The Dollmaker's Daughters (Bo Bradley Mysteries, Book Five)
Page 12
Over the din it was impossible to hear the message being taped on her answering machine. A terrified voice whispering, "She's coming to get me, oh, God, she's coming to get me, don't let her get me, please!" Then a click, and silence.
Chapter 13
“Cher pacan!" Teless Babineaux muttered, banging a skillet Andrew LaMarche had found perfectly adequate until now against his new cooktop. "Dis moodee thing give me de chou rouge, Nonk Andy. Ain't you got a iron pan?"
"I'm afraid not," he answered, studying the orange-mango salsa he was mixing in a white ceramic bowl. "And please try to speak English when Bo arrives, Teless. She tends to pick up speech patterns from people around her. It wouldn't do for her to latch on to some of your more colorful phrases."
"Now you givin' me de chou rouge," the teenager grinned, stirring a mountain of shrimp, butter, and spices in the less than adequate skillet. The aroma reminded Andrew of childhood summers on the bayous of southwestern Louisiana with his aunt and uncle. Teless even looked a little like his aunt, or would in a few years. The same wide hips and thick, dark hair. The same blue eyes darting everywhere, amused by everything. He found himself delighted with her, with their shared family history and Cajun French.
"Young ladies don't say 'You're giving me a red butt' every time they're irritated," he smiled while inhaling the spicy smells.
"Sounds all wrong in English, don't it?" the girl agreed. "Promise I'll never say it in English around your old lady."
"I don't think the term 'old lady' is quite appropriate for Bo," Andrew replied, frowning. "I'm afraid she'll take exception to that."
"Not unless she's as uptight as you, sha," Teless said, leaning to kiss his cheek.
The term meant "dear," elided from the French cher. Andrew realized he was basking in the affectionate attention of his remarkable young relative. She had a gift, he observed, for incisive observation made palatable by a blanket, loving acceptance. She'd be fabulous with children. He wondered if she'd be interested in volunteering at St. Mary's, and then lost the train of thought as the doorbell announced Bo's arrival.
Teless got there first, her wooden spoon dripping roux on the flagstone entry floor which flowed from the door into both the dining room and kitchen. Bo had picked out the flooring, the most substantial change he'd imposed on the old seaside Tudor after gutting and adding a twenty-foot extension to the cramped and cabinet-heavy kitchen. He was sure the flagstone's grouting wasn't quite dry, and quickly dropped to his knees to mop at the buttery droplets with a tea towel.
"You must be Teless!" Bo said as Molly scampered to help lick up the roux. "I'm Bo, Andy's, um ..."
"Old lady?" Teless suggested.
"Precisely," Bo giggled. The term, she thought, fit like a favorite sweatshirt. "Andy, why are you crawling around on the floor, which incidentally looks great?"
"Roux," he explained, standing to hug her. "But Molly's taking care of it. You look lovely tonight, Bo. Green's definitely your color."
Beneath the words was a sense of accomplishment, as if he, personally, were responsible for the affinity between redheads and the vernal color. Bo noted the hint of a surprise in his words, too. Probably something about her Christmas gift, she guessed. Something green. From deep in her personal history a treacherously female interest bubbled to the surface. Emeralds.
She'd always wanted an emerald ring. A wide gold band with chip diamonds and seed pearls spilling away from an emerald blazing green fire from its heart. She'd even made designs for the ring and then hidden them in old sketchbooks. Intelligent, socially aware people eschewed ostentation in favor of higher spiritual values; she knew that. These were her family's values, reinforced by her own experience in life. But everyone was entitled to one deplorable fantasy, she told herself. One unbecoming, self-serving, pointless capitulation to vanity. For her, it would always be the emerald ring.
Fortunately, there was no way Andy could know about it. Her gift would probably be a green silk blouse. More likely lingerie. She wished she felt comfortable enough to tell him what she really needed was a coat. After all, she'd promised Estrella she'd look presentable at the christening.
“Teless has made a sort of shrimp gumbo," he explained as the girl played with Molly. "Popcorn rice, yeast biscuits. My contribution is the appetizer and a chocolate raspberry torte for dessert."
"I can't tell you what this means to me," Bo grinned. "Just when I finally lost the last pound of the ten I've been battling for two months. And I love gumbo, but what's popcorn rice?"
"Louisiana special rice. Smells just like popcorn," Teless explained. "I brought five pounds for Nonk Andy. Would've brought crawdads, too, 'cept the bus man said they had to be froze with dry ice an' I didn't have no dry ice, me. This puppy like a boudin sausage on legs, Bo. T-Boudin!"
The teenager's speech was fascinating, Bo thought. And the girl herself was radiant with a natural beauty born more of spirit than of Madison Avenue. Molly adored her immediately, as, Bo was certain, did every Cajun boy in southwestern Louisiana. Including one, Andy had said, determined to marry her before he left for a stint in prison. Her godmother had been wise in sending Teless to California for the holidays, Bo mused. Brilliant, actually.
"In Cajun, 'T' before somebody's name means 'little,'" Andrew explained, taking Bo's coat. "Um, your lining's falling apart," he mentioned.
"Old coat," Bo concurred.
After a dinner in which Bo forced herself to forget the meaning of the word "calorie," Andrew proudly displayed the finished harpsichord which had prompted him to move from his condo into a house. Painstakingly crafted of cherrywood, it glowed softly in a spacious library-music room adjacent to the dining room. The flagstone floor had been laid here as well, but an Oriental carpet protected the harpsichord from contact with the stone. Bo pulled a package of rolled sheet music from her purse, smoothed it flat, and placed a sheet on the harpsichord's music brace.
'"Prelude and Fugue in G Sharp Minor,' from "The Well-Tempered Clavier,'" she announced.” I also got the A minor and the A flat major, but the G sharp's my favorite. Could you start with that one, Andy?"
"My lady," he nodded, bowing and flipping imaginary tails over the edge of the harpsichord's tiny bench as he sat.
"Gat," Teless exhaled. "Would you look at that!"
But Bo was lost in the music from the first plucked note. Sliding with it into a Bachian landscape she had learned to love as a child. The precision, the repetition, the theme announced and then hidden only to be heard again beneath another, or to be heard somehow vertically where before it had been horizontal. The music unfolding like a garden of roses in time-lapse photography, the imagery now blatant, now obscure, but always rose. The room with its bay window and shelves of books, its brilliant carpet and pewter lamps, might have been a starship navigating a universe of exquisite order. A universe made of music.
"Ah, Andy!" she sighed when he released the last keystroke, allowing the damper to silence its still-vibrating string. "How beautiful!"
"I made the springs from real boar bristle," he beamed. "And I told you about the crow's-quill plectra."
"Bach would be proud, Andy. And so would my mother. Where did you learn to play like that?"
"Our parents insisted that my sister and I have piano lessons when we were children. We both hated it, but we learned to play anyway. Later, during my residency at Tulane's Medical Center, I rented a room near the Quarter. There was a piano in the living room where the boarders hung out. I started playing just to get people to turn off the TV, and found that I enjoyed it. Plus, it took my mind off... things."
Bo knew the veiled reference was to the accidental death of his two-year-old daughter, Sylvie, in New Orleans while he was in Vietnam with the Marines. The child's mother, his high school girlfriend, had simply vanished after the little girl's death. More than twenty years had passed, and still he paid private investigators to search for her. The loss of the child, Bo realized, had opened a wound that would never entirely heal.
"I had no idea anyone remembered," Andrew said softly. "How nice to know about the flowers."
"Family's family," Teless said, shrugging. "You got any music here for singing?"
"I think I can manage 'Jolie Blonde,'" he smiled, banging out the opening bars of the Cajun classic on the harpsichord which suddenly sounded, Bo thought, amazingly like an accordion. Teless sang the first verse in an enthusiastic alto, followed by Andrew on the chorus, teaching Bo the French words as they went. Then Teless pulled Bo into a hearty two step around the harpsichord, oblivious to the museum-quality carpet being stomped by their feet. Andrew, his head thrown back, bellowed verse after verse until Bo was dizzy from laughing.
"I got to go on now, call my old man, Robby," Teless giggled when the song was over. "Is that okay, Nonk Andy? Use the long distance, I mean? Robby got sentenced today, but he said they wouldn't take him off until Monday since his daddy spoke for him. Prob'ly the last time me'n Robby'll talk for a while, oui."
"Go ahead, but keep it under thirty minutes," Andrew agreed. "And now, Bo, I want to show you my latest decorating tour de force.”
"Okay," Bo answered, accustomed to nonstop decorating crises beginning the day he'd taken possession of the house a month ago. Her attention was on Teless in any event. The teenager had been strangely cheerful about her boyfriend's impending incarceration. No histrionics, no gnashing of teeth. An epically unadolescent attitude. Something about this boyfriend story, Bo thought to herself, was fishy.
"This way," Andrew said, leading her outside and across the pine-littered lawn and driveway to the mock-Tudor garage with its upstairs apartment. He'd offered her the apartment as a compromise in their unending battle over the nature of their relationship. She could live there, he said, or she could use the space as a studio. It would be hers if she wanted it. Otherwise he'd rent it to someone, a nice elderly couple maybe, who'd live there and keep an eye on the property during his frequent absences.
"I think you'll be pleased with the look," he said, unlocking a security gate at the base of the apartment's external stairs, then a Dutch door opening into the apartment at the top. The landing and stairs, Bo noticed, were fenced with redwood two-by-twos set three inches apart and secured below the landing floor and the base of each step. There was no way a small animal—a dachshund, for example—could wiggle through and fall.
"Voila!” he said, turning on the overhead light to reveal wide horizontal pine paneling bleached to a honey gray defining the small living room and dining nook adjacent to a sparkling new kitchen similar to the one in her apartment. Both the kitchen and dining area commanded a view of the sea through tall pines, and a brick-red freestanding fireplace on an island of flagstone pavers set off the inland-side wall, flanked by casement windows.
"The carpet's the tour de force, I think," he went on proudly. "Matte nylon indoor-outdoor in a Berber weave. Looks like wool, but it can't mildew and cleans with soap and water."
"Wow," Bo agreed, kneeling to inspect the dark green and blue plaid at her feet
"It's a tartan called MacCallum. I assumed from your, um, plaid sheets that you liked tartans. Green tartans."
"I had no idea you'd noticed my sheets, Andy," Bo teased him. "What's in here?"
"Ah," he said. "Go look."
Bo opened a door in a bookcase wall and discovered a short hall, bathroom, small laundry room, bedroom, and a large, bare room with a skylight. The floor was covered in springy beige sheet vinyl. A granite pattern. Washable, easily replaceable. The south and west walls were glass and bordered by a widow's walk railed in the same close-set two-by-twos as the stairs and landing.
"Of course it's a little bare and empty at the moment," Andrew mentioned casually, "but with the right window coverings and... things, I think it will do nicely."
"Oh, Andy," Bo sighed, reaching for his hand, "it's my best fantasy! A place that feels safe and warm with a view of the ocean and a studio where I can paint. But I can't... I can't take advantage of you. I can't let you keep giving when I give nothing. It's not right, and—"
"Bo," he interrupted, "you've given me my life. I don't know why, but from the beginning loving you somehow made it possible for me to be me. Just knowing that you exist, that you're in the world, makes me want to do things I've never done, try things I've never tried. You're like a window for me, Bo. A thousand windows. And all I have to give in return are things. Things I can buy, like a little carpentry work up here so you'll have a place to paint. I'm not trying to own you, Bo. I just want to be a window for you, too."
"Window," Bo repeated as they walked back into the empty living room. He was magnificent, honest, convincing. And he'd melted her heart.
"Window will do," she said as he pulled her to him with an urgency she shared, an urgency which quickly increased her familiarity with the new carpet. It smelled like nutmeg, she noticed peripherally as he wadded his shirt to pillow her head, and somewhat later, his.
"Mmph," she mumbled much later as they lay quietly in the moonlight pretending to be marble statuary, "I thought I heard something at the door."
"Impossible," Andrew said, snagging Bo's black lace bra from the floor with a toe and then swinging it above them. "What do they make these things with, flexible steel?"
"Just the underwiring," Bo replied. "Centuries from now archaeologists will find bra underwires while sifting through dump sites, and conclude that everyone had prosthetic knee replacements or something."
"Knee? This wouldn't fit anywhere in a knee, Bo. There's only one possible use—"
The knock at the door was completely audible this time.
"I'm really sorry to bother y'all," Teless yelled, "but there's a emergency call for Bo. Says he's a social worker an' you got to come talk right now."
"Be right there," Bo yelled back, grabbing her bra from Andrew's foot. "Damn."
It was Rombo Perry, a psychiatric social worker with whom Bo and Andrew had become friends after his help on an unusual case a year in the past.
"I knew I was interrupting something when it took so long for you to come to the phone, Bo," he apologized after Bo had sprinted to the phone in Andrew's kitchen, "but I'm working graveyard tonight and we just got an admission who says she knows you. Says she tried to call you earlier, that you were her social worker. Name's Malcolm. Janny Malcolm."
"Janny's in County Psychiatric? Why? What's happened?"
"I don't know. She seems terrified, says somebody's after her. Apparently her foster parents called the CPS hotline when she wouldn't stop screaming and hid in a closet. Hotline called the police to pick her up and bring her down here. She's oriented, knows where she is and what's going on, but she's got a doll chained to her wrist and goes stiff when anybody tries to take it from her, and—"
"Don't take the doll," Bo urged. "Let her hang on to it."
"It's got a bisque head, Bo. Breakable. You know the suicide precautions. The duty psychiatrist sedated her, but it doesn't seem to be having any effect. We need to get her calmed down. I thought it might help if you talked to her."
Janny Malcolm terrified and cowering in the back of a patrol car. Embarrassed by the uneasy attention of handsome young cops only a few years older than she. Humiliated by her own overwhelming fear. It was, Bo acknowledged, the reality implicit in Madge's threat earlier that day. Shameful, devastating.
"Yes, I'll talk to her," Bo said, and then waited as Rombo went to bring Janny into his office.
"Bo?" the girl's voice cracked, making two syllables. It was like the train whistle she'd heard the night she visited Janny's foster home, Bo thought. The pattern repeating itself.
"She came after m
e! She was looking in my window, Bo. I called you but you didn't answer, just the machine. And then I knew she was out there in the dark, and she'd find a way to get in and, and there were all these shadows everywhere and I couldn't stop screaming because they could be her, and I couldn't get away, and she was going to kill me, Bo!"
"Janny, you're safe now," Bo said softly. "Nobody can get you in the hospital. Nobody can get in and get you. There are people there to protect you. You're safe. And I'm going to come see you. Tonight. I'll be there in about a half hour, okay?"
"Okay," Janny answered, her voice reedy with terror. "Come as quick as you can. She might be able to get in here. She's so big, she can do things, Bo. I'm so scared!"
"You're safe, Janny. I promise you're safe there. Mr. Perry is a friend of mine. He'll keep you safe tonight. See you soon."
After hanging up, Bo stood in Andrew's paneled den and thought about the girl's words. "She's so big, she can do things, Bo." Could this be a child's memory of someone "big," an adult, who had done something so terrible that Janny had buried the scene deep in her mind? What could an eighteen-month-old child remember? No one, Bo thought, remembered anything from infancy. A sense of security, maybe, of hunger quickly assuaged and the loving warmth of a mother's and father's touch. Or the opposite, hunger and a primordial sense of abandonment. But these were the under-pinnings of social awareness and trust, not actual memories. Before the acquisition of language the human brain could not encode "memory," in the adult sense, and even adult memory was fragmented and inaccurate. And yet what if Janny were reacting to some mental image encoded long ago and then buried? And what if that image were of a twin sister, a darkened room, and the violent hands of someone "big"?
"I'm scheduled for surgery at seven tomorrow," Andrew mentioned from the hall door. "Molly and I will have a walk and head for bed. You go on and do whatever you need to do."
"Where are you going?" Teless asked Bo.
"To see a teenager who's been placed in a psychiatric hospital because she's so scared she can't stop screaming," Bo answered.