Horror Stories

Barbie Doll

I'd been working maintenance for a few years by the time I got done with college, mostly just garbage pick-up and stuff like that at apartment complexes my dad was in charge of in central Arizona. Pay was okay and I got my own little place where I was living with my girlfriend. It was all pretty good in its own right, but I wasn't making too terribly much and we'd never been able to take a vacation or anything on our own.

It was on a Wednesday when I saw an ad in my city newspaper for a pool boy in a little place a few miles out of town for almost twice what I was making doing all the other maintenance work I already was. I almost immediately called the number the paper mentioned and was greeted by a calm sounding man, probably in his mid-forties. When I inquired about the job he seemed to become even happier and we set up a meeting time.

That Saturday we met at his place, a big, open house with lots of windows and all the latest appliances. He seemed to be a pretty nice guy, rich too, obviously. When I asked why he was offering so much just to monitor his pool, he replied that he had just let his last guy go and his pool always needed surveillance because he had a young daughter and she had a lot of friends, that sort of thing.

I accepted the job almost instantly and was gladly up at his place right after my two week notice passed at my dad's. Work was pretty smooth for the first few weeks, my new employer being much more understanding of circumstances than my old man was allowed to be, due to rules and regulations every employee had to follow at his complex - I could go in and cool off when it seemed too hot outside, he always kept his fridge stocked with water, it all seemed exceedingly comfortable.

I would occasionally make small talk with the maid. She couldn't speak English very well, but one day when I asked her, she told me the boss was a cosmetic surgeon, obviously a very wealthy one at that. As a personal rule, I'm generally against that kind of stuff and admittedly grimaced at the prospect of working for someone whose money came from boob jobs. Still, he seemed like a nice, settled in family man, and the pay was good, so I let it be.

About two months in I was clearing some sand and other sorts of residue out of the bottom of the pool, faintly hearing the sound of a piano inside. The doc's window was wide open and he was overseeing his daughter practicing. I try not to snoop, but work was taking longer than expected and the music was pleasant until it suddenly stopped. I could hear the doc calmly explaining to the daughter what she did wrong, but in an instant she was screaming at him that she wanted to stop.

It hadn't occurred to me until then that she had been playing the entire morning. This in mind, I couldn't help but listen in just a little over the sound of my pool vacuum. He started shouting and threatening to ground her, to take her dolls away. I caught something that I didn't quite understand, something about her "big Barbie" or something like that. When I began to hear the music again I went back to cleaning out the pool, trying to forget what I had just heard.

Though I tried to make good on this attempt, I decided I'd be on the watch for this kind of thing in the future. I know parents snap at their children and all, but if this turned into abuse, someone was going to hear about it.

Sometime thereafter, I was inside getting a drink when I got a good look at a photo on the refrigerator I had never noticed before, showing the doctor, his daughter and two other women, one in her forties or fifties and the other a teenager. Judging by the doc's youngest daughter, it looked fairly recent. I asked the maid about it, and in the best broken English she could give me, she said the older woman was the doctor's wife, the younger, his older daughter.

I hated to keep asking questions, given her difficulty speaking to me, but I pressed on just a little more to ask why I never saw them around. Now with difficulty not only speaking but recalling, she told me the doctor's daughter was killed in a car crash a year ago, his wife killed herself shortly thereafter. This shocked and horrified me, and suddenly I couldn't help but feel a new sense of compassion for the doctor and his daughter.