Page 224 of It Happened on the Lake

“You picked this one? Really?” Dawn asked, eyeing the sparse belongings. “What’s with the sleeping bag?”

“It’s temporary. I wasn’t sure how long I would be staying.”

“Aren’t there other beds here? With like sheets and stuff.”

“Nothing that isn’t twenty years old. I’ll probably have everything moved from California, once I clean this place out.”

They wandered through the servants’ quarters on the third floor, and Dawn tested the dumbwaiter and elevator again. Neither responded. “I’m not kidding, Mom, youreallyhave to fix these!”

“Got it. Duly noted.”

“You know, this place is like a hotel.”

“An old hotel,” Harper said, leading the way down the stairs.

“Don’t you love it here?”

Harper admitted, “Sometimes,” but didn’t add that often she hated it.

On the second floor, Dawn wrinkled her nose at the musty scent that the cleaning people hadn’t quite eradicated. “It smells kinda funky up here.”

“I know. I think I need to really air the place out.”

“For sure.”

They wended their way through the rooms. In the final guest room, she stopped short and stared within. “What’s with all the dolls?” she asked. Harper had stashed most of Gram’s collection here, out from underfoot. The bed and floor were littered with the dolls, while others spilled out from the closet. “There must be a hundred.”

“Or more. They were Gram’s,” Harper said, eyeing the dolls she hadn’t yet put in the trash. “I’m going to donate them.”

“Why? I kinda like ’em. They add a creep factor. Especially the really old ones with the googly eyes.” She walked inside and stepped on an old baby doll that cried out. “Oh shit. See what I mean?”

“I wasn’t thinking about a creep factor motif,” Harper said from the doorway. She thought about Maude and Toodles with their chilling messages, how someone had moved them around in the middle of the night. How that same sicko had left a dead cat in the house. What perverted son of a—

“Oh! Wait. What’s this one?” Dawn wended her way through a pile of baby dolls to the bed. She pushed aside a brunette Bubblecut Barbie in a red swimsuit and tossed Midge in a two-piece out of the way to retrieve a pudgy doll with blond hair, freckles, and blue eyes, one half-closed.

“Chatty Cathy,” Harper said, remembering how delighted Gram was to show it to Harper when she was around ten.

“Oh God, I’ve heard about these!” Dawn said. She turned the doll over and pulled the ring just below the doll’s neck. “Does she talk?”

“She did. I don’t know now if—”

“Please take me with you,” Chatty Cathy requested in a surprisingly clear, high-pitched voice.

Dawn laughed.

“You can, you know. If you want the doll, she’s yours. Any of them are,” Harper said. “Take her. Take them all.”

“Oh sure,” Dawn said, smiling in amusement. Another pull of the string, and the doll requested a story. “These are all so cool. Mom, seriously, don’t get rid of any of them! Your grandma loved them.”

“That she did.”

“You know what you could do?” Dawn asked, replacing the doll on the bed next to a blond Ken doll wearing only red swim trunks. “You could rent out rooms here. Everything is so retro and old. Creaky. Like if anyone wanted a ‘haunted hotel’ experience? Each room could have a doll or twenty in it. The house would pay for itself.”

“I’ll think about it,” Harper said dryly, though she didn’t see herself doing anything of the kind. An innkeeper she was not.

“Just don’t sell it, please!” Dawn pleaded. “Come on, Mom, you can’t!”

She could, but Dawn’s supplication touched her. Despite the tragedies that were a part of the island and regardless of the silent intruder who stalked the halls of the house at night, she did love it here, and with each passing day, she felt more connected to this island where she’d grown up. “It’s a lot of house.”

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