Miss Polly had a Dolly (Emma Frost #2) (13 page)

Maya was still
sleeping when
there was a knock at the front door. I
ran downstairs to see who it was. It was Jack and he was smiling.

"Ready?" he asked.

"The shop! I completely forgot," I
said. "We were going to visit Helle's shop today."

Jack looked disappointed.

"Just give me one minute and I'll be
there," I said and stormed inside. I threw on a new blouse and decided
that jeans would be fine. It was a little windy outside and very cloudy so I
took my jacket and an umbrella as well, just in case. I wrote a note for Maya
and put it on the kitchen table, then hurried outside to meet Jack.

He smiled when he saw me. "Do you want to
walk down there?"

"Sure," I said and closed my jacket
when the cold wind hit my chest.

It took fifteen minutes to walk into town. It
was nice to get out of the house and get some fresh air for a change. Plus, I
enjoyed Jack's company. He was the outdoorsy type, you could tell just by
looking at him. He liked it when the tip of the nose turned red and the wind
bit the cheeks. And he was funny, too. Made me laugh out loud several times on
our way there. He always made me feel so comfortable in his presence. It was a
quality I had grown to like in a man more than anything. Especially since my
failed marriage to Michael, Victor and Maya's father. Ever since he left me, I
had come to realize that he wasn't good for me. Being with him had somehow
dragged me down, made me insecure about myself. Michael was a fault finder,
especially with people and in particular with me. He never thought I looked
good, or at least he never told me. Instead he would always pick some other
woman at the party or in the restaurant and ask me why I didn't wear my hair
like that or why I didn't exercise more to look like her. It wasn't all the
time, but just small hints here and there, enough to make me constantly feel
lousy about myself when I was with him. While married to him I thought that it
was okay, that it was just the way it was, that if I just changed then he would
be happy again, but after he left me I realized that it wouldn't have mattered
what I had done or not done. It would have never been enough for him.

"A penny for your thoughts?" Jack
said.

"Sorry?"

"You went quiet all of a sudden. I was just
wondering what was on your mind."

"Ah. Well, lots of things, to be honest
with you. Just now I was actually thinking about my ex-husband."

Jack nodded. "Ah, I see. Dddo you miss
him?"

I shrugged. "Not really, I guess. I miss
him being a father for my children. I miss having a father figure in their
lives, but me? I think I'm better off without him. Besides, he is married to
someone else now."

"But if he wasn't, would you miss
him?" Jack asked.

I looked at his handsome face. He had the
gentlest eyes I had ever seen. "I don't know," I said. "I think
he has disappointed me so much that it is hard to still care. But I do miss
being a family. I think I will always miss that."

Jack went quiet.

"What about you?" I asked.

"What about me?"

"Do you have someone you miss in your
life?"

"Nah. I have given up my life to take care
of my sister."

I felt a pinch in my heart. That was so sad.
"But don't you want a family? A wife? Children?"

Jack nodded slowly and thoughtfully. "Sure.
I've always wanted that. And I have had my share of female friendships."

"But never anything serious?" I asked.

He looked at me. "There was one. We went
out for almost a year." Jack sighed and looked away. I thought about
grabbing his hand, but restrained myself. We walked up the cobbled street in
the middle of the town. Small shops lined the road up ahead. One of them was
Helle's.

"What happened?" I asked.

"Well, she wanted to move on with the
relationship. She wanted to move in together. I told her she could come live at
our house and so she did. But she soon grew tired of it. She wanted me to put
my sister in a home. She was waking her up at night with her moaning and crying
in pain. She was annoyed with me for constantly taking care of my sister
instead of her. Stuff like that. Finally she told me it was her or my sister. I
told her I had made a promise to myself to take care of my sister and I wasn't
going to break that promise."

"So she left?"

"So she left, yes. Ever since then I've
been very careful and I never bring anyone to my house anymore. It is always
the same. They want me to put my sister in a home so we can build a life
together. I tell them I can't and then they're gone. So eventually I have kind
of just accepted the fact that maybe I won't get that big family with all the
children I dreamt of. Well I can always borrow one of Sophia's, right? I mean
she has plenty."

I laughed but not joyfully. Jack's story made me
so sad.

"I think it is here," he said and
looked up at a sign above a small shop.

It said
Dolls
and Trinkets
.

"Hi guys!"

Helle smiled and came out from the back as we
entered the store. It was a small and dark room swamped with trinkets and
souvenirs on all the shelves and in aisles in the middle.

"Wow," I said as I looked around the
inviting shop.

"Yes," Helle said with a smile.
"Welcome to my small shop. This is my pride and joy."

My eyes fell on the back row and the maybe fifty
dolls sitting on the shelves staring at me. I felt a chill on my spine. Dolls
as lifelike as these had always creeped me out.

"Come and look at them closer," Helle
said and walked towards them. She picked one and pulled it down. It was the
size of a child of maybe six years and looked completely like it was alive. The
eyes especially looked so real.

"Wow," I said again and studied it
closer. "I can't believe how real it looks. There is even a little sparkle
in her eyes. And the hair…" I reached over and touched it, but Helle
pulled it away. "Sorry," she said and pointed at a sign behind her
that said
Please don't touch the dolls.
"No
touching, please. I don't want them to be greasy and dirty from people's
fingers."

"Oh, okay. Well, they're
really…lifelike."

Helle hugged the one she was holding then looked
at its face. "They're my babies." She put her finger on the doll's nose
and pretended to be talking to a child. "Yes you are, cutie pie, yes
you're my baby doll."

I cleared my throat. Helle stopped herself and
put the doll back. I forced a smile.

"So wwwhat do you want me to pppaint?"
Jack asked, stuttering slightly again. He was nervous.

Helle smiled widely. "I want you to do five
paintings of five dolls. I want you to make them as a portrait of a living
person. I'll pick the dolls and give them to you. I'll pay you well. Five
thousand for each painting."

Jack gasped. His eyes grew wide. "Five
thousand? That's too much…"

"No, no," Helle interrupted him.
"I know you're the best for the job. I don't mind paying a little extra to
get something extraordinary. You're definitely worth it."

Jack blushed. "Wwwell tthank you, then."

"You're welcome. Here is the first doll I
want you to create a portrait of," she said and pulled down one with
blonde hair and blue eyes. "I just need to make her look real
pretty." Helle put a new light blue dress on the doll. Then she found a
brush and started fixing her hair, then pulled out a light blue bowtie and put
it in the side of the hair. My heart stopped when I saw the bowtie. Could it
be? I walked closer and looked at it. It seemed to be exactly like the one I
had seen the night before, the one that had been sewn into that poor girl's
breast. I was shocked at first but then figured that you could probably buy the
exact same bowties in many doll stores around the country and that the police
had probably already looked into that. But why did the bowtie killer do this to
his victims? Was it to tell us something?

I watched as Helle finished the doll up and we
followed her into the back. She had arranged a small scene with a landscape in
the background and a chair in the middle. Helle now placed the doll in the
chair and walked backwards.

"There is the painting I want," she
said. "With her like that and then the landscape in the background. Make
her look as alive as you can." Helle paused, then spoke again. "Isn't
she adorable? She looks just like my girl did on the day when she…"

Helle stopped and I could tell she was fighting
back tears. "She would have been fourteen next months if she…" Helle
picked up a photo of her daughter in a lovely frame from a shelf and showed it
to me. My heart dropped and I put my hand on Helle's shoulder. Her baby girl
would have been Maya's age by now. I couldn't bear to think about it. I didn't
even want to imagine what it had to feel like. To think of losing Maya when she
was only six? Oh my God, it was unbearable. The horror of losing your child by
far surpassed anything I could ever imagine.

"I was thinking you would come here and
paint her," Helle said and sniffled. "I prefer is she doesn't leave
the store."

"Okay," Jack said and nodded.
"I'll start first thing tomorrow."

As we left Helle's shop I felt horrible inside.
I felt bad for Helle and what had happened to her and I couldn't stop thinking
about what Officer Morten had told me about the disappearances maybe not being
drowning accidents after all. I could hardly tell Helle since it was just
speculation so far, but part of me wanted to give her some hope that maybe her
daughter was out there somewhere, that maybe, just maybe there was a slight
possibility that she could still be alive.

It was her
birthday, but
no one at the brothel knew or even
cared. Nina turned ten years old doing what she had done dozens of times a day
the last four years; being raped by old fat guys who especially asked for her
because of her blonde hair and fair skin. She was a specialty, she'd realized
that by now. A pearl in the sea. The people keeping her locked up was making a
fortune on her. She was the star of the place, the one attracting the most men.

Yet no one even cared to celebrate her on her
big day. As usual, Nina worked all night and didn't go to sleep before five in
the morning. She danced for the men and let them touch her, assault her, even
hurt her, just because she knew that as long as she gave them what they wanted,
she'd stay alive. The more men she pleased the more and better she ate and
lived. On days when the customers weren't pleased, she didn't eat at all. Just
one complaint and they would take her food. Sometimes even slap her around in
her room till she understood how to behave.

They had given her a new name.  Miss
Cha-Cha, they called her. Because of her dancing skills that allured so many
men. Nina had little by little learned to understand the language. She hadn't
forgotten her native Danish, since she had practiced it every time she had a few
minutes between clients, while laying alone in her bed, enjoying the rare
moment of peace, crying, remembering her mother and trying hard to forgive her
for giving her away. But it was becoming harder and harder as she grew older
and soon a hatred for her mother was growing inside of her poisoning her mind.

And so it was this morning on her tenth birthday
that Nina lay down on her bed, her legs sore from dancing all night, her
insides sore from being misused again and again. Her cheeks sore from the slapping
of her face that many men enjoyed when they
played
with her as they called it. So it was that Nina looked back at her life before
she was sent away and remembered all the details of her mother's face, even the
house on the street that she had grown up in and decided that some day, one day
in the near future, she was going to go back. Somehow she was going to escape
this hellhole.

Nina cried thinking about her hometown and the
life she'd had before her mother decided to send her away. She even remembered
the name of the island that she grew up on.
Fanoe
Island
. And even if she knew it was far away from Poland, she knew
she was going back there one day, if it was the last thing she ever did.

Nina jumped out of the bed and walked down the
hall and into the shower that was shared by all twelve girls on the floor. She
turned it on extremely hot, then walked in. It was so warm it was painful, but
that was how she wanted it to be. After a long night of working she always took
burning hot showers. She had this idea that it somehow cleansed her of all the
smells, of the germs put there by the smelly, stinky old men. And she wanted to
be clean. More than anything Nina wanted to be cleansed of the atrocities
committed against her. She felt so dirty, so besmirched, and no matter how much
she washed herself and scrubbed her body with soap, the feeling wouldn't go
away.

Nina found the bath brush and started to scrub
her skin. She rubbed and rubbed it and soon her legs had started bleeding.. But
that didn't stop her. She continued scrubbing, while crying and sobbing, in the
burning hot shower.

"I hate you. I fucking hate you, you
bitch," she yelled thinking of her mother's face, hearing her mother's
words inside of her head. She looked down at her stomach and legs and felt like
screaming, but restrained herself since she didn't want to alert the guards by
the doors downstairs. They would just come in here and have their way with her
as well. She had learned that lesson when she had gotten into a fight with
another girl in the bathroom and they had come running. They had locked the
door and then raped both of the girls for hours, taking turns until the girls
could hardly walk. Then they had sent them to their room for ten minutes before
a customer was sent up there.

Nina had come to hate her body, to loathe
everything about it. All the things that made her successful in the brothel,
she hated. Even her long blonde hair that they all adored so much. But most of
all she hated the fact that she was beginning to look like her mother.

Nina walked out of the shower and glanced at
herself in the reflection of the window. She could see it a little more every
day. Even if her mother wasn't blonde and fair like her, she could still see
her when she looked at herself. See her in her features. The nose, the chin,
and even sometimes in the eyes. It made her furious.

"One day, mommy dear. I'll be back,"
she told her own reflection. "And then I'll fucking kill you, you piece of
shit," she mumbled. "That's my promise to you. I'll make you suffer
like you have caused me to suffer and then I'll kill you."