A few more steps and he reached his building. He opened the door and hastened down the hallway, then upstairs. Once in his room, he bolted the door, set down his hat, withdrew the dress from his pocket and placed it on the table, and finally removed his jacket and folded it neatly over a chair. On the wall behind him hung a summer duster, another seersucker jacket, several hats. His shaving things sat on a window ledge: straight razor and brush, a pair of scissors, and a bottle of Lilac Vegetal eau de cologne. He always kept the drapes drawn; he lit the gas lamp, its hiss the only sound other than the occasional putt-putt of an automobile in the street.

He crossed the dim room to the closet, digging in his pocket for the key, and opened it.

There was no light inside, but he didn’t need one. The doll stood on the floor, gazing straight ahead. Her socket head and jointed limbs were made of molded bisque, as was the top half of her torso. A wig of dark hair—real human hair—was attached to her bisque scalp, and her blue sleep-glass eyes closed whenever he lay her down on a flat surface.

At forty-four inches tall, she was the largest doll he’d been able to find. The dresses she wore were still much too big, the fabric frayed where he’d cut off sleeves and hems in an attempt to make them look as though one day the doll might grow into them.

The doll had started as a prop, a means of deflecting attention from the fact that he had a collection of girls’ worn clothing in his suitcase. At first he’d invented imaginary daughters, but this provoked too many questions—their ages, names, where they lived, why he traveled with their clothes, their mother’s name, on and on and on.

The doll, oddly, inspired less curiosity. Of course he kept her out of sight. It was possible to forget where he’d stuffed a dress or pinafore, but not the doll. The doll demanded attention. She demanded to be hidden. Only twice had someone glimpsed her. The first time, he’d been careless in his hotel room and left her on his bed after unpacking. A bellman noticed her when he dropped off an item he’d left in the lobby. The bellman assumed she was a mannequin of the sort one saw in the more expensive department stores, and that he was a salesman.