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

by Abigail Padgett

  "Strange," she mentioned to Molly, already stretched tummy-up on her sheepskin bed. "Very strange."

  In the night Bo dreamed of Goblin Market in flames, its vampire-children flying out over the sea with smoking wings. Waking briefly, she thought she could actually smell the charred fiberboard of the club's mock turrets, but the scent was quickly subsumed in sleep.

  Chapter 19

  The reindeer sheets smelled like Christmas, Bo noted upon awakening to sunlight. Piney and crisp. Or something did. And something was clumping around on her deck. A tall man with no hips in jeans, hiking boots, and a canvas jacket. As she watched sleepily through her deck door, he shook an eight-foot-tall knobcone pine to loosen its branches and then leaned it against her deck rail.

  "Got here early so I climbed over the rail, hauled it up," he said, pointing to a mess of ropes lying on the redwood floor. "Couldn't have got it up the steps and through your place anyway." The effort necessary to explain his presence seemed to drain him.

  "It's eight o'clock in the morning. You must be Pete Cullen," Bo said.

  "All right."

  The response suggested that he'd just allowed her to assign him a name and that the name would do, although in general names were frivolous and unnecessary. Above his brown corduroy coat collar Bo took note of a wide jaw just beginning to go jowly, unmatched teeth indicating a partial plate, and blue eyes full of somber intelligence. Or one of them was. The other, the left one, moved blearily in synch with its mate but wore a caul of blindness.

  "What happened to your eye?" Bo asked.

  "Guy bashed it," Cullen growled, creating the impression that further demands for speech might cause him to go berserk and demolish the deck.

  "Let me get dressed and start the coffee, Cullen. I'll let you in in a minute."

  Bo threw on jeans and a green sweatshirt before addressing Molly.

  "There's an enormous man and a tree on the deck," she pointed out "You're supposed to be aware of these things, bark, guard. The very nature of the dog involves barking and guarding."

  Molly stretched her stubby legs and then waddled to the deck door.

  "Woof," she said, and then wagged her tail as Pete Cullen hunkered to hold his hand to her through the screen. His hand alone, Bo thought would make a meal for two standard dachshunds or several generations of carnivorous beetles. Weird thought. Big guy.

  "It's a beautiful tree, but it's not going to fit inside," she told him, opening the dining area deck door.

  "Nope," he answered.

  Bo made coffee and snapped on Molly's leash.

  "I guess you're going to set it up on the deck, then. Great idea. While I walk the dog, why don't you trim off some extra branches and wire them into wreaths for inside? There's baling wire in the drawer under the coffeemaker. You don't have to say anything, okay?"

  Cullen nodded, contemplating the task before him.

  When Bo returned twenty minutes later there were wreaths and evergreen swags on the front door, bathroom mirror, and deck railing. The tree was upright in a bucket of water and braced by boards nailed to a triangular base. Pete Cullen seemed pleased, although it was hard to be sure. The slightly less dour set of his lips did suggest an embryonic smile.

  "It all looks lovely," she told him. "Thank you. I hope you can come to the party tonight, Pete. It's at seven. And here's my CPS ID. Can we talk about the Malcolm case now?"

  "What's your part in it?" Cullen asked, knocking a set of wooden candle holders off the coffee table in an attempt to cross his long legs while sinking into Bo's couch.

  "Kimmy Malcolm died Wednesday night," Bo began. "Her twin Janny, who does not remember Kimmy, was at a Goth club on the beach when it happened. She was carrying an old doll she believes is named Kimmy, and went into some kind of shock. Since then she's had escalating problems, including a fear that someone is coming to get her. She's in County Psychiatric now."

  Cullen's good eye had registered interest at "someone is coming to get her."

  "I checked out the hill behind the foster home," Bo went on. "It's all ice plant, and steep. Janny didn't imagine somebody was outside her bedroom window, Pete. The ice plant was smashed all the way up to the school playground above the property. Somebody was there."

  "Good work," Cullen muttered, causing Bo to blush with pleasure. She couldn't remember the last time anyone had actually complimented her on the way she did her job.

  "Who do you think it was?" he asked.

  "Probably the neighborhood Peeping Tom. The point is, Janny's being dumped into the psychiatric system and labeled with an illness she doesn't have. She's just a kid, and nobody in her family cares about her at all. They've abandoned her.

  They all abandoned her thirteen years ago after whatever happened in that beach cottage, and—"

  "It was no Peeping Tom," Cullen interrupted. "Whaddaya say we go by and take a look at that cottage?"

  "What for?" Bo asked. "It's been empty for years. It's got rats."

  "It's been empty since the night somebody bashed that kid, Bradley. I want you to see it. Maybe you can figure out what happened there better than I did."

  "I've already seen it and I don't really have time," Bo said, but the old cop was already at the door.

  "Just take a minute," he insisted.

  The Nantasket Street cottage was as ominous as it had been when Bo first saw it, curtained by dead palm fronds and tangled blueberry climber. Pete Cullen boosted Bo over the fence and then strode through plant shadows to a side window, from which he easily tore the remaining boards. The glass was broken, but jagged edges remained stuck in the glazing. Cullen knocked the rest of the glass out with his canvas-covered elbow and helped Bo over the sill before hefting himself into a ruined living room.

  "Happened back here in a bedroom," he muttered, ignoring a magazine on the floor whose cover featured Ronald Reagan in a campaign debate with incumbent President Jimmy Carter. Something had gnawed the edges of the magazine.

  Bo followed him through a small kitchen that reeked of rust to a rear hallway. Cullen opened a door on his right.

  "In here," he said as rustlings on the trash-strewn floor made Bo's stomach lurch.

  Only box springs remained on the double bed, their fabric shell eaten away in patches that made Bo think of ancient maps. The sort of maps that always included sea monsters. Things had been living in the box springs, she realized. Things probably still were living in the box springs. The air in the room felt bitter, stung her eyes.

  "We shouldn't be breathing in here," she told Cullen. "Rats carry plague."

  "The cribs were on either side of that dresser," he said, pointing to a waist-high chest of drawers against the wall at the foot of the bed. "Kimberly on the left and Janet on the right. The boy, Jeffrey, slept in the other bedroom."

  Bo stared at the grimy glass of a boarded window near where Kimmy Malcolm's crib had been.

  "Maybe somebody came through that window," she suggested without conviction.

  "Screen was nailed in and undisturbed. Nobody came through it."

  Something about the top of the dresser bothered Bo. Just a slab of thick pulp-composition from which the veneer was curling, it seemed to occupy more space than it actually did. It seemed somehow physically loud. And it made her sick.

  "You never found the weapon, did you, Cullen?" she whispered through rising nausea.

  He followed her gaze to the thick, straight edge of the dresser top.

  "Fuck! You're right. Why didn't I see it then? Nobody hit that kid with anything, but somebody hit something with the kid! The edge of that damn dresser! Just picked her up and slammed—"

  But Bo was gone, diving headlong through the rancid cottage and out the open window. Something snagged the back of her coat and she felt ripping fabric. Irrelevant. Nothing mattered but getting out of that space, away from a mental image so cruel it forever poisoned the air where its reality had occurred. Gasping against the vine-covered trunk of a magnolia tree, Bo wondered if she had
the strength to tear the cottage down herself. It had to be obliterated. And so did the thing that had taken Kimmy Malcolm's life.

  "Good eye, Bradley," Cullen said as he replaced the window boards, pounding the nails in with a rock.

  "It was Tamlin," Bo whispered, still shaking. "It had to be Tamlin."

  "Maybe, but I don't think so. Too violent. It was a man."

  Bo inspected a foot-long flap of ripped ripstop nylon hanging from the back of her coat "Rick Lafferty? He wasn't here. He had an alibi."

  "Lafferty's parents were his alibi, which is no alibi. But I don't think it was Lafferty."

  "Who, then?" Bo asked.

  "The pervert" Cullen announced in a gravelly bass. "The grandpa. The little fop with his damn little dolls. He did it I always thought he did it but I couldn't prove it."

  Bo watched a wisp of fog drift across a cluster of rattling palm fronds and evaporate over the fence. "Jasper Malcolm? Why?"

  "Because he's a sick bastard. Who knows what goes on in his mind? But I think he killed his wife so he could have at those girls, have them to himself. Then they grew up and—"

  "Killed his wife?" Bo interrupted. "What?"

  "Supposedly she fell down the stairs in that mausoleum of a house in Golden Hill. Broke her neck."

  "And?"

  "And I read the medical examiner's report. She'd been carrying a tray. Tamlin was sick and the mother'd taken dinner up to her room on a tray. There were flowers on the tray in a small glass vase. Roses. Dorothy Malcolm liked to grow flowers."

  It occurred to Bo that Pete Cullen could be very talkative when discussing a case.

  "Many women who grow flowers are not murdered by their husbands," she said.

  "There were a number of small puncture wounds in the woman's face, Bradley. The ME determined that they were from rose thorns."

  "So, she fell on the roses. I don't get this, Pete."

  His voice dropped to basso profundo. "There were punctures on her forehead and both sides of her face, yet the ME was certain she died instantly."

  Bo breathed deeply, pondering this information. The dour cop had presented it as a sort of riddle. Solving it would earn his respect. Bo found herself wanting that respect, realized that she liked the grisly old giant.

  "Maybe her body moved after the fall that broke her neck. She dropped the tray and the flowers fell down the steps, then she fell on them, dying instantly. But gravity caused her to roll farther down and in the roll her head turned, pressing against the rose stems from the other side."

  "Good, you're good," he grinned. "That's what the ME figured, too. But I don't buy it. I think somebody deliberately pushed those thorns into her face as she lay there dead at the bottom of the stairs. A kind of a mark to show he'd won. Malcolm has a thing about faces, you know. His damn dolls. It's the kind of thing he'd do, hurt her face that way."

  Bo remembered Jasper Malcolm's interest in her own face, his touch on her cheekbone, and shuddered. Then she remembered a child's doll-like skull, also ruined.

  "You may be right, Pete," she said. "But why would he hurt his own granddaughter?"

  "Remember Tamlin said the man who broke in grabbed both twins. I think he meant to kill them both, but dropped Janet when Tamlin struggled with him. I think he had to kill them before they grew any older, before he couldn't resist them any longer. He had to keep them babies, like his dolls, or succumb to his lust for them. It was the only way he could stop himself."

  "But Tamlin would have seen him, been able to identify him. Why would she protect him?"

  "Money, some sick attachment to him. Malcolm's loaded. He supports that monastery she's in, and his other daughter, Beryl, as well. You know how victims are, Bradley. You work with this stuff every day. They never stop worshiping the bastard that raped them as kids, even when they grow up."

  "'Worship' isn't the right term, and Tamlin's in a convent, not a monastery," Bo began, and then remembered Jasper Malcolm's phone call of the night before. "He called me, you know, and asked me to believe he'd never molested a child. He said it was important."

  "He's a shitbag," Cullen said with finality. "Do you know his dolls are used to make kiddy-porn photos that're sold all over the world?"

  "Whaaat?"

  "Yeah. We've been tracking this thing for a while. Hard to prosecute, since dolls aren't people. I wanna nail him, Bo. I want it so bad I can taste it!"

  There was a determined movement beneath the blueberry climber near Bo's left foot.

  "And I want to get out of here," she said. "I'm having a party this evening, a Christmas party. I'm going to go out and buy wine and cookies and créme-filled chocolates with little sugar holly leaves on them. I'm not going to think about this case any more today."

  "Won't work, hound dog," Cullen said knowledgeably. "But you can try. And I think I'll take you up on that invitation. Party sounds pretty good, actually. But first maybe we'll drop in on our friend the dollmaker, huh? I've got some pictures I'd like to show him. And I think you and I make a pretty good team."

  Bo was flattered.

  "I've already seen him," she replied. "The one I haven't talked to is Tamlin. If I were going anywhere today it would be up to Julian to interview Tamlin Lafferty, but I really don't have time."

  "I haven't convinced you the old man's the perp?"

  "Nobody convinces me of anything," Bo smiled ruefully. "I have to do it myself."

  "Then let's do it."

  "Do what?"

  "Get you up there to interview Sister Sicko."

  Bo looked at her watch. "Pete, it's a three-hour round trip to Julian and back."

  "Not in a chopper," he answered, a genuine smile threatening to crack the panes of his face. "I need your help on this thing, Bradley. Let's go!"

  Chapter 20

  Daniel Man Deer inhaled deeply and chose crumb-crust apple pie with vanilla ice cream and coffee. Beside him Mary shrugged off her rust-colored down vest and ordered the same thing, but with pastry crust The little Julian restaurant was warm and redolent with the characteristic odor that had rescued the town after the mines played out. Apples. Thousands of them from mountain orchards planted above deep veins of quartz that could be, and sometimes were, laced with gold.

  Dan wasn't quite sure why they'd made the mountainous hour and a half drive from San Diego except that Mary wanted to go someplace. For days she'd talked about a trip, a drive up to San Francisco or out to Palm Springs, a weekend cruise down the Mexican Baja Peninsula, maybe a week in Hawaii. Tucked in the pocket of his pajama shirt he'd found a colorful brochure on deep sea fishing off Santa Catalina Island. Mary believed that he needed to get away, that his obsessive prowling in Mission Trails Park was unhealthy.

  "Dan," she'd whispered the night before after an inspired interlude of lovemaking that left him breathless, "this Indian thing you're doing is approaching silly. You've been peeing in spray cans in the garage and then hauling them off to the park. No doubt this is some ancient Kumeyaay ritual, but face it, you're not an ancient Kumeyaay. You're a well-off retired mortgage broker of Kumeyaay ancestry. It's the end of the twentieth century now, Dan. Let's hop on a Concorde and spend Christmas in Paris!"

  "I was trying to save a bobcat," he'd said, blushing in the dark. "Marking territory with urine to keep him out of the park, over across Fifty-two where it's still wild and he can live safely. I think it worked, Mary. There hasn't been any scat on the trails for days."

  Her silence after this revelation suggested that she knew there was more to it.

  "And?" she said finally.

  "And it was a way of appealing to the Old Ones, asking for their help with the unhappy spirit I knew was approaching you. They had methods for dealing with spirits of the dead, you know. I needed their help to protect you."

  Mary had smoothed his hair and kissed the top of his head, nestled against her breasts.

  "You were peeing in cans to save a bobcat in order to solicit the help of your ancestors in protecting me from the spirit of
Kimmy Malcolm. Do I have this right?"

  "Yeah."

  "Dan?"

  "Yeah?"

  "You are the most wonderful man in the world and I love you, but this is nonsense. Madge Aldenhoven and I buried Kimmy Malcolm three days ago. It was a terrible case, but it's over now. There is no 'spirit' pursuing me, nothing you need to protect me from. And I absolutely insist that we get out of here for a while. Preferably to someplace where there have never been Indians!"

  "We'll take a drive tomorrow," he'd promised, keeping to himself an awareness that there were just some things Mary would never understand. Like the fact that he couldn't leave San Diego right now. Like the certainty that he would be called upon, finally, to stand against something alien and threatening. Something from the world of the dead crossing back not in love and courage, like David, but in bitterness.

  And Mary, straightening the edge of her pillowcase before settling in to sleep, also kept certain thoughts to herself. There was one thing she hadn't told her husband about the Malcolm case, one thing she would never tell him. Men were not equipped to cope with the chaotic forces which bind life to life, she knew. Men were frightened by chaos and knew a single response to fear, a response which usually involved killing something. Only women could withstand that maelstrom and survive to maintain the illusion of order. Madge Aldenhoven had survived, so far. But the danger Daniel Man Deer imagined to be threatening his wife was in fact looming closer to Madge. And it had nothing to do with the ghost of Kimmy Malcolm.

  "Let's go look at woodburning stoves," she said after Dan finished his pie and the melted ice cream in her dish as well. "The hardware store has a bunch of them—different enamel colors, soapstone, Franklin stoves, hi-tech ones, everything."

  "Do you want a woodburning stove?" he asked, rising sluggishly in the overheated restaurant festooned with twinkling Christmas lights that made him sleepy. "Where would we put it?"

  "I don't want one, I just want to look at them," Mary answered. "They're pretty. They're Christmasy."

  Daniel Man Deer followed his wife onto the main street of a mountain mining town where sparse, tiny snowflakes flashed in the morning sun before dissolving on the shoulders of tourists. He had no idea why looking at woodstoves should be fun, but he didn't care. He'd stand around and look at piles of giraffe manure if she wanted him to. As long as he could be with her, woodstoves were just fine.