The Dollmaker's Daughters (Bo Bradley Mysteries, Book Five) (4 page)

"Good work. Bo," the supervisor answered. "What's the name?"

"Malcolm. Janny Malcolm."

Bo heard a sharp intake of breath, followed by silence.

"Madge?”
she said. "What's the matter?"

"I... I just tore a nail on the edge of my desk," Madge said, her voice shrill. "And it won't be necessary for you to stay on this case any longer. It can be closed now that the foster parents are available. I want you to come back to the office immediately. Estrella just got a case I feel is too dangerous for her in her condition. I want you to go out with her on the preliminary investigation."

"Sure," Bo said. "It'll just take me a few minutes to document the reasons for releasing the hospital hold." Then she replaced the phone thoughtfully in its cradle.

There wasn't any hospital hold, Bo knew. Janny Malcolm's paper workup at St. Mary's had never been done because the staff had assumed the girl would be transferred to another hospital after the shift change. And there would have been no reason for a legal hold in any event, since the whereabouts of the minor's parents or guardian were unknown at the time of her admission. The hospital would have procured a judge's permission to treat the child, if any treatment had been necessary. As it was, Janny had merely spent the night in a clean bed, restrained from harming herself, but given no medication or other treatment. St. Mary's needed no hold to do that, and Madge Aldenhoven knew it.

Bo leaned against the nurses' station counter and pictured her supervisor's hands. The polished nails, filed smooth below the fingertips. A typist's hands, even though Madge never typed. Short, short fingernails. Impossible to snag on anything, especially the edge of a Formica-topped desk. Madge hadn't torn a nail,
Bo realized, puzzled. It was th
e girl's name that made her gasp.

And in her three and a half years with Child Protective Services, Bo had never known investigators to work in pairs. It wasn't done. There were too many cases. If a case were dangerous because the adults involved were on drugs or made threats, then CPS turned the investigation over to the police. The guidelines were in the
Procedures Manual
. Madge, unaccountably, was breaking the rules.

"Something's rotten in Denmark," Bo whispered to a picture of a pink woolly mammoth on the wall. "Several things, actually."

Janny Malcolm was staring at the restraint cuff on her right wrist when Bo came back into her room. In the morning light she looked especially fragile, Bo thought. Like an old-fashioned doll meant for pink taffeta and lace mitts, but made up as an eighteenth century laudanum addict instead. The hollow eyes were especially informative, betraying too much worldly exhaustion for even an aging child to bear.

"I haven't got much time, Janny," Bo said, "but I want to help you."

"Okay," the girl sighed, trying unsuccessfully to sit upright against the pull of the body restraint. "I don't... really know what happened."

"You went to Goblin Market last night. A boy you know as Gunther said you just stood on the patio for an hour or so, and when he went to look for you, you'd collapsed on a bench. Do you know why you collapsed? Were you sick? Did you drink anything or use any drugs? Did something upset you before you went there?"

"I don't do that shit," Janny answered. "Goths, well, most of the really cool ones, they don't do drugs or get drunk or anything like that
.
It's not cool."

"What do Goths do?"

The wan face with its halo of dark, fine hair became animated. Bo saw a weak smile tug at the edges of the girl's mouth where the night's dark lipstick had crusted in bloodlike flakes.

"Oh, it's really neat!" she began. "It's a scene. You just, well, you just get to wear these great clothes like in the old days, only sexy, y'know, and dance and listen to music. Some of them get a little carried away, I think. I mean, there's this girl who wears a bustier over just this mesh T-shirt, and you can see her breasts and everything. I mean, that's not really Goth. It's like, you're supposed to look like you're into kinky sex and everything, but really be nice underneath and have this, like, secret code where you have really nice manners and nobody outside knows the dirty stuff is just to fake them out so they won't find out the truth."

"What truth?" Bo asked, feeling herself spiral into the barely remembered confusion of adolescence.

"That you're really nice. Like, nicer than the real world. You know. Nicer than the way things are."

Bo nodded, gazing pointedly at the girl's wrists. "Fancy black cuffs with chrome studs and little chains really are nicer than real wrist restraints, even with the lambswool padding," she acknowledged. "Do you know why they put those on you?"

"I keep freaking out," Janny admitted. "Something keeps, like, coming into my mind. I don't want it... I don't want to think about it."

"Is it like somebody talking?" Bo asked casually. "Like a background noise or radio static that sounds like words?"

"Nooo! I'm not hearing voices or anything. I'm not crazy!"

"Some people who hear voices—religious mystics, for example—aren't crazy. And some people who don't hear voices
are. But I don't think you're crazy at all. What I think is that something's really upset you, and you need to be safe and quiet at home for a while until we can get you some counseling. Would you like for your foster parents to come and take you home now?"

Bo watched for the girl's reaction. If there were a problem with the foster parents, if they were involved in whatever had traumatized Janny Malcolm, their culpability would broadcast itself from her body. Maybe just a twitch, a swift compression of the lips, a wild, roaming glance that avoids the question.

"I guess," Janny said with a nervous sigh Bo couldn't interpret. "I'd like to go back there, but what if... I mean, it sort of started happening when I was there."

The dark eyes regarded Bo warily.

"They don't know. Bev and Howard. I've been with them for two years now. They're okay. Bev even drives me down to the Goblin, y'know, like last night. She lets me go once or twice a week if I get my homework done. And she lets Bran, that's my boyfriend, she lets him drive me home. But I didn't tell them about this thing that started happening a couple of weeks ago. It's so scary. I was afraid, you know, I was crazy and they wouldn't keep me anymore."

Impulsively Bo leaned over and wrapped an arm under the restraint ties, hugging the girl close. What must it be like, she wondered, to fear both madness and the certainty of abandonment among strangers because of it? No wonder the kid was a wreck.

"Let's try an experiment," she suggested after Janny's sobbing had subsided. "I'm going to unbuckle your wrists and hold your hands while we talk about this thing that's happening to you. Can you manage it?"

"I'm scared," Janny answered, rubbing her wrists after Bo pulled off the cuffs.

"So am I, but let's see what happens. Now ... a while ago you said, 'Kimmy's gone.' What does that mean?"

"I don't know," the girl answered, shaking her head. "But it's got something to do with this doll, this old
doll I've had since I was littl
e. I think the doll must be Kimmy, and it's dead or something. Except I always called my doll Lateesha because that was my friend's name in this one foster home a long time ago. She was black and older than me, and she was really nice. We used to play all the time. She showed me how to make doll clothes with cut-up pieces of cloth and tape. I guess she went back with her mother or something. One day she just left and I never saw her again."

Janny was regressing again, Bo noted. Talking about childhood interests in that high, breathy voice. Talking about a childhood only a foster child knows, in which other people appear and then vanish for inexplicable reasons. A childhood in which nothing may be trusted to remain the same. Bo held the girl's hands firmly and wished orphanages didn't get such bad press. At least in an orphanage a kid could develop a sense of place, a notion of identity.

"So maybe Kimmy's just a new name for Lateesha," she suggested. "Maybe you're growing up a little now, having a boyfriend and dressing up, being a Goth. Maybe calling the doll Kimmy is a way of
beginning to stop being a littl
e girl."

The analysis was both shallow and beyond Janny's comprehension, Bo realized, damning herself for indulging in instant psychology.

"No!" Janny wept, shaking. "There wasn't a Kimmy at all until a little while ago, and then all of a sudden there was, and then she was gone. Last night. Last night she wasn't there
anymore. And I was supposed to go with her, but I couldn't, and it was like I wasn't anywhere because I couldn't. And it's not Lateesha, it's Kimmy. And I have to keep the doll. I have to keep Kimmy or she'll be like ... like she was always gone, and she wasn't. So I have to ... I have to ..."

"Okay," Bo pronounced evenly as Janny clung to her hands, "this is what happens to you, this thing about Kimmy. And it's happening now, and you're still right here in this hospital, in this bed, holding on to me. You're okay. It's weird, but you're okay. And it's scary, but you're still okay. Now, tell me who the Fianna were."

"B-brave Irish warriors. Long, long time ago," Janny answered, relaxing a little.

"And who was the Norse king they fought?"

"Murf-wurf in the big boats."

"How many battles?"

"Lots. They all sound alike."

"They are all alike," Bo grinned as the slender hands loosened their grip. "You know, when I get scared I recite the names of shipwrecks. It works."

"Can I learn
something to recite besides these stupid warriors?" Janny smiled shakily, letting go of Bo's hands.

"How about state capitals?"

"Oh, gag! I want 'Famous Vampires.'"

"No way. Too scary. When you're scared you have to have something really dull to calm you down."

"Shipwrecks aren't dull."

"They are if you just say the names and dates."

"Okay. State capitals."

"Excellent!" Bo exhaled, grubbing in her briefcase for a business card. "Here's my number at the office and at home. Call me as soon as you're ready and I'll drill you."

"I'm not so scared now," the girl said thoughtfully. "But I still don't know who Kimmy is, or where she went. You're one of the social workers, right? Then you've seen all kinds of kids. Have you ever seen another kid with something like this happening?"

"I don't know," Bo answered. "But I'm going to think about it. The important thing right now is for you not to be so scared. We'll let Kimmy be a mystery until you can recite all the state capitals, okay?"

"I'll try," Janny Malcolm agreed, "but will you, like, ever come to see me or anything? You're, you know, pretty good with this scary, crazy stuff."

"I ought to be," Bo grinned from the door. "And I'll tell you what
.
If your foster parents agree, you and I will have lunch this weekend, maybe do a little shopping afterward. Today's Thursday. How about Sunday afternoon if you feel up to it?"

"For real?"

"For real."

In the bustling hallway Bo confronted the several rules she had just broken, and didn't care. Something about this case, this terrified girl, felt strangely close in a way she couldn't define. Too close to walk away from.

Near the elevator a small a capella group in Edwardian costume
s
was singing "Rudolph, the Red-Nosed Reindeer" as children in wheelchairs and casts peeked from the doors of their rooms. The song reminded Bo of her new flannel sheets and seemed to suggest a mystical connection to the events of the night before, when the strange dream had frightened her as badly as Janny was frightened of her doll. Bo stopped to listen, to let the symbolism of tiny reindeer flood her consciousness. There was some connection. She could feel it

"Oh, shit!" she whispered suddenly, jabbing the down button.

Reindeer symbols. Mystical messages. The trappings of mania. She'd lost too much
sleep last night
. And she was under stress because she hadn't sent a single Christmas card or begun her gift-shopping. And Estrella would have her baby within weeks, and Bo was worried about that. Besides, the holidays were hard on everybody. And even under medication just about anything could tip her volatile brain in directions best left unexplored. Like this teenager's delusional experience, which still seemed to hang tauntingly just beyond her reach.