Child of Silence (2 page)

And all else failing, there was always the damned lithium. She'd had to take it before, more than once; she'd do it again when the inevitable necessity arose.

“But I'd rather not,” Bo sang determinedly into the fog as her feet found the narrow path to the Ocean Beach Pier. The last time she'd had to take the famous salts to calm her racing mind, her supervisor at work, the American Gothic Madge Aldenhoven, complimented her on her sudden “maturity.” Chronic ringworm, Bo mused, would be preferable to Madge's brand of maturity. What Madge meant was nothing more than tidy paperwork and blind obedience to the bureaucracy. Bo had never been renowned for tidy paperwork or obedience to anything.

The Ocean Beach Pier loomed whitely out of the fog, promising a good jog. Bo knew every board of the creaking old pier, and could run it blindfolded. The smooth increase in her heart rate was comforting. It would reduce the restlessness, drain the content of the crazy dreams. A little.

A dark heap under a fish-cleaning sink appeared suddenly and turned out to be a pile of kelp. Someone fishing had undoubtedly hauled it up and left it there, its rubbery green leaves browning at the edges. Bo stopped to toss it over the rail. It vanished instantly into the white mist and made no splash when it hit the water. The fog simply swallowed it.

Still, behind the white swirls Bo could swear she felt something happening. Something vague and distant, but nevertheless desperate. Something about Laurie. It made no sense and that, Bo knew, was dangerous.

Her grandmother would have lit a candle and rattled a few rosaries. Bo chose instead to increase the pace of her jog and wondered idly if she'd inadvertently propel herself over the rail at the end of the pier and vanish in fog, like the kelp.

The weird feeling wasn't going away.

A gong buoy beyond the twin breakwaters to her right clanged in the manner relished by Victorian poets. Eerie and prophetic. Bo couldn't see the buoy but knew its shape—a small blue Eiffel Tower lurching in the swells.

“Oh, shut up,” she told it.

At the end of the pier she leaned on the railing and breathed fog. Except for the buoy there was no sound. Her throat still hurt and numerous small headaches twitched sporadically behind her eyes. A dawning awareness that she might be physically sick rose like a warm, pink sun. Sore throat and headache? Bingo!

“I'm not getting manic, I'm getting sick,” Bo told the pier railing with enthusiasm. “It's the flu!”

And regardless how stuffy, drippy, achy, and miserable it might be, the flu was a piece of cake compared to that other alternative. Hands down.

On the return jog Bo forced her attention into the labyrinth of the mundane with its comforting boredom. She'd try to catch another three hours of sleep and then maybe get to the office early. She couldn't stay home; she'd used all of her sick days in pursuit of her current fascination—the primitive paintings.

A bit of rock at a museum exhibit had started it. Just a meaningless spiral-shaped squiggle etched on a rock many centuries before the first white explorer would claim the land for condos and shopping malls. Bo had felt the bit of rock, the inexplicable spiral on its surface, pulling at her. Had felt some antediluvian hand arching in her own fingers. The need to create images, the artist's need. She welcomed it, familiar as her first tin tray of watercolors. Art was the only language she knew that could be understood on either side of the line marked “sanity.”

“Where is this from?” she asked, dragging the museum docent to the display case. “Were these done by Anasazi People, or does anybody know? Are there any more drawings? How do I get there?”

The docent had to pull a file from a dusty cabinet.

“. . . Mojave desert. .. a valley in the Coso Range, now part of the China Lake Naval Air Station. It's about five hours north of here, up toward Death Valley,” the woman explained. “Nothing is known of the people who left the drawings. Tribes now living in the region do not regard the creators of the drawings as ancestors, and refer to them merely as ‘the old ones.’”

Bo spent two days doodling spirals on interoffice memos before capitulating to the fascination. A fictitious bout of bronchitis bought her a four-day weekend. Plenty of time for exploring a silent desert canyon whose walls were galleries of forgotten art. Spellbound, Bo longed to bring the images out of silence, give them new life on her own canvases. She wished she didn't have to work. She wished she could make a living with her painting.

“But so what?” she commented to one of San Diego's homeless, irritably trying to sleep on a fishing bench. “I mean, it could be worse, right?”

“Right, lady,” the man muttered dismally. “It could be worse, like if you don't get the hell outta here!”

Bo chose not to explain the public nature of the pier and her right to be there despite fog and wee hours.

It was going to be okay. She'd go to work, stay in the office all day, finish up the paperwork trailing the ten cases she'd investigated already this month. Take it easy. It would be a good day. It would be good to have the flu.

Mildred was waiting at the door when Bo returned, a bundle of leaps and wags. Gathering the little dog in her arms, Bo buried her face in comforting, furry warmth.

“Aye, an’ there’s a banshee after me for sure,” she joked as the dog cocked an ear curiously at her brogue.

“It’s Caillech Bera a wailin’ in the fog.”

The reference to the ancient Celtic goddess of death and madness failed to achieve the level of parody Bo had intended. In fact, the words seemed oddly, and quite sanely, true.

Dawn sieved through the leaves of coast live oaks off Wildcat Canyon Road on the Barona Ranch Indian Reservation thirty miles east of San Diego. The light roused mountain jays, quail, and one sluggish crow. The crow swooped erratically to land on the roof of a ramshackle trailer. Its cawing wakened the woman inside.

“What does Little Black Eagle want with an old woman?” Annie Garcia muttered to herself.

At seventy-nine she had little use for spirit-messages, especially before she’d had her coffee. And maybe it wasn't a spirit-message, but just a crow. It was hard to separate the old Paiute ways from modern ways, in her mind. Mostly, she didn’t try. Sometimes, she thought she was a girl again, sleeping with her grandmother beneath a blanket of woven rabbit skins in the lonely Sierra reaches beyond Yosemite. Sometimes she only wished she were.

Her body hurt in more places than she could name. She could feel every interstice of bone and bone. Her chest ached; her breath was short. A cry-dance lay not far in the future, and Annie knew it would be for her—the somber Paiute circle-dance around a fire in which her belongings would burn.

But not today.

She forced a gnarled foot to find her shoes beneath the cot—men's Adidas her oldest daughter, Maria Bigger Fox, got for her in a thrift store in El Cajon. The shoes were loose and comfortable for walking. Annie liked to walk.

After a trip to the chemical toilet behind the trailer, she began. It wasn't too far. Just past Maria and Joe’s cement-block house, up Wildcat Canyon Road, and onto the dirt track to the old house.

She walked up to the house whenever she could. It reminded her of one she and Charlie rented in Three Rivers years ago when the kids were little and he made some money in the almond groves.

The path looked safe today. The car that somebody parked at the trailhead was gone.

People slept at the old house sometimes. Indian kids with beer who shot guns at the walls. Knots of hungry Mexicans on their way north to work. But almost never a white, like the one with the car.

Leaning against a cottonwood, Annie paused to get her breath in the early-morning damp. Her heart trembled briefly and then resumed a painful thumping she could feel in her knuckles. A spadefoot toad stared at her from its hole in the ditch beside the path. Annie stared back and then kicked a shower of dust and granite pebbles at its bulging head. The toad was so ugly it made her laugh as she struggled uphill.

But the laugh subsided when she saw the house. It was just an adobe shell crumbling amid granite boulders and shrubby manzanitas with their smooth, mahogany-colored limbs. The bullet-pocked walls and gaping windows were as familiar to Annie as her own wide and crumpled face. But something was wrong.

A spirit shook her suddenly and then moved away through the oaks in a shower of tear-shaped acorns that rattled on the licheny boulders. It was too quiet!

There was no sound. No gray squirrels scrabbling among the dry October leaves. No jays screeching in the oaks. No crows swooping and cawing in the whole expanse of ashen sky.

A chill moved up Annie’s spine like a hand of feathers under her skin. The spirit had warned her.

“Better go, old woman,” she told herself. “Something bad here.”

Then she smiled and moved instead toward the house. Not for nothing did her people name her Sees the Dark. Unable to describe the emotion known as fear, Annie knew as second nature the fierce tug of curiosity.

The sweep of her gaze revealed gray clouds moving in layers, a limb of oak, three mossy stone steps, and the hollow doorway of the house. Entering, her nostrils flared at the scent of rot in the place and other, more recent smells. Excrement, vomit, fear.

There was something odd in the murky shadows beneath what remained of the roof. Annie blinked, trying to focus. Something on an old mattress in front of the fireplace, something tied to the mattress with clothesline, its eyes rolled back and white as eggs. Something barely alive.

Annie had been a mother five times. Even in the gloom with her failing eyes she could see what it was. It was a child.

Bo awoke with an epic headache and blearily noted an absence of early-morning silence that could only mean one thing. The clock radio, softly cranking out Danny and the Juniors' 1958 hit, “At the Hop,” confirmed her worst suspicion. It was 8:15. She’d overslept.

“Shit!” She yelled with an enthusiasm that hurt her throat. Madge Aldenhoven was going to kill her. To make matters worse, every item of clothing she pulled from the closet revealed a heretofore unseen stain, tear, or wrinkle.

“Does this happen to everybody, or just to me?” she asked Mildred. “Do my clothes actually
plot
against me, or am I acting out a subconscious wish to avoid going to work?’’ The obvious answer made her grin as she pulled on an ancient Irish fisherman's sweater still redolent of the buttered popcorn she'd enjoyed last night during a Pavarotti rerun. The sweater would have been baggy on the stocky tenor; on Bo it resembled a hot-air balloon. The corduroys she found in the back of her closet under a bolt of canvas matched, she noted ruefully, nothing she'd ever owned. What had possessed her to buy red-and-black herringbone? Just looking at the fabric made her feel queasy.

“Madge,” she wheezed into the bedside phone after dialing the well-known number, “I'm sick. But I'm coming in anyway. I'll stay at the office and catch up on paperwork. Just dock me an hour. I'll be in.”

The supervisor's voice was businesslike.

“If you're really sick, stay home. If you're coming in, you've got a new case—”

“I've
what
. . . ”

Bo flung herself on the unmade bed and reveled in its retained warmth.

“Madge, I've got the flu or something. I can't interview any kids today.

It was tempting just to drop the bomb, to say, “Madge, you don't know this, but I'm a manic-depressive and if I don't get out from under that grueling job and your ever-present thumb for a while, I may come to work in a jacket with sleeves that tie in back, so give me a break!” So tempting. And so stupid. She'd be out of a job in less time than it would take Aldenhoven to complete the paperwork. Better to play the game.

“. . .found the child on the Barona Reservation,” Madge was going on, “but it's not an Indian child, so you don't have to worry about dealing with the Indian Child Welfare Council. . .”

“Madge, I'm really sick, but I don't have any sick leave left. I have to come in. Can't you just give the case to somebody else?”

The thought of staying home was immensely appealing. Bo trailed a finger over the open book she'd fallen asleep reading—part of the background research for the primitive paintings. She'd bought the book near Lone Pine when she'd gone up into the high desert to photograph the mysterious rock drawings left there by long-vanished artists.

“I scream because I am a bird,” sang a line of Paiute chant from the page. “The boy will rise up.”

Bo wished for the three-millionth time that she could make a living with her art. The social work degree that qualified her as an investigator had been earned when it had not occurred to her that she might someday have to support herself. The Paiute chant shimmered curiously on its page as Bo blinked and felt her brow for fever. That eerie, compelling feeling was back. Something happening, something already in progress.