“I saw her all that year, and then the next, and the next. She made me feel as if I was part of her family. I loved her, just as if she were my mother, a good mother—and she told me she loved me, too, like a daughter. She made me feel safe. It got so I would rather be here, near her, than out in the world.”
“Didn’t you want to go home?” Sam asked.
“How do you define home?” Jennifer asked. “My mother killed my stepfather. It wasn’t exactly a healthy environment.”
“I’m so sorry,” Sam said. “How old were you?”
“Six,” Jennifer said. “That’s when I came here. I saw my mother do it, but I couldn’t remember the details. They got buried in my brain. To this day, I know more from what other people have told me than what’s in my actual memory.”
“That must be so traumatic. No wonder you had to go to a hospital.”
“Yes, lucky me. Maynard-King. I really have that therapist to thank—the one I told you about. The thing is, she started off with my mother—evaluating her, after she was arrested. When she realized that my mother wasn’t getting out of prison anytime soon, she found a way to help me—she took me out of the group home and brought me here.”
“Do you still see her?” Sam asked.
“Sort of,” Jennifer said. “But you know, it’s not the same.”
“Why?”
“All that I-love-you stopped when I wouldn’t do what she wanted. She got angry instead. She would act cold to me, and it hurt a lot. I’d cry, and she’d reel me back, telling me she loved me again. And I’d go along with her for a while, and the pattern would go on and on.”
“What did she want you to do?” Sam asked.
“She was grooming me,” Jennifer said. “Raising me for 1740.”
“That’s horrible,” Sam said.
“Yes, it is. She found a lot of troubled girls through working at the jail—either inmates or their daughters or victims. I was one of the youngest. She’d get us admitted to Maynard-King and then cull through us and decide which of us could be trained to make the men happy.”
“The men?”
“Yes. Whoever can make it into the club.”
“This club?” Sam asked. “Here?”
Jennifer nodded. “Where do you think the name came from? Enchanted Petals? It’s because we are all flowers, and we’re supposed to open our petals to the men. Let our petals just drop to the floor.”
“Like dead roses,” Sam said.
“Oh, they wouldn’t like that,” Jennifer said. “They actually think they’re romantic. That we like what they’re doing. We’re supposed to pretend.”
“Jennifer, I think I understand why you put all these knives in the dollhouse,” Sam asked, feeling sick from what she was hearing.
“So that the dolls could protect themselves,” Jennifer said. “And each other. So when bad people came after them, they could fight back.”
Sam nodded, feeling sad for a little girl who had to think that way, in terms of weapons and attack, defense and protection.
“How long has 1740 been here?” Sam asked. “Did it start at the hospital or here at this house?”
“It goes back to the Civil War,” Jennifer said. “Crispin Adams’s family owned all of this property—hundreds of acres. Trafficking women has been around forever. His ancestors were doing it back when this house was built—when Abraham Lincoln was president. Crispin is very proud of that fact. Apparently, the supply of women in this part of Rhode Island wasn’t enough for the demand, so a few generations later, Cantwell Adams—head of the family at the time—split the land and endowed an asylum. That’s what they called it back then.”
“Maynard-King,” Sam said.
“Yes.”
“Are there Maynards and Kings in the family tree?” Sam asked.
“Nope. ‘Maynard’ was the last name of Cantwell’s favorite girl. Dorothy Maynard. She was just a young woman who worked here. Somewhere along the line she was taught to read, and her favorite story wasBeauty and the Beast.”
