The Dollhouse Murders (12 page)

“She doesn't care.” Louann stuck out her lower lip. “She doesn't like us. And I don't like her.”

“Did Mom say anything about when she'd be back?”
There was a slim chance her mother wouldn't wait for Dad's seminar to end on Sunday. After all, she'd only gone along so that Louann would have to be at Amy's party. Maybe she'd come home on the bus today.

“I don't remember,” Louann said. “You call her and tell her to come right now.”

Amy considered. “I could call and see if she's at our house, I suppose,” she said. Amy was willing to try anything. She didn't want to stay another night any more than Louann did.

She tiptoed downstairs to the telephone niche, catching a glimpse of Aunt Clare still hunched on the top step of the porch. She looked like a little girl sitting there by herself. A
frightened
little girl.

Amy brushed away the thought. Aunt Clare knew as much about the haunted dollhouse now as Amy did. If she refused to believe, whose fault was that?
She's not my responsibility anymore
.

Amy let the telephone ring a dozen times, just in case her mother was in the basement or out in the garden. But she didn't really expect an answer. Her mother was almost certainly a hundred miles away in Madison, shopping or having dinner with Dad.

“That isn't necessary.” Amy whirled around. Aunt Clare stood on the other side of the screen door. “You don't have to call anyone. I don't want you to leave, Amy—not before we try to straighten this out.” Her face was set and pale, but her voice was strong.

“We can't go home anyway,” Amy said. “Nobody is there.”

“Of course not.” Aunt Clare came into the foyer. “Let's go out in the kitchen and make some cookies,” she said. “I want to talk to you, and we might as well do something constructive at the same time. Where's Louann?”

“Upstairs in our bedroom.”

“I upset her terribly, didn't I? And you. I'm sorry. Would you go up and ask her to come down? Tell her I've stopped roaring.”

“She won't come—not until she feels like it.” Amy followed her aunt to the kitchen, dizzied by her shift in mood and wondering what was going to happen next.

A flick of the light switch turned the kitchen into a cheery haven from the storm that was beginning to break overhead. “Chocolate chip?” Aunt Clare began getting out ingredients without waiting for an answer. Amy sank into a chair, still not sure what was expected of her.

“I'm not going to talk about the dollhouse,” Aunt Clare said firmly. “I've thought it over, and I believe that you believe what you said is true. So it was wrong of me to say you lied. I hope you'll forgive me. My temper is my curse. But I do want you to know why I feel so strongly about being reminded of what happened in this house. The thing is, Amy”—she turned away to pour chocolate bits into a measuring cup—“I'm quite certain that it was my fiancé—Tom Keaton—who murdered Grandpa and Grandma Treloar.”

“Oh!” The word popped out of Amy as if she'd been hit in the stomach.

“Tom was eight years older—hotheaded, reckless, charming—exciting to a strong-willed eighteen-year-old girl who'd seen practically nothing of the world. Grandpa and Grandma met him only once—I told you about that—and they said I was to stop seeing him immediately. He was drunk when he came to the house. It seemed terribly unfair that they'd let one bad impression make up their minds and determine the course of my whole life. He'd already asked me to marry him by then, and I'd agreed.”

“Oh, Aunt Clare—”

“Let me keep talking while I feel up to it,” Aunt Clare hurried on. “You can get out the cookie sheets, if you want. . . .

“I was furious with Grandma and Grandpa. I told them a hundred, a thousand times that I didn't want to be treated like a child. I guess that's why I despised the dollhouse. I was practically an adult when they gave it to me, and my grandmother insisted that it remain in my bedroom for the next three years. When I was a woman of eighteen, in love with an older man who said he loved me, I still had a dollhouse in my bedroom!” Aunt Clare's voice shook. “It seems incredible now that a thing like that bothered me so much. But it did. I sulked and stormed all through those months, and I never stopped seeing Tom. Grandma and Grandpa suspected what I was doing, but they couldn't stop me. I'd pretend I was going out with other friends, and then I'd meet him somewhere. Or I'd just sneak out of the house after the others were asleep. Grandpa caught me coming
in once, but he didn't tell Grandma. She wasn't well—she had severe arthritis—and he didn't want her to be any more upset than she already was.”

Amy moved around the kitchen in a daze, setting the cookie sheets on the table, rinsing the measuring cups and spoons as Aunt Clare finished with them. At one point she realized Louann was standing in the doorway, watching and listening.

“Gradually I realized that Grandma and Grandpa might be right about Tom. He was drinking a great deal, and when he drank his temper was uncontrollable. Worse than mine! I was frightened, but I was far too stubborn to admit I was wrong about him. The more they tried to keep me home—the more they treated me like a prisoner—the more determined I was to be with him. And then he began to insist that we get married soon. When I put him off, he blamed my grandparents for influencing me, and one afternoon he told me he was going to come to the house and have it out with them. I didn't believe him—he was drunk, rambling—I was sure it was just talk. That night I went to a movie with girl friends, to have something else to think about. That was the night they were killed.”

Later when Amy thought about Aunt Clare, she remembered watching teaspoonfuls of batter plop onto baking pans in neat rows. The familiar sound of the spoon scraping the bowl made Aunt Clare's words that much more horrifying.

“I came home from the movies and found the front door standing open. The parlor door was partly closed,
and when I pushed it, something kept it from opening all the way. I peeked into the room and saw the desk—and I saw Grandma lying in front of the fireplace—the blood. . . . I ran upstairs, and Grandpa was lying across the bed in their room. Paul—Paul was nowhere! All I could think of was that Tom had come and killed them all. And it was my fault!”

“What did you do?” Amy's whisper was almost drowned out by a clap of thunder.

“I ran out of the house. The nearest neighbor was a half-mile away, but I never thought of using the phone. All I wanted was to run! When the police came, they found the phone lines had been cut, so I couldn't have called anyway.”

Aunt Clare slid the cookie sheets into the oven. When she turned around, she saw Louann and motioned her to come in. “You're just in time, Louann. We'll have cookies and milk in about ten minutes.”

Louann, looking sullen, sat at the table and propped her chin on her hands. Amy sat next to her, and Aunt Clare pulled out a chair across from them.

“The police found Paul—your father—sound asleep in the wood closet in the parlor. He couldn't tell them a thing. They decided the killer must have broken in on Grandpa and Grandma in their bedroom. He shot Grandpa, and Grandma ran out of the room. She grabbed Paul from his bed and took him downstairs to the parlor. The phone lines were cut, and her arthritis was too bad for her to run away, so she did the only thing she could think of. She hid Paul in the closet, and
then she pushed that desk up against the door as a barricade. But Tom—the killer—was too strong. He pushed the door open, and he killed her. Then he went through the house emptying drawers, pulling things out of closets, making a shambles.”

Aunt Clare's voice faded off, and for a few moments no one spoke. Then Amy suggested timidly, “Maybe it wasn't your fiancé who did it. If things were stolen, it could have been just anyone. A burglar—”

“Tom would have been clever enough to make it look like a burglary,” Aunt Clare said. “And I know he owned a gun. I don't think he came here meaning to kill them—he probably intended to frighten them. But when he suddenly appeared in their bedroom, they must have told him exactly what they thought of him. Grandma would have, I'm sure. And he went crazy! I've imagined it a thousand times, every hideous minute of it. Sometimes I feel as if I were there myself.”

She sighed, looking into the girls' white faces. “I'm talking too much,” she said. “But I want you to know how it was. . . . Later, the next day—the house was full of policemen and my grandparents' friends—I realized that something
else
was wrong. People were looking at me and whispering. Finally someone told me that there'd been a car accident, and Tom was dead. He'd been driving at high speed on a road north of town, and he'd hit a tree. No one knew we were engaged—I'd never dared announce it—but there'd been rumors, and everyone knew we were close. I suppose the police wondered if there could be a connection between the two
tragedies, but Tom had friends who testified that he'd been with them all evening. So that was it. The police called it ‘murder by person or persons unknown.' And I was the only person who guessed the truth.”

The timer buzzed, and Amy and Louann jumped. Aunt Clare got up and opened the oven. “Perfect,” she said. “There's something soothing about baking. It's one thing you can count on to turn out right, if you just follow directions.”

She lifted the trays from the oven and set them on trivets to cool. Then she went to the refrigerator and poured tall glasses of milk.

“As soon as I could get away—as soon as I knew Paul would be taken care of—I went to Chicago to look for a job. I never wanted to see Claiborne or be reminded of what happened here again.”

“But you did come back,” Amy marveled. “I don't think I could have done it.”

“I didn't have much choice,” Aunt Clare replied. “You see, even though I'd left Claiborne behind, I couldn't forget. The guilt—the terrible feeling that Grandma and Grandpa died because of me—just about drove me out of my mind. Eventually I found a good job, but six months later I was fired. I had awful headaches that made me miss work—and moody times when I just couldn't get control of myself. I found another job, and the same thing happened. It's never really stopped. The periods between ‘explosions' are longer now, but the bad times haven't ended. I dream again and again about this house and what happened here. A
couple of months ago, after a long period of sleeplessness, I had a battle with my boss—and I was out of a job again. Just about then, your father wrote, pleading with me to take time to look over the house and get it ready to be sold. I had nowhere else to go, nothing else to do. I thought maybe if I came back and emptied the old place of all its memories, I'd be able to make a fresh start.”

She loosened the cookies with a spatula, transferring them one at a time to a plate. “So here I am,” she said dryly, “scaring my two nieces to death with all the gruesome details I wanted to forget—and with a haunted dollhouse, so you tell me, up in the attic. That's a thought I can't tolerate—the idea that my grandparents can't rest peacefully, any more than I can.” She smiled wearily at Amy.

Louann bit into a cookie. “Yum,” she said, smacking her lips. “You make good cookies, Aunt Clare. I guess we can stay here tonight.”

Aunt Clare laughed. She touched Louann lightly on the top of the head. “Thanks, pal,” she said. “I needed that.”

The telephone rang, and Amy jumped up to answer it. She welcomed a moment away from the kitchen.
It's so sad
, she thought, forgetting how angry she'd been with Aunt Clare a half-hour earlier.
No wonder she's moody and bad-tempered sometimes. That horrible night has spoiled her whole life
.

Amy's mother was on the phone. “I'm still in Sun Prairie, Amy,” she said. She sounded tired. “It's been
a difficult twenty-four hours here. John is terribly sick, but the doctors are more encouraging now than they were last night.”

“John?” Amy felt as if she were coming back from a great distance. John was Barbara's husband. And he really was sick? Her mother hadn't made up the emergency after all?

“He had surgery late last night,” her mother said. “Barbara's practically in shock.”

“That's awful,” Amy said. “I hope he'll be okay.”

“So do I. Oh, Amy,” her mother's voice warmed, “I'm sorry about last night—I really am. I know you wanted your party to be all your own, so for me to thrust Louann on you and Clare . . . but there was no other way. Barbara has two tiny children, and they've kept me hopping while she's been at the hospital with John.”

Amy felt as if she should apologize to her mother, but she didn't. “We had a great time last night,” she said, knowing that would make her mother feel better than anything else she could say. “Louann was fine. It was really a good party.”

“That's wonderful!” The tired note was gone. “I can't tell you how relieved I am.”

“When will you be home?”

“I just talked to your father on the phone. Barbara's mother expects to get here tomorrow afternoon from California, and she'll take over with the children. Unless something unexpected happens before then, Dad and I'll both be back tomorrow night.” Her mother
paused. “How about you?”

“How about me what?” Amy was confused.

“When will you be home to stay?”

Right away!
Amy wanted to shout it into the phone. She thought of sitting at the dinner table with her own family, of going to bed in her own bedroom.

“I don't know,” she said. And then, “Soon.”

It was the best she could do. She knew her mother was disappointed. But she couldn't leave now, right after Aunt Clare had confided in them. More than ever, she had to uncover the secret of the dollhouse. If there was a secret at all.