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

by Abigail Padgett

  "Ma'am, are you all right?" a tall boy in owlish glasses and a red vest asked Bo. "Is there something I can do to help you?"

  "No, I'm just looking," Bo answered, wiping her eyes on the cuff of the bulky russet-brown sweater she'd worn to work in lieu of her disreputable winter coat. She hadn't realized that she was crying.

  A new low, Bradley. All you need is a tin cup to complete the look. And a sign saying, pitiable nut-case, please give.

  Striding with feigned purpose into the Housewares section, Bo studied the price tag on a round white appliance with ten interchangeable blades. Its packaging featured color pictures of salads. Food processor. So far, so good. Identifying arcane objects could provide a path out of the mood that had descended on little flute-paws, she thought ruefully. But what in hell was the matter with her?

  "Lo, How a Rose E'er Blooming" sang a brass choir from the same CD as she moved into Automotive Accessories to escape the music. The mood had come from nowhere, she thought. Or had it? Manic depression was characterized by mood swings, but they didn't swing quite this frivolously. Besides, she was taking her meds. This mood had its origins elsewhere, she was sure. This mood was, in fact, epidemic.

  "It's the longest night we're approachin'," Bridget Mairead O'Reilly had told her granddaughter years ago at Christmas. "Old Cally's feast it is, when there's no escapin' the darkness nor the emptiness nor the cold. That's why folks long ago brought in a tree all green to remind them spring would come again, and put candles in its branches like little suns. And all the while Caillech Beara's out there a howlin' to birth the new year. All alone she is, Gormfhlaith." The old woman had paused, using Bo's Gaelic name for emphasis. "And it's in every one of us to know we're alone, too, when Cally's time is upon us. A natural thing it is, but frightnin' to the heart."

  She'd held Bo close then, and rocked her beside the twinkling tree in a house sold twenty years later to a young doctor from Pakistan on the staff at Mass General.

  "It's all gone," Bo told a shelf of car wax. "The house in Boston, the cottage on Cape Cod, my grandmother, my parents, my sister. It's Old Cally's feast, the season of death and madness. And I am alone."

  Saying the words out loud to an oblivious collection of plastic containers felt good. It put boundaries on the epic loneliness and opened a way out. Everyone was alone, which was why everyone clustered together like magnets for the Midwinter Solstice. A way of putting up a fight. Bo's Irish soul understood the need for fighting very well. Quickly she located a pay phone and two quarters.

  "Andy," she said into Andrew LaMarche's answering machine, "we've got to have a Christmas party! I'm not at the office right now, I'm at Target I've just been to a funeral, or in the garage of a funeral, actually, which is what made me think of having a party. Sunday evening will be good, don't you think? Call me."

  Then she placed a second call to Dar Reinert's voice mail at San Diego Police Department Headquarters.

  "Two things, Dar," she announced. "First I'm having a little get-together at my place on Sunday evening and I'd like for you and Deb to come. About seven o'clock. A tree-trimming party. And the other thing is, can you check out a Kimberly Malcolm who's just been buried from the Heidegger Mortuary? I think she might be the mother of Janny Malcolm, the kid who freaked out at the Goth club two nights ago. And, uh, Dar... don't give the information to the message center, okay? I don't want Madge Aldenhoven to know I'm investigating this case any further, and the switchboard automatically routes all my messages to her desk before I see them. This is just between you and me."

  On the way back to the office Bo stopped for a rolled taco plate at a Mexican restaurant where only last year she'd fed a deaf four-year-old boy before fleeing with the child into a desert more dangerous than the mania electrifying her brain. At least the job wasn't boring, she told herself. For now, the job would do.

  Chapter 8

  Daniel Man Deer squinted into the gray sky above Oak Canyon and again raised the small binoculars to his eyes. A red-tailed hawk swooped over the sage scrub and chaparral of Fortuna Mountain, hunting. The hawk's presence so close to the bobcat corridor was a good indication that the cat wasn't around. Shouldering his heavy canvas pack, Man Deer began the rocky ascent toward the area where he guessed the cat usually crossed Highway 52 into the park from the relatively safer military property. The pack contained two new pump-spray canisters he'd bought at a home supply warehouse. Each canister was filled to the load line with watered-down urine, and their combined weight made the pack straps dig into his shoulders.

  The urine had been an educated guess. He wasn't sure if his own species chemistry was quite right, but it was worth a try. The bobcat might read the territorial marking and not cross into an area already claimed by another animal. Man Deer laughed at the thought of what Mary would say if she caught him peeing into bug-spray cans in the garage. She'd think he was crazy. She wouldn't understand that he was doing it for her as well as the cat. Mary would never understand how one thing connected to another, how saving the cat might free her from the spirit invading her dreams, her life. It wouldn't end after the funeral today; he was sure of that. What he wasn't sure of was what to do about it.

  Last night he'd awakened in the dark, aware that the bed was unnaturally cool. He didn't need to open his eyes to know that Mary wasn't beside him. The flesh of his chest, his arms and feet had sensed her absence even as he slept. The night before, when the first dream came, she'd screamed in her sleep and then clung to him, shaking. Now, on the second night, she wasn't sleeping at all. Pulling her pink quilted robe over his bulky shoulders, he'd gone downstairs looking for her. A thread of light beneath the utility room door told him she was in the garage. When he pushed open the door he found her sitting on the floor beside a faded storage box, her hands clutching a small red T-shirt to her face.

  "Oh, Mary," he said, taking the robe from his shoulders and wrapping it around hers, "don't."

  In the yellow garage light his wife's reddish brown hair appeared gunmetal gray. Artificial. Like a wig. And the pale flesh of her arms felt cold to his touch.

  "Danny, I can't even smell him anymore," she wept. "I used to be able to smell him, a little. You know, that little boy smell? It was like leaves, Danny. Leaves and chewing gum. It was, wasn't it?"

  Her hazel eyes were red-rimmed, and in the harsh light he could see the loose fold of flesh beneath her chin that she hated so much and disguised with a wardrobe of pretty scarves. She talked about having a "necklift" by one of the cosmetic surgeons patronized by the wives of his former business associates, and he'd told her that was fine, he could well afford it. But she never made the appointment. She'd learned there was no way to alter the truth, just as he had. They had both learned twenty-eight years ago. When the child they named David went to sleep atop his new bunk bed, a surprise for his fifth birthday, and never woke up.

  "Intracerebral hemorrhage," a neurologist told Daniel later, after the autopsy. "An aneurysm in a large left-hemisphere blood vessel. There's no way anyone could have known, but the vessel wall was defective from birth, paper thin at a point deep in the brain. A time bomb. This would have happened sooner or later. I'm sorry. There's nothing that could have been done to save David. I'm so very damn sorry."

  Dan didn't like to remember the time after David's death, the months and then years when he and Mary stopped loving each other and tried to make another baby anyway, and failed. He'd thrown himself into work and a series of affairs with women who told him he looked like Geronimo, or Cochise, or Sitting Bull. Women who played guitars and bought him silver Concho belts he never wore. When Mary finally told him she wanted a divorce, he didn't argue but moved into an apartment near his office in La Jolla and stocked the cabinets with Johnnie Walker Black. On weekends he drank straight through from Friday night to Sunday night. He forgot David.

  But one Sunday afternoon Mary came to him with an eerie light in her eyes. He was drunk, he thought, but she was insane. She had looked insane. He thought it might
happen.

  "I wanted to see you" was all she said.

  In his blurred vision her eyes looked strange, not Mary's eyes at all but someone else's. Someone small and frightened and brave. And over the sound of a televised football game in the next apartment he heard a single word pronounced in a voice that could not be. A voice that was gone. The only voice ever possessed of the right to call him by that name, that single syllable.

  "Dad."

  Mary had not said it. The word had simply been there in the air between them, heard not with his ears but with his heart. And he could not hide from what it told him.

  That he was a dead thing, infinitely more dead than the bright little soul who was merely gone. That he had crawled away from life like a coward, abandoning not only Mary in her grief but abandoning his own spirit as well. It was David, he knew, who had come with heroic courage across unspeakable boundaries to give him back his name. David, riding the strength of his mother's love for his father, looking at him through Mary's eyes, who had spoken the syllable that broke open his heart and saved his life.

  He had wept in Mary's arms then, bent double on the floor, his shame like fire roiling in his veins. Later he'd crawled to the apartment's filthy bathroom and vomited until he emptied himself of the fire and was dry and frail as the pressed violet he'd once found in a library book. They went home then. He locked the apartment, kicked the key back under the door, and went home with the only woman he would ever love. The woman who had mothered the only child who would ever call him "dad." He had never stopped being grateful for the gift.

  "Come on in," he now urged in the yellow glare of the garage light, enfolding her in muscular arms that dwarfed her small frame. "It's cold out here. I'll make some coffee and we'll talk. It's because it's Christmas, isn't it?" he suggested, offering a way out, hoping she'd accept the lie. "If he'd lived we might have grandkids now. We'd be out buying trail bikes and computer games to put under the tree. God, we would've loved that, wouldn't we?"

  But her arms remained stiff and tight against her sides, her fists knotted in the red shirt.

  "No. It's not Christmas. We've been through a thousand holidays since he died. It's not that," she answered in a voice cold with rage. "It's just... I don't understand, I will never understand... how a mother could ... how she could ..."

  "Come inside," he repeated as she began to rock, the little shirt against her face and her bare knees white against the cement floor. "I don't know what—"

  "How a mother could deliberately kill," his wife sobbed, "her own child."

  "Well, they say that sometimes in this post-partum depression—" he began, pretending something she'd read in the paper or seen on television had raked up the old anguish.

  "No, Danny, nothing like that." She lowered the red shirt to her lap and turned to him. "That's horrible, but it can be understood. This cannot, and you know it. Quit pretending you don't have any idea what's upset me. That I would have given my very life for David, and couldn't, and yet another woman took another child in her hands and—"

  "Mary, what's happened? Please tell me what's happened."

  But he knew then. Knew the name of the spirit that had affixed itself to his wife. And knew why.

  "Kimmy Malcolm finally died last night, Dan. It's over."

  In the yellow silence of the garage Daniel Man Deer felt something in his brain snap and then relax, like an old rope tied too long to a terrible weight. A memory. It had been waiting.

  "Thank God," he whispered. "Oh, Mary, thank God."

  What he hadn't said was that it wasn't over. He hadn't said that after thirteen years of secrecy and silence, it had just begun.

  Two hundred yards away, the hawk plummeted behind a split boulder and rose again with a whiptail lizard wiggling in its beak. Dan watched the bird climb the gray sky and vanish between two low hills. Nothing had changed for thousands of years, he thought. A sprawling city had grown up thanks to the old dam constructed here by Indian labor under the heel of the padres, but eventually the dam had crumbled and the city had never come closer than it was now. The rocky hills and twisting valley that once harbored a Kumeyaay village were as they had always been. And the spirits here were undisturbed. Free.

  A scent of sage on the breeze alerted Dan to the place where the lizard had scampered its last. In the damp earth beneath a coastal sage bush were the marks of a scuffle. The hawk's beating wings would have bruised the sage enough to release its characteristic odor into the air. Breathing deeply, Dan knew the moment for what it was—a sign that he was on the right path, the path which would lead him to the Old Ones and a way to free Mary from the burden now haunting her. The sage smell made him light-headed for a moment, as if he were walking just above the surface of the ground. That was good. A good sign.

  Nearing the highway, he dropped the pack, removed one of the canisters, and pumped it. Then he began spraying the rocks, the dusty path he believed was part of the bobcat's territory, all the way to the edge of the pavement. Then he walked a half mile in both directions beside the road, spraying the ground. Later he'd drive east on 52, park the car somewhere, and spray the eastbound shoulder.

  "Kill them weeds, Injun!" a man in a western shirt yelled from a pickup truck, and threw a half-empty can of beer in Dan's general direction. The can bounced and spewed yellow foam on the road before coming to rest in the ditch. Dan thought of rattlesnake venom and then forced himself to stop thinking altogether. He could allow nothing to break his concentration. He had to be there for the cat entirely. That was how he would contact the Old Ones, by saving the cat and earning their respect. And they would find a way to tell him things never recorded because there was no written language when they lived here. They would find a way to tell him how the angry dead may be silenced, how the living may be allowed to forget

  But it was going to take time. And there might not be very much time now. Something terrible had been released at last and he was sure a long-awaited chain of events had already begun. A chain of events that would almost certainly involve more pain. And almost certainly involve more death.

  Chapter 9

  Mary Mandeer stood in ankle-high grass and thought about the construction of her shoes. They were ordinary black pumps with ordinary two-inch heels. But because of the way they were made, she couldn't shift her weight to the balls of her feet, couldn't stand on her toes. The shoes forced an even distribution of her weight, which meant that her heels sank into the damp ground with every step. She could actually feel the tearing of roots as her heels punctured the earth's surface. She could feel the occasional pebble, the rotting twig. It was good to have something to think about as they watched the gray casket being lowered into the ground.

  There was no graveside service. She and Madge had agreed that a few words at the funeral home would suffice. Now the only sound was the creaking of a small winch attached to some sort of tractor. The winch was lowering Kimberly Malcolm's body into what Mary hoped would be a final peace. God knew, the child deserved an eternity of peace. A billow of exhaust from the tractor scented the air unpleasantly.

  "I think that will do," Madge Aldenhoven said as a breeze moved the black net veil covering the inch of thick silver hair visible between her forehead and the edge of a small hat. “I think we can go now."

  Mary felt her heels digging again as she took five steps to the yellow-orange mound of earth and reached for a handful. It felt sandy and wet.

  "It's over now, Kimmy," she whispered. "Be at peace."

  The dirt made a scratchy thunk on the casket lid when she threw it into the grave, but brought no sense of finality or closure. Mary hadn't really expected it to.

  "I'm ready," she said then, and punctured a wavering line of small holes in the earth leading from Kimmy Malcolm's grave to Madge Aldenhoven's car. It was the kind of thing Dan would notice, she thought. The kind of thing Dan would say meant something.

  As Madge started the car Mary waved to the mortician standing beside the hearse. That the man kn
ew absolutely nothing about what now lay six feet beneath San Diego's rocky soil made her feel grounded in reality. Not knowing was reality, she decided in that moment. Not knowing was healthy, was comfortable, was necessary. Some things shouldn't be known. So from now on, she wouldn't know them. The man nodded politely and raised three fingers of his white-gloved right hand in a small farewell. The gesture was a perfect dismissal, Mary thought. Good-bye. The end. Fini.

  "How is Dan doing, now that he's retired?" Madge asked.

  There had been no conversation about Kimmy Malcolm, no discussion of the case so many years ago that only now would close. Mary remembered when she'd taken the job with the Welfare Department after David's death, after Dan moved out. She'd thought she was going to be on her own and would need a job. But after she and Dan got back together she found she liked having somewhere to go every day, something to do. So she stayed on, and stayed up with the endless paperwork, kept her caseload clean. The cheaters couldn't get by Mary Mandeer, but she wasn't beyond stretching things a payment or two for the ones who really needed help. And then, years later, the department had asked her to move into a new division called Child Protective Services. It would involve not only adoptions and foster care, but the investigation of child abuse as well. Mary had thought it over and finally agreed to the new job, where she was assigned to a supervisor only slightly older than herself named Madge Aldenhoven. The two had become friends, Mary remembered, almost immediately. And remained friends, until the Malcolm case. Almost fourteen years ago now. It felt like yesterday.