The Inspector, Gretchen thought, watching the blue Chevy make a U-turn. Isn’t that what the English called their detectives?
Gretchen’s eyes were riveted to the empty workbench. The French fashion doll, the trunk, the inventory list, and all the pictures were gone. That explained why the patio doors stood wide open and hot air billowed in. Someone had entered the house through the back.
The air-conditioning unit whirled into motion to compensate for the increase in temperature. Then Gretchen saw it. She picked up a rumpled piece of paper lying where the fashion doll had lain a short while ago.
Meet me on the mountain. You know where. I’ll explain everything. And hurry.
Mom
Gretchen felt an enormous weight crushing her chest and concentrated on breathing slowly. The handwriting appeared to belong to her mother, although obviously rushed. How could Matt have been so wrong about her time of arrival? She must have eluded his efforts to spring the trap by taking an earlier flight.
Gretchen sprinted to the bedroom, grabbed her binoculars, and returned to the workshop window. The few hikers on the mountain, aware that the sun was rapidly setting, descended from the heights and began traveling earthward. Only one climber continued upward, and Gretchen sighted in the binoculars for a clearer view.
The departing sun’s shadows splayed across the red cliffs of Camelback Mountain, darkening Gretchen’s visibility through the binoculars. But she made out one distinguishing feature. Her mother’s shoulder-length silver hair gleamed in a ray of light as she climbed with her back to Gretchen. The light shifted away, the color in her hair faded, but her daughter had recognized her in that brief moment.
Gretchen struggled to understand her mother’s actions.
Why did she take the doll and climb the mountain? What was going on?
The only path to the truth was up. She had to meet her mother and demand an explanation, had to hear her reason for running away. Then she had to convince her to turn herself in. With a good lawyer and Gretchen beside her, they would overcome this obstacle just as they had survived the cancer scare.
She remembered the police officer stationed outside. The only way out of the house would be through the backyard and over the adobe wall. Gretchen sized up the wall, a good six feet high, and frantically looked around for something to stand on or to climb with.
A kiva log ladder in the living room with a decorative runner draped over its rungs would work perfectly. She flung the cotton runner aside and hurried past the pool with the ladder in her good hand.
Bracing it against the wall, she climbed the rungs, then, with incredible effort, given her broken wrist, she pulled her body the rest of the way up and dropped over the other side. She loped up to the trailhead and passed the posted safety warnings while scanning the ledges above her.
The last of the straggling hikers passed as she veered to the left and began the steep climb up Summit Trail. The only thing on her mind was her reunion with her mother.
Twilight descended quickly in the desert, but Gretchen’s eyesight adjusted readily to the change. Perhaps her mother didn’t realize the dangers of being on the mountain after dark. They would have time to descend safely as long as she hadn’t gone all the way to the top. Gretchen doubted that. The few times they had hiked the mountain together, their goal had been a point on the enormous boulder. The same one that attracted all the tourists and offered a splendid view of Phoenix and the valley below.
The boulder towered ahead, rising like an obelisk before her. She scurried up until she stood on its highest point. Her mother was nowhere in sight. Right when she decided she must have been wrong about their meeting place, she heard a voice softly call her name.
She twirled around on the ledge and stared with dawning terror at the image before her.
It wasn’t her mother standing back in the shadows of the mountain.
Too late, she remembered where she had seen one of the dolls in the picture.
27
Acknowledgments
I’d like to thank the Phoenix Dollers for their overwhelming contributions to this book, especially April Lehman, doll appraiser extraordinaire, Bonnie Albright, who manages to keep the club members on task and supplied a wealth of valuable information, Rita Phyller for her extensive Barbie doll expertise, and Larry and Julia Gerney, owners of the China Doll Shop. They took me under their wings and shared many secrets of their success.
I am eternally grateful for the love and encouragement of two wonderful women: my sister, Nina, who can make me laugh even when I want to cry, and my daughter, Gretchen, who remains, always, the light of my life.
– From World of Dolls by Caroline Birch
Gretchen stared in horror as Larry Gerney stepped from his protected position against the mountain rocks, a gun hanging loosely at his side. Strands of hair from the silver wig he wore blew in the gentle breeze, reminding her of her mother.
Or a caricature of her mother.
The picture should have warned her.
She remembered picking up the Schoehut wooden doll and admiring it in the back room of the China Doll Shop. At the time, she had noted the slight crack around its nose, and she remembered that Larry had watched her intently.
The wooden doll’s picture was among those she had found hidden behind the false cabinet wall.
One of Martha’s.
Larry’s financial problems and the threat of losing his doll business could be strong motives for stealing valuable dolls and murdering Martha.
His talent for making human-hair wigs was exhibited in the intricately fashioned replica of her mother’s own hair that he wore on his head. The hikers who had witnessed Caroline’s descent from the mountain must have pointed accusatory fingers based solely on the color of her hair.
As Larry walked toward her with a gleam of triumph in his madly blinking eyes, everything fell into place.
He was the Inspector.
Another epiphany realized too late.
Inspector Dreyfus, Clouseau’s boss in The Pink Panther, had been driven crazy by Clouseau’s bumbling antics, resulting in wildly twitching eyes just like Larry’s. Martha had made a mockery of Larry’s involuntary facial spasms by comparing him to a slapstick comedy character.
“You had to interfere,” Larry said without emotion. Quietly. “You couldn’t leave well enough alone.”
“All I want is to find my mother. I don’t care about the dolls.” Gretchen stole a glance at the ledge she stood on. Too close to the vertical drop. She edged away from the precipice toward Larry.
“The dolls. Yes, thank you for finding the French fashion doll. I searched Caroline’s house several times and couldn’t find it.”
Gretchen thought of the times Larry had offered to check on the animals as she sat at the hospital waiting for news. Of the unlocked door and her personal items slightly out of place. Of how easily he could have planted the parian doll while feigning concern. “You tipped off the police,” she said. “You told them about Martha’s doll and the list.”
Larry grinned, pleased with himself, while Gretchen tried not to stare at the gun in his hand. “Martha entrusted all her dolls to me while she slowly drank herself to death. Always talking about how she’d get a place of her own again and take them back. My business dying with well over a million dollars’ worth of dolls wasting away in the storage room.”
Larry’s mouth contorted in contempt, and he shook his head. “I sold one of her dolls to pay the rent and keep afloat a little longer. I didn’t expect her to notice, but she did. She started stealing them back, if you can believe that, and I had to stop her.”
“What does any of this have to do with my mother?” Gretchen asked.
“Caroline helped her. I got that much out of that drunken sad excuse for a human being.” Larry’s eyes flickered; his hand that held the gun seemed unsteady. “The pathetic woman begged me to let her go, thinking she could buy her life in exchange for information. She told me she had hidden the Jumeau Triste doll at Bonnie’s house one day when she was away. I don’t fault Bonnie for that. But Caroline…”