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

by Abigail Padgett

  On a desk beside the patio doors was a framed photograph of a little boy with thick black hair and Mary Mandeer's large, pale blue eyes. Bo watched as the older woman touched the photo's sand-cast silver frame with one finger, tracing its edge as if she were touching the face of the child inside.

  "A life, yes," she said quietly. "Of course, that's right."

  Bo remained motionless, her eyes downcast. Mary Mandeer was going to tell her something. The thing to do was clear the air between them of every extraneous thought, make a tunnel in that space, just go blank. Not easy for a brain that could not, even when comfortably medicated, stop generating thoughts, imagery, words, and sounds. A brain that could not stop its almost palpable interest in absolutely everything. But Bo could do it, in an emergency. Could pull a sort of falcon's hood over the very chemistry of which she was made. In the spill of sunlight reaching in from desert hills, Bo went blank.

  "I only know this," Mary said softly. "Madge and Jasper Malcolm spent one night together. At the Hotel Del Coronado."

  Bo stifled an image of the seaside Victorian landmark with its cupolas and priceless woodwork, trysting place of an English king and a divorcee named Wallis Simpson. An evocative picture, darkened.

  "I participated in this by pretending to be away with Madge at a seminar in Los Angeles. What I really did was spend the night alone in a motel twenty miles from here reading a mystery called, of all things, Generous Death. I still have it somewhere, even remember the author's name, Pickard. The title turned out to be prophetic."

  "How so?" Bo asked very quietly.

  "Madge received a phone call at work the following Monday, telling her there were photographs of her and Jasper Malcolm, taken secretly in their hotel room. No evidence of these was ever produced, but Madge was terrified. She agreed to stop the sequence of official CPS demands, which were really my demands, for forensic analysis of the crime scene. In particular, the chest of drawers between the two cribs, where I believed there would be hair and blood. Kimmy's hair and blood. The police, you see, were certain the blow had been administered by a man. A man strong enough to wield a very heavy object with great force. They refused to consider what I believed had actually happened, although at the time I had the wrong person identified as the perpetrator. In any event, after the blackmail threat Madge begged me to let it go, and I did. Money was suddenly available for Kimmy's care at Kelton, and St. Dymphna's Convent in Julian received a generous endowment. Everybody was cared for, you see—"

  "Who called Madge that Monday morning?" Bo asked, pulling the hood off. "Who blackmailed her?"

  "She never told me," Mary Mandeer said, biting her Up. "She said it was too dangerous. But I know, don't you?"

  "Yes."

  It all fit. Everything. Bo didn't know why she hadn't seen it, but it didn't matter.

  "Thank you, Mary," she said, hugging the other woman. "I'll do what has to be done now. And thank Dan, too. Especially Dan. You've both saved Janny's life, you know. Tell him that. And enjoy your trip."

  She could be there in twenty minutes, Bo calculated. And it was going to be ugly.

  Chapter 26

  Bo parked at a meter on Washington Street, one of the two main thoroughfares through the central San Diego community known as Hillcrest. It would be best if the Pathfinder were not seen. Best to maintain the element of surprise. There were a few things she wanted to confirm before deciding what to do next.

  The neighborhood sidewalks were no strangers to foot traffic. Within walking distance of two major medical centers, they saw a steady flow of pedestrians wending their way from distant parking lots to dozens of outpatient clinics treating everything from bunions to schizophrenia. Bo stuffed her hands into the sleeves of her heavy Aran sweater muff-style, and hunched over, furtively watching the ground. Anyone glancing in her direction would see a woman obviously heading for the psych clinic. She knew how to do that walk.

  The geraniums were still there. Bo noted their presence from the corner of her eye, but kept walking. Around the corner to the alley one could expect to find in any older neighborhood. At the alley she looked about in feigned confusion, then waved as if she'd just recognized someone in one of the yards, or at a window. Briskly now, she hurried to the back gate of Beryl Malcolm's Craftsman bungalow.

  The yard was unkempt and littered with blown newspapers, a pitted aluminum chaise-lounge frame folded against the fence, and the seeping remains of a giant tutti-frutti Slurpee some child had undoubtedly tossed there within the hour. Bo eyed the bright pink liquid melting from its quart-sized paper cup. Something about it felt diseased, ominous.

  The low chain-link gate wasn't locked, not that it mattered. She could easily have jumped the fence. In fact, jumping the fence might have been good, she thought. Might have drained some of the adrenaline twitching in the muscles of her forearms and hands.

  The back door wasn't locked, either. Bo doubted that Beryl Malcolm saw any point in locks. She was, after all, omnipotent. Who would dare to intrude on her? Locks were for people who weren't absolutely sure of their superiority to everyone else. Locks were for people who were weak, frightened, pathetic. People who were like children, like little girls.

  The kitchen was as Bo had expected. Rank, filthy, strewn with the debris generated by obsessive hunger. Beryl Malcolm apparently didn't cook. She bought things that came packaged in cans, boxes, bottles, Styrofoam. On one of the pearlized yellow plastic chairs Bo counted eight empty pizza boxes, stacked and reeking. On two others were a wad of dirty clothes and a grocery bag from which peeked three unopened packages of potato chips. The refrigerator was brand-new. Beryl hadn't bothered to remove the Day-Glo orange promotional sticker from its freezer. Neither had she cleaned the dried red salsa leaking from beneath its rubber seal near the floor.

  "Get out of here!"

  The voice made Bo jump even though she'd been waiting for it. Waiting since the night she'd dreamed of a long-abandoned subway station where one more train was expected, and then no more. The Station of the Dead.

  "Hello, Beryl," she singsonged in a faux contralto, tilting her head to one side and letting her eyes open too widely. "You've been expecting me, haven't you?"

  The psychotic act, occurring nowhere in life except low-budget slasher movies, would serve to put the woman off, Bo calculated. It would scare her, even the playing field.

  "You're crazy! Get out!"

  Beryl was wearing another snap-front housecoat, this one in a floral print that obscured the egg-yolk stain on its bodice. In a trembling, pudgy hand she held a soup bowl of cooling coffee. Bo could smell its sickly-sweet vanilla flavoring, even over the room's preponderant odor of pizza-soaked cardboard.

  "I know what you did," Bo sang, turning her head in birdlike jerks. "Killed your mommy and your little niece. Killed your sister and your daddy, too. Nobody left but Janny now, is there? When will you kill Janny, Beryl? How long does little Janny have to live?"

  "I told you to get out," Beryl Malcolm pronounced in threatening tones. "I'm calling the police."

  "Police, puh-lease," Bo mocked, staring with grossly exaggerated intensity into the watery aqua-blue eyes across the yellow Formica table. "We'll tell them what you did, won't we? We'll tell them how you like to hit heads, like the ones daddy was always making when you wanted him to pay attention to you. How you like to smash them, make the people inside them go away so you can have daddy all to yourself, right? So you can make daddy do exactly what you want him to do. So you can own your daddy, isn't that right?"

  The immense woman seemed to shift the bulbous fat of her torso, shake it into her shoulders and arms, draw it up. Bo had never seen anything like the quivering psychic distortion taking place before her eyes. Beryl Malcolm was some kind of amoeba, she thought, who could throw the mass of curdled fat beneath her skin as the one-celled organism throws itself after a protrusion of its outer membrane. And with a blossoming fear, Bo also knew what it meant. The coffee hit her face before she could fling a hand over he
r eyes.

  "What ends when the symbols shatter?" a line from one of the Goth songs echoed in her head. "What ends, what ends..."

  "You think you're so smart, but you don't know anything," Beryl said with an absence of feeling that made Bo's skin crawl. "You don't know what it's like to live with the memory of that violation, that—"

  "Spare me the party line," Bo said, dropping the lunatic act as she wiped coffee from her face with a sleeve of the Aran sweater. "I know a hundred women who actually were raped by their fathers, uncles, grandfathers, and brothers. Brave, valiant women who carve out decent lives for themselves despite the pain. You're not one of them, Beryl. You're nothing but a viciously self-absorbed murderer who will go to prison now, where you've belonged since you were a child!"

  The transformation hit Beryl Malcolm's eyes then, answering the bleak Goth question. The watery film dissolved, revealing what had lain beneath all along. A peevish, demanding arrogance refined to diamond-hard rage. Her body was that of a grossly obese middle-aged woman, but the eyes were Beryl Malcolm as she had always been. They were the eyes of a soulless child.

  And they were moving beneath the white eyelids. Scouring the cluttered room for something. Then they stopped abruptly to focus on the coffeemaker as Bo grabbed three pizza boxes and held them before her. The coffeemaker hit with surprising force, but the boxes deflected any real damage. The Pyrex carafe, flung sideways from its burner, shattered on the floor in a spray of hot liquid.

  "People don't really die, do they, Beryl?" Bo taunted, watching uneasily as the woman moved across the rear door. "You pushed your mother down the stairs and even pushed thorns into her face to show her how you felt when she spent time in her garden instead of catering to you. But part of her stayed, didn't it? Part of her lived on right inside you, making you line your porch with flowers and buy gardening books you never read. And if you had any friends they'd tell you crystal candy dishes are really passé, Beryl. Brocade couches, too. But then that's your mother's living room, isn't it? It's your front, the little charade behind which you live in filth. You're hiding behind your dead mommy, Beryl, but it won't work anymore. You're finished!"

  "He told you about the stairs, didn't he?" the woman screamed. "He told you what I did. I HAAATE him!"

  The single, piercing word was accompanied by a crash as she overturned the stove, then leaned to rip its heating coils free and fling them wildly at Bo.

  "In a way he did," Bo said, remembering the unpleasant little carving of St. Francis. "He told me he accepted responsibility for the ugliness he created. I guess he meant you, Beryl. But why did you have to hurt the children? Why did you go down to that beach house thirteen years ago and bash your own niece into the top of a dresser?"

  "The dolls," Beryl answered, climbing awkwardly over the fallen stove toward Bo. "He made them into dolls and it should've been me. It wasn't fair. I'd already made Tamlin change their names to Malcolm instead of Lafferty, so he'd have us back, so he'd have his two little girls again. That had to be what he wanted, didn't it? I made her do that. But it wasn't enough. He had to make them into pretty dolls in all the stores where everyone could see, and I had to show him he couldn't..." she stopped, panting, pulling out cabinet drawers, "do that!"

  Beryl Malcolm's face was splotched with purple now, as was the hand Bo saw curling around the black plastic handle of a cheap bread knife which had fallen from one of the overturned drawers.

  Get OUT of here, Bradley! She wants to kill you!

  “Tamlin saw you that night," Bo said as she began a retreat toward the back door. "Why didn't she turn you in to the police?"

  "So I wouldn't kill daddy," the woman answered in the voice of a bored child. "Daddy was rich and paid for everything, see? All Tamlin wanted was to wiggle on that boy Rick's dirty wiener. But he pulled his weenie out of her and ran away, and she had to be a nun but daddy kept paying and paying. Tamlin knew as long as Kimmy stayed a doll and no one saw her or the other one, I'd let daddy pay. Everyone knew daddy had to pay. Even my support group...!"

  Bo saw the lunge coming and sidestepped toward the door as the bread knife slashed through air and Beryl Malcolm fell against the remaining yellow plastic chair. But Bo had forgotten the spilled coffee until her left foot, unable to find purchase on the slick, greasy floor, slid away from her weight at the wrong angle. She fell hard on the other knee as a tearing pain flashed in her left ankle. Beryl had dropped the knife and swung the chair over her head when Bo saw something enter from the living-room door behind the woman. Something silvery white and familiar. Somebody's hair, fastened back with a carved ivory clip.

  "Get up, Bo!" Madge Aldenhoven yelled as she grabbed the grime-encrusted chair legs about to smash into Bo's head. "Run!"

  Pulling a large piece of broken glass from a deep cut in her knee, Bo flung her hand toward Beryl's foot instead. Then she dragged the razor-sharp glass through the pale, veiny flesh covering ligaments, tarsal bones. Purple, almost black blood welled out of the cut as Beryl screamed, released the chair held over her head, and grabbed the knife left lying on the table. Bo watched as Madge Aldenhoven lurched backward with the chair, falling against the wheeled coffee cart. The knife was coming at Bo. She could protect her head, she realized, by jerking her torso under the table. But the descending knife was going to hit something. Slice something. Probably more than once.

  Then Bo sensed another presence, footsteps pounding in the backyard. A sharp sound, a flash, the smell of cordite.

  Beryl Malcolm sank to the floor with a sound that made Bo think of butcher shops, slabs of meat being slapped on a scale. Her eyes were merely amazed, then blank. Near the egg stain on the front of her housecoat was a neat, black-rimmed hole.

  "Damn," Pete Cullen pronounced gloomily. "Didn't mean to kill her, but I had to shoot on the run. Place smells like maggot heaven. You ladies all right?"

  "How did you know, Pete?" Bo asked as Madge groaned reassuringly and then kicked the coffee cart.

  "Lotta stuff," he answered as if that answered anything. "Bad cut there. You're bleedin'. Gonna need stitches."

  "There's an emergency room less than a block from here," Bo said, allowing him to pull her upright. "Except I can't walk. Tore the other ankle."

  "Well, I gotta stay here with this ton of fly bait till the cops come and the paperwork's done, but..."

  His eye fell on the wheeled coffee cart.

  "Ma'am," he addressed Madge, "think you could push her over there on this?"

  "Sure," Madge replied.

  Bo couldn't remember when she'd felt as idiotic, but Madge seemed to enjoy the shocked attention from bystanders watching blood drip onto the sidewalk.

  "How did you know what was going on?" Bo asked the supervisor. "How did you know where I was?"

  "Mary Mandeer phoned me," Madge answered. "After your talk with her, I knew you'd go straight for Beryl. But there's something else, Bo. I watched you before you left the office. I saw you bum something in the parking lot."

  "So? I'm always doing bizarre things. You remind me of them daily."

  Madge stopped the cart beneath a coral tree, pulled a folded sheet of paper from her coat pocket, and handed it to Bo. It was an enlarged copy of a photo of Madge Aldenhoven and Jasper Malcolm, the camera obviously held in his outstretched arm.

  "But I burned this!" Bo yelped. "That's what went up in flames out in the parking lot. That and the original. I swear it, Madge. I found the snapshot stuck in a prayer book at Malcolm's house this morning. I made the copy because ..." Bo felt a flush of shame mottle her neck, but went on. "Because I wanted to make you do right by Janny. And because I wanted to have something on you, something I could use to get even every time you humiliate me with your damn incessant references to the fact that I have a psychiatric illness. But I didn't keep the picture or the copy. I couldn't. I don't understand where this—"

  "One of the runners in the hotline saw you go into the copy room and then found this in a copier," Madge explained. "You know it
never worked properly; it made an extra. He didn't know what it was and didn't care. I doubt that he even looked at it. But he brought it to your supervisor, as he should have."

  "The best-laid plans ..." Bo sighed.

  Madge gave the coffee cart a stern shove forward as an orderly appeared in the emergency room driveway.

  "I admire what you did, Bo," she said evenly. "You possess a great deal more character than I've realized. Beryl Malcolm might have killed you just now, and it would have been my fault, as Janny's plight is my fault. I don't know how to make it right."

  "Keep Janny out of that group home!" Bo answered.

  "Already done. I spoke with the foster care supervisor and then the Schroders this morning. They'll be pleased to take her back now that they understand the origins of her strange behavior. And I think when Rick Lafferty hears what actually happened, he'll be willing to develop some sort of relationship with Janny, although it will never be much. He's an odd, cowering sort of man. I think his relationship with Tamlin and then the loss of his children broke him completely."

  "What did Beryl have on him?" Bo asked. "It seems she blackmailed everybody involved."

  "Nothing that I know of," Madge replied. "It was the police who put the fear of God into Rick Lafferty, and his parents as well. Apparently there had been some questionable contracts between the city and Lafferty Construction. Kickbacks, the usual political corruption. The police dug it all up and threatened George Lafferty with prosecution if he didn't admit he was lying about Rick's whereabouts that night. The Laffertys always believed that the twins were fathered by someone other than their son, since Tamlin had legally changed their names. To avoid the whole ugly situation they took the one child they believed was their grandson, Jeffrey, and left town. Rick stayed, but has lived in fear of the police ever since."

  At the door of the ER Bo handed Madge the copied photograph.

  "He really didn't molest Beryl, did he?" she asked.