Child of Silence (10 page)

Detroit Mar

Drops Not

The meaningless words leaped at her repeatedly like flickering strobe lights. She couldn't ignore them.

Over El Paso a woman in the seat in front of Bo had adjusted her seat-back so many times Bo could only conclude that the woman actually wanted to be strangled by an irate fellow passenger before touching ground. The in-flight magazine provided distraction; Bo memorized its editorial roster to focus her attention, and wondered idly why they'd chosen a printer in Chibougamau, Quebec.

She was delighted when the plane finally taxied to its gate at Houston's Intercontinental Airport, and she could move. Moving, walking, provided sensory experience that was real. Diminished that weird playground shrinks loved to call “internal stimuli”—the fascinating, then gradually terrifying panorama of intense perceptions created in a brain no longer able to filter, arrange, and categorize the million messages coming at it. A brain that would seize any stimulus—an odor, a color, a snatch of conversation—and amplify it randomly.

It was good to walk, but the heat was astonishing. Especially in a wool skirt and boots.

Must you always look like the publicity agent for a foreign circus
,
you jerk
?

It hadn't occurred to her that Houston might be warmer than San Diego. Among the litany of other things that hadn't occurred to her, it seemed a mere oversight. Nothing compared to the oversight that had brought her here. The one in which she'd forgotten that this particular grandiose delusion would without doubt cost her her job while racking up astronomical credit card charges. Which would have to be paid. And with what? Bo glanced at her image in a vending machine mirror and wondered if, after twenty years of struggle, the idiosyncratic wiring in her brain were going to win after all. The specter of herself as a lunatic bag lady lurked relentlessly just below consciousness. A doppelgänger, a dark and ruined twin. Nothing lay between her and that ever-present ghost but hard-won insight.

You re delusional
,
Bradley
.
But you're here
.
Eat something
,
pop your lithium
,
and see what you can find out
.
Then get back to San Diego and pretend this never happened
.

Over rubbery and unnecessarily yellow scrambled eggs in an airport coffee shop, Bo looked around. A lot of Stetson hats and cowboy boots. A chantlike drawl in conversations. A propensity for repetition in verb phrases.

“Ah
told
him, ah said, Jack, ah said. . .”

Bo could, after three minutes, replicate the Texans' drawl precisely. Just another perk from a mental disorder that would guarantee many of its victims employment as actors. There was always an up side. She clung to the thought as she negotiated the rental of the cheapest car possible.

Houston's phone directory gave a Shepherd Drive address for the grocery called Jamail's. Bo bit the end off a ballpoint pen while plotting her course on a map provided by the rental car service. The airport was in the middle of nowhere, miles from the city.

On the long, humid drive she noticed a plethora of billboards promoting the candidacy of a woman named Rowe for a seat on the state senate.

“Reclaim the future; VOTE ROWE!” the signs urged. The candidate looked competent enough. Sleek. Shrewd. Mature and tough, yet costumed in a soft blouse accented with a floppy bow that managed to suggest warmth, humor. But the eyes. . . Even with professional makeup and a heavily filtered camera lens, there was no disguising the emptiness of those wide-set eyes. A chameleon's eyes that would reflect whatever you wanted to see. A manipulator's eyes, cool as caves.

Bo only saw one billboard for Bea Yannick, Rowe's opponent. She looked for all the world like an ex-nun who could, if necessary, kick ass.

“I'd vote for Yannick in a second,” Bo mentioned to the dashboard, and clicked on the radio. An incredibly long version of “Mamas, Don't Let Your Babies Grow Up to Be Cowboys” lasted to the Westheimer exit off the 610 loop.

From the long road behind her the skyline of Houston had looked like a gleaming miniature landscape of chrome Legos and milk cartons painted black. The city's splendid architecture was dwarfed to toy size by endless sky. In fact, the cluster of steel-and-glass buildings appeared to be sinking even as it struggled upward. The sky was pushing it down.

It occurred to Bo that Texas songs were always about the sky because there simply wasn't anything else. No hill, no mound, not even a ripple of earth to break the dizzying sweep of the eye toward infinity. “Flat,” she decided, was a term insufficient to the terrain. It was more than that. It was actually a negative pull, an inverted gasp of ground beneath a firmament so boundless it might threaten the sanity of even those who weren't already pushing the edge.

To her right, below the 610 loop, a broad tube of greenbrier and blackberry vines woven over loblolly pines, black hickory, and oak trees snaked under the overpass. Nearly strangled by poison ivy, a small sign identified the winding jungle as Buffalo Bayou. Impossible not to wonder what buffalo might do in a bayou. She exited the freeway on Westheimer; a street named Buffalo Speedway answered the question. They would speed.

Bo shook her head. This wouldn't do. Fortunately, the grocery was less than a mile away.

The store's parking lot teemed with Mercedeses and other cars too pricily obscure for Bo to name. Boys in white dress shirts carried even the smallest packages for the grocery's well-dressed patrons. No one seemed to notice the heat.

Money, Bo concluded. Megamoney. Jamail's was not in a slum. Taking the grimy receipt from her purse, she went inside.

“That?” a gum-chewing cashier answered. “Sure, it's ours. Whaddaya think? It's the Rowes' account too.” She pointed to a code at the top. “M-A-C-R-O. That's MacLaren Rowe.
The
Rowes. You know.”

Bo didn't know.

“Tia Rowe?” The girl was growing impatient. “Her name's all over town!”

“You mean the one that's running for—?”

“Yeah. That's her.”

“Uh, do the Rowes live near here?” Bo pressed.

“Yeah. . . over in River Oaks. Why do you wanna know?”

Cover your tracks
,
Bradley
.

“They've contributed
so
much to owah food drive for the homeless,” Bo drawled sweetly. “Of co-wus they wanted to remain anonymous, but Ah'm afraid this receipt gave them away. Such
de
-
ah
people!”

Bingo
!

The Rowe mansion was Georgian Colonial, its brick facade buffered by leatherleaf mahonia shrubs and two geometrically placed magnolia trees. Bo would not have been surprised to see Scarlett and Rhett lusting in one of the upstairs windows tucked under overhanging eaves. She was surprised, though, to see an aluminum attic vent set in the shake shingles. It spoiled the house's lines.

Climbing the broad brick steps beneath white pillars supporting a Georgian pediment, Bo was unnerved a second time by the door. Its color had been identified in her childhood crayon box as Indian Red. To her artist's eye, the color was an assault. The door's brass knocker had been crafted to resemble a cluster of grapes. Bo grabbed it anyway, and knocked.

“Yes?” A uniformed maid inquired.

“May I speak to Tia Rowe?” Bo didn't really expect to speak to the much-publicized candidate.

The entry hall bore the unmistakable imprint of a decorator who had fought and lost the battle to meld the house's architecture to someone's, probably Tia Rowe's, demand for a “Country French” look. A reproduction Louis XIV tapestry screen in which Breton peasants sculled through a maze of vines stood beside a cherry table whose cabriole legs seemed bent under the weight of an oversized brass spittoon full of chrysanthemums. Bo shuddered.

Tia Rowe, with her flat billboard eyes, also possessed the artistic sensibilities of a
nouveau riche
pack rat. Bo cast about for something to say, some way to gain entry.

On a wall beneath the first landing of an elegant staircase, a jarring collection of framed antique photographs failed to create warmth and appeared merely shabby against bright wallpaper featuring more tortuous vines, lavender blossoms, and sunflowers. One of the photographs seemed familiar.

“Miz Rowe don't allow no reporters at the house,” the maid insisted, and began to close the door.

“Wait!” Bo exhaled.

The sepia-toned studio portrait of a boy in knickers and a belted jacket was more than familiar—it was Weppo! It didn't just look like the wiry-haired child in the hospital bed, it
was
that child. The same unmistakable hair, the same wide eyes and pale, thin lips. The boy in the picture was a few years older than Weppo, maybe six or seven. But it was
Weppo
at six or seven. And at the turn of the century!

“I'm not a reporter,” Bo explained. “I'm here because of the boy, because of Weppo,” she gestured toward the picture. “Please!”

Bo saw the reaction, the involuntary pull of scalp muscles behind the ears. The moment of recognition. And then panic. The maid knew exactly what Bo was talking about, and was terrified.

“Go on outta here,” she whispered. “Go ‘way! It ain't safe.”

Jamming a toe of her boot against the door, Bo slipped one of her business cards with her home number written on it into the young black woman's hand.

“Somebody tried to murder him,” Bo hissed through clenched teeth. “Call me.”

The door closed in her face.

Only two people were present in Houston's Oak Arbor Country Club bar when it opened at 11:00. One of them was the bartender.

“The usual, Mr. Rowe?” he inquired as if there were the remotest possibility that Mac Rowe would start his day with anything other than scotch, neat, with a water back. It was common knowledge that Mac never drank the water. It was also common knowledge that this would not be the aging playboy’s first drink of the day.

MacLaren Rowe rested his elbows on the massive bar salvaged from a long-vanished resort hotel in Galveston, and nodded absently. He felt like one giant chicken dropping. The sharp pain in his stomach was getting worse. And he looked as bad as he felt.

With Deely gone, he couldn't find anything. The cuffs of a stained shirt flapped without cuff links over trembling fingers. He had to hold the glass with both hands.

“Election's in three days,” the bartender noted conversationally. “Looks like the missus'll be our next state senator, huh?”

Everybody on staff at the heavily paneled Oak Arbor Club continued to refer to Tia Rowe as Mac's “missus.” A polite tribute to four generations of Rowe membership in a club so rooted in Southern tradition it would still accept Confederate money. The truth was, Mac had known for two decades, if Tia Rowe were married to anything, it was to the Rowe shipping fortune, accumulated when slaves still loaded bales of raw cotton onto vessels bound for Europe from Galveston. And the Rowe fortune was gone, drained into Tia's wardrobe, Tia's decorators, Tia's thousand charitable and cultural endeavors that were never substantial enough to be acknowledged beyond the society pages.

Mac Rowe hadn't regarded Tia as his wife in longer than he could remember. The thought gagged him, like the idea of bedding a bag of broken glass.

“We'll see.” He smiled crookedly. “How about another scotch?”

Tia might win, he acknowledged to himself. She wanted it badly enough and whatever Tia wanted, Tia got. He'd signed over a power of attorney to her the last time he wound up detoxing at that pansy-ass health spa in San Antonio. Before he got out, Tia'd sold the last of the Rowe property—three square blocks of hand-fired brick warehouse, right on the Galveston Strand—to a mall developer. The money had financed her campaign and an endless parade of consultants, promoters, handlers. A win would present Tia Rowe with ample opportunity for replenishing the coffers and supporting herself in the style to which he had accustomed her.

But first she had to win the election. And it was close. Last week's poll had shown Bea Yannick running only six percent behind. A Yankee yokel with nothing but a grassroots organization, Yannick had come out of nowhere and put the fear of God into Tia Rowe.

Secretly Mac was glad Yannick had dragged his wife into deep water. With any luck, she might drown. Mac often wished he'd killed her himself, years ago. She'd brought him down, just like his mama said when he announced his marriage to the flamboyant Northerner. Mac pondered how much further down he could go before the end, and realized he didn't care.

Deely had left, suddenly. And the imbecile child his daughter had produced was gone too. Mac didn't care about the kid, but Deely had cleaned up after Mac, kept his clothes clean, made sure he had a meal now and then. The new maid didn't know her ass from a soup can and jumped out of her skin at the fall of a shadow.

Mac ordered another scotch, just to kill the pain in his gut. He wondered how Tia was going to bankroll the final days of the campaign. There was nothing left, but Tia kept buying more TV slots, spending like she owned a bank.