The Dollmaker's Daughters (Bo Bradley Mysteries, Book Five) (37 page)

"I only know this," Mary said softly. "Madge and Jasper Malcolm spent one night to
gether. At the Hotel Del Coron
ado."

Bo stifled an image of the seaside Victorian landmark with its cupolas and priceless woodwork, trysting place of an English king and a divorcee named Wallis Simpson. An evocative picture, darkened.

"I participated in this by pretending to be away with Madge at a seminar in Los Angeles. What I really did was spend the night alone in a motel twenty miles from here reading a mystery called, of all things,
Generous Death
. I still have it somewhere, even remember the author's name, Pickard. The title turned out to be prophetic."

"How so?" Bo asked very quietly.

"Madge received a phone call at work the following Monday, telling her there were photographs of her and Jasper Malcolm, taken secretly in their hotel room. No evidence of these was ever produced, but Madge was terrified. She agreed to stop the sequence of official CPS demands, which were really
my
demands, for forensic analysis of the crime scene. In particular, the chest of drawers between the two cribs, where I believed there would be hair and blood. Kimmy's hair and blood. The police, you see, were certain the blow had been administered by a man. A man strong enough to wield a very heavy object with great force. They refused to consider what I believed had actually happened, although at the time I had the wrong person identified as the perpetrator. In any event, after the blackmail threat Madge begged me to let it go, and I did. Money was suddenly av
ailable for Kimmy's care at Kel
ton, and St. Dymphna's Convent in Julian received a generous endowment. Everybody was cared for, you see—"

"Who called Madge that Monday morning?" Bo asked, pulling the hood off. "Who blackmailed her?"

"She never told me," Mar
y Mandeer said, biting her Up. "She said it was too dangerous. But I know, don't you?"

"Yes."

I
t all fit. Everything. Bo didn't know why she hadn't seen it, but it didn't matter.

"Thank you, Mary," she said, hugging the other woman. "I'll do what has to be done now. And thank Dan, too. Especially
Dan. You've both saved Janny's li
fe, you know. Tell him that. And enjoy your trip."

She could be there in twenty minutes, Bo calculated. And it was going to be ugly.

Chapter
26

B
o parked at a meter on W
ashington Street, one of the
two main thoroughfares t
hrough the central San Diego
community known as Hillcrest. It would be best if the Pathfinder
were not seen
. Best to maintain the element of surprise. There were a few things she wanted to confirm before deciding what to do next.

The neighborhood sidewalks were no strangers to foot traffic. Within walking distance of two major medical centers, they saw a steady flow of pedestrians wending their way from distant parking lots to dozens of outpatient clinics treating everything from bunions to schizophrenia. Bo stuffed her hands into the sleeves of her heavy Aran sweater muff-style, and hunched over, furtively watching the ground. Anyone glancing in her direction would see a woman obviously heading for the psych clinic. She knew how to do that walk.

The geraniums were still there. Bo noted their presence from the corner of her eye, but kept walking. Around the corner to the alley one could expect to find in any older neighborhood. At the alley she looked about in feigned confusion, then waved as if she'd just recognized someone in one of the yards, or at a window. Briskly now, she hurried to the back gate of Beryl Malcolm's Craftsman bungalow.

The yard was unkempt and littered with blown newspapers, a pitted aluminum chaise-lounge frame folded against the fence, and the seeping remains of a giant tutti-frutti Slurpee some child had undoubtedly tossed there within the hour. Bo eyed the bright pink liquid melting from its quart-sized paper cup. Something about it felt diseased, ominous.

The low chain-link gate wasn't locked, not that it mattered. She could easily have jumped the fence. In fact, jumping the fence might have been good, she thought. Might have drained some of the adrenaline twitching in the muscles of her forearms and hands.

The back door wasn't locked, either. Bo doubted that Beryl Malcolm saw any point in locks. She was, after all, omnipotent. Who would dare to intrude on her? Locks were for people who weren't absolutely sure of their superiority to everyone else. Locks were for people who were weak, frightened, pathetic. People who were like children, like little girls.

The kitchen was as Bo had expected. Rank, filthy, strewn with the debris generated by obsessive hunger. Beryl Malcolm
apparently didn't cook
. She bought things that came packaged in cans, boxes, bottles, Styrofoam. On one of the pearlized yellow plastic chairs Bo counted eight empty pizza boxes, stacked and reeking. On two others were a wad of dirty clothes and a grocery bag from which peeked three unopened packages of potato chips. The refrigerator was brand-new. Beryl hadn't bothered to remove the Day-Glo orange promotional sticker from its freezer. Neither had she cleaned the dried red salsa leaking from beneath its rubber seal near the floor.

"Get out of here!"

The voice made Bo jump even though she'd been waiting for it. Waiting since the night she'd dreamed of a long-abandoned subway station where one more train was expected, and then no more. The Station of the Dead.

"Hello, Beryl," she singsonged in a faux contralto, tilting her head to one side and letting her eyes open too widely. "You've been expecting me, haven't you?"

The psychotic act, occurr
ing nowhere in life except low-
budget slasher movies, would serve to put the woman off, Bo calculated. It would scare her, even the playing field.

"You're crazy! Get out!"

Beryl was wearing another snap-front housecoat, this one in a floral print that obscured the egg-yolk stain on its bodice. In a trembling, pudgy hand she held a soup bowl of cooling coffee. Bo could smell its sickly-sweet vanilla flavoring, even over the room's preponderant odor of pizza-soaked cardboard.

"I know what you did," Bo sang, turning her head in birdlike jerks. "Killed your mommy and your little niece. Killed your sister and your daddy, too. Nobody left but Janny now, is there? When will you kill Janny, Beryl? How long does little Janny have to live?"

"I told you to get out," Beryl Malcolm pronounced in threatening tones. "I'm calling the police."

"Police, puh-lease," Bo mocked, staring with grossly exaggerated intensity into the watery aqua-blue eyes across the yellow Formica table. "We'll tell them what you did, won't we? We'll tell them how you like to hit heads, like the ones daddy was always making when you wanted him to pay attention to you. How you like to smash them, make the people inside them go away so you can have daddy all to yourself, right? So you can make daddy do exactly what you want him to do. So you can own your daddy, isn't that right?"

The immense woman seemed to shift the bulbous fat of her torso, shake it into her shoulders and arms, draw it up. Bo had never seen anything like the quivering psychic distortion taking place before her eyes. Beryl Malcolm was some kind of amoeba, she thought, who could throw the mass of curdled fat beneath her skin as the one-celled organism throws itself after a protrusion of its outer membrane. And with a blossoming fear, Bo also knew what it meant. The coffee hit her face before she could fling a hand over her eyes.

"What ends when the symbols shatter?" a line from one of the Goth songs echoed in her head. "What ends, what ends..."

"You think you're so smart, but you don't know anything," Be
ryl said with an
absence of feeling that made Bo's skin crawl. "You don't know what it's like to live with the memory of that violation, that—"

"Spare me the party line," Bo said, dropping the lunatic act as she wiped coffee from her face with a sleeve of the Aran sweater. "I know a hundred women who actually
were
raped by their fathers, uncles, grandfathers, and brothers. Brave, valiant women who carve out decent lives for themselves despite the pain. You're not one of them, Beryl. You're nothing but a viciously self-absorbed murderer who will go to prison now, where you've belonged since you were a child!"

The transformation hit Beryl Malcolm's eyes then, answering the bleak Goth question. The watery film dissolved, revealing what had lain beneath all along. A peevish, demanding arrogance refined to diamond-hard rage. Her body was that of a grossly obese middle-ag
ed woman, but the eyes
were Beryl Malcolm as she had always been. They were the eyes of a soulless child.

And they were moving beneath the white eyelids. Scouring
the cluttered room for som
ething. Then they stopped abruptl
y to focus on the coffeemaker as Bo grabbed three pizza boxes and held them before her. The coffeemaker hit with surprising force, but the boxes deflected any real damage. The Pyrex carafe, flung sideways from its burner, shattered on the floor in a spray of hot liquid.

"People don't really die, do they, Beryl?" Bo taunted, watching uneasily as the woman moved across the rear door. "You pushed your mother down the stairs and even pushed thorns into her face to show her how you felt when she spent time in her garden instead of catering to you. But part of her stayed, didn't it? Part of her lived on right inside you, making you line your porch with flowers and buy gardening books you never read. And if you had any friends they'd tell you cryst
al candy dishes are really passé
, Beryl. Brocade couches, too. But then that's your mother's living room, isn
't it? It's your front, the litt
l
e charade behind which you live in filth. You're hiding behind your dead mommy, Beryl, but it won't work anymore. You're finished!"

"He told you about the stairs, didn't he?" the woman screamed. "He told you what I did. I
HAAATE him!"

The single, piercing word was accompanied by a crash as she overturned the stove, then leaned to rip its heating coils free and fling them wildly at Bo.

"In a way he did," Bo said,
remembering the unpleasant littl
e carving of St. Francis. "He told me he accepted responsibility for the ugliness he created. I guess he meant you, Beryl. But why did you have to hurt the children? Why did you go down to that beach house thirteen years ago and bash your own niece into the top of a dresser?"

"The dolls," Beryl answered, climbing awkwardly over the fallen stove toward Bo. "He made them into dolls and it
should've been me. It wasn't fair. I'd already made Tamlin change their names to Malcolm instead of Lafferty, so he'd have us back, so he'd have his two little girls again. That had to be what he wanted, didn't it? I made her do that. But it wasn't enough. He had to make them into pretty dolls in all the stores where everyone could see, and I had to show him he couldn't..." she stopped, panting, pulling out cabinet drawers, "do that!"

Beryl Malcolm's face was splotched with purple now, as was the hand Bo saw curling around the black plastic handle of a cheap bread knife which had fallen from one of the overturned drawers.

Get OUT of here, Bradley! She wants to kill you!

“
Tamlin saw you that night," Bo said as she began a retreat toward the back door. "Why didn't she turn you in to the police?"

"So I wouldn't kill daddy," the woman answered in the voice of a bored child. "Daddy was rich and paid for everything, see? All Tamlin wanted was to wiggle on that boy Rick's dirty wiener. But he pulled his weenie out of her and ran away, and she had to be a nun but daddy kept paying and paying. Tamlin knew as long as Kimmy stayed a doll and no one saw her or the other one, I'd let daddy pay. Everyone knew daddy ha
d to pay. Even my support group
..
.
!"

Bo saw the lunge coming and sidestepped toward the door as the bread knife slashed through air and Beryl Malcolm fell against the remaining yellow plastic chair. But Bo had forgotten the spilled coffee until her left foot, unable to find purchase on the slick, greasy floor, slid away from her weight at the wrong angle. She fell hard on the other knee as a tearing pain flashed in her left ankle. Beryl had dropped the knife and swung the chair over her head when Bo saw something enter
from the living-room door behind the woman. Something silvery white and familiar. Somebody's hair, fastened back with a carved ivory clip.