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

. The liaison was scrounging volunteers for the police department's Christmas toy dis tribution, and enjoying littl e success. Many of the donated toys, Bo knew, were still stacked in the CPS lunchroom.
    "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