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

by Abigail Padgett

  Running a hand through her shaggy silver and auburn curls, she shook her head to dispel the feeling. The pulse beneath her fingers was fast but strong enough. Fianna was clearly in trouble, but probably not from physical shock. Her skin was cool but not clammy, her color within normal limits.

  "She calls the doll Kimmy," said the boy in the doublet. "Lately she's had it with her all the time. Pretty weird, huh?"

  "Do you know her?" Bo asked.

  "Not really. She comes here sometimes. She goes with this guy named Bran. He's older. Works for some software company. I already told the cops all this. Bran never showed up tonight." The boy sighed and shrugged in embarrassment. "I was worried about her. That's when I came out here and found her whacked-out. I guess she's crazy, huh?"

  In the question Bo heard an enormous distance taking shape between the staring girl and the boy, the crowd, the entire known world. It was a distance she knew very well, impossible to breach once in place.

  "No!" she answered instinctively. "I don't think it's that. Something's happened, though, and she's in a kind of shock. She needs to be at home now. She needs to be taken care of. Do you know where she lives?"

  "Bran told me once she has foster parents, but that's all I know."

  The girl's left hand began to move slowly, as if she were searching for something only discernible to touch.

  "How can I reach this Bran?" Bo asked.

  "Dunno. That's, like, not his real name. People use different names here, old-fashioned names, y'know? Like, my real name's Mark Byfield, but everybody here knows me as Gunther. It's just something we do."

  The girl's hand had found Molly on the bench beside her and hovered over the little dog as if testing a magnetic field.

  "We?" Bo asked. "Who's 'we'?"

  "Goths," the boy answered.

  "Goths?"

  "Yeah. It's a kind of a statement. It's a scene."

  "Oh," Bo said, watching Fianna's slender, pale hand begin to stroke Molly's soft fur. In the girl's huge, dark eyes tears swam and finally spilled over the kohl and the white makeup on her cheeks. In her peripheral vision Bo saw an ambulance pull into the parking lot.

  "The puppy's name is Molly," she told the girl softly, "and she's real and alive and so are you!" The words had come from Bo's heart, and Fianna seemed to nod slightly, as if they'd had an effect. "I want you to pet her while I make some arrangements for you to go to a hospital."

  Holding her CPS ID badge over her head like a police officer's shield, Bo loped toward the ambulance attendants. "Take her to St. Mary's," she said as if the destination were a foregone conclusion.

  "The dispatcher said County Psychiatric," a plump, cheerful young woman with rosy cheeks and strong arms answered. "We'd need some kind of authority, a doctor or something, to change it."

  "Wait two minutes," Bo said, already running into the restaurant.

  "Andy," she explained breathlessly on the phone to Dr. Andrew LaMarche, head of the Child Abuse Unit at St. Mary's Hospital and the only man whose extra toothbrush hung beside hers in a rack over her bathroom sink, "I know it's three in the morning, but I desperately need a favor."

  Less than two minutes later she told the ambulance attendant, "Dr. LaMarche at St. Mary's has ordered the admission. They're expecting her."

  "No problem," the young Brunhilde grinned, unlatching the gurney from its clamps on the ambulance floor. "Let's load 'er up!"

  When the ambulance had vanished into fog, followed by the squad car, Bo carried a sleeping Molly back to her woolly bed in the oceanfront apartment. Everything looked the same, except different. Something had changed, not in the physical structure of the world but in her perception of it A window had opened somewhere between the dream and the strange girl. It felt like a window in time through which something unfinished wept in silence. And, Bo realized, whatever it was bore a strange connection to her.

  Chapter Two

  In the morning Bo dropped Molly with the same elderly neighbor who'd cared for her fox terrier, Mildred, until the old dog's death months earlier. Then she headed inland on 1-8 forty-five minutes earlier than usual. Probably forty-five minutes earlier than ever, Bo thought. It wasn't seven-fifteen yet. Unquestionably a record.

  "Bo! Are you sick? What's the matter?" Madge Aldenhoven yelled through the still-locked side door of CPS's Levant Street offices in the heart of San Diego. "Don't you have your key? What are you doing here?" The supervisor's impossibly violet eyes revealed surprise tinged with something else. Fear. And Bo knew why.

  "I ate my key last night in a psychotic episode," she smiled, tilting her head far to one side and allowing her jaw to hang slack. "I think it was right before I blew up the church, although it may have been just after I imprisoned the entire City Council in a frozen food locker and forced them at gunpoint to read the Yellow Pages aloud until they denounced capitalism. Anyway, I wanted to get here early so I could murder you and mail your body in pieces to remote desert military installations before everyone else arrives. Open up."

  "That's disgusting, Bo," Madge said into a pile of paper on her desk after pushing the door only far enough for its lock to release, then scuttling into her office.

  Bo leaned on her supervisor's office doorjamb and sighed.

  "It's what you were thinking, Madge. Only for a second, but in that second you imagined that because I have a psychiatric illness I'm dangerous. You're alone here. When you saw me, you were afraid."

  The older woman adjusted a pearl earring and patted the snowy bun at the nape of her neck. "I was stunned," she said briskly, turning to regard Bo through violet-tinted contact lenses. "You've never understood that getting to work on time is the mark of a professional."

  The speech, Bo thought, sounded as if it had been written on a tea bag. Earl Grey.

  "Madge, haven't you ever screwed anything up, made a mistake, broken the rules?"

  "Not at work," the supervisor answered. "In dealing with children's lives it's essential to follow the rules."

  Bo noticed that the woman's hand had come to rest reverently on a copy of the San Diego County Department of Social Services Procedures Manual. It was tempting to drop to one knee and mutter something in Latin, but Bo curbed the impulse, partially.

  "Caveat emptor," she whispered. "But ubi est insula?"

  Since her high school Latin class in Boston she'd waited for an opportunity to ask, "Where is the island?" in a dead language. This chance, she thought, might well be the last.

  "What?"

  "I said we'll be getting a new case as soon as the hotline switches over from the night number," Bo answered. "I did the immediate response last night. It was in Ocean Beach. Dar Reinert called. He couldn't get down there in the fog."

  The sun was finally burning off the haze. Bo could see light swimming through Madge's office window, turning the paper-strewn room a pale gold.

  "What happened?" the supervisor asked.

  "A fifteen-year-old with an old doll chained to her wrist and neck collapsed at a club frequented by vampires. She wasn't drunk or on drugs, but she wasn't talking. I called Dr. LaMarche, and he admitted her to St. Mary's."

  The morning light painted green highlights in the folds of the older woman's blue silk blouse, then fell in a dusty pool on the carpet. Bo watched the light as if it were a friend.

  "You know we don't have sufficient staff to deal with adolescents, Bo. Our resources must be devoted to the protection of younger children who are the most vulnerable. You had no business getting involved in this. It's not a CPS case!"

  "The girl is in foster care," Bo mentioned, tossing a curling wisp of hair out of her eye.

  "Then why on earth didn't you just call the foster parents?"

  Madge had grabbed a Bic pen and jabbed it into the hair over her ear. The day, Bo thought was beginning to feel manageable.

  "She wasn't talking, so there was no way to get the names of the foster parents, much less a phone number. But she's our responsibility, Madge. She's already in the
system."

  "I'll phone the supervisor in Foster Care Placement and give her the girl's name. It won't be hard to trace the placement."

  "I don't know her name," Bo replied. "She calls herself Fianna, but the kids who frequent this club all use these romantic pseudonyms. The cops interviewed everybody in the place. Nobody knew her real name or the real name of her boyfriend, who calls himself Bran."

  "What's romantic about Bran? It sounds like cereal."

  Bo saw Celtic designs in the light and floating motes of dust.

  "The Fianna were the warriors of Erin," she said softly, "long, long ago. And the bravest among them was Finn Mac Cool, who slew the Goblin of Flaming Breath whose name was Aillen, and saved Tara."

  "Tara from Gone with the Wind?" Madge asked, pulling the pen from her hair and tapping it against her teeth.

  “Tara is a hill near Dublin," Bo explained, disturbing the dust patterns with a movement of her right hand. "It was the ancestral seat of Irish kings."

  "And Bran?"

  "In his pack of hounds, Finn Mac Cool loved two best. Sgeolaun and Bran. People say that ghosts of these hounds are sometimes seen roaming among the fallen stones of Finn's castle in County Kildare, whining and impatient for the hunt."

  "Oh," Madge Aldenhoven said, nodding. "This girl's boyfriend is named for a dog."

  "A ghost dog, Madge. I think that's the point."

  "What point?"

  Bo recognized the impasse and gave up. Madge might enjoy a story, but symbolism was beyond her.

  "What was your maiden name?" Bo asked, backing into the hall.

  "Rasmussen. Why?"

  "And your mother's?"

  "Schramm."

  "And her mother's?"

  "I think it was Thompson, but don't ask me to go back any further," the older woman smiled. "Why are you asking?"

  "I didn't think any Irish names would turn up," Bo answered. "Just checking."

  "My father's mother's name was Quinn," Madge offered, triumphant.

  "Then you have to understand about the ghost dog!"

  "You're crazy, Bo."

  "Yeah."

  After flipping on the light in the cramped office she shared with another investigator, Bo sat at her desk and listened as the quiet office building gradually came to life. The conversation with Madge had been oddly pleasant as if the long animosity between them were simply gone. Bo filed the impression for later reference, but didn't trust it. Madge had tried unsuccessfully for over three years to oust Bo from her job. One noncombative encounter did not, she noted, necessarily constitute genuine warmth. Still, it was strange to think of Madge Aldenhoven as a child. With a paternal grandmother named Quinn. Almost as if Madge might actually have at one time been human.

  This is what comes of getting to work early, Bradley. Bureaucrats appear to have qualities of the living. It's an illusion. Don't let it happen again.

  After leaving a note for Estrella Benedict, her office-mate and enormously pregnant best friend, Bo collected the multiplicity of forms necessary if Fianna's case had to be petitioned, and phoned the hospital for the girl's room number. Then she ambled back out to the four-wheel-drive Nissan Pathfinder she'd bought at a police auction, and exited the CPS parking lot as another hundred social workers and clerical staff were trying to get in. The feelings associated with being early were interesting, she thought. Arrogant and superior to those who were merely on time. Fortunately, she was in no danger of having the experience twice.

  At St. Mary's Hospital she parked in a space marked police and showed her ID badge to the eleven-to-seven graveyard shift guard just going off duty.

  "You here for that teenager?" the man asked. "The one they brought in last night from the beach?"

  "Well, she wasn't exactly on the beach—" Bo began.

  "They called me to help hold her down," he went on sadly, fingering a pack of Camels showing above the top of his uniform shirt. "Had to put her in restraints and the orderlies were all in the ER with a bus full of Cub Scouts. Wrecked in the fog on their way home from Disneyland. Bad night."

  Bo looked at the wiry, aging man and thought of Greek choruses. The news of the night handed over to the day, which would reconstruct from the narrative its own version of reality.

  "Were any of the scouts badly hurt?" she asked.

  "No, thank God," the guard answered, glancing dramatically at the ceiling through smudged bifocals. "Guess I'll go on now and get some breakfast."

  "Good idea," Bo said from the elevator as its doors whooshed shut.

  Restraints. Bad news. And hell to pay when Andrew LaMarche would quite reasonably demand an explanation for her insistence that the girl be admitted here, when she obviously needed to be in a psychiatric facility. Bo felt little transparent things tumbling around in her head. Just bits of things nobody could see. A puzzle. She was certain that the girl called Fianna wasn't psychotic last night, merely upset and in some kind of shock. So what had happened that would require restraints?

  The girl was awake when Bo knocked politely on her open hospital room door. On a tray beside the bed a full breakfast, including coffee, sat untouched. The doll was nowhere in sight, apparently stored with the girl's clothes by the hospital staff. Bo pretended not to notice the fabric restraint vest across the girl's chest or the sheepskin-lined leather wrist cuffs belted loosely to the bed frame. She knew what they felt like. It wasn't good.

  "You might not remember me, but I saw you last night at Goblin Market," Bo began. "I work for Child Protective Services, and—"

  "Kimmy's gone," the girl said, her voice whispery and too high. "Kimmy isn't here anymore."

  In the pitch and childlike delivery of this news Bo recognized the flutter of hysteria. If the desperate train of thought, whatever it was, were not derailed, the girl's anxiety might escalate beyond her control, carrying her body with it. The predictable thrashing about for which restraints had been invented.

  "I like the name you chose—Fianna," Bo said clearly and with no emotion. "The Fianna were brave and strong, long, long ago. Let me tell you a story about the Fianna. About the battle the Fianna waged against Murf, the Norse king, and his fleet of big ships with iron shields on their sides."

  "Murf" had come from nowhere, and the battle Bo described as monotonously as possible had never happened. The point was to bore the girl down from hysteria with a flat, sequential, and impersonal narrative. Like most of the female gender, Bo guessed, Fianna would find descriptions of men throwing spears at each other a total yawn. But tracking the boring story might have a calming effect.

  "And that's how the Fianna saved Ulster," she finished without noticeable punctuation, "and I want you to tell me your real name."

  "Janny," the girl answered sleepily. "Or Janet or Janice. I don't know. I think it's always been Janny, though."

  "And your last name?"

  "Malcolm. Like Malcolm X. You know."

  "Yes," Bo droned on, "a black political leader who was raised in foster homes in three different states before going to prison for robbery. I'm going to make a phone call right now, and then I'm going to come back and teach you how to stay calm. While I'm gone you're to repeat to yourself the story of the Fianna and King Murf, okay?"

  "I don't believe his name was Murf."

  "Might've been Wurf. Just do it."

  "Wurf?"

  "Just do it," Bo insisted from the hall. "It will help you keep it together until I get back."

  The girl wasn't psychotic. Bo felt a certain pride in having been right all along. Something was wrong, something so frightening that Janny Malcolm had no resources for coping with it. But with help she could follow a distracting story, regain control of herself, answer questions.

  "Madge," Bo said from the phone at the nurses' station, "I've got the girl's name. You can track her through the foster care office and call the foster parents. Something's happened to this kid, but right now what she needs most is security and familiarity. And I'll need to talk with her caseworker about
getting her in to work with a psychologist. She's messed up, but I think it's situational rather than a real psychiatric problem."

  "Good work. Bo," the supervisor answered. "What's the name?"

  "Malcolm. Janny Malcolm."

  Bo heard a sharp intake of breath, followed by silence.

  "Madge?” she said. "What's the matter?"

  "I... I just tore a nail on the edge of my desk," Madge said, her voice shrill. "And it won't be necessary for you to stay on this case any longer. It can be closed now that the foster parents are available. I want you to come back to the office immediately. Estrella just got a case I feel is too dangerous for her in her condition. I want you to go out with her on the preliminary investigation."

  "Sure," Bo said. "It'll just take me a few minutes to document the reasons for releasing the hospital hold." Then she replaced the phone thoughtfully in its cradle.

  There wasn't any hospital hold, Bo knew. Janny Malcolm's paper workup at St. Mary's had never been done because the staff had assumed the girl would be transferred to another hospital after the shift change. And there would have been no reason for a legal hold in any event, since the whereabouts of the minor's parents or guardian were unknown at the time of her admission. The hospital would have procured a judge's permission to treat the child, if any treatment had been necessary. As it was, Janny had merely spent the night in a clean bed, restrained from harming herself, but given no medication or other treatment. St. Mary's needed no hold to do that, and Madge Aldenhoven knew it.

  Bo leaned against the nurses' station counter and pictured her supervisor's hands. The polished nails, filed smooth below the fingertips. A typist's hands, even though Madge never typed. Short, short fingernails. Impossible to snag on anything, especially the edge of a Formica-topped desk. Madge hadn't torn a nail, Bo realized, puzzled. It was the girl's name that made her gasp.

  And in her three and a half years with Child Protective Services, Bo had never known investigators to work in pairs. It wasn't done. There were too many cases. If a case were dangerous because the adults involved were on drugs or made threats, then CPS turned the investigation over to the police. The guidelines were in the Procedures Manual. Madge, unaccountably, was breaking the rules.