The Dollmaker's Daughters (Bo Bradley Mysteries, Book Five) (11 page)

"Is there anything left that's appropriate for an older child?" Madge had asked. "A teenager?"

"Not really," the other woman had answered, distracted. "Nobody ever knows what to donate for teenagers. I think we've got a couple of those clip-on sports radios, but the speakers are terrible."

"That won't matter," Madge had answered with a catch in her voice. "The gift is symbolic."

Later Bo had overheard Madge on the phone, saying, "I know it's silly, Mary, but I wanted something that would be like a real Christmas gift from Janny, a last gift because they never..."

Janny. Bo had heard the name before Madge turned from her office door, obscuring whatever else was said. Something about a gift from Janny. A plastic radio from the police toy drive? For whom? Why would Madge take a gift, ostensibly from Janny, to someone? And was this the engagement for which Madge had surpassed even her own sartorial standards? She looked as though she'd been summoned to the White House for a summit meeting. Black tie.

There w
ould be no lunch with a husband,
Bo already knew. That had been a lie. So where was Madge going with a flawed gift, supposedly from Janny? Maybe all the secrecy involved relatives. Wealthy relatives, from the care Madge had taken in preparation for this meeting. Bo had decided at that moment to follow Madge, see what this was about. It was the least she could do for Janny.

Now in the gloom she slowly turned the brushed chrome knob between the mortuary garage and the room beyond. Then she nudged it to a hair-fine opening she hoped no one
would notice. A scent of carnations and metal fell across her face in the thin shaf
t of air from the other side. Th
e door
was cov
ered by a filmy drapery along th
e interior wall and situated immediately behind the gray steel casket. Pressing her right ear to the narrow opening, she tried to hear what was being said.

A woman's voice, reading something. Poetry, Bo thought. It wasn't Madge, it was the other woman. The voice much deeper than Madge's, less controlled. And the poem was by Louise Bogan, Bo was sure. The poet was a favorite of hers, a kindred spirit.

" 'What is forsaken will rest,"' the woman's voice announced through tears. '"But her heel is lifted,—she would flee,—the whistle of the birds/ Fails on her breast.' "

Bo knew the poem. It was about a statue, a girl carved in marble. For a moment the haunting Indian flute seemed, in fact, a "whistle of birds." And the sound
would certainly fail to stir th
e hea
rt of whoever lay just beyond th
e curtain. That heart, Bo acknowledged somberly, would not stir again. But who was it? From her position behind the casket she could see nothing. Why had Madge gone to such elaborate lengths all that morning to deny the fact that she was going to a funeral? And why was no one else present?

Bo had seen no option but to tail her supervisor. And an unlocked side door to the mortuary garage provided surreptitious entrance. But now what?

Through the knife-thin opening between the door
and th
e frame, she saw a man approach the casket and lower the open half of its lid. The most wrenching
moment in any funeral
. The moment in whic
h a singular, never-to-be-seen-
again human face is rem
oved from sight forever. Also th
e moment after which the mourners file out and the casket is removed to the hearse for its trip to a cemetery.

There were two hearses in the garage, as well as a beige van. The smaller hearse had been backed in, its rear door facing the door to the room now occupied
by Madge Alden
hoven, a mortician, and two others, one of them dead. Bo scuttled to the shadows at the far side of the van, taking care to crouch close to the front tire. Blocked by its bulk she would be less likely to cast a noticeable shadow when the wide garage door was opened for the exit of the hearse. In minutes the taped music stopped and she heard the mechanical sound of draperies moving on a rod. Then a bump as something on wheels hit the door and rolled into the garage. A smell of cigarette smoke.

Bo held her breath as a pair of black-clad legs visible beyond the van's underside walked beside a heavy object being rolled from a gurney into the open hearse. Then the man neatly folded the gurney's legs inward and lifted it out of Bo's sight. A thunk announced the closing of the hearse door, and the feet moved quickly to the front of the black vehicle. A lit cigarette dropped to the concrete and was ground out by one of the feet, then picked up by a medium-sized male hand wearing a white glove. Bo could see the black cuff of the man's coat sleeve, the three buttons sewn there, an edge of white shirt
.
In the silence it was like a pantomime, she thought
.
Or a painting.

When the hearse was gone and the garage safely closed, Bo stood and looked around. The place appeared to be empty. There were no sounds from the interior of the building. Opening the door beyond which the brief service had been held, she stepped into an empty room carpeted deeply in
mauve. A white satin skirt that
would have disguised the gurney sup-porting the casket was flung over a vaguely art d
eco floor lamp, one of two flanking
a bare space marked deeply by the impression of small wheels. Bo could hear herself breathing through her nose. The sound seemed loud and inappropriate.

"As th
e cradle asks 'Whence?', the coffin asks 'Whither?'" she quoted her grandmother softly. It seemed necessary to say something.

Bradley, th
is isn't a wake, just an empty ro
om. Save the Gaelic rhapsodizing over death until you at least know who's dead!

Moving soundlessly across the thick carpet, Bo edged i
nto the hall. Silence. Apparentl
y the mortician had handled the service alone and now was supervising the burial. To the right of the entry Bo saw another plaque affixed to the door of a front room,
office
. She knocked softly and, when
there was no response, opened th
e door.

As she expected, there was a neat stack of papers atop a large desk. There was always a neat stack of papers. There had been papers at the Boston mortuary from which her sister Laurie had been buried after deliberately breathing the exhaust from her own car through a garden hose. And there had been a larger stack after the accidental deaths of both her parents in Mexico. Pushing aside a tho
usand dust motes swimming in th
e light from two side windows, she
stepped closer and then heard th
e sharp intake of her own breath.

Beside th
e word "Deceased" on the dea
th certificate facing her was th
e name "Malcolm, Kimberly."

"Kimmy," Bo whispered
.
"Kimmy Malcolm."

The death had occurred in the City and County of Los Angeles, California, the document told her, at
12:03 a.m
. on the previous day. Bo memorized the address from which death
had claimed someone with a doll's name. Then she realized that her palms were damp and her eyes felt too small. The air in the closed room seemed suddenly eggshell-colored and judgmental. It wanted her to leave.

"No problem," she pronounced through her nose, backing into the hall and then dashi
ng through the garage door to th
e street
.
The Pathfinder
was parked in the shopping center
lot facing the mortuary, but Bo instinctively ducked into the first store she came to, just to decompress. It was a Target
,
one of the nationwide chain of variety stores that sold everything from cosmetics to pesticides. Now bustling with Christmas shoppers, it offered near-perfect anonymity as Bo confronted the fact that she was scared.

Not scared of dolls or caskets or death, but of California. Of having no past. Of being left out by virtue of never having been let in. Whatever had just happened in that bland funeral home, she acknowledged as she examined a display of Christmas socks, was rooted in some past drama to which she was not privy. Something involving Madge Aldenhoven and another woman. And something involving Janny Malcolm.

Kimberly Malcolm mig
ht be Janny's mother.
A drug addict maybe, or a prostitute who'd left her daughter in foster homes for years and now had died. Perhaps Madge had handled the original case. It happened that way sometimes. A CPS worker might know the whereabouts of a missing parent for years, even maintain contact with that parent but never reveal those facts to anyone. It happened when the parent
,
almost always the mother, was too damaged
,
strung out or criminal ever to regain custody of her child, but too desperately alone to release that child
for adoption. In those cases th
e social worker might become a sporadic link to the child, a source of news or an occasional snapshot
.
Some of
the CPS workers took pity on these mothers. Bo was puzzled at the thought of Madge in that role, but what else could account for her secrecy and her presence
at the brief littl
e funeral?

Turning at the end of the sock aisle, Bo sadly perused the half city block devoted to hair care items. Estrella had phoned to say she'd be going home from the hospital at noon to await the birth of her baby comfortably ensconced in the recliner Bo had helped her and Henry select. Overnight, Estrella had drifted outside thei
r shared office and was gone. Po
pping open the cap
of a pearlized gray plastic bottl
e of conditioner, Bo sniffed the contents and felt a surge of nausea that brought tears to her eyes. Coconut. A smell like cheap suntan lotion, a summer beach smell. It embodied California. Where Bo Bradley didn't belong.

Eve
n Andy had a family
. A sister in Louisiana, nieces and nephews, teenage second cousins who showed up unexpectedly for Christmas. Even Eva Broussard had made a new life for herself in her high desert compound, surrounded by a handful of people from New York State who believed they'd seen extraterrestria
ls on a mountain in the Adiron
dacks. The recent discovery of several new planets believed to be capable of supporting life had inspired these people, Eva explained during last night's dinner, to create a computer screen saver featuring the new planets as they stood in relation to earth. In their spinning white galaxies, the new planets blinked fuchsia, electric blue, neon green. The screen savers were selling briskly, Eva said, and the renewed enthusiasm of the "Seekers," as the group had named themselves back in New York, would provide a finale to her research documenting their response to having seen almond-eyed aliens with silver skin in the Adirondack dark.

"I have concluded," the half-Iroquois psychiatrist told Bo over freshly baked Italian bread, "that the nature of experience is so ephemeral it doesn't feel 'real' unless validated by others. Thus human beings expend inordinate percentages of available energy in attempts to enlist others as support for their own experience. I doubt that any of the Seekers will see another 'space alien,' but they've established cohesion based on an enterprise which will encourage others to validate their experience."

"What?" Bo had asked. The shrink's French accent made her words sound like the voice-over for a lingerie commercial despite their academic content

"The Seekers are marketing their version of reality, which includes an awareness of life on other planets," Eva simplified the theory. "And people are buying their product begging for more. It validates the Seekers' experience."

"Mental health through capitalism?"

"I'm afraid so," Eva had smiled.

In the store's music section Bo stopped to listen to the Mannheim Steamroller Christmas CD playing from speakers inside a gated area containing electronic equipment
.
A solo flute soared over the shopping noise in the simple French folk melody called "The Holly and the Ivy." Bo knew the tune from a past in which her mother played it on the little violino piccolo she'd bought in Italy. The sound meant Boston and snow and the scent of pipe tobacco as her father strung lights on a tree placed in the bay window overlooking a streetlight
. It meant her littl
e sister Laurie at five, pantomiming the music she couldn't hear by dancing in time to the movement of their mother's arm across the wooden soundboard. Laurie's huge green eyes had seen the music, Bo remembered as strings swelled beneath the trill of the recorded flute.