Puppet Graveyard

7

What now?

What came next?

What was Kitty to do armed with this new, impossible knowledge? Sitting in her hotel room that night she told herself that she was not going to turn away from this. That if she swallowed what Bascomb had said, then she might as well go check herself into the madhouse right now. Because, really, that’s what it all was: madness. Sure, Bascomb was completely convinced of what he was saying and Kitty had been, too… you couldn’t sit there and listen to that nightmare pouring out of him without feeling its effects, without finding yourself drawn down into some fathomless blackness.

But now that she was back in the real world, her thinking mind had questions.

There’s a common thread to all this and it has nothing to do with spooks. Bascomb needs therapy. He’s crazy. That entire Eddie Bose situation must have unhinged him in ways he wasn’t even aware of, she thought. That’s got to be it. Whether Bose ever told him any of that business about spirits and possession is open to conjecture. Regardless, it unhinged him. He let his mind direct all its shock, trauma, and sense of loss at Ronny and the dummy and their twisted, unhealthy relationship. He needed to find a target for his despair and that was the dummy. By that point he’d already talked himself into the idea that it was some evil devil doll. But it was delirium, mania. That’s all.

Yet… despite her very rational turn of mind, she wasn’t entirely convinced. If Bascomb was telling her the truth about the midnight sessions in the family crypt, then there was definitely something weird and downright scary going on with Ronny McBane. That he wasn’t right in the head, she knew from her interview with him, and that he had some inexplicable power over the dummy she had seen firsthand. But that didn’t necessitate anything supernatural. Something was going on here and that common thread led to the disappearance of her sister. She didn’t doubt that. But she wasn’t about to believe that Ronny McBane was anything more than deranged and Piggy was anything more than a dummy.

Now it was time to turn up the heat and dig a little deeper.

She’d hired a private investigator three days before and now it was time to find out what he had learned. And when she did, she’d act on it because that’s the kind of person she was. Her sister Gloria was hardly an angel. Kitty knew some of the dirt and it was pretty much the same old shopworn dirt that came with the entertainment business… but that did not make Gloria a bad person.

Whatever had happened to her, she deserved better.

She deserved to be more than a statistic in the police files.

Kitty took out her cell and looked through her photos. Gloria, Gloria, Gloria. Funny, as a kid, she’d been so jealous of her she sometimes broke out in hives and now she languished over her sister’s photos on a daily basis. Gloria was older than she and far prettier. Just ask anyone. Maybe Mom would never admit it, in so many words, but Gloria got the attention because she not only looked good but looked good regardless of what she was doing. Peeling potatoes, doing the dishes… it didn’t matter: she had looks, grace, and poise. All Kitty ever wanted to be was Gloria because her face opened every door and warmed every heart, it brought the boys in slavering packs that she commanded with but one flick of her slender, graceful hand. It brought friends who wanted to be with her, to be part of her world, to bask in her glow that was golden. It was pure sunshine.

Kitty could remember on her fifteenth birthday, crying in her cake, hating the braces in her mouth (Gloria had naturally model-perfect white teeth) and the hair on her legs (Gloria never shaved her legs because hair didn’t dare grow on those long golden limbs) and her face (no pouting lips or high cheekbones like Gloria) and her eyes (definitely not crystal-blue like Gloria’s) and just about everything.

“Come now,” Mom had said. “Your sister’s pretty, but so are you. Gloria has the kind of pretty that’s going to get her in trouble, mark my words. But you got the kind the boys respect.”

Kitty only wanted to be disrespected and have the wrong kind of pretty. Gloria went away to college and a pall fell over the house. Nothing Kitty did could warm up her parents the way Gloria did just by walking in the door. Whenever Gloria came home, they perked up and their blood started running again. Suffice to say, Kitty never formed a close bond with either her mother or her father. She cried only the acceptable amount when they passed within a week of one another via twin coronaries. As much as she seethed with envy over her older sister and boiled with jealousy, Gloria lit her up as much as anyone else. When Gloria came home, she did not ignore Kitty. She always made sure they had special time together. They watched movies, they shopped, they went to restaurants. Gloria always made sure Kitty felt special. Unlike everyone else, she never forgot about her and with that in mind, there was no way in hell that Kitty was going to forget about her now either.

But it wasn’t going to be easy to succeed where the police had failed.

It was going to be dangerous whatever path she took. After what Ronny… or Piggy… had said to her in the dressing room, it seemed pretty obvious that they… or he… or it… knew who she was.

Back in Dayton, Kitty had accomplished everything she’d ever set out to do via sweat and hard work. Even as a little girl there was no quarter, no fear, no backing down from the most insurmountable odds. In a month, she was starting a new job in a new city far from the Midwest and before she opened a new chapter in her life, she planned on closing an old one. She deserved that and certainly Gloria’s memory demanded it.

So here was another challenge. One with rules right out of the Twilight Zone.

But Kitty decided she would not back down.

Not yet.