Moonbird Boy (16 page)

In the fog she could see nothing, but she knew the beach from memory. Soon she would see the white framework of the Ocean Beach Pier looming out of the gray mist. The volleyball net was nowhere near her. But something else was. Something just out of sight in the drifting blanket of microscopic water. A cold net trembled and slid over Bo's back, up her calves, across her scalp. She wanted to run, but the net quivered against her muscles, sapping their strength. The net was in her eyes. And there was something, somebody, behind her in the fog.

Run, Bradley! It could be anybody. You could be raped, beaten, killed out here. You're not stupid. Lose yourself in the fog. Run!

Bo felt her heels digging into sand as she propelled herself away, felt the spray of fine grit from each pounding step. A sharp rock dug into her instep, then another scraped her toe. She could hear the crash of the sea at her back. She was running in the right direction, toward the seawall and the sidewalk where hundreds of tourists would stroll in tomorrow's sunlight. She was almost there; she could sense it. And then she heard something. A sound that paralyzed her lungs and dissolved something behind her knees, sending her sprawling in the sand.

A dog. A small dog barking inside the fog behind her. The same frightened bark she'd heard on the phone. Bo felt sand in her teeth, in her eyes. The dog sounded like Mildred. But Mildred was gone. And the noise was coming closer. As she scrambled on hands and knees toward a muzzy pink light ahead, Bo was certain she heard one other sound. An empty, cruel chuckle.

Then there was only the crash of surf, and a car ahead on sibilant tires. As Bo flung herself over the seawall she noticed the white plastic handles of the grocery bag wrapped like a tourniquet around her right hand.

Alexander Morley could feel the Sunday morning sunlight pooling on St. Luke's wide limestone aisle as he sat beside his wife. Seventh pew, Gospel side. They'd sat there every Sunday for years. And for years he'd gifted the suburban Episcopal church with new kneelers, organ repairs, choir robes, and tuck-pointing. He'd chaired the financial committee and headed the fund drive for a new educational wing. He knew the church better than did the succession of priests who stood in its pulpits. It felt like a second office.

As one of the priests read the collect for the Feast of St. Luke, Morley nodded to himself. St. Luke had been a physician, as he was. But St. Luke could not have written a check to cover the new air-conditioning system in a church honoring his name. Alexander Morley had written the check. A deep pleasure in the fact stretched into reverie.

Things were developing on the Indian deal. He'd assigned Bob Thompson the task of packaging it, creating the prospectus that would attract buyers for the program. A formality. And a ruse. MedNet already owned this Indian loony bin, whatever it was. The Indians had tried hooking up with the mob, offered them a gambling franchise on adjacent land, but Morley had easily put a stop to that. And Henderson had already reached a tentative agreement with the Japanese.

They'd buy the franchise with an under-the-table commitment to a ten-year consulting contract with MedNet. Plus, they'd agreed to purchase all medications and lab work from MedNet holdings, which meant expansion into the Japanese market with a built-in profit margin from the start.

Morley was glad he'd met Walt Henderson at the club and immediately sensed the man's similarity to himself. It was, he thought, a repetition of the day Randolph Mead had met a smart young doctor named Morley many years ago. Henderson was young, only in his forties, and hadn't received his medical training at an impressive school. It didn't matter. He had an attitude Morley recognized at once. Unlike Morley's own children, Henderson knew the rules.

With an imperceptible sigh, Alexander Morley acknowledged that Randolph Mead had taught him that lesson as well.

"Business sense isn't inherited," Mead explained cheerfully after birdying the seventh hole of a Palm Springs golf course long ago. "I made the mistake of marrying at sixty and siring a son who already thinks he's slightly superior to God and a daughter who lives only to rescue things that have mange. They're still little children, but I have no hope that either of them will change sufficiently to be able to manage a business. That's why I've already established trust funds for them, and why I'm turning MedNet over to you."

When Morley nodded thoughtfully, Mead had gone on.

"When the time comes," he said, selecting one of three custom-made drivers for the next fairway shot, "remember that your own children will have been raised in luxury, which produces either arrogance or idealism. What it doesn't produce is hunger, and that's what our little enterprise runs on."

His eyes narrowed as he jammed a monogrammed tee into the ground. "At your retirement, your only job is to find a man as hungry, and therefore as unscrupulous, as you are."

Morley had understood then. He understood now.

Musing pleasantly, he realized that it was also time to do something about Bob Thompson. The man was a pathetic, drunken womanizer and a detriment to the corporation. A salesman, nothing more. Morley had detested him for years. Now he could dispense with him.

"He that soweth little shall reap little," the priest said, heading into the long ritual of Holy Communion.

Morley braced himself for the verbose Anglican precision of prayers he could recite verbatim but had never really heard. Only occasionally did a phrase from the altar actually make sense. Like sowing little and reaping less. He'd sowed mightily in MedNet, put everything he had into it after Randolph Mead had taken him into the company just as he would now take in Walt Henderson. And he'd reaped everything he wanted. Now with retirement just ahead, he'd replace himself on the board with a man who had the guts and vision to fill his shoes. Henderson was that man.

There was a swell of rustling as two hundred people slid onto kneelers. A dull hush. Morley knelt beside his wife and placed his hand over her clasped fingers on the back of the pew before them. The gesture created an appropriate image. It was the only time he touched her.

"We acknowledge and bewail our manifold sins and wickedness," he intoned, admiring the diamond bracelet on his wife's wrist. The bracelet said a great deal about Alexander Morley, he thought. And "sins and wickedness" fit Bob Thompson perfectly.

It was going to be simple. Just let Thompson exhaust himself putting together the Indian setup, and then pull the whole thing out from under him with Henderson's coup. Make it look as though Henderson saved them from Thompson's incompetence. As though Bob Thompson was just too boorish and provincial for the international market, which was the only market left.

Kines and Brockman would see through it, of course. They already knew Thompson's head was on the block, but wouldn't lift a finger to save him. Why should they? MedNet stock would provide each of them a luxurious retirement. They'd follow Alexander Morley as they always had. He'd made them rich.

"Lift up your hearts," said the priest as light spilled through colored glass onto a limestone floor that reminded Alexander Morley of his secret. The private, chant-filled monastery where he cherished his soul.

Bird sat on the floor between two of the seven beds. He'd counted the beds; they were all alike. It was like the dorm at his school where kids stayed if their parents lived someplace far away. But this wasn't Tafel. The lady said this was a group home. She said it when she came that morning in her stupid, ugly car to take him away from the old man named Dutch.

Dutch was nice and didn't care when you hit things. He had some kind of bag hanging from a chain in a shed, and real boxing gloves. Dutch would let you go in there and hit the bag over and over after he tied the gloves on. That was pretty neat.

But Dutch had a grown-up kid named Gwen, and Gwen had a baby that got sick, and Dutch said he was real sorry after Gwen called him on the phone, but he couldn't keep Bird at his house because he had to go to this town far away where Gwen and the sick baby lived. Bird could tell from the way Dutch talked on the phone that he was scared the baby would die. It would be like daddy. The baby just wouldn't be there anymore. Slowly Bird began to swing his shoulders from side to side, hitting his head against the beds.

"As I was sailing down the coast," he sang to himself, "Of High Barbaree, I chanced to see a Muffin Bird A-sitting in a tree." It didn't sound right without daddy saying it, too, but there were other kids coming in the door and the words were better than the way they looked at him. Three boys, bigger than him. They smiled all together in a way that made the room feel cold.

"Oh, mournfully he sang, And sorrowful he sat," Bird went on, banging his head in time with the poem's meter. "Because he was a-frightened of The Crumpet Cat!"

Something hit him on the chest. A pencil. One of the boys had thrown a pencil at him. Bird closed his eyes and hummed the meter of the poem through clenched teeth. It was iambic, daddy said. The sound. He said iambic was like duh-DUH, duh-DUH, like the way his head felt hitting the mattresses.

"Hey!" one of the boys said. "You crazy? You look crazy. What's your name?"

"It's time for dinner," another one said. "We always have chicken on Sunday. Don't you want some chiiick-en?"

Bird kept humming the poem. It didn't quite block out the chicken part.

"Chicken, chicken," the first voice taunted. "Crazy chicken.

Bird knew no one else was in the room without looking. He could smell what was going to happen. A smell like waking up in the dark knowing everything had been moving until you opened your eyes. A metal smell that hurt the back of your nose.

"Hey! Get up, chicken!"

The first boy hit him on the shoulder with his fist. Bird kept his eyes closed and flailed at them with his hands, kicked at them. But they kicked back, hard, yelling, "ChickEN, chickEN," in iambic until Bird couldn't hear them anymore.

By three o'clock in the afternoon Bo had completed Mildred's portrait, cleaned the deck, and dictated a preliminary report for Bird's detention hearing on Monday. A calming, domestic day with iced decaf and Bach on the stereo. A normal day. An illusion. Reluctantly she settled on one of the whitewashed bar stools at the counter and centered the phone in front of her. No way to put this off any longer.

"Eva," she began when the psychiatrist answered, "I need to talk to you about something that's happening, if it's happening. Last night..."

Eva Broussard listened without comment as Bo described the incident in the fog, her terror and, later, her shame.

"I think I'm hallucinating this," Bo admitted. "I think I'm trying to bring Mildred back, or trying to believe she's out there somewhere needing me. Except it isn't really Mildred. It scares me. I wouldn't be afraid if it were really Mildred, but it isn't."

"No, it isn't," Eva Broussard repeated conversationally. "That's not an option. So either you're hallucinating it, you're making it up to draw attention to your feelings of loss, or it's actually happening. I'm curious about why you've decided it isn't."

Bo stretched the phone cord across the cream-colored wall between her living room and the deck, and stared through the open deck doors at a deceptively placid sea. "I didn't exactly take it easy yesterday," she confessed. "In fact, I flew to St. Louis and back, and before that I went out to the reservation and built a cairn of stones where Mort was killed. But I did wear sunglasses, Eva, and a straw hat."

“Go on.”

Bo marveled at her shrinks ability to avoid obvious, sidetracking questions like "What in God's name were you doing in St. Louis?"

"Well, when I got back last night I took a bath and a sedative, but I was still pretty wired so I went shopping. I only spent twenty dollars. I got Andy a toothbrush."

Eva Broussard couldn't help herself. "A twenty-dollar toothbrush?" she asked.

"A toothbrush and some other stuff. And I decided to walk home on the beach, in the fog. I was manicky, Eva. Not too bad, but definitely hyper. That's why I'm afraid there wasn't really anybody there, no barking dog, nothing. By the time I got home I felt like an idiot with a mouthful of sand. There couldn't have been anything behind me. It doesn't make any sense."

"What about the answering machine messages?"

"I erased them. They're not there. I could have hallucinated those, too."

Eva Broussard sighed. "It doesn't happen that way, Bo. Oh, I suppose it could. There's undoubtedly a rare case on record somewhere in which a single hallucination may have recurred in otherwise normal contexts. But generally speaking that's the stuff of fiction. In real life even people with psychiatric illnesses don't produce such narrow, specific hallucinations. The brain isn't wired that way."

"So what are you saying?" Bo asked, scowling at a sleek seagull perched on her deck railing. "That I'm making this up to get attention?" The seagull jumped to the deck floor and walked aimlessly toward a green-and-white-striped deck chair, its webbed feet making tiny flapping sounds against the wood.

"It's possible. But it's inconsistent with what I know of you. I take it there were no further barking dog calls today?"

"I unplugged the phones," Bo told her shrink. "I sometimes do that when I'm painting."

"If it happens again, don't erase it," Eva Broussard said. "Now would you mind explaining why you flew to St. Louis and back?"

When Bo had finished the explanation of Zach's strange behavior, the white colonial house with its absent Dr. Keith, and the threatening note left in a mailbox, Eva Broussard was silent. After several seconds she said, "I can't help finding this information as suspicious as you do, Bo. Suspicious and possibly quite dangerous. I suggest that you avoid further contact with Zachary Crooked Owl. Let the authorities handle it."

"Eva," Bo asked as the gull dashed clumsily across her deck and then flapped skyward, "is there any reason Zach might have killed Mort?"

"I don't know," Eva answered, "but it seems unlikely. Mort had offered to underwrite an advertising campaign for Ghost Flower, allowing himself to be photographed for the promotional materials. He loved the lodge, and the Neji. I had the impression that he and Zach were quite close. Don't jump to extreme conclusions based on sketchy evidence, Bo. Just try to stay out of the situation altogether."