The Dollmaker's Daughters (Bo Bradley Mysteries, Book Five) (2 page)

The uniformed officers Dar had mentioned stood in a
partially enclosed patio attach
ed to the small restaurant, illuminating with flashlights a pale girl dressed in black. She was
sitting upright on a bench, her gaze transecting the posturing young cops as if they weren't there. Beside her a boy in a doublet and lacy shirt repeatedly offered a steaming metal tankard Bo presumed was coffee, but the girl didn't respond. Some forty other figures, all dressed in black, milled about, watching somberly. Bo had expected theatrics, but when a blond young man in a cape bowed and smiled at her, she instinctively pulled Molly closer and regretted an absence of pointed wooden stakes among the debris she carried in her purse. The fangs revealed b
y his smile weren't the peppermint
flavored paraffin variety Bo remembered from childhood Halloweens. They were real.

"I've misplaced my rope of garlic," she told him casually. "But trust me, my blood would taste like boiled tomato juice. Medication. You know how it is. By the way, does this run in your family?"

"A dentist in L.A. does them for seventy bucks,"
the caped figure explained, smil
ing. "They're a birthday present from my wife."

"Happy birthday," Bo smiled, nodding toward the scene on the patio. "Do you know anything about this?"

"Maybe she came to the end of the hunt," he suggested.

"The hunt for what?"

"Loneliness."

With that he swirled his cape, drew its hem with one hand across his chest, and retreated into the fog. Bo harbored a conviction that she'd just wandered into an avant-garde play understood by everyone except her. From inside she could hear a guitar strumming four chords over and over beneath electronic effects and a male voice intoning something in a British accent. It had to do with rust. Under Bo's arm, Molly began to howl tentatively.

"I'm Bo Bradley from Child Protective Services," she explained to the police, displaying the ID badge clipped to her sweatshirt. "Detective Reinert phoned me. I live near here, and he thinks this case will wind up with CPS in a matter of hours, anyway. What's going on?"

"Umm," the younger of the pair began, "is there something the matter with your dog?"

"She sings," Bo answered. "When she hears music, she sings. Now, what's happened to this girl?"

"Somebody's coming from County Psychiatric to get her. She's flipped out. Nuts. We have to stay here until they take her away. Creepy, huh?"

"What about St. Mary's? Dar said they were going to check that out first."

The crewcut young cop shrugged. "Dunno. The dispatcher just said County Psychiatric, and we're supposed to wait. Now that you're here maybe we can leave. I'll call in and see. God, this place is sick!"

Bo looked around. Nobody's eyes had pupils the size of quarters, nobody was staggering drunk, and despite their chalky makeup and black-ringed eyes, the denizens of Goblin Market appeared uniformly healthy. And possessed of sufficient disposable income to purchase expensive props for which there would be little workday use. Leather boots with silver skull buckles, capes and lace collars, studded armbands and wrist restraints, black vests and corsets and bustiers worn decorously over silk blouses.

"You don't know sick," she told the young cop. "You don't have a clue. Who runs this place?"

"Guy behind the bar with the hood over his head."

"Ah, the
hangman," Bo noted.
"What did he say happened to the girl?"

"He doesn't know anything, says she's been a regular, hangs with a guy named Bran who's some kind of computer geek and hasn't showed up tonight. Apparently she got here just before midnight, stood around on the patio for an hour or so, and then went mental. Nobody talked to her. Did you get a load of the doll?"

Bo looked at the seated girl. She was holding something, but it was obscured by folds of black lace.

"Doll?"

"Mega-creep shit." The cop sighed, heading for the patrol car. "Check it out."

Approaching slowly, Bo kept her eyes on the girl's feet. If this were a psychotic episode of some kind, Bo knew, an aggressive attitude and direct eye contact would only increase the girl's terror.

"Who're you?" asked the boy with the coffee.

"Bo Bradley. I work for Child Protective Services, the agency that handles foster care, among other things. I've been told that Fianna is in a foster care placement."

Looking up very slowly, Bo addressed the girl.

"Is that right, Fianna? Could you tell me the name of your foster parents?"

The girl called Fianna looked straight through Bo's forehead at a point lost in two hundred yards of fog. Her breathing, Bo noted, was fast and shallow, and she was trembling.

"I need to feel your pulse," Bo told her quietly. "I'm going to touch your left arm now, your wrist
.
If you'd rather I didn't touch you, I won't
,
but you'll have to let me know."

When there was no response, Bo set Molly on the bench beside the girl and reached for a pale arm hidden beneath wrinkled black lace. At its wrist was a black leather cuff from which a slender chain ran to an object in the girl's other hand.
Bo tugged on the chain and then gasped as a small, chubby leg emerged from the wad of lace across the girl's lap. Discolored and locked in the characteristic bent-knee position of a young infant, the leg for a split second seemed real. And frozen in the transitory condition called rigor mortis.

Bo forced herself to breathe deeply and tugged the doll free of its covering. Although worn and missing an eye, the toy still bore evi
dence of the craftsmanship that
had gone into its making. One blue glass eye gazed from beneath delicately painted lashes above a pug nose. Even the tiny upper lip protruded to a point over the recessive lower one in the typical embouchure of the newborn. The doll's painted hair had been dark before most of it wore away, Bo noticed. And its bisque arms and legs were still firmly stitched to a cloth body now covered in grime. Bo felt a wrenching sadness as she wrapped the toy in lace again and felt the girl's pulse. A sadness like that in the dream.

Running a hand through her shaggy silver and auburn curls, she shook her head to dispel the feeling. The pulse beneath her fingers was fast but strong enough. Fianna was clearly in trouble, but probably not from physical shock. Her skin was cool but not clammy, her color within normal limits.

"She calls the doll Kimmy," said the boy in the doublet. "Lately she's had it with her all the time. Pretty weird, huh?"

"Do you know her?" Bo asked.

"Not really. She comes here sometimes. She goes with this guy named Bran. He's older. Works for some software company. I already told the cops all this. Bran never showed up tonight
.
" The boy sighed and shrugged in embarrassment
.
"I was worried about her. That's when I came out here and found her whacked-out
.
I guess she's crazy, huh?"

In the question Bo heard an enormous distance taking
shape between the staring girl and the boy, the crowd, the entire known world. It was a distance she knew very well, impossible to breach once in place.

"No!" she answered instinctively. "I don't think it's that
.
Something's happened, though, and she's in a kind of shock. She needs to be at home now. She needs to be taken care of. Do you know where she lives?"

"Bran told me once she has foster parents, but that's all I know."

The girl's left hand began to move slowly, as if she were searching for something only discernible to touch.

"How can I reach this Bran?" Bo asked.

"Dunno. That's, like, not his real name. People us
e different names here, old-
fashioned names, y'know? Like, my real name's Mark Byfield, but
everybody here knows me as Gun
ther. It's just something we do."

The girl's hand had found Molly on the bench beside her and hovered over the little dog as if testing a magnetic field.

"We?" Bo asked. "Who's 'we'?"

"Goths," the boy answered.

"Goths?"

"Yeah. It's a kind of a statement. It's a scene."

"Oh," Bo said, watching Fianna's slender, pale hand begin to stroke Molly's soft fur. In the girl's huge, dark eyes tears swam and finally spilled over the kohl and the white makeup on her cheeks. In her peripheral vision Bo saw an ambulance pull into the parking lot.

"The puppy's name is Molly," she told the girl softly, "and she's real and alive and so are you!" The words had come from Bo's heart, and Fianna seemed to nod slightly, as if they'd had an effect. "I want you to pet her while I make some arrangements for you to go to a hospital."

Holding her CPS ID badge over her head like a police officer's shield, Bo loped toward the ambulance attendants. "Take her to St. Mary's," she said as if the destination were a foregone conclusion.

"The dispatcher said County Psychiatric," a plump, cheerful young woman with rosy cheeks and strong arms answered. "We'd need some kind of authority, a doctor or something, to change it."

"Wait two minutes," Bo said, already running into the restaurant.

"Andy," she explained breathlessly on the phone to Dr. Andrew LaMarche, head of the Child Abuse Unit at St. Mary's Hospital and the only man whose extra toothbrush hung beside hers in a rack over her bathroom sink, "I know it's three in the morning, but I desperately need a favor."

Less than two minutes later she told the ambulance attendant, "Dr. LaMarche at St
.
Mary's has ordered the admission. They're expecting her."

"No problem," the young Brunhilde grinned, unlatching the gurney from its clamps on the ambulance floor. "Let's load 'er up!"

When th
e ambulance had vanished into fog, followed by the squad car, Bo carried a sleeping Molly back to her woolly bed
in th
e oceanfront apartment
.
Everyth
ing looked the same,
except different
.
Something had changed, not in the physical structure of the world but in her perception of it A window had opened somewhere between the dream and the strange girl. It felt like a window in time through which something unfinished wept in silence. And, Bo realized, whatever it was bore a strange connection to her.

Chapter Two

In the morning Bo dropped Molly with the same elderly neighbor who'd cared for her fox terrier, Mildred, until the old dog's death months earlier. Then she headed inland on 1-8 forty-five minutes earlier than usual. Probably forty-five minutes earlier than ever, Bo thought
.
It wasn't seven-fifteen yet
.
Unquestionably a record.

"Bo! Are you sick? W
hat's the matter?" Madge Alden
hoven yelled through the still-locked side door of CPS's Levant Street offices in the heart of San Diego. "Don't you have your key? What are you doing here?" The supervisor's impossibly violet eyes revealed surprise tinged with something else. Fear. And Bo knew why.

"I ate my key last night in a psychotic episode," she smiled, tilting her head far to one side and allowing her jaw to hang slack. "I think it was right before I blew up the church, although it may have been just after I imprisoned the entire City Council in a frozen food locker and forced them at gunpoint to read the Yellow Pages aloud until they denounced capitalism. Anyway, I wanted to get here early so I could murder you and mail your body in pieces to remote desert military installations before everyone else arrives. Open up."

"That's disgusting, Bo," Madge said into a pile of paper on
her desk after pushing the door only far enough for its lock to release, then scuttling into her office.