want anyone else to know. There. Are you happy?” The words came fast, spilling over each other in one long breath.
Gretchen gaped at Bonnie, wondering if she had heard correctly. Detective Albright’s mother? What surprised Gretchen the most was the ease with which they had forced the truth from her. Bonnie crumbled with little resistance. Detective work might be easier than she originally thought.
Nina found her voice first. “You broke in, stole the bag, and hung Caroline’s doll?”
Bonnie held her hands up in protest. “No, of course not. I don’t know why anyone would do that. I wanted to get my key back before it surfaced and I became a suspect, too. Matty would be so angry. But I never went to Caroline’s house. You have to believe me.”
“I do,” Nina said, and Gretchen wondered if Nina’s aura analysis skills were working again. She also wondered what color Bonnie’s aura would be. Red, she guessed, to match her hair and teddy bears’ bows. “The key was in the bag, Bonnie. But why would anyone else steal it?” Nina asked.
No one said anything.
An idea dawned on Gretchen, and she wanted to thump her head with her cast. What little mind she had left could fit inside the French fashion doll’s beaded purse. Dense. Dense. Dense. “We didn’t tell anyone what we found in the bag,” she said. “So maybe the thief expected to find something else. The strangled doll might have been an angry afterthought.”
Bonnie nodded her snarled head in agreement. “That makes sense.”
“It’s possible,” Nina said.
“Tell us what happened, Bonnie,” Gretchen said. “Why did Martha have a key to your house?”
“If I tell you, you have to promise not to tell anyone.”
“We promise,” Nina said.
Bonnie looked at Gretchen. “You, too?”
“Me, too.”
“About a week before Martha died,” Bonnie began, “she came to my house, disheveled and agitated. At first, I thought she’d been drinking, and I had reservations about even letting her in, much less doing her a favor. But Martha insisted repeatedly that someone was stealing from her and that she needed a safe place to store something that meant a lot to her.”
“She wouldn’t tell you what it was?” Gretchen asked.
“She said she would tell me when she brought it over. That she had to find it first. She said she needed several hiding spots, not just one, because one hadn’t worked before. I felt sorry for her. She cried and carried on like her closest family member had died, and in a weak moment, I told her where I keep a spare key in case she came back when I was gone. Behind that little Hummel picture inside the screen porch, I told her. That’s where I keep it. Or kept it.”
“What happened?” Nina asked.
“A few days later, the key disappeared. I didn’t find anything hidden in the house, but she was the only person I ever told about the key, so I know she took it. Then after she died, I forgot all about it until Matty started saying he thought she had been murdered, and by the time I remembered, the opportunity to tell him about it seemed to have passed. You know how sometimes you put off telling someone something important, and the longer you wait, the harder it gets until you don’t tell them at all?” Bonnie sniffed, and tears formed around the rims of her eyes.
“That’s why you went to the Rescue Mission?” Gretchen asked. “To find Martha’s friends and to retrieve your key?”
Bonnie wrung her hands. “No one there would help me. It scared me to think that some homeless people might have a key to my house. And I didn’t want Matty to know how foolish I’d been.”
Nina cupped Bonnie’s hands in her own. “You have to tell your son what you just told us.”
“I did. I told him all about it. Well, except for the key. But I told him everything Martha said to me about her dolls.” Bonnie glanced sharply at Gretchen. “It certainly doesn’t clear Caroline. In fact, it casts more suspicion on her.”
Gretchen thought the same thing. Bonnie’s story only confirmed the existence of dolls worth stealing, worth killing for. If only Martha had mentioned a name, things might have turned out differently. Her furtive actions and evasive words could destroy an innocent person and allow the guilty one to escape.
Gretchen took her copy of the inventory list out of her purse and handed it to Bonnie. “This is a list of the dolls Martha used to own. It’s becoming clearer that she had at least some of them in her possession when she died. We don’t know whether she actually owned them or if she was in the process of stealing them. Take a look at the list. Have you ever seen any of these dolls? In the past or recently?”
Bonnie slipped on reading glasses and bent over the list. “These here,” she said, pointing at the list. “I saw these years ago.”
Gretchen pulled the list over and read the description. “Kammer & Reinhardt 101 Character children, composition and wood jointed bodies, sixteen inch and seventeen inch, c. 1916.”
“Beautifully made dolls,” Bonnie said, taking the list back. “German manufacturers. Kammer & Reinhardt were the first to popularize character dolls, you know. Quite wonderful dolls. I remember them well.”
“Pictures of the dolls would be helpful,” Gretchen said, always amazed when collectors could identify a doll by such a brief description. The picture of the French fashion doll flashed through Gretchen’s mind. Once she’d seen a picture, the doll would remain in her memory forever. Martha had catalogued her dolls with such detail. Why wouldn’t she have taken pictures?
“Anything else look familiar?” Nina asked.
“Noooo…” Bonnie said, reading intently. Then she gasped, a little puff of air escaping from pursed lips. “Maybe this one. I’ll read it to you.” She looked up over her reading glasses. “You know I like Kewpie dolls. Actually, I’m obsessed with them. Listen to this.” She cleared her throat. “Blunderboo laughing baby Kewpie, Bisque, c. 1915, O’Neill mark on feet, original red heart label.”
“What about it?” Nina demanded. “What’s familiar about it?”
“I saw a Kewpie fitting this description at Joseph’s Dream Dolls.” Bonnie pounded the table with an open palm. “That has to be the same doll. No question about it.”
“When did you see it?” Gretchen asked.
“Two days ago,” Bonnie answered. “I couldn’t afford to buy it. He had priced it right, considering the age and condition, which was excellent, but I’m on a fixed income, and the price was out of my budget.”
Around in circles we go, Gretchen thought. Like musical chairs. The music stops, players scramble for seats, and I’m left standing in the middle staring at the same faces and asking the same questions.
What had today’s intruder expected to find in Caroline’s workshop besides a bag of old clothes? Another doll from Martha’s original collection? If Gretchen could believe April and Bonnie, they hadn’t shared news of the discovery of Martha’s bag with anyone else. That left only a handful of people who knew about it and had the opportunity to steal it. But why risk exposure by taking the bag if it contained nothing of value? And why draw more attention by hanging the Shirley Temple doll? Quite dramatic.
“Wait a minute,” Bonnie said, still concentrating on the list. “I’ve gone over this inventory twice, and it isn’t here.”
“What isn’t here?” Nina said.
“Martha showed me several dolls. This was long before the bank repossessed her house, and I had gone over to solicit donations for the Phoenix Dollers annual fund-raiser, which by the way is coming up again soon, and I hope I can count on you two for a contribution. Anyway, she showed me the character children, and she showed me another doll. A Madame Rohmer. I remember how surprised I was at the time, because she never let anyone see her dolls. But this group was new to her collection, and she was very excited.”
Nina swung the list around to her side of the table, and Gretchen watched her index finger underline each entry. “No Madame Rohmer,” she announced.
“That’s so odd. It had a darling blonde wig.” Bonnie posed both hands lightly on top of her own wig for emphasis. “And the cutest little cream dress with a blue feather pattern.”
“Maybe she sold the doll and revised the list,” Gretchen suggested. “But from what I hear, she refused to sell anything from her collection.”
“That’s right,” Bonnie said. “Even at the end, she wouldn’t sell any of them. They were like her children. She never had children of her own, you know, and I think she transferred all her pent-up affection onto the dolls.”
