The Dollmaker's Daughters (Bo Bradley Mysteries, Book Five) by Abigail Padgett Page A

See?"
    "Bran," Bo said, rolling her r's in the thickest brogue she could manage, "it's a deep thinker ye are with the heart of a poet."
    "Hey, you do that pretty well," he grinned. "Do you really think so?"
    "Aye," she answered, steering Molly back toward the Pathfinder. "Now go home and look up Jean-Paul Sartre in an encyclopedia. It's S-A-R-T-R-E, okay?"
    "Who's that?"
    "An early Goth."
    "Wow."
    Driving to her dinner appointment with Eva, Bo realized that she knew no more about Janny Malcolm than she had sixteen hours earlier at Goblin Market. It was as if a thick curtain hung in folds between the teenager and whatever was endangering her fragile security, even her mental stability. Only one thing had slipped through that curtain to provide a clue. A chipped porcelain doll.
    Bo thought she could feel its single blue glass eye watching her. Certainly something was watching her. A sense of secretive and totally malign attention drifted in from the darkness behind her taillights. But when she turned to look over her shoulder, the leaf-strewn street was empty.
     
    Chapter 7
     
    B y eleven forty-five the f ollowing morning Bo's enthu siasm for her job had turned, she realized, to a state more closely resembling entropy. Everything was wrong. Not only wrong, but perilously close to lunacy. Why else, she asked herself, would she be hiding in the excessively clean garage of a mortuary while Madge Aldenhoven and another woman attended a funeral? A strange funeral at which they appeared to be the only mourners.
    Leaning against the whitewashed cement-block wall, she mentally reconstr ucted the series of events that had compelled her to follow her supervisor to this beige stucco building on a residential street just behind a shopping center. heidegger mortuary , read a small plaque beside the double front doors. Without the plaque, the building might have been anything from a dental complex to a private elementary school. A tribute to the Southern Californ ian's renowned distaste for reality.
    The day had begun reasonably enough, she remembered as the recorded sound of a guitar and Indian flute floated through a closed door leading to one of the mortuary's three "chapels." Discounting, that is, Andre w LaMarche's dismayed early-morn ing announcement of a surprise visit by a young relative from Louisiana. The sixteen-year-old daughter of a cousin the dashing pediatrician hadn't seen in over thirty years.
    "Her name is Teless and she says her nannan gave her bus fare for the trip as a Christmas present in exchange for promising not to marry a boyfriend who's apparently on his way to prison," Andrew explained raggedly over the phone. "I don't know what to do."
    "What's a nannan ?" Bo had asked.
    "Cajun for godmother. Her godmother gave her the money. But no one contacted me and now she's here. She keeps reassuring me that she's not pregnant and asking me where the movie stars live. I've called my sister, Elizabeth, in Lafayette to see if she knows anything about this, but no one's home."
    "It'll be nice to have a kid around for Christmas," Bo offered. "Don't worry. I'm sure she'll be lots of fun, remind you of those idyllic childhood visits to the bayou, all that."
    " Mon dieu ," Andrew LaMarche had sighed and then hung up.
    Bo filed her lover's predicament for later contemplation and focused instead on the impact of Madge's costume that morning. A black faille suit, pencil-slim and so well cut that Madge looked like the widowed mother of an international fashion designer. But the black satin cloche hat with the quarter veil resting atop a stack of case files had really been the clue, Bo thought . When she'd said "Did somebody die?" Madge had blanched and muttered something about meeting her husband and his b usiness partner for lunch. The li e had felt dark, Bo remembered. Navy blue, at least .
    If it hadn't been for the hat she might have overlooked the significance of a discussion in the hall between Madge and the CPS Police Liaison