A veritable sea of dolls crowded the bed and the carpet and ebbed up to about three feet from the door. A multi-faced one sitting on the windowsill seemed like it was staring right at me. A fine sweat prickled my forehead. It wasn’t an especially warm evening, but suddenly I wanted to get this over with as soon as possible.
Angus snorted as we hovered in the entryway. “Damn. Guess ol’ Harriet wasn’t planning on having any guests sleep over. This place is stuffed with stuff!”
I steeled myself to edge inside. In this room was more of a variety. Kewpie dolls, Madame Alexanders, and Izannah Walker cloth dolls from the 1870s. I bent and picked up a tiny World War I era doll with a body of papier-mâché, a bisque head, mohair wig, and painted-on shoes.
“Jeez, Angus. Some people are only interested in a certain kind of doll, but it appears Harriet was an equal opportunity collector.”
“She sure knew how to spend money, I’ll give her that.”
There was even a first-edition Barbie doll in her zebra-striped bathing suit, still in the original box. I smiled ruefully to myself as I thought about Sarah’s Barbies; their golden ponytails restyled into choppy bangs with a pair of scissors and barbed wire tattoos added with a black marker.
Angus did his best to make an inventory, and I called out as many different dolls as I could spot.
Next was the master bedroom and adjoining sitting room with their high tray ceilings. There was one very large doll, about three feet tall, sitting in a rocking chair, and numerous others covering the bed. It was tough to see how Harriet could have slid in between them to sleep, no matter how skinny she was. While I inspected a Victorian tin dollhouse near the bathroom, and Angus was busy counting the dolls on the bed, Birch Kunes finally caught up to us.
I didn’t look at him, but I sensed his appraisal.
“I don’t know what you must think of me, Daisy,” he said softly.
Was my contempt that easy to read? And why should he care what I thought of him, anyway?
“I did love her once, you know.” He gestured to a silver photo frame on the dressing table. It was a picture of Harriet, a younger Harriet, and I caught a glimpse of the woman he must have fallen for. She was on a boat, wearing a black maillot swimsuit, her body slender, not yet painfully gaunt. She was laughing at him, her blond Adonis, with her hair swept back in the breeze. Even though she was ten years older than Birch, I couldn’t see much of a difference between them in this picture.
Wow. Harriet had aged rapidly. And badly.
“After we tried unsuccessfully to have a baby early on, she shut me out. She became obsessed with her collecting, with no room for anything or anyone else in her life. Literally.”
Birch ran a hand through the now artificially streaked blond hair. In the unforgiving light shining up from the table lamp, I could see the bags under his eyes, and the lines around his mouth showed his four-plus decades on this earth. He looked more like a distracted scientist than a successful doctor.
He frowned slightly, not from anger it seemed, more like he was pondering a puzzle. “We moved to Meadow Farms about five years ago. I’d hoped it would be a fresh start for us, but unfortunately nothing changed. She managed to fill this place with junk in a relatively short period of time.”
Very expensive, very collectible junk.
Birch sighed and straightened the picture frame. “After a couple of years, I guess I finally gave up. That’s when I met Bettina.”
He brightened at the sound of her name, the lines of exhaustion disappearing for a moment. “She was a patient. She was getting divorced at the time and needed a job. Even though she didn’t have a medical background, she made a great receptionist. Not only was she warm and friendly, but being diabetic herself, Bettina could sympathize with my patients, especially the younger ones who had just been diagnosed. Diabetes is tough for anyone to deal with, but especially kids, when they’re with their friends who want to go to the Dairy Queen . . .”