The Dollmaker's Daughters (Bo Bradley Mysteries, Book Five) (24 page)

Which probably accounted for his not answering her first ring at the solid oak door with its leaded glass window, she thought. But after trying the bell a second time she heard movement inside the house. Someone descending the oak staircase visible in the entry hall. Polished black shoes became visible beneath sharply creased gray trouser legs. Then
a pale hand rested thoughtfully on the carved newel post as a pair of turquoise-blue eyes regarded Bo through thick, round glasses. Aft
er a moment the man bowed slightl
y, not to Bo but to something in the air above him, tugged at the pointed corners of a yellow wool vest, and approached the door.

"I am Jasper Malcolm," he said softly after opening the door. "What a well-loved young dachshund! May I ask her name?"

"Molly," Bo answered, feeling a not-unpleasant sense of falling. "Her name is Molly and mine is Bradley. Bo Bradley. I work for Child Protective Services. I'm here to discuss your granddaughter—"

"Please come inside, Bo Bradley, and have a seat in the parlor while I secure the Venerable Bede. He, of course, can scarcely be expected to welcome the lovely young Molly."

"Of course," Bo replied, hating herself for the saccharine panic in her voice. The voice people used when addressing the insane. It wouldn't do.

"Wasn't the Venerable Bede a monk who wrote about English history?" she asked, attempting a save.

"
An Ecclesiastical History of the English People
, to be precise," Jasper Malcolm replied. "It covered the Roman invasion to about 731. However, that Bede died in 735. The one I'm going to confine on a sun porch is my cat."

"Ah," Bo said, nodding. "Why don't I just take Molly back to my car and—"

"Oh, no. I'm so pleased you've brought her. It will make things nicer, you see."

Bo didn't see, but led Molly through carved woodwork into the room he'd indicated to the left of the entry hall. It had once been a real parlor, the formal entertaining area of the Victorian house. Later owners had covered the hardwood
floor with now-faded blue carpeting and the single white couch was contemporary, but those facts were lost in the overall impression made by the room. Horror. Bo stood frozen on the thick carpeting and gasped as a jester in elaborate harlequin watched her with black glass eyes from an end table. On the marble mantel at least thirty Kewpie dolls held their short arms toward her, wide-eyed. Bo fought a sense that they were about to jump, that they were daring her to save them.

It's that baby poster, Bradley! The one everybody has at the office. The Kewpie dolls are that poster!

Her lifelong discomfort with dolls faded measurably. It all made sense. Everything was really everything else, a series of recurrent and overlapping images behind which Great Meaning hid, smiling cosmically. Knowledge of this fact, she remembered, was the special gift of those whose psychiatric diagnoses included the term "manic." But it wasn't delusional, it was real. People who had never experienced one of these odd flashes couldn't understand, but the experience was "religious" in nature, transforming. A glimpse of universal order at once confounding and reassuring. This glimpse meant that she was where she was supposed to be, even if she had no idea why. The awareness of secret "rightness," of special complicity in a hidden univer
sal design
sometimes promoted an unpleasant arrogance in those with manic-depressive illness.

"But what the hell?" she whispered, enjoying the little manic rush. It was good to
feel that shimmering link to th
e universe, to know she'd been chosen and was performing her task correctly, whatever it was. The thing was to keep it to yourself.

"Rose did create a timeless American icon, didn't she?" Jasper Malcolm mentioned conversationally from the parlor
door. In his voice Bo heard an eerie sympathy with her brief flutter of mania. An affirmation.

"Rose?" she said, turning to face blue-green eyes magnified by thick spectacles.

"Rose O'Neil. Oh, dear, I'm so sorry. Please forgive an old man who has lived so long in solitude that he assumes all thoughts are identical to his own. Rose created the drawing on which tens of thousands of Kewpies have been modeled since the first one in 1912. They're angels, you know. Only the more recent ones lack the trademark blue wings. Do you believe in angels, Bo Bradley?"

The question carried desperation, sorrow. Bo reined in her earlier sense of cosmic sainthood, sought humility, and found it. Whatever else was happening, Jasper Malcolm had just lost a granddaughter to death.

"I am certain that we understand almost nothing of life beyond what is accessible to our brains, our narrow little band of awareness," she answered. "'Angel' is just a word to me, but I suspect that it may represent some reality beyond my understanding. Why did you ask me that, Mr. Malcolm? Are we really talking about your granddaughter, Kimmy?"

In the dim winter light of his parlor, surrounded by the hundred glass and painted eyes of dolls whose original owners were surely dead, the slight dollmaker buttoned and then unbuttoned his gray tweed jacket, smoothed collar-length hair so white it seemed a wig, and then pressed the back of a trem
bling right hand against pink li
ps visible above his white goatee.

"Of course," he
whispered, and then stood silentl
y as tears streamed through his beard and left dark smudges on the yellow vest.

"I... had a dream," Bo said quietly. "Before I knew anything of this case. I think that Kimmy ... I believe she was reaching out somehow."

The smile that broke across Jasper Malcolm's face made Bo think of Bach. The Toccata and Fugue in D Major played on a great cathedral organ beneath light spilling through a rose window created by Tintoretto.

"Thank you," he said. "You have great courage, Bo Bradley. But of course, you're Irish. I knew when I saw you and Molly at the door. But come, I have much to tell you and there's little time."

Bo followed the back of his tweed jacket through the hall toward the rear of the house. There was no point in questioning anything, and the soft clack of Molly's nails on hardwood flooring was the only sound.

Chapter
17

“
My interest in dolls began as an interest in religious statuary," Jasper Malcolm explained as he led Bo thro
ugh a kitchen that smelled faintl
y of spray starch. "My first effort, the St. Francis you see there on
the counter blessing the bottl
e of Ivory Liquid, was a disaster. I quickly abandoned wood in favor of other media for obvious reasons."

Bo considered the misshapen carving draped in a brown washcloth. It looked more like a lizard than the patron saint of animals, and its outstretched arm seemed to threaten rather than to bless the taller dish-soap container. The rest of the kitchen's accoutrements, she noted, seemed perfectly normal.

"Why did you keep it if you didn't like it?" she asked.

"Because it was mine, Bo Bradley. I kept it because I had made it and it was mine." Weariness and anger in his voice. Over an ugly wooden statue?

"What does your St. Francis have to do with Kimmy and Janny, Mr. Malcolm? And why haven't you been available to Janny? She doesn't even know she has a family, and she's experiencing some serious problems now. She doesn't remember that s
he had a twin sister. But recentl
y she's begun carrying around an old doll which I suspect is one of your creations. She calls it Kimmy.

"Janny's terrified, Mr. Malcolm. Last night she was admitted to a psychiatric hospital after she saw someone in the dark outside her bedroom window at the foster home. It may have been a run-of-the-mill neighborhood pervert, but Janny is convinced that something's coming to get her. She thinks that 'something' is Kimmy, although she doesn't know what Kimmy is. I need to know why you've abandoned your remaining granddaughter, Mr. Malcolm."

"Surely you've read your own agency's files concerning my family," he replied while ushering Bo through a door at the kitchen's rear into a large, well-lit studio. It had probably been a rear apartment, she thought, now gutted and redesigned as an artist's workplace.

Bo noted the off-white ceramic tile floor and surrounding glass cabinets from which hundreds of bisque doll heads watched with colored glass eyes or, worse, empty eye sockets. All were variants of the trademark Jasper Malcolm doll Bo had seen as Johanna in the Fashion Valley toy store. Infant dolls, each different but all sharin
g the exquisitely molded upper li
p of a nursing baby. Against a tiled back wall a large kiln stood on firebrick, its two-twenty cord properly grounded with an extra wire running through the wall from below the switchplate. Jasper Malcolm had exercised great caution in the design of his studio, Bo thought. Wisely. The century-old wood frame house was a tinderbox.

"My supervisor doesn't want me to see the file," she told him. "I was only able to get a few addresses. She's removed the file from our office, actually. I don't know why."

"Is Mrs. Aldenhoven your supervisor?"

"Yes," Bo answered. "You remember her?"

The older man closed his eyes briefly and then merely exhaled. "I began making Infant of Prague dolls for my wife's relatives, who were from Czechoslovakia. I would design the
heads and Dottie would sew the pretty robes. We used a cloth body, a rag doll body, with sewn-on china hands I bought through mail-order. But soon our Prague dolls were in such demand that I realized crafting each head individually was impossible. That's when I learned how to make hundreds of identical heads by pressing porcelain clay that had been rolled out like pie crust into a mold I made from a clay model. At first Dottie and I painted the eyes on, but I was anxious to try glass."

Here he opened a lighted metal cabinet filled with trays of eyes in varying sizes and colors. Bo felt her jaw drop and then clench.

"Some of the bronze-colored ones are actually made of cats'-eyes," he went on animate
dly. "They're lovely in a dark-
haired—"

"I need to know about Kimmy and Janny," Bo interrupted, pushing the cabinet door shut and leaning on a metal table where a mound of clay sat covered in clear plastic film. "I'm aware that you're a master dollmaker, and your history is fascinating. But that's not why I'm here. Please."

"I have two daughters," he went on, touching the clay through the plastic as though it were alive.

“
Tamlin and Beryl," Bo filled in, watching his hands. She wasn't sure whether he wanted to caress the clay or crush it. "Why is Tamlin, a mother of three, in a convent?"

Jasper Malcolm continued to press the ball of his right thumb against the muddy plastic film. "She is safe from evil there. After Kim was hurt I made arrangements for Tamlin to join the Sisters of St. Dymphna, whom I have helped financially for years. Tamlin is not a strong person. She could not have survived otherwise."

Bo fought a growing impatience. "Could not have survived what? And who are the Sisters of St. Dymphna?"

"A small order devoted to the patron saint of the mentally ill, a young woman whose life was obliterated by evil. Her story is quite interesting. The sisters maintain a lovely facility in the mountains near Julian. Tamlin has been with them for thirteen years now."

His voice had become a whisper and Bo noticed his thumb smoothing rough facial planes in the plastic-covered clay. Without realizing it he was forming a crude face, the beginning of a doll. It seemed to have drowned beneath crumpled waves of plastic.

"Does Tamlin have a psychiatric illness?" Bo asked as something smoke-colored and terrible fell on the skin of her arms. It was like the plastic film over the clay. A somber revulsion that raised gooseflesh. Had the mother harmed her own child during a psychotic episode? The twins had been a year and a half old, statistically at low risk for a mother's untreated postpartum depression and its potentially tragic outcome. Still, that scenario would explain Tamlin Lafferty's withdrawal from all contact with her husband and children. It would also explain the paternal grandparents' swift move to Connecticut with Jeffrey, who might have witnessed the tragedy. But it wouldn't explain why everyone in the family had abandoned Janny to a life of nameless obscurity in the foster care system.

"No," Jasper Malcolm said as though the concept had never occurred to him. "Not Tamlin. Tamlin is fine. Do you know, all the baby dolls are based on a model of Kim and Janet that I made only a few months after they were born. Tamlin was so proud of them. She even sewed little matching dresses and sleepers, buttercup yellow for Kimmy and robin's-egg blue
for Janny. Those were their colors, so Tamlin could tell them apart. Kim was always the more boisterous one, hence the yellow. Janet was quieter, less demanding, so she got blue, you see."