Deb Baker - Dolled Up For Murder

The first book in the Dolls to Die For series, 2006

Thanks to Jacky Sach, the most amazing and talented agent on the planet, and to Chris Roerden, good friend and editorial wizard extraordinaire, for giving this manuscript extra pizzazz. Without her, I’d still be in the slush pile.

Thanks to Anita Husby, who welcomed me into her doll workshop and answered questions throughout the writing process. Any mistakes I’ve made regarding doll repair are strictly my own.

Thanks to poet and playwright Anne Godden-Segard for never losing her enthusiasm, and to best friends, Mary Goll, Mary Korkor, and Lee Wolfs, for forcing me away from the computer when I thought I might assimilate into it.

Special thanks to my kids for never complaining about all the frozen pizzas, and to my husband, who gave me the space I needed to follow my dream and who taught me to never, ever give up.

Head buried under a mound of pillows, Gretchen Birch struggled to ignore the phone’s incessant ringing. She had stopped answering the phone at midnight, and it had rung every hour on the hour since. Gretchen lifted a corner of the pillow and squinted at the clock on the nightstand. Three in the morning. The answering machine would pick up after one more ring, and Nina’s urgent message, the same hour after hour, would reverberate in her head until the woman called again at four.

What was the use? She wasn’t sleeping anyway.

Gretchen fumbled in the dark for the phone and knocked it to the floor. Tangled in a sheet, she yanked herself free and lunged for the phone.

“What now?” she said. “Don’t you ever give up?”

“You have to come to Phoenix.” Aunt Nina, her mother’s sister. Bold, bigger-than-life Nina. The dramatist. “Martha Williams is dead, and your mother is missing.”

Gretchen rubbed her red, sleep-deprived eyes. “Drunken Martha tripped and fell from a mountain ledge. That’s what you told me when you called the first time. Again, I extend my sympathies to you, even though you hardly knew her.”

“Your mother is missing.” Nina’s husky voice strained upward, hitting a high soprano note. “How many times do I have to tell you that?”

“According to you, she’s been missing…” Gretchen checked the clock again. “… approximately fifteen hours. That isn’t missing. That’s out power shopping or taking a personal day to recharge. Knowing her, she’s probably in Vegas, finishing up at the blackjack table as we speak.”

“She didn’t take her lucky bracelet. She would never go without it. And she wouldn’t leave without telling me.”

Gretchen’s cat, Wobbles, brushed against her bare toes, demanding attention. The stray’s leg had been smashed in a hit-and-run outside Gretchen’s apartment two years earlier. She witnessed the accident as she stood waiting for the traffic light to change; the car traveling too fast on the winding street, the cat lying at her feet. Shocked and outraged, she scooped the injured stray into her coat, ignoring the blood soaking her clothes, and rushed to the vet. Too late to save his back leg, but a partnership developed between them. Wobbles, the three-legged cat, had stayed.

Gretchen ran her hand along the cat’s silky black fur. She sighed and tried another tactic. “I lost my job last week. Downsizing, remember? I was terminated without warning along with several other startled, soon-to-be-starving souls. I don’t even have the money for rent, much less airfare.”

Not to mention that July in Phoenix is like the inside of a blast furnace. You cook from the inside out. Roasting, suffocating, charring heat. But Boston, home sweet home, is at its peak. Green, leafy trees, breathable salty air, foghorns calling in the harbor.

“A ticket is waiting for you at the airport,” Nina replied. “You have to get moving. Check in by seven, or you’ll lose your seat.”

Gretchen shot upright, startling Wobbles. “I need more time to think about this. If I decide to come, I need to make arrangements for Wobbles’s care, and I need to pack. I need to stop the paper for a few days and water the plants.” A to-do list formed in Gretchen’s head. “Impossible. I can’t come tonight. Tomorrow. I’ll come tomorrow. Maybe.”

Nina’s voice was tense. “Not seven P.M., Gretchen. Seven A.M. your time. You have four hours. Throw a few things together and dig out the pet carrier I sent you for Christmas.”

“But, but…” Gretchen searched her repertoire of excuses for the perfect response, but Nina had disconnected.

“I have to look for a new job,” Gretchen said aloud to no one in particular. What day of the week was it, anyway? Friday. With luck, she’d be back in Boston by Monday, following more weak leads to full-time employment.

Gretchen flung aside the covers and began throwing cosmetics into her travel case. Three fifteen in the morning. What was she thinking? She was as crazy as her aunt Nina and, for that matter, her mother. All three were wildly impulsive and disorganized, and Gretchen secretly attributed the anomaly to a renegade gene passed down through generations of Birch women. A strong matriarchal line with a few crossed wires.

I have to learn to say no, Gretchen thought, considering another genome gone askew, afflicting her but having passed up her mother and Nina. Skipping generations, like twins. She could think no, shake her head back and forth no, and shout no in her head, but when it came to forming the word with her lips and emitting the actual sound, she froze. This inability to refuse a request had landed her in many murky situations. This one, for example.

She threw shorts and tank tops into a suitcase and sorted through a pile of laundry in her closet. Nearly all her clothes needed washing, but she tossed in the cleanest of the dirty clothes. She could wash them at her mother’s house. Before she closed the suitcase, she remembered one other essential item: her hiking boots. How could she forget her gear?

Phoenix had few redeeming qualities in mid-July, but it did have Camelback Mountain, and its most challenging series of steep inclines, Summit Trail, was Gretchen’s favorite. Before closing the suitcase, she added a Western states bird book and a pair of binoculars. Traveling to Arizona in July was on a par with arriving in northern Michigan in January, but she planned on making the most of it.

The first call from Nina flashed into Gretchen’s mind. Martha, a casual acquaintance of her mother, had fallen from Camelback Mountain. Found by a group of hikers. Broken. Dead. A destitute alcoholic with the bad judgment to leave the trails and wander along the rock outcroppings.

What could you expect from a crazy, onetime doll collector who roamed the streets and lived inside a bottle? Certainly not a gentle passing.

Gretchen struggled to remember more, but she’d been too tired at the time to listen to the details. Nina sounded concerned about her mother, but Nina tended to overreact to everything.

Gretchen, loaded down with luggage and a drowsy, medicated Wobbles, entered a taxi. While the cabby expertly maneuvered through winding streets and roared toward Callahan Tunnel, which led to Logan Airport, Gretchen called Steve on her cell phone and explained the events of the last few hours.