‘Played a trick on you, didn’t I, pumpkin?’
Roger had already surveyed the room, knew what she knew, and where the minimizer was. But first he had to get to it, and hoped to distract her. Perhaps showing Lucy her damaged dollhouse would do it.
Lucy, dry-mouthed and sweating, wanted to scream.
Where are my children?
But Nick’s arms restrained her, even his even breathing seemed to tell her to stay calm, if she hoped to extract the answer from Dolly. She couldn’t care less about Dolly’s dollhouse at this point but it seemed she would have to play this game out. Dolly held the markers.
Nick let her go. She moved woodenly toward the dollhouse, suddenly afraid that
where
might be the enormous, ruined dollhouse. Walking slowly around it, she saw it had been given a new base, big enough to hold a scale model of the grounds. Curious, she touched the grass and an electric shock went through as she realized it was real. A merry-go-round had been placed in the garden; her fingers trailed over its elaborate decoration and stopped. Now she could see, as well as smell, the fire and water damage.
It was obvious but also not serious, mostly a matter of scorching and smoke stain. She rubbed her fingers across one stain. The fire had begun in one room and sucked oxygen, like any other housefire, from the windows. Like any other fire. Removing the wall, she looked into the bedroom where the fire originated. Here the smell was really nasty. She fingered the draperies and noticed immediately the tiny slits in the cloth, the rips at the level of the fixtures, which were themselves bent, as if a strong downward force had been exerted on them.
She removed another wall and stared into the Blue Room. A stain like a rusty puddle marred the carpet like the shadow of a cloud on a sunny day. With one finger, she traced it across the floor in a line like a vein near the surface of the skin. When she lifted her hand, it trembled.
The others stood watching her, Dolly with bright, curious eyes, Nick and Sartoris anxiously, Roger in admiration, impressed with her easy passage into professionalism. And then he watched it shatter.
She looked up at them, pale, beginning to shake. Nick Weiler moved to support her.
‘I think she’s going to faint,’ Roger observed.
The scramble was not as satisfactory as he had hoped, for only the old man and Weiler seemed particularly concerned. Dolly, cool and distantly amused, looked on avidly, but did nothing to help. But Roger was committed; this was his moment, his chance to put his finger on the Button again.
He jumped for the Glass Dollhouse, where the minimizer, looking itself like some curious abstract of glass and colored foils, was camouflaged among the angles of Dolly’s third dollhouse.
And she anticipated him, sticking out one elegantly shoed foot to trip him up. He fell forward with all his weight, shouting ‘No!’ and crashed into the dollhouse. As all but Dolly watched in horror, the glass structure seemed to explode into him. The room suddenly rained bits of glass, pieces as big as hailstones, slivers, shards, and glass dust. Roger’s hands, streaked with red, clawed after the device, which had popped upward, away from him. But Dolly caught it, braving the storm of glass, and his flailing.
She stepped back, aimed the device, and the thing went off immediately. They all felt it, like a sudden breath of death pushing them gently aside, in a wash of red light. Lucy and Nick instinctively shielded their eyes. Only Sartoris really watched as Roger, painted in his own blood from dozens of superficial glass cuts, threw up his hands in a futile gesture of warding off. He appeared to twist away from them like a piece of paper suddenly caught on fire. The shrinking was so incredibly fast as to be almost imperceptible to the eye. One moment, Roger writhed among the glass shards; the next he was curled like a giant shrimp on top of a six inch square rhomboid that had once been part of the dollhouse roof.
Sartoris felt his heart stutter, as it was apt to do, and he fought a silent, titanic struggle within himself, willing the muscle to heave once more and then again and again. He sucked in lungsful of suddenly cold air, and was chilled in his bones.
Dolly, her eyes glittering impossibly bright, as a bit of glass in the daylight, turned like a ballerina on a music box, one hand as straight as a clock, aiming the device at Sartoris, Nick, Lucy in turn. She came to rest.
‘Two dollhouses down,’ she announced. ‘But you can fix the Doll’s White House for me, can’t you?’
Lucy, trembling, stared at her.
‘At least,’ Dolly crooned, ‘this one is still perfect.’ She danced, delicately, on her toes, a few steps to the Gingerbread House.
For the first time, they all looked at it. Next to it, on the table that supported it, the plaster figures of Hansel and Gretel had been discarded. Within, a small boy crouched in a cage, a little girl, a gossamer chain around her ankle, slept on the hearth rug, abandoned, so it seemed, by heartless parents to the captivity of the cruel witch. And the light caught tears glassing the boy’s cheeks.
Grief welled in the old man. His heart felt swollen and abused.
Dolly, entranced with her witchcraft, crooning over the children, let down her guard.
With a feral snarl, Lucy launched herself from the periphery of Dolly’s vision, catching her like a tackle around the knees. Losing her balance, Dolly tightened her grip on the minimizer but could not stop her arm instinctively seeking to regain balance, reaching upward. Her hand landed hard against the woodwork, smashing the sensitive nerves of the thinly fleshed back of the hand. Crying out in pain, she let go of the device. It tumbled away, to be snatched up by Nick Weiler.
Dolly, tangled with Lucy on the floor, grabbed a handful of the younger woman’s hair, reaching for support. Realizing what she had, she yanked for all she was worth. Lucy screamed; her nails found Dolly’s face.
Sartoris backed carefully away from them. He could not interfere; his newly stumbled heart sought rest. It hurt to even look at the two women, fighting each other with such complete and deadly passion. Closing his eyes made it worse; he could hear it still. Slowly, he maneuvered toward the Gingerbread Dollhouse, thinking he would, if he could, protect the children.
His swollen nose aching, Nick stared at the device in his hand numbly. Whatever it was, he didn’t know how to use it. He held it distastefully between thumb and forefinger, feeling that it was profoundly evil. He was afraid to put himself between the thrashing women, who were using their teeth, nails, and elbows on each other with savage abandon. Some male part of him quailed before such unleased female violence.
They were nearly equal in their struggle. Beginning to tire, they had to think their moves. The savagery, slowed, became more intense. The more powerful Lucy shoved Dolly against the window wall of the room. She was determined to beat her mother-in-law’s skull against the glass and sought leverage under Dolly’s chin. Dolly, maddened with desperation, sought Lucy’s throat with her small, silver-tipped fingers. The balance shifted abruptly; Lucy began to fade as her oxygen was cut off. Dolly’s eyes bulged with effort.
Shaking off his trance, Nick Weiler dropped the minimizer onto the grounds of the model White House and moved toward the women.
Lucy made one last, violent effort. In a spasm of strength that seemed to ripple from her head to her feet, she seized Dolly and slammed her against the window. It crached. A head-sized chunk of glass fell silently away. Dolly’s nose spurted blood and she fell limply against Lucy.
The dead weight of the older woman pushed Lucy, on the edge of exhaustion, backward. She began to keen. Leighton Sartoris flinched. Without volition, Nick shouted, ‘Stop!’
Lucy thrust again with all her strength, pushing Dolly away.
The limp body seemed to fly backward at the window, where it encountered the glass. The glass bulged and gave way. She was gone.
Lucy turned away and collapsed into Nick Weiler’s arms. It was Sartoris who watched and witnessed from the gaping window, Dolly’s falling body, like a rag doll’s, turning limply in slow motion, over and over. It became smaller and smaller, until it was faceless, a black stick figure hurtling downward. There was no sound, no cry. It met the earth and disintegrated. Sartoris closed his eyes briefly. Then he turned back to the living.
Despite the presence of Leighton Sartoris and at least three other witnesses, including her maid, Ruta Lansky, former daughter-in-law Lucy Douglas, and Nicholas Weiler, director of the Dalton Institute, the facts of Dorothy Hardesty Douglas’s death were curiously murky. A sketchy official account released by the police suggested that the former president’s daughter became suicidally depressed as a consequence of the apparent drowning deaths of her two grandchildren. Lucy Douglas, the mother of the missing children, sustained numerous cuts and bruises, and Weiler, a broken nose, while attempting unsuccessfully to restrain Douglas.
The day of Dolly’s death began on the island off the Maine coast where Sartoris has lived a hermitlike existence for several decades. Dorothy Hardesty Douglas, her son’s widow, Lucy Douglas, Lucy’s children, Laurie, age 7, and Zachary, age 4, Roger Tinker, a family friend, and Nicholas Weiler, Sartoris’s natural son, were visiting the island in the wake of the apparent kidnapping and possible murder of Lady Maggie Weiler, Weiler’s mother and Sartoris’s long-time mistress. Early that morning, Dolly Douglas left the island, alone. A call to the airport at Bar Harbor from Lucy Douglas asking if Dolly Douglas were the only passenger on the helicopter ferry suggests that when the children were discovered missing, Lucy Douglas suspected her mother-in-law of taking them. The fact that Sartoris, Lucy Douglas, and Weiler, the younger Douglas’s fiancee, followed Dolly to Manhattan supports the idea that they believed she had taken her grandchildren.
Loose ends: Why was a sea and air search for the missing children not begun until after Dolly’s death? And what are the whereabouts of Dolly’s recent live-in lover, Tinker, who might or might not also be among the missing? An unconfirmed report of a dinghy missing from Sartoris’s boathouse forms the basis of one theory: that Tinker, with Dolly’s knowledge, possibly at her behest, may have attempted to abduct the children with the intention of meeting Dolly at some prearranged, secret place and that the abduction ended tragically in the notoriously rough waters off the island. If the theory has any basis in fact, the loss of the grandchildren and lover might be grounds enough for Mike Hardesty’s daughter’s suicide, let alone possible felony charges ranging from kidnapping to murder (manslaughter occurring during the commission of a felony is automatically first degree murder).
But it seems unlikely that the whole truth will ever be known.
8.22.80 • —
VIPerpetrations, VIP
They came back to the island. It was, as always, impossible to speak over the noise of the helicopter as they flew over the sea, but they held hands as the dark speck in the blue grew rapidly, magically, until it was a real place again. And then they could see the old man and Ethelyn Blood, waiting for them with the pony and cart.
Lucy was much thinner, Sartoris noted, as she ducked out of the chopper. He gathered her up and kissed her cheek. It was wet. She had veiled her eyes behind dark glasses, an act of courtesy, to spare him her pain. Over her shoulder, the old man peered anxiously at his son, who shrugged, and muscled the bags into the cart.
In a few minutes they sat on the terrace in companionable silence. The day was pleasantly warm, but with the fading heat of an autumn sun. Ethelyn Blood served, with some ceremony, hot tea spiced with oranges. Its delicate scent mingled with the salt smell of the sea, brewing in them a rich sense of the day.
‘Have you told Lucy the whole business?’ Sartoris said at last, putting down his tea cup.
‘No,’ Nick answered, reaching out to take Lucy’s hand.
She was, except for the convulsive reaching out to Nick, stone still in her chair.
‘I am sorry,’ the old man began. She turned her shaded eyes toward him, but he could not be sure she really saw him. ‘The trash in the papers, I mean, and keeping you shut up so long.’
She looked away from him, out to sea.
‘Would you believe the truth if you had not seen it?’
‘No,’ she murmured, in a voice so low he had to strain to hear it.
‘Of course not. And Nicholas and I thought there would be a great deal of room for abuse of the device.’
She laughed harshly.
‘You were in shock. It was my decision to keep the business as secret as I could. I removed the children and Tinker from the apartment, as Nicholas told you, by means of a small jewelbox of Dolly’s. It was quite small enough to fit into my jacket pocket and no one, apparently, had any idea of searching an old relic like myself. I held out no hope to you; I really thought it unlikely they would survive. From what Tinker told you, the thing killed Maggie and her old nurse; we could not be sure, either, that Dolly had operated it correctly.
‘We were able to convince the police that Dolly’s death was accidental, that she attacked you and you had to fight back. They called it suicide, saving themselves the cost of legal action against you, and further investigation. The fact of the children having been lost weighed in your favor, I suspect. There was one great hole in the whole yarn, of course.’
‘The maid,’ Lucy said.
‘Yes. Silly woman. She’d seen Tinker. Fortunately, she went all hysterical and the police discounted her evidence.
I
said we’d come without Tinker, just the three of us. There are benefits to notoriety. It did turn out that Tinker has a mother, who has written a number of letters to the police. Rather a pathetic thing, I gather, but the police find her amusing.’