"Rose?" she said, turning to face blue-green eyes magnified by thick spectacles.
"Rose O'Neil. Oh, dear, I'm so sorry. Please forgive an old man who has lived so long in solitude that he assumes all thoughts are identical to his own. Rose created the drawing on which tens of thousands of Kewpies have been modeled since the first one in 1912. They're angels, you know. Only the more recent ones lack the trademark blue wings. Do you believe in angels, Bo Bradley?"
The question carried desperation, sorrow. Bo reined in her earlier sense of cosmic sainthood, sought humility, and found it. Whatever else was happening, Jasper Malcolm had just lost a granddaughter to death.
"I am certain that we understand almost nothing of life beyond what is accessible to our brains, our narrow little band of awareness," she answered. "'Angel' is just a word to me, but I suspect that it may represent some reality beyond my understanding. Why did you ask me that, Mr. Malcolm? Are we really talking about your granddaughter, Kimmy?"
In the dim winter light of his parlor, surrounded by the hundred glass and painted eyes of dolls whose original owners were surely dead, the slight dollmaker buttoned and then unbuttoned his gray tweed jacket, smoothed collar-length hair so white it seemed a wig, and then pressed the back of a trembling right hand against pink lips visible above his white goatee.
"Of course," he whispered, and then stood silently as tears streamed through his beard and left dark smudges on the yellow vest.
"I... had a dream," Bo said quietly. "Before I knew anything of this case. I think that Kimmy ... I believe she was reaching out somehow."
The smile that broke across Jasper Malcolm's face made Bo think of Bach. The Toccata and Fugue in D Major played on a great cathedral organ beneath light spilling through a rose window created by Tintoretto.
"Thank you," he said. "You have great courage, Bo Bradley. But of course, you're Irish. I knew when I saw you and Molly at the door. But come, I have much to tell you and there's little time."
Bo followed the back of his tweed jacket through the hall toward the rear of the house. There was no point in questioning anything, and the soft clack of Molly's nails on hardwood flooring was the only sound.
Chapter 17
“My interest in dolls began as an interest in religious statuary," Jasper Malcolm explained as he led Bo through a kitchen that smelled faintly of spray starch. "My first effort, the St. Francis you see there on the counter blessing the bottle of Ivory Liquid, was a disaster. I quickly abandoned wood in favor of other media for obvious reasons."
Bo considered the misshapen carving draped in a brown washcloth. It looked more like a lizard than the patron saint of animals, and its outstretched arm seemed to threaten rather than to bless the taller dish-soap container. The rest of the kitchen's accoutrements, she noted, seemed perfectly normal.
"Why did you keep it if you didn't like it?" she asked.
"Because it was mine, Bo Bradley. I kept it because I had made it and it was mine." Weariness and anger in his voice. Over an ugly wooden statue?
"What does your St. Francis have to do with Kimmy and Janny, Mr. Malcolm? And why haven't you been available to Janny? She doesn't even know she has a family, and she's experiencing some serious problems now. She doesn't remember that she had a twin sister. But recently she's begun carrying around an old doll which I suspect is one of your creations. She calls it Kimmy.
"Janny's terrified, Mr. Malcolm. Last night she was admitted to a psychiatric hospital after she saw someone in the dark outside her bedroom window at the foster home. It may have been a run-of-the-mill neighborhood pervert, but Janny is convinced that something's coming to get her. She thinks that 'something' is Kimmy, although she doesn't know what Kimmy is. I need to know why you've abandoned your remaining granddaughter, Mr. Malcolm."
"Surely you've read your own agency's files concerning my family," he replied while ushering Bo through a door at the kitchen's rear into a large, well-lit studio. It had probably been a rear apartment, she thought, now gutted and redesigned as an artist's workplace.
Bo noted the off-white ceramic tile floor and surrounding glass cabinets from which hundreds of bisque doll heads watched with colored glass eyes or, worse, empty eye sockets. All were variants of the trademark Jasper Malcolm doll Bo had seen as Johanna in the Fashion Valley toy store. Infant dolls, each different but all sharing the exquisitely molded upper lip of a nursing baby. Against a tiled back wall a large kiln stood on firebrick, its two-twenty cord properly grounded with an extra wire running through the wall from below the switchplate. Jasper Malcolm had exercised great caution in the design of his studio, Bo thought. Wisely. The century-old wood frame house was a tinderbox.
"My supervisor doesn't want me to see the file," she told him. "I was only able to get a few addresses. She's removed the file from our office, actually. I don't know why."
"Is Mrs. Aldenhoven your supervisor?"
"Yes," Bo answered. "You remember her?"
The older man closed his eyes briefly and then merely exhaled. "I began making Infant of Prague dolls for my wife's relatives, who were from Czechoslovakia. I would design the heads and Dottie would sew the pretty robes. We used a cloth body, a rag doll body, with sewn-on china hands I bought through mail-order. But soon our Prague dolls were in such demand that I realized crafting each head individually was impossible. That's when I learned how to make hundreds of identical heads by pressing porcelain clay that had been rolled out like pie crust into a mold I made from a clay model. At first Dottie and I painted the eyes on, but I was anxious to try glass."
Here he opened a lighted metal cabinet filled with trays of eyes in varying sizes and colors. Bo felt her jaw drop and then clench.
"Some of the bronze-colored ones are actually made of cats'-eyes," he went on animatedly. "They're lovely in a dark-haired—"
"I need to know about Kimmy and Janny," Bo interrupted, pushing the cabinet door shut and leaning on a metal table where a mound of clay sat covered in clear plastic film. "I'm aware that you're a master dollmaker, and your history is fascinating. But that's not why I'm here. Please."
"I have two daughters," he went on, touching the clay through the plastic as though it were alive.
“Tamlin and Beryl," Bo filled in, watching his hands. She wasn't sure whether he wanted to caress the clay or crush it. "Why is Tamlin, a mother of three, in a convent?"
Jasper Malcolm continued to press the ball of his right thumb against the muddy plastic film. "She is safe from evil there. After Kim was hurt I made arrangements for Tamlin to join the Sisters of St. Dymphna, whom I have helped financially for years. Tamlin is not a strong person. She could not have survived otherwise."
Bo fought a growing impatience. "Could not have survived what? And who are the Sisters of St. Dymphna?"
"A small order devoted to the patron saint of the mentally ill, a young woman whose life was obliterated by evil. Her story is quite interesting. The sisters maintain a lovely facility in the mountains near Julian. Tamlin has been with them for thirteen years now."
His voice had become a whisper and Bo noticed his thumb smoothing rough facial planes in the plastic-covered clay. Without realizing it he was forming a crude face, the beginning of a doll. It seemed to have drowned beneath crumpled waves of plastic.
"Does Tamlin have a psychiatric illness?" Bo asked as something smoke-colored and terrible fell on the skin of her arms. It was like the plastic film over the clay. A somber revulsion that raised gooseflesh. Had the mother harmed her own child during a psychotic episode? The twins had been a year and a half old, statistically at low risk for a mother's untreated postpartum depression and its potentially tragic outcome. Still, that scenario would explain Tamlin Lafferty's withdrawal from all contact with her husband and children. It would also explain the paternal grandparents' swift move to Connecticut with Jeffrey, who might have witnessed the tragedy. But it wouldn't explain why everyone in the family had abandoned Janny to a life of nameless obscurity in the foster care
system.
"No," Jasper Malcolm said as though the concept had never occurred to him. "Not Tamlin. Tamlin is fine. Do you know, all the baby dolls are based on a model of Kim and Janet that I made only a few months after they were born. Tamlin was so proud of them. She even sewed little matching dresses and sleepers, buttercup yellow for Kimmy and robin's-egg blue for Janny. Those were their colors, so Tamlin could tell them apart. Kim was always the more boisterous one, hence the yellow. Janet was quieter, less demanding, so she got blue, you see."
He seemed to have slipped into the past and was discussing the doomed twins with a grandfatherly vivacity that ignored the intervening thirteen years. It was like trying to interview a kaleidoscope. As soon as she "saw" Jasper Malcolm, got a fix on his train of thought, he changed. Yet he wasn't lying. Not quite. Neither was he revealing more than the most superficial aspects of his family's troubled history.
"Mr. Malcolm," she said, "I intend to find out what happened to Kimmy. I intend to find out who inflicted the head injury that took her life from her years ago and has finally killed her."
"It would be best if you didn't," he whispered, his aqua-blue eyes roaming the surface of her face with a sudden enthusiasm. "Please leave this situation to me and go on with your life. I am responsible, no one else."
"Do you mean that you did it? That you—"
"No," he answered, reaching to touch her cheekbone with the thumb of his right hand. "I do not mean that I have harmed anyone. I haven't."
Bo pushed his hand from her face in irritation. The touch wasn't erotic or even personal. It was simply thoughtful, as if her face were that of an unusual doll.
"You aren't helping me, Mr. Malcolm," she said. "You aren't telling me anything I need to know. And you aren't offering to help Janny, either. She needs to see you. Your grandson Jeffrey was taken in by the Laffertys, but Janny was abandoned by her parents and you as well, even though you're all right here in San Diego. Why, Mr. Malcolm? Why don't you give a damn?"
The harsh language had the intended effect. A flush of anger stained the older man's neck above his white broadcloth shirt collar, and he bit his lower lip with teeth that reminded Bo of old pearls. That yellowed wisdom.
"What do you know of evil, Miss Bradley?" he exhaled. "Don't answer; you know nothing. So let me tell you that it has no face, that it simply exists and cannot be explained, nor can it be defeated. Let me tell you that once a certainty of evil enters your life, once you know how alien and pure it is, you become as one blind, forever staggering through absolute dark, your arms outstretched against it. Awareness of everything else fades, is unimportant. You have no right to question my behavior. I will not permit it!"
"I am questioning your behavior whether you 'permit' it or not," Bo answered, her eyes wide and blazing. "And let me tell you that Janny Malcolm is not 'unimportant' nor do I believe that fear does anything but feed evil. Beyond that I have no idea what you're talking about not that it matters. Thank you for your time, Mr. Malcolm. I'm afraid mine is too important to waste."
In the silence that followed, Bo felt hatred in a hundred pairs of glass eyes. The doll heads, bodiless and therefore immobile even in fantasy, nonetheless seemed enraged. She had insulted their creator. Bo struggled to avoid parallel imagery involving human heads and their gods, and failed.
"I will show you to the door," Jasper Malcolm intoned, and then said nothing more as they retraced their steps through the old house. At the door Bo handed him her card and scooped Molly into her arms. The simple action brought an unaccountable sparkle of delight to the old man's face.
"And please tell Mrs. Aldenhoven she remains in my prayers," he said softly, then closed the door.
Bo chose not to consider the remark until she was safely in the Pathfinder and out of Golden Hill. When she did consider it, it seemed arcane. Obviously he'd met Madge during the original investigation, but then he'd met Mary Mandeer as well and he hadn't mentioned her. And why "prayers"? Something about the word suggested either a wistful connection or a private slur, neither of which made any sense.
"But we'll tell Madge and see how she reacts," Bo mentioned to Molly as she headed toward the central San Diego address of Beryl Malcolm, the sister of Janny's mother.
The house was one of the area's many old Craftsman bungalows, this one on a quiet street near the University of California San Diego's sprawling medical complex in the community known as Hillcrest. Bo noted with approval the long eaves shading side windows and a pleasant front porch facing the street. There were white geraniums everywhere, she noticed. Rows of them in identical green plastic pots lined precisely along the porch floor where it met the wall of the house. But rather than extending a welcome, they seemed to establish a barrier. Bo wondered where in classical literature geraniums had been used as guards, and to guard what. They had that mythological sense, might even turn into serpents if one knew the magic word. Leaving Molly in the car, Bo faced the fact that she was seriously tired as she approached the house and rang the bell.
"What is it?" a breathy female voice called from inside.
"Bo Bradley from Child Protective Services," Bo answered. "I'd like to speak to Beryl Malcolm."
The woman who opened the door was short and had the most exquisite skin Bo had ever seen. A dusky peaches-and-cream complexion that glowed in matte finish from her face and the arms extending from a beige and white checked housecoat with mother-of-pearl snaps down the front. But the white terrycloth slippers on her feet were stretched and flattened from the strain of bearing her weight, which Bo guessed to be two hundred and twenty pounds at least. Framed by the doorway she looked like a Daliesque wrecking ball, melting. From within it watery aqua-blue eyes regarded Bo without interest.
"I'm Beryl Malcolm," she said. "Please come in."
Bo stepped into ankle-deep carpeting in a beige so pale it bordered on white. No pets, obviously. And no foot traffic. The carpet billowed immaculately from wall to wall, punctuated by a faux Queen Anne couch and wingback chairs in cream-colored velvet and white-on-white striped brocade, respectively. Beside Beryl Malcolm the furniture seemed miniature, meant for a playhouse.
Or a theatrical set, Bradley. Because that's what this is. Meant for show. Never used.
Bo sat carefully in the wingback chair and glanced at items on the marbleized white coffee table. An art book on Fabergé eggs. A Waterford crystal lidded candy dish, empty. And three issues of a glossy gardening magazine, the top one bearing a date three years in the past.
"Ah, my aunt in Boston used to subscribe to this," Bo lied enthusiastically. "Do you garden?"
"Not much," Beryl Malcolm answered, lowering herself onto the couch as if it might slide out from under her. "What brings you here, Miss Bradley? I assume it has something to do with my niece Janet."
The words were pronounced with resignation. The woman presented the long-suffering attitude of a parent driven to exhaustion by a rebellious teenager. And yet there had been no contact between aunt and niece in years, or at least none of which Bo knew. Janny hadn't mentioned her aunt, didn't seem to know the woman existed.
"She's having some problems," Bo confirmed, keeping her voice neutral. "In fact, Janny is being treated in a psychiatric hospital. Hasn't her foster care caseworker contacted you?"
"I'm disabled," Beryl Malcolm pronounced in a soft whine, pushing thin, mouse-brown hair behind her right ear. Bo watched as the woman took a soiled paper napkin from the pocket of her housecoat and kneaded it violently in a trembling hand. "I tried to take care of my niece right after it happened, but I just couldn't manage. We have to take care of ourselves first, you know."
Bo considered the series of statements.
"We?" she said.
"Victims," Beryl Malcolm answered. "Janet is a victim, too, of course, but I'm afraid I just couldn't help her. And I can't help her now. It's best that I have absolutely no contact with any reminders of what happened. My support group is clear on this."
"Do you mean the incident in whi
ch Kimmy was brain damaged?"
Beryl Malcolm stared at her feet, then turned to Bo. In her eyes was both irritability and a desperate boredom, as if the answer to that question were universally known.
"No, I mean my own abuse," she said. "My father incested me from the age of five until my twelfth birthday. Surely this is in Janet's file, the reason I just can't be involved with any of them. It's too painful. But if there's something she needs, I can give you a little money. Clothes or something. Let me get my purse."
Bo evinced no reaction to the jarring use of the noun "incest" as a verb, and merely watched as the mountainous woman pushed herself upright and then walked with surprising agility to a sliding wooden door at the rear of the large living room. Through it Bo caught a glimpse of coffeemaker, the back of an old-fashioned padded plastic kitchen chair in pearlized yellow. The air pushed across Bo's face by the closing door smelled faintly of rotting pizza.
And the situation had just been complicated. If Beryl had indeed been the victim of child sexual abuse at the hands of Jasper Malcolm, then the case-management profile actually made sense. Or some of it did. Two girls traumatized by the death of their mother and then abused by their father, growing up damaged. Tamlin, the younger daughter, would have been abused as well. Incestuous fathers rarely confined their diseased sexual advances to one child.
As a young adult, Tamlin would have been likely to select another abusive man as a mate unless she'd had years of therapy. If that man were Rick Lafferty, then his absence from the home on the night of the deadly incident might actually have been ordered by the courts. It was nothing unusual, the standard practice then and now. And it would have left Tamlin, a confused and dependent young woman, alone with three demanding preschool-aged children. She might have snapped. The likelihood that she had, Bo thought grimly, was not small.
"Will twenty dollars be enough?" Beryl asked peevishly, reclosing the kitchen door behind her. "I live on my retirement and my disability allotment. I don't have much."
The Dollmaker's Daughters (Bo Bradley Mysteries, Book Five) Page 16
