Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine. Vol. 7, No. 9, September 1962

“Oh, just little things. Getting his shoes muddy and forgetting to put his things away.”

Ann’s eyes twinkled. “What’s so wrong with that? As a matter of fact, she doesn’t sound very different from me, or any other mother.”

Holly continued in the same earnest manner, “But she won’t let him alone, She always wants him to do what she thinks is best for him and not what he’d really like to do at all. And another thing, she can’t stand a bit of dust anywhere. She really works poor Clara... the maid... terribly hard. I think Clara would’ve left a long time ago if it hadn’t been for Mr. Pettingill and Charlie.” She stroked Clara’s blond pompadour. “I want you to make Clara a beautiful dress with a parasol to match.”

Ann’s mouth turned up. “But, darling, she’s the maid.”

Holly said stubbornly, “I don’t care. Besides, she doesn’t have to work on Sundays, and she always takes Charlie for a walk in the park after church. Sometimes Mr. Pettingill goes along with them, too. So she needs a pretty dress.”

“And what about the new clothes for Mrs. Pettingill?”

Holly was indifferent. “Oh, you don’t have to bother with her. What she has on is all right.”

Ann felt curiously defensive about the mother doll. She couldn’t understand Holly’s hostile attitude toward Mrs. Pettingill. More to herself than to her daughter, Ann replied, “The mother’s dress could be dark blue... taffeta, I think. With a white lace collar.”

“I think I’ll read for a while.” Holly rose, and went over to the bookcase under the dormer window.

Ann knew that she was being dismissed. She got to her feet and started to leave when Holly added, “I’d like Clara’s dress to be pink with a real full skirt and ruffles around the bottom. Charlie and Mr. Pettingill would like that, too.”

As Ann changed the linens on the bed in Phil’s and her room she kept thinking about her conversation with Holly. She was pleased, naturally, that her daughter’s imagination had apparently begun to emerge. And yet, it had taken such a strange turn. There was something so... real about the Pettingills. They weren’t at all like the improbably good, pretend families she remembered from her own childhood. Still, they were far more intriguing, and evidently real to Holly.

She went over to a chest, and pulled out the bottom drawer. She rummaged through it, and finally came up with a scrap of Alençon lace. There was more than enough of it for a collar, but the taffeta... She found a piece of dark blue satin. That would do even better. Mrs. Pettingill would be a model of good taste compared with the frilled pink organdy flounces of Clara, with matching parasol.

The following Monday afternoon Ann was in the kitchen making seven-minute frosting when she heard Holly come home from school. Her daughter called from the living room, “Mommy, Sara’s here. Her mother said she could stay ’til five o’clock.”

Ann raised her voice over the clatter of the beater. “Hang up your things in the hall closet.” She expected the girls to come into the kitchen, but shortly she heard them run upstairs. Abruptly she turned off the mixer. Sara was such a helter-skelter sort of child, there was no telling what she might do to the doll house. And there were the new clothes on the Pettingills and Clara. She’d planned to surprise Holly with them, but it wouldn’t be the same now with Sara around. Her face hardened. She would go upstairs anyway.

The two girls didn’t notice her when she came to the doorway. “It’s sort of funny looking,” Sara was saying. “I like my doll house better. Mine’s got electric lights, too.” She seized Mrs. Pettingill by one arm, crushing the leg o’mutton sleeve that Ann had struggled over.

“Put her down,” Ann commanded. The girls started. Ann removed the doll from Sara’s sticky fingers, and as she tried to fluff the sleeve into fullness again, she said coldly, “You’d better play down in the recreation room.”

“But, Mommy,” Holly protested.

“Go ahead. Do as I say.” They left, subdued and silent, but she stayed by the doll house for a time. Finally she returned to the kitchen. Thanks to Sara, the frosting was ruined. She dumped it into the sink, and turned on the water with such force that it soaked her apron.

Holly was so constrained at dinner that night that Phil asked her, “What’s the matter? Something happen at school today?”

“No.” She avoided looking at her mother and addressed Phil, “Can I be excused now?”

He glanced at her plate. She’d hardly touched her food.

“It’s all right.” Ann made the decision for him. As soon as Holly slipped from the dining room, Ann explained, “Sara was over this afternoon. She always overstimulates Holly.”

“I’ve never noticed it before,” he said.

“Well, she does.” Ann pushed back her chair, and began stacking the plates.

“You think Holly might be coming down with something? She’s seemed pretty quiet the last couple of days.”

“I don’t think so. She’s just tired, that’s all.”