The Dollmaker's Daughters (Bo Bradley Mysteries, Book Five) (27 page)

Bo swallowed a last bite of biscuit. Teenagers, she mused, were so damn prone to asking difficult questions. And expecting answers.

"It's never okay to deceive someone who cares about you," she answered carefully. "Never. But sometimes it happens anyway. The question is, what are you going to do about it?"

Teless scowled at the knuckles of her left hand. "You think I should tell my
nanaan
."

"What do you think, Teless?"

"I think I should tell her," the girl sighed. "And I think I should pay her back the money she spent for my bus fare. Except how am I gonna do that?"

"One step at a time, Teless. Just make a plan and then follow through. Now get going before you miss out on visiting hours at the hospital, and tell Janny hi for me."

With th
e teenager's absence the apartment felt calmer, Bo thought. Less likely to blow apart from all that unbridled energy. After a last walk with Molly, she turned the portable radio in the bathroom to the NPR station and lit a bayberry candle on the edge of the filling tab. The program was a Christmas special by a local investigative reporter, Margo Simon. Interviews of San Diego toymakers interspersed with children's classical music. Bo slipped into the steaming water as Simon concluded an informative chat with a man who made kaleidoscopes from crushed beach glass, followed by excerpts from The Nutcracker. Bo directed "The Dance of the Sugar Plum Fairy" with a long-handled back scrubber, then felt her ears lay back as Simon introduced the next interviewee.

"Jasper Malcolm has delighted generations of children with his beautifully crafted bisque-head baby dolls," the reporter
said, "but rumors are flying that this year's award-winning doll, Johanna, may be the last. A phoned interview, taped only hours ago, seems to deepen the mystery surrounding this reclusive local artist."

Bo listened as Jasper Malcolm's familiar, cultivated voice conceded that the end of his career was indeed in sight. But, he hinted, there might be one more doll. His masterpiece. If only he could complete the prototype in time. Margo Simon, clearly not wishing to press the possibility of terminal illness during a Christmas special meant for children, let it go. But Bo did not.

Was the old dollmaker ill? Or did his words reflect a doom closing in from elsewhere? What had Kimmy's death meant to him? The lucrative sequence of dolls had been modeled on Kimmy and Janny, he said. Thirteen baby dolls creating again and again two infant faces that no longer existed. One a frightened teenager now, and one dead. Would the dolls cease with Kimmy's death? But Jasper Malcolm had said there would be one more, if he could complete it in time. Maybe this last doll would be Janny, Bo thought. A lovely young lady doll in velvet and lace. An infant frozen in time, now allowed to grow up.

The broadcast closed with Debussy's "Serenade for the Doll," written for the composer's daughter, Claude-Emma, in the first decade of
the 20
^th
century
. Bo stretched in the cooling bath water. Eventually, she pondered, everyone connected to this strange case, including Bo Bradley, would be gone. But some of Jasper Malcolm's dolls, like Debussy's music, would still exist
.
The thought was eerie. Bo shelved it for later and headed sleepily for her reindeer sheets until her progress was interrupted by the phone ringing.

Probably Andy, she thought calling to confirm the arrangement for meeting Teless and returning the Pathfinder. But the voice on the phone wasn't Andrew LaMarche's.

"Ms. Bradley," Jasper Malcolm stated decorously, "by now you will have spoken with my daughter Beryl."

"I have," Bo answered. Something in his voice made her think of mice, the scritching sound of mice in a dark cabinet where traps are baited and waiting.

"And she told you that I sexually molested her from the time she was five until early adolescence."

"Yes."

"Did you believe her?"

"I did at first, Mr. Malcolm. Then I had questions. Why do you ask?"

"It's terribly important to me that you know the truth, Ms. Bradley. There are several reasons, but please let it suffice that this matters. I did not sexually molest or in any other way abuse Beryl or Tamlin or any other child. Evil cuts a wide swath and a blind one. I am no less its victim than poor, tortured Kimmy or her sister, whom
you are championing so valiantl
y. Please believe me."

Bo drummed her fingers on the counter.

"Why should I?" she asked.

   ^“
Why shouldn't you?" he countered. "Good-bye, Ms. Bradley. And thank you for helping Janny."

"I haven't—" Bo began, but he'd hung up.

"Strange," she mentioned to Molly, already stretched tummy-up on her sheepskin bed. "Very strange."

In the night Bo dreamed of Goblin Market in flames, its vampire-children flying out over the sea with smoking wings. Waking briefly, she thought she could actually smell the charred fiberboard of the club's mock turrets, but the scent was quickly subsumed in sleep.

Chapter
19

The reindeer sheets smelled like Christmas, Bo noted upon awakening to sunlight. Piney and crisp. Or something did. And something was clumping around on her deck. A tall man with no hips in jeans, hiking boots, and a canvas jacket. As she watched sleepily through her deck door, he shook an eight-foot-tall knobcone pine to loosen its branches and then leaned it against her deck rail.

"Got here early so I climbed over the rail, hauled it up," he said, pointing to a mess of ropes lying on the redwood floor. "Couldn't have got it up the steps and through your place anyway." The effort necessary to explain his presence seemed to drain him.

"It's eight o'clock in the morning. You must be Pete Cullen," Bo said.

"All right."

The response suggested that he'd just allowed her to assign him a name and that the name would do, although in general names were frivolous and unnecessary. Above his brown corduroy coat collar Bo took note of a wide jaw just beginning to go jowly, unmatched teeth indicating a partial plate, and blue eyes full of somber intelligence. Or one of them was. The other, the left one, moved blearily in synch with its mate but wore a caul of blindness.

"What happened to your eye?" Bo asked.

"Guy bashed it," Cullen growled, creating the impression that further demands for speech might cause him to go berserk and demolish the deck.

"Let me get dressed and start the coffee, Cullen. I'll let you in in a minute."

Bo threw on jeans and a green sweatshirt before addressing Molly.

"There's an enormous man and a tree on the deck," she pointed out "You're supposed to be aware of these things, bark, guard. The very nature of the dog involves barking and guarding."

Molly stretched her stubby legs and then waddled to the deck door.

"Woof," she said, and then wagged her tail as Pete Cullen hunkered to hold his hand to her through the screen. His hand alone, Bo thought would make a meal for two standard dachshunds or several g
enerations of carnivorous beetle
s. Weird thought. Big guy.

"It's a beautiful tree, but it's not going to fit inside," she told him, opening the dining area deck door.

"Nope," he answered.

Bo made coffee and snapped on Molly's leash.

"I guess you're going to set it up on the deck, then. Great idea. While I walk the dog, why don't you trim off some extra branches and wire them into wreaths for inside? There's baling wire in the drawer under the coffeemaker. You don't have to say anything, okay?"

Cullen nodded, contemplating the task before him.

When Bo returned twenty minutes later there were wreaths and evergreen swags on the front door, bathroom mirror, and deck railing. The tree was upright in a bucket of water and
braced by boards nailed to a triangular base. Pete Cullen seemed pleased, although it
was hard to be sure. The slightly less dour set of his li
ps did sugges
t an embryonic smile
.

"It all looks lovely," she told him. "Thank you. I hope you can come to the party tonight, Pete. It's at seven. And here's my CPS ID. Can we talk about the Malcolm case now?"

"What's your part in it?" Cullen asked, knocking a set of wooden candle holders off the coffee table in an attempt to cross his long legs while sinking into Bo's couch.

"Kimmy Malcolm died Wednesday night," Bo began. "Her twin Janny, who does not remember Kimmy, was at a Goth club on the beach when it happened. She was carrying an old doll she believes is named Kimmy, and went into some kind of shock. Since then she's had escalating problems, including a fear that someone is coming to get her. She's in County Psychiatric now."

Cullen's good eye had registered interest at "someone is coming to get her."

"I checked out the hill behind the foster home," Bo went on. "It's all ice plant, and steep. Janny didn't imagine somebody was outside her bedroom window, Pete. The ice plant was smashed all the way up to the school playground above the property. Somebody was there."

"Good work," Cullen muttered, causing Bo to blush with pleasure. She couldn't remember the last time anyone had actually complimented her on the way she did her job.

"Who do you think it was?" he asked.

"Probably the neighborhood Peeping Tom. The point is, Janny's being dumped into the psychiatric system and labeled with an illness she doesn't have. She's just a kid, and nobody in her family cares about her at all. They've abandoned her.

They all abandoned her thirteen years ago after whatever happened in that beach cottage, and—"

"It was no Peeping Tom," Cullen interrupted. "Whaddaya say we go by and take a look at that cottage?"

"What for?" Bo asked. "It's been empty for years. It's got rats."

"It's been empty since the night somebody bashed that kid, Bradley. I want you to see it. Maybe you can figure out what happened there better than I did."

"I've already seen it and I don't really have time," Bo said, but the old cop was already at the door.

"Just take a minute," he insisted.

The Nantasket Street cottage was as ominous as it had been when Bo first saw it, curtained by dead palm fronds and tangled blueberry climber. Pete Cullen boosted Bo over the fence and then strode through plant shadows to a side window, from which he easily tore the remaining boards. The glass was broken, but jagged edges remained stuck i
n the glazing. Cullen knocked th
e rest of the glass out with his canvas-covered elbow and helped Bo over the sill before hefting himself into a ruined living room.

"Happened back here in a bedroom," he muttered, ignoring a magazine on the floor whose cover featured Ronald Reagan in a campaign debate with incumbent President Jimmy Carter. Something had gnawed the edges of the magazine.

Bo followed him through a small kitchen that reeked of rust to a rear hallway. Cullen opened a door on his right
.

"In here," he said as rustlings on the trash-strewn floor made Bo's stomach lurch.

Only box springs remained on the double bed, their fabric shell eaten away in patches that made Bo think of ancient maps. The sort of maps that always included sea monsters.
Things had been living in the box springs, she realized. Things probably still were living in the box springs. The air in the room felt bitter, stung her eyes.

"We shouldn't be breathing in here," she told Cullen. "Rats carry plague."

"The cribs were on either side of that dresser," he said, pointing to a waist-high chest of drawers against the wall at the foot of the bed. "Kimberly on the left and Janet on the right. The boy, Jeffrey, slept in the other bedroom."

Bo stared at the grimy glass of a boarded window near where Kimmy Malcolm's crib had been.

"Maybe somebody came through that window," she suggested without conviction.

"Screen was nailed in and undisturbed. Nobody came through it."