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

by Abigail Padgett

  "But then you're not really talking about California, are you?" she said.

  Bo ran a hand through her own thick curls and enjoyed the cool sea breeze against her scalp. The quail-egg salad was actually good. And a red pepper sorbet sounded intriguing for dessert.

  "Janny Malcolm's case, the dream I had, whatever happened down there in Mission Beach thirteen years ago, it's all from the past, Eva. Madge was involved in it, and another social worker who's retired now, named Mary Mandeer. They signed off the paperwork authorizing the transfer of Kimmy Malcolm to the Kelton Institute. Then when she died last week they arranged for her funeral, just the two of them. A secret funeral. Janny doesn't know any of this, doesn't even remember she had a twin sister, and—"

  'Twin?" Eva interrupted. "On the phone you said 'sister.'"

  "Identical twin," Bo went on, signaling the waiter to bring more coffee to their outdoor table. "Eva, I'm sure that dream, that empty place I called 'The Station of the Dead' when I thought about painting it—I'm sure it was some kind of image of Kimmy Malcolm's world at Kelton. There were these clicking sounds and an awful sense of waiting ... for death."

  Eva Broussard stared at the glassy, flat surface of the sea as though it puzzled her.

  "The dream troubles you, doesn't it?" she said, her Canadian French accent and deep voice giving the words a resonance Bo had come to trust unconditionally. "How do you plan to deal with this?"

  Bo pushed up the sleeves of her black turtleneck sweatshirt and propped her chin on her hands.

  "I've read the medical file from the police report, Eva. Kimmy sustained a severe brain injury comparable to a two-story fall onto the edge of a cement block. She wasn't expected to live but somehow she did. Or at least she didn't quite die. The report said that she was blind and subject to constant seizures, that she could no longer swallow or make sounds. It said that she had lost all brain function above the cerebellum, the old, preconscious part of the brain that just regulates breathing, heartbeat, stuff like that. It said she would never regain consciousness, and that a medically induced coma was necessary to control the seizures."

  "None of which answers my question, Bo."

  "Was Kimmy Malcolm really alive?" Bo went on. "And how could she stay alive in that condition for thirteen years?"

  "I assume this line of inquiry will eventually lead back to the condition of my patient," Eva sighed. "You know there is no simple answer to your first question. Definitions of life vary. As to the second, survival of a child for thirteen years with the massive brain deficit you describe would be extremely rare but not impossible in a clinical setting. What are you really asking, Bo?"

  "I think something happened in Kimmy Malcolm's brain as death became imminent. There are stories about things like that at Kelton. I think she somehow sent psychic energy, maybe even imagery, out. And Janny picked up on it, which is what's causing her so much stress right now. And maybe that dream... maybe for some reason I did, too."

  The psychiatrist sipped coffee and merely waited.

  "I'm not manic, the meds are fine," Bo continued. "My sleep patterns are normal, there are no unusual stressors in my life."

  "Unless you regard shots fired through a wall into a room where you and your closest friend are interviewing a child as stress-free," Eva interjected softly.

  "The dream came before that, Eva. What I want to know is—am I crazy?"

  "People are always asking me that," Eva smiled and then leaned to ruffle Bo's hair. "And you already know you aren't. What you want me to say is that I agree with your theory. I neither agree nor disagree, Bo. What you have described is a belief which cannot be proven, like the Seekers and their visits from extraterrestrials. You have every right to believe it if it makes sense to you. My only interest in this belief is in how it will affect the ways in which you deal with your life and problems, your feelings about the dream and about the case. What are you going to do?"

  "Janny says something's coming after her trying to 'get' her," Bo said, pondering three artificial sweeteners, honey, and refined, brown, and raw sugar in individual packets. Brown, she decided. The molasses flavor would enhance the fresh Guatemalan coffee steaming in her cup.

  "And you think this something is Kimmy's ghost?"

  "I don't know," Bo answered. "Something like that. She calls her doll Kimmy. She says the doll was called something else until a few weeks ago. That may have been when her sister began to fail, began to ... die. They were identical twins. I've read that identical twins sometimes have a kind of psychic connection, that when one dies, even in infancy, the surviving twin feels the presence of the other one throughout fife."

  "I'm familiar with such narratives," Eva said with, Bo thought, an exquisite neutrality.

  "So do you think it's possible that Kimmy's spirit is trying to stay attached to Janny? Maybe make Janny remember who was there that night, the person that killed Kimmy?"

  "How does Janny describe this entity attempting to 'get' her?"

  "She said it was outside her window last night. It terrified her so badly she decompensated enough to get slapped into Country Psychiatric."

  "And the foster parents have confirmed that there actually wasn't someone outside the window?"

  Bo felt something like a thin wet sheet coming to rest lightly over her head and shoulders. Reality. She'd forgotten to check that, she realized with chagrin.

  "I told you about my shrink years ago in St. Louis, Dr. Bittner?" Bo said, her cheeks flushed. "She always said there's nothing but reality."

  "How I wish we could have worked together," Eva Broussard smiled broadly. "She of course recognized that beliefs can sometimes blind us to critical aspects of reality. And I'm sure she attempted to impress that fact upon the minds of all her manic-depressive patients, who would be so vulnerable to more fanciful, less boring interpretations of events."

  "Touché," Bo said. "But I still think there's something creepy about this case."

  "The empty shell of a child's body growing to maturity without the child herself pretty much sets the standard for 'creepy,"' Eva agreed. "But it's time for me to go and we still haven't talked about you. What are you going to do with all this, Bo?"

  "I'm going to find out what happened thirteen years ago."

  "Why?"

  "Because Janny has a right to know. It will help her come to terms with herself, control her terror."

  Bo heard the wavering whine beneath her voice that meant she was dissembling. Eva Broussard heard it as well.

  "Your insurance company is not paying me to encourage haphazard thinking," Eva said evenly. "Janny's probable response to information about the existence of a twin is unknown, as is any assumption of benefit to her from information about her twin's murderer. Moreover, we're not talking about Janny, we're talking about you. What's going on, Bo?"

  "I'm so sick of Madge with her arrogance and her insults," Bo admitted, her head bent over her coffee. "And she's hiding something about this case—"

  "Ah," Eva interrupted, "you want to hurt Madge. The important thing is that you're aware of your motivation."

  "My motivation is petty and vengeful, isn't it? But besides that, I'm just curious, Eva. Dar Reinert told me the best detective around back then couldn't crack this case. It's never been solved. Dar says it never will be. Two girls, one dead and one abandoned to the foster care system as if she had no family, but there's a grandfather, this famous dollmaker, who's still alive and lives in San Diego, and the police report said nothing about the parents being dead, so where are they? I don't get it."

  "What will the cost be to you if you pursue this?" Eva asked while pulling a wallet from her purse in preparation for leaving.

  "Maybe my job, maybe nothing." Bo grinned. "I just want to know what happened. I want to solve a case the best cop in San Diego couldn't crack."

  "I can certainly understand that," Eva replied thoughtfully. "And telling you to be careful will be a waste of breath. I'm looking forward to your tree-trimming event
tomorrow. See you then!"

  Bo stood to hug her shrink good-bye and then flung herself back into the yellow Adirondack chair. It was time for red pepper sorbet and some thinking.

  Eva had, as usual, been right. The strange dream might represent some connection to Kimmy Malcolm and it might not. Deep inside Bo knew that it did, but so what? Psychic phenomena were, she acknowledged, interesting. But they were also random, inexplicable, and woefully short on the sort of data necessary for solving thirteen-year-old mysteries. Better to focus on reality.

  The police report on the Malcolm case had been thorough but lacked any documentation about CPS's investigation. Bo enjoyed her sorbet and its accompanying shortbread cookie while pondering the California laws which afforded more protection to CPS files than any other stockpile of information in the entire justice system. Even the cops could not access those files or obtain copies of them. The idea had been to protect the children involved. Its result was often to protect CPS.

  And Madge had taken the information gap a step further in deleting the old file from the new, and nearly empty, folder she handed Bo. So what had Madge done with that thirteen-year-old file? She wouldn't have sent it back to storage, Bo thought, smiling into her sorbet dish. Because Bo or any other worker in the system could simply request it back out. No, Madge would have to keep that file away from the storage room for a while. At least until Janny Malcolm's case was back on routine maintenance status and the foster care worker assigned to Janny would not be likely to request it. Then, three years in the future when Janny was eighteen and no longer legally under the "care and custody" of San Diego County, the file would be microfiched and stored in another facility. Always it would enjoy the strictest legal protection.

  "But not at the moment." Bo smiled to herself and found her keys.

  Half an hour later she pulled into the nearly vacant parking lot of her office building, parked near the rear door, and then walked Molly among the sparse plants comprising CPS's landscaping. A few social workers were in the building, their cars parked in a clump as if for company. Madge's car was not among them.

  "Hey, Bo!" a worker from another court unit greeted her as he exited the building. "Working Saturday again?"

  People were in and out every weekend, trying to keep up with caseloads and the accompanying tons of paperwork. Before her involvement with Andrew LaMarche, Bo had done all her paperwork in the office on weekends when it was quiet. Nobody would bat an eye at her presence there now.

  "Just have to authorize a stack of vouchers for Medi-Cal payments," she yelled back. "The doctors need money for Christmas!"

  "They're out of luck, then." He grinned as he unlocked his car. "Medi-Cal takes six to nine months to pay."

  "I didn't say which Christmas," Bo countered, and unlocked the door.

  The hall was quiet and musty with the odor of old building, cheap paint, and paper. An institutional smell. Bo secured Molly in her own office and checked the other eight cubicles lining the hall. All empty. But any one of a hundred people could show up at any time. Bo ducked into Madge's office and closed the door.

  As usual, every available surface was piled high with case files. An old picture of Madge, a man, and two boys peeked over the stack of three-ring binders in which Madge filed every shred of information disseminated to its employees by the County of San Diego. Dental insurance forms, revised parking regulations, announcements of cholesterol testing and stress-management programs—Madge kept them all. There was something sentimental about Madge's hoarding habits, Bo thought. Like the collecting of mementos characteristic of young teenage girls, their scrapbooks of ticket stubs and snapshots that would later be thrown out as embarrassingly juvenile trash. It occurred to Bo that Madge's identity was wrapped up in her job in the same way a thirteen-year-old's identity might be wrapped up in a horse or a cheerleading squad. An obsessive identity meant to be transitional, temporary. Except in Madge the temporary had become permanent. The glass over the photograph, Bo noticed, was smudged and filmed with dust. And the younger Madge staring out from it seemed as stiff and unreal as a middle-aged doll.

  "Okay, where would you stash it?" Bo whispered to the photograph.

  There wouldn't be time to go through every one of the hundreds of files littering every flat surface including the floor. She would have to think like Madge, get into a Madge-like frame of reference in order to find the old Malcolm file. But how did Madge think? Bo forced her mind to become a flat reflective surface, envisioned her supervisor, and drew a blank. From every conceivable angle, Bo could imagine Madge doing nothing but following rules. Gleefully following rules. Being happy and even oddly intense about following rules, as if guidelines for every aspect of behavior were a blessing.

  "Okay, then, what are the rules for old files?" Bo muttered, feeling suddenly like a voyeur. She hadn't intended this psychic intrusion on the older woman who was a co-worker as well as nemesis. Still, it was necessary. And Madge would have constructed a legitimate reason for keeping Janny Malcolm's file. Something defensible, procedural. But what? The file really belonged over in foster care with Janny's foster care worker.

  "Except for a change in status!" Bo breathed. If Janny were to be transferred to relatives in another state, for example, or removed from foster care because she'd been sentenced to serve time in a juvenile correctional facility, then the case would be handled by the court unit. And there was nothing about Janny which might necessitate such a change except her medical condition. Bo scoured the room for files with the protruding light blue Post-its that indicated a child undergoing critical medical treatment, and saw a stack of them under a chair between a filing cabinet and the far wall. The Malcolm file was the fourth one down, thick as the phone book for a town of a hundred thousand people. Breathing fast, Bo grabbed it and scuttled back to her own office.

  Mary Mandeer had done the entire investigation and had originally placed Janny with a maternal aunt named Beryl Malcolm shortly after the incident in which Kimmy had been injured. The home investigation on Beryl Malcolm documented Mandeer's opinion that the home was "adequate" and that the aunt's concern for her nieces seemed "distant, but appropriate," but that supplemental payments might be necessary for incidental expenses since the aunt didn't work and was apparently supported by her father. Madge Aldenhoven had signed the approval for additional foster care funds.

  Bo scribbled Beryl Malcolm's address on a legal pad and then cocked her head in puzzlement at the next address on the old list "Tamlin Malcolm Lafferty," it said, "Mother House, Sisters of Saint Dymphna, Julian, CA." Bo mentally surfed her Roman Catholic childhood for memory of a saint named Dymphna and came up with nothing. But the name sounded Greek. Maybe Dymphna was a Greek Orthodox saint. And why was Tamlin Malcolm, a married mother of three, in a convent?

  Knitting her brows, Bo noted the information and read on. The father, Rick Lafferty, was listed at the same address he now occupied. The maternal grandfather, Jasper Malcolm, had an address in the old Victorian San Diego neighborhood called Golden Hill because of its exposure to the setting sun. Kimmy's older brother, Jeffrey, Bo read, had been placed with his paternal grandparents, George and "Dizzy" Lafferty. The elder Laffertys had moved to a small Connecticut town called Redding Ridge less than a year later, taking Jeffrey with them.

  "Why did they agree to care for Jeffrey and not Janny?" Bo frowned. "Why did they abandon her?"

  The slam of a car door in the parking lot roused Molly from a nap in Bo's lap, and an extended growl vibrated against Bo's stomach. In the silence she could hear a key turning the lock of the exterior door. Slamming the case file shut, she jammed it to the back of a bottom desk drawer and grabbed a handful of legal forms. The characteristic authority of the turning lock was familiar and brought a hot flush of guilt that bloomed from her neck to her scalp.

  You'd make a rotten criminal, Bradley. Now what in hell are you going to do?

  "Bo," Madge Aldenhoven pronounced with a tremor of alarm, "what are you doing here?"
<
br />   Molly's juvenile barks and scramble to escape Bo's grasp provided a momentary distraction.

  "Looking for that form we use to document parent searches," Bo lied. "The mother of that baby I picked up yesterday hasn't turned up and I want to have the report ready for the detention hearing."

  "The detention hearing won't be until next Wednesday," the supervisor scowled.

  In a rumpled khaki dress and tennis shoes Madge looked older, Bo thought. Frazzled. There were dark smudges beneath her eyes, and her usually gleaming silver hair hung dispiritedly from a rubber band at the base of her neck. Bo couldn't remember ever having seen Madge's hair fastened with anything short of a museum-quality clip.

  "I'm running a little fever and I was afraid if I didn't get it done now I might be really sick by Monday and not feel like coming in to do it. By the way, somebody was down here looking for something in your office. You might want to check with the front desk…"

  "Who?" Madge asked.

  "I don't know. I think it was Diane something-or-other. Somebody from the other side."

  Nice save, Bradley. Now if she 'll just go check, you can get that damn file back in her office.

  Fully a third of the female CPS social workers seemed to be named Diane, Bo remembered, so that had been a stroke of genius. And "the other side" was in-house parlance for the offices in the front of the building. Adoptions, foster care, the police liaison, and the public relations representative. That had been a stroke of idiocy, since none of them ever worked weekends. But Madge might feel compelled to check it out anyway.

  "I'll see if anybody's over there," she nodded. "And go home, Bo. You look flushed."

  Bo made noisy leave-taking movements near her office door until she saw Madge turn the corner at the end of the long CPS hallway. Then she grabbed the Malcolm file, her ears ringing with guilt, and stuffed it back into the stack of "medical crisis" files in Madge's office. She wasn't sure where, exactly, it had been. Fourth or fifth, she thought, and jammed it under four other files. Then she grabbed Molly and dashed to the waiting Pathfinder. There hadn't been time to read much of the file, but at least she had names and addresses. And a growing headache born of nefarious behavior.