The Dollmaker's Daughters (Bo Bradley Mysteries, Book Five) (18 page)

"Well, Merry Christmas," she said, fighting a dizziness that shimmered in the tangled greenery. For a moment she thought she could see tiny red eyes watching from inside the shadows. Hundreds of them. "Gotta run."

After a quick drive home, Bo dashed up the steps to her apartment and phoned her shrink even before picking up Molly.

"Eva," she began, "I'm either getting manic or there's something, well, magical going on with this Malcolm case. I feel as though I'm just running on a track already in place, like a maze. Everything I turn up, everybody I talk to—it all seems to make some kind of huge sense even if I don't know
why. It's a pattern, Eva. And that dream pulled me into it even before Dar called and asked me to—"

"Whoa, Bo," the shrink's deep voic
e warned. "Are you sleeping, eati
ng right, taking your meds?"

"Yes. I'm really okay, I think. But Madge buried somebody today in secret, and the grandfather's this famous dollmaker. It happened years ago, Eva, in a cottage over in Mission Beach, and now the place is abandoned. There are rats—"

"I'd like to see you as soon as possible, Bo. Whatever you're talking about is obviously too complex for a phone conversation. What are your plans for this evening?"

Bo ran a hand through her short curls and scowled at the refrigerator across from her kitchen counter. "Dinner at Andy's," she said. "A teenage relative has turned up for the holidays. I'm going to meet her. And by the way, I'm having a tree-trimming party Sunday evening at about seven. Can you be here?"

"I'd love to come, and I'll bring something nourishing. But we need to talk before then. Breakfast tomorrow? Why don't I meet you in Del Mar near Andy's. I've been meaning to do some shopping up there and this will be perfect."

Bo pondered the ease with which her shrink made arrangements. "Thanks, Eva," she sighed. "I'll meet you at the bookstore around nine. We can pick a restaurant from there. And Eva?"

"What, Bo?"

"How much do you know about brain injuries, comas, that sort of thing?"

"You are not to think about this case anymore today," the psychiatrist intoned. "Is that understood?"

"Okay, okay," Bo grinned. "But I want to talk about brain death over breakfast."

"An enticing prospect," Eva noted dryly, and hung up.

Bo retrieved Molly from the neighbor's, then turned off the phone and enjoyed a leisurely ba
th before dressing in a forest-
green sweater and long knit skirt that made her look wholesome and robust, she thought
.
With the addition of boots and a fur muff, she could pose beside a sleigh.

"
Ach Tannenbaum, Ach
Tannenbaum
," she sang as Molly howled gleefully from the floor, "
du bist ein edler Zweig!
"

Over the din it was impossible to hear the message being taped on her answering machine. A terrified voice whispering, "She's coming to get me, oh, God, she's coming to get me, don't let her get me, please!" Then a click, and silence.

Chapter
13

“
Cher pac
an
!" Teless Babineaux muttered, banging a skillet A
ndrew LaMarche had found perfectl
y adequate until now against his new cooktop. "
Dis moodee
thing give me
de chou rouge
, Nonk Andy. Ain't you got a iron pan?"

"I'm afraid not," he answered, studying the orange-mango salsa he was mixing in a white ceramic bowl. "And please try to speak English when Bo arrives, Teless. She tends to pick up speech patterns from people around her. It wouldn't do for her to latch on to some of your more colorful phrases."

"Now you givin' me
de chou rouge
," the teenager grinned, stirring a mountain of shrimp, butter, and spic
es in the less than
adequate skillet. The aroma reminded Andrew of childhood summers on the bayous of southwestern Louisiana with his aunt and uncle. Teless even looked a little like his aunt, or would in a few years. The same wide hips and thick, dark hair. The same blue eyes darting everywhere, amused by everything. He found himself delighted with her, with their shared family history and Cajun French.

"Young ladies don't say 'You're giving me a red butt' every time they're irritated," he smiled while inhaling the spicy smells.

"Sounds all wrong in English, don't it?" the girl agreed. "Promise I'll never say it in English around your old lady."

"I don't think the term 'old lady' is quite appropriate for Bo," Andrew replied, frowning. "I'm afraid she'll take exception to that."

"Not unless she's as uptight as you,
sha
," Teless said, leaning to kiss his cheek.

The term meant "dear," elided from the French
cher
. Andrew realized he was basking in the affectionate attention of his remarkable young relative. She had a gift, he observed, for incisive observation made palatable by a blanket, loving acceptance. She'd be fabulous with children. He wondered if she'd be interested in volunteering at St. Mary's, and then lost the train of thought as the doorbell announced Bo's arrival.

Teless got there first, her wooden spoon dripping roux on the flagstone entry floor which flowed from the door into both the dining room and kitchen. Bo had picked out the flooring, the most substantial change he'd imposed on the old seaside Tudor after gutting and adding a twenty-foot extension to the cramped and cabinet-heavy
kitchen. He was sure the flag
stone's grouting wasn't quite dry, and quickly dropped to his knees to mop at the buttery droplets with a tea towel.

"You must be Teless!" Bo said as Molly scampered to help lick up the roux. "I'm Bo, Andy's, um ..."

"Old lady?" Teless suggested.

"Precisely," Bo giggled. The term, she thought, fit like a favorite sweatshirt. "Andy, why are you crawling around on the floor, which incidentally looks great?"

"Roux," he explained, standing to hug her. "But Molly's taking care of it. You look lovely tonight, Bo. Green's definitely your color."

Beneath the words was a sense of accomplishment, as if he, personally, were responsible for the affinity between redheads and the vernal color. Bo noted the hint of a surprise in his
words, too. Probably something about her Christmas gift, she guessed. Something green. From deep in her personal history a treacherously female interest bubbled to the surface. Emeralds.

She'd always wanted an emerald ring. A wide gold band with chip diamonds and seed pearls spilling away from an emerald blazing green fire from its heart. She'd even made designs for the ring and then hidden them in old sketchbooks. Intelligent, socially aware people eschewed ostentation in favor of higher spiritual values; she knew that. These were her family's values, reinforced by her own experience in life. But everyone was entitled to one deplorable fantasy, she told herself. One unbecoming, self-serving,
pointl
ess capitulation to vanity. For her, it would always be the emerald ring.

Fortunately, there was no way Andy could know about it. Her gift would probably be a green silk blouse. More likely lingerie. She wished she felt comfortable enough to tell him what she really needed was a coat. After all, she'd promised Estrella she'd look presentable at the christening.

“
Teless has made a sort of shrimp gumbo," he explained as the girl played with Molly. "Popcorn rice, yeast biscuits. My contribution is the appetizer and a chocolate raspberry torte for dessert."

"I can't tell you what this means to me," Bo grinned. "Just when I finally lost the last pound of the ten I've been battling for two months. And I love gumbo, but what's popcorn rice?"

"Louisiana special rice. Smells just like popcorn," Teless explained. "I brought five pounds for Nonk Andy. Would've brought crawdads, too, 'cept the bus man said they had to be froze with dry ice an' I didn't have no dry ice, me. This puppy like a boudin sausage on legs, Bo. T-Boudin!"

The teenager's speech was fascinating, Bo thought. And
the girl herself was radiant with a natural beauty bo
r
n
more of spirit than of Madison Avenue. Molly adored her immediately, as, Bo was certain, did every Cajun boy in southwestern Louisiana. Including one, Andy had said, determined to marry her before he left for a stint in prison. Her godmother had been wise in sending Teless to California for the holidays, Bo mused. Brilliant, actually.

"In Cajun, 'T' be
fore somebody's name means 'littl
e,'" Andrew explained, taking Bo's coat. "Um, your lining's falling apart," he mentioned.

"Old coat," Bo concurred.

After a dinner in which Bo forced herself to forget the meaning of the word "calor
ie," Andrew proudly displayed th
e finished harpsichord which had prompted him to move from his condo into a house. Painstakingly craft
ed of cherrywood, it glowed softl
y in a spacious library-music room adjacent to the dining room. The flagstone floor had been laid here as well, but an Oriental carpet protected the harpsichord from contact with the stone. Bo pulled a package of rolled sheet music from her purse, smoothed it flat, and placed a sheet on the harpsichord's music brace.

'"Prelude and Fugue in
G Sharp Minor,' from "The Well-
Tempered Clavier,'" she announced
.”
 
I also got the A minor and the A flat major, but the G sharp's my favorite. Could you start with that one, Andy?"

"My lady," he nodded, bowing and flipping imaginary tails over the edge of the harpsichord's tiny bench as he sat.

"
Gat
,
" Teless exhaled. "Would you look at that!"

But Bo was lost in the music from the first plucked note. Sliding with it into a Bachian landscape she had learned to love as a child. The precision, the repetition, the theme announced and then hidden only to be heard again beneath another, or to be heard somehow vertically where before it had been horizontal. The music unfolding like a garden of roses in time-lapse photography, the imagery now blatant, now obscure, but always rose. The room with its bay window and shelves of books, its brilliant carpet and pewter lamps, might have been a starship navigating a universe of exquisite order. A universe made of music.

"Ah, Andy!" she sighed when he released the last keystroke, allowing the damper to silence its still-vibrating string. "How beautiful!"

"I made the springs from real boar bristle," he beamed. "And I told you about the crow's-quill plectra."

"Bach would be proud, Andy. And so would my mother. Where did you learn to play like that?"

"Our parents insisted that my sister and I have piano lessons when we were children. We both hated it, but we learned to play anyway. La
ter, during my residency at Tu
lane's Medical Center, I rented a room near the Quarter. There was a piano in the living room where the boarders hung out. I started playing just to get people to turn off the TV, and found that I enjoyed it. Plus, it took my mind off... things."

Bo knew the veiled reference was to the accidental death of his two-year-old daughter, Sylvie, in New Orleans while he was in Vietnam with the Marines. The child's mother, his high school girlfriend, ha
d simply vanished after the littl
e girl's death. More than twenty years had passed, and still he paid private investigators to search for her. The loss of the child, Bo realized, had opened a wound that would never entirely heal.

"Oh,
sha
," Teless said, touching his shoulder, "the whole family knows about your little girl that died, about Sylvie. Some even takes flowers to her grave there in New Orleans. I
went once, with your sister Elizabeth and her husband Gaston, and my cousin Alcide and his wife MaryLou, and I think
Marylou’s
brother, Henri, but it might have been Alcide's friend, Norman—"