The Dollmaker's Daughters (Bo Bradley Mysteries, Book Five) (25 page)

He seemed to have slipped into the past and was discussing the doomed twins with a grandfatherly vivacity that ignored the intervening thirteen years. It was like trying to inte
rview a kaleidoscope
. As soon as she "saw" Jasper Malcolm, got a fix on his train of thought, he changed. Yet he wasn't lying. Not quite. Neither was he revealing more than the most superficial aspects of his family's troubled history.

"Mr. Malcolm," she said, "I intend to find out what happened to Kimmy. I intend to find out who inflicted the head injury that took her life from her years ago and has finally killed her."

"It would be best if you didn't," he whispered, his aq
ua-
blue eyes roaming the surface of her face with a sudden enthusiasm. "Please leave this situation to me and go on with your life. I am responsible, no one else."

"Do you mean that you did it? That you—"

"No," he answered, reaching to touch her cheekbone with the thumb of his right hand. "I do not mean that I have harmed anyone. I haven't."

Bo pushed his hand from her face in irritation. The touch wasn't erotic or even personal. It was simply thoughtful, as if her face were that of an unusual doll.

"You aren't helping me, Mr. Malcolm," she said. "You aren't telling me anything I need to know. And you aren't offering to help Janny, either. She needs to see you. Your grandson Jeffrey was taken in by the Laffertys, but Janny was abandoned by her parents and you as well, even though
you're all right here in San Diego. Why, Mr. Malcolm? Why don't you give a damn?"

The harsh language had the intended effect
.
A flush of anger stained the older man's neck above his white broadcloth shir
t collar, and he bit his lower li
p with teeth that reminded Bo of old pearls. That yellowed wisdom.

"What do you know of evil, Miss Bradley?" he exhaled. "Don't answer; you know nothing. So let me tell you that it has no face, that it simply exists and cannot be explained, nor can it be defeated. Let me tell you that once a certainty of evil enters your life, once you know how alien and pure it is, you become as one blind, forever staggering through absolute dark, your arms outstretched against it
.
Awareness of everything else fades, is unimportant
.
You have no right to question my behavior. I will not permit it!"

"I
am
questioning your behavior whether you 'permit' it or not
,
" Bo answered, her eyes wide and blazing. "And let me tell you that Janny Malcolm is not 'unimportant' nor do I believe that fear does anything but feed evil. Beyond that I have no idea what you're talking about not that it matters. Thank you for your time, Mr. Malcolm. I'm afraid mine is too important to waste."

In the silence that followed, Bo felt hatred in a hundred pairs of glass eyes. The doll heads, bodiless and therefore immobile even in fantasy, nonetheless seemed enraged. She had insulted their creator. Bo struggled to avoid parallel imagery involving human heads and their gods, and failed.

"I will show you to the door," Jasper Malcolm intoned, and then said nothing more as they retraced their steps through the old house. At the door Bo handed him her card and scooped Molly into her arms. The simple action brought an unaccountable sparkle of delight to the old man's face.

"And please tell Mrs. Aldenhoven she remains in my
prayers," he said softly, then
closed the door.

Bo chose not to consider the remark until she was safely in the Pathfinder and out of Golden Hill. When she did consider it, it seemed arcane. Obviously he'd met Madge during the original investigation, but then he'd met Mary Mandeer as well and he hadn't mentioned her. And why "prayers"? Something about the word suggested either a wistful connection or a private slur, neither of which made any sense.

"But we'll tell Madge and see how she reacts," Bo mentioned to Molly as she headed toward the central San Diego address of Beryl Malcolm, the sister of Janny's mother.

The house was one of the area's many old Craftsman bungalows, this one on a quiet street near the University of California San Diego's sprawling medical complex in the community known as Hillcrest. Bo noted with approval the long eaves shading side windows and a pleasant front porch facing the street. There were white geran
iums everywhere, she notice
d. Rows of them in identical green plastic pots lined precisely along the porch floor where it met the wall of the house. But rather than extending a welcome, they seemed to establish a barrier. Bo wondered where in classical literature geraniums had been used as guards, and to guard what. They had that mythological sense, might even turn into serpents if one knew the magic word. Leaving Molly in the c
ar, Bo faced the fact that she w
as seriously tired as she approached the house and rang the bell.

"What is it?" a breathy female voice called from inside.

"Bo Bradley from Child Protective Services," Bo answered. "I'd like to speak to Beryl Malcolm."

The woman who opened the door was short and had the most exquisite skin Bo had ever seen. A dusky peaches-and-cream complexion that glowed in matte finish from her face and the arms extending from a beige and white checked housecoat with mother-of-pearl snaps down the front. But the white terrycloth slippers on her feet were stretched and flattened from the strain of bearing her weight, which Bo guessed to be two hundred and twenty pounds at least
.
Framed by the doorway she looked like a Daliesque wrecking ball, melting. From within it watery aqua-blue eyes regarded Bo without interest.

"I'm Beryl Malcolm," she said. "Please come in."

Bo stepped into ankle-deep carpeting in a beige so pale it bordered on white. No pets, obviously. And no foot traffic. The carpet billowed immaculately from wall to wall, punctuated by a faux Queen Anne couch and wingback chair
s
in cream-colored velvet and white-on-white striped brocade, respectively. Beside Beryl Malcolm the furniture seemed miniature, meant for a playhouse.

Or a theatrical set, Bradley. Because that's what this is. Meant for show. Never used.

Bo sat carefully in the wingback chair and glanced at items on the marbleized white coff
ee table. An art book on Fabergé
eggs. A Waterford crystal lidded candy dish, empty. And three issues of a glossy gardening magazine, the top one bearing a date three years in the past
.

"Ah, my aunt in Boston used to subscribe to this," Bo lied enthusiastically. "Do you garden?"

"Not much," Beryl Malcolm answered, lowering herself onto the couch as if it might slide out from under her. "What brings you here, Miss Bradley? I assume it has something to do with my niece Janet."

The words were pronounced with resignation. The woman presented the long-suffering attitude of a parent driven to exhaustion by a rebellious teenager. And yet there had been no contact between aunt and niece in years, or at least none of which Bo knew. Janny hadn't mentioned her aunt, didn't seem to know the woman existed.

"She's having some problems," Bo confirmed, keeping her voice neutral. "In fact, Janny is being treated in a psychiatric hospital. Hasn't her foster care caseworker contacted you?"

"I'm disabled," Beryl Malcolm pronounced in a soft whine, pushing thin, mouse-brown hair behind her right ear. Bo watched as the woman took a soiled paper napkin from the pocket of her
housecoat and kneaded it violentl
y in a trembling hand. "I tried to take care of my niece right after it happened, but I just couldn't manage. We have to take care of ourselves first, you know."

Bo considered the series of statements.

"We?" she said.

"Victims," Beryl Malcolm answered. "Janet is a victim, too, of course, but I'm afraid I just couldn't help her. And I can't help her now. It's best that I have absolutely no contact with any reminders of what happened. My support group is clear on this."

"Do you mean the incident in which Kimmy was
brain damaged
?"

Beryl Malcolm stared at her feet, then turned to Bo. In her eyes was both irritability and a desperate boredom, as if the answer to that question were universally known.

"No, I mean my own abuse," she said. "My father incested me from the age of five until my twelfth birthday. Surely this is in Janet's file, the reason I just can't be involved with any of them. It's too painful. But if there's something
she needs, I can give you a littl
e money. Clothes or something. Let me get my purse."

Bo evinced no reaction to the jarring use of the noun "incest" as a verb, and merely watched as the mountainous woman pushed herself upright and then walked with surprising agility to a sliding wooden door at the rear of the large living room. Through it Bo caught a glimpse of coffeemaker, the back of an old-fashioned padded plastic kitchen chair in pearlized yellow. The air pushed across Bo's face by
the closing door smelled faintl
y of rotting pizza.

And the situation had just been complicated. If Beryl had indeed been the victim of child sexual abuse at the hands of Jasper Malcolm, then the case-management profile actually made sense. Or some of it did. Two girls traumatized by the death of their mother and then abused by their father, growing up damaged. Tamlin, the younger daughter, would have been abused as well. Incestuous fathers rarely confined their d
is
eased sexual advances to one child.

As a young adult, Tamlin would have been likely to select another abusive man as a mate unless she'd had years of therapy. If that man were Rick Lafferty, then his absence from the home on the night of the deadly incident might actually have been ordered by the courts. It was nothing unusual, the standard practice then and now. And it would have left Tamlin, a confused and dependent young woman, alone with three demanding preschool-aged children. She might have snapped. The likelihood that she had, Bo thought grimly, was not small.

"Will twenty dollars be enough?" Beryl asked peevishly, reclosing the kitchen door behind her. "I live on my retirement and my disability allotment. I don't have much."

"It's very kind, but I didn't come here to ask you for money," Bo said, wondering what to do next. The information regarding Jasper Malcolm's abuse of his older daughter had shocked her despite the fact that she worked with such information every day. The dollmaker hadn't seemed like a child molester, but then neither did most child molesters. Trusting in what people seemed to be, she knew, was invariably a mistake.

The heavyset woman jabbed a finger at a jarring pink and green glass vase on the otherwise empty mantel, a stained straw briefcase clasped to her side. She was perspiring from her hike to the kitchen and back, wheezing softly. Bo felt her own lungs demanding air. It was as if Beryl Malcolm were absorbing all available oxygen from the room.

Aye an' it's like a cat she is, whispered the familiar voice of Bo's long-dead grandmother. A cat suckin' the very life's breath from a baby.

Bo was familiar with the Irish folk tale. The one warning mothers of soul-eating cats-in-the-cradle, their whiskers still as they inhale milk-scented baby breath until there is no more breath. Except according to Beryl, Jasper Malcolm was the cat, Bo reasoned. Not this obese, neurotic daughter with watery aqua-blue eyes. It didn't scan.

"Then what do you want?" the woman asked.

"I want to help Janny, Ms. Malcolm. She needs her family, some support, the truth about her past, an identity. Without any of these things she may not make it through adolescence with her sanity even though she has no real psychiatric illness. The system will assign her one anyway, and then warehouse her someplace until she becomes whatever she's told she is."

"There's nothing I can do for her, Miss Bradley. Surely you understand, I have to take care of myself. You deal with incest victims, don't you? You know that we have to protect ourselves at all costs."

"Mmm," Bo answered, standing. "I appreciate your time."

Back in the Pathfinder she gave Molly a dog biscuit and frowned at Beryl Malcolm's hostile army of porch geraniums.

"No, I don't understand that at all," she said softly through clenched teeth. "I'm beginning to understand what happened thirteen years ago, but I don't understand what's happening right now. I don't understand how you can just forget about Janny."