Free Shadows on a Cape Cod Wedding by Lea Wait Page B

heads, arms, and legs. One box of eyes. She shuddered. “Those are creepy! But not as creepy as the dolls at Cordelia’s house. Now I know why you two are friends. You have weird dolls, too.”
    Maggie and Gussie looked at each other.
    “I use those parts to repair old dolls. I didn’t know Cordelia had dolls,” said Gussie. “But lots of people collect them. What kind does she have?”
    “She doesn’t exactly collect them,” said Diana. “That would be normal for a kid, I guess, but for an older woman—I mean, she must be over forty! It would be strange.” She ignored the half smile Maggie and Gussie exchanged. “She cooks them.”
    “What?” Maggie blurted. “Cooks them? Are you sure?”
    Diana nodded dramatically. “The first night I was there Dad said he’d get Chinese food for us because we couldn’t use the stove. I thought it was broken, so when he was out I looked at it. The oven was on, and there were two baby dolls inside. In a roasting pan! Now I know she does that all the time. She has parts of dolls upstairs in her bedroom, too, like you have in those boxes. Eyes, and hair, and arms and legs. Clothes, too.”
    “Have you seen her working on them?” asked Gussie.
    “She keeps the door to her room closed. But I’ve peeked when she was out walking,” Diana admitted. “She has a workbench in there, with half-finished naked dolls all over it.”
    Gussie laughed.
    “Gussie, I’m with Diana. That’s strange. Roasting dolls? If she has doll parts maybe she’s making or repairing dolls. Okay. But cooking them in the oven? What’s that? Voodoo?” Maggie shivered. “I don’t see what’s funny.”
    “No, no, no. I’ve always wondered how Cordelia makes a living, since she stays in that house by herself all the time. Now I think I know. I’ll bet she’s making OOAK reborns. The best get pretty high prices nowadays.”
    Diana and Maggie looked bewildered.
    “English, please? OOAK? Reborns?” Maggie shook her head. “Whatever that means, it sounds awful. Educate us who clearly have no clue.”
    “It’s not awful.” Gussie smiled. “They’re dolls, like Diana said. OOAK means One of a Kind. Reborns are dolls that look like newborns or preemies. People make them by hand. Someone, like maybe Cordelia, takes expensive manufactured baby dolls apart, removes the factory paint, cleans them, and then repaints them, adding real hair, eyes, eyelashes, and fillers to make the doll feel like a real baby. Then they dress the doll, often in real preemie or baby clothes. ­Every OOAK is different. They can be made to look like any race. At several steps along the way the doll has to be baked to set the paint or glue. Making them isn’t simple. It takes patience and time, and only someone who’s really talented artistically can do it successfully.”
    “It sounds horrible,” said Maggie.
    “Not to a lot of people. A reborn isn’t the kind of doll most children would play with. It’s a baby doll that can sometimes be mistaken for a real infant. People collect them. Some women with emotional issues, especially those who’ve lost an infant, find taking care of them is relaxing. I’ve heard of women who can’t have children who ‘adopt’ an OOAK as a substitute.” Gussie shot a sideways glance at Maggie, who pointedly ignored her.
    “Taking care of them?” Diana looked askance. “You mean people act like they’re real babies? Weird!”
    “I’ve seen women with reborns in strollers at doll shows. The best are very realistic. One of the artists, as their makers are called, told me she had a customer arrested for child abuse for leaving hers in a car seat in a parked car. Of course, all charges were dropped when the policeman saw her ‘baby’ was really a doll.”
    “Talk about embarrassing moments!” said Maggie. “I’ll bet the other cops teased him about that for months.”
    “How much do the dolls sell for?” asked Diana.
    “At the doll shows they can go over a couple of