Stylish Payne

It had been about a week and a half. I still hadn’t learned anything about the dolls other than the fact that there was no specific clientele. Many people came in for a variety of dolls that I gladly sold to them only for Harry to replace them with others from a safe in the office downstairs. I wasn’t permitted to get them because for one thing, I didn’t have the eye he had (or so he said) for the proper arrangement of a collection in a specific room. Second, Harry wanted everyone, including me and Liam, to be surprised by his creations and we were. My black eye was going from purple to red and a sickening green, and with Louis’s herbal help, the swelling and pain was finally going away. Louis and I had to sneak around our little rendezvous which was tricky because he always insisted on bringing flowers. Both of us tried passing them off as nothing; I didn’t know why they changed every morning and Louis told Harry it was a surprise welcoming present.

I don’t think Harry really believed us.

“How’re you, Miss?”

I sat up in bed, setting aside a book I’d found in the mansion’s library to greet Louis as he climbed in through the window. “I’m good I guess. You?”

“M’fine.” Louis clambered through the gap in the window and carefully shut it. “I um, wanted to ask ya somethin’”, he continued. “You ain’t saw CeCe around?”

“I’m afraid I don’t know CeCe”, I answered. “Why?”

Louis glanced at the ground as he sat himself at the foot of my bed. “I just ain’t saw her around”, he murmured. “It ain’t like her to just skip work, you know? She’s a good lass. Always doing washin’ when it needs it, helping Miss Winston when the woman can’t reach the china in the cupboards. She’s a good girl.”

“Is she a servant?” I wondered.

The gardener nodded. “Her contract ain’t up yet. We all expire in the new year and get to choose if we’d like to sign the next one. I don’t know where she’d be.”

“Maybe she went through a door she wasn’t supposed to and Harry and Liam released her early?” I suggested.

Louis pouted. “I’m afraid ‘releasing’ ain’t gonna be what they’d do to you if you went through one of them things”, he mumbled. “And I’m a wee bit concerned cos Mr. Styles says he wants to discuss something with me.”

“Any idea what it’s about?”

Louis shrugged. “I don’t know. I’m wondering if it ain’t about the business. Hopefully it’s just somethin’ easy like a performance review.”

“You’re a splendid gardener”, I smiled.

He shrugged again. “I just don’t know”, Louis whispered, more to himself. “Hey, there’s a doll eye on one of sheds in the garden! Do you want to go see it?”

“Why?” I questioned.

Louis gripped my hands. “Miss, CeCe saw something she wasn’t supposed to see. There’s a God damned Scotland Yard twit coming around and always askin’ for Mr. Styles. And nobody can go through those doors? We deserve to know what she knows and we deserve to find the truth. Come with me, please?”

“Nothing says that that is in fact what happened to her”, I noted.

“No, but she had to have done something naughty to just up and leave”, Louis hissed in the dark. “Please, Miss. I know I ain’t in a place to ask you for things but please, just this. Just this door. It’ll be our secret.”

I stared him dead in the eye before relenting. “Only because I’m insatiably curious about this”, I agreed. “Let me get dressed.” Louis nodded and covered his eyes with both hands while I found some skinnys and a jumper to pull over myself. Once I was dressed, we snuck out the window and into the cold night. Louis led me to one of the various sheds that were hidden behind massive trees and flower beds. This one was by the garage. A big doll eye that was grey sat at Louis’s eye level.

“I’ve never been in here”, he whispered in the dark. I shivered in the dark.

“Well, there’s a first for everything, right?”

Carefully, he tried the door latch which was surprisingly unlocked. Louis silently pushed the door open, going inside before stepping to his right so I could go in too. He clicked on a flashlight from his back pocket, only to illuminate a strange room. Pictures lined the walls on fishing wire, fixed into place with clothespins like one of those red rooms you see in movies. All of the pictures showed the same little girl; brown curls, a doll like face, frilly dressed and Mary-Janes. A few showed her with what looked like porcelain dolls, normally looking up at shelved ones or sitting uncomfortably still on a day bed with them. “This one looks like Mr. Styles”, Louis said, pointing to a picture of the little girl in lavender. She was holding a doll dressed just like her, with the same brown curls in the same dress with little white shoes. Her face did look an awful lot like Harry’s and I frowned.

“Maybe he had a sister”, I suggested, feeling sympathy for the strange man. “Has he ever said anything about it to you?”

“I believe there was an Emily”, Louis nodded. “He has a very special doll that sits in the front window at the Dollhouse. He calls her Emily and she’s part of the Play Things group but she ain’t got a price. That doll looks just like this one.”

“Who looks just like the girl. Who looks just like Harry”, I added.

“Mr. Payne gets upset if I ask about Emily”, Louis sighed, shifting through the room to a desk. There was an aging notebook on it that we flipped through, noting the decade old dates on what looked like journal entries and the childish cursive. “‘On this day, March 17th’”, Louis began, picking a page with an obituary. “‘The Styles family is pronounced dead. After three days of silence, a concerned neighbour investigated the uncharacteristic quiet of the home finding the family butchered. The eldest child Harold E. Styles, was located and notified a few neighbourhoods away at a family friend’s home. The daughter, Emily, has yet to be found.’”

“Do you think she was kidnapped?” I wondered.

Louis skimmed through the article slowly. “Looks like it was suggested”, he mumbled. “Damn, Mr. Styles never told us about this.”

“There’s probably a good reason”, I said. “I mean, why would he just willingly say ‘hey by the way, I have a long lost sister who may or may not be dead’?”

“I dunno, but it makes sense, don’t it?” Louis asked. “He makes dolls for the sis he never found. He keeps all this secret from us so he can have a place for her mem’ry. I don’t feel right being in here. It’s a invasion of privacy, innit?”

I didn’t bother to agree with Louis. I gripped his arm and waited for him to turn off the flashlight before we left the shed. He walked me across the lawn back to the ladder. “Let’s not go in another door”, I said quietly, hugging Louis.

“Roger that”, he cooed. I squeezed Louis, feeling the warmth that the only normal person in this place could emit before I climbed up the ladder back into bed. He waved at me and pulled the ladder away. I watched him leave and got back into my pajamas to go to sleep, trying my best to formulate a new approach to Harry when I saw him in the morning.

Notes