The Guests on South Battery (Tradd Street #5)(20)
“They look so happy,” Jayne said, replacing the frame.
“They were best friends, according to my mother.”
“Who’s this, do you think?”
Jayne held up another photograph of a girl about ten years old, more recent than the ones of Button. The colors were sharper and the television in the background looked as though it could have been early to mid-eighties. The girl bore a striking resemblance to Button, the same light hair and large, almond-shaped blue eyes.
“I’m not sure,” I said. “But it could be her niece. Her brother had a child.”
Jayne looked at me with surprise. “Then why didn’t she inherit everything?”
I glanced over at Sophie for help, but she was busy studying something in the rocking chair. “She didn’t survive childhood. My mother remembers that she was . . . sickly.”
The frame fell heavily onto the tabletop, almost as if it had been wrenched out of Jayne’s hand and thrown down.
“Sorry,” Jayne said. “I’m so clumsy.”
My phone began to ring in my purse, the ring tone one I didn’t recognize. My hand froze on the purse clasp, willing it to stop ringing.
“You can answer that,” Jayne said. “I don’t mind.”
“It’s not important,” I said, keeping the tremor out of my voice. “I’ll just silence it so we can focus.” I reached into my purse and flicked the button on the side of the phone without looking at the screen, knowing it would be the same unidentified number as before.
I picked up the frame, the clips on the back apparently loosened in the fall and allowing the glass and photograph to slip out. I turned the picture over to see if there was any writing on the back. There, in faded blue ink and in a feminine hand, was written the single name Hasell.
“Is that a misspelling of Hazel?” Jayne asked.
I shook my head. “It’s actually an old Charleston family name—there’s a street by that name that runs from King Street past East Bay. It’s pronounced like Hazel but spelled with an S. My mother told me that Button’s brother, Sumter, married a Hasell, which would explain why they used it for their only child.”
As I replaced the photograph and glass back in the frame, I studied it more closely, seeing now the dark circles under the child’s eyes, the pale translucence of her skin, the faint blue veins that bracketed her temples. I thought of the robust cheeks and bright eyes of my own children, and I felt a stab of loss for this girl I’d never known. I couldn’t take my gaze away from the image, noticing now something familiar in the shape of the chin and the delicate arch of the eyebrows.
I was about to pick up the photo of Button to compare the faces when I heard that odd, metallic sound again that Jayne and I had heard earlier. We both turned toward Sophie, who was holding something up in her hands, a look of surprise and wonder on her face.
“That’s hideous and bordering on creepy,” I said, staring at the old china-faced doll in her hands, noticing that Jayne had stepped behind me as if for protection. The doll’s straggly brown hair made a cloud over its expressionless face, the two large dark eyes staring unblinkingly back at us. I suppressed a shudder.
“The vibration of our footsteps on the stairs must have shifted it in the chair to make that sound. If this is what I think it is, it could be worth a small fortune.” Sophie smiled widely as if unaware of the terrifying object she was holding.
“What is that?” I asked, staying where I was. Like with clowns and dollhouses, there was something inherently disturbing about antique dolls. Certainly the stuff that childhood nightmares were made of.
Sophie looked protectively at the doll. “I’m pretty sure this is a Thomas Edison doll—the first talking doll. There are only a handful left, and even fewer are intact, which makes them so valuable. They have these little tin phonograph cylinders inside their torsos—all recorded more than one hundred years ago. They’re all nursery rhymes that are kind of hard to understand, and one in particular—‘Now I Lay Me Down to Sleep’—is a little scary because it sounds like a woman shouting under duress. For some reason they didn’t sell and they halted production after only a month.”
“For some reason?” I repeated. “I can’t imagine parents disliking their child enough to gift them with such a thing unless they were being punished for something serious like vandalism. Or murder.”
“Does this mean that it belongs to me now?” Jayne asked. She didn’t sound as excited as Sophie probably expected her to.
“Yes,” Sophie said brightly. “I’d have to take it to an antique doll expert who’s a friend of mine to verify, but I’m pretty sure that’s what this is.” She flipped it around to show an opening through a hole in the back of the doll’s white linen dress. “The cylinder is so delicate that if I tried to make the doll talk, it would break. There’s new technology that can digitally convert the sound from the cylinder so you can hear the original recording, which might be cool to hear.”
Both Jayne and I were shaking our heads. “That won’t be necessary,” Jayne said. “Let’s let your expert friend assign a value so that I can sell it as quickly as possible.”
“Let me talk with my friend first to see what our first course of action should be. We’ll leave it here for now, where it’s safe.” As Sophie was distracted replacing the doll in the rocking chair, I gave a thumbs-up at Jayne to let her know that at least on this subject, I was in full agreement.