The Doll-Master and Other Tales of Terror

  (If Violet tried to remember further back things got blurry as in a watercolor left out in the rain. That memory of the scratchy-jawed beer-smelling funny-face man who’d been Daddy made her choke up and snivel.)

  It was true, as Violet’s mother had said, small children were going missing in the area. Two little girls, a little boy—just in the past six weeks—no one had any idea what had happened to them. Local and state police were “investigating all leads” but had “not yet made any arrests.” Weirdly, there were also missing pets—cats, dogs, rabbits. In fact, the pets had begun to disappear at least a year ago and there were many more of these missing than children. As soon as Violet and her mother had moved into their new apartment they’d started seeing these sad posters in stores and on walls and fences—pictures of lost children, lost cats, lost dogs, lost rabbits with headlines missing, or have you seen me?

  Some of the pictures of dogs, cats, rabbits were so cute, Violet wanted to cry to think they were lost. The children’s pictures she didn’t look at too closely.

  Older people like Violet’s mother said how strange it was there didn’t seem to be kidnappings in the United States any longer, only just abductions. Violet asked what was the difference between a kidnapping and an abduction and her mother said, “If a child is kidnapped, the kidnappers contact the parents and ask for a ‘ransom.’ And the child might be returned safely. That was how it used to be in the old days! Now, the child is just—taken away . . .”

  And never heard from again, Violet thought with an excited little shiver.

  At South Valley Middle School the missing children were spoken of with the same sort of excited shivers. No one actually knew any of the missing children or their families—and it was only “little kids” who were at risk, not older children—so it was possible for the cruder boys to make jokes about the abductions. (Violet flinched to hear these jokes. Yet a few times to her shame Violet heard herself laugh with the others.)

  At a school assembly the principal (a stout fussy woman named Mrs. Flanagan) addressed them in a grave voice warning them not ever to be “cajoled into” getting into a vehicle with a stranger, and not to walk home from school alone if they could avoid it. “Use your common sense, children! You’re old enough to be vigilant. If you miss your school bus, report to the office immediately. Do not walk alone on the busy truck routes at any time. Do not walk anywhere after dark alone—or even with a friend.”

  Police had a theory that the abductions were the work of out-of-state truckers who drove their enormous trailer trucks along Ajax Boulevard, which turned into state highway 103 outside the city limits. This would account for the fact that the children had vanished into thin air—it would be easy to carry captives inside a storage truck. (Especially if it had a deep freeze!—the boys joked.) Police claimed there’d been witnesses to “attempted abductions” by truckers on Ajax Boulevard but unfortunately the witnesses hadn’t been able to see the truck licenses, only just to notice that, by their color, the licenses had been out-of-state.

  (Violet would learn that Rita Mae Clovis’s older brother Emile was one of the witnesses who’d reported to police what he’d seen, or almost seen—an out-of-state tractor trailer truck stopped at a red light and the driver opened his door and tried to “drag a boy into the truck” before the light changed; but the light turned green before he could get the boy inside the cab of the truck, and the driver—“Must’ve been six foot five, weighed two hundred fifty pounds, one of those droopy mustaches like they wear in Mexico and sort of dark-skinned,” as Emile had reported—had to drive away.)

  People debated whether the missing pets had anything to do with the missing children. It was not likely that the truckers—(if it was truckers who were abducting children)—would bother with mere dogs and cats and rabbits, if they could get children; but then, could it be a coincidence that children, cats, dogs, pet rabbits were all being taken at the same time, by different people?

  So far there’d been eight cats, five dogs, a dozen or more pet rabbits that had disappeared. Each had left behind a bereft family, including stricken children.

  Talking about the disappearances Rita Mae said, with a shudder, “Wonder where they all are. Seems like the poor things would be all in the same place.”

  “Some kind of heaven, y’think?” Violet said.

  Rita Mae giggled. “Or hell.”

  valley garden apartments was the sign in front of the apartment complex where Violet and her mother lived, that resembled a two-storey motel of stucco painted dull orange. “Garden” had to be some kind of joke—there wasn’t any garden that Violet could see from their first-floor windows, only a parking lot with laser-lights that bored through the venetian blinds in her room and kept Violet awake at night. Her mother insisted the apartment was “just fine” and anyway it was “just temporary” and Violet didn’t even bother to contradict her, it was too depressing.

  Just temporary? Like, the rest of their lives?

  Violet’s mother could drop her off at school (three miles away) before work but how Violet made her way home after school was the issue. Which city bus would she take, if she missed the 3:30 p.m. school bus to which she was assigned. (Violet never “missed” the school bus except on purpose. Already during the first week of school she’d grown to fear and hate the school bus for the driver was indifferent to older boys bullying younger children and girls. The driver seemed not even to notice how Violet had been singled out by several ninth-grade boys for particular torment since she was new, and easily intimidated. They’re just teasing, can’t take a joke, how’n hell are you going to survive in the real world? Somehow it was worse, the driver was a woman.)

  Violet knew better than to complain to her mother who might become hysterical over the phone making threats against the school principal, or whoever—if the damn bullies stopped, it would be just for a few days. Then they’d start again, nastier.

  So when Violet “missed” the school bus she had to take a city bus which meant walking to Meridian Avenue, and taking the bus that came every twenty minutes; unless she walked to Curtiss Boulevard, where a bus came every thirty minutes. But sometimes she got confused, or frightened, and ended up taking a bus that dropped her off a quarter-mile from her home on the wrong side of a busy street. It was all so exhausting!

  Her mother didn’t like Violet taking the city buses, and she didn’t like Violet waiting for any bus on Curtiss Boulevard which had almost as much heavy truck traffic as Ajax Boulevard. So Violet allowed her mother to think—(it wasn’t like lying outright, was it?)—that most days she took the school bus home, with no problem.

  When the weather got bad in the winter, Violet would be miserable, she supposed, but as it happened, something so wonderful occurred by the last week of September, she never had to worry about the damn old buses again.

  She’d been walking toward Meridian Avenue when there came a call—“Vi’let! Hey! Want a ride?”—and she’d looked around to see a girl from her homeroom waving to her out the window of an SUV with mud-splattered fenders and scraped sides, that looked as if it had been in use for some time.

  This was such a nice surprise! Violet could not believe her good luck. She had been noticing Rita Mae Clovis at school but had felt too shy even to smile at the tall skinny girl who wore glittery silver piercings in her ears, eyebrows, and nose, and dark maroon lipstick—in eighth grade.

  Of course, Violet said yes. Violet ran to the SUV and climbed into the rear seat, that smelled of something delicious—yeasty-sugar doughnuts, greasy fried hamburger meat with ketchup. (On the floor were crumbled food bags.)

  “Hi, ‘friend of Rita Mae’—I’m Rita Mae’s father, Harald Clovis.”

  Mr. Clovis was smiling at Violet in the rearview mirror. He was a friendly-looking man with fair, fawn-colored hair in waves that fell to his shoulders, and eyebrows so thick they reminded Violet of caterpillars in a children’s picture book
—something to make you smile, not shrink away.

  It was strange and wonderful how, from the start, Violet didn’t feel shy with the Clovises. She was smiling and laughing and just so grateful to be where she was and not out on windy Meridian Avenue waiting for some damn bus.

  Rita Mae was much friendlier to Violet than she’d ever been at school. She told her father that Violet was “just about the smartest girl” in eighth grade which made Violet laugh, for it wasn’t true, but the thought behind it was so generous, if maybe silly—Violet laughed and blushed as if Rita Mae had leaned back over her seat and tickled her. And there was Mr. Clovis regarding her in the rearview mirror, with a big smile.

  “Well, I hope that Violet will become a good friend of yours, Rita Mae. Seems like you could use some smartenin’-up not dumbin’-down.”

  Violet would discover that all of the Clovis family talked like this, smart-snappy like TV dialogue that went on and on seemingly without any effort. You expected a laugh track with such clever talk.

  Mr. Clovis asked Violet about her family, and Violet told him a few facts, in an embarrassed mumble; but Violet did not tell Mr. Clovis that nobody was waiting for her inside the Valley Garden Apartments and that her mother sometimes didn’t get home until after 7:00 p.m.—some evenings, her mother didn’t get home until 10:00 p.m. and when she did, her breath smelled of some evil mix of garlic, beer, and cigarette smoke. Gross!

  Mr. Clovis extracted from Violet the information that her mother was a “single parent” and that Violet was an “only child.” Mr. Clovis seemed to find this information valuable for he smiled and winked at Violet in the rearview mirror as if she’d given the correct answers to some tricky questions.

  “Rita Mae, are there any doughnuts left?—just pass the bag back to your friend Vi’let.”

  Violet had vowed not to eat fattening things, delicious fattening things like cinnamon glazed doughnuts, especially between meals—but Mr. Clovis’s generosity could not be rebuffed.

  “Oh thank you, Mr. Clovis!”

  “You’re certainly welcome, ‘friend of Rita Mae.’”

  At first it had seemed like a happy coincidence—“Seren-dippity” Mr. Clovis called it—that Violet happened to be walking along the street when Mr. Clovis’s SUV came along, at least twice a week; then, one day at school Rita Mae told Violet that she could have a ride home any time she needed it—“My dad really likes you, Violet. He says you’re special.” This was so utterly amazing, Violet had to wipe tears from her eyes. Rita Mae seemed embarrassed but pleased. In the SUV Mr. Clovis said, with his sunny smile, “Hey, it’s no trouble, Vi’let. We’re going almost that way, anyhow.”

  Sometimes, one or two other Clovis children were in the SUV with Rita Mae, so Violet got to know Trissie and Calvin too, who were both younger than Rita Mae; eventually she met Eve, who was older and in high school, and Emile who was the oldest, who’d dropped out of South Valley High a year or two ago.

  All of the Clovis children were friendly, and all took an interest in her.

  And suddenly Violet had friends at school also, at least Rita Mae Clovis’s girlfriends with whom she could sit in the cafeteria and eat lunch, instead of huddling at a remote table by herself, hoping/dreading that someone, anyone, would join her.

  Almost overnight Violet had stopped hating school. In fact, Violet had begun to look forward to school each morning.

  “You’re making friends, are you? I told you, you would.”

  Violet’s mother was so damn smug. But Violet was too happy to mind.

  Once on the way to Violet’s home when there were just Violet and Rita Mae in the SUV, and Violet was sitting in front beside Rita Mae, Mr. Clovis took the girls to Edgewater Park where he bought ice cream cones for the three of them. Violet hesitated for a fraction of a second, for it threw her into despair how damn fat she was, compared to the girls she most admired at school, then she gave in—“Mr. Clovis, thanks!”

  When Rita Mae went to use a restroom in the park Mr. Clovis said in a tender voice to Violet, “Any friend of my daughter’s is a friend of mine. No questions asked!”

  It near-about broke Violet’s heart, these words like the words of a song. And the way Mr. Clovis lay his hand lightly on the nape of her neck, like you’d stroke a nervous cat. She’d have flinched away except—she was so happy.

  In October it began to happen that, since Violet’s mother wasn’t home anyway, Violet was often invited to come home with Rita Mae to visit, or even to stay for supper.

  Violet’s mother was making new friends of her own, Violet had reason to believe. She’d hear her mother singing in the bathroom, and she’d smell her mother’s special cologne, and began to notice her mother making up her face ever more glamorously.

  Think I care? I do not care.

  I hate you.

  The Clovises started their evening meal early, between 5:00 p.m. and 5:30 p.m. Most days there was a whirlwind of busyness in the kitchen, until the meal was on the table. Often the family straggled in and out of the messy kitchen until early evening—nobody was in a hurry to clear away the table or wash or even rinse or soak dishes, the way Violet’s mother was insistent upon Violet helping to clean up the kitchen after every meal. (“My mom says a dirty kitchen ‘breeds bacteria,’” Violet told Rita Mae, expecting her friend to laugh scornfully; but Rita Mae said, frowning, “Oh gross. I saw on TV once, what a kitchen sponge looks like under a microscope. Made me want to throw up.” But nobody fussed much over the sanitary conditions in the Clovis’s kitchen, or anywhere in the Clovis house.)

  Something or someone was missing at the Clovis house—at first, Violet couldn’t think what it was. Who.

  Unlike Violet’s mother who was always muttering about “­nutrition” —“organic foods”—“omega fats”—Mr. Clovis allowed the kids to eat anything they wanted, and as much of it as they wanted. He certainly didn’t fuss—for Mr. Clovis a “gourmet meal” was fresh pizza picked up on the way home, instead of frozen pizza heated in the microwave. An “ultra-gourmet” meal was takeout from Tong Lee Chinese Kitchen, packages of leaky sugary-oily food and sticky white rice, fortune cookies in crinkling cellophane wrappers. Mr. Clovis brought hefty bags from McDonald’s, Kentucky Fried Chicken, Taco Bell, Wendy’s, Dunkin’ Donuts to slide onto the kitchen table with a grin and the greeting—“Hey, kids! Chow time.” And seeing Violet there beside Rita Mae, Mr. Clovis would wink, adding, “And Vi’let. Did I get around to adopting you yet, sweetheart?”

  Adopting was a charged word at the Clovis house. For some of the children, Violet had reason to believe, were adopted; others, like Rita Mae, were home-born.

  But where was the children’s mother? Violet didn’t want to ask for fear there was some sad, tragic story behind her absence. She supposed that, in time, she would be informed.

  Violet was fascinated by the possibility of being adopted. It would explain so much, like why she and her mother just could not get along—“It’s like we have two different strands of DNA. But I think I am my father’s actual child.”

  “How’d you know that?” Rita Mae asked, staring at her with a skeptical smile.

  “Just some thought I have. Just intuition.”

  “Vi’let, you are weird. But wonderful.”

  Weird but wonderful. Violet who’d always thought she was totally ordinary if slightly “plump” and not very pretty flushed crimson with joy.

  And so, one day, the mystery was solved. Or anyway, the mystery was acknowledged.

  Just as Violet’s father had vanished from Violet’s life when she’d been a little girl, so Rita Mae’s mother had vanished from Rita Mae’s life when she’d been a little girl. Violet felt how close they were in that instant, like sisters. She asked, “Do you miss your mom?” and Rita Mae said, sniffing, “I do not. It’s, like, she walked out on us. Dad says.”

  Violet was impressed. “That’s cool! My da
d walked out on us, or anyway my mom says so.”

  “Don’t you believe her?”

  “D’you believe your dad?”

  “Yes! My daddy never lies.” Rita Mae spoke so vehemently, with such a fierce glare at Violet, Violet felt rebuffed and embarrassed. She hadn’t meant anything by her silly question. But she was impressed with the way Rita Mae claimed her father never lied, as Rita Mae claimed that her father was the best father there was, who’d do anything for his family.

  Violet had to consider that she didn’t know if she believed her mother much of the time, or any of the time, or all of the time. She just did not know.

  But she guessed she didn’t love her mother the way Rita Mae and the other Clovis kids loved their dad. The way they looked at Harald Clovis, sort of eager and anxious, as if there was something unspoken among them that no one dared bring up.

  “Don’t you wonder where your mother went?” Violet couldn’t resist asking Rita Mae.

  “I said—no. Dad said she’d ‘betrayed’ the family by leaving us, so that’s all I know. Nobody ever thinks of her any longer.”

  “How long has she been gone?”

  Rita Mae shrugged. As if to say Why ask me? Who cares?

  Unlike the boring residential neighborhood in which Violet lived, the Clovises lived in what Mr. Clovis called a “rural retreat.” Their house was a sprawling old farmhouse at the edge of town, in an open field that had once been, Rita Mae said proudly, a “pasture.”

  Behind the farmhouse were decaying outbuildings—hay barn, storage barn, chicken coop, silo. There were the remains of a decaying apple orchard and at the rear of the property a straggling forest of deciduous trees. The nearest neighboring house wasn’t even visible—“Lots of privacy for my brood,” Mr. Clovis said, with a wink.