Child of Silence (9 page)

“I'll see if we’ve got anything,” Denny responded, and headed for a wall phone.

“Bo, are you. . . okay?” Estrella whispered in the empty office, as if somebody might overhear, guess the secret. “I mean, this is enough to make
anybody
crazy, having a kid on your caseload shot at!”

Bo cupped a hand over the phone's mouthpiece. “No, I'm not okay. Not since early this morning. But I've got the lithium already. I'm on top of it.”

She knew she was talking too fast, showing too much feeling. Estrella didn't miss it.

“Oh,
sheet
!” she shouted. “Bo, you've got to get away from this. Get away from Madge before she figures out there's something wrong with you. She'll crucify you.”

“I know,” Bo agreed. “But, Es, I just have this feeling. If you could see him, see Weppo. . . he's so...
alone
.”

“He's not alone! He's got the three biggest bureaucracies in San Diego on his side. Cops, social workers, doctors. He'll be fine. But you won't...”

Bo could see the boy, awake in his room across from the nurses' station. An armed uniformed cop stood at the door. Rudy Palachek was inside, teaching the child to sign colors. They'd mastered red. Weppo was still alive and had learned to sign a color. Bo couldn't find words to explain the miracle.

“Es,” she whispered, “I can't walk away from this. I'll be all right. Don't worry.”

“I
will
worry. Get home as soon as you can. Or come over to our place. I'll have Henry make up the guest bed. And don't worry about Mildred. She's right here, and she's going home with me. Nobody's going to hurt her. Henry will see to that. You know how he loves her.”

“Thanks, Es,” Bo whispered. After hearing of the threat, Madge had arranged for Estrella to pick up the dog from the hospital before going over to the office to help draft the voluminous paperwork required by the situation. A district attorney was on his way to sign the petition. Bo experienced an exaggerated wave of affection for her coworkers that brought tears to her eyes.

A small voice warned, “Delusional. Don't get smarmy!” But Bo didn't have time to listen. Bill Denny was waving the scrap of paper bearing a star and three numbers.

“Gotta go, Es.” Bo hung up the phone.

Madge and LaMarche appeared to be arguing as Bill Denny passed them. Bo heard her name in the conversation.

“Bingo!” Denny smiled grimly. “A stolen car. Registered in Houston to a guy named Barry Velk. He reported it stolen two weeks ago to the Houston ED. The star was the big clue. Texas plates, the older ones, have a star over the numbers. This one was 351-687. Squash yellow, just like you said. A Mercury. And. . .”

Bo was elated. “And this Velk? Who is he? Does he know anything about Weppo?”

Bill Denny shook his head. “Nah. When the auto theft guys called him yesterday to tell him his car was found here he just said he went to a movie one night, and when he came out, his car was gone. But—”

“The car was found yesterday in San Diego? Where?”

Bill Denny pushed the loose frame of his aviator glasses up an aquiline nose and sighed. “Downtown. Early morning. Some wino was gonna sleep in it. But if you'd slow down and let me finish, I'd tell you the big news.”

Bo bit her lower lip and was silent.

“The wino found a stiff in the car. White male. Young. Maybe twenty-three. OD'd on some bad stuff he'd just bought on the street. The needle was still in his right hand. Lotta tracks. The guy was a heavy user. Medical examiner'll do an autopsy on Monday.”

Death. Everywhere. Bo could see the nightmare settling in a nest made of the bones of poets. Could see a painting of the scene she might do herself. The feverish, spavined mare. Screaming. Nesting on a mound of bones.

“Watch out, Gormfhlaith,” her grandmother's voice cautioned in Gaelic. In the ancient tongue her name meant “strange woman.” It was appropriate, she acknowledged. Totally.

“Are you okay?” Bill Denny inquired.

Under the detective's red nylon windbreaker Bo noted the bulge of a gun. And a rumpled T-shirt. Bill Denny had been pulled out of bed like the rest of them. She wished she could be as calm.

“There wasn't anything to identify the. . . the corpse, in the car?”

Denny yawned. “Nothing. Clean as a bone in the desert. And besides, there may be no connection between the stiff and the kid. We've got some Indians downtown, street types, druggies. Maybe one of them borrowed a car from our guy in Houston and drove home to see Mom. Maybe the guy was up on the reservation making a drug drop. There's still nothing to connect him to the kid.”

Bo knew Denny was right. Annie's message hadn't brought them any closer to solving anything. She felt like throwing up.

And then she remembered something—the grocery receipt.

“Is there a grocery in Houston called Jamail's?” she asked the detective.

His eyelids were at half mast.

“How should I know? I've never been in Houston. Why?”

“I found a receipt,” Bo raced through an explanation, “up at the reservation. And SpaghettiOs. They were
on
the receipt.”

“Spaghetti on a receipt.?” Bill Denny was beginning to look wary. Bo wanted to strangle him.
Why
were they all so slow?

“If I give you the receipt, will the police check it out?” She tried to slow down.

“Sure. No problem.”

“When?”

“Monday, probably. This case will have to go through the assignment desk. I'm backed up for weeks. The department'll assign another detective. It'll take a while.”

Monday
!
He’ll be dead by Monday
!

Across the hall the pale child with wild, wiry hair touched a red plastic truck, a red notebook, the red print on a hospital menu, and then signed “red.”

“Excuse me.” Bo smiled at the detective, and went to Weppo's door.

It was going to be up to her. She'd known it somehow all along. The message in the fog. Caillech Bera wailing... to her. The rest of them didn't understand, were too slow, simply couldn't see. She would have to solve the mystery of Weppo's identity quickly, if he were to survive. And she would have to do it alone.

“Kid's crazy about colors,” Palachek mentioned. “I just thought I'd entertain him for a while until the excitement dies down, see if he could pick up a little signing. He loves it. But all he wants to know are colors.”

“Where did you learn to sign?” Bo asked the beefy ex-Marine.

“My aunt was deaf,” he explained. “From Rocky Mountain spotted fever. She lived with us. We all learned to talk on our hands.”

Incredible
.

“Bo?”

It was Madge, her eyes following Bo narrowly.

“I've decided to take you off this case. We'll let the higher-ups handle it. It's too dangerous, after the threat on your door. . . and you, well, I just think it's best.”

How much do you know
,
Madge
?
How much do you suspect
?

The supervisor's gaze was critical, judgmental.

“Dr. LaMarche does not agree.”

“Absolutely not!” Andrew LaMarche seethed. His tie was askew and his chin revealed a salt-and pepper stubble. “Ms. Bradley actually
cares
about this child, unlike some of your other…”

Madge stiffened as Bo shot the doctor a look of gratitude. What she saw in the man's face was surprising. Fondness. Concern. A disarming genuineness. Andrew LaMarche, she realized with bemused amazement, actually liked her. Or was she imagining that too?

The intense state she was sliding into could produce a knock-your-socks-off romantic interest out of thin air. Was it only three years ago, Bo tried to remember, that she'd responded avidly to a similar look on the face of a marine biologist ten years her junior, only to tire of the affair with equal abruptness three weeks later? The manic's pattern of hypersexuality. To be avoided at all costs.

Andrew LaMarche, she decided firmly, was just a workaholic pediatrician with a messy situation on his hands. A messy situation dumped by fate into the lap of the one person with sufficient vision to comprehend its urgency. The one person mysteriously destined to protect this deaf little boy. Still, she wished she could tell the overwrought doctor about what she was going to do to help the boy. Something in his changeable gray eyes, now slate-colored from exhaustion, would see the sense behind the madness. Bo trusted her judgment on that, and was grateful for the fact of it. Andrew LaMarche was on her side.

“There is nothing but reality,” she mumbled to herself.

“What?” LaMarche asked.

“I said, I have to make a phone call.”

In minutes a long-distance directory assistance operator confirmed Bo's grasp of the information provided by Bill Denny. There
was
a grocery in Houston called Jamail's. Three more calls and Bo had reservations on an oddball flight to the Texas city leaving in less than two hours. A San Francisco-to-Houston-via-San-Diego carrier downed in San Diego when its landing gear refused to retract. They were fixing it, even though the San Diego airport was closed, technically, until 6:00 a.m. Too good to be true. A weekend, she could fly to Houston and back without anyone knowing where she had gone.

“Don't worry.” She waved to Andrew LaMarche.

“You too, Madge.”

They looked like puppets as she left, marionettes dangling on invisible strings in a hospital corridor. Already a great distance from her.

“There is
nothing
. . .” Lois Bittner's warning began, but Bo snuffed it.

Yeah
,
but this is
my
reality
.
Who's to say it isn't the real one
?

There was no answer.

Deely Brasseur stirred some “dirty rice” over a butane stove and broke an egg into the steaming bean-and-rice mixture. The sun came up slow in the swamp. Easy. Like the breathing of someone asleep. No light touched the raggedy, nasty curtains yet, and Deely cooked by the light of a candle. Just one candle, so as not to draw attention. But the sun's light would steal on. One more night was gone.

The Atchafalaya Swamp had its secrets, and Deely was one of them, hidden among its cypress stumps and Spanish moss like a snake. Her nephew Raveneau's place, over the state line from Texas into Louisiana. Just a fishing shack. But safe as a prayer. They wouldn't find her there. Deely smoothed the cotton skirt over her ample belly and bowed her head.

“Thanks to the Lord,” she intoned, “for this here food. Watch over my baby, wherever he be.”

The child might as well be hers, even with his pale white skin. She alone had cared for the poor, sickly thing after the mama was called. Cared for the mama too. Right up to the child's birth when Julie Lynn Rowe, at seventeen, hemorrhaged to death in her own attic. Miz Rowe had said there couldn't be no doctor. And the baby had cried and cried.

“Wilhelm,” Julie whispered. “His name is Wilhelm, for our grandfather.” And then she was dead. That was four years ago. Deely ate in silence.

Some folks was given one thing to deal with in life, and some folks another. She'd done her best to deal with what she was given—a secret locked in an attic. But when she saw the bags of quicklime hid in the garage, she knew her best wouldn't be good enough. Not anymore.

She'd made a phone call when she saw what was going to happen. It would defy
God
, what was going to happen! And it worked, as she hoped it would. Julie's brother, Kep, all wide-eyed and stumbling from the drugs, came and took the child away. Deely had done what could be done.

Now she feared for her life, and hid, and waited for it to be over. Outside, the first light gleamed dully on swampwater gray as gunmetal. Deely opened her Bible to the part about Moses. About how when the mama couldn't hide her baby no more from Pharaoh, she put him in a little handmade boat down among the bullrushes, and hoped someone would feel pity. And someone did. Moses' mama's plan worked. Deely prayed hers would too.

Marguerite would send word soon, from Houston.

It wouldn't be much longer.

The airport was swollen with the spoor of mildew as Bo disembarked from the plane at 9:30. The odor hit her like an oozy wind, like the air from a bag of damp, forgotten swimsuits. Decay, mold, fungus. This city, she determined, must be like a huge toadstool spawned in the brackish sludge of below-sea-level wetlands. The realization made her think of the gills she and every other mammal had possessed before birth. Houston's air made her wish she still had them. A fitful nap on the plane had been troubled by an increasing unease, paranoia, and knifelike sensory perceptions the lithium wouldn't diminish soon enough. At one point she'd wakened to the sharp scent of rotting peaches, although of course there were no rotting peaches immediately noticeable on the plane. There would be, sixteen rows away, a child with a lollipop or a woman wearing some fruity perfume. The man in the aisle seat to Bo’s left had meticulously folded his
Los Angeles Times
so that only half a column headline was visible.