The Dollmaker's Daughters (Bo Bradley Mysteries, Book Five) (21 page)

Well, there had almost been someone, he remembered with a familiar rush of emotion that made him feel both young and
terribly old. There had been someone who loved him, believed in him, kissed and made love to
him in a hotel overlooking the sea
. But it had been wrong, and she'd gone away.

Still on his knees, he contemplated a large Shirley Temple "walker" doll with rooted saran curls and "sleep" eyes that clicked with age when they opened and closed. Maybe he could stay awake long enough to pack that one, too. It was important to get the dolls packed and shipped before it was too late. Half of them would go to St. Dymphna's, the other half to the trust he had established for Janny. They represented a fortune.

Coughing deeply, he wrapped a gnarled hand over the arm of a chair and pulled himself up. The cat stretched briefly against the sharp crease of his pin-striped trousers and then padded from the room. Just one more. He'd pack the Shirley Temple and then allow himself to rest until morning. If there were a morning.

Daniel Man Deer awoke suddenly, a faint chill rippling across his chest Someone was standing near the foot of the bed, or had been. The image seemed to recede when he opened his eyes, but the certainty of its presence hung in the air for several seconds. It had been a dream. It had been a stocky Indian with a massive chest dressed in stiff canvas pants and a strange, long jacket with narrow lapels and widely spaced buttons made of wood. He'd worn a faded scarf at his neck, and a top hat. It was a photograph, Daniel realized. It had to be. A studio photograph of an Indian made in the 1800s, probably one of several he'd seen while researching the Kumeyaay. But the face had been smiling, the dark
eyes impish in the shadow of th
e incongruous hat
.
The face had

been a message of encouragement and pride, he felt. And humor.

"Dan, what is it?" Mary grumbled from beneath the down comforter, reaching for him.

"A dream. I think the bobcat is safe," he answered. "I think the ancestors are pleased and will help us now."

"Dan, tomorrow I want us to talk about taking a trip, okay? I've been thinking about a cruise. Let's talk about it over breakfast."

"A cr
uise? I don't think now is the time, Mary.
"

But she was already snoring softl
y.

Chapter
15

By nine-thirty Saturday morning Bo was cross-legged in a yellow Adirondack chair eyeing quail-egg salad with radicchio and capers mounded atop pita crisps cut to resemble Christmas trees. The table was aqua-blue and Eva Broussard's chair was lavender. The coffee in Fiesta Ware cups was so delicious Bo had forced herself to restrain a moan of sheer animal pleasure at the first sip.

"It's true what they say about Southern California," she observed as they watched the
Pacific turn from gray to blue-
green in the morning sun.

"If you mean the fabulously pretentious cuisine, it can hold its own against ridicule from the Fatty-Acid Belt, Bo," Eva replied, sighing. "These salmon crepes surpass anything I tasted in Quebec, especially with the peach-ginger soup and braided kelp bread. I'm afraid I'm a convert."

"I was thinking of the fifties color scheme, the constant attempts to improve on the past by dressing it up and dragging it into the present."

"A result of proximity to Hollywood, the entertainment industry, don't you think? After all, what are motion pictures and television series but attempts to 'improve' things that have already happened by explaining them?"

Eva, dressed in a bulky red hand-knit sweater that emphasized her wiry, muscular frame, stretched her signature jeans and moccasins to rest on an adjacent Adirondack chair and pushed her dark glasses up to rest in stylishly cropped white hair. Her coal black eyes turned to regard Bo.

"But then you're not really talking about California, are you?" she said.

Bo ran a hand through her own thick curls and enjoyed the cool sea breeze against her scalp. The quail-egg salad
was actually good
. And a red pepper sorbet sounded intriguing for dessert.

"Janny Malcolm's case, the dream I had, whatever happened down there in Mission Beach thirteen years ago, it's all from the past, Eva. Madge was involved in it, and another social worker who's retired now, named Mary Mandeer. They signed off the paperwork authorizing the transfer of Kimmy Malcolm to the Kelton Institute. Then when she died last week they arranged for her funeral, just the two of them. A secret funeral. Janny doesn't know any of this, doesn't even remember she had a twin sister, and—"

'Twin?" Eva interrupted. "On the phone you said 'sister.'"

"Identical
twin," Bo went on, signaling th
e waiter to bring more coffee to their outdoor table. "Eva, I'm sure that dream, that empty place I called 'The Station of the Dead' when I thought about painting it—I'm sure it was some kind of image of Kimmy Malcolm's world at Kelton. There were these clicking sounds and an awful sense of waiting ... for death."

Eva Broussard stared at the glassy, flat surface of the sea as though it puzzled her.

"The dream troubles you, doesn't it?" she said, her Canadian French accent and deep voice giving the words a resonance Bo had come to trust unconditionally. "How do you plan to deal with this?"

Bo pushed up the sleeves of her black turtleneck sweatshirt and propped her chin on her hands.

"I've read the medical file from the police report, Eva. Kimmy sustained a severe br
ain injury comparable to a two-
story fall onto the edge of a cement
block. She wasn't expected to l
ive but somehow she did. Or at least she didn't quite die. The report said that she was blind and subject to constant seizures, that she could no longer swallow or make sounds. It said that she had lost all brain function above the cerebellum, the old, preconscious part of the brain that just regulates breathing, heartbeat, stuff like that. It said she would never regain consciousness, and that a medically induced coma was necessary to control the seizures."

"None of which answers my question, Bo."

"Was Kimmy Malcolm really alive?" Bo went on. "And how could she stay alive in that condition for thirteen years?"

"I assume this l
ine of inquiry will eventually lead back to the condition of
my
patient," Eva sighed. "You know there is no simple answer to your first question. Definitions of life vary. As to the second, survival of a child for thirteen years with the massive brain deficit you describe would be extremely rare but not impossible in a clinical setting. What are you really asking, Bo?"

"I think something happened in Kimmy Malcolm's brain as death became imminent. There are stories about things like that at Kelton. I think she somehow sent psychic energy, maybe even imagery, out. And Janny picked up on it, which is what's causing her so much stress right now. And maybe that dream... maybe for some reason I did, too."

The psychiatrist sipped coffee and merely waited.

"I'm not manic, the meds are fine," Bo continued. "My sleep patterns are normal, there are no unusual stressors in my life."

"Unless you regard shots fired through a wall into a room where you and your closest friend are interviewing a child as stress-free," Eva interjected softly.

"The dream came before that, Eva. What I want to know is—am I crazy?"

"People are always asking me that," Eva smiled and then leaned to ruffle Bo's hair. "And you already know you aren't
.
What you want me to say is that I agree with your theory. I neither agree nor disagree, Bo. What you have described is a belief which cannot be proven, like the Seekers and their visits from extraterrestrials. You have every right to believe it if it makes sense to you. My only interest in this belief is in how it will affect the ways in which you deal with your life and problems, your feelings about the dream and about the case. What are you going to do?"

"Janny says something's coming after her trying to 'get' her," Bo said, pondering three artificial sweeteners, honey, and refined, brown, and raw sugar in individual packets. Brown, she decided. The molasses flavor would enhance the fresh Guatemalan coffee steaming in her cup.

"And you think this something is Kimmy's ghost?"

"I don't know," Bo answered. "Something like that. She calls her doll Kimmy. She says the doll was called something else until a few weeks ago. That may have been when her sister began to fail, began to ... die. They were identical twins. I've read that identical twins sometimes have a kind of psychic connection, that when one dies, even in infancy, the surviving twin feels the presence of the other one throughout fife."

"I'm familiar with such narratives," Eva said with, Bo thought, an exquisite neutrality.

"So do you think it's possible that Kimmy's spirit is trying to stay attached to Janny? Maybe make Janny remember who was there that night, the person that killed Kimmy?"

"How does Janny describe this entity attempting to 'get' her?"

"She said it was outside her window last night. It terrified her so badly she decompensated enough to get slapped into Country Psychiatric."

"And the foster parents have confirmed that there actually wasn't someone outside the window?"

Bo felt something like a thin wet sheet coming to rest lightly over her head and shoulders. Reality. She'd forgotten to check that, she realized with chagrin.

"I told you about my shrink ye
ars ago in St. Louis, Dr. Bitt
ner?" Bo said, her cheeks flushed. "She always said there's nothing but reality."

"How I wish we could have worked together," Eva Broussard smiled broadly. "She of course recognized that beliefs can sometimes blind us to critical aspects of reality. And I'm sure she attempted to impress that fact upon the minds of all her manic-depressive patients, who would be so vulnerable to more fanciful, less boring interpretations of events."

"Touch
é
," Bo said. "But I still think there's something creepy about this case."

"The empty shell of a child's body growing to maturity without the child herself pretty much sets the standard for 'creepy,"' Eva agreed. "But it's time for me to go and we still haven't talked about you. What are you going to do with all this, Bo?"

"I'm going to find out what happened thirteen years ago."

"Why?"

"Because Janny has a right to know. It will help her come to terms with herself, control her terror."

Bo heard the wavering whine beneath her voice that meant she was dissembling. Eva Broussard heard it as well.

"Your insurance company is not paying me to encourage haphazard thinking," Eva said evenly. "Janny's probable response to information about the existence of a twin is unknown, as is any assumption of benefit to her from information about her twin's murderer. Moreover, we're not talking about Janny, we're talking about you. What's going on, Bo?"

"I'm so sick of Madge with her arrogance and her insults," Bo admitted, her head bent over her coffee. "And she's hiding something about this case—"

"Ah," Eva interrupted, "you want to hurt Madge. The important thing is that you're aware of your motivation."

"My motivation is petty and vengeful, isn't it? But besides that, I'm just curious, Eva. Dar Reinert told me the best detective around back then couldn't crack this case. It's never been solved. Dar says it never will be. Two girls, one dead and one abandoned to the foster care system as if she had no family, but there's a grandfather, this famous dollmaker, who's still alive and lives in San Diego, and the police report said nothing about the parents being dead, so where are they? I don't get it."

"What will the cost be to you if you pursue this?" Eva asked while pulling a wallet from her purse in preparation for leaving.

"Maybe my job, maybe nothing." Bo grinned. "I just want to know what happened. I want to solve a case the best cop in San Diego couldn't crack."

"I can certainly understand that," Eva replied thoughtfully. "And telling you to be careful will be a waste of breath. I'm looking forward to your tree-trimming event tomorrow. See you then!"