Hide Your Eyes (24 page)

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Authors: Alison Gaylin

Tags: #Fiction, #Romance, #General, #Contemporary, #Sagas

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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 toward 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 blonde 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 blonde woman wore the same camelhair 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.

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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 blonde 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 blonde woman who owned the neighborhood toy store.

That’s what Cynthia was - a beautiful blonde 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 Dani£ Noin,el’s mother arrived twenty minutes 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
.

You could say I learned a lot from these people: Trust your intuition, but not too much. Don’t think you have everything figured out, because you don’t. Things are never truly as they appear. But the main thing I learned was this: I am capable of killing another human being.

Who wants to talk about that with anyone, let alone reporters? (Though, I must say, I did generate some excellent headlines. ‘Schoolboy Saved by the Belle!’ was my favorite.)

A week after I killed Cynthia, my mother flew out to New York with Vito the hairdresser in tow, and served as my spokesperson while actually cooking me dinner several nights. Sydney and Vito were staying at the Plaza, but frequently, she’d share my pullout bed, so that when I woke up, sweating and weeping in the middle of the night, she’d be there.

Sydney referred to Krull as ‘that policeman’ until he was released from the hospital and she met him face-to-face. Then she decided I ‘certainly could never do any better than that, so please, Samantha, don’t ruin this with any of your intimacy issues.’

Well, it’s six months later, and to Sydney’s shock and my own, I haven£my f y’t ruined anything. I’ve moved all my Rent 2 Own furniture into Krull’s formerly sparse apartment. I’ve met his father and brother. We’ve chipped in on a summer share on Fire Island, babysat for Patton’s son, said the
L
word to each other more than once. I never thought I’d believe it, but my mother was right. Love
is
the rudder.

Otherwise, not much has changed. I still work at the Space and Sunny Side, where I spend most of my days alternately amused and annoyed.

This afternoon, we’re going to Hermyn and Sal’s wedding. It’s at a converted mansion in Tarrytown, and we’re driving there with Yale and Peter. En and Shell - who recently outed themselves as a couple after two years of secret-but-consistent ‘buddy sex’ - will be there too. And Argent is going to sing.

Krull will wear the hand-tailored suit his father gave him for Christmas and since I’m in the bridal party, I’ll be wearing a hideous lime-green taffeta gown chosen by Hermyn’s mother.

But now, dawn is breaking and I’m taking a walk. I’m just about there, now - the construction site on the Hudson River where this whole thing started. The place formerly known as Shank’s.

I’ve been walking here every morning at sunrise for the past week, and it’s made me feel good - the warm air, the glinting water. It makes me think,
No more ghosts
.

The site has been leveled. There’s nothing here now but concrete, and soon that will be gone too. The area will be planted with grass, and there will be a plaque - a tribute to Sarah, Graham, Jocelyn and all the other children taken away. I was one of the people who lobbied for it. There had been too many morbid tourists here, posing for pictures in front of the ‘Shank’s’ sign. Too many ‘Ariel Raves,’ with teenagers doing drugs and dancing around the trailer.

I walk down to the river, inhale the smell. It’s so warm now and the air is thick and wet, summer breathing its last gasps.

Funny how different this place is.

Somehow, with the bin and the trailer and the stacks of concrete blocks, it seemed emptier. Now that it really is empty, it feels like any other part of the city.

When I was a kid, my superstitious grandmother used to say the same few words every night before dinner, which was as close to prayer as we ever got. I’m thinking of those words now as I look out at the churning, brown-green water where Sarah’s body was dropped:
That nothing bad should ever happen here
.

I put my back to the river, gaze up at my crowded, messy, beautiful city. In the distance, I hear the insistent cry of a police siren. ‘That nothing bad should ever happen here again.’

I say it three more times, for good luck, then gaze up at the dawn sky. It’s a strange, chemical purple, pink rays seeping into it like blood from a deep wound.

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Hide Your Eyes

ALISON GAYLIN

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