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

by Abigail Padgett

  "Something's rotten in Denmark," Bo whispered to a picture of a pink woolly mammoth on the wall. "Several things, actually."

  Janny Malcolm was staring at the restraint cuff on her right wrist when Bo came back into her room. In the morning light she looked especially fragile, Bo thought. Like an old-fashioned doll meant for pink taffeta and lace mitts, but made up as an eighteenth century laudanum addict instead. The hollow eyes were especially informative, betraying too much worldly exhaustion for even an aging child to bear.

  "I haven't got much time, Janny," Bo said, "but I want to help you."

  "Okay," the girl sighed, trying unsuccessfully to sit upright against the pull of the body restraint. "I don't... really know what happened."

  "You went to Goblin Market last night. A boy you know as Gunther said you just stood on the patio for an hour or so, and when he went to look for you, you'd collapsed on a bench. Do you know why you collapsed? Were you sick? Did you drink anything or use any drugs? Did something upset you before you went there?"

  "I don't do that shit," Janny answered. "Goths, well, most of the really cool ones, they don't do drugs or get drunk or anything like that. It's not cool."

  "What do Goths do?"

  The wan face with its halo of dark, fine hair became animated. Bo saw a weak smile tug at the edges of the girl's mouth where the night's dark lipstick had crusted in bloodlike flakes.

  "Oh, it's really neat!" she began. "It's a scene. You just, well, you just get to wear these great clothes like in the old days, only sexy, y'know, and dance and listen to music. Some of them get a little carried away, I think. I mean, there's this girl who wears a bustier over just this mesh T-shirt, and you can see her breasts and everything. I mean, that's not really Goth. It's like, you're supposed to look like you're into kinky sex and everything, but really be nice underneath and have this, like, secret code where you have really nice manners and nobody outside knows the dirty stuff is just to fake them out so they won't find out the truth."

  "What truth?" Bo asked, feeling herself spiral into the barely remembered confusion of adolescence.

  "That you're really nice. Like, nicer than the real world. You know. Nicer than the way things are."

  Bo nodded, gazing pointedly at the girl's wrists. "Fancy black cuffs with chrome studs and little chains really are nicer than real wrist restraints, even with the lambswool padding," she acknowledged. "Do you know why they put those on you?"

  "I keep freaking out," Janny admitted. "Something keeps, like, coming into my mind. I don't want it... I don't want to think about it."

  "Is it like somebody talking?" Bo asked casually. "Like a background noise or radio static that sounds like words?"

  "Nooo! I'm not hearing voices or anything. I'm not crazy!"

  "Some people who hear voices—religious mystics, for example—aren't crazy. And some people who don't hear voices are. But I don't think you're crazy at all. What I think is that something's really upset you, and you need to be safe and quiet at home for a while until we can get you some counseling. Would you like for your foster parents to come and take you home now?"

  Bo watched for the girl's reaction. If there were a problem with the foster parents, if they were involved in whatever had traumatized Janny Malcolm, their culpability would broadcast itself from her body. Maybe just a twitch, a swift compression of the lips, a wild, roaming glance that avoids the question.

  "I guess," Janny said with a nervous sigh Bo couldn't interpret. "I'd like to go back there, but what if... I mean, it sort of started happening when I was there."

  The dark eyes regarded Bo warily.

  "They don't know. Bev and Howard. I've been with them for two years now. They're okay. Bev even drives me down to the Goblin, y'know, like last night. She lets me go once or twice a week if I get my homework done. And she lets Bran, that's my boyfriend, she lets him drive me home. But I didn't tell them about this thing that started happening a couple of weeks ago. It's so scary. I was afraid, you know, I was crazy and they wouldn't keep me anymore."

  Impulsively Bo leaned over and wrapped an arm under the restraint ties, hugging the girl close. What must it be like, she wondered, to fear both madness and the certainty of abandonment among strangers because of it? No wonder the kid was a wreck.

  "Let's try an experiment," she suggested after Janny's sobbing had subsided. "I'm going to unbuckle your wrists and hold your hands while we talk about this thing that's happening to you. Can you manage it?"

  "I'm scared," Janny answered, rubbing her wrists after Bo pulled off the cuffs.

  "So am I, but let's see what happens. Now ... a while ago you said, 'Kimmy's gone.' What does that mean?"

  "I don't know," the girl answered, shaking her head. "But it's got something to do with this doll, this old doll I've had since I was little. I think the doll must be Kimmy, and it's dead or something. Except I always called my doll Lateesha because that was my friend's name in this one foster home a long time ago. She was black and older than me, and she was really nice. We used to play all the time. She showed me how to make doll clothes with cut-up pieces of cloth and tape. I guess she went back with her mother or something. One day she just left and I never saw her again."

  Janny was regressing again, Bo noted. Talking about childhood interests in that high, breathy voice. Talking about a childhood only a foster child knows, in which other people appear and then vanish for inexplicable reasons. A childhood in which nothing may be trusted to remain the same. Bo held the girl's hands firmly and wished orphanages didn't get such bad press. At least in an orphanage a kid could develop a sense of place, a notion of identity.

  "So maybe Kimmy's just a new name for Lateesha," she suggested. "Maybe you're growing up a little now, having a boyfriend and dressing up, being a Goth. Maybe calling the doll Kimmy is a way of beginning to stop being a little girl."

  The analysis was both shallow and beyond Janny's comprehension, Bo realized, damning herself for indulging in instant psychology.

  "No!" Janny wept, shaking. "There wasn't a Kimmy at all until a little while ago, and then all of a sudden there was, and then she was gone. Last night. Last night she wasn't there anymore. And I was supposed to go with her, but I couldn't, and it was like I wasn't anywhere because I couldn't. And it's not Lateesha, it's Kimmy. And I have to keep the doll. I have to keep Kimmy or she'll be like ... like she was always gone, and she wasn't. So I have to ... I have to ..."

  "Okay," Bo pronounced evenly as Janny clung to her hands, "this is what happens to you, this thing about Kimmy. And it's happening now, and you're still right here in this hospital, in this bed, holding on to me. You're okay. It's weird, but you're okay. And it's scary, but you're still okay. Now, tell me who the Fianna were."

  "B-brave Irish warriors. Long, long time ago," Janny answered, relaxing a little.

  "And who was the Norse king they fought?"

  "Murf-wurf in the big boats."

  "How many battles?"

  "Lots. They all sound alike."

  "They are all alike," Bo grinned as the slender hands loosened their grip. "You know, when I get scared I recite the names of shipwrecks. It works."

  "Can I learn something to recite besides these stupid warriors?" Janny smiled shakily, letting go of Bo's hands.

  "How about state capitals?"

  "Oh, gag! I want 'Famous Vampires.'"

  "No way. Too scary. When you're scared you have to have something really dull to calm you down."

  "Shipwrecks aren't dull."

  "They are if you just say the names and dates."

  "Okay. State capitals."

  "Excellent!" Bo exhaled, grubbing in her briefcase for a business card. "Here's my number at the office and at home. Call me as soon as you're ready and I'll drill you."

  "I'm not so scared now," the girl said thoughtfully. "But I still don't know who Kimmy is, or where she went. You're one of the social workers, right? Then you've seen all kinds of kids. Have you ever seen another kid with something
like this happening?"

  "I don't know," Bo answered. "But I'm going to think about it. The important thing right now is for you not to be so scared. We'll let Kimmy be a mystery until you can recite all the state capitals, okay?"

  "I'll try," Janny Malcolm agreed, "but will you, like, ever come to see me or anything? You're, you know, pretty good with this scary, crazy stuff."

  "I ought to be," Bo grinned from the door. "And I'll tell you what. If your foster parents agree, you and I will have lunch this weekend, maybe do a little shopping afterward. Today's Thursday. How about Sunday afternoon if you feel up to it?"

  "For real?"

  "For real."

  In the bustling hallway Bo confronted the several rules she had just broken, and didn't care. Something about this case, this terrified girl, felt strangely close in a way she couldn't define. Too close to walk away from.

  Near the elevator a small a capella group in Edwardian costumes was singing "Rudolph, the Red-Nosed Reindeer" as children in wheelchairs and casts peeked from the doors of their rooms. The song reminded Bo of her new flannel sheets and seemed to suggest a mystical connection to the events of the night before, when the strange dream had frightened her as badly as Janny was frightened of her doll. Bo stopped to listen, to let the symbolism of tiny reindeer flood her consciousness. There was some connection. She could feel it

  "Oh, shit!" she whispered suddenly, jabbing the down button.

  Reindeer symbols. Mystical messages. The trappings of mania. She'd lost too much sleep last night. And she was under stress because she hadn't sent a single Christmas card or begun her gift-shopping. And Estrella would have her baby within weeks, and Bo was worried about that. Besides, the holidays were hard on everybody. And even under medication just about anything could tip her volatile brain in directions best left unexplored. Like this teenager's delusional experience, which still seemed to hang tauntingly just beyond her reach.

  "I'll call my shrink as soon as I get back to the office," she promised the elevator's padded wall. "I see what's happening here."

  In the Pathfinder she jammed a tape of Bach's Brandenburg Concerto Number Three in G Major into the tape deck and matched her breathing to the music.

  "The Kate Harding, 1892," she recited. "The British schooner Lily, 1901."

  Something was scaring her. But she wasn't sure whether it was an encroaching mania or something else. Something empty and waiting for one last train in a station where no one ever goes.

  Chapter 3

  On the way back to the office Bo considered the calming exercise she'd given Janny Malcolm. What was the capital of Nevada? Las Vegas? Surely not. Then what about Wyoming? Idaho? Arizona? Blanks everywhere.

  You couldn't pass an eighth-grade civics class, Bradley. You're pathetic.

  "Es, what's the capital of Arizona?" she asked as she opened her office door. "Also the rest of the western states and Rhode Island."

  Estrella Benedict turned her desk chair slowly, even radiantly, Bo thought, toward the door. Always attractive, the younger woman's clear skin had become translucent and glowing in the final months of her pregnancy. And the slower movements demanded by her unaccustomed bulk seemed less awkward than thoughtful.

  "We've shared this office for three years and I should be prepared." Estrella grinned, shaking her dark hair recently cut in a sophisticated Sassoon bob. "But I never am. There is simply no way to prepare. You could come through that door and say anything. And it's got to be Phoenix. Why?"

  "You'd think I would know that," Bo answered, biting a hangnail as she glanced at the case file on her desk. The cream-colored file folder with its red-orange stripe was new, she noticed. Brand-new. "Malcolm, Janny" had been penned across the stripe.

  "Madge is so worried that I'm going to have the baby in my car on the freeway that she's sending you out on a case with me, can you believe it?"

  "No," Bo answered, "I can't."

  "At least it's close," Estrella went on. "In fact, we can walk."

  "You're kidding."

  The nation's sixth largest city, San Diego covered hundreds of miles, and as an agency of the county rather than the city, Child Protective Services spread its jurisdictional net hundreds of miles beyond that. In her work Bo had traveled north to the Orange County line, east over mountains into the ancient Sonoran desert, and south to the Mexican border without leaving San Diego County. But despite the marginal nature of the old central San Diego community in which her office building sat behind high chain-link fences, she'd never heard of anybody getting a case there. Probably, she thought, because the neighborhood's predominantly Southeast Asian immigrants hadn't yet acculturated sufficiently to view their children as property.

  "It's an apartment on Linda Vista Road across from that Asian supermarket, only four blocks or so. The walk will be fun."

  "You only get the Latino cases. How can there be a Spanish-speaking case in this neighborhood?" Bo asked, noticing for the twentieth time that the plaid wool lining of her black trench coat sagged indecorously from a rip along the front placket. She'd bought the coat during her college days in Massachusetts, when black ripstop nylon outerwear had somehow been a profound statement about the absence of basic human rights in countries with no alphabets. Now people born in those countries purchased octopus and strawberry flavored rice milk at a supermarket three blocks from her office, their rights intact.

  "I don't know, but you look like a vagrant in that coat," Estrella added.

  Bo knit her brows at the case file on her desk. The case file for a child with a CPS history, a child in foster care. It should be fat, dog-eared, greasy with fingerprints of the many caseworkers and file clerks who would have crammed paperwork into it. It shouldn't be slim and new. Flipping it open with one hand, she saw that it contained nothing but a face sheet. Odd.

  "I'm going to get an appropriate, California-type coat during the after-Christmas sales," she reassured her friend. "Don't worry, I'll look smashing at the christening."

  The day had already lost its morning chill, but Bo kept her coat buttoned at the chest so that its ripped lining wouldn't show as she and Estrella strolled the neighborhood of prefab military housing built during World War II and later sold to private owners. Each two-apartment wood-frame duplex had been identical to every other when they were built, but over the years porches, carports, awnings, and cement-slab patios had been added to the dilapidated buildings, and native sagebrush grew wild in the tiny yards. An original tidiness had surrendered to the demands of time. Beyond a low fence matted with half-dead geraniums, Bo heard a ratchety, aggressive squawk.

  "What in hell?" she blurted, lurching against Estrella, who shook her head.

  "El pollo," Estrella laughed, pointing to a large chicken wire cage hidden behind some towels drying on a low clothesline. Atop the cage was an animal with reddish brown feathers and a territorial attitude.

  "Rooster," Bo pronounced. "And those things inside the cage are regular chickens."

  "Very good, Bo. Next we identify moo-cows and horsies. Now, the way to tell the difference ..."

  Bo scowled at the rooster, who hopped to the ground and glared beadily from between two towels that said holiday inn.

  "Es, we're in the middle of a city," she said. "There aren't supposed to be farm animals."

  "A lot of these people were farmers in Vietnam, Cambodia, Laos. They like their chickens."

  Bo imagined the rooster on a Styrofoam tray under shrink-wrap, and sighed as they rounded the corner onto Linda Vista Road, the main thoroughfare. Near a Jack in the Box restaurant a smaller store announced itself with a sign saying heo quay dat tat dai naan cho toi nha. For all she knew it could be saying "All hope abandon, ye who enter here." The proprietor, a tiny man in tiny Wrangler jeans and flip-flops, was scrubbing the security bars over the store's front window with soapy water and a hairbrush.

  "You know, I've never actually walked around here," Bo observed. "I just drive through, in and out of the office. It's interesting."<
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  "Little Saigon," Estella said. "It's been a neighborhood of immigrants since the military left. First it was Latinos, then people from Southeast Asia. But a few of the Mexican families just stayed. This case we're investigating is one of them. It's nothing serious, just a four-year-old girl who showed up at a daycare center with an odd burn on her back that she refuses to explain. The grandmother's at home with her now."

  On the sidewalk ahead of them a Latino man in pressed black chinos and an elaborately patterned sweater talked on a cell phone as he walked. The hand holding the phone displayed a huge gold ring set in flashing diamonds.

  "Dealer or pimp?" Bo asked conversationally.

  "Dealer."

  "How can you tell?"

  Estrella smiled at a young Chinese woman pushing twin baby boys in a double stroller. The man with the telephone, his conversation concluded, stopped and dropped to one knee to make cooing noises at the twins in Spanish.

  "Pimps don't flash cell phones on the street," Estrella answered, her gaze lingering on the plump baby boys in their quilted Chinese jackets. "But the pants are the giveaway."

  "Pants?"

  "Yeah. The black chinos with the knife-edge crease. Years ago those were part of the uniform of a Latino gang called Los Brujos, 'The Magicians.' As teenagers Los Brujos worked as drug runners for some small-time Mafia clones. Then they grew up, ousted the clones, and took over the business of supplying drugs to the children of their own people. Some of them still wear the black chinos."

  "Like a school tie," Bo observed. "An old boys' network."

  Estrella had wrapped both arms over her bulging abdomen. "More like a warning," she replied. "Those pants let other drug dealers know that a Brujo is working the territory. It isn't wise to mess with them. They kill their competition."

  Bo admired the clearing sky through the bare limbs of a sycamore tree in the grassy median between Linda Vista Road and the fronting residential street called Morley.

  "How do you know all these things, Es? You're a walking encyclopedia."