The Dollmaker's Daughters (Bo Bradley Mysteries, Book Five) (38 page)

"Get up, Bo!" Madge Aldenhoven yelled as she grabbed the grime-encrusted chair legs about to smash into Bo's head. "Run!"

Pulling a large piece of broken glass from a deep cut in her knee, Bo flung her hand toward Beryl's foot instead. Then she dragged the razor-sharp glass through the pale, veiny flesh covering ligaments, tarsal bones. Purple, almost black blood welled out of the cut as Beryl screamed, released the chair held over her head, and grabbed the knife left lying on the table. Bo watched as Madge Aldenhoven lurched backward with the chair, falling against the wheeled coffee cart. The knife was coming at Bo. She could protect her head, she realized, by jerking her torso under the table. But the descending knife was going to hit something. Slice something. Probably more than once.

Then Bo sensed another presence, footsteps pounding in the backyard. A sharp sound, a flash, the smell of cordite.

Beryl Malcolm sank to the floor with a sound that made Bo think of butcher shops, slabs of meat being slapped on a scale. Her eyes were merely amazed, then blank. Near the egg stain on the front of her housecoat was a neat, black-rimmed hole.

"Damn," Pete Cullen pronounced gloomily. "Didn't mean to kill her, but I had to shoot on the run. Place smells like maggot heaven. You ladies all right?"

"How did you know, Pete?" Bo asked as Madge groaned reassuringly and then kicked the coffee cart.

"Lotta stuff," he answered as if that answered anything. "Bad cut there. You're bleedin'. Gonna need stitches."

"There's an emergency room less than a block from here," Bo said, allowing him to pull her upright. "Except I can't walk. Tore the other ankle."

"Well, I gotta stay here with this ton of fly bait till the cops come and the paperwork's done, but..."

His eye fell on the wheeled coffee cart.

"Ma'am," he addressed Madge, "think you could push her over there on this?"

"Sure," Madge replied.

Bo couldn't remember when she'd felt as idiotic, but Madge seemed to enjoy the shocked attention from bystanders watching blood drip onto the sidewalk.

"How did you know what was going on?" Bo asked the supervisor. "How did you know where I was?"

"Mary Mandeer phoned me," Madge answered. "After your talk with her, I knew you'd go straight for Beryl. But there's something else, Bo. I watched you before you left the office. I saw you bum something in the parking lot."

"So? I'm always doing bizarre things. You remind me of them daily."

Madge stopped the cart beneath a coral tree, pulled a folded sheet of paper from her coat pocket, and handed it to Bo. It was an enlarged copy of a photo of Madge Aldenhoven and Jasper Malcolm, the camera obviously held in his outstretched arm.

"But I burned this!" Bo yelped. "That's what went up in flames out in the parking lot. That and the original. I swear it, Madge. I found the snapshot stuck in a prayer book at Malcolm's house this morning. I made the copy because ..." Bo felt a flush of shame mottle her neck, but went on. "Because I wanted to make you do right by Janny. And because I wanted to have something on you, something I could use to
get even every time you humiliate me with your damn incessant references to the fact that I have a psychiatric illness. But I didn't keep the picture or the copy. I couldn't. I don't understand where this—"

"One of the runners in the hotl
ine saw you go into the copy room and then found this in a copier," Madge explained. "You know it never worked properly; it made an extra. He didn't know what it was and didn't care. I doubt that he even looked at it. But he brought it to your supervisor, as he should have."

"The best-laid plans ..." Bo sighed.

M
adge gave the coffee cart a stern
shove forward as an orderly appeared in the emergency room driveway.

"I admire what you did, Bo," she said evenly. "You possess a great deal more character than I've realized. Beryl Malcolm might have killed you just now, and it would have been my fault, as Janny's plight is my fault. I don't know how to make it right."

"Keep Janny out of that group home!" Bo answered.

"Already done. I spoke with the foster care supervisor and then the Schroders this morning. They'll be pleased to take her back now that they understand the origins of her strange behavior. And I think when Rick Lafferty hears what actually happened, he'll be willing to develop some sort of relationship with Janny, although it will never be much. He's an odd, cowering sort of man. I think his relationship with Tamlin and then the loss of his children broke him completely."

"What did Beryl have on him?" Bo asked. "It seems she blackmailed everybody involved."

"Nothing that I know of," Madge replied. "It was the police who put the fear of God into Rick Lafferty, and his parents as well. Apparently there had been some questionable contracts between the city and Lafferty Construction. Kickbacks, the
usual political corruption. The police dug it all up and threatened George Lafferty with prosecution if he didn't admit he was lying about Rick's whereabouts that night. The Laffertys always believed that the twins were fathered by someone other than their son, since Tamlin had legally changed their names. To avoid the whole ugly situation they took the one child they believed was their grandson, Jeffrey, and left town. Rick stayed, but has lived in fear of the police ever since."

At the door of the ER Bo handed Madge the copied photograph.

"He really didn't molest Beryl, did he?" she asked.

"No, the man I knew was flatly incapable of it," Madge said with conviction. "But then where did she come up with the story? Remember this was nearly forty years ago. Incest was not discussed at all forty years ago. We're never going to know what went on in Beryl's mind. And Bo?" The supervisor's smile was uncharacteristically impish.

"Yeah?"

"I wish you hadn't burned the original."

Bo could feel the light in her own eyes. A EUREKA! kind of light. "I've got something even better for you," she said.

Chapter
27

“N
o, I'm not going to stay," Bo told the doctor who'd just quilted nine stitches into her right knee with unattractive black thread and fastened bags of frozen blue jelly to her left ankle with an Ace bandage. "This is nothing, trust me."

"She's right," Andrew LaMarche smiled gamely from his post at the foot of her ER gurney. "Bo has taken harder knocks than this."

"Whatever you say, Doctor," the young intern sighed in deference to Andrew's medical-fraternity seniority. "But don't let her put any weight on that ankle and remember the antibacterial cream for the laceration. It's pretty ragged. I'm afraid she's going to scar—"

"
She
is right here in front of you and perfectly capable of hearing information about her own damn knee!" Bo seethed from her supine position on the gurney. "What is it about being a doctor that makes you incapable of talking to people? It's
my
ankle,
my
knee, get it?"

"Got it," the intern agreed, casting a covert glance at Andrew. A glance which, Bo noted, dripped with sympathy.

"Can you give me a ride, Andy?" she asked while struggling to fit crutches into th
e armpits of her baggy, coffee-
stained Aran sweater. "After Madge phoned you, she ran by my place
to get something
and then went back to the office and arranged for a
couple of the hotline trainees to pick up my car and drive it home for me. They'll leave the keys in my mailbox. So my only problem now is getting home."

"Of course," he answered. "And we can talk."

"I just saw a woman shot dead in an ugly housecoat, Andy. Do we have to talk?"

"Yes," he said brightly.

The substance of the talk involved, as Bo had known it would, the future. Their future. He was sorry he'd been condescending and controlling the night before. It was a slip. He'd work on it, never stop working on it. Could she overlook the incident?

"Sure," Bo answered, squinting at her gaunt reflection in the visor mirror of his Jaguar. "I love you, Andy. It'll take more than one of your slips into male supremacy to change that. But I'm not sure I'm ready to move out to Del Mar. At least not quite yet. I may, I probably will, I love the apartment, but let's face it, it's a big step. No going back. That sort of thing. And right now I'm just not quite there."

She had expected him to register dismay. Controlled, of course. But his gray eyes merely sparkled happily as he turned off
I
-8 and onto Sunset Cliffs Boulevard near her apartment.

"Should I stop at the grocery?" he asked. "You're not going down those steps tonight, so we should get whatever you need now."

"No, Eva's already there. I called her from the ER after Madge called you. She'll walk Molly for me and can get anything I need. Mainly, I want to talk to her about this case. She's discovered something interesting. But Andy, I thought you'd be disappointed about... you know ... my not moving right now."

"I have confidence in your judgment, Bo, despite my momentary lapses," he smiled. "Besides, Teless and I had a long chat last night after we left your place. She told me about the ruse she and her friend Robby Landry cooked up to get her out here, and about the debt she owes her
nannan
. You helped her with that, Bo, spelled out her responsibility for her. She's found a part-time job waitressing in a restaurant in Del Mar and called her godmothe
r to arrange for repayment of th
e bus fare. And I think I can pull some strings to get her enrolled in the local high school for the spring semester. I want Teless to stay until summer, Bo. And your apartment is perfect for her. Well, for me. I couldn't stand listening to that atrocious music she plays, and—"

"Andy, that's terrific!" Bo broke in. "Janny will be able to see Teless, not lose another friend. You have no idea how hard that is on foster kids, the way the others just come and go. I approve!"

"I thought you would."

Eva Broussard was on the deck when Bo and Andrew struggled in, laughing from the exertion of getting Bo up the apartment stairs on crutches.

"I brought quiche and a double-fudge layer cake for dinner," she said, shaking her head at Bo's injuries. "And an interesting book on saints."

"I'm sure I must be scheduled for surgery immediately," Andrew hedged. "The cake's enticing, but I had enough of saints as a child. All those unusual tortures. I'll call you later, Bo. Stay off that ankle."

Bo fondly tossed a crutch at the closing door and sank into the couch. The afternoon was overcast and chilly, and Eva had turned on the wall furnace which was the apartment's only source of heat
.

"Sh
ouldn't we open the door a littl
e?" Bo asked, edgy. "My
parents both died because of a faulty wall heater. Carbon monoxide poisoning, just like my sister, only they didn't intend—"

"This one's electric, Bo," Eva pointed out. "And it sounds as though you may need to take a nap before I tell you my theory about Beryl Malcolm. You're stressed."

"Probably," Bo answered, remembering a cheap bread knife descending. "But I'm dying to hear what you've come up with. Eva, that woman terrified her whole family for decades, had them in her thrall. And yet she was nothing but a common sociopath. It should have become obvious to her parents when she was still a child. And she should have wound up in prison as an adult like they all do."

The bakery box on the counter had become irresistible. Bo hopped toward it, balanced on a crutch and the back of the couch.

"Double-fudge layer cake reduces stress," she grinned. "Let's have some while you theorize, okay?"

Minutes later Eva Broussard was pacing in front of the couch, holding a book featuring a stained-glass window on its cover and gesturing with her dessert fork. Bo could hear the fringe on her moccasins flapping softly as she paced. A comforting sound.

"The key to Beryl, as to anyone, lies in the stories they use to make sense of life," she began. "And because of Jasper Malcolm's rather antiquated religious bent, she had access at an early age to some of the strangest, bloodiest tales available."