I crossed the room to the table where one doll sat alongside what might have been a shoebox. The wooden floorboards creaked beneath my weight. My heartbeat thudded in my ears, likely because even though Solano was dead, I felt as though I was trespassing, invading his privacy—which was exactly what I was doing.

I peered in the shoebox.

I wasn’t sure what I’d been expecting to discover—spare doll parts?—but certainly not makeup. Yet that’s what I found, loads of it, far more than any woman would ever need. I selected a metallic tube of lipstick, removed the cap: Firetruck Red. I dumped it back in the box and examined the doll. Its face was painted with eyeliner, eyeshadow, blush, and lipstick. Moreover, it was in much better condition than its outdoor cousins. Limbs intact, dressed in clean clothes, free of cobwebs and filth. The word “groomed” came to mind.

I picked up the doll. Its eyes were dark, reptilian, almost calculating, its earlobes pierced with bronze hoop earrings, its fingernails sporting vermillion nail polish. I sniffed its hair—a pleasant citrus scent.

Did Solano bathe the thing?

I wished Pepper were here to see it, because it was proof I was right. Solano had been a crazy bastard. Maybe even a raving lunatic.

I pictured him sitting at this table at nighttime, an old man worn down by time and aged by the weather and hardship of living off the land, working by candlelight, brushing the dolls hair, or carefully applying blush to its cheeks, or lipstick to its lips, or polish to its nails, mumbling incoherently to it as he did so, maybe asking how her day was, or what she was going to do tomorrow, or, hell, had she met any Ken dolls lately.

Yet why? What had he been thinking? That it was a flesh-and-blood child?

Did he fuck it?

This question startled me. He wouldn’t, couldn’t—it was a doll, for Christ’s sake. Then again, some people had pretty sick fetishes, and he was lonely as a cloud out here, no human company…

I was tempted to lift the doll’s dress, pull down its knickers, see if Solano had altered the space between its legs in any way. But I didn’t. I didn’t want to know.

The sight of a gaping hole would make me sick.