Amanda Stevens - The Dollmaker

“Why did you have to die?” he whispered.

Because you let me.

His voice became petulant. “But I was just a child.”

You should have found a way to stop him.

“I’ve stopped him now.”

Too late.

“It’s not too late. You’re not dead. You’re just…hiding.”

Then come and find me.

He leaned closer, searching and searching his reflection until the ringing of his cell phone jarred him. He didn’t want to answer it. He hated disturbances while he worked, but his concentration was already broken. Fetching the phone from his jacket pocket, he checked the caller ID and, recognizing the number of the nursing home, didn’t bother to answer.

Tossing the phone aside, he returned to the unfinished doll and placed a gentle hand on her sculpted head. “I have to go out for a while, but I’ll be back soon, I promise.”

Leaving the door to the studio open, he hurried up the steps to the kitchen to fix a tray. He toasted bread and poured a bowl of cereal, then, once he had the dishes and silverware arranged just so, carried everything back down the steps and placed the tray on his worktable while he unlocked and slid open a hidden compartment in one wall. He bent down to peer inside.

The lights were out. He couldn’t see anything in the shadowy room, but he knew she was already awake because he could hear her whimpers. The sound irritated him. So did her persistence.

I want to go home.

She must have said it a hundred times already. They all did. And his answer was always the same.

You can’t go home. Not until after the party.

Slipping the tray through the opening, he waited a moment, hoping to catch a glimpse of her, but when she didn’t appear, he shut the compartment and locked it without a word, then hung the key on a peg near the door.

If he’d learned anything in the past seven years it was that even the most stubborn girl would eventually eat when she got hungry.

The dark clouds piling up over the Gulf of Mexico brought an early twilight to the city, but Claire Doucett barely noticed the sporadic raindrops that splashed against her cotton blouse as she hurried along the sidewalk. Her gaze was fastened on a group of teenage girls in front of her, and as they stopped to admire something in a shop window, she paused, too, her heart beating a painful staccato inside her chest. Their backs were to her, but when the one in the middle turned just so…dear God, she looked like Ruby.

At least the way Claire imagined her daughter would look at fourteen. The way she appeared in the age-progressed photo created by a forensic artist at the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children.

She would be tall like her dad, but with Claire’s thin stature and her grandmother Lucille’s golden ringlets.

The girl in front of her shook her head and her blond curls shifted against her narrow back. She wore shorts and flip-flops, and her legs were long and tanned and gorgeous. Her laughter drifted back to Claire, sending a fine chill along her spine, and her heart started to beat even harder. There was something so sweet and innocent and familiar about that sound.

Claire closed her eyes and tried to conjure Ruby’s laugh. It was getting harder and harder to do. After seven years, the memories were sometimes elusive.

But, no, there it was…the image of a two-year-old Ruby at the zoo, tugging on Claire’s hand as she laughed up at her. “Bears, Mama!”

Even as a toddler, Ruby had been such a happy child. Sweet and tenderhearted, and yet so willful and stubborn at times that Claire’s patience had been sorely tested.

“That child would argue with a fence post,” Claire’s mother used to say with an exaggerated sigh.

“Yes, and I wonder who she gets that from,” Claire would counter.

Secretly, Claire had been grateful that her daughter inherited more of Lucille’s disposition than hers. Claire was too much like her moody father, although she hoped to God she never succumbed to the same demons that had driven him to suicide when she was just a baby.

Even in her deepest despair after Ruby’s kidnapping, Claire had never contemplated taking her own life, and for one good reason—she’d never given up hope that her daughter would someday come home to her. The flame had grown dimmer with each passing year, but on days like today, the glimpse of a familiar face on a crowded street could rekindle her faith, and she’d find herself indulging in the same old fantasy.

Ruby was still alive and she’d been happy and healthy all these years. A childless couple had seen her riding her bike on the sidewalk that day and had been enchanted by her blond curls and sunny smile.

They’d taken her home with them, loved her as if she was their very own, and in time, Ruby had responded to their kindness and affection. In time, she’d adjusted to her new home, and for the past seven years, she’d led a perfectly normal life. Maybe she no longer even remembered her real family. Her real mother.

Claire blinked back unexpected tears.

The fantasy was just that. Nothing more than a wishful daydream that had helped sustain her through some of her darkest days. And the girl on the street in front of her wasn’t Ruby. The likelihood of her daughter still being alive was miniscule. To even consider for a moment that Ruby might have been in New Orleans all this time, that fate would have miraculously brought them together on this very street, was ludicrous.

And yet…

Claire whispered her daughter’s name. The sound slipped through her lips as a plea.

The girl turned, as if responding to the soft entreaty, and Claire saw her clearly for the first time. The girl’s face split into a broad smile, and Claire’s breath caught. Everything around her seemed to still. The noise from the street faded, and the palm fronds and banana trees in a nearby courtyard stood motionless in the heat, as if nature itself was holding a breath.

And then Claire exhaled in a painful rush. It wasn’t Ruby. Of course it wasn’t Ruby. But for that one fleeting moment when their gazes touched, Claire had a glimpse of what it might be like to see her daughter’s face again after all these years.

The girl’s attention moved past her and she waved at someone behind Claire. Someone who had called out her name.

Megan. The girl’s name was Megan. Not Ruby.

Claire glanced at her reflection in a store window, saw the pinched look on her face, the whitened knuckles where her hand gripped her purse strap, and slowly she let out another breath.

Ruby was dead and she wasn’t coming back. She’d been taken from the sidewalk in front of their home while riding her bike, the victim of an abduction that had never been solved. Claire knew the statistics. Her daughter had probably been dead within the first twenty-four to forty-eight hours after she’d been grabbed, her body discarded in some remote field or shallow grave, where she had been lying all these years. Alone.

Claire put a hand to her mouth. Tears scalded her eyes, but she held them back as she scoured the street in front of her. The girl and her friends had scurried beneath an awning to get out of the drizzle. Claire deliberately turned and started walking in the opposite direction.

“Did you hear about the body they found in the Quarter?” Charlotte LeBlanc asked casually when she and Claire met a few minutes later at their designated rendezvous.

“I saw it on the local news before I left the house this morning. Do the police know who did it?”

Claire’s sister was an assistant D.A. for Orleans Parish and usually had an open pipeline to the police department, but she shook her head. “They think it was probably drug-related. So far they haven’t even been able to identify the body. Poor bastard was sliced up pretty bad. All his fingers were missing.”