The Dollmaker's Daughters (Bo Bradley Mysteries, Book Five) (10 page)

"Albany," Bo replied. "I'm from Boston. The East Coast ones are easy. How about Michigan?"

"Lansing."

"Wow. Does it help?"

"A littl
e," the girl answered. "But I can't get this thing about the doll out of my head. I'm afraid of the dark. It's like something's after me. Can Bran stay with me tonight, Bev? I feel safer with a friend around, and it's not like we're, you know, going to have sex or anything."

Howard Schroder rose to the moment majestically, Bo thought.

"How about one of those pills from the hospital tonight?" he suggested. "
And you can sleep out here on th
e couch so I can stay with you right here in this chair. You're not going to be alone tonight. I'll be right here. Scott can come by tomorrow."

"Okay," Janny said, relieved. "I'm really scared."

Bo noticed the battered doll tucked under the girl's arm, but said nothing. Questions about Jasper Malco
l
m and his expensive creations could wait
.

"I'll walk out with you," she said, smiling at the boy named Bierbrauer.

The chilly air outside reminded Bo that she'd been sweating profusely in her successful attempt to impersonate a social worker. The gray silk dress was drenched beneath her blazer.

"By the way, who lives in the Schroders' downstairs flat?" she asked the boy.

"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 r
ec 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 eve
n minor dementia. Undoubtedly th
e 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 littl
e 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 li
e 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 vastl
y 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

B
y eleven forty-five the f
ollowing morning Bo's enthu
siasm 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 reconstr
ucted 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 Californ
ian'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, Andre
w LaMarche's dismayed early-morn
ing 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 b
usiness partner for lunch. The li
e 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 dis
tribution, and enjoying littl
e success. Many of the donated toys, Bo knew, were still stacked in the CPS lunchroom.