Gretchen Birch Boxed Set (Books 1-4)

by Deb Baker

  The biggest doll show of the year, and Gretchen had to handle it alone. But that’s life. Like finding yourself in front of a sold-out audience without a script, and just as the curtain rises you realize that you’re standing up there stark naked, and there isn’t a thing you can do about it.

  “You can do it,” Aunt Nina said, perching like a colorful songbird on a stool next to Gretchen. “You know your mother would be here if she could. It’s not her fault.” Nina wore an array of bows in her hair that matched her outfit right down to the stones in her rings.

  Gretchen glanced at a bin of dolls and miscellaneous doll parts in her mother’s workshop and felt a surge of nervous energy. After weeks of preparation, the countdown was underway. It would be her first doll show, and she hadn’t anticipated losing her mother’s help at the last minute.

  “She could have rescheduled her California book tour,” Gretchen complained, feeling unreasonable and not caring. “It certainly is her fault. I’ve never even done a little show before. How will I get through one this size all by myself?”

  “Caroline put a lot of work into her doll book, and she deserves the time off to promote it,” Nina scolded her. “Besides, it could be worse. She could have left without arranging for any assistance. Instead, she asked me to help you, so don’t worry.”

  Knowing Nina as well as she did, helpless would be more accurate. Since her mother’s younger sister knew nothing about dolls or doll shows, Gretchen didn’t see how helpful she would be. An excellent reason to worry myself sick.

  Gretchen had that naked-onstage feeling again.

  The final week leading up to the show had been a whirlwind of activity - selecting dolls for the show from her mother’s large inventory and repairing damaged dolls they hoped to sell, along with helping the Phoenix Dollers Club coordinate last-minute details.

  The workshop where Gretchen and Nina sat talking was cluttered with bits and pieces: fabric, clothes, tools, and dolls.

  “Here’s the list I was supposed to take to the auction,” Gretchen said, pulling it from the clutter on the table and surveying the items. “Two Shirley Temples, a Tammy, two or three Ginnys...” Gretchen groaned. “I bought twelve Ginny dolls and none of the others she wanted.”

  “How could you know Howie would offer them all together?”

  “I was a complete failure. I didn’t bid on anything else on the list, I paid too much, and, worse, I lost the entire investment and the doll show profit.”

  “You’re being too hard on yourself. The dolls will show up. And you have a perfectly good excuse. What with the accident and all.”

  Brett’s death the day before still occupied most of Gretchen thoughts. That, and the show she didn’t feel prepared for.

  She dabbed a doll repair hook with nail polish labeled Poodle Skirt Pink.

  “I love the color,” her aunt said, observing the splash of pink on the repair hook. “But when I bought the polish for you, I thought you’d wear it on your nails, not waste it on your tools.”

  “I’m trying to organize my new tool box.” Gretchen picked up a clamp and steadied her polishing hand. “I’ll be restringing dolls tomorrow, and I need everything organized.”

  “That doesn’t explain the polish.”

  “I’m personalizing my tools so they don’t disappear. With all the traffic through the exhibit hall, I have to be careful.”

  “Well, at least color-coordinate your ensemble by painting your toes the same color. And since when are you worried about order?” Nina looked at the surrounding disorder.

  “Self-improvement. I’m determined to put some organization into my life. I’m tired of spending so much time looking for things. My mind is scattered, but I’m going to change.”

  Nina looked skeptical.

  Nimrod, Gretchen’s black teacup poodle, looked on from his bed in the corner. Wobbles, the three-legged cat Gretchen had rescued a year earlier in Boston after a hit-and-run, cleaned himself in the doorway, running a moistened paw over his face, one watchful eye on the activity in the doll workshop.

  “I’ve inherited a menagerie,” Gretchen said, holding the hook in the air to dry.

  “You love every minute of it.” Nina swirled around in a full circle. “The animals are good for you. Admit it.”

  Gretchen blew on the wet polish to hasten its drying and considered Nina’s observation. Did she enjoy Wobbles and Nimrod? Absolutely. Would she admit it? Never. Her aunt claimed psychic abilities. Let her figure it out on her own.

  Nimrod yawned leisurely from his bed, and Gretchen gave him a tender look in spite of her frayed nerves. Thanks to Nina’s experienced guidance, the puppy had quickly adapted to his traveling purse and accompanied Gretchen most of the time.

  Nina was a purse dog trainer, teaching miniature puppies to ride in their owners’ shoulder bags. Leave it to her aunt to come up with a one-of-a-kind occupation that included unlimited freedom of movement, a unique expertise, and a great deal of patience. Purse dogs were now all the fashion among the local doll collectors.

  Nina leaned closer to study Gretchen’s polishing technique. “Maybe you should go back to graphic design work. Look how good you are.”

  “Very funny.”

  “Do you miss it?”

  “Not at all. I’ll never go back to the corporate world. This…” Gretchen looked around the workshop, “…is where I belong.”

  It took all her willpower to keep her hand steady, her heart rate even, and her words light. As if the pressure of her first show and the abrupt demise of the auctioneer’s assistant weren’t enough. She had another problem.

  “You just missed that clamp and globbed polish on your fingers.”

  Gretchen jammed the cover on the polish and dropped her chin into her hands. “He’s here, you know.”

  “Who? Who?” Nina said with wide, rounded eyes. She dipped a tissue in polish remover and swiped at Gretchen’s fingers.

  “Steve Kuchen,” Gretchen whispered. She tensed at the thought of coming face-to-face with her former boyfriend. Steve, who had cheated on her. With a summer intern, no less. What a cliché. A very young summer intern, at that.

  “It’s about time he showed up. For a while I thought he didn’t care. How long has it been?”

  “Two months.” Could it really have been that long since she had packed up and fled from Boston and from him?

  “How can you walk away from a seven-year relationship without at least talking it over?” Nina asked. “Even if he did deserve it.” She caught the look in Gretchen’s eyes and made a hasty revision. “Which he did. No doubt about it. The cheating pond scum.”

  Gretchen stared at the nail polish.

  “Not,” Nina added, quickly, “that I don’t support you in your decision. I love having you here.”

  “My life certainly has changed since I left Boston.”

  “That’s true. You turned thirty…”

  “Don’t remind me.”

  “…and you have a new home and a new job.”

  Gretchen didn’t want to point out that she was, at thirty, living with her mother, or that her mother had offered her a partnership in the doll repair business out of pure pity. Well, that wasn’t exactly true. Her mother’s business had taken off with the publication of her first doll collecting book, and she’d actually needed Gretchen’s help.

  The fact remained though: Gretchen was living in her mother’s cabana. How pathetic is that?

  “Now that he knows you’re serious, he won’t give up,” Nina said. “I bet he thought if he waited long enough, you’d come crawling back on your knees. How did he manage to pry himself away from his law firm? No one getting a divorce this week?”

  “I don’t know, and I don’t care.” But she did. Very much. She had moved past the angry stage, past the first jolts of anguish. The man she had once loved was long gone, replaced by an ambitious, singularly focused attorney with a roving eye and snappy excuses. “I won’t see him.”

  Nina chuckled. “I b
et he’s here for the doll show, pretending he likes dolls. You should have taken his phone calls. Now you have to deal with him in person.”

  “Maybe you can run interference,” Gretchen said and instantly regretted the comment. Nina had a tendency to run amok, and planting her in the middle of this dispute wasn’t a smart move. In fact, it was a recipe for disaster.

  “This isn’t a football game.” Nina tapped a jeweled hand on Gretchen’s knee. “Where’s he staying?”

  “The Phoenician.” No turning back now. Nina was involved.

  Her aunt raised a penciled eyebrow. “That’s where our other visitors from Massachusetts are staying. Those Boston bluebloods have upscale taste. I hear the Phoenician has grass tennis courts. How they maintain grass in the desert is beyond me. Not to mention using precious water for such extravagance.”

  “If it wasn’t for the doll show, I’d take an unplanned vacation and stay away until Steve left,” Gretchen said.

  Before she could slip into self-pity mode, she was distracted by Tutu, Nina’s schnoodle - half schnauzer, half poodle - who chose that moment to prance toward the doorway, stopping abruptly when she discovered Wobbles blocking the way. The cat’s ears slicked back against his head, and his tail swished warningly.

  “Those two are never going to get along,” Gretchen said, rising to referee the combatants and hopefully save Tutu from another clawed nose.

  Wobbles’s eyes narrowed to slits, and he hissed. Tutu boldly shot past him and ran down the hall, Wobbles in hot pursuit. Nimrod gleefully joined the race, taking up the rear. His black puppy paws slid on the Mexican tile as he rounded the corner.

  Gretchen heard Tutu yelp, then a loud bang, and the sound of something breaking.

  “Uh-oh,” Nina said, hurrying after them.

  Gretchen followed slowly, hoping Nina would handle whatever mess the troublemakers had made. Wobbles, the most sensible of the three, had disappeared from sight. Tutu looked sufficiently contrite, tail between her legs, head hanging. Nimrod thought it was playtime, rollicking in circles around Tutu.

  Nina stood over a broken doll lying on the tile floor where it had fallen from the bookcase. Gretchen scowled at her forgetfulness. She had taken this one out of the box to study it and left it on the bookcase. Foolish of her.

  She bent and picked up the pieces, doll body in one hand, head in the other.

  One of Duanne Wilson’s Kewpie dolls, a Blunderboo, had broken in two.

  FIVE

  The Kewpie’s grinning baby face seemed to be showing appreciation for Gretchen’s efforts to repair it. She had to look carefully to detect the thin, glued line reconnecting the doll’s head with its body. An expert fix, she thought with satisfaction. Her mother couldn’t have done much better.

  But her fingers could feel the telltale ridge. Her repair wouldn’t fool a professional, but she’d done the best she could.

  Blunderboo was her favorite of all the Rosie O’Neill designs. He was the clumsy Kewpie, always falling, tumbling, or rolling.

  Gretchen turned the three-inch doll upside down and examined the fake O’Neill mark on its feet, then studied the red heart label painted on its bare, chubby body.

  Why had Chiggy attempted to make her own Kewpies? Based on the woman’s vast collection of dolls at the auction, her tastes ran more toward reproductions of rare antique dolls than the fairylike Kewpies.

  “I feel bad about the doll,” Gretchen told Nina with genuine regret. “Especially since it isn’t mine. I hope the elusive Mr. Wilson isn’t an expert. Unless he picks it up and runs his fingers along the neck, he won’t know that it’s been repaired.”

  “If he had expertise in the field, he wouldn’t have purchased the dolls in the first place,” Nina said, peering into the box Gretchen had placed on her mother’s worktable. “It’s a motley lot anyway. Every one of them seems to be broken.”

  “Or repaired,” Gretchen agreed. “Why did Chiggy keep such a box of junk? It looks like a practice batch that should have been thrown out.”

  “From what you said about her reproductions, the whole auction was filled with garbage.”

  “Not the box of Ginnys. Those were exquisite. I have to get them back.”

  Gretchen gently scraped a tiny dot of glue from the doll’s neck with her X-Acto knife. “The first doll I ever owned was a Kewpie. I called her Lucy. Dad gave her to me.”

  Gretchen felt an acute sense of loss. Her father’s death had left an immense hole in her life. “I miss him every day.”

  “The car accident was a horrible shock,” Nina agreed. “It’s been two years, but it takes a long time to get over something like that. At least you survived.”

  Gretchen laid the X-Acto knife on the table. “Yesterday when Brett stepped out in front of the SUV, it brought back memories of the accident.”

  Squealing tires, screams, breaking glass, metal collapsing, moans.

  It had all come rushing back—the fear, the horror of crawling unharmed out of the rolled car and finding her father lifeless behind the wheel. The screams she’d heard had been her own.

  “I wish you hadn’t been at the auction when it happened,” Nina said.

  “I wish the same thing.” Gretchen rose and cleaned off the table, returning the glue to its assigned spot.

  “Well, we’re off for our hair appointment,” Nina said, clipping a pink leash to Tutu’s collar. “I’ll pick you up for lunch in a few hours.”

  “Is Tutu getting a new hairdo, too?”

  “Of course,” Nina said, breezing out, leaving a vacuum of silence behind her.

  In spite of the heat, it was good to be in Phoenix, away from the complications associated with Boston. Gretchen liked her renewed relationship with her mother and the comfortable presence of the workshop.

  Gretchen glanced around her. Dolls had played an integral part in her life. They were the glue that bonded her to her roots and especially to her mother.

  Feeling a need to connect, Gretchen picked up the phone. Her mother answered, her voice light and happy.

  “A book tour,” Caroline said, “is exactly what I needed. I’m meeting new readers, seeing the coast, renewing acquaintances with doll collectors. It’s marvelous.”

  Now was not the time to start whining and complaining. “That’s great,” Gretchen said, forcing the same easy tone. “I just wanted to hear your voice. Everything is fine on my end.”

  Fine? Brett was dead, Steve had turned up in Phoenix, she’d lost three hundred dollars and the Ginny dolls, and she wasn’t sure she could handle the doll show by herself.

  “Everything’s fine,” she repeated.

  “Okay, what’s wrong?”

  “Nothing. What makes you think something’s wrong?”

  “You’re part of me. I can tell.”

  Gretchen sighed. “I’m worried about the show,” she said, picking the least complicated of her concerns to share with her mother.

  “I have absolute confidence in your ability to handle the doll show,” Caroline said. “It’s Brett’s death that has you upset.”

  “How did you know about that?”

  “I’m not entirely out of touch. California isn’t on Mars.”

  “Nina told you.”

  “Nina called to ask if I’d received her telepathic signals and if I had been able to decipher them.”

  “And?”

  “Of course I didn’t get Nina’s unique but faulty wireless message. I told her I’d felt something special that I couldn’t identify just to keep her happy. She suggested that I try harder next time.”

  Gretchen laughed, feeling her gloomy thoughts dissipating.

  She and Caroline chatted a little longer, and after hanging up, Gretchen turned her attention to creating a sign to display at the doll show announcing her restoration service. Making room on the table for a yellow piece of poster board, she went to work with colored Magic Markers.

  As she finished the sign, she heard someone clearing his throat behind her.

&
nbsp; Startled, she turned quickly.

  Steve Kuchen stood a few feet inside the workshop door. He wore an expensive pair of khakis and an air of confidence that only the really rich carried off well. He’d probably leased a Beemer at the airport.

  “How did you get in?” she said.

  “The door was unlocked.”

  Thanks, Nina.

  She felt her face flush. How long had he been watching her?

  “Do you know what day it is?” Steve asked, softly, a hesitant smile on his face, a few blond locks falling loosely across his forehead. He was as handsome as ever.

  “It’s October first.” Gretchen laid the marker on the table. “Friday.”

  “That was a rhetorical question, Gretchen. Today is day number sixty-two since you left Boston. You refused every one of my calls. You can’t hide forever.”

  Why not? Gretchen was a master at dodgeball. Confrontations weren’t her specialty. She considered herself more the ostrich head-in-the-sand type.

  “You should have knocked at the front door,” she said to fill the uneasy void.

  “Would you have answered?”

  “Another rhetorical question?” Gretchen felt angry, and her anger energized her. She had nothing to explain. She was the injured party, and he wouldn’t force her into a conciliatory role, as he’d done so many times in the past.

  “There’s someone else, isn’t there?” he said.

  Predictable.

  Steve of the inflated ego could never imagine that the end of their relationship might be his fault.

  He has the nerve to ask me if there’s someone else? “I believe you stole my line.” Gretchen saw him blanch, and she felt smug satisfaction. He’d been the one who cheated, not her. And he couldn’t claim it was a random moment. It was an affair with someone at his office.

  “Nina says you’re dating a police officer.”

  Gretchen wanted to correct him but didn’t. Matt Albright was a detective with the Phoenix Police Department. They’d met right after she had moved to Phoenix. His mother presided over the Phoenix Dollers Club.

  Not that they were “dating” as Steve believed, thanks to her Chatty Cathy aunt. It had been only two months since her breakup with Steve. She wasn’t ready. Still…