The Dollmaker's Daughters (Bo Bradley Mysteries, Book Five) (19 page)

"I had no idea anyone remembered," Andrew said softly. "How nice to know about the flowers."

"Family's family," Teless said, shrugging. "You got any music here for singing?"

"I think I can manage 'Jolie Blonde,'" he smiled, banging out the opening bars of the Cajun classic on the harpsichord which suddenly sounded, Bo thought, amazingly like an accordion. Teless sang the first verse in an enthusiastic alto, followed by Andrew on the chorus, teaching Bo the French words as they went
.
Then Tele
ss pulled Bo into a hearty two
step around the harpsichord, oblivious to the museum-quality carpet being stomped by their feet. Andrew, his head thrown back, bellowed verse after verse until Bo was dizzy from laughing.

"I got to go on now, call my old man, Robby," Teless giggled when the song was over. "Is that okay, Nonk Andy? Use the long distance, I mean? Robby got sentenced today, but he said they wouldn't take him off until Monday since his daddy spoke for him. Prob'ly the last time me'n Robby'll talk for a while,
oui
."

"Go ahead, but keep it under thirty minutes," Andrew agreed. "And now, Bo, I want to show you my latest decorating tour de force.
”

"Okay," Bo answered, accustomed to nonstop decorating crises beginning the day he'd taken possession of the house a month ago. Her attention was on Teless in any event. The teenager had been strangely cheerful about her boyfriend's impending incarceration. No histrionics, no gnashing of teeth.
An epically unadolescent attitude. Something about this boyfriend story, Bo thought to herself, was fishy.

"This way," Andrew said, leading her outside and across the pine-littered lawn and driveway to the mock-Tudor garage with its upstairs apartment. He'd offered her the apartment as a compromise in their unending battle over the nature of their relationship. She could live there, he said, or she could use the space as a studio. It would be hers if she wanted it. Otherwise he'd rent it to someone, a nice elderly couple maybe, who'd live there and keep an eye on the property during his frequent absences.

"I think you'll be pleased with the look," he said, unlocking a security gate at the base of the apartment's external stairs, then a Dutch door opening into the apartment at the top. The landing and stairs, Bo noticed, were fenced with redwood two-by-twos set three inches apart and secured below the landing floor and the base of each step. There was no way a small animal—a dachshund, for example—could wiggle through and fall.

"Voila!”
he said, turning on the overhead light to reveal wide horizontal pine paneling bleached to a honey gray defining the small living room and dining nook adjacent to a sparkling new kitchen similar to the one in her apartment. Both the kitchen and dining area commanded a view of the sea through tall pines, and a brick-red freestanding fireplace on an island of flagstone pavers set off the inland-side wall, flanked by casement windows.

"The carpet's the tour de force, I think," he went on proudly. "Matte nylon indoor-outdoor in a Berber weave. Looks like wool, but it can't mildew and cleans with soap and water."

"Wow," Bo agreed, kneeling to inspect the dark green and blue plaid at her feet

"It's a tartan called MacCallum. I assumed from your, um, plaid sheets that you liked tartans. Green tartans."

"I had no idea you'd noticed my sheets, Andy," Bo teased him. "What's in here?"

"Ah," he said. "Go look."

Bo opened a door in a bookcase wall and discovered a short hall, bathroom, small laundry room, bedroom, and a large, bare room with a skylight. The floor was covered in springy beige sheet vinyl. A granite pattern. Washable, easily replaceable. The south and west walls were glass and bordered by a widow's walk railed in the same close-set two-by-twos as the stairs and landing.

"Of course it's a little bare and empty at the moment," Andrew mentioned casually, "but with t
he right window coverings and..
. things, I think it will do nicely."

"Oh, Andy," Bo sighed, reaching for his hand, "it's my best fantasy! A place that feels safe and warm with a view of the ocean and a studio where I can paint. But I can't... I can't take advantage of you. I can't let you keep giving when I give nothing. It's not right, and—"

"Bo," he interrupted, "you've given me my life. I don't know why, but from the beginning loving you somehow made it possible for me to be me. Just knowing that you exist, that you're in the world, makes me want to do things I've never done, try things I've never tried. You're like a window for me, Bo. A thousand windows. And all I have to give in return are things. Things I can buy, like a little carpentry work up here so you'll have a place to paint. I'm not trying to own you, Bo. I just want to be a window for you, too."

"Window," Bo repeated as they walked back into the empty living room. He was magnificent, honest, convincing. And he'd melted her heart.

"Window will do," she said as he pulled her to him with an urgency she shared, an urgency which quickly increased her familiarity with the new carpet. It smelled like nutmeg, she noticed peripherally as he wadded his shirt to pillow her head, and somewhat later, his.

"Mmph," she mumbled much later as they lay quietly in the moonlight pretending to be marble statuary, "I thought I heard something at the door."

"Impossible," Andrew said, snagging Bo's black lace bra from the floor with a toe and then swinging it above them. "What do they m
ake these things with, flexible
steel?"

"Just the underwiring," Bo replied. "Centuries from now archaeologists will find bra underwires while sifting through dump sites, and conclude that everyone had prosthetic knee replacements or something."

"Knee? This wouldn't fit anywhere in a knee, Bo. There's only one possible use—"

The knock at the door was completely audible this time.

"I'm really sorry to bother y'all," Teless yelled, "but there's a emergency call for Bo. Says he's a social worker an' you got to come talk right now."

"Be right there," Bo yelled back, grabbing her bra from Andrew's foot. "Damn."

It was Rombo Perry, a psychiatric social worker with whom Bo and Andrew had become friends after his help on an unusual case a year in the past.

"I knew I was interrupting something when it took so long for you to come to the phone, Bo," he apologized after Bo had sprinted to the phone in Andrew's kitchen, "but I'm working graveyard tonight and we just got an admission who says she knows you. Says she tried to call you earlier, that you were her social worker. Name's Malcolm. Janny Malcolm."

"Janny's in County Psychiatric? Why? What's happened?"

"I don't know. She seems terrified, says somebody's
after her. Apparentl
y her foster parents called the CPS hotline when she wouldn't stop screaming and hid in a closet. Hotline called the police to pick her up and bring her down here. She's oriented, knows where she is and what's going on, but she's got a doll chained to her wrist and goes stiff when anybody tries to take it from her, and—"

"Don't take the doll," Bo urged. "Let her hang on to it."

"It's got a bisque head, Bo. Breakable. You know the suicide precautions. The duty psychiatrist sedated her, but it doesn't seem to be having any effect. We need to get her calmed down. I thought it might help if you talked to her."

Janny Malcolm terrified and cowering in the back of a patrol car. Embarrassed by the uneasy attention of handsome young cops only a few years older than she. Humiliated by her own overwhelming fear. It was, Bo acknowledged, the reality implicit in Madge's threat earlier that day. Shameful, devastating.

"Yes, I'll talk to her," Bo said, and then waited as Rombo went to bring Janny into his office.

"Bo?" the girl's voice cracked, making two syllables. It was like the train whistle she'd heard the night she visited Janny's foster home, Bo thought. The pattern repeating itself.

"She came after me! She was looking in my window, Bo. I called you but you didn't answer, just the machine. And then I knew she was out there in the dark, and she'd find a way to get in and, and there were all these shadows everywhere and I couldn't stop screaming because they could be her, and I couldn't get away, and she was going to
kill
me, Bo!
"

"Janny, you're safe now," Bo said softly. "Nobody can get you in the hospital. Nobody can get in and get you. There are
people there to protect you. You're safe. And I'm going to come see you. Tonight. I'll be there in about a half hour, okay?"

"Okay," Janny answered, her voice reedy with terror. "Come as quick as you can. She might be able to get in here. She's so big, she can do things, Bo. I'm so scared!"

"You're safe, Janny. I promise you're safe there. Mr. Perry is a friend of mine. He'll keep you safe tonight. See you soon."

After hanging up, Bo stood in Andrew's paneled den and thought about the girl's words. "She's so big, she can do things, Bo." Could this be a child's memory of someone "big," an adult, who had done something so terrible that Janny had buried the scene deep in her mind? What could an eighteen-month-old child remember? No one, Bo thought, remembered anything from infancy. A sense of security, maybe, of hunger quickly assuaged and the loving warmth of a mother's and father's touch. Or the opposite, hunger and a primordial sense of abando
nment. But these were the under-
pinnings of social awareness and trust, not actual memories. Before the acquisition of language the human brain could not encode "memory," in the adult sense, and even adult memory was fragmented and inaccurate. And yet what if Janny were reacting to some mental image encoded long ago and then buried? And what if that image were of a twin sister, a darkened room, and the violent hands of someone "big"?

"I'm scheduled for surgery at seven tom
orrow," Andrew mentioned from th
e hall door. "Molly and I will have a walk and head for bed. You go on and do whatever you need to do."

"Where are you going?" Teless asked Bo.

"To see a teenager who's been placed in a psychiatric hospital because she's so scared she can't stop screaming," Bo answered.

"Can I go?"

"No, that wouldn't be—" Bo began, and then stopped short of "appropriate." Teless was exhibiting no signs of morbid curiosity, just puzzlement and concern. And she was sixteen, just a year older than Janny Malcolm. A solid, good-hearted kid.

"Oh, why not," Bo altered her train of thought. "It's irregular and you may not be allowed in even with me, but I think you might be helpful. Have you ever been inside a psychiatric hospital?"

"Sure," Teless said. "At least if detox counts. My cousin Alcide used to go into detox at one of those hospitals for, you know, drinking. I've been to see him there, me. It was a lot better there than when he was at home, you know? And they finally got him to stop, too. Alcide's been sober for more'n a year now, goes to meetings and stuff. We're all real proud."

Bo wondered what topic would not elicit in-depth family histories from Teless. "Fine," she said, hoping to avert further documentation of Alcide's substance-abuse problems. "Let's go."

"Let me just get some big ole warm socks from Nonk Andy."

"Socks?"

"For the girl," Teless explained. "Them hospitals, always cold as ice. Alcide said the worst part was gettin' up in the night and puttin' his feet on them cold tile floors when he had to—"

"Great idea," Bo interrupted as Andrew bounded upstairs for the required items. Alcide, she noted, had been right. Cold floors were epidemic in hospitals of all kinds, even those created to protect their charges from ghosts no one else could see.

Chapter
14

Pete Cullen stretched his long legs under the old door mounted on sawhorses that served as his desk. Then he took off his glasses and rubbed his eyes even though only one of them felt the strain from staring into the damn computer monitor for the last four hours. The other eye, the left one, still moved in its socket and appeared normal even though it hadn't seen anything since Nixon was in office.

Not since a littl
e shithead drifter named Donny Barsky found a wheelbarrow full of broken concrete behind the San Diego church where he'd just robbed the building maintenance committee of its cash and jewelry. He'd pulled off his shoe and sock, then filled the sock with jagged chunks of concrete before scuttling off to his favorite pawnshop. But the cops got there first, as he thought they might, and Barsky ducked into an alley to stash his take until later. When one of the cops ca
me sniffing in the alley, Barsk
y hid in a Dumpster and then whomped the cop o
ver the head with the concrete-
stuffed sock from behind. The cop had been Pete Cullen. And the blow had sent three pieces of shattered optical lens from his glasses deep into his left eye.