Deb Baker - Goodbye Dolly

He'd established enough motivation to keep her inside the car.

Gretchen felt Nimrod shudder inside her purse, and she reached in and gave him a reassuring pat.

The airport lights dimmed behind them as they sped toward Camelback Mountain. Gretchen's cell phone rang from someplace on the floor, and she automatically stooped to retrieve it from under the seat.

"Get up," Duanne screamed, digging the gun into her side. "Sit up. NOW!"

She eased back into the seat, careful not to startle him, and listened as the phone rang several more times before stopping.

Was it Matt finally calling her back? Like every other man in her life, he offered too little, too late. This seemed to be a recurring theme.

She glanced down between her feet but didn't see the phone.

Help as close as the floor mat yet as far away as the stars.

A few minutes later, they pulled into her carport. Duanne turned off the car and, waving the gun, motioned her out.

Tied to a leg of the doll workbench, Gretchen contemplated life. It was extraordinarily complex, with unexpected plot twists. Her situation at the moment was a perfect example. She strained to lift the bench to free her hands, even though she knew it was built into the wall. She couldn't feel so much as a millimeter of movement.

She had managed to slip the cell phone into her pocket, a feat she was proud of at first, but what good was it doing her now?

With her hands behind her back, she couldn't reach her pocket, let alone bring the phone to her ear. And with her legs bound together with her own doll restringing elastic, she wasn't going anywhere soon.

She could hear Duanne ripping through the house, pulling out drawers and overturning furniture. Wobbles, true to form, was nowhere in sight. Nimrod, wisely sensing random chaos within his domain, remained inside her purse. It lay next to a bin filled with dolls' underpants.

Once Duanne left the room, Nimrod boldly ran over to Gretchen, crawling over her bound body hunched on the floor.

"Hide," she commanded him after a moment of intense puppy love. He rushed back across the room and burrowed inside the purse.

More banging, and Duanne came around the corner and entered the workshop.

"Where is it?" he said, enraged, his face the same color as the red clay from the darkening mountain framed in the window.

"I don't know what you're talking about."

"The box. Where is it?"

"It's in the trunk of the Echo." She should have told him where the Kewpies were stashed earlier, but she'd been frozen with fear.

Duanne smiled, a cruel tilt to his lips.

"If that idiot auction creep hadn't pulled a fast one," he said, "none of this would have happened."

Gretchen tried to stretch out a cramped leg but only made her position on the floor more uncomfortable. "You mean Brett?"

Without answering, he stomped away, and she heard the door leading to the carport close. Then it opened again, and he reappeared with the box of broken Kewpies in his arms. He dumped the contents on the floor and kicked shards at Gretchen, stomping on the larger pieces. Bits of porcelain flew in the air, and a powdery silt fell over Gretchen's legs.

"Wrong box, silly girl." He clenched both fists.

"It's the only box I have."

"You're as obstinate as Florence. She wouldn't help me, either." He continued to slam through rooms, and Gretchen shifted her body and stretched her fingers toward her pocket. She felt fabric with her fingertips and continued to stretch, straining as far as she could.

She felt the edge of the cell phone and adjusted her body again. Picking at the pocket and shifting her shoulders and legs, she finally managed to palm it. The easy task was over. She flipped it open. Stage two, keying in a number without being able to see the phone, was under way when she heard Duanne's footsteps. She jerked into her former position, the phone behind her back.

Duanne had a cardboard box in his arms and a sneer on his face.

"Bingo," he said, gently placing it on the floor and squatting over it. "Let's see what we have here. If my calculations are correct, my quest is over."

He held up a Ginny doll, and Gretchen's mouth dropped open in surprise.

"Where… did… you find that box?" she stammered.

"You think you're so cute," he said. "Still playing dumb. But you're smart. Smart enough to hide it in all that junk, and the smell in that room…"

Daisy.

Daisy had the box of Ginny dolls all along in the spare room she occasionally called home?

Gretchen remembered the day that Nina had arrived with Daisy and the contents of her shopping cart. She and April had been preoccupied in the doll repair room and hadn't noticed. Daisy must have carried in the box of Ginnys right in front of an oblivious Nina.

"I didn't know the Ginnys were here."

Duanne shrugged. "It doesn't matter anymore. I have them now." His face darkened. "It was that derelict sitting on the curb. He made off with them when I wasn't looking."

Duanne began to empty the box, throwing the dolls onto the floor.

Gretchen cringed at his harsh handling of them and was glad that each came in its own small box. Hopefully the damage would be minimal.

She must be a certified nutcase or a full-fledged rabid doll collector to be thinking of doll preservation at a time like this.

He dug down to the bottom of the cardboard box and extracted a small white rectangular box, quite different from the others.

Gretchen intuitively knew what was inside.

Duanne rubbed the white box lovingly between his hands.

"This whole thing has been a series of missteps," he said. "One mistake after another. But this…" He held up the box. "This is what it was all about."

He opened the box and removed a Blunderboo Kewpie doll. The genuine article, Gretchen noticed. Not one of Chiggy's reproductions, but a fine example of Rosie O'Neill's early work.

Blunderboo, always the clumsy, tumbling, laughing Kewpie.

Duanne rummaged through the doll tools on the workbench, almost stepping on Gretchen in his rush. She heard the doll break open.

The room was silent while Duanne looked over his treasure. Then Gretchen's cell phone rang.

She stabbed at the key pad, blindly searching for the one that would connect the call. The ringing stopped when Duanne kicked her hands.

The pain was excruciating, and she struggled not to cry out as the phone skidded across the room and hit the wall. Gretchen let out a frustrated gasp and closed her fingers together, ignoring the throbbing.

"You stupid…" Duanne backed away from the table and glared at her. The top of Blunderboo's head was missing, and, by the tender way he held the doll, Gretchen knew he had found what he was looking for.

"Diamonds?" she asked. "Did you find diamonds?"

He held up a large, sparkling stone. "The finest there is. My cousin Percy would be alive today if he had shared with me. Instead, he was greedy. Too greedy for his own good."

"You killed Percy, and then you killed Brett and Ronny?"

"Couldn't be helped, now could it?" He fondled the diamond and returned it to the Kewpie. "People are exceedingly stupid."

"You make it sound like they deserved to die." Gretchen stared at Duanne, searching for any sign of compassion, but finding cold, lifeless eyes staring back at her instead.

"If Chiggy had given the Kewpie up… but no, the sentimental fool insisted it was the last gift she'd ever receive from her brother. She even tried to trick me with those ridiculous Kewpie reproductions. But I knew what she really had."

"Ronny Beam was writing a story," Gretchen said, all the time working her fingers through the nylon that bound her hands. Her captor was insane.

"Ronny Beam was a parasite. Too bad his newest fantasy was a little too close to the truth."