The Dollmaker. Amanda Stevens

      “Claire, terrible things can happen in a place like this.” Lucille’s eyes, small and unblinking, were dead serious. She sat in a chair next to the bed, shoes kicked off, feet propped on the mattress. Her toenails were painted bright red. The lacquer matched the lipstick she’d reapplied after her last cigarette, but the crimson had already started to bleed into the deep crevices around her mouth, giving her a grotesque appearance in the harsh lighting.

      “Nothing is going to happen to me in the hospital, Mama.”

      “You don’t know that. You’re at their mercy once they get you all doped up on morphine.”

      “They didn’t give me any morphine.”

      “Well, they gave you something for pain, didn’t they?” Lucille brushed stray ashes off the front of her T-shirt. “I ever tell you what happened to my cousin Corinne?”

      “She got a staph infection from a contaminated needle.”

      “That’s right, she did. The nurse dropped the syringe on the floor, picked it up and stuck it right in Corinne’s arm. Didn’t bother to wipe it off or nothing. Took twenty years, but that infection finally killed her.” Lucille’s birdlike eyes gleamed knowingly. “Now don’t you think Corinne wished someone had been watching out for her that day?”

      “Yes, Mama.”

      Lucille nodded in satisfaction. “You just close your eyes and get some rest. You don’t need to worry about a thing. I’ll be right here all night if you need me.”

      Twenty minutes later, she was snoring softly, her head thrown back against the chair, mouth open. Claire wanted to wake her and send her home, but Lucille would swear she wasn’t a bit sleepy, she was just resting her eyes.

      Turning off the light, Claire sat in the dark for a while, trying to sort through her emotions. Her nerves vibrated like a taut rubber band as the antiseptic walls closed in on her. A nurse had brought her something for the pain after Charlotte left, but the medication wasn’t working.

      Slipping out of bed, Claire walked over to the window to watch the storm. Thunder rumbled overhead and the rain came down hard, blurring the city lights like a soft-focus filter.

      And then just like that it was over. The storm moved farther inland, the rain stopped and moonlight broke through the clouds. The dripping treetops glistened and the lights from passing cars painted the glossy streets with misty streaks of color.

      After the rain, ditches and backyards would come alive with the sounds of crickets and frogs, but inside Claire’s hospital room, all was silent except for Lucille’s soft snoring.

      Climbing back in bed, Claire reached for the remote to the TV. Turning down the volume, she surfed until she finally found a cable news channel. She watched images from a car bombing in the Middle East and a mud slide in Southern California, but her attention was caught by the scrolling text at the bottom of the screen.

      An Amber alert was in effect for a seven-year-old Alabama girl who’d been missing for nearly a week. The FBI and local authorities were still combing a wooded area near her home, but so far no trace of the child or her abductor had turned up. No eyewitnesses had come forward; no one had seen anything. It was as if the little girl had gotten off the school bus one afternoon and disappeared into thin air.

      Claire watched the scroll until the broadcast finally switched to a video feed from Linden, Alabama. They ran footage of the search, an interview with the local sheriff and a tearful plea from the mother for her daughter’s safe return.

      “That poor woman.”

      Claire hadn’t realized that her mother was awake, but when she turned her head, she saw the sheen of her eyes in the light from the television screen. Some of Lucille’s hair had come loose from the bun, and the strands coiled around her face like tiny gold wires.

      “I hope they catch that son of a bitch,” she said in a fierce whisper. “I’d like to get ahold of him myself.”

      “I know, Mama.”

      “It’s an abomination, men preying on little girls like that. They ought to fry every last one of them.”

      Claire switched off the TV. She couldn’t watch anymore, and she didn’t feel like talking. The room fell silent, but her mind raced with images that had plagued her for years. Ruby was dead. In her heart, Claire knew that to be true. But what torment had the child suffered before she drew her last breath?

      Claire squeezed her eyes closed, trying to shut off those terrible questions, but it was no use. Another mother’s agony, coming on the heels of seeing that doll, had reawakened her worst fears.

      When Ruby first went missing, Claire had made the same plea to her daughter’s abductor. Before the camera started rolling, she’d agonized over what to say, worried herself sick that she might not be able to make it through the broadcast without breaking down. Dave had wanted to go on camera in her place, but the reporter who conducted the interview encouraged Claire to make the appeal because it would have a more visceral impact coming from the mother. So she’d gone on air and begged for her daughter’s safe return, pleaded with the kidnapper to spare Ruby’s life. And it hadn’t made any difference.

      For weeks afterward, Claire worried that she’d come across badly or unsympathetic, and that’s why whoever had Ruby didn’t respond. Both Dave and the FBI agent assigned to the case told her that such an appeal was a long shot, anyway. It wasn’t her fault. But Claire had wondered for ages if she should have said or done something differently. Sometimes she still wondered.

      After the interview, she’d been so emotionally drained, she’d walked away from the reporter and collapsed in Dave’s arms. He’d held her for a long time, as if he’d never let her go. He was so strong back then, a rock in times of crisis, but that was before the guilt had eaten him alive. That was before the alcohol had destroyed the man Claire had fallen in love with.

      In the weeks and months following Ruby’s disappearance, he’d become someone Claire barely recognized. A drunken stranger who’d shoved his gun in her face one night and demanded to know what she’d done with their daughter.

      Claire could picture him the way he was at that moment, with hate and despair twisting his once familiar features. She would never get that image out of her head. That he’d suspected her even for a moment, even under the influence of alcohol, was something she hadn’t been able to live with. She’d packed her bags and walked out the next day.

      Drawing the covers over her shoulders, Claire slid down in bed and closed her eyes. The room was quiet, the air was cool and the pain medication she’d finally had to succumb to had started to numb the ache in her joints.

      She’d always told herself it was the not knowing that still tore her up all these years later. If Ruby had died of a terrible disease or in some tragic accident, Claire would have been racked with grief. Her life would never have been the same, but eventually she might have been able to move on. If she could have buried Ruby…if she could have known in her heart that her child was at peace, maybe she could have drawn some comfort from her faith.

      The not knowing was the worst.

      Or so she’d always thought.

      But on this dark, drenched night, as Claire huddled under the covers, dread settled like a shroud over her hospital bed. She’d never considered herself clairvoyant or even particularly intuitive, but she could feel the tug of something that might have been a premonition. A presage that warned of an evil she could hardly imagine.

      And suddenly she realized how wrong she’d been. The not knowing wasn’t the worst. Her ignorance had kept her sane all these years.

      She dreamed about Ruby that night, the same nightmare that always came back in times of stress.

      In her dream she was standing at her grandmother’s kitchen sink shelling crawfish. She and Dave and Ruby lived in the tiny apartment over the garage, but Claire had come over that day to use her grandmother’s stove because