The Dollmaker's Daughters (Bo Bradley Mysteries, Book Five) (17 page)

"I got the baby on the s
ibling petition," Bo answered. “
Took him to St Mary's and I'll go over to court and file it right away. It was pretty bad."

"That's our job, Bo," Madge answered as if she, too, had just climbed a set of reeking stairs into a corridor of hell. "And I
have to say I'm growing a littl
e tired of your whining. With Estrella on leave everybody's going to have to shoulder the extra burden. Complaining about 'bad' cases is scarcely professional. Surely we can assume they're all 'bad.' Just do your job, Bo. I haven't got time to pamper you."

"Pamper?" Bo said as layers of possibility began to assume a pattern she could actually feel. "I don't recall asking to be pampered."

The older
woman drummed her fingers softl
y against the side of her head. "Bo, I don't have time to play one of your
pathetic, manipulative games. Get over to court and file the petition. I've already seen Dr. LaMarche's preliminary report. There will be no problem with the petition. What are you staring at?"

"Did you do the closing summary on the Malcolm case?" Bo asked, wondering if Madge actually knew or merely intuited that random changes in attitude routinely unnerved those under her supervision. Was this the same woman who had driven to Mercy Hospital to pick Bo up, the woman who said she had an Irish grandmother? Impossible.

"The Malcolm case is no longer any of your concern. I'm busy, Bo. Please stop harassing me or I'll have to call security. I really don't know why you insist on staying in this job when you can't conduct yourself appropriately."

Security
? Bo felt the gratuitous insult like an acid mist permeating her body. It defined her, made manifest her status as leper. No matter what she did or didn't do, anyone could, at any time, cast her apart from the rest of humanity by pronouncing any of a thousand words meant to illuminate her essential, fearful deviance. And Madge had invoked that power for no reason Bo could ascertain except the need to establish a boundary. But Madge had gone too far.
Way
too far.

The pattern fell into place with finality. It had been sifting like sand in muddy water all along, finding its way to the bottom. The Malcolm case might belong to the past, but it also hid something Madge Aldenhoven did not want anyone to know. And she had just guaranteed that Bo Bradley would unearth whatever that was. Bo ground her teeth and experienced a rush of calculated vindictiveness. It wasn't par
ticularly unpleasant
. Neither was it pleasant. It was just necessary.

After filing the sibling petition at juvenile court, Bo phoned the office message center and left word for Madge that she was going to look for the baby's mother. Then she scanned Pete Cullen's notes on the Malcolm case. He had, as Dar Reinert said, investigated
everybody connected to the litt
l
e girls —the parents, a maternal aunt, the paternal grandparents, and the maternal grandfather, Jasper Malc
olm. Bo wasn't sur
prised to see the dollmaker's name. It was part of the pattern; she could see that now.

So was her impromptu visit to the toy store in Fashion Valley. Everything flowed into the pattern. There was no point in fighting it, although the momentary lapse into rationalism just before Madge's last outburst
had been comfortable
. No wonder people spoke about "behaving rationally" with such fondness. Behaving rationally really meant behaving comfortably. Not an option for Bo Bradley.

Checking Cullen's file, she chewed softly on her lower lip and headed east toward El Cajon and the last known address for Kimmy and Janny Malcolm's father, Rick Lafferty. Once there, she found that she was not surprised at what she saw despite the fact that anyone else probably would have been. It was part of the pattern; it made sense. Now all she had to do was figure out what that sense was.

One of several half-acre "estates" carved out of hilly chaparral in the late fifties, the Lafferty property looked less like Southern California than the set for an English Gothic. While the adjacent properties displayed identical watered lawns in which identical ranch-style houses were situated with unimaginative pride of place, the Lafferty house could not be
seen from the street at all. The
old subdivision had no sidewalks, Bo observed, so the eight-foot mortared stone wall fronting the Lafferty property was nearly flush with the street
.

Two arched gateways opened to a semicircular drive paved with bricks set in a basket-weave design. Bo parked and approached one of the ornamental iron gates, waving at a woman setting bulbs in the ground beneath a handsome live oak.

"Hi!" she called, improvising her approach from details of the landscaping. "I'm driving around getting ideas for ways to dress up a house we've just bought, and somebody told me this place had great stonework. Would you mind if I asked the name of your contractor?"

The woman pulled off her canvas gloves and stood, pushing a black bandana back against short ash-blond hair. In muddy jeans and an old sweatshirt she looked young, but her less-than-waspish waistline suggested a respectable maturity.

"Where's your house?" she asked, moving to the heavy gate.

"Del Mar," Bo improvised. Andy's new house in the San Diego seacoast village would do. "But I was visiting a
friend up her
e and decided to drive around checking out ideas. Your driveway is lovely!"

"My husband Rick did it," the woman said. "But he doesn't contract out
.
You can find bricklayers at the sand-and-gravel companies, though. Just call a few of them and ask for names."

Rick. It had t
o be Rick Lafferty
. After all, how many master bricklayers named Rick could live at the same address sequentially? Especially in an area like San Diego where brickwork was uncommon, expensive, and actually undesirable because of the area's occasional minor earthquakes. There probably weren't enough bricklayers in San Diego County to fill a whole column in the Yellow Pages. So was this woman Tamlin, Rick Lafferty's wife? Bo smiled
sweetly as she scanned the woman for hints of character or the lack thereof.

"It's my third marriage," she confided in what she hoped were girl-talk tones. "I really want to do it right this time, make a beautiful home for both of us. Before, I was always too busy with my job. You know how it is? You just never seem to have time for the little details that make a home special, like flowers and pretty draperies and plants in the yard."

Gag, Bradley! Why don't you just swing from the gate, beaming, and then burst into "Raindrops on roses and whiskers on kittens"?

The woman looked askance. "If you've got a husband like mine, he'll do all the work," she smiled dismissively. "We got married eight years ago and he's worked on this place every day since then. Walls, driveways, garden paths, fireplaces, even a stone gazebo in back overlooking the freeway. Keeps him busy. All I do is putter around. Listen, I wish you luck."

If they'd only been married eight
years, this would be Laf
ferty's second wife, not Tamlin. But Bo had to know for sure.

"Thanks for the tip on bricklayers," she said. "Maybe if I mention that I've seen you
r husband's work they'll know th
e sort of thing I'm looking for. A brick driveway like this would be perfect in front of our house. It's sort of Tudor."

The woman was moving away. "His name's Rick Lafferty," she called over her shoulder. "Most of the masonry contractors around here know who he is. Just tell them you saw Rick Lafferty's driveway."

"Great
.
Thanks so much!" Bo replied, edging toward the Pathfinder while studying the
house hidden behind a low rub
blest
one wall backed by thorny winter
green barberry hedges. With two stone walls and a barrier hedge, the sprawling ranch-style house beyond seemed a prisoner of its own landscaping, although, Bo noted, there were no security bars at the windows. The protective w
alls and plantings were apparentl
y symbolic rather than functional. But what had Rick Lafferty been trying to wall out, or in?

At a convenience store near the freeway on-ramp Bo stopped for a Coke and then pulled a frayed legal pad from under the passenger's seat. "Rick Lafferty," she wrote atop the page. "Sti
ll at father's address. Apparentl
y remarried eight years ago. Has turned property into a fortress with brick and stonework. Check to see if his parents, George and 'Dizzy' Lafferty, are still alive. And where is first wife, Tamlin?" Then she opened the police file.

Cullen had named the location of Kimberly Malcolm's injury as a tiny Mission Beach street stretching only a few blocks across the strip of land between Mission Bay and the Pacific Ocean. Bo knew the area. Just north of her own beach community, it was small and comprised almost entirely of vacation properties. On the bay side were large modular housing resorts, and the short streets running from Mission Boulevard to the beachfront sidewalk were crammed with wooden cottages and more modern townhouses on tiny lots. While a few people lived in Mission Beach year-round, most of the beach and bay properties were rented to vacationers during summer and to col
lege students at vastl
y reduced rates during winter.

Bo headed west on Interstate 8 all the way to the beach, navigated the maze of turns necessary to reach Mission Beach, and stopped a block from Nantasket. Some of the surf shops and streetside sandwich counters were closed for the winter, and the remaining businesses seemed eerily vacant without sun and flocks of bronzed teenagers. Bo locked the Pathfinder and walked slowly toward the comer of Nantasket
and Mission Boulevard as a yellow haze broke through the cloud cover and was quickly swallowed again.

The cottage where somebody had harmed an e
ighteen-
month-old child was on a block-long street ending at the sidewalk and seawall. Bo stood at the corner gazing down the length of the block and out to sea. Then she turned and walked swiftly to the address in Pete Cullen's file. There was nothing there.

Or rather there was too much there. The minuscule lot was dense with unkempt tropical plants moving ominously in the clammy sea wind. From beyond the scaling picket fence defining the lot, Bo counted four two-story feather palms, their dead lower fronds bent to the ground and moving with the wind. The sound made Bo thin
k of huge moths trapped in brittl
e paper. Among the sagging palms a magnolia tree was covered with blueberry climber, and dead tangles of the vine matted clumps of unrecognizable shrubbery as well as the ground. Even in broad daylight the place lay in shadows.

Bo walked the length of the fence, trying to see through the overgrown plants. From the western corner of the lot she glimpsed the side of a cottage almost invisible amid the rampant green. It had shake shingles, although most were curled and rotted and many had fallen off. The windows were boarded over, but even that appeared to have been done years in the past and many of the graying boards had also fallen away. The patch of cement foundation she could see was coated in sickly green moss.

"May I help you?" a well-dressed man in his thirties asked from the deck of the modern dwelling next door
. Bo noticed that a cell
phone was attached to his belt. At his left wrist a wide gold watchband caught the dim light. Yuppies and
drug dealers,
she thought, with their status
phones and gold jewelry.

"Is this property for sale?" she asked.

"Don't we wish!" the man answered. "Place is a blight. Drags down the value of the whole street. But it's not for sale. Tied up in an estate or something, I guess."

A nonvege
table rustl
e in the undergrowth made Bo jump.

“
Tree rats," the man explained. "They love to nest in these palms. We were going to pay for an exterminator but then we realized the rats keep the vagrants from sleeping in there. My wife calls the place Hamlin."

Bo thought of children lost forever, children spirited into a mountain that closed around them and never opened again. It had happened to Kimberly Malcolm. The apt symbolism made Bo's hair stand on end. The pattern. She could feel it glowing inside her head. People, stories, random comments—all led back to a moment thirteen years in the past when something had happened here. Something that stopped time for one little girl and left another lost and alone.