Page 23 of The Fall Back Plan
For a split second, my throat closes up, a knot forming until I force it down with a swallow. “Of course, Brooklyn. I get it. Hang out as long as you want. I need to get something from my office, but let any of us know if you need anything.”
I smile and hurry to my office, closing the door quietly and leaning against it. What I need is a deep breath to ease the ache in my chest. I don’t know what it is, exactly. I’m trying to pin it down because I don’t like any feeling I can’t explain. The closest comparison I can come up with is that it reminds me of the feeling I get every time I see one of those videos on social media of soldiers coming home to surprise their families.
What the actual heck?
Just then, I recognize the music Ry is playing on the bar’s PA system now that the worst of the outside is cleaned up. Elvis. I listen for a few bars. It’s “Love Me Tender,” and the word catches my attention.
Tenderness. I’m feeling tenderness.
It’s new, and I’m not sure I like it.
But for Brooklyn and Brooklyn only, I’ll allow it.
Chapter Eleven
Lucas
Iworkedforthesheriff’s department for eight years before I ran for sheriff. I wasn’t ignorant of the challenges I’d face in my job. Not from criminals. Not even from dealing with people making a single poor choice that lands them in my place of work. But none of that—not one single bit of it—prepared me for the single greatest aggravation of my career to date: baby dolls.
Yeah. Big glass eyes, frilly dresses. Those dolls. The ones Beryl Griggs had told me about first and I had dismissed. I’d found that report about as credible as her claim last year that the Silver Sneakers morning walking group was an organized band of porch pirates.
They weren’t.
Beryl had gotten her girdle in a twist because Barbara Lee’s grandson was always parking in front of Beryl’s house when he came to visit his grandmother across the street. Yes, he parked there on purpose because it aggravated Beryl, who he called a “hateful old crow” when she’d called the sheriff’s office on him. But Barbara Lee’s grandson wasn’t breaking any laws, and Barbara Lee was even less inclined to persuade him to park elsewhere after Beryl’s call to our office.
Anyway.
We get real criminals too. The usual stuff you find in any city our size. And we get tourists in here partaking too much of the local fermented goods and acting a fool, so we have to go keep the peace by giving them a night of hospitality in one of our cells.
But Beryl Griggs has generated an astonishing amount of wild goose chases with her outlandish claims.
So no. I did not take her initial doll warnings seriously.
But as Becky hands me her phone to look at Harvest Hollow Happenings, I scroll through the posts and concede that Harvest Hollow may, in fact, have a doll problem.
Which means I now have a doll problem. I sigh and hand back Becky’s phone. “Explain this to me again.”
“These dolls started showing up a week ago. The first one was on a porch over on Delancey. The dad was leaving to go to work when he found a doll.” She scrolls and shows me a picture of a doll with smooth brown hair and big brown eyes. These are dolls that look like little girls, not babies. It’s dressed kind of old-fashioned. I don’t know my fashion eras, but I’d say it’s not an outfit from this century or the last.
“They didn’t think too much about it until a few days later when someone else in their daughter’s class found a doll on her porch. She brought it in for show and tell.” Becky shows me the doll in question, a blonde doll with green eyes. “Kid who got the first doll is in the same class. She mentions to her parents that her friend got one too. Parents think it’s weird and call second friend’s parents. Same situation. Appeared on their front doorstep one morning. No note.”
“Tell me how it gets to crisis level,” I say. Because that’s where we are. Becky has fielded six phone calls about it this morning and put the mayor through to tell me that it was going on this week’s city council agenda and “the people” were demanding to know how my department would be dealing with these threats. That’s the actual word he used to describe dolls appearing on people’s porches. “Threats.”
“So the parents get on Happenings and ask if anyone else has received them. That’s when even I have to admit it gets creepy,” Becky says, almost apologetically. “Turns out it’s not entirely random. So far, six girls have received the dolls over the last two weeks. The youngest girl is seven. The oldest is twelve. They don’t always appear on the front porch but they do always appear without a note. And, boss . . .” She draws a deep breath. “Each doll looks like the girl it’s left for.”
Okay. It’s a little weird. “Doorbell footage?” There’s always doorbell footage. It’s a blessing and a curse for us. Sometimes it truly does help us find our suspects. But it also turns regular people into Harvest Hollow CSI, and they have a tendency to overestimate both their skillandtheir authority to get in the middle of things.
She shakes her head. “Three of the families have them, but they all checked their video out of curiosity, and none of them saw who left it. At those houses, the person left the doll on the hood of a car.”
“None of the neighbors’ cameras picked up anything?”
“One of them caught footage of someone leaving one of the dolls on a car, but it’s too dark to make out much. Gender, race, nothing. Just someone shadowy walking over to the car then leaving again. Here.”
She plays me the video that the neighbor sent to Happenings. Skimming the nearly three hundred comments below it tells me they’re either people asserting their theory of the “Doll Bandit” as gospel fact or demanding that SOMETHING BE DONE, generally in all caps and usually with at least one word in the sentence misspelled.
I lean back in my chair and stare at the ceiling for several moments before I straighten and shake my head at Becky. “How dumb am I that I’ve been putting all my time into planning crowd control for the Harvest Festival that I didn’t even put ‘serial doll leaver’ on my September bingo card?”
She shakes her head. “I know. But honestly, it kind of skeeves me out.”
