"Nobody now," he answered. "They fixed it up years ago for Mr. Schroder's mother to live in. But then she got Alzheimer's and they had to put her in a home. She died three or four years ago, before Janny came. The flat's like a rec room now. My dad and Mr. Schroder play pool down there, that kind of stuff."
"Oh," Bo said.
The experience with Alzheimer's could account for the Schroders' fear of even minor dementia. Undoubtedly the couple had been through some exhausting and painful times before making the difficult decision to find twenty-four-hour care for Howard's mother. They would wish to avoid any similar experience.
"So what's wrong with Janny?" Scott Bierbrauer asked as Bo scooped Molly from the Pathfinder and set her on the ground in a swirl of fallen sycamore leaves.
"I don't know, but you may be able to help. Tell me a little about this Goth business. I assume you picked Janny's name, Fianna. And what are the vampire teeth, the skull jewelry, and black leather wrist cuffs all about?"
"Gothic is about what a joke the whole middle-class scene is, you know? Everything's a lie. The politicians lie, the corporations lie, and religions are the biggest lie of all. It's like, there's nothing. They tell you to go to school and then get some job all day every day, and then you get old and you're dead and that's it. It's like everything they tell you is just this big commercial for something that doesn't exist, you know?"
They were walking slowly in the leaves near Bo's car. Christmas in San Diego felt more like Halloween in Boston, she reflected. And Scott Bierbrauer's remarks were both typically adolescent and impenetrably philosophical.
"So what does exist?" she asked, going along. Generations of philosophers had fallen short of an adequate answer to that question, but she was sure the boy would nail it with ease.
"Nothing," he said, smiling at Molly's wagging tail. "That's pretty Gothic, that nothing exists. And death is nothing, so we dress like vampires and people you see in old pictures. People who are dead. The whole Goth scene is like just saying screw it to the lies and accepting the truth."
As Molly sniffed the base of a cement-block ledge bordering somebody's yard. Bo congratulated herself on her choice of jobs. Commodities trading would have provided vastly more income, but not the opportunity to stand in leaves under a streetlight discussing existentialism with this bright, serious boy who had undoubtedly never heard of existentialism.
"And Janny understands all this?" she went on.
"Nah, she just likes the clothes. For a lot of them it's pretty superficial. You know, just someplace to hang out and feel accepted. A lot of Goths work in computers like I do. I guess you could say we aren't exactly truly wild. And we like the manners, the rules. A Goth won't just go up and hit on some girl. You have to be introduced."
"What about the doll Janny carries? Is that a statement about nothingness, too?"
"Well, yeah, in a way. I mean, Janny's past is kind of nothing, isn't it? She doesn't even know who her parents are, all those foster homes since she was really little. She said she's always had the doll. And she's always had nothing. See?"
"Bran," Bo said, rolling her r's in the thickest brogue she could manage, "it's a deep thinker ye are with the heart of a poet."
"Hey, you do that pretty well," he grinned. "Do you really think so?"
"Aye," she answered, steering Molly back toward the Pathfinder. "Now go home and look up Jean-Paul Sartre in an encyclopedia. It's S-A-R-T-R-E, okay?"
"Who's that?"
"An early Goth."
"Wow."
Driving to her dinner appointment with Eva, Bo realized that she knew no more about Janny Malcolm than she had sixteen hours earlier at Goblin Market. It was as if a thick curtain hung in folds between the teenager and whatever was endangering her fragile security, even her mental stability. Only one thing had slipped through that curtain to provide a clue. A chipped porcelain doll.
Bo thought she could feel its single blue glass eye watching her. Certainly something was watching her. A sense of secretive and totally malign attention drifted in from the darkness behind her taillights. But when she turned to look over her shoulder, the leaf-strewn street was empty.
Chapter 7
By eleven forty-five the following morning Bo's enthusiasm for her job had turned, she realized, to a state more closely resembling entropy. Everything was wrong. Not only wrong, but perilously close to lunacy. Why else, she asked herself, would she be hiding in the excessively clean garage of a mortuary while Madge Aldenhoven and another woman attended a funeral? A strange funeral at which they appeared to be the only mourners.
Leaning against the whitewashed cement-block wall, she mentally reconstructed the series of events that had compelled her to follow her supervisor to this beige stucco building on a residential street just behind a shopping center. heidegger mortuary, read a small plaque beside the double front doors. Without the plaque, the building might have been anything from a dental complex to a private elementary school. A tribute to the Southern Californian's renowned distaste for reality.
The day had begun reasonably enough, she remembered as the recorded sound of a guitar and Indian flute floated through a closed door leading to one of the mortuary's three "chapels." Discounting, that is, Andrew LaMarche's dismayed early-morning announcement of a surprise visit by a young relative from Louisiana. The sixteen-year-old daughter of a cousin the dashing pediatrician hadn't seen in over thirty years.
"Her name is Teless and she says her nannan gave her bus fare for the trip as a Christmas present in exchange for promising not to marry a boyfriend who's apparently on his way to prison," Andrew explained raggedly over the phone. "I don't know what to do."
"What's a nannan?" Bo had asked.
"Cajun for godmother. Her godmother gave her the money. But no one contacted me and now she's here. She keeps reassuring me that she's not pregnant and asking me where the movie stars live. I've called my sister, Elizabeth, in Lafayette to see if she knows anything about this, but no one's home."
"It'll be nice to have a kid around for Christmas," Bo offered. "Don't worry. I'm sure she'll be lots of fun, remind you of those idyllic childhood visits to the bayou, all that."
"Mon dieu," Andrew LaMarche had sighed and then hung up.
Bo filed her lover's predicament for later contemplation and focused instead on the impact of Madge's costume that morning. A black faille suit, pencil-slim and so well cut that Madge looked like the widowed mother of an international fashion designer. But the black satin cloche hat with the quarter veil resting atop a stack of case files had really been the clue, Bo thought. When she'd said "Did somebody die?" Madge had blanched and muttered something about meeting her husband and his business partner for lunch. The lie had felt dark, Bo remembered. Navy blue, at least.
If it hadn't been for the hat she might have overlooked the significance of a discussion in the hall between Madge and the CPS Police Liaison. The liaison was scrounging volunteers for the police department's Christmas toy distribution, and enjoying little success. Many of the donated toys, Bo knew, were still stacked in the CPS lunchroom.
"Is there anything left that's appropriate for an older child?" Madge had asked. "A teenager?"
"Not really," the other woman had answered, distracted. "Nobody ever knows what to donate for teenagers. I think we've got a couple of those clip-on sports radios, but the speakers are terrible."
"That won't matter," Madge had answered with a catch in her voice. "The gift is symbolic."
Later Bo had overheard Madge on the phone, saying, "I know it's silly, Mary, but I wanted something that would be like a real Christmas gift from Janny, a last gift because they never..."
Janny. Bo had heard the name before Madge turned from her office door, obscuring whatever else was said. Something about a gift from Janny. A plastic radio from the police toy drive? For whom? Why would Madge take a gift, ostensibly from Janny, to someone? And was this the engagement for which Madge had surpassed even her own sartorial standards? She lo
oked as though she'd been summoned to the White House for a summit meeting. Black tie.
There would be no lunch with a husband, Bo already knew. That had been a lie. So where was Madge going with a flawed gift, supposedly from Janny? Maybe all the secrecy involved relatives. Wealthy relatives, from the care Madge had taken in preparation for this meeting. Bo had decided at that moment to follow Madge, see what this was about. It was the least she could do for Janny.
Now in the gloom she slowly turned the brushed chrome knob between the mortuary garage and the room beyond. Then she nudged it to a hair-fine opening she hoped no one would notice. A scent of carnations and metal fell across her face in the thin shaft of air from the other side. The door was covered by a filmy drapery along the interior wall and situated immediately behind the gray steel casket. Pressing her right ear to the narrow opening, she tried to hear what was being said.
A woman's voice, reading something. Poetry, Bo thought. It wasn't Madge, it was the other woman. The voice much deeper than Madge's, less controlled. And the poem was by Louise Bogan, Bo was sure. The poet was a favorite of hers, a kindred spirit.
" 'What is forsaken will rest,"' the woman's voice announced through tears. '"But her heel is lifted,—she would flee,—the whistle of the birds/ Fails on her breast.' "
Bo knew the poem. It was about a statue, a girl carved in marble. For a moment the haunting Indian flute seemed, in fact, a "whistle of birds." And the sound would certainly fail to stir the heart of whoever lay just beyond the curtain. That heart, Bo acknowledged somberly, would not stir again. But who was it? From her position behind the casket she could see nothing. Why had Madge gone to such elaborate lengths all that morning to deny the fact that she was going to a funeral? And why was no one else present?
Bo had seen no option but to tail her supervisor. And an unlocked side door to the mortuary garage provided surreptitious entrance. But now what?
Through the knife-thin opening between the door and the frame, she saw a man approach the casket and lower the open half of its lid. The most wrenching moment in any funeral. The moment in which a singular, never-to-be-seen-again human face is removed from sight forever. Also the moment after which the mourners file out and the casket is removed to the hearse for its trip to a cemetery.
There were two hearses in the garage, as well as a beige van. The smaller hearse had been backed in, its rear door facing the door to the room now occupied by Madge Aldenhoven, a mortician, and two others, one of them dead. Bo scuttled to the shadows at the far side of the van, taking care to crouch close to the front tire. Blocked by its bulk she would be less likely to cast a noticeable shadow when the wide garage door was opened for the exit of the hearse. In minutes the taped music stopped and she heard the mechanical sound of draperies moving on a rod. Then a bump as something on wheels hit the door and rolled into the garage. A smell of cigarette smoke.
Bo held her breath as a pair of black-clad legs visible beyond the van's underside walked beside a heavy object being rolled from a gurney into the open hearse. Then the man neatly folded the gurney's legs inward and lifted it out of Bo's sight. A thunk announced the closing of the hearse door, and the feet moved quickly to the front of the black vehicle. A lit cigarette dropped to the concrete and was ground out by one of the feet, then picked up by a medium-sized male hand wearing a white glove. Bo could see the black cuff of the man's coat sleeve, the three buttons sewn there, an edge of white shirt. In the silence it was like a pantomime, she thought. Or a painting.
When the hearse was gone and the garage safely closed, Bo stood and looked around. The place appeared to be empty. There were no sounds from the interior of the building. Opening the door beyond which the brief service had been held, she stepped into an empty room carpeted deeply in mauve. A white satin skirt that would have disguised the gurney sup-porting the casket was flung over a vaguely art deco floor lamp, one of two flanking a bare space marked deeply by the impression of small wheels. Bo could hear herself breathing through her nose. The sound seemed loud and inappropriate.
"As the cradle asks 'Whence?', the coffin asks 'Whither?'" she quoted her grandmother softly. It seemed necessary to say something.
Bradley, this isn't a wake, just an empty room. Save the Gaelic rhapsodizing over death until you at least know who's dead!
Moving soundlessly across the thick carpet, Bo edged into the hall. Silence. Apparently the mortician had handled the service alone and now was supervising the burial. To the right of the entry Bo saw another plaque affixed to the door of a front room, office. She knocked softly and, when there was no response, opened the door.
As she expected, there was a neat stack of papers atop a large desk. There was always a neat stack of papers. There had been papers at the Boston mortuary from which her sister Laurie had been buried after deliberately breathing the exhaust from her own car through a garden hose. And there had been a larger stack after the accidental deaths of both her parents in Mexico. Pushing aside a thousand dust motes swimming in the light from two side windows, she stepped closer and then heard the sharp intake of her own breath.
Beside the word "Deceased" on the death certificate facing her was the name "Malcolm, Kimberly."
"Kimmy," Bo whispered. "Kimmy Malcolm."
The death had occurred in the City and County of Los Angeles, California, the document told her, at 12:03 a.m. on the previous day. Bo memorized the address from which death had claimed someone with a doll's name. Then she realized that her palms were damp and her eyes felt too small. The air in the closed room seemed suddenly eggshell-colored and judgmental. It wanted her to leave.
"No problem," she pronounced through her nose, backing into the hall and then dashing through the garage door to the street. The Pathfinder was parked in the shopping center lot facing the mortuary, but Bo instinctively ducked into the first store she came to, just to decompress. It was a Target, one of the nationwide chain of variety stores that sold everything from cosmetics to pesticides. Now bustling with Christmas shoppers, it offered near-perfect anonymity as Bo confronted the fact that she was scared.
Not scared of dolls or caskets or death, but of California. Of having no past. Of being left out by virtue of never having been let in. Whatever had just happened in that bland funeral home, she acknowledged as she examined a display of Christmas socks, was rooted in some past drama to which she was not privy. Something involving Madge Aldenhoven and another woman. And something involving Janny Malcolm.
Kimberly Malcolm might be Janny's mother. A drug addict maybe, or a prostitute who'd left her daughter in foster homes for years and now had died. Perhaps Madge had handled the original case. It happened that way sometimes. A CPS worker might know the whereabouts of a missing parent for years, even maintain contact with that parent but never reveal those facts to anyone. It happened when the parent, almost always the mother, was too damaged, strung out or criminal ever to regain custody of her child, but too desperately alone to release that child for adoption. In those cases the social worker might become a sporadic link to the child, a source of news or an occasional snapshot. Some of the CPS workers took pity on these mothers. Bo was puzzled at the thought of Madge in that role, but what else could account for her secrecy and her presence at the brief little funeral?
Turning at the end of the sock aisle, Bo sadly perused the half city block devoted to hair care items. Estrella had phoned to say she'd be going home from the hospital at noon to await the birth of her baby comfortably ensconced in the recliner Bo had helped her and Henry select. Overnight, Estrella had drifted outside their shared office and was gone. Popping open the cap of a pearlized gray plastic bottle of conditioner, Bo sniffed the contents and felt a surge of nausea that brought tears to her eyes. Coconut. A smell like cheap suntan lotion, a summer beach smell. It embodied California. Where Bo Bradley didn't belong.
Even Andy had a family. A sister in Louisiana, nieces and nephews, teenage second cousins who showed up unexpectedly for Christmas. Even Eva Broussar
d had made a new life for herself in her high desert compound, surrounded by a handful of people from New York State who believed they'd seen extraterrestrials on a mountain in the Adirondacks. The recent discovery of several new planets believed to be capable of supporting life had inspired these people, Eva explained during last night's dinner, to create a computer screen saver featuring the new planets as they stood in relation to earth. In their spinning white galaxies, the new planets blinked fuchsia, electric blue, neon green. The screen savers were selling briskly, Eva said, and the renewed enthusiasm of the "Seekers," as the group had named themselves back in New York, would provide a finale to her research documenting their response to having seen almond-eyed aliens with silver skin in the Adirondack dark.
"I have concluded," the half-Iroquois psychiatrist told Bo over freshly baked Italian bread, "that the nature of experience is so ephemeral it doesn't feel 'real' unless validated by others. Thus human beings expend inordinate percentages of available energy in attempts to enlist others as support for their own experience. I doubt that any of the Seekers will see another 'space alien,' but they've established cohesion based on an enterprise which will encourage others to validate their experience."
"What?" Bo had asked. The shrink's French accent made her words sound like the voice-over for a lingerie commercial despite their academic content
"The Seekers are marketing their version of reality, which includes an awareness of life on other planets," Eva simplified the theory. "And people are buying their product begging for more. It validates the Seekers' experience."
"Mental health through capitalism?"
"I'm afraid so," Eva had smiled.
In the store's music section Bo stopped to listen to the Mannheim Steamroller Christmas CD playing from speakers inside a gated area containing electronic equipment. A solo flute soared over the shopping noise in the simple French folk melody called "The Holly and the Ivy." Bo knew the tune from a past in which her mother played it on the little violino piccolo she'd bought in Italy. The sound meant Boston and snow and the scent of pipe tobacco as her father strung lights on a tree placed in the bay window overlooking a streetlight. It meant her little sister Laurie at five, pantomiming the music she couldn't hear by dancing in time to the movement of their mother's arm across the wooden soundboard. Laurie's huge green eyes had seen the music, Bo remembered as strings swelled beneath the trill of the recorded flute.
The Dollmaker's Daughters (Bo Bradley Mysteries, Book Five) Page 7