Carolyn McSparren - The Only Child

How could he have missed seeing her clearly before? The shock of recognition of her sheer femaleness startled him. He stood and strode back to the relative sanctuary of the front hall.

Molly followed him.

At the door he turned and took his checkbook from his inside jacket pocket. “I’ve come to pay for the doll.”

“I planned to bill you.”

“How much?”

“Fifteen hundred dollars will do. Use my desk.” She pointed at an aged plantation desk inside the living room.

He sat down, wrote the check and handed it to her.

She stuck it into her jeans without looking at it. “Sherry told me what happened. You must understand something, Mr. MacMillan. I am a craftswoman, pure and simple. I’m certainly not clairvoyant. In fact, I do not have a bit of ESP in my entire body.”

This time he did look up, and straight into those amazing blue eyes. They were full of intelligence and compassion. He kept his voice even. “The doll-”

“Please, let me finish. Sherry told me your granddaughter died two years ago. I’m sorry, that is simply not possible.”

This was the last thing Logan expected to hear. He was stunned and then anger began to take over. What right had this madwoman with the teal blue eyes to tell him his granddaughter had not died? He felt his heart begin to speed up. “I assure you, Mrs. Halliday, I have seen her death certificate.”

“I don’t care if you had all nine justices of the Supreme Court testifying to you,” she said. “I don’t make things—children—up. And I certainly don’t pull the names of dead grandchildren out of the air. I name all my dolls. It’s standard in the industry. It’s easier to keep them straight that way and the customers like it.”

“So?”

“So, that doll, the one you smashed this afternoon…I didn’t pull her name out of a hat, either.” Molly sat on a wing chair across from him.

It was as though a ghost had stepped into the room. He looked at the woman before him, noticing that she met his gaze head-on.

He stood up. “Mrs. Halliday, this is obviously some sort of confidence game. I won’t tolerate it.”

“Oh, for Pete’s sake, sit down before you fall down. Hear me out. Do it. There. That’s better.”

“Very well, I will hear you out, but I assure you—”

“Look, when I designed the Dulcy doll—”

“Stop calling her that!” he shouted.

The anguish in his voice took Molly’s breath. “Mr. MacMillan, Logan,” she said gently. “That’s her name. It has always been her name, ever since I saw her and decided to model her.”

She watched his hands curl into fists and hoped he didn’t plan to hit her, but she stood her ground. “I said I saw her and I meant it. Obviously I also heard her name. I told you, I don’t make up children in my mind and then model them. Within the last year, I saw that little girl and heard someone call her Dulcy. Who could forget a name like that?”

“Even if I believed you, what proof have you? Do you take pictures?”

Molly shook her head. “Only when I’m working on commission. Let’s face it, most children look a good deal alike. Shortly after my divorce four years ago I decided I wanted to devote my life to creating dolls, and in the beginning I tried to find a mold that had the same expression and bone structure as the child I was working on, then I either added or subtracted material to make the doll as much like the child as possible. I still use that technique sometimes, but after a while it didn’t satisfy me. I took some sculpture classes and began to sculpt my own molds. The Dulcy doll is my fourth attempt at creating a portrait from scratch, and the only one I’m really proud of!”

“That doesn’t explain…”

“I know. It’s a rather long-winded way to the point, which is that I know Dulcy’s face intimately. In my mind I’ve touched the curve of her cheek, the angle of her eye socket. And I know the Dulcy doll is a perfect reproduction of the child I saw. I have a photographic memory for faces. I may not know where I met you or under what circumstances, but I remember your face. In Dulcy’s case, I remember the name, too. Usually I don’t.”

“For the sake of argument, let’s say that you did see Dulcy somewhere in Memphis, heard someone call her name. She was not quite two when Tiffany ran away with her three years ago.”

Molly relaxed. At least MacMillan was prepared to talk rationally to her now.

“I’m sorry, but I can’t project change on the faces I see. I couldn’t sculpt the way you looked at twenty or the way you’ll look at ninety. The Dulcy I saw was that age, that shape, that size and called by that name. How many Dulcys do you think there are in the United States, Mr…Logan? A few thousand? There is something I don’t understand, by the way. If you haven’t seen your granddaughter since before she was two, why are you so sure that the child I sculpted looks the way she would look?”

“Computer simulation.” Logan leaned forward. “How much did Sherry tell you?”

“She filled me in on as much as she knows.”

“She knows most of it. I guess I owe you an explanation for the rest.”

Molly realized that even that small an admission had cost him dearly. It was clear that he wasn’t used to accounting to anyone.

“When my daughter-in-law, Tiffany, ran away with Dulcy, she was out on bond awaiting sentencing for vehicular homicide. She was probably facing a sentence of five to eight years in prison. Even with good behavior, she’d have served two years, maybe more.”

“Sherry told me about your son’s death.”

A flash of pain crossed MacMillan’s face, but he continued stoically. “My son, Jeremy, wasn’t the only one killed in the wreck. Edward Valdez, a cardiologist, was changing a flat tire when Tiffany hit his car. His family is rich and prominent. They demanded the prosecutor go for the maximum sentence possible. No plea bargains, no lesser charge, no probation or credit for jail time served. They wanted Tiffany’s blood. They would have gotten it.”

“Please, I know this is hard for you…” Molly reached a hand out to touch him. He drew back as though any physical contact would shatter his iron control.

“I have told the story many times since Jeremy was killed, Mrs. Halliday.”

“Doesn’t make it any easier.”

“In an odd way it does. While I’m talking, I can almost convince myself that the entire thing happened to someone else. It’s only afterward that the full force of Jeremy’s death hits me again. Do you have children, Mrs. Halliday?”

Molly nodded. “A daughter, a son-in-law and a granddaughter. I’d go nuts if anything happened to any of them.”

“Unfortunately, I’ve remained sane. Madness might be easier. Did Sherry tell you that Jeremy was an alcoholic?”

Molly nodded and felt a chill as she looked into his eyes, as flat and bleak as an Arctic ice floe.

“My granddaughter, Dulcy, was not even two,” he continued. “Tiffany’s mother is dead, her father has remarried and lives in Spain. At the trial, her lawyer argued that since Tiffany grew up with a drunken mother and an absentee father…” He stopped speaking a moment and closed his eyes. “An absentee father,” he repeated, “she was not responsible. The jury looked at the size of her trust fund and were not impressed by his argument.”

Molly wondered whose side Logan had been on. Most men would feel vengeful for the loss of an only son. She couldn’t tell from that careful voice, that stony face, what Logan felt about his daughter-in-law.

“My wife, Sydney, and I were the obvious ones to take custody of Dulcy,” he went on. “Tiffany signed the custody papers willingly. We made plans to help her get her life back on track after she was paroled.”