while Nola slept. “But if you wanted it in the living room, I wouldn’t have a problem with it, and I’m sure your grandmother wouldn’t mind. Might even give you more room up here. I was thinking about maybe putting in a little music corner here, with a great chair for guitar playing, and a place for your music and your mother’s guitar. . . .”
The look she gave me wasn’t as hostile as I’d been expecting. It was more bleak, as if she’d rehearsed this conversation to keep the emotion out of it. “I don’t like to play the guitar. I just keep all that crap because it was hers.”
A cold breeze rippled a pile of sheet music Nola had stacked next to her bed. “Air-conditioning,” I said quickly in response to her questioning look. The vent was directly over my head and wasn’t currently blowing anything. I hoped Nola wouldn’t notice.
I thought I saw something move on the dollhouse, but when I turned to look I was met with five blank, staring gazes. I rubbed my hands over my arms, feeling chilled. “Well, let me know if you change your mind.”
“Whatever,” she said as she moved to the open back of the house and began arranging the miniature furniture.
“Don’t stay up too late.” Without waiting for an answer, I backed out of the room, not sure whom or what I didn’t want to turn my back on, then headed down the stairs. Jack sat on a Chinese Chippendale chair in the foyer, but when I opened my mouth to greet him, he put a finger to his lips and motioned for me to follow him onto the front piazza. Curious, I followed, flipping on the outside lights against the gathering gloom, then took a seat in one of the wicker rocking chairs. He leaned against the porch railing and casually crossed his ankles, but his tense jaw and shoulders belied his relaxed pose.
“Where’s Rebecca?”
“I needed to speak with you, but Rebecca needed to get home, so Marc drove her.”
I studied him in the dim light, wondering whether anything he’d just said hit him as awkwardly as it had me. But from the engrossed look on his face, it looked like his thoughts were elsewhere.
Clearing his throat, he said, “I wanted to talk to you about Nola, but didn’t want her to overhear.”
“Good move,” I said. “Although she seems pretty preoccupied with her new toy.”
“Yeah.” He shook his head. “What was my mother thinking? I don’t know about you, but I think that dollhouse is pretty creepy.”
I raised my eyebrows but didn’t say anything, wondering whether the signals the dollhouse was sending out were so strong that somebody with a thick skull like Jack could pick up on it.
He placed both palms on the railing and leaned toward me. “Is there something I should know about that dollhouse?”
I shrugged, not sure how to answer. “I don’t know. Yet. I’m not crazy about it being in Nola’s room, but she was really insistent. I’ll keep an eye on things, though.” I paused for a moment. “Could you tell me what Bonnie looked like?”
He tilted his head. “She was tall and slender—like Nola. But her hair was long, and she always wore it straight. She liked to wear loose-fitting clothes, like Sophie, but with a little more style.” He smiled softly. “Why?”
“I told you that I thought Nola hadn’t come alone—and your description of Bonnie matches that of a woman I’ve seen a few times. Since Bonnie’s guitar keeps finding its way into Nola’s bed or other strange places, I just wanted to make sure it was her doing it.” I shrugged. “Maybe the dollhouse spirits can keep Bonnie company.”
Jack narrowed his eyes at me. “Do ghosts really do that? Make friends, I mean?”
“I have no idea. I try not to hang around them too much. Most of the ghosts I’ve known are sort of the loner types.”
His gaze was focused on the black and white tiles of the piazza floor. “Has Bonnie . . . said anything to you?”
I shook my head. “Not yet. She seems kind of shy. But as I said, she keeps moving her guitar—which makes Nola mad at me, since she thinks I’m doing it—and just now she rustled some sheet music. Maybe she simply wants Nola to take guitar lessons.”
I studied Jack for a long moment, smelling the fragrant oleander from the garden, which would always make me think of him, probably because like the beautiful and sweet-smelling flower, Jack was an irritant and quite possibly fatal to my well-being. His hair was still dark, his shoulders broad, his waist trim. He was devastating at thirty-five. I couldn’t help but wonder what he’d looked like as a college football quarterback. “You need to tell me more about Bonnie so that I can try to reach her. Did she have any success as a songwriter? Did she ever marry? That kind of thing.”
He looked stricken, as if I’d just told him that the tooth fairy wasn’t real. “I have no idea. I can’t believe
that I don’t know anything about her life after we broke up. Or that I had a daughter. Somehow I think I should have known.”
I clasped my hands to keep them from reaching out to him. This was dangerous territory, and I wasn’t completely sure that I would survive the journey unscathed. Besides, comforting him was Rebecca’s job now. “Don’t beat yourself up, Jack. Bonnie didn’t want you to know. That’s why she lied to Nola about you. She was hell-bent on cutting ties with her past, and she was very successful at it.”
He rubbed his hands over his face. “Has Nola opened up to you at all? Anything about her mother? About her growing up?”
I shook my head. “Not a thing. I’ve tried to start conversations to get her talking about it, but let’s just say that teenagers aren’t the best conversationalists. Especially those who feel like they’ve been exiled into hostile territory.” I considered him for a moment. “As crazy as this sounds, I think your mother did the right thing giving Nola that dollhouse. Seeing her with it was the first time I ever saw her face go soft. Like a kid’s should be. It’s strange seeing such a grown-up face on a thirteen-year-old. Maybe this is the beginning.”
He was regarding me closely with what I secretly called his “Jack look,” and I shifted uncomfortably. Usually when Jack Trenholm wanted something, it was only a matter of time before he found even unwilling subjects bending backward to do what he wanted.
“What?” I asked, running my tongue over my teeth to make sure I didn’t have food stuck between them.
“Does Nola have a diary?”
Warily, I said, “I have no idea. Why?”
“I’m just thinking that if she won’t open up to us, maybe we should try to find her diary to see in her own words what’s going on in her head. There might even be stuff in there about Bonnie.”
I started shaking my head before he’d even finished speaking. “No way. Uh-uh. Even if she does have a diary, it’s off-limits to you, or to me, or anybody but Nola.” I thought of my own teenage diary and how humiliated I would have been for anybody to have read it, but not for the reasons one might imagine. My diary during those awkward teenage years (and even beyond, if I wanted to be honest) consisted solely of lists of what I’d worn each day, to make sure I wouldn’t repeat an outfit in a certain period of time. I was so hopeless and pathetic there wasn’t even one remark about a crush on a particular boy or hating my parents.
He at least had the decency to look abashed. “Yeah, you’re right. I’m a guy, you know? I don’t always consider all angles before I speak.”
I cleared my throat. “You know, Jack, for someone with such a long track record with women as you claim to have, you’re a little clueless about the younger versions.”
A wicked grin spread across his face. “Tell that to Mary Beth May-bank, who sat in front of me in math class in seventh grade.”
I raised an eyebrow and Jack shrugged. “She was an early developer. I could unhook her bra through her sweater in five seconds flat. Made me a hero with the other guys when she had to get up to go to the girls’ room to fix it.”
“That’s different. This is your daughter. Imagine some teenage boy doing that to Nola.”
His face changed immediately and I have to admit to being a little scared. “I’d kill him.”
“Exactly. This is uncharted territory for you, Jack. For both of us, really. But at least I have faint memories of actually being a teenage girl once upon a time so that maybe I can relate a little. From what I remember about my own thought processes back then, I think the only choice you have is to be patient and to keep trying to get through to her. And not be too upset at the repeated rejections. She’ll come around as soon as she realizes that she’s safe here and that she’s got a family who loves her, bad fashion sense and all.” I kept to myself how Jack’s concern for his daughter was a completely unexpected—and totally appealing—quality. Maybe a little too appealing.
“Still,” he said, straightening, “I’m going to try to find out as much about Bonnie as possible. Maybe there’s something that can help me bond with Nola. I’ve got nothing else, so I might as well start there.”
I was about to tell him that being a concerned and present father was the best place to start—something I did happen to know about—and that he’d already covered that, but my phone rang. I slid it out of my pocket and looked at the number.
“It’s my mother,” I said to Jack, then held the phone to my ear. “Hello?”
“Your father’s sleeping, so I thought now would be a good time to speak to you about that dollhouse.”
My father, a lifelong disbeliever in all things that went bump in the night, had recently seen his first ghost, the long-dead Hessian soldier who’d resided in my mother’s ancestral home for a couple of centuries. Although he still denied their existence, explaining what he’d seen as a trick of the light or my own projected imagination, his resistance wasn’t nearly as adamant as it had once been.
“What about it? You said all you could see was a bright white light.”
She was silent for a moment. “At first, yes. But . . .”
“But what?” I prodded.
“There was something behind the light. Something . . . bad. But somebody, something, was preventing me from seeing it. To protect me or them, I don’t know. Whatever you do, don’t put it in Nola’s room until we can find out for sure what it’s all about.”
I frowned into the phone. “It’s a little late for that.” I glanced at Jack and he was frowning, too.
I listened to my mother breathe into the phone. “Then be very, very careful. Keep an eye on Nola and her behavior. Let me know if you see her acting strangely, or becoming overly negative.”
“Really, Mother? Like how could I tell the difference?”
“Never mind. You’ll be moving here within the week, so I’ll be able to keep an eye on her, too. Maybe even suggest she keep the thing downstairs.”
“Good luck with that. She’s very pigheaded about what she wants. She gets it from her father.” I glanced at Jack to see him scowling at me.
“Be that as it may, keep a close eye on her, and let me know when I can expect you.”
“It might be another week. Amelia and I are still trying to coordinate where all the big pieces of furniture are going. I don’t suppose I need to be here for that. And I—”
My words were cut off by a muffled scream from inside the house. Before I could tell my mother I’d call her back, Jack was already inside and sprinting up the stairs. I reached Nola’s room right behind him and had to stop for a moment to register what I was seeing.
General Lee, a dog more closely resembling a teddy bear than a wolf, had his teeth bared and he was snarling in the direction of the dollhouse, where Nola stood glowering at him. I was sure that if she could curl her lips above her teeth, she’d be snarling, too.
“What happened?” Jack demanded, his voice a lot calmer than how I knew we both felt.
Nola’s hair was soaking wet and dripping on the rug and wood floors, but I didn’t think it was a good time to point it out. “I went to take a shower and when I got back the dog must have been messing with my dollhouse, because all the people are moved. And look—the head’s broken.” She held out a shaking hand where the figure of the boy, its head at an awkward angle, lay.
General Lee whimpered, so I bent down to scoop him up. But when I took a step toward the dollhouse, he wiggled out of my arms and ran as fast as he could out of the room. My eyes met Jack’s for a moment before we both turned to get a closer look at the dollhouse.
The entire dollhouse family, except for the boy and dog, was crowded in the high turret window as if trying to see something outside. I swallowed thickly. “Where’s the dog?” I asked.
“Right here.” She tapped a spot on the floor in front of the dollhouse with a black-painted toenail.
The head of the dog figure was cracked in half, the body almost hidden under the bed, as if it had been thrown with a good deal of force.
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br /> “And where was the boy?”
“Same place.” Nola’s face reddened. “I want you to keep that damned dog out of my room, okay? He’s just going to wreck everything.”
I was sure that General Lee would ignore any kind of restraining order, just as I was sure that he’d had nothing to do with rearranging the dollhouse figures—and not just because he didn’t possess the opposable thumbs required to do that kind of manipulation. Luckily, Nola was either unaware of dog anatomy or was too upset about the broken figures to really care.
“Look,” I said, trying to force a calm reason I wasn’t feeling, “I’ve got some superglue downstairs. I’m sure I won’t have any problem making this look brand-new again, okay?” I held out my hand to Nola.
With a sniff, she dumped the boy into my hand. “Fine. But I’m keeping my door closed. I know this is your house and all, but I really don’t like you and your dog messing with my stuff.”
I glanced at the bed, noticing for the first time that Bonnie’s guitar was propped up on the pillows. “I’ll remember that,” I said as I began backing out of the room.
“Are you going to be okay in here?” Jack asked. “You can always come back with me, you know.”
Nola’s voice dripped with an equal measure of angst and sarcasm. “Right. That would solve everything.”
“Just checking. You have my number if you need me. Anytime.”
I waited in the hallway for Jack to close Nola’s door.
“What was that all about?” he asked quietly as we headed for the stairs.
“I’m not sure—and neither is my mother. And it might not even be about the house at all. All my life I’ve done a lot of reading on the subject of spirits and the like—just so that I’d know that I wasn’t crazy and that other people had the same kind of experiences that I always have. Anyway, Nola’s at that emotional, hormonal age where they sort of attract energies wherever they are.” We reached the foyer and I stopped to face him. “But there’s one more thing you can research while you’re looking into Bonnie’s past.”