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“What’s all this?” Ammo asked as he walked in.
“I found it in the chest,” she said. “Maybe it belonged to Kirsten’s father or grandfather. I don’t know.”
“Could have,” he said. “The doll looks old.”
She held up the doll. It was soft, and smelled a little musty, but it was still cute.
“Maybe I shouldn’t touch it,” she said. “These feel like family heirlooms.”
“You could message Kirsten, and ask her,” he said.
“Yeah, I could do that. I turned on my phone earlier and all of these messages came through.”
“What messages?” he asked. “Were any of them from that guy that threatened you?”
She blinked at him. “Not that I saw. How would he get my phone number? Would he message me?”
“I need to look at these messages,” he said. “Where’s your phone?”
“I put it back in the pack,” she told him as she moved the car back and forth along the wooden floorboards of the cabin.
Wow, it moved surprisingly well, considering how old it had to be. She put the doll on top of the car and drove it along from one side of the living room to the other. She barely noticed Ammo returning with her phone in his hand. Instead, she set up the blocks, then pushed the truck toward them.
“Oh no, careful,” she cried, and the doll stepped into the way of the truck, stopping it from knocking into the blocks.
“That was naughty,” she said in a deep voice. “Bad, Dolly, bad. You shouldn’t step in front of a moving truck.”
“I’m sorry, Daddy. I’m sorry,” she cried in a high-pitched voice as she pretended that the doll was running away from an imaginary Daddy.
“You’re going to get your bottom spanked,” she growled in a Daddy voice.
“No, Daddy, no!” she said, hiding the doll behind the wall of wooden blocks and putting the doll’s hands over its bottom. “You can’t spank my bottom.”
“Interesting play you’ve got going on there,” he said dryly.
“Sometimes I like to reenact real things.”
“Really? So you’ve run in front of a truck, have you? To stop it from driving into wooden blocks, and then had your Daddy threaten to spank you?”
“Well, obviously not this exact scenario,” she said. “However, you do like to threaten to spank me a lot. I think it’s a bit of an obsession.”
“I think it’s because you’re so naughty,” he told her. “You just keep earning those spankings.”
“I haven’t done anything to earn spankings, Daddy. What are you talking about?”
“Hmm. Let’s see. Continually putting yourself in danger, going on a bus, leaving the house without permission. I could go on and on. But the biggest one is trying to send me away to keep me safe, when you were being threatened.”
“See what I mean? An obsession. Did you hear that, Lola? Did you hear how mean my Daddy is to me? You think your Daddy’s mean to you? But you were super naughty getting in the way of that truck. I wouldn’t do that.”
“You’d better not,” he said in a deep voice. “Lola?”
“I think she looks like a Lola.”
“Well, I can’t see any threatening text messages on here. Just a lot of people messaging to let you know that they’re sorry that your house burned down. Some of them don’t read as sincere.”
“Oh, I’m sure a lot of them aren’t sincere,” she said. “I haven’t checked any of my social media accounts. The text messages were enough.”
“Social media,” he said with a scoff. “It’s ruining the modern world.”