him a pair of porcelain dolls, their lips puckered for a kiss.
He turned them over in his hands and stared at them, remembering the time early in their relationship when their own actions mimicked the dolls’. Drawing his and Ruthie’s features on them had provided the perfect opener for their first kiss. And many more after that.
“What happened to the freckles?”
She flashed him another of her sassy grins. “Foundation makeup. It covers a lot of flaws.”
He knew she was joking, but the comment drew his attention to her face. The cute little specks were still there, but much lighter now, and he couldn’t help wondering if there were still twenty-nine. Somehow he doubted she’d let him count them. Perhaps spending less time in the sun had allowed them to fade. He hoped she wasn’t trying to cover them with makeup.
She ducked her head and looked away under his scrutiny. He hadn’t meant to bring out her shyness, but he couldn’t let her put herself down, even if only in jest.
“I don’t consider freckles flaws,” he said, and idly ran a thumb over the girl doll’s puckered face.
Mirroring his gesture, Ruthie lifted a hand to her face, then immediately slid her hand into her slacks pocket.
“Right. They’re kiss prints,” she said, automatically parroting back the words he used to tell her.
She looked uncomfortable, as if realizing she’d opened a door that led someplace they weren’t supposed to go. “I’m sure Sobo will be glad to get this set back,” she said, abruptly changing the subject.
Gray shook his head. “This isn’t the doll I’m looking for. The one I’m talking about is the size of a Barbie and has real hair and a red kimono.”
Ruthie sagged against the counter. “Oh, no.”
“Oh, no?” He clutched the porcelain dolls tighter. “What does ‘oh, no’ mean?”
“That must have been the doll that was sold. I thought Paisley meant these.”
She looked sick, and that was the way Gray felt right now.
“You sold it?”
She gave a slow nod and pinched her lip between small white teeth. “Yesterday, while we were at the hospital. Paisley said an Asian woman bought it. I hadn’t inventoried all of the boxes at that point, so I assumed she was talking about the kissing dolls.”
With a knot in the pit of his stomach, Gray considered the possibilities. Pop had said Naoko treasured that doll, and he didn’t want her to come home from the hospital to find that her most valued possession had been sold. He pushed the kissing dolls into Ruthie’s hands. “Sobo has to have it,” he insisted. “Call the customer and get it back.”
“I don’t know who bought it.” Her voice sounded precariously close to cracking. “It was a cash sale.”
He closed his eyes and wiped a hand over his face, wishing he could wipe away the problem. “Sobo doesn’t care much about...things,” he said. He almost said worldly things, which was the way she always phrased it, but something made him leave that part out. “This is the one item she treasures, and if there’s any way to get it back for her, I’m going to do it.”
“I know.” Ruthie wrung her hands, then retightened her ponytail. “I feel just terrible about it. Sobo has been so good to me. If there was any way I could find her doll...”
“There is,” he said, taking the kissing dolls from her and placing them on the counter. He dropped his hands on her shoulders and pulled her toward him. “We’ll put our heads together. Between the two of us, we should be able to cover all possible bases. From this point on, you and I will be joined at the hip until Sobo’s doll is found.”
Chapter Three
At the Bristows’ house that evening, Pop took Ruthie and Gray to the downstairs guest room to show them the progress he’d made clearing out excess odds and ends accumulated over the years. Ruthie used the short delay to try to decide the best way to break the news to him.
Since sleeping upstairs was out of the question for a while, an adjustable twin bed had been pushed against the far wall for Sobo during her recovery from hip surgery. A recliner had been moved in here from the den, presumably where Pop would sleep, and Ruthie was touched by the devotion he held for his wife.
Her dream was that someday she would have someone who would love her that much, even after fifty years together. She glanced over at Gray, who ran his hand over a glass-front display case.
“You did a great job clearing out this room, Pop,” he said. “Sobo will be very happy.”
Indeed he had. The clean design of the room reflected Naoko’s Japanese heritage and minimalism. Simple shades for the windows, a small wool rug beside the bed, a nightstand and a dresser adorned with painted branches of cherry blossoms.
Pop smiled and puffed out his chest. The action made him seem more like a young boy than a white-haired man in his early eighties. “No ranzatsu in here,” he said. “That case will eventually go in the den, where we’ll display my army things and her doll. Memories of when we met. But for now they’ll stay in here.” He grew oddly quiet for a moment. Finally, he said, “She needs to see them.”
Although Ruthie had been close to the Bristows for eleven years and had asked Sobo on various occasions about their romantic beginnings, she still didn’t know how the pair had met. The elderly woman had deflected her questions with a bow of her head and started talking about one of the household projects she always had going. Ruthie made a mental note to ask Pop about it at a more appropriate time.
He laid a hand on Gray’s shoulder and squeezed. “Give me a hand to move it over here, where she’ll be able to see everything from the bed.”
After the men maneuvered the furniture into position came the moment she and Gray had been dreading. Breaking the news to Pop.
“About the doll,” Gray began. “It’s, uh, temporarily misplaced. It may be a while before we can get it back to you.”
Ruthie had never known him to tap-dance around a subject the way he had just now.
“A while? Your grandmother will need it here when she comes home from the hospital. In a few days, God willing.” A worried frown lined his brow. “And what do you mean by temporarily misplaced?”
Ruthie looped her hand through the crook of Pop’s arm and they all walked to the kitchen. “I appreciate Gray for not laying blame at my feet,” she said, “but the truth is that the doll was mistakenly sold from my shop. It’s my fault for not setting your boxes aside until I finished taking inventory of them.” She hated to disappoint him and avoided looking at the wounded expression in Pop’s pale blue eyes while she filled him in on how the doll came to be sold.
He patted her arm. “If anyone is to blame, it’s my own silly self for taking the wrong box to your store. How could you have known any different?”
“I promise you, I will do everything in my power to get it back.”
Gray reached into a drawer near the sink and withdrew a pad of paper and a pen, then set them in front of Ruthie. “We should create a strategy list. Make sure we cover all the bases.”
Ruthie started by listing what they’d already done to try to find the doll’s purchaser. “One. Go through my customer list and start making calls to see if one of them might be our mystery lady. Two. Ask the neighboring business owners if they recognize the description Paisley gave of her.”
Pop sat beside her at the table and touched a finger to the paper. “Did you pray?”
She smiled at the gentle reminder. “Of course. It should have gone at the top of the list—that’s the first thing I did.”
“Me, too.”
He