“I’m sorry, dollhouses?”
“I know, right? Dollhouses. This town’s obsessed with them.”
“What’s your name? I’m Amber.”
“Name’s Walter,” said the kid. “Walter S. Bryant. The S stands for Samuel. Had a teacher once, said my destiny was to become a poet with a name like that. But he didn’t know what the hell he was talking about. I can barely spell, and most of the words I know don’t even rhyme with each other.”
“Walter, what’s so important about a few dollhouses?”
“Where you from?”
“Florida.”
“Florida,” he repeated. “Wait, you mean with Disney World and all?”
“Yep, we have Disney World.”
“You ever been?”
“A few times,” she said. Always with friends, though – never with her parents.
“Aw man,” said Walter. “Disney World. I’d like that, walking around and everything looking like it’s out of a cartoon or something. Ever meet Mickey Mouse?”
“I have.”
Walter laughed. “That’s cool. You met Mickey Mouse. That’s cool.”
“I’m from Ireland,” said Glen.
“I don’t care,” said Walter.
“Can you tell me about the dollhouses?” Amber asked.
“Oh yeah,” said Walter. “I knew you weren’t from around here, cos if you were you’d know already. There’s this dumb story everyone’s been telling us our entire lives, and they all expect us to believe it, y’know? Dacre Shanks. He was a real person, back in the 1970s, cos I looked him up. He was a toymaker, right? He had a little store down beside where the arcade once was, but he only made crappy toys like dolls and model railways and stuff. Nothing cool. But what nobody knew was that he was also this serial killer, and he killed a ton of people before the cops figured out who he was and came and shot him.”
“I looked him up, too,” said Amber. “I didn’t see any mention of dollhouses.”
“Course not,” said Walter, “cos that’s the part they made up, isn’t it? The story is, he came back from the dead, right, ten years later, and kept killing and he, like, shrank his victims or something and put them in these dollhouses he made.”
Amber frowned. “He shrank them?”
“How stupid is that, right? Not only do they have him come back from the dead, but they have him shrinking people, too. Anyway, the school had three dollhouses that supposedly held these shrunken victims – although officially they’re just normal dollhouses with nothing weird about them at all. Cos every school has a few dollhouses in a huge glass cabinet right inside the door, don’t they? I mean, that part’s totally normal. Nothing weird about that. Ask any of the teachers; they all say the story’s a load of crap, but they say it in a way that’s supposed to make you think they’re lying. We had to pass those dollhouses every single day. I’m not stupid. I know why they were there. It was a message, wasn’t it? Stay in school. Keep your head down. Don’t question authority. Or Dacre Shanks will get you.
“Well, practically everyone else in my school were cool about going along with it, but me and a couple of others, and you just met them a few minutes ago, got talking one day and figured hey, we were getting a little tired of being treated like fools.”
“So you trashed the dollhouses.”
Walter nodded. “Stomped two of them to splinters before we were caught.”
“What happened then?”
“Aw, everyone went insane. I knew the school would be mad and all, but they were threatening to expel us. It was crazy. Only reason they didn’t is cos they didn’t want the State Board to know about their dumb stories. But everyone, like, the whole entire town, was against us. Everyone except the old people. They didn’t see what the fuss was about. But our folks, some of our older brothers and sisters, they just … I didn’t know they’d take it so seriously.”
“Is that when you were beaten up?”
“Yeah,” Walter said, with an impressive amount of bitterness. “Broad daylight. Had to stay indoors the whole summer after that. People in this town are nuts, and they all worship that Medina chick.”
“Who?”
“Heather Medina. She’s the one who stopped Dacre Shanks from killing any more kids. According to the story.”
“Does she still live around here?”
“Yeah, lives over on Pine Street. Works in the library.”
“Brown hair?” asked Milo. “Silver in it?”
Walter nodded. “That’s her. She won’t even mention his name, though, so good luck trying to get anything out of her. She looks perfectly normal, but she’s as crazy as the rest of them. That’s why her husband left her, I heard. They expected us to believe a story like that, and then they were actually angry when we didn’t. Moment I’m old enough to drive I am out of here. I may not be able to spell or rhyme, but I’m pretty smart. Smarter than everyone in this town, anyway.”
“Definitely looks like it,” said Amber. “Thank you so much for your help.”
“Don’t worry about it,” the kid replied. “I’m assuming you’ll take care of this?”
He held up his bag of doughnuts so the teller could see it, and Amber smiled. “Sure thing, Walter. See you around.”
“Stay frosty,” Walter said, and walked out.
Amber paid for the doughnuts, and rejoined Milo and Glen as they were putting on their jackets.
“You think you’ll be able to get back in the librarian’s good books?” Amber asked.
“Don’t know,” admitted Milo. “Women have a tendency to learn fast around me.”
“Told you I should have talked to her first,” Glen said.
They left the cafe and walked back to the Charger, where a stocky man in his late sixties stood admiring her. He gave them a quick smile as they approached, and when Amber saw the star on his shirt her own smile faded.
“Now this is a damn fine automobile,” the man said. His moustache was a deeper shade of grey than his hair. “A friend of mine had one, back in my youth. Light gold, it was. A thing of beauty. He crashed it not far from here, going too fast, and he just lost control. That’s all there was to it. Nobody else was hurt, thank God, but my friend, he was killed instantly. I don’t know, ever since then, I see one of these cars and I just think … death.” He gave a little smile and a little shrug.
“Well, that is a story with a sad ending,” said Milo.
“Isn’t it just?” The man smiled at them, for real this time, though there wasn’t much friendliness in it. “How are you folks? My name is Theodore Roosevelt, no relation to the big man, I’m afraid. You can call me Teddy. As you can probably tell by the badge, I’m the sheriff ’round these parts. If no one has bothered to do it, I bid you welcome to Springton. Now what brings you nice people to our little town, I wonder?”
“Just passing through.”
“Ah, that old staple. Just passing through. It’s hard to make new friends when everyone’s just passing through, that ever strike you as a truism? I’m collecting them – truisms, that is. Collecting them, coming up with them, going to put them all into a book when I’m done, try and get it published some day. Kind of going for a homespun sort of feel, you know? Going to call it Words of Wisdom, something hokey like