Jayden, his pale clothes looking luminous in the bedroom’s odd, rippling-underwater light, stepped inside.
“You?” He sounded truly amazed. “Savannah’s ‘friend.’ How did you get in?”
“The doors … opened for me. I think it was the cats. They seem to be jumping ship.”
“Maybe, but you’re trespassing. You shouldn’t be here. This is a storeroom. Violet keeps it locked. She’s very sick. She could go at any time.”
“Then shouldn’t you be there, for the signing of the will?”
“That was done this afternoon.”
“So I guess you’ve got nothing to lose now.”
Temple tried to figure out how to push past him. He ignored her accusation and seemed disinclined to move. He, too, was mesmerized by the walls of Barbie dolls in their store packaging.
“What are these things?” he asked. “Astounding. It’s very Kachina-doll, in a totally Vegas sort of way.”
“You’ve never seen this room?”
“Violet had her boundaries. I respected them.”
“As long as they included you, in the will.”
“I witnessed it,” he said, frowning. “You’re a terribly cynical young woman. That attitude will impede your path through life.”
“At least I’ve got a life.”
She regretted pointing that out as his odd-colored eyes fixated on her.
“You’ll be sorry…” he started to say.
And she couldn’t disagree.
Then Jayden bounded forward.
And tripped.
He fell facedown on the hard wooden floor, a ghostly Kachina doll with a dark arrow impaled in his back.
A paler shadow-figure behind him began to weave martial-arts motions Temple recognized from a zillion movies and TV shows and Matt’s shadowboxing by the Circle Ritz pool.
In the faint, flickering candlelight, the arrow in the back she thought had felled Jayden was starting to look a lot more like a … kitchen knife.
“Oh,” Temple said, backing up in the room of Barbie dolls, the cul-de-sac of Barbie dolls, the dead end of Barbie dolls, and probably her.
“Aren’t you pretty?” The man in martial-arts pajamas stepped around Jayden’s bleeding body to follow her retreat step-by-step, advance-by-advance.
“You’re almost as pretty as Miss Angel Alexandra,” he crooned in a phony, scary-soothing way. “Her momma’s joy and puppet. You all just belong in a box, don’t you, girly? All fluffed and frozen perfect, freeze-dried, like Mama’s Alexandra. In a box so they can put you in the ground where you all can rot.”
Oh, my God, Temple thought, who would ever connect the Barbie Doll Killer with Violet and her estranged daughter and her massive and valuable and hateful doll collection?
The man glanced up at the tiny Barbie faces wallpapering the room in 3-D.
And came closer.
“So here you are, too. Up against the wall, like these untouchable dolls. Who said it’s better to have loved and lost? Lost is better.”
“That would be Alfred, Lord Tennyson,” Temple said, her mind flying in three different directions.
One: this man was a killer, the killer. Two: Jayden might still be alive and needed emergency attention. Three: she might not be alive long enough herself to be in a position to help anyone.
“Huh?” the guy said. Lord Tennyson and his poetry had always been quite a mouthful.
“Just saying who said it,” Temple said, retreating. Babbling. “A dead English aristocrat. You might be related. You have a fancy first name. Sylvan. Very … dead English aristocrat.”
Her left leg had stopped against the wicker headboard, beside the piled small pillows in lacy, embroidered shams. For show.
“So.” Temple’s wandering gaze tried to fasten on a better defensive option than a heart-shaped crocheted pillow. “When did you get hooked on Barbie dolls? Aren’t you a bit old for them?”
“Never,” he said. “I play with them. I muss them up, all their pretty perfect looks. You all need mussing up.”
“No thanks.” Temple grabbed a couple pillows, clutched them to her chest like they were a Kevlar vest. “You play rough, Rowdy. When did it start? When Violet told Alexandra she was too good for you? And she left you?”
“Alexandra. No.”
The name seemed to put him off track.
“Oh, wait.” Temple began to see when the anger and madness set in. “Alexandra didn’t leave you. She was taken from you. She died from poisoned drugstore painkillers.”
“We would have been fine,” he said, ignoring the tragedy that had probably set him off, “if the old bitch hadn’t had her claws into her.”
“Like, you were better for her?”
He lunged, as she had hoped.
Temple dropped the pillows to grab the bedside lamp, a ruffle-shaded, Barbie-like accessory, and smashed it into his momentarily parallel back.
“That cut!” Rowdy complained, brushing off the shattered lightbulb shards and pushing himself upright, looking around, not sure which doll had claws.
“It ‘cut’ when Alexandra rejected you after Violet warned her about you.”
Temple grabbed a couple more pillows. There was nothing behind her but walls of insubstantial dolls in cheap packaging.
Rowdy was unarmed now, but she remembered he’d always worked in the construction trade. His short, stocky body must be all muscle, as his mind was all vengeance and spite, nursed for years and acted out in the meantime on all the pretty Alexandra dolls who also dreamed of auditioning for fame.
Temple was betting that Alexandra bought her own Barbies after leaving home and moving to Tucson, ones she could take out of the box and handle and costume. And she also had acquired a cat and kittens she could play with. And somehow she’d acquired a very loco local admirer whose seemingly simple, earthy ways had intrigued her for a time but who wanted, needed, her complete attention, sans dolls, sans cats.
Or … Rowdy may have never been her serious boyfriend, just someone she saw that she could flaunt at her mother, to reject Violet’s quest for perfection in her daughter’s life.
Temple had to wonder if Violet breathed yet in the main room.
She had to do something.
So she scrambled across the pile of pillows on the bed, pushing them into a white dotted-swiss avalanche behind her. She made the floor on the other side of the bed and ran for the bedroom door, leaping over Jayden’s red-streaked form and out into the hall.
She was halfway through it when the stomping sound of Rowdy’s weird white Oxfords, like forties hepcats and male dancers wore, caught up to her. Her ankles were clutched in two hard, tight, grasping hands. She went down, all at once, facedown, Jayden-fashion.
Temple kept her legs churning like a cartoon character’s, but her hands and wrists had taken the brunt of her weight and burned with sharp, scraping pain.
She kicked loose and scrambled up onto her skinned knees and crawled toward the table where Alexandra’s photo was enshrined. Maybe seeing his “lost love” would slow Rowdy down.
Maybe she could shove the table in front of him and escape to the front hall and through the big, heavy front door and into the dark and lonely street that stretched into desert beyond where Violet has lived and Pedro and maybe Jayden had died and maybe where Temple Barr would be found as another Barbie-accompanied serial-killer victim.
Not while she could stand and shove. Violet was alone now for real, in the main room, with only Temple between her and this madman.
She pushed one side of the chest into Rowdy’s path, slamming it into his hip bones hard enough to jar the contents and knock the breath out of the guy.
With all the cats in Violet’s house, you’d think a few of them could have congregated to get in the man’s way, but Temple was spoiled by having Louie always around as her guardian feline.
Apparently he was out to lunch, and she was on her own.
She spun to rush out of the hall when a flare of … flame caught her eye.
The tall, thick candle flickering in front of Alexandra’s eternally youthful features had fallen to the floor, rolled and … caught the bottom edge of Rowdy’s flared martial-arts pants on fire.
Liar, liar, pants on fire.
The fabric was simple cotton. The flame climbed his pants leg, but Rowdy was fixated on claiming Alexandra’s Barbie doll face. He lurched up to grab the photo off the wall, clasped it, then turned to the Barbie doll–lined bedroom, running back into it, reaching for and knocking down any Barbie doll boxes he could, a figure amazingly fast and furious … and quickly being consumed by fire.
Temple stood there panting, torn between where to go, what to do. Violet in the main room? Jayden on the floor, forgotten by his assailant? Rowdy only had eyes for Barbie. For so many Barbies, to be hated, mutilated, destroyed. Even with himself. He was screaming, with pain or triumph, or maybe they were the same thing. The entire room was a bright, crackling backdrop to Sylvan Smith.
Temple dropped to duck as much heat as possible and knee-crawled to Jayden’s feet, half out of the bedroom door. She grabbed his ankles and pulled. Backward, backward. Out of the burning Barbie doll room. She really didn’t have the strength for this, and he might be literally dead weight, except that she’d misjudged him and she could only budge his body a couple inches at a time.
When she looked up for Rowdy, she could see the cardboard and cellophane and plastic and tiny bits of satin and velvet and nylon hair erupting in a final blaze of glory. She could hear the dying Barbies screaming. High-pitched, tiny voices that rose in a silent smiling chorus as they shrunk into floating bits of ember in Alexandra’s girlhood bedroom.
Rowdy’s howling white figure turned black, dancing with transformation and death, and then it was all ashes, like the old nursery rhyme, and all fell down.
The screams continued for a long time, until someone lifted Temple up by the elbows and dragged her out of there with her heels trailing—ouch!—while big moonwalking spacemen smelling of smoke blocked the view of the bedroom and poured out a flash flood of epic Las Vegas proportions into the flames and on the room and all its contents.