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

by Abigail Padgett

  Overhead a Boeing Chinook helicopter clattered above the pines and then seemed to land somewhere at the edge of town. There were a few meadows nearby large and flat enough to handle the big chopper, Dan thought. But what was it doing up here? In the distance he could hear its twin rotors slow and then stop. Probably the police or the military. People sometimes grew marijuana in the backcountry, he knew, but Julian wasn't exactly a magnet for criminal activity. Nothing there but abandoned mine shafts, apples, and tourists from San Diego looking for country atmosphere.

  "I like the red one," Mary said as they entered the hardware store. "And look! You can get a cast-iron dragon to sit on top as a humidifier. I guess the steam comes out its nose."

  "Nose," Dan repeated without thought. He had a funny feeling about that helicopter.

  Pete Cullen had arranged for an off-duty sheriff's deputy to meet them near the field where the chopper landed as efficiently as he'd arranged for the chopper. Piloted by a friend of his, a flight instructor at Camp Pendleton, it was a two-hour "loan" from the Marines, the friend said. In exchange, Pete was to make sure the Marines got a mention when the story broke about busting the porn ring.

  "Convent of St. Dymphna," Pete told the Jeep's driver. "It's off Pine Hills Road, used to be some kind of church camp until about thirteen years ago."

  "It's the old Hayden property," the deputy said. "Hear those nuns fixed it up real nice."

  "Or somebody did," Cullen growled, and then fell silent.

  Bo relaxed and enjoyed the relative silence of the back country Sheriff's Department Jeep as they drove through oaks, manzanita, and pine. The delicate snow falling was a nice touch, she thought. And Pete Cullen's bony knee cramped against hers in the Jeep's back seat felt oddly pleasant She watched as his big hands clenched and then stretched in response to some private thought undoubtedly having to do with Jasper Malcolm and this case, an open professional sore for thirteen years. When the Jeep hit a pothole in the mountain road, he lurched against her awkwardly.

  "Christ! Sorry," he muttered.

  Bo smiled inanely and then bent to retie a shoelace with shaky fingers.

  Bradley, you cretin, did you remember to take your meds this morning? No, you didn't! This guy's twenty years older than you and has all the charm of freeze-dried moss. Get real!

  Except Pete Cullen didn't look twenty years older with his cop hair and aviator sunglasses. What he looked like was an interesting challenge. Bo mentally surfed a private list of manicky sexual encounters for the most absurd, and forced herself to remember it. The doorman years ago at a swank St Louis hotel where she was working the registration table for a social worker's conference on homelessness. There had been something irresistible about his epaulets.

  The memory made her smile with chagrin. Mania in its early stages promoted such ridiculous behavior and then went on to dissolve every other boundary separating rationality from emotional anarchy. She'd just get through this interview with Tamlin Lafferty, if in fact she were allowed to speak to the woman, and then be rotored home to the plastic vial of Depakote resting in her handbag beside Molly's bed. Or the

  other vial of the same stuff in her bathroom medicine cabinet. She had plenty. The point was to take it.

  "Here it is, Bradley," Cullen noted, nodding to an attractive wooden sign announcing Convent of St. Dymphna.

  Beyond a simple gate Bo could see three large shake-shingled buildings attached by a rustic post-and-beam cloister through which the winter sun fell in slanted stripes. From one of the buildings she heard chanting. Post-Gregorian, she thought as the practiced voices drifted out on cold, still air. And familiar. It was the Rorate Coeli, the traditional introit for the fourth Sunday in Advent. For a moment the sound drew Bo back to a Boston childhood in which her mother had filled the house with music and taught her daughters—even Bo's little sister Laurie, who could not hear—its varying forms.

  "You go on," Cullen said. "I don't think they want men in there."

  Bo opened the gate and walked twenty yards to a bell just outside the cloister. She had known the bell would be there, and knew what to do. Ringing it briefly, she merely stood and waited. Four minutes later a plump woman of about seventy entered the cloister from an interior door and walked toward Bo, her eyes downcast. The brown fabric of her habit perfectly matched the cloister's redwood posts and made her seem merely a moving aspect of the building itself.

  "How may we help you?" she asked through the redwood slats of an arched door. Beneath the habit's simple cowled hood the woman's ruddy, kind face observed Bo closely. Her glance fell on Bo's left shoulder.

  "Of course," she smiled. "Someone has sent you to us for a coat, and I think I know just the one! In return we ask only that you pray for people who are hated and misunderstood because they have neurobiological diseases which affect the brain. Will you pray for them?"

  "Well, I, uh..." Bo began, remembering that her winter coat did suggest indigence. "I don't need a coat. I mean, I do need a coat, but that's not why I'm here, although I certainly support the concept you've just outlined. Actually, I'd like to speak—"

  "We're happy to be of help," the cheery nun insisted. "Just wait there and I'll be right back. Size twelve, right?"

  "Well, yes, but no!" Bo bumbled on. "I do wear a twelve and for that matter I have a psychiatric illness, so I'm sort of blown away by all this, but what I'm here for is to speak to a woman named Tamlin Lafferty. My name is Bo Bradley and I work for Child Protective Services in San Diego. This concerns a client on my caseload. I'm sorry if I misled you."

  "Your coat is a mess," the nun noted, smiling. "And I'm afraid none of the sisters is available for talks with outsiders. We live a cloistered life. It's best for what we do."

  "Which is?" Bo asked.

  "Pray. We live communally and we pray, particularly for souls troubled by psychiatric illness. Our patron is St. Dymphna, whose martyrdom at the village of Gheel, Belgium, in 650 resulted in her sainthood and the transformation of Gheel to an internationally recognized haven of compassion for those with nervous and brain disorders."

  Bo saw the conceptual straw and grabbed it.

  "This situation involves a child who's in a psychiatric hospital," she said. "It's very serious. I must speak with Tamlin Lafferty, who may be able to help. Please."

  "I'll get our Mother Superior," the woman nodded into her ample bosom and left.

  Minutes later another nun whose calm bearing hinted at authority approached Bo.

  "My name is Mother Mary Andrew," she said. "And I know about Kimberly's death. Mr. Malcolm, who is our benefactor, informed me. I know why you're here. But Sister Martin, as Tamlin Lafferty has been called for thirteen years now, cannot help you. There is no point in your speaking to her."

  Bo leveled her gaze into intelligent brown eyes set in a refined, even aristocratic, face. Mary Andrew, she thought, might be the descendant of one of Julian's original families. Southern aristocrats driven from Georgia by carpetbaggers after the Civil War, but denied employment in North-sympathizing San Diego when their accents revealed their origins. Out of her brown habit and into gray silk, Bo imagined, the nun could easily have played Melanie in Gone with the Wind.

  "Please hear me out," Bo pleaded. "Tamlin's surviving daughter is in grave danger. If I can't ascertain what happened to that child so that I can help her deal with it, she's very likely to be shunted off into the public psychiatric system and lost. She isn't ill, but eventually she'll think she is. I need to talk to her mother."

  "I'm sorry," Mother Mary Andrew said with finality.

  Bo felt her ears lay back as a rage at pointless authority bubbled up from deep inside her. Who was this woman to stand between Janny Malcolm and the truth she so desperately needed to know?

  "Great," Bo said. "I'll call you in a year or so when Janny, who will only be sixteen, has lost the battle for an identity and given up. She'll believe she's crazy then, damaged, a misfit nobody will ever love. But of course I'm sure you'll be happy to in
clude her in your prayers. How very damn precious of you!"

  "You're impulsive and cruel, Ms. Bradley," Mother Mary Andrew said, watching as several snow crystals blew onto her sleeve and then vanished.

  "No, I'm Irish and manic-depressive," Bo answered, playing the ace. "I know what I'm talking about."

  The nun unlocked the cloister door with slender fingers and turned away.

  "Come, then," she whispered, "but I will expect an apology when you realize that Sister Martin can tell you nothing."

  Bo was left unceremoniously in a nearly bare anteroom just beyond the cloister. In it were four folding chairs, a small wooden table, and a graceless crucifix made of two pine branches lashed together. Its corpus, carved also of pine, was so ungainly Bo suspected Jasper Malcolm must have created it in his St. Francis period. The room, she thought, was the visiting area. It felt musty, seldom-used.

  "I'm Sister Martin," a voice announced from the hall door. "Mother Superior said you wished to see me."

  Bo turned and then gasped. The face of the nun before her was Janny's, and seemed only slightly older.

  "Please sit down, Sister Martin," Bo began, and then explained the reasons for her presence. "Janny needs to know what happened that night," she concluded. "She needs to know what happened to her twin and she needs to know why her family has abandoned her."

  "God has not abandoned my children," Tamlin Lafferty answered calmly. "God and his Holy Mother are the only family we need."

  In the eyes of Janny Malcolm's mother Bo saw nothing but an emotionless peace. The woman might have been one of her father's dolls. The nun doll, Bo thought with a shiver.

  "Mrs. Lafferty," she tried again, using a different tactic, "either someone broke into that beach cottage and attacked your twin daughters or you did it yourself. If you didn't, it's time you told somebody who did. Janny's future may depend on your courage now. What happened that night?"

  "So long ago. A stranger came, I struggled, then it was over. Please. The person you're asking these questions isn't the same as then. I know only peace now. My life is perpetual prayer and thanksgiving for the salvation of the world through grace."

  Switch to Plan C, Bradley. You're getting nowhere.

  "Grace," Bo intoned, trying to remember the Baltimore Catechism which had bored her insensate as a child. "And how do we achieve grace?"

  Tamlin reproduced the formula while Bo raked her brain for a way to land this loose kite.

  "And to whom is grace forever denied?" she recited.

  The question wasn't part of the Catechism, but it was the one to which she wanted an answer.

  "Those born without souls," Tamlin answered as if Bo had asked directions to the ladies' room. "They are unable to love God."

  With that she placed a small object on the table beside Bo's hand, and left. When the door closed Bo had the odd impression that she'd been alone in the room all along. That Tamlin Lafferty had used no air, generated no body heat, occupied no psychic space at all.

  And the object was an old-fashioned scapular, two holy pictures encased in plastic and tied to opposite ends of a looped cord. Catholic children used to be given these, Bo recalled, to wear under their clothing for protection. One picture over the chest and the other in back. But protection from what? On the way out Bo extended an apology to Mother Mary Andrew and then remembered the answer. For protection from evil.

  Pete Cullen had created a path around the Backcountry Sheriff's Department Jeep, pacing.

  "So?" he inquired with a characteristic disdain for extraneous syllables.

  "So the perpetrator in this case is the one with no soul," Bo told him. "At least I think that's what Tamlin meant."

  "Not exactly what I need to drag that old bastard's ass into court, but it describes him pretty well. Is that all you got?"

  Bo fingered the scapular in her coat pocket. It should be given to Janny, she decided. She would tell Janny everything she knew, and then say her mother had sent this symbolic gift from a world of safety and relentless peace. Maybe it would help. At least it would give Janny something concrete to hang on to.

  "Yeah," Bo answered. “Tamlin's in the ozone, just repeated a very condensed version of the story she told when it happened. But she knows, Pete. In her strange way I think she tried to tell me who it was. Except all I can deduce is that she was describing herself."

  "A nun with no soul?"

  "Yeah. Can we stop in town on the way back to the helicopter? I want to pick up some apple pies for the party."

  "Sure," Cullen said, even his dead eye registering a thoroughly masculine disdain for anyone who could think of party refreshments in the middle of important business.

  The deputy double-parked in front of Bo's favorite pie shop long enough for her to borrow forty dollars from Cullen and select five pies. On her way out she noticed a familiar figure on the sidewalk in front of the Old Julian Drugstore. It was Daniel Man Deer and an attractive middle-aged woman. He was carrying what looked like a cast-iron dragon and she was smiling. Bo remembered the voice at Kimmy Malcolm's funeral, reciting a poem by Louise Bogan. The woman would be Mary Mandeer!

  "I'll be right back," Bo told Pete Cullen after shoving the five pie boxes into his arms. Then she hurried across the street, wadding her coat under an arm as she ran.

  "Mrs. Mandeer? I'm Bo Bradley from Child Protective Services," she gasped. "My supervisor, Madge Aldenhoven, has told me so much about you. Could we talk for a minute?"

  "What about?" Mary Mandeer asked.

  "A poem called 'Statue and Birds.'"

  The skin over the woman's nose, Bo noticed, grew pale and shiny even as a flush crept up her neck. The curse of pale-skinned redheads, Bo knew it well. Impossible to mask the slightest shock when your entire face was broadcasting a patchwork of color.

  "I'm trying to help Janny Malcolm," Bo went on. "Do you know who killed Kimmy?"

  Mary Mandeer sighed and regarded the dragon in her husband's arms.

  "I've always thought it was Tamlin," she said. "But the police never really investigated that possibility. They thought it was Rick, the father, and then later one of them was convinced it was Jasper Malcolm, the grandfather. I assume you know about the other daughter, Beryl's, claim that Jasper Malcolm molested her continually after the girls' mother died. That set the police off, convinced them he'd been the one who broke in that night."

  "She told me. Did you believe her at the time? Did you believe that Jasper Malcolm was a child molester?"

  “I believed Beryl Malcolm," Mary Mandeer said thoughtfully, "at least for a while. It was a very complex case, Ms. Bradley. Nothing was ever proven, nothing was ever clear."

  "What do you mean 'I' believed, Mrs. Mandeer? Was there somebody else who didn't? Who? The only other CPS worker on that case was Madge Aldenhoven, and the two of you buried Kimmy Malcolm in secret only days ago. I need to know the truth, Mrs. Mandeer. You worked for CPS and so as long as you live in California you're legally forever a mandated reporter of child abuse whenever you see it. Janny Malcolm has been and is now being abused. By the system. You've got to help her. You're obliged to help her."

  "And you're obliged to stop harassing my wife," Daniel Man Deer pronounced in tones that meant business. The iron dragon in his arms seemed to squirm threateningly.

  "Please call the hotline later when you've thought about this," Bo begged Mary Mandeer. "They'll contact me at home and I'll call you back."

  "Your enthusiasm places you at great danger, Ms. Bradley," Daniel said softly. "You have no idea how much danger."

  "What?" Bo queried. But the big man had already wrapped an arm about his wife and steered her away into the throng of tourists.

  Only then did it occur to Bo that she might just have lost her job. Mary Mandeer would be sure to phone Madge Aldenhoven the minute she got home. She would tell Madge what had just transpired, that Bo was continuing to work on a case her supervisor had explicitly forbidden. It was grounds for dismissal.

  "Whatever,"
Bo said to the wadded coat under her arm. It really didn't matter.

  Chapter 21

  The first phone call came just as Pete Cullen returned from the all-night supermarket with two more strands of tiny white lights to replace the one he'd crushed when Molly fell into the box of popcorn in his lap. He and Eva Broussard had been sitting on the couch competing to see who could string the most popcorn when the little dachshund lost her balance on his shoulder and tumbled into a dog's version of heaven, causing him to lurch forward on his knees into the tangled lights on the floor. Bo could barely hear the caller over Andrew, Dar Reinert, Teless, and Rombo Perry harmonizing on "Silent Night" from the kitchen as Estrella, ensconced in the recliner, searched for the matching chords on an old guitar Bo hadn't tuned since her black coat was new.

  "Just run those around the bottom of the tree and then we can plug it in!" she called to Cullen and Estrella's husband, Henry. "Hello?"

  "It's the hotline, Bradley," a male voice announced. "Sounds like you're having a party."

  "You called to tell me that?" Bo yelled over the din.

  "You got a message. Nothing major, just some guy named Man Deer who wants you to call him. Here's the number."

  "I've already got that number, and I'll call him. Thanks."

  So Daniel Man Deer wanted to talk with her, Bo thought. Why not Mary? And had Mary called Madge yet? Surveying her crowded apartment, Bo acknowledged just how far beyond professional boundaries she'd barged. A CPS worker who brought a child client into his or her home for any reason whatever was automatically fired on the spot. And sitting on Bo's bed tying wired-ribbon bows with Deb Reinert and Rombo's partner, Martin St. John, was Janny Malcolm. Beside her under a profusion of metallic gold bows was the old doll, dressed in maroon velvet and lace. Rombo and Martin had designed and sewed the outfit, modeled on a nineteenth century Kate Greenaway children's illustration.