The Dollmaker's Daughters (Bo Bradley Mysteries, Book Five) (32 page)

"Whatever," Bo replied, wondering if she should try to contact Dar Reinert, ask for a police presence at the club. If Cullen were right, Jasper Malcolm might just be there, waiting for a moment alone with his last granddaughter. But the scenario seemed out of character for the old dollmaker. Best just to get Janny back to the hospital and analyze the ramifications of Pete Cullen's theory later.

On an end table beside the couch Bo noticed Janny's doll, discarded as it should have been years in the past. Happy among friends, the teenager had momentarily escaped whatever curse lay over her.

Goblin Market was well patronized but not yet crowded as Bo and Andrew hurried past the empty lifeguard station and across fifty yards of clammy sand to its entrance. The fog, Bo noticed, lay over the beach in odd clumps that blew apart and re-formed in the growing wind. In places it was possible to see breaking black waves, far out at low tide. In others there was nothing but roiling clots of mist.

Bo felt the eerie Goth music pulsing from the club before she could understand the words accompanying it. That simple four-chord progression born in folk music and worked to death in the fifties, half buried beneath snatches of film noir choirs and echoing industrial electronic effects. The sound track for a cartoon version o
f Tolstoy's "The Death of Ivan Il
yich," she decided. The music managed to convey both an

adolescent silliness and its concurrent longing for immutable meaning.

"What is this place?" Andrew muttered as a girl in military jackboots and a yellowed wedding dress hurried past, her black veil hanging in shreds.

"A stage on which alienated people merely pretend to be alienated," Bo said, molding her answer from the remarks of a long-ago Marxist professor who was now, she'd heard, selling dental equipment in Miami. "Try to look as though you understand the decay inherent in technology."

"What?"

"What ends when the symbols shatter?" asked the voice of a British singer over a merging of creep-show musical artifacts. "What ends..."

Bo tried to ignore the question as she scanned the assemblage of vampires and Miss Havisham lookalikes for Rombo, Martin, and the girls. They weren't there.

"Check the tables on the beach," she told Andrew. "I'll look on the patio."

The boy named Gunther was there, dressed in a black jester's tunic.

"Have you seen Janny, er, Fianna tonight?" Bo asked him.

"Sure. And her friend, too. There were two guys with them, but one had to leave or something. She and her friend just left with the ot
her one. Is she okay? Fianna, I
mean? She looked pretty okay."

"She's fine," Bo said. "Thanks, Gunther."

When Bo found him again, Andrew was questioning a ruddy, heavy set young man whose fangs failed to create the anemic aura necessary to vampirism.

"Apparentl
y Martin had to leave for some reason," she told the pediatrician, "or at least it was probably Martin. And
Rombo and the girls have left. We can probably catch up with them if we hurry."

The Goth singer's voice followed them into wads of fog and tentative splatters of rain that made pocks in the sand.

"What ends when the symbols shatter?" the voice demanded. "What ends ..."

"It's raining," Andrew noted miserably. "I don't know why we didn't run into them on our way over here."

"They probably walked on the beach, Andy. Let's go that way. There's a set of steps from the tide pools past the pier. They're accessible during low tide and they lead right to my apartment building."

"They wouldn't know that, Bo. They'd walk back on the street."

"We would have seen them if they'd walked back on the street, Andy. Now let's go."

"Bo, it's raining and you're being difficult. Please."

Difficult A word used to describe uncooperative children and untidy pets. Bo looked at the handsome, distinguished figure standing beside her in a windswept rain and thought of dolls. The control-freak doctor doll, to be precise. Complete with dashing mustache and antiquated attitudes about women.

"I'm walking on the beach," she said, and dived into a shelf of fog.

He didn't follow.

Bo headed toward the sea where receding water left the sand densely packed and less likely to slow her down. There were shallow footprints, she noticed, leading south. Three people, the heaviest walking between the other two, its heel impressions deeper and filmed with water. Those might be Rombo's footprints, she nodded. With Janny and Teless walking on either side. Pulling the plastic hood of her raincoat over
her hair, she bent into the blowing rain and sprinted along the tracks. They were already dissolving as she ran. And then they stopped.

Bo looked up to get her bearings. The fog was denser now and moving in horizontal cartwheels caused by the interaction of cold inland air with the warmer, water-saturated air blowing off the Pacific. Moving three yards to her right, she escaped a fog-wheel and could see the Ocean Beach Pier a city block ahead. Illuminated against the black water, it was deserted. Just an artwork pier, she thought, like the one on her Christmas cards. Unreal in the slanting rain.

There had been a scuffle in the sand where the footprints stopped. Or something had happened to disrupt the orderly progress of three people south along the beach toward the
pier and the barn
acle-encrusted steps to her apartment building beyond. Bo stared at the wet, jumbled sand and then veered inland. Th
ere were no further tracks in th
e expanse of hard sand, so they must have moved upward into the littoral with its tangled kelp and difficult footing. She snagged her right toe in a nest of fishing line caught on a wet board from which three rusty nails protruded, shook the whole mess free, and hurried on. Beach crews cleaned the sand ever
y day in summer,
but only sporadically in winter when there were few tourists to impress. And the ocean's debris could be deadly.

Ahead lay another obstacle, only momentarily visible and then obscured by a roulette wheel of spinning mist
.
Something limp and dark, lying atop a mass of kelp. A shark carcass,
Bo thought. Not one of the littl
e nurse sharks people caught daily off the pier, but a larger one. The size of a man.

Sweating now inside the cheap plastic raincoat
,
Bo skirted the object but stayed close enough to see that it was no shark,
nothing left on the beach by an ebbing tide. It was a man, moving groggily on a mound of ropy seaweed as if he'd been asleep and only just wakened. B
o thought of selkies, the seal
people who took human form out of love but could never stay, so great was their need for the sea. The picture before her might be the birth of a selky, she imagined. That magic might happen on just such a night, and only then, safe from watching eyes. Except this selky looked oddly familiar. Too familiar.

"Martin!" she yelled, scrambling over rubbery, squeaking kelp to reach his side. "What happened? Where are Rombo and the girls?"

Martin St. John responded by vomiting into the kelp, his right hand pressed in a fist against the back of his skull where a thin stream of blood trickled onto his neck.

'Told them ... run!" he answered, shuddering. "Just happened. Couldn't see. Somebody behind us—"

Another spasm of retching curtailed his narrative as Bo ripped off her shoes. She could run faster that way. And she would have to run!

"Martin, you've got a concussion," she said, peering through the fog ahead. "Someone will be back as soon as possible. Whatever you do, don't let yourself drift into sleep. Stay awake!"

Far ahead Bo thought she saw two black-clad figures running through the shadows beneath the pier, toward the flat shale of the tide pool rocks with their web of eroded gutters and crab-filled sinkholes. And something else. Something lost in a spinning penu
mbra of fog, but something that
left
deep
footprints. Something close behind the fleeing figures who were, Bo was certain, Janny and Teless.

Willing her legs to move quickly through the soft sand, Bo
peeled off her raincoat and ran. But every step seemed to drag at her body, pull it downward. There was a magnetic force, she decided, generated by the pull of salt water away from the land. She knew she was covering ground. The pier was closer now. But she felt as if she were running in place against an insistent dark velvet that wanted her to stay, to sink, to give up.

"Janny!" she yelled as rain hit her teeth. "Keep going! Follow the rocks around the seawall to the steps!"

But the words merely swirled about her own ears and then were lost in the wind. The girls had run into a trap. Beyond the pier the seawall rose sharply to protect the last few feet of land between the battering sea and a row of apartment buildings, the second of them Bo's own. Below the wall, the sand ran out at a cul-de-sac of mud-colored rocks submerged except at low tides. The flat rocks were visible now, but the wind blew a shifting film of water and foam over them from the sea farther out. No one unfamiliar with the area would know they could walk around the curl of the cul-de-sac on the barely submerged shale and climb the cliffs on the other side. To a stranger it would feel like walking out to sea.

"Keep going, keep going!" Bo screamed at the distant figures as sand sucked at her ankles and another plate of fog swirled through her as if she, and not it, were insubstantial. "Dammit, run!"

But Janny and Teless had stopped. Bo could only see their legs below the mist, jumping desperately against the patched stone wall some eight feet high where it met the rocks. And the footsteps, generated by something shrouded in fog massed against the rising seawall, continued.

There was someone on the sidewalk above the seawall where the cul-de-sac began, she realized. Someone big. As she gasped and fell and pulled herself up again, whoever it
was threw a leg over the metal railing and jumped the six feet to the tide pools below. Jumped between Janny and Teless and whatever was following them.

The footsteps reversed, but by the time Bo realized what had happened the follower was gone, vanished into the pier's shadows and the fog-riddled beach.

In seconds she felt the sand become rock under her feet, and broke through a tumble of mist to see Daniel Man Deer, rain dripping from the stone on a leather cord about his neck to run down his bare chest. Immobile, he faced the direction in which the follower had run from him. For a moment Bo saw him as part of the rock itself, as if he had been there long before seawalls and apartment buildings, before pavement and supermarkets and greed.

"It wasn't Mary at all," he said as Bo approached. "I thought I had to protect her, but that wasn't it. Who was that chasing these children, Ms. Bradley? What's going on here?"

"I don't know," Bo answered as Janny and Teless stumbled across the tide pools and clung instinctively to the big man. "But if you hadn't been here—"

"I
was
here," he interrupted softly. "I saved the cat and the Old Ones showed the way. Mary will never understand."

"Yes, she will," Bo said, not understanding, either. "I'll tell her."

Chapter 23

“An
dy!" Bo yelled minutes la
ter as she and the big Indian
ushered Teless and Janny into her apartment. "Martin
was hit by someone as they walked back from the club. He's still down on the beach and I think he has a concussion. Look near the pile of kelp just north of the pier."

"I'll go with you," Daniel Man Deer said. "He may not be able to walk."

Implicit in the Indian's statements was a danger that might still lurk on the darkened beach. Eva Broussard nodded her approval as she nudged the girls into Bo's bedroom for dry clothes. Janny, Bo noticed, had seized the old doll from its place on the end table and was clutching it to her side.

"Kimmy," the girl whispered in that high, breathle
ss child's voice, "Kimmy's gone.
"