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  He ran his oily hands down the arms of my sweater, slipping his fingers into the cuffs. Out came the knife. “Nice try.”

  Before Randy pushed me into the apartment, I stared him in the eyes—looking for some human emotion, something within him that might take that NYPD cell phone and call for help. “Why would you do this for him?” I said.

  But Randy didn’t answer. He was wearing colored contacts—deep purple, like a bruise. Strange I hadn’t noticed them earlier.

  Alone in the basement apartment, what reached me first was the smell—a flat, clean, unnatural odor I quickly identified as paint. It was dark here, with no lights on and the shades drawn, but it wasn’t pitch-black like a black box theater. I could see shadows. Nothing moved.

  Randy had shut the door behind me and stayed outside. Probably following orders, but still, I got the feeling he was afraid to go in. What is in here?

  I felt something near my back—put my hand behind me and touched cloth, soft and inanimate, stretched against a frame. Chair, no, longer. Couch. Okay.

  “Hello?” My voice came out thin, a whisper. “Daniel?”

  Clink. My foot knocked into it, and I felt something wet hit my sock. I looked down at a squat cylinder. Paint can. Paint on my sock.

  My eyes were beginning to adjust. I looked down and saw five paint cans lined up against the back of the couch. To the right a wall of exposed brick and some kind of hallway.

  I turned around, rested my hands against the back of the couch, the only thing I could trust. I could make out a more complex shape against the opposite wall. A shelf unit lined with small silhouettes, all of them perfectly still. All of them human.

  Don’t scream, not yet. Where is the light? Need light. Calm, calm . . . “I’m ready to make the trade!” My voice was louder this time, and like a reward, the lights went on.

  The forms on the shelves were dolls: some porcelain, some plastic. I recognized many of them as collectibles. The same collectibles I’d seen on the shopping channel, with working limbs and plush clothes and names like Clarissa and Scarlett and Sebastian. Just like on TV, only with one difference: Someone had removed all their eyes.

  The couch was a spotless white, its back cushions removed to make way for a large cardboard box. From where I stood, I could see its closed top.

  “Hello?”

  No answer still. I moved closer to the box and touched it. “Daniel?”

  Holding my breath, I pulled back the cardboard folds and looked inside.

  Dead white skin, bloody lips.

  “Shit.”

  I jumped back, threw my hands over my mouth.

  Stay quiet. Breathe in, breathe out. Now. Take a step. Look again.

  In the box was a face, yes. But not Daniel’s. Not human. A chalk-white doll’s face, lips painted red, resting atop many other painted doll’s faces. Looking closer, I saw the box was packed with bald, porcelain heads, their lips gleaming and lurid, their cheeks rouged, bright blue and purple and green paint smeared generously over their eyes, which were all open, all intact.

  When I closed the lid again, I noticed three words, printed on the bottom left corner in neat, capital letters: THE BAD ONES.

  The lights flashed off, then on again.

  All right asshole, you want mind games, I’ll give you mind games. “Show your face,” I said. “Or I break all the good ones!”

  I moved around the couch, headed straight for the shelving unit. But before I could get there, I slipped on something wet, fell to my hands and knees on the cold cement floor.

  I got up fast, saw blood on my hands, blood on the floor. And then I saw a man’s body, lengthwise against the front of the couch with the paint cans looming over him, throat slit so deeply he’d nearly been decapitated.

  His eyes were opened wide, as if he still couldn’t believe what had happened, couldn’t believe he’d seen his own death coming at him so strong, so soon. And he was still wearing his mirrored contacts.

  “Cinderella / dressed in yella /

  Went upstairs to kiss her fella /

  How many kisses did she take?”

  I whirled around, and saw the girlfriend. The frightened blonde with the perfect face.

  “One, two, three, four . . .”

  She wore her short-sleeved red dress, and dragged Daniel by the arm like a rag doll. Over his mouth stretched a thick piece of gaffer’s tape. In her other hand, she grasped the black handle of a butcher’s knife.

  It hit me all at once: The phone calls, always a whisper. Her voice, not his. Her notes, her paint, her makeovers. She’s the doll freak. She’s the murderer.

  “It’s okay, Daniel,” I said.

  “Don’t lie.” She grinned. Her lips were painted a bright bloodred.

  I glanced at the dead man on the floor, then back at her. “Why did you kill him?”

  She started around the couch. I moved in front of the head, trying to block it from Daniel.

  “He was big and ugly,” she said.

  I looked at Daniel. Tears ran down his cheeks.

  “Plus, he brought me nothing but bad ones.”

  “Bad ones?”

  “The ones with the obvious flaws you can never fix, no matter how much paint you use. The oversized ones. The nasty ones that hit and bite and run away.”

  “You’re not talking about dolls. You mean children.”

  She rolled her eyes. “Projects.”

  “But . . . you were crying at the river. I saw—”

  “You saw me from the back.” She said it as if she were talking to a slow student. “I was laughing. At him, for being such a pansy. He was the one who always cried.”

  She took a few more steps forward. “Randy will be much better. He’s not an ugly pansy like Phil.”

  My eyes went back to the body. “Evan.”

  “Evan. Do you want to know who Evan is?” She let go of Daniel’s hand for a moment, strode over to the shelf unit and picked up a male doll, with shining yellow hair and red velvet overalls. “This is Evan,” she said, kissing each of its eyeholes. “My favorite of the boys.”

  “Run, Daniel!” I yelled, but he just stood there, staring at me. I know how you feel. Once upon a time, there was a princess who couldn’t move.

  “My goodness,” she said. “You are stupid.” She stepped closer to me, touched the blade of the butcher knife to the side of my face. “Pretty, though.”

  I thought of John Krull. Did he still think I was in the hospital cafeteria?

  “The best projects,” the red mouth said, “are pretty to begin with.” With the index finger on her other hand, she tapped my lower lip—softly, as if she were testing its resilience. “Close your eyes, Kleine Samantha.”

  What else could I do, but obey? What could I do, but wait as she dragged the cool blade down the side of my face, ’til I felt the point at the hollow of my throat? Please don’t watch this, Daniel. Please look away.

  The sharp point lingered there for several seconds and suddenly, I had her figured out: I knew she wouldn’t slit my throat. I was too pretty for that, too small for the big blade. If she did that, I’d be wrecked, like Phil, beyond restoration. No. What she’s going to do is drop the knife and strangle me—just like the children. She’s going to wait like a spider until I’m paralyzed with fear, and then she’s going to do it.

  When I felt the knife come away from my throat, I knew I was right. I knew that was exactly what she’d done with Graham, with Sarah, with all the others. They’d died feeling the same way I’d felt in the Pinto. Frozen. Once upon a time there was a princess who got angry.

  At the exact same moment, my eyes flew open and my knee shot up, connecting with her stomach. “You . . .” she wheezed, and the knife came at me, still clutched in her hand, point grazing my chest through the thick wool of my sweater. I felt a sting, knew I was bleeding, but not deep—at least, not deep enough to matter.

  I balled my hand into a fist and socked her in the face. I’d never punched anyone before, and it was
surprisingly painful, like hitting a brick wall.

  She fell back, clutching her face but still holding the knife. Shaking the pain out of my hand, I turned to Daniel. Daniel, now sitting on the floor in his dapper little overcoat. I looked into his face, at the gaffer’s tape over the mouth, the tears still streaming down his cheeks, and thought of his mom, Erika. What she must be thinking . . .

  “Run, run, run!” I screamed, louder and higher than I’d screamed, four days earlier, when I’d first seen John Krull. “Run!”

  “Shut the fuck up!” shouted the woman, and I couldn’t help but wonder, Where is Randy during all this? Maybe he wasn’t standing guard. Maybe he’d betrayed her and left, maybe he had called the police. Or maybe the walls were soundproofed.

  I lifted Daniel to his feet, and pushed him. Finally, he moved. He backed up, away from Phil’s body, around the side of the couch. Atta boy. Now go faster. She was coming at me now, knife raised, red lips stretched into a grin, like the pig on the mural.

  She flew forward, and I grabbed the hand with the knife in it. But she was ready this time. She didn’t let go. I pushed the knife hand back with all my might, but still it moved closer and closer to my throat.

  I could feel the huge cardboard box pressed against the small of my back, and I knew we’d reached the couch.

  Out of the corner of my eye, I could see the little boy—still motionless, still watching. Oh, God, Daniel, would you please just run away!

  The knife moved closer until the point touched the soft tight skin above my trachea. My grip on her wrist was weakening, my arm tiring of holding her off. I looked at her face, the bright blue contacts, the lipstick smeared across her chin, the cheek purplish where my fist had made contact and thought, This is it.

  Suddenly, she screamed and dropped the knife, and it took me a few seconds to compute what had happened. Daniel—tiny Daniel, frozen with fear—had ripped the tape off his mouth and bit her in the leg.

  He raced out of the room, and she headed after him, all anger, all reflex, unaware she’d dropped her knife.

  I snatched it off the floor as she caught up with Daniel, grabbed him by the hair and jerked him back towards her.

  “Let him go!” I yelled, and when she spun around to face me, Daniel took off again.

  “Bitch.” She grabbed for my neck with both hands, ready to kill, but there was no time. No time for her now.

  In one motion, I plunged the blade straight into her chest. It was like pushing through thick ice, then a release, like hitting running water below. That’s how I tried to imagine it. Just ice. Just water.

  Her arms went lax, and I waited for her to drop, thinking of absolutely nothing.

  It wasn’t until she fell to the floor and I noticed her gold hair fanning out behind her and the blood spreading out from the hilt of the knife in a widening circle, that I remembered she was a person.

  I watched her face. Behind the contacts, her eyes seemed fixed, motionless. Then she smiled, blood leaking out of her mouth, staining her white teeth and mingling with the smeared lipstick as her breathing stopped. From deep in her chest, I heard the rattle as life finally left her body. But she kept watching me, still smiling, as if she’d had the last laugh.

  The room that Daniel had run into wasn’t a room at all. It was a large closet that smelled of cedar. Nothing was hanging in it, but there were several stacks of magazines on the floor. Doll Fancy, American Doll, Doll Collector, Doll Aficionado . . . Must have been where she’d gotten the ad for Schoolteacher Barbie. Daniel was curled up between two of the stacks with his head down, his knees pressed into his chest. It made him look smaller than usual, almost like a baby.

  My sweater had been covered in the woman’s blood, but I’d taken it off, used it to wipe the blood off my hands, so Daniel could see me without getting more frightened.

  I lifted a bunch of magazines out of the way, got on the floor and put my arms around him. How tiny he was beneath that grown-up overcoat.

  After a long time, I said, “You are a very brave boy.”

  Tentatively, Daniel sat up. He reached into one of his overcoat pockets, handed me a photograph he’d been carrying.

  It was of the blond woman—the doll restorer—sitting on a bench in a small city park. A light snow dusted everything around her, and she was smiling her perfect smile, holding a little red-haired girl in her lap. It would have been an ideal Christmas card photo, were it not for the serious set of the little girl’s lips, or the strange, imploring way in which her eyes watched the camera. The blond woman wore the same camel-hair coat she’d had on three days earlier, when she’d accosted me outside the Sixth Precinct house. The girl wore an unzipped purple parka and underneath, a Little Mermaid T-shirt.

  Epilogue

  The Rudder

  After I killed the doll restorer, Daniel didn’t say a word—not even when the police arrived at the apartment, on a tip from a pedestrian who’d heard screams.

  “You okay, little fella?” said one of the officers, and still, he said nothing. Not until he noticed three more cops, opening another door at the end of the long hallway—a door I hadn’t noticed earlier.

  Then he started to scream and, hard as we tried, we couldn’t get him to stop. When Erika Klein finally showed up, he fell into her arms, sobbing and coughing.

  The room was the doll restorer’s project gallery, where she kept all her finer, more exotic paints, her vats of plaster and homemade hair dye, her knives, her scalpels, and the jagged eye scoopers she’d fashioned from soup ladles and welded saw blades. There were more dolls there, of course—good ones and bad, works in progress.

  And one human project. A little girl, later estimated to have died nearly six months earlier, her body too decomposed for proper identification. Daniel had been tied to a chair, facing this project for a long time, as Phil yelled at the blond lady in the other room.

  Three weeks later, the Kleins left New York. They never said where they were moving but, Erika assured me, it was “someplace warm.”

  On the last day of school, I got a manila envelope in the mail, with a postmark from New Mexico. There was no note inside—just a brown crayon drawing of a long-eared, four-legged animal, a child’s handwriting underneath. MY DOG FRED, it said. LOVE DANIEL.

  The doll restorer’s name was Cynthia Jane Gray, and she was the sole owner and proprietor of Cinderella’s Toy and Hobby. It’s how she met the children or, as she might have put it, how she found her projects.

  Four weeks before her disappearance, Jocelyn Reed, the girl in the footlocker, had bought one of Cinderella’s vintage Barbies and joined the store’s Barbie Collector’s Club, which met Wednesday afternoons. After walking alone to her third meeting, she never returned. An anxious-sounding Cynthia had phoned Jocelyn’s parents, telling them their daughter had never shown up—was she all right? And no one had doubted her concern—not the Reeds, not the police who’d questioned “kind, caring” Cynthia Gray.

  I learned that Jocelyn had been murdered a week before Sarah had. Seeing me at the river had not made Cynthia kill more kids, but it had rattled her. Rattled her enough to stalk me, to murder Elmira, to kidnap Daniel, to drop her carefully crafted mask of sanity by making my death an all-consuming goal.

  As for the others, Graham was from New Jersey, but had corresponded with Cynthia when he tried to order model airplane kits from her Web site.

  Sarah Flannigan had lived just one block away from Cinderella’s Toy and Hobby. More than once, her parents had panicked when Sarah suddenly disappeared, then breathed sighs of relief when they found her talking to that beautiful blond woman who owned the neighborhood toy store.

  That’s what Cynthia was—a beautiful blond woman. It often placed her beyond suspicion. When she’d shown up at Sunny Side, claiming to be Daniel Klein’s visiting cousin, Daniel had forgotten all he’d learned from Buster the Safety Dog and walked willingly away with her. Terry hadn’t thought twice about it. Not until Daniel’s mother arrived twenty minute
s later.

  Before she bought the store, Cynthia had two interests: dolls and her job. She worked in a funeral home, embalming bodies, painting faces.

  A week after she was laid off, the funeral home owner discovered a body missing—that of a five-year-old girl. Her family threatened to sue, and they settled out of court. While the body was never found, the owner had creeping, unvoiced suspicions. (“Pretty,” Miss Gray used to croon as she painted lips and cheeks. “So pretty, pretty, pretty . . .”)

  With more free time, Cynthia devoted it to dolls. She scoured eBay for collectibles, went to conventions. “She could drive a hard bargain,” said a fellow hobbyist. “What she liked best was porcelain girls.”

  Cynthia was from Pennsylvania, a rich only child who rarely went to school. Her parents, a former housekeeper said, sent Cindy to her room when she talked too much or got, as they put it, “too lively.” It was a room filled with beautiful antique dolls.

  Cynthia’s parents died when she was seventeen. They were discovered in bed together, their wrists slit, holding hands. Double suicide, everyone assumed. Cynthia’s mother—who’d never liked makeup of any sort—had been wearing a deep garnet shade of lipstick. Odder still were the freckles drawn on her father’s cheeks with eyebrow pencil.

  I learned all this by reading the tabloids, which had a field day with Cynthia Jane Gray. “Cinder-hell-a,” she was dubbed by the Post. Not many living people knew her well—except possibly Randy, who was talking through lawyers, proclaiming his total ignorance as to the horrific crimes his boss had committed.

  As for Mirror Eyes, his real name was Phillip Allen Brewster, and he was thirty-two years old. He was a schizophrenic who’d spent most of his life in mental institutions and probably couldn’t believe his luck when a woman who looked like Cynthia Gray showed interest in him. They had met three summers earlier, when, recently released, he’d applied for a job at her store. Soon after he got the job, he stopped taking his medication and sent his sister a letter. I’m doing good works, he wrote. I’m helping an angel who makes little ones beautiful and sends them to God.