Hollywood Dolls

Short story

On the night we met her, Jessica told us she was afraid to return to her apartment alone. I first saw her at Bob’s Frolic, the Hollywood bar where I made my friends, Rena and Ron, stop for drinks before driving up the hills to Kim’s place. At the bar, Ron anxiously flicked a crisp twenty between his fingers. Rena took off her leather jacket and was throwing her long black hair over her shoulder when she froze, spotting Jessica in the crowd.

Rena screamed, “What are you doing here?”

A group of people hovering near the jukebox parted at the urgency in her voice, probably hoping they wouldn’t turn out to be the one she had dramatically discovered. Their flight left me with my first full view of a nervous, petite girl lost somewhere in her twenties violently running a crumpled dollar bill across the top edge of the jukebox, trying to straighten it to feed the machine. She wore a functional yellow dress that made you think of mental in-patients. Her hair was raked back in deep finger-tracks, its flow down her shoulders kinked with the ghost impression of a band that must have once held it in a ponytail.

Rena yelled, “Jessica!” and the girl turned, her mouth pulled into a sneer by her efforts to flatten the bill. Rena looked her up and down, searching for something to say.

“What a cute dress!”

They leaned toward each other and executed a quick, rigid hug.

“No one told me you were in town,” Rena said to her, then turned to us and said, “Jessica was in my freshman hall at Northwestern – god, six years ago.” She spun back to Jessica and said, “Didn’t you live on my floor?”

Jessica’s eyes became distant. She seemed to go deep inside for a moment, then shrugged as if Rena had asked her to go back to an unreachable time.

“But you disappeared, or I mean, we lost touch,” Rena said.

When Jessica still didn’t say anything, Rena burst into a nervous laugh. “What, were you hiding? Just kidding. Jen tried once or twice to dig you up.”

Ron reached out and gently touched Rena’s hip, and she stepped back into his arms, scanning Jessica and obviously having no idea who this oddly dressed girl had become, or how to fit her into a conversation.

Rena said, “How’ve you been? What are you doing now?”

When Jessica answered, her voice was cracked, hoarse and barely intelligible. “I’m a singer,” she said.

“That’s so great,” Rena said, looking to Ron and me for help.

Jessica had the wild look of someone who had just burned down her own home and was now, in her donated clothes, searching our faces for some way to make that madness fit with what she already knew of herself.

My friends and I were in, as they say, good places, advancing in our careers, fit in our physiques, able to afford the service charges. Rena was a magazine photo-shoot producer; Ron had given up a perfectly honest job writing female fantasies for Hustler to become an ad copywriter at my office.

“Are you in a band?” Rena asked her.

Jessica smiled and spoke rapidly, but not an intelligible word cut through the music. Rena concentrated on Jessica’s face, nodding when a nod seemed necessary as Jessica hammered out what appeared to be her life story since college. She made arcing gestures with her hands which I imagined represented long sweeps of time, then scaled her gestures and her voice down to worry some small indecision or failure of faith, her words still impossible to make out under the music. It occurred to me that Jessica knew we couldn’t understand her and that that was the idea, to spill her guts but leave us unburdened. She flicked her eyes to me, then turned back to Rena, smiling as she wrapped it up with a sigh of resignation.

“Are you okay?” Rena said, bewildered. “You’re sounding a little raw there.”

“Ron tells me this bar was in an old movie,” I shouted over the music, startling Jessica. “What was it called, Ron, A Woman Under the Influence?”

“Under a Woman of Influence,” Ron yelled back.

Rena made a shouted round of introductions. “You can call this one Hobie,” she told Jessica, pointing at me. “But you have to know that his real name’s Hoberman.”

“That’s a great name, Hobie, Hoberman,” Jessica said, her voice breaking on Hobie and leaving the emphasis, and which name she preferred, to float in a vacuum. She told us that she was there with a few friends, who were sitting in the back, but they might have given her seat to someone while she was feeding the jukebox, so why didn’t she just stay with here us.

“Why don’t we go outside,” I yelled at Jessica, gesturing toward the door, “so you can tell me everything you’ve said again.”

We came out onto the sidewalk and stood a few moments, stunned by the relative silence while we stared at the speckling of glitter on Hollywood Boulevard.

She said, “Sorry. I trashed my voice yesterday during this prolonged screaming session in my car, with the windows up.”

“What were you listening to?” I asked.

“Not singing, screaming. There’s been a sag in the film musician’s market. It’s nothing to worry about. There’s just no work for the next few weeks, or months.”

I’ve always gotten a rise from being spoken to by a woman who’s losing her voice. The thrill of her bedroom huskiness. It seemed like Jessica’s croaking voice came out of a fantasy adolescence when people spoke honestly to each other.

Jessica said, “I hope you guys couldn’t hear me going on about the friends I’m supposedly here with. Rena would think there’s something wrong with me if she knew that I was here by myself.”

“She means well,” I said automatically.

“I’ve been having apartment troubles,” Jessica said.

Just the day before, she said, she was down on her knees where her bed normally sat (she had shoved it away from the wall) and was pushing a damp towel to wipe away the dust that had drifted there, when she felt three loose floorboards rock and give. All the joints between the flooring had become slightly separated with age, filling with the generations of dirt that gave her French Normandy-style apartment, close to the house where I stood, listening to her story, an antique look that she loved, so it didn’t annoy her that a few of the floorboards would be loose. She was curious how the space beneath her floor might look, so she went to the kitchen and opened the cabinet where a bucket of tools sat, like her bed, unmoved for the two years she’d lived there, then returned with a flat-head screwdriver to pry the rotting boards up. In the gap she opened, Jessica saw a tiny, white communion dress and a bridal veil draped over the blond curls and closed eyes of a doll.

She sat back, a little winded after moving her bed and scrubbing her floor, and stared at the doll, so matter of fact, hundreds of nights of lying in a direct line down from Jessica’s sleeping back, its arms thrust out from the dress’s puffy shoulders and its fingers splayed in a gesture of frozen need. It wasn’t until a roll of sweat dropped from Jessica’s forehead and struck one of the doll’s dusty arms, leaving a creamy grey run, that she decided to pick it up.

“My real estate agent sold me on the place when she told me that Lenny Bruce and Art Linketter lived on the same block,” she said. “Different times, of course. I think she was just trying to cover all the bases.”

“And you get to tell the story.”

“I get to tell the story. And I have a good view, so who cares if it’s true or not.”

“It’s true enough.”

“But I think my bedroom’s haunted.”

The muffled booming of an amped-up car stereo arrived on the boulevard, detonating behind the closed windows of a white limousine headed our way, blue neon glowing under its chassis. A teenaged girl in a pink ruffled prom dress rose from the sunroof, laughing and shaking her hair free of its gels and sprays and white ribbons. As the limo passed another girl in a peach taffeta dress joined her. They screamed at us as they rolled by, all wind and fluttering carnation petals and smiles full of brilliant teeth.

Rena and Ron came out of the bar laughing.

“We’re moving on to Kim’s now,” Ron informed us.

“Why don’t you come with us?” I said to Jessica.

“Oh, wait,” Rena said, “what about Jessica’s friends?”

Jessica turned, anxiety flashing in her eyes. There wasn’t anyone.

“They know she’s with us,” I said. “Come on, Jessica, you can tell us about this haunted apartment of yours.”

Kim’s modeling photos hung framed on every wall. She slammed the front door behind us with a sigh, brushed back her long, wispy strands of her famously clean hair, and said, “Who wants beer? They brought a case of Schlitz, the geeks.” The geeks, meaning some hangers-on who’d been there before us, rarely anyone she claimed she wanted to see.

I went into the kitchen to fetch a few beers, and when I returned Rena was introducing Jessica to Kim.

“You can’t pay these any attention,” Kim was saying to Jessica as she swept her arm across a series of fashion shoots on the opposite wall. “My fiancé is a photographer.”

“It must be nice,” Jessica said, turning to look at all the photos around us. “You never have to look in the mirror.”

Kim said, “No, with these around, a mirror is an absolute must.”

After we’d had a couple of rounds, Ron pointed a hand holding a cigarette at me and said, “What’s your favorite band name.”

Ron had been struggling with an ad campaign that needed band names with hidden meanings.

Rena sat up. “I love these kinds of questions. How about Babes in Toyland?”

“An old Laurel and Hardy movie isn’t a hidden meaning.”

“Cheap Trick,” I said.

“Good.”

Ron produced a little notebook from his back pocket.

Jessica sat on the couch, flipping through one of Kim’s Cosmo’s. Ron spun around and fixed her with a drunken stare. “What about you.”

Jessica said, “Joy Division,” flashing a smile I was starting to like.

Ron’s pen paused above his notebook.

“Well, that’s the name the Nazis gave to a certain group of female prisoners, the one they kept separate from the others.”

“That’s turned out to be bullshit. Why don’t you just say what you’re trying to say,” said Kim, a little creamed on the Schlitz. “Why don’t you just come out with it.”

Rena said, “The name’s fictional. It comes from an old S & M novel, The House of Dolls, or something or other.”

Ron shrugged. “Check it out, Kim, see what you find.”

I looked at Jessica, who was staring at a photo of Kim, a slow, inky spread of boredom crossing her face.

Kim brought out the dope she kept in her fiancé’s old 35-millimeter film canisters. Jessica passed a joint to Rena, exhaled, and told us about finding the doll. She stopped after describing the doll’s dress and glanced down at herself.

“FYI,” she said, “this dress isn’t mine. I was staying at a friend’s house last night, and she’s been getting a little too serious with her Scientology lately, like trying out her recruiting techniques on me. I didn’t have a fresh change of clothes, so I stole this dress from her closet and I slipped out the back door.”

Rena immediately relaxed, confirmed in her grasp on the world now that her college friend hadn’t gone off the deep end, wearing the clothes of the lunatic.

“But Jessie,” she said, handing the joint to me, “You didn’t just leave the doll in your bedroom.”

Jessica reached into the hole, wrapped her fingers around the doll and lifted it into the sunlight. Behind the veil, the doll’s eyes snapped open over empty eye sockets. Around its eyes and over the swells of its cheeks ran a network of cuts and gouges.

Now in the kind of let’s-see-how-bad-it-can-get trance, Jessica watched its scarred, empty eyes bob half-open, half-closed as she carried the doll into the kitchen, where the light was better. She laid it face-down on her breakfast table and unzipped the dress, expecting to find pentagrams or the fine, spidery writing of the deranged covering its skin, but found only the mark,

Hollywood Doll Manufacturing Co.

First Communion Series ’57.

She flipped the doll over, trying not to look at its eyes, and rapidly searched under the white bodice, where she found the skin still colored its original Pepto-pink, lightly drawn nipples and a dimple belly button. But its face, she said. She went out for a drive and found herself not wanting to go back.

“Working out my heebie jeebies hasn’t been going too well,” Jessica said, “because I’m staying with someone who believes we’re space men.”

“Why not just throw it out,” Rena said.

“It’s easy now, sitting here, but when I found it ... I don’t know, I just can’t throw it out and feel better. I think I need to know why it was put there before I can sleep there again.”

“You guys go be in the Twilight Zone without me,” Kim said, rising. She stretched and said, “I’m going to bed.” She flowed out of the room.

I said, “I think she does this think about me in my bedroom act on purpose.”

A few months earlier, Rena, Ron, Kim and I took a day trip to San Diego. On the drive back to LA, Kim and I slouched deep in the back seat, the day’s long drive lulling us into a murmured talk. Kim told me about growing up in New Mexico, the state road her parents drove her down, two-hours each way to the orthodontist and the beauty coach in Albuquerque. Thirteen-year-old Kim sitting in the back seat of the family car, quiet and shy, wanting only time alone in her room to hump her bed’s pillows, she said, grinning. Her coach soon convinced her family to move to LA, the real model’s market. I snapped a few pictures as she stared back at me, Kim’s backseat memories of the drives more intimate and time-honed than her recollections of her own bedroom.

A week after San Diego Kim and I snapped back into a chilly acquaintanceship. I gave Rena the prints of the photos I’d taken and slid the sleeve of negatives into the bottom of a drawer.

Now in Kim’s living room, Jessica was staring at me, waiting for me to prove myself capable of doing more than dragging her all over Hollywood, feeding her pot and then ignoring her in favor of the model.

“All right,” I said. “Why is that doll under your floor in your French Normandy building on the street where Art Linkletter lived? Let’s come up with five reasons.”

“Kids do fucked up things,” Ron said, counting his words on his fingers. “That’s all five.”

“Number one,” I said, standing up. “The little girl who lived there years ago saw one of those eyes-that-hypnotize black-and-white movies, so she popped her doll’s eyes out and buried it under her floor.”

I paced the living room, which, with its chromes and anti-bacterial whites, reminded me of the conference room at work where I made my ad presentations. I approached a large photo of Kim sprawled nearly naked across the arms of a Queen Anne chair.

“Or a previous tenant,” I said. “A guy with a lot of time on his hands left the doll behind as a mystery.”

Jessica leaned forward and folded her arms on her legs. She seemed to have given up on the discussion but waited for us to finish.

I said, “A psychotic who once lived there believed that the little girls who played in the street outside his window could see into his heart, so he used the doll to practice gouging their eyes out.”

“Jesus, Hobie,” Rena said. “It was probably the little girl’s brother. The end. Let’s go get some waffles. Chicken and waffles, Jessie. Hobie, please shut up.”

Jessica stood and said, “All right, where’s the bathroom in this place.”

Rena snapped to attention. “Down the hall, past the picture of Kim riding a tiger.”

When Jessica had gone, I said, “I think we should take her home. She lives just down the canyon. You know, so she can pick up some clothes.”

“Good idea,” Ron said, lifting Rena’s jacket from the back of a chair.

We gathered the empties into a neat cluster on Kim’s coffee table, yawning, stretching, and otherwise pretending that we hadn’t just spent an hour talking about a doll. A few moments later Jessica returned, her hair dampened and smoothed.

Rena said, “We’re taking you home so you can get some things. Hobie wants to see you in your own clothes.”

“That’s the nicest thing I’ve heard in a long time,” Jessica said.

The cutback turns slowly unfolded before my headlights. I flipped the radio to a talk station and turned the volume just below Jessica’s voice as she murmured directions to her building.

“Did you recognize Kim?” I said.

“Of course,” said Jessica, happy to have something new to talk about. “She’s all over the place in commercials. Shampoo, right?”

“Among others,” Rena said. “But for a model she’s pretty down-to-earth, don’t you think?”

“Yes, but – and don’t take this the wrong way – but when I was looking for the bathroom, I opened her bedroom door by mistake.”

“We’re not taking it the wrong way,” Ron said.

“Kim was in there, taking Polaroids of her clothes.”

“Oh, Kim’s also an artist,” Rena told her. “Designers loan her the dresses she wears in their shoots, but she has to give them back eventually, so she’s making a photomontage of the dresses she’s worn once. It’s sort of like a diary. But cynical.”

“Got it,” Jessica said. She tapped the dashboard.

“Stop, this is it.”

Above the bare courtyard, elderly palm trees swayed, years of dried fronds cracking around their throats. I imagined her building was made up of midget studios occupied by ninety-eight-year-old screenwriters.

“Oh, it’s so interesting to live in an older building,” Rena said as Jessica opened a small gate and led us into the courtyard.

“The outside of this place makes me want to cry,” Jessica said. “But I have a view from the back, so I won’t complain.”

At the third and top floor, Jessica paused by her door to search for her keys in the bottom of her purse.

“I really appreciate this, guys.”

“You grab your stuff while we have a look at this doll,” I told her.

“Okay,” Jessica said. She threw her shoulder against the door, and it banged open, rattling.

“Earthquakes,” she moaned. On the opposite wall of her living room, three cinemascope windows hung before an orange sheet of Los Angeles light spreading to the horizon.

Jessica said, “There’s chips and beer and bottled water and the fucking doll in the kitchen. I’ll be just a sec.” She disappeared down a hall.

I went into the kitchen and flipped on the light. As I picked up the doll, its eyes snapped open over the black interior of its head. I had expected the cuts and scratches around its eyes to reveal the kind of person who had made them, but I might have as easily guessed a cut of meat by the pattern the cleaver left in the carving block.

Silver-blue rhinestones covered the lace bodice, and the veil was embroidered with angels. Its pink shoes were tied to its ankles by silk bows. This must have been an expensive doll, not one of many a girl could spare, and nothing her mother would have let her brother keep hidden.

I shook it, listening for the soft rolling thump in its chest that would be smuggled diamonds wrapped in a handkerchief, or drugs bundled in sealed tubes. The only sounds came from clicks of its empty eyes snapping awake, asleep, awake.

“Dude, close its eyes,” Ron said from the door. I turned to find Rena standing beside him.

“Actually, it’s a beautiful dress,” I told them, holding out the doll.

“Okay, what is the attraction here?” Rena said. “Fuck it.”

“Fuck it,” Ron agreed.

Together we walked out of the kitchen, Rena and Ron giggling and mock shivering, then stopped short. Jessica stood before us, holding clothes under her arms. She was watching us with a carefully guarded expression I couldn’t interpret. It was the flip side of the look I had enjoyed by the jukebox, not a surrender to the events around her.

She looked down at her flung-together clothes as though she was measuring their worth, standing before these strangers in their leather and full employment, their apartments without histories.

“Do you think I’m being silly?” she said.

“Not in the slightest,” I said. “It’s very wrong and very not-belonging in your apartment.”

Jessica stared directly at me, searching my eyes for some sign that I had any idea what she had seen in the doll, something like that paranoid line she had felt connecting her sleeping back to the doll lying under the floor.

I said, “I don’t think you should get rid of it either. We’re never going to know – Jessica’s never going to know why it was put there if she throws it away.”

“Jesus,” Ron said. “It’s a doll.”

“Close its eyes, you said.”

Rena took Ron’s arm and said, “All right, Jessie, tomorrow I’m going to look up the Hollywood Doll Company.”

“What’s that going to do?” Ron asked her.

“We’re going to find out it’s not weird, so Jessie can sleep in her own house. And Jessie, until then you’re staying with me.”

I wished that I too could call Jessica Jessie. I was jealous of Rena for having known her, however vaguely, in college.

The next morning the ad agency hummed with the paranoid eagerness of the assistants trying to look like they hadn’t just had a weekend filled with greedy pleasures. I ducked into my office and closed the door. Five seconds later Ron came in, looking scrubbed and polished and in the depths of despair. Coming up with so few band names had left his project adrift.

“I want to go back to writing lesbian sex letters.”

“Get out of here with that negativity.”

“I’m in here for the creative tools,” he said, bending over a wooden box tucked in a corner of my office. He took out a large silver robot that started beeping and moving its legs.

“Boys have better toys,” he said.

A female assistant opened the door and extended a few papers toward me.

The fax was on Rena’s letterhead, and she had written, in her slashing script across the top of the page,

Nothing on eyes. Hollywood Doll Co. closed 63 years ago. Kim asked us to see a singer friend of hers tonight at Jack’s Sugar Shack. I haven’t told Jessica.

“Cara! Let me ask you something,” Ron said.

The assistant smiled and leaned against the door, twisting a lock of her hair between her fingers. It was well known that Ron had written for Hustler, and few women at the agency minded telling Ron whatever he wanted to know about matters sexual-gymnastic, or otherwise.

“When you were a little Cara, cute as a turnip, did you ever poke out your dolls’ eyes and bury them?”

“I once melted my Barbie in the oven, and I threw my Cabbage Patch doll in the woodchipper behind my grade school.”

“No eyes or burial?” I said.

“No – should I have?”

“Thank you, Cara.” Ron said. “You’re normal. I’m sorry.”

Cara laughed and went back out, closing the door behind her.

“See how much simpler?” Ron said. “Maybe you should think about what you see in this Jessica girl in the first place.”

I picked up the phone and dialed the number Jessica had given me when I dropped her off at Rena’s.

When she answered I said, “Your E-meter results look good.”

“Hello?”

“Your company is requested tonight at eight to see some live music. No dolls this time.”

“Yes,” she said.

I picked Jessica up before Rena would arrive home to change for the evening. Jessica opened the door wearing a cream-colored, clinging sweater over a pair of dark jeans, her hair pulled back in a ponytail.

“What’s up?” she said matter-of-factly, pulling the door closed behind her. “Sorry I can’t let you in. According to Rena, the place is a mess.”

Seeing Jessica in her own clothes and hearing her voice, healed into a smooth and glazed richness, was a minor shock, briefly alien in a way that nudges time into a skipped beat.

An expectant thrum and murmur filled the bar. When Jessica found Kim it was like they’d known each other for years.

“I’m so glad you know Maribel Lovotny,” Jessica told her after they hugged.

“Who’s this?” I asked.

“The girl singing tonight,” Jessica said. “She’s sixteen and she’s been making these amazing tapes in her bedroom. Her first tape was just her, like, chanting, ‘LSD, LSD,’ over loops of Indian prayer music.”

“Ok,” I said.

Jessica threw me a quizzical look and said, “What? Could be interesting, right?”

“What’s your problem this time, Hoberman?” Kim said.

Rena sprang out of the crowd and gave Jessica a hug.

“Jessie, I’m so glad you decided to come,” she said. “Are you moved back in?”

“Oh. I think I have to wait for my landlord to fix the floor.”

Rena’s eyes went round.

“As long as it takes,” she said, sounding like she was preparing herself, rather than Jessica, for the wait.

“Sorry, I need to find Ron,” she said, walking away.

I pretended to be jostled by the crowd milling around us, bumped shoulders with Jessica, and gave her what I hoped was a reassuring look. She smiled and lightly shoved me back.

Piercing feedback whined out of the house speakers, and we automatically turned to the stage, where a young girl struggled to pull a microphone from its stand.

“Good evening,” she said in a Transylvanian drawl, having little choice but to play with how she said to what must have seemed like half of Hollywood, come out to watch. Lovotny wore a pastel yellow satin dress with white netting around the shoulders. Large, embroidered daisies circled her neckline. She looked like she had gotten lost on her way to a wedding in 1978.

“My name is Maribel Lovotny, and I hope you’re enjoying my dress,” she said.

She smoothed her ruffled skirt.

“Actually, it’s a bridesmaid’s dress I got at a thrift store. I like to look through the clothes other people don’t care about anymore. They throw them away when a Gap opens nearby, like when they just have to have a new pair of polyvinyl chloride stretch pants.”

I turned to Jessica to make a snarky comment, but she was staring at Lovotny, transfixed. A spotlight flared to life and began a wandering search for the girl.

She said, “Some girl wore this dress one time and everyone told her how pretty she looked in it. She wore it all day long and then she crammed in the back of her closet. So, like, years later, she’s going through her old clothes and she goes, ‘How awful, how awful,’ and just throws this dress onto the pile.”

Lovotny crossed the stage to sit behind her keyboard, clipping the microphone to a small stand.

“My first song is called “Scared of Me,” she said, then laid a tattered spiral notebook on her music stand. “And if I can read my own writing, I’ll get through this.”

Lovotny sang below her register and shot up to pitches like the feedback she had made when she had pulled the microphone from its stand. Her synthesizer generated wheezing, hurdy-gurdy effects and bleak carney melodies, and I found myself thinking about a sculpture I had seen months before in an exhibition famous for its sliced-up sharks and barnyard animals. The sculpture was a plain gray block, nearly the size of the exhibition room, grooves set in random patterns and a rectangular depression in the shape of a door set in its sides. A placard lying on the floor said the sculpture was a cast of the interior of a fifteen-year-old girl’s bedroom. It contained everything and showed nothing but the walls it had been molded around. In that gray block some point was being made about the impossibility of ever knowing what went on inside the girl’s room. And now, listening to Lovotny’s music, I was no longer in Jack’s Sugar Shack, with its self-mocking bamboo and tiki torches, but was standing at the door of Lovotny’s bedroom. I saw a bed canopy of white rayon, a geometry textbook peeking from beneath the collapse of a bridesmaid’s gown, hundreds of mementos scented with self, and weird, staring dolls.

I grabbed Jessica’s hand and led her away from the crowd and over to a quieter spot near the door. She turned to face me with that good, searching look in her eyes again.

I said, “Let’s burn the doll.”

“I thought you wanted me to keep it.”

“What’s it been storing up, all these years? Some little girl’s frustrations, like that girl’s singing up there. I don’t know. This music has put me in a gothy mood.”

Ron offered to stop at 7-11 to find a bottle of lighter fluid, and said he’d meet us at Jessica’s in fifteen minutes.

“You kids go have fun,” Rena said.

Then Jessica and I were driving through Hollywood again. When we got to her apartment I scouted a spot clear of the dry brush behind the building. Jessica ran inside to get the doll and a shovel she’d seen in a maintenance closet. Ron came through the dark alley beside her building, pulling a yellow bottle out of a paper bag and grinning like a boy on the Fourth of July.

“Burns clean for better taste,” he said with satisfaction, reading the label.

The back service door opened and Jessica emerged, cradling the doll in one elbow and dragging the shovel behind her. I started in with the shovel, stomping my heel to get some depth and tossing each blade’s worth of dirt onto a pile as Jessica and Ron looked on.

“That’s deep enough, Hobie,” Jessica said.

I stepped back. With a single gentle movement, Jessica bent and laid the doll in the hole. She smoothed the doll’s arms to its sides, fluffed its skirt and draped the veil over its closed eyes. Ron’s bottle made a sucking pop as he flipped open its nozzle. He squeezed out several threads of fluid over the doll, washing the dust from its dress. Jessica unfolded a book of matches, and, as she started to work a single one loose, I worried that we weren’t doing the right thing, burning our only chance to solve this minor mystery.

The match flared to life in Jessica’s hands, then flipped across the dark, and the air around the hole bloomed orange and blue. We stepped back, then slowly approached the burning hole. Beneath the flames, the doll’s face was swelling, and liquid came bubbling from the corner of its mouth.

Jessica laughed.

“Jesus, look at its eyes,” Ron shouted. “There’s flames coming out of them.”

Jessica glanced at me over the fire.

“Hey, Hoberman, what’s wrong?”

“Cara used a woodchipper, for God’s sake,” Ron said.

I watched the dress burn, the lace turning black and curling. We couldn’t know now what had gone on in that bedroom, couldn’t peek in as Jessica had when she found Kim working her camera over her dresses.

A plosive, gassy breath burst from the doll’s neck, blowing fragments of lace into a breeze. They drifted away from the hills and over the city, fluttering like carnation petals flying from the roof of a rented limo.

“Nothing’s wrong,” I said.

I grabbed the shovel and waited for the flames to die down. All right, I told myself, let’s bury this.

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