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

by Abigail Padgett

  Chapter 12

  Walking back into her office building under a glowering sky, Bo realized she had made no decision about the Malcolm case. There was really no decision to make, she thought in an attempt at rationality. While intriguing, the case was only a historical curiosity. One among thousands gathering dust on corridors of metal shelves in a windowless ground-floor storage room behind the word-processing office. Kimberly Malcolm was dead. Kimberly Malcolm had in significant ways been dead for many years.

  Madge, Bo assumed, had been involved in the Malcolm case with the social worker Mary Mandeer. Mandeer was probably the other woman at the funeral, the one who recited Louise Bogan's poem about a girl who was a statue. The two women had arranged and participated in the closure of an old case for reasons belonging to the past. Bo knew she would read the rest of Pete Cullen's file. But maybe she would only read it out of curiosity. There were sufficient numbers of live children demanding her professional attention, like the baby boy she'd just found in a sea of dirty clothes. The Malcolm case, she decided vaguely, was best left in a past that had not included Bo Bradley. Besides, she didn't want to think about it. Not about the Kelton Institute and not about whatever realm lay between life and death. Not about an eighteen-month-old toddler trapped in that realm for over thirteen years. Thinking about it pushed open a door Bo recognized as dangerous. A door that could open into nothing but horror, grief, and madness.

  Leaning against Madge's door frame with her hands jammed into her denim skirt pockets, Bo felt herself sliding into "the look." She hadn't meant to. It just happened organically sometimes. The heavy-lidded, medicated manic-depressive look that made people feel transparent and exposed. Bo had experienced it herself at a fund-raising dinner for San Diego's suicide hotline, which had at one point been nothing more than an answering machine. Seated with other psychiatric "consumers," she'd been uncomfortably aware of the steady, intrusive gaze of a chubby, bespectacled young man across the table from her. His look forced her to acknowledge that she was acting, that all social interaction was essentially a sequence of exhausting roles which existed only to obscure the flawed personalities hiding inside them. His look made her nervous.

  "Why are you staring at me?" she asked.

  "Sorry. It's the meds. I've got manic depression, and sometimes—"

  "Look, I've got manic depression and that's not the look we cultivate. It's supposed to be, you know, wild and zany."

  "Never could do wild and zany," he said with a slow smile, continuing to stare at Bo as though she were covered in pages that could be read.

  "Duel, then," she challenged, matching her eyelid level to his and staring hypnotically into his face. "Loser picks up the parking tab for the whole table."

  "You're on," he agreed, and then just sat there like a Buddha with laser eyes. In less than four minutes he'd made Bo so uncomfortable she conceded the challenge and forked over twelve dollars in parking fees. After that she practiced. By now it came naturally, sometimes unbidden. This time, she thought, it was probably a response to the idea of the Kelton Institute and a toddler's body growing to young womanhood there without a brain, without awareness.

  "What is it, Bo?" Madge asked, looking up from a stack of case files. "What are you staring at?"

  For a split second Bo imagined being able to talk to her supervisor, imagined saying, "How have you survived all these years in a job which demands daily confrontation with the unspeakable? How do you keep the truth about what people do to helpless things from killing you?" But Madge was in one of her renowned snits, and the moment passed. The snits were legendary and occurred in response to nothing in particular. Everybody in the building knew there was no remedy but to stay out of Madge's way. She could be vicious.

  "I got the baby on the sibling petition," Bo answered. “Took him to St Mary's and I'll go over to court and file it right away. It was pretty bad."

  "That's our job, Bo," Madge answered as if she, too, had just climbed a set of reeking stairs into a corridor of hell. "And I have to say I'm growing a little tired of your whining. With Estrella on leave everybody's going to have to shoulder the extra burden. Complaining about 'bad' cases is scarcely professional. Surely we can assume they're all 'bad.' Just do your job, Bo. I haven't got time to pamper you."

  "Pamper?" Bo said as layers of possibility began to assume a pattern she could actually feel. "I don't recall asking to be pampered."

  The older woman drummed her fingers softly against the side of her head. "Bo, I don't have time to play one of your pathetic, manipulative games. Get over to court and file the petition. I've already seen Dr. LaMarche's preliminary report. There will be no problem with the petition. What are you staring at?"

  "Did you do the closing summary on the Malcolm case?" Bo asked, wondering if Madge actually knew or merely intuited that random changes in attitude routinely unnerved those under her supervision. Was this the same woman who had driven to Mercy Hospital to pick Bo up, the woman who said she had an Irish grandmother? Impossible.

  "The Malcolm case is no longer any of your concern. I'm busy, Bo. Please stop harassing me or I'll have to call security. I really don't know why you insist on staying in this job when you can't conduct yourself appropriately."

  Security? Bo felt the gratuitous insult like an acid mist permeating her body. It defined her, made manifest her status as leper. No matter what she did or didn't do, anyone could, at any time, cast her apart from the rest of humanity by pronouncing any of a thousand words meant to illuminate her essential, fearful deviance. And Madge had invoked that power for no reason Bo could ascertain except the need to establish a boundary. But Madge had gone too far. Way too far.

  The pattern fell into place with finality. It had been sifting like sand in muddy water all along, finding its way to the bottom. The Malcolm case might belong to the past, but it also hid something Madge Aldenhoven did not want anyone to know. And she had just guaranteed that Bo Bradley would unearth whatever that was. Bo ground her teeth and experienced a rush of calculated vindictiveness. It wasn't particularly unpleasant. Neither was it pleasant. It was just necessary.

  After filing the sibling petition at juvenile court, Bo phoned the office message center and left word for Madge that she was going to look for the baby's mother. Then she scanned Pete Cullen's notes on the Malcolm case. He had, as Dar Reinert said, investigated everybody connected to the little girls —the parents, a maternal aunt, the paternal grandparents, and the maternal grandfather, Jasper Malcolm. Bo wasn't surprised to see the dollmaker's name. It was part of the pattern; she could see that now.

  So was her impromptu visit to the toy store in Fashion Valley. Everything flowed into the pattern. There was no point in fighting it, although the momentary lapse into rationalism just before Madge's last outburst had been comfortable. No wonder people spoke about "behaving rationally" with such fondness. Behaving rationally really meant behaving comfortably. Not an option for Bo Bradley.

  Checking Cullen's file, she chewed softly on her lower lip and headed east toward El Cajon and the last known address for Kimmy and Janny Malcolm's father, Rick Lafferty. Once there, she found that she was not surprised at what she saw despite the fact that anyone else probably would have been. It was part of the pattern; it made sense. Now all she had to do was figure out what that sense was.

  One of several half-acre "estates" carved out of hilly chaparral in the late fifties, the Lafferty property looked less like Southern California than the set for an English Gothic. While the adjacent properties displayed identical watered lawns in which identical ranch-style houses were situated with unimaginative pride of place, the Lafferty house could not be seen from the street at all. The old subdivision had no sidewalks, Bo observed, so the eight-foot mortared stone wall fronting the Lafferty property was nearly flush with the street.

  Two arched gateways opened to a semicircular drive paved with bricks set in a basket-weave design. Bo parked and approached one of the ornamental iron gates, waving at a woman s
etting bulbs in the ground beneath a handsome live oak.

  "Hi!" she called, improvising her approach from details of the landscaping. "I'm driving around getting ideas for ways to dress up a house we've just bought, and somebody told me this place had great stonework. Would you mind if I asked the name of your contractor?"

  The woman pulled off her canvas gloves and stood, pushing a black bandana back against short ash-blond hair. In muddy jeans and an old sweatshirt she looked young, but her less-than-waspish waistline suggested a respectable maturity.

  "Where's your house?" she asked, moving to the heavy gate.

  "Del Mar," Bo improvised. Andy's new house in the San Diego seacoast village would do. "But I was visiting a friend up here and decided to drive around checking out ideas. Your driveway is lovely!"

  "My husband Rick did it," the woman said. "But he doesn't contract out. You can find bricklayers at the sand-and-gravel companies, though. Just call a few of them and ask for names."

  Rick. It had to be Rick Lafferty. After all, how many master bricklayers named Rick could live at the same address sequentially? Especially in an area like San Diego where brickwork was uncommon, expensive, and actually undesirable because of the area's occasional minor earthquakes. There probably weren't enough bricklayers in San Diego County to fill a whole column in the Yellow Pages. So was this woman Tamlin, Rick Lafferty's wife? Bo smiled sweetly as she scanned the woman for hints of character or the lack thereof.

  "It's my third marriage," she confided in what she hoped were girl-talk tones. "I really want to do it right this time, make a beautiful home for both of us. Before, I was always too busy with my job. You know how it is? You just never seem to have time for the little details that make a home special, like flowers and pretty draperies and plants in the yard."

  Gag, Bradley! Why don't you just swing from the gate, beaming, and then burst into "Raindrops on roses and whiskers on kittens"?

  The woman looked askance. "If you've got a husband like mine, he'll do all the work," she smiled dismissively. "We got married eight years ago and he's worked on this place every day since then. Walls, driveways, garden paths, fireplaces, even a stone gazebo in back overlooking the freeway. Keeps him busy. All I do is putter around. Listen, I wish you luck."

  If they'd only been married eight years, this would be Lafferty's second wife, not Tamlin. But Bo had to know for sure.

  "Thanks for the tip on bricklayers," she said. "Maybe if I mention that I've seen your husband's work they'll know the sort of thing I'm looking for. A brick driveway like this would be perfect in front of our house. It's sort of Tudor."

  The woman was moving away. "His name's Rick Lafferty," she called over her shoulder. "Most of the masonry contractors around here know who he is. Just tell them you saw Rick Lafferty's driveway."

  "Great. Thanks so much!" Bo replied, edging toward the Pathfinder while studying the house hidden behind a low rubblestone wall backed by thorny wintergreen barberry hedges. With two stone walls and a barrier hedge, the sprawling ranch-style house beyond seemed a prisoner of its own landscaping, although, Bo noted, there were no security bars at the windows. The protective walls and plantings were apparently symbolic rather than functional. But what had Rick Lafferty been trying to wall out, or in?

  At a convenience store near the freeway on-ramp Bo stopped for a Coke and then pulled a frayed legal pad from under the passenger's seat. "Rick Lafferty," she wrote atop the page. "Still at father's address. Apparently remarried eight years ago. Has turned property into a fortress with brick and stonework. Check to see if his parents, George and 'Dizzy' Lafferty, are still alive. And where is first wife, Tamlin?" Then she opened the police file.

  Cullen had named the location of Kimberly Malcolm's injury as a tiny Mission Beach street stretching only a few blocks across the strip of land between Mission Bay and the Pacific Ocean. Bo knew the area. Just north of her own beach community, it was small and comprised almost entirely of vacation properties. On the bay side were large modular housing resorts, and the short streets running from Mission Boulevard to the beachfront sidewalk were crammed with wooden cottages and more modern townhouses on tiny lots. While a few people lived in Mission Beach year-round, most of the beach and bay properties were rented to vacationers during summer and to college students at vastly reduced rates during winter.

  Bo headed west on Interstate 8 all the way to the beach, navigated the maze of turns necessary to reach Mission Beach, and stopped a block from Nantasket. Some of the surf shops and streetside sandwich counters were closed for the winter, and the remaining businesses seemed eerily vacant without sun and flocks of bronzed teenagers. Bo locked the Pathfinder and walked slowly toward the comer of Nantasket and Mission Boulevard as a yellow haze broke through the cloud cover and was quickly swallowed again.

  The cottage where somebody had harmed an eighteen-month-old child was on a block-long street ending at the sidewalk and seawall. Bo stood at the corner gazing down the length of the block and out to sea. Then she turned and walked swiftly to the address in Pete Cullen's file. There was nothing there.

  Or rather there was too much there. The minuscule lot was dense with unkempt tropical plants moving ominously in the clammy sea wind. From beyond the scaling picket fence defining the lot, Bo counted four two-story feather palms, their dead lower fronds bent to the ground and moving with the wind. The sound made Bo think of huge moths trapped in brittle paper. Among the sagging palms a magnolia tree was covered with blueberry climber, and dead tangles of the vine matted clumps of unrecognizable shrubbery as well as the ground. Even in broad daylight the place lay in shadows.

  Bo walked the length of the fence, trying to see through the overgrown plants. From the western corner of the lot she glimpsed the side of a cottage almost invisible amid the rampant green. It had shake shingles, although most were curled and rotted and many had fallen off. The windows were boarded over, but even that appeared to have been done years in the past and many of the graying boards had also fallen away. The patch of cement foundation she could see was coated in sickly green moss.

  "May I help you?" a well-dressed man in his thirties asked from the deck of the modern dwelling next door. Bo noticed that a cell phone was attached to his belt. At his left wrist a wide gold watchband caught the dim light. Yuppies and drug dealers, she thought, with their status phones and gold jewelry.

  "Is this property for sale?" she asked.

  "Don't we wish!" the man answered. "Place is a blight. Drags down the value of the whole street. But it's not for sale. Tied up in an estate or something, I guess."

  A nonvegetable rustle in the undergrowth made Bo jump.

  “Tree rats," the man explained. "They love to nest in these palms. We were going to pay for an exterminator but then we realized the rats keep the vagrants from sleeping in there. My wife calls the place Hamlin."

  Bo thought of children lost forever, children spirited into a mountain that closed around them and never opened again. It had happened to Kimberly Malcolm. The apt symbolism made Bo's hair stand on end. The pattern. She could feel it glowing inside her head. People, stories, random comments—all led back to a moment thirteen years in the past when something had happened here. Something that stopped time for one little girl and left another lost and alone.

  "Well, Merry Christmas," she said, fighting a dizziness that shimmered in the tangled greenery. For a moment she thought she could see tiny red eyes watching from inside the shadows. Hundreds of them. "Gotta run."

  After a quick drive home, Bo dashed up the steps to her apartment and phoned her shrink even before picking up Molly.

  "Eva," she began, "I'm either getting manic or there's something, well, magical going on with this Malcolm case. I feel as though I'm just running on a track already in place, like a maze. Everything I turn up, everybody I talk to—it all seems to make some kind of huge sense even if I don't know why. It's a pattern, Eva. And that dream pulled me into it even before Dar called and asked me to—"

/>   "Whoa, Bo," the shrink's deep voice warned. "Are you sleeping, eating right, taking your meds?"

  "Yes. I'm really okay, I think. But Madge buried somebody today in secret, and the grandfather's this famous dollmaker. It happened years ago, Eva, in a cottage over in Mission Beach, and now the place is abandoned. There are rats—"

  "I'd like to see you as soon as possible, Bo. Whatever you're talking about is obviously too complex for a phone conversation. What are your plans for this evening?"

  Bo ran a hand through her short curls and scowled at the refrigerator across from her kitchen counter. "Dinner at Andy's," she said. "A teenage relative has turned up for the holidays. I'm going to meet her. And by the way, I'm having a tree-trimming party Sunday evening at about seven. Can you be here?"

  "I'd love to come, and I'll bring something nourishing. But we need to talk before then. Breakfast tomorrow? Why don't I meet you in Del Mar near Andy's. I've been meaning to do some shopping up there and this will be perfect."

  Bo pondered the ease with which her shrink made arrangements. "Thanks, Eva," she sighed. "I'll meet you at the bookstore around nine. We can pick a restaurant from there. And Eva?"

  "What, Bo?"

  "How much do you know about brain injuries, comas, that sort of thing?"

  "You are not to think about this case anymore today," the psychiatrist intoned. "Is that understood?"

  "Okay, okay," Bo grinned. "But I want to talk about brain death over breakfast."

  "An enticing prospect," Eva noted dryly, and hung up.

  Bo retrieved Molly from the neighbor's, then turned off the phone and enjoyed a leisurely bath before dressing in a forest-green sweater and long knit skirt that made her look wholesome and robust, she thought. With the addition of boots and a fur muff, she could pose beside a sleigh.

  "Ach Tannenbaum, Ach Tannenbaum," she sang as Molly howled gleefully from the floor, "du bist ein edler Zweig!"