The Girl in the Locked Room by Mary Downing Hahn

Author:Mary Downing Hahn
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
Published: 2018-09-04T07:00:00+00:00

18

The Girl

The girl hears Jules’s voice. She goes to her window and sees her walking on the grass below. Another girl is with her. Or at least she thinks it’s a girl. Her hair is cut shorter than a boy’s. Like Jules, she wears boys’ short pants and a baggy shirt. A pair of spectacles bigger than Grandfather’s perches on her freckled nose.

They stop at the midden. Once more, the girl wonders why Jules is so interested in trash and broken things.

Jules’s friend picks up a stick and pokes at the ground. The first thing she finds is the ugly bald doll. “Look at this.”

Jules makes a face. “Put her down, Maisie,” she says. “That doll scares me.”

So the friend is named Maisie. That means she’s a girl. Unless boys have girls’ names and girls have boys’ names. Jules, for instance.

“Not me.” Maisie examines the doll. “She must have come from the house. We should keep her.”

“You keep her,” Jules says. “I don’t want her.”

The girl watches Maisie lay the doll gently down in the weeds. Why does she want it? It’s ugly and ruined. Its eyes are gone, its hair is gone, its body is stained, and its legs and arms are falling off. Jules is right. The doll is scary.

The girl can’t bear to look at it. She is sure she doesn’t want that doll. It’s dead.

Jules sits in the weeds and watches Maisie dig in the dirt. She doesn’t help her.

“Oh, look.” Maisie scoops up the little china dolls.

The girl’s fingers itch to hold them. She has an idea that they’re all named Charlotte, but she doesn’t know why they share the same name. Such odd notions she has.

She considers making the dolls talk again, but she doesn’t want to scare Jules, so she keeps quiet and watches Jules and Maisie divide the little figures between them. The girl wishes they’d share them with her. One for her, that’s all. Just one.

Maisie says, “It’s hot. Did you say there’s a creek where we can cool off?”

The girl watches them disappear into the woods. If only she could go with them. There’s something at the end of that path she longs to see. The trouble is, she cannot leave the locked room. She promised not to.

Who made her promise? And why can’t she remember?

She looks at the little dolls on the grass, their faces turned up to the sky, their bodies stiff and hard. The bald doll sprawls beside them. A few tufts of hair still cling to her head, and her empty eye sockets are dark holes in her cracked face.

The girl turns away from the window. If she could, she’d run outside and gather all the little dolls and bring them back to her room. She’d play with them. She’d make them talk.

The dead doll can stay where it is. If the girl had a shovel, she’d bury it so deep, no one would ever dig it up again.

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