The May Special Guest Story is by
Joe McKinney
Please feel free to visit Joe HERE
A LITTLE CRIMSON STAIN
by Joe McKinney
Donnie Ross knew the little girl was dead the instant he saw her picture in the attic of the Wilmington town home.
He gasped and stopped short. His gaze flicked to Cowen and Curtis, but neither man had noticed his reaction. Both were too busy fussing over a dusty porcelain tea set. Slowly, like two heavy wheels reluctant to turn, Donnie’s eyes moved back toward the dead girl’s picture. With her eyes closed, one hand nested in her lap, she might have been sleeping. But Donnie knew better. In her black, papery dress, her features as wooden and as doll-like with rigor mortis as the doll she was holding, she was most certainly dead. He swallowed hard. The picture disturbed him, even horrified him. And yet he was completely fascinated.
Postmortem photography such as this was common between 1845 and 1925, though this example was almost certainly from around 1905. It was very Edwardian. Her clothes helped to date her, but so too did some basic history. Until 1900, most middle class families dressed and prepared their loved ones for burial at home, an operation customarily performed in the front parlor. But as professional funeral homes opened up, this tradition became a mark of the provincial and the poor. So much so that in 1910 the Ladies’ Home Journal issued a decree that the front parlor should be forevermore referred to as the living room. Funeral establishments were then free to adopt the more familiar, and less threatening, attribution of funeral parlors.
Donnie, who made his living as an antiques acquisition agent for the auction house of Harris-Sadler, Inc., had once delivered much the same lesson on an episode of Antiques Roadshow, and the show’s producers loved it. So much so that they’d asked him back four times. But the dead girl’s picture meant that he was probably wasting his time here in this dusty attic. Photography used to be expensive, and death was one of the only occasions important enough to justify the expense. That meant pictures like this were a middle class commodity. And that, in turn, meant that everything in this attic was likely to be middle class too. Donnie sighed. Another road trip wasted.
He scanned the rest of the attic, his practiced eye hoping to catch sight of something unusual as he stifled the need to cough. Intense morning sunlight poured in through the large, open window opposite him. White silky curtains billowed on the breeze. The dust clothes covering the furniture fluttered gently. Opening the window was a wasted effort, he thought. Airing the place out had done nothing for the dust. He was going to be miserable with sneezing and sniffling all the way back to Greensboro. He could already feel it coming on.
And then he saw the doll.
Donnie blinked in surprise. It was a “bebe” bisque doll, he could see that through the layers of dust covering it, but it wasn’t done in the usual French or German style. The clothes were simpler, more American. French and German dolls had round, cherub-like faces, with enormously round blue eyes that always reminded Donnie of the anime cartoons of Japan. From its clothes to its facial features to the eggshell fragility of its cream-colored cheeks, this doll, perhaps 24 inches high, was something else entirely, something uniquely American.
Dolls weren’t Donnie’s forte. His specialty was furniture. But he knew the basics, just like he knew the basics of sports memorabilia and landscape paintings and model trains and a hundred other species of attic treasures. Donnie knelt down next to the little figure and examined its fingers and the joints where the arm pieces met. These dolls usually showed signs of wear, nicks and cuts and gouges in the porcelain, and so the value at auction could range from the ultra rare six figure examples to the modestly worn ones that might fetch a few hundred dollars on a lucky day. This one was very clean. It was better than clean, he corrected himself. It was amazing.
“Is that...?” Frank said, gasping.
Donnie glanced up at him. Frank put his hand over his mouth, stifling a giggle. Herb came over to stand by Frank’s side. Both men were wide-eyed.
“Oh my God,” Herb said. “I can barely breathe.”
“I know,” Frank said. He took Frank’s hand and squeezed.
Donnie shared their excitement. This was exactly what they’d hoped to find when Frank and Herb first contacted him about this house. The woman whose death had created the opportunity for them to search the attic was the daughter of the fin de siècle actress, Marianne Staples, who at one time had lived with the American doll maker, Christian Mueller. They had two daughters together. Mueller’s dolls rarely came up for auction. But when they did, they fetched high prices, even when the condition was less than ideal. If this was an authentic Mueller, Donnie figured, it could bring $130,000 at auction, easily.
Donnie removed a fingerprinting brush from his shirt pocket and gently cleaned away some of the dust from the doll’s face. Except for a little dark spot just below the left eye, the doll’s condition was marvelous.
He worked on the spot with the brush.
It wasn’t dust.
“Can you see Mueller’s mark?” Frank asked. “It should be just behind the ear, right at the hairline.”
“I know,” Donnie said, suddenly irritable. The spot wasn’t coming off, and he didn’t like people hovering over him while he worked on something as delicate as this. But the more he worked on the spot, the more troubling it became.
Then it hit him what the spot was.
He flinched away from it.
“What’s wrong?” Frank said.
Donnie didn’t answer. He stood up and went to the little dead girl’s picture on the sideboard on the opposite side of the room. The doll she was holding, the clothes were different, but that little spot just below the eye, that little dark stain, it was the same.
“Ugh,” Frank said, covering his mouth again. “That’s ghastly.”
“It’s the same doll,” Donnie said. “Look at the little crimson stain below the eye.”
“It’s in black and white,” Herb said. “How can you tell that’s crimson?”
“Look at the cracked veins around the girl’s eyes. Those aren’t crow’s feet. Not at her age. That girl died of consumption. She was probably coughing up blood to the very end.”
“Oh,” Frank said. He shivered. “Ghastly.”
“Yeah,” Donnie agreed.
“What do you want to do?” Herb asked.
“I have to take it with me,” Donnie said. “I know an expert in Raleigh. I can stop there on my way home to Greensboro. I'll let you know what I find out.”
“Definitely,” Herb said. He squeezed Frank’s hand again, his grin a mile wide. “This could be a major score.”
*****
Before leaving Wilmington, Donnie stopped off at a small diner for an early lunch. He’d taken quite a few pictures of the doll with his iPhone, and after ordering a Diet Coke and a hamburger, he emailed them to Marty Wright, a doll expert he sometimes worked with, and waited to see how long it would take her to call him back.
The waitress didn’t even have time to bring him his drink.
“Please tell you have that with you?” Marty said. “You didn’t let the dynamic duo take it, did you?”
“Relax. I have it in the car. You saw the maker’s mark, right?”
“Oh, I saw it. I can’t believe the condition. It was like it was never played with.”
Donnie smiled. She was on the hook all right, and it was in deep. “So, you don’t mind if I come see you today?” he said.
“Stop teasing me. Just get here.”
“It’ll take me about two and a half hours.”
“I’ll be waiting.”
He heard the purr in her voice and he felt a sort of hunger stirring inside him. At 36, Marty Wright was among the best in the business. Auction houses and museums from all over the world paid handsomely for her services. He’d once seen her take a representative from Lloyds $143,000 above his initial valuation on a Victorian era closed-mouth bisque head doll, despite the mountain of documentation and research he’d brought with him. She was confident, unrelenting in negotiations, and very beautiful. She was single, too. Donnie’s wife hated her.
Still smiling, he hung up.
After lunch, he called his wife.
“Are you coming home to me?” she said.
“I’m headed back that way,” he said. He felt suddenly tired. This trip to Wilmington was his third road trip this week, and it was only Thursday. It’d be good to start the weekend off early, knowing that he’d just made a score that could leave him sitting pretty for months.
The diner was just off the 40, and midday traffic was roaring by. Donnie leaned on the side of his Subaru, waiting while a heavy truck lumbered by, belching black diesel smoke into the air.
When it was gone he told Abigail about the doll and about what it may be worth. He hadn’t said anything to Marty about the little dead girl in the picture, or the bloodstain on the doll, but he told Abigail.
“Oh God,” she said. “That’s horrible.” A pause. “I bet you took pictures, didn’t you?”
He laughed again. “Guilty.”
“God, you’re a sick man.”
“Yeah, but I’m your man.”
She huffed. “I suppose that means you have to stop in Raleigh on the way home.”
“To see Marty, yeah.”
She grumbled under her breath.
“Don’t be like that,” he said. “She is the expert on this stuff.”
More grumbling.
“Don’t be jealous. She’s not half the woman you are.”
“Are you kidding? She’s gorgeous.”
“Abby, she’s got nothing on you.”
“You mean like killer legs and big tits? Yeah right, she’s got nothing on me.”
“Come on,” he said.
“Whatever.”
“Are you mad at me?”
“No, stupid. Just missing you. Hurry home, okay?”
They said their goodbyes and Donnie hung up. He popped the hatchback and shifted some of the boxes he’d taken from the attic so that the doll wouldn’t get any direct sunlight during the car ride to Raleigh. It was a nice June day, very few clouds, and not too hot, but the windows would act like a magnifying glass and superheat anything left inside. He’d have to ask Marty for a storage box, he told himself, as he made a little nest for the doll in some of the dresses he’d taken from the attic.
It was then that the little dead girl’s picture shifted and slid out from under the clothes beneath the doll, and suddenly her dead face was staring up at him.
Donnie gasped, his breath hitching in his throat.
He stared at the girl, trying to swallow the lump that had formed in his throat, unable to move. His heart was hammering in his chest. For a while, during lunch, the initial unease he’d felt after first encountering the photo had faded and he’d even laughed about it with Abigail on the phone. But now, looking at her picture like this, unexpectedly, he was frozen. So much care had been taken to surround her with dignity, with pious goodwill. But to Donnie, the effect was not kind, not loving, but monstrously misguided and eerie. He could no more leave his gaze upon her than he could upon the sun, and yet he couldn’t look away.
Sometime later he became aware of the heat of the sun on the back of his neck.
He shivered and looked around. The parking lot was filling up, the lunch crowd rolling in, though nobody seemed to be paying him much mind.
Donnie looked back at the little dead girl, her straight, oily black hair pulled back over her ears, her little pale hand resting on her belly. He closed his eyes and caught his breath, then cradled his face in his hands and wiped away the cold sweat that had collected there.
He let out a long breath, and threw one of Marianne Staples’ dresses over the girl’s picture. Then he tossed his iPhone in with his day bag, got in his car, and headed for Raleigh.
*****
Three hours later, he had the doll laid out on the glass coffee table in front of Marty Wright’s black leather couch. She sat beside him in a knee-length gray skirt and clingy white top. Their hips were touching. “This is just amazing,” she said. She looked stunned. Delighted, but stunned.
“I couldn’t believe it either,” Donnie said. “Even covered in all that dust I knew it was a Mueller.”
“Oh, it’s a Mueller all right. There’s no question about that.” Marty straightened the doll’s clothes and whistled. “It’s in almost perfect shape. Original clothes. The craftsmanship is simply...there just aren’t words. Mueller did such powerful work.” She shook her head in admiration. “Wow. Donnie, you hit it out of the park on this one.”
“You think so?”
She held his gaze. Out of the corner of his eye, he was aware of how the fabric of her blouse strained at her breasts, at the well-muscled curve of her calves, the strappy sandal dangling from her toes.
He cleared his throat. “Any idea how much it’s worth?” he asked.
She sat back and crossed her legs toward him, her sandal dangling inches from his knee. “I think you could take anything you wanted,” she said.
He forced himself not to look at her legs. “I told Herb and Frank it might go as high as $130,000.”
“Easily,” she said. One of her bangs fell down over her face. She let it stay. “I’d have to do a proper prospectus on it before I could tell you for sure, but I bet you could make that the opening bid at auction.”
“The opening bid?”
“It’d be a steal at that price.”
Donnie swallowed. His face felt hot. His palms were sweating.
“How long would it take you to do that?” he managed to say.
“The prospectus?”
He nodded.
“That depends on how thorough you want me to be?” she said, her voice was a silken purr. Her eyes flashed. She touched his knee. “Certainly overnight.”
He looked at her hand. He couldn’t stop swallowing. Donnie was happily married, but if he was honest with himself, he didn’t know what he’d do if she kept coming on to him like this. It felt like the room was spinning.
“Look, Marty I...”
Unexpectedly, she took her hand away and leaned forward to examine the doll. “The prominence is going to be your problem,” she said. Her voice was suddenly clipped, businesslike.
He looked at his knee where her hand had been. “I...what?”
“The prominence,” she repeated.
She seemed like a whole different person. It was like she’d flipped off a light switch. Donnie gaped at her, not at all sure what was happening. Was she playing with him? Had he made her mad? He couldn’t tell. But she was looking at him now, waiting for him to answer. His mind raced to catch up with what she had just said.
“But, the daughter...we found the doll in her attic.” He was babbling. Come on, he thought. Get it together. He said, “I don’t understand.”
Marty lifted the doll with all the care she would use on a real baby and held it out at arm’s length. “So beautiful,” she muttered.
“I’m still lost, Marty. What’s the problem with the prominence?”
She continued to stare at the doll. “You have no idea what you have here, do you?”
“I...I guess not.”
She took the doll over to a stack of white storage boxes and moved boxes around until she found one that fit. She put the doll inside and adjusted its clothes and smoothed its hair, fussed over it like a nervous mother.
“It’s a Mueller,” she said at last. “That’s a sure deal. And it’s the cleanest one I’ve ever seen, too. But if you could show that Mueller made it for his own child, well, then it wouldn’t be a rare doll at all, would it?”
“It would be a one of a kind,” he said.
“Exactly,” Marty said. “Collectors of Mueller’s work claim that every doll is made with love akin to magic. I don’t know of any other doll maker who inspires that kind of admiration among collectors. They’re like a cult. If you could prove that he made this for his daughter, well, there wouldn’t be any love greater than that, would there?”
He shook his head.
“And looking at this doll, I can believe what all those collectors have been telling me over the years. I can feel it. Can you feel it?”
The corner of his mouth twitched. “Sure,” he said. “Yeah, I feel it.”
She brought the doll, now in its box, back to the table and put it in front of him. It stared up at him. Just like a little girl in a coffin, he thought. He shivered, forcing himself to look away from the bloodstain on the doll’s cheek.
Marty was beaming at him. Not flirting, but excited, eager. “That doll could be worth millions, Donnie.”
He felt like the air had been knocked out of his lungs.
“Millions?” he repeated.
“If you can prove the prominence,” she reminded him.
He sat there, his mind reeling with the idea of that much money in his bank account. He and Abigail could pay off the house, buy new cars. He could retire, take her to Venice, London, the Bahamas. Donnie’s pulse raced.
Abruptly, his casino eyes cleared and again a darkening unease clouded his mind.
“What is it?” she said. “You okay?”
“Yeah.” He looked at the doll again, at the bloodstain. Somewhere in the back of his mind a small voice was telling him to stop, don’t go any further, but he forced it down. Millions of dollars, he thought. He said, “What if I told you I had a picture that could prove he made it just for his daughter?”
She huffed. “Then I’d kick you in the knee for not showing it to me the minute you walked in the door.”
He tried to smile, but couldn’t quite pull it off.
“It’s here,” he said.
He had a large plastic bin he was using to transport all the stuff from his car up to here. Donnie dug the little dead girl’s picture out of that and handed it to Marty.
“That’s Sally Staples, I believe. The sister of the woman whose attic I was exploring this morning.”
Marty’s face blanched. Her lips parted in horrified shock. “This is...dreadful,” she said.
Her voice was hushed. She closed her eyes. Donnie watched her breasts rise and fall with her breathing. She opened her eyes again, and one hand slowly came up to cover her mouth.
Probably because she’s noticed the blood, he thought.
“Marty?” he said.
She extended the picture out to him. “Please take that back,” she said. “Put it away. Cover it or something. Please.”
“That’s why I didn’t show the picture right away. I...I knew that...”
He trailed off there, not sure what else he could say. The picture had affected him too. He wasn’t surprised that it creeped her out, but he hadn’t expected anything as severe as this. Her hand was still over her mouth, but it was her eyes he noticed. They were wet, shining with horror and dismay. He was pretty sure she was about to cry.
“Look, Marty—”
She cut him off with a wave of her hand.
“Just put it away,” she insisted.
“Sure. Okay, sure.”
He slipped the picture back into the bin and pulled a dress over it. When he turned back to Marty she was over by her desk, taking out a bottle of scotch and a tumbler. She poured with a shaky hand, the neck of the bottle clanking against the rim of the glass.
Marty sipped her drink. She wouldn’t look at him. Her lips were pursed tightly together, like she was trying to keep herself from trembling.
“Marty, we don’t have to use this picture. I’m sure there are other ways to prove the prominence.”
She put her drink down. She shook her head. “No,” she said.
“No?” he said, and waited. Nothing. “Marty, I know this is—”
“No,” she said. She looked at him. “No. Take it away, Donnie. I don’t want any part of this.”
“Marty, don’t be—”
“No!” she said. “Take that doll out of here. I won’t have any part of this. I won’t.”
“But, Marty, you said millions...”
“It could be billions, I don’t care.” She stared at him. “This isn’t about money. Do you...do you know what you have there?”
Donnie felt confused by the repeated question. He shrugged. “No, I guess not.”
“Donnie, I beg you, take that doll back where you got it. Put it back in that attic with that dead girl’s picture and...and...”
She was stumbling over her words, uncertain of what to say.
“But Marty, what’s wrong? Talk to me.”
“I’m cold,” she said. She looked miserable. She shivered, hugging herself. “Donnie, a toy becomes something magic in the mind of a child. We forget that as adults. We grow old and they become objects to us, something our kids love, and that we love because our kids love them. But there’s a separation there. Our love is conditional on our children loving them. Do you see? We’ve changed, not the toys. The toys are the same as when we loved them as kids. They’re still magic. It’s us. Something inside us ossifies. We get hard, or busy, or callous...I don’t know. But we lose something. We forget that toys have power.”
He almost smiled. He would have, if she weren’t so obviously scared. “Marty, don’t you think you’re overreacting? I know it’s creepy, but, I mean, come on. This is a once in a lifetime score for us.”
She shook her head again. “No. No, toys are powerful, Donnie. And dolls are the most powerful of all. A child, a little girl, puts her heart into them. They are the beginnings of motherhood and all the power that goes with that. They become more than toys. It’s primal. It’s an atavistic thing, Donnie. I think Mueller understood that. In fact, I’m sure he did. I look at that doll, and at the way that dead girl is holding that doll, and I know that Mueller understood the power a doll represents. Call me stupid, I don’t care, but I will not have any part of this.”
She stared at him, eyes burning with emotion. Then her voice softened as she went on: “And Donnie, if you’re smart, you won’t either.”
Donnie didn’t know what to say. He looked at her and shrugged.
“Just go,” she said. “Please, Donnie. Go. And take all that with you.”
“You’re serious?”
She nodded.
“Okay,” he said. He shook his head. “Marty, I’m sorry.”
She scooped up her drink and downed it, her eyes closed. She didn’t open them while he packed up the storage bin and made his way to the door. He paused there, waiting for her to say something, to look at him even, but she never opened her eyes.
“Maybe next time,” he said, and closed the door behind him as he left.
*****
Two years earlier, while on his fifth road trip in four days, Donnie had been using his iPhone to get directions to a hotel in Harrisburg. There was a convention there, and he was late. It was raining. Morning rush hour traffic. He was trying to figure out what exit to take when his Subaru drifted into the oncoming lanes. There’d been a horn, an 18-wheeler that looked like the side of a building filling up his windshield, and a lucky last second cutback into his own lane. After that he made himself a promise not to use his phone while driving. But his visit to Marty Wright had confused him. Actually, if he was honest with himself, it made him angry.
He needed to calm down, to hear a comforting voice. He called Abigail and told her about his visit, leaving out the parts about Marty’s dangling sandal and her straining blouse and her hand on his knee. But he told her the rest.
“What do you want to do?” she said.
“About what?” Her question caught him off guard.
“About the doll. Are you going to take it back to Wilmington?”
“It’s worth millions,” he said.
“That’s a lot of money,” she said.
“So why would you ask me if I’m taking it back?”
“Donnie, don’t snap at me. You called me, remember? Obviously it bothers you, otherwise we wouldn’t be talking, right?”
She was right, of course. He was just mad at Marty for making this more difficult than it had to be. Abby didn’t deserve this.
“I’m coming home,” he said. “Sweetheart, we’re gonna be rich.”
“I always thought I’d look good married to a rich man.”
“You and me both, baby.”
*****
He was driving through Greensboro, about ten minutes from home, when his phone rang. It was Herb Cowen’s number.
“Hey Herb, what’s—”
Donnie was cut off by the sound of something big, like a chandelier, shattering in his ear. The Subaru shimmied as he fumbled the phone. The driver of the beat-to-hell Ford pickup behind him laid on the horn. Donnie flinched. He hated driving. He could be a tiger when it came to auctions. He thrived on the ebb and flow of money, the electric mood of a room in a bidding frenzy. But behind the wheel, amid the ebb and flow of traffic, caught up with other drivers jockeying for position, he often felt rattled, even frightened.
He tried to wave an apology to the angry redneck behind him, but the guy would have none of it. The pickup’s engine roared as the driver accelerated around Donnie, yelling something that sounded like “Get off the fucking phone, dickhead!” out the window as he surged by.
Donnie watched him go.
Hard, frantic breathing came through the phone. Donnie looked at the phone in surprise. He’d forgotten he was still holding it. He put it back to his ear and listened. There were voices on the other end, panicked voices bulleted by ragged breathing.
“Frank, is that you?”
The voices became inarticulate grunts.
“Frank?”
Donnie heard something thud, and then Frank—he was pretty sure it was Frank; his voice was deeper than Herb’s—said something Donnie didn’t quite catch.
“Frank? Hey, are you okay?”
No answer. The line was open, but nobody was talking. Maybe he butt-dialed me, Donnie thought. He was about to hang up when he heard something. A small sound, like somebody sobbing.
“Frank, is that you?” He waited a beat. “Herb?”
A car pulled away from the curb just ahead of him. He mashed down on his brakes, his stomach lurching into his throat as the distance to the other car closed at an alarming rate. But he missed it. He waited for the other guy, who didn’t wave an apology, Donnie noticed bitterly, turned right at the next corner and slipped away into a neighborhood.
He was still holding the phone, he realized. Enough of this. He hung up and tossed it onto the passenger seat. Focus on your driving, Donnie.
That was it, he told himself as he pulled into his driveway. They butt-dialed me. Had to be. Frankly, he was too tired to assign more meaning to it than that. It had been a long day of driving, of angry rednecks in traffic, of having Marty Wright twist him around her finger like he was made of rubber. He was exhausted. He didn’t even want to unpack. He just wanted a shower, maybe some dinner, and then bed. Getting to bed early would be nice.
Abigail greeted him at the back door and helped him bring in the boxes of stuff he’d taken from the attic back in Wilmington. They put it all in his office. She took the lid off the doll’s storage box and leaned it up against the backrest of the armchair in the corner of his office. Donnie didn’t want to look at it.
But Abigail took a step back from it and crossed her arms over her chest, cocking her head from side to side as she studied the doll. “It is beautiful,” she said.
He grunted by way of a reply. Standing inside the storage box like that, it reminded him of the Old West outlaws they used to photograph in their coffins along with the men who brought them in.
“Hard to believe somebody would pay millions for it, though.”
When he turned to ask her about dinner, she was looking at the picture of the little dead girl.
“This is her?”
He nodded, his lips pressed firmly closed.
“It was a different time, wasn’t it?” she said. “Imagine posing your dead child like this. It must have been so painful.”
“Yeah. Listen, I’m gonna take a shower, okay?”
“Okay,” she said. She put the picture down. “Go take your shower. The steam’ll do you good.”
And it did, too. Donnie stood under the water, shoulders slumped, feeling tired and depleted.
He toweled off, pulled on a pair of jeans and a ragged Penn State t-shirt, and went out to the kitchen. His nose hadn’t completely cleared, but at least he could smell the stew now. He thought he might even be able to stay awake long enough to enjoy it.
Donnie passed through the saloon doors that separated the living room from the kitchen. He expected to see Abigail hovering over her cooking the way she liked to do, but instead saw the dining room table knocked askew, one of the black wooden chairs toppled, and, behind that,
Abigail sprawled out on the floor.
“Abigail!”
He rushed to her side and turned her over in his arms.
Her body was stiff as a piece of furniture. But it was the look frozen on her face that caused him to recoil. Abigail’s eyes were wide open and staring at something beyond the ceiling. Her mouth was twisted into a scream. A long black lock of her beautiful hair hung over her cheek.
Her expression was one of such abject horror and fear that he didn’t immediately recognize that she was dead.
“Abigail? No. Oh Jesus, no!”
He scrambled back from her until he ran into the wall and collapsed, his legs stretched out before him. Donnie froze there in panic. For a long moment, he sat staring at her, unable to take it all in. There was no sound but his own taxed breathing. Take her pulse, he thought. CPR, anything. Do something!
He extended a trembling hand toward her, but couldn’t make himself touch her. It was too horrible, that look on her face.
Something moved off to his right.
His gaze snapped toward the saloon doors, and his eyes widened. Beyond the doors, a pair of legs. Black shoes. Black stockings. The swish of a black, papery dress.
Donnie shook his head. He pressed his fists into his eyes, as though to grind the vision out, but when he took his hands away, the saloon doors were swinging inward.
He jumped to his feet and ran through the kitchen and into the front parlor. For a moment, the thought that played over and over in his head was: This is where they used to hold funerals, this is where they used to hold funerals—
She was behind him. The little dead girl. He couldn’t hear her, but he could sense her. He could feel the dust and the cold gathering at his back, creeping through the sun-bright kitchen, coming for him.
Again he bolted, this time to his office, where he slammed the door shut.
He came to a stop in the middle of the room, staring around at the clutter that came from a lifetime of hunting antiques. The doll, standing like a corpse in its white, casket box, stared back at him with its huge round eyes.
The little dead girl’s picture was there, too.
The color fell away from his face. His knees buckled. Her eyes were open, and they were locked on his, vacant and empty, yet somehow weighing him, judging him.
“No,” he said. His voice sounded like a sigh. “No.”
Lurching back, he turned to flee. But there was nowhere he could go. He realized that like a slap in the face. Donnie thought of the call he’d received from Herb and Frank. It was horror he’d heard in Frank’s voice. He knew that now. The same chest-clenching fear that had killed Abigail and put that awful death mask on her face.
And now, the little dead girl was coming for him.
He heard her footsteps on the tile on the other side of the door. It was locked, but he knew that wouldn’t matter to her. He knew that just as surely as he knew she’d passed over Marty Wright, spared her because she’d refused to have anything to do with the doll. It was strange to him how clear and reasonable that knowledge was. He knew it was so, knew it just as he knew the little dead girl was coming now for her doll, the one she’d marked with her own blood.
Donnie began to scream. But that didn’t last long.
For a moment later, the doorknob creaked and turned, like something long dead groaning back toward life.
Joe McKinney has been a patrol officer for the San Antonio Police Department, a disaster mitigation specialist, homicide detective, administrator, patrol commander and successful novelist. Winner of the Bram Stoker Award, he is the author of the four part Dead World series, Quarantined, Inheritance, Lost Girl of the Lake, and Dodging Bullets. His short fiction has been collected in The Red Empire and Other Stories and Dating in Dead World. For more information visit his website at http://joemckinney.wordpress.com
See all of Joe's books HERE
