Moonbird Boy (23 page)

Bo retrieved her shoelaces from Molly's needlelike teeth and tied her shoe. The laces were wet. "You're close," she told Andrew, "but there's one thing you can't even imagine."

"What?"

Okay, Bradley, finish it. Fling yourself into thin air and just hope you don't crash and burn.

"You can't imagine what it's like to live inside my brain," she explained. "It's different, Andy. I don't just mean the obvious manic-depressive symptoms. Even when I'm fine, I'm different. When I was young I wanted to be like everybody else, watched people constantly so I could learn to be like them. And every time I overreacted or did something that made them shut down and turn away, I was ashamed. It was like this black wave with a bilious, purple crest sweeping over me. But I don't feel that way anymore. I really like being different, being completely who I am. But it's fragile, and it's something I've come to terms with on my own, alone. Now you want to rearrange that identity, and you can't, Andy. Only I can change what I am, and I don't want to. But that doesn't mean what I am doesn't want you. I do."

"I do, too," he said softly. "Just the way you are. No more demands for towels monogrammed 'Mr. and Mrs.,' I promise. My parents had towels monogrammed 'Mr. and Mrs.' They were miserable together. Hey, is it too late for me to show you my big surprise?"

Bo felt something like ground rising beneath her fall. Molly, curled like a fur donut on her stomach, had fallen asleep. "I'm pretty tired, but I'll last for another hour or so," she answered quite calmly, she thought, under the circumstances, "but what about our pup?"

"Here." Scooping Molly gently in one hand, he tucked her in the big patch pocket on the right side of his shirt and held her there as they walked to his car. During the drive she stretched her head and front paws out to rest on his shoulder. Observing this, Bo stifled a bizarre impulse to tell him she'd changed her mind and would marry him now, tonight.

"You're beautiful," she said instead, and then settled in to wonder why everything chose to happen at the same time. He was driving up the coast on I-5 toward Del Mar, the tiny, pricey beach community where he owned a condo. Bo assumed the surprise would be there. Maybe a painting he'd bought in Germany, she thought. It would be something like that. But he passed the expected street and continued along the darkened beach road where Torrey pines bent over surf gilded silver in moonlight.

"Well, here it is," he finally said after turning off the village's main street and making several turns in the residential area leading to the beach. He had stopped in a cul-de-sac with a sagging chain link fence at its end. Beyond the fence was a bristling field of dry grass sloping to the Amtrak tracks and then the beach. In the amber streetlight Bo could see a ranch-style bungalow with blue shingles, white shutters, and white window boxes trailing pink Martha Washington geraniums into the night. The bungalow was on the left. On the right was a looming shadow in a yard overgrown with weeds.

"Here what is?" Bo said.

"The house I'm going to buy."

Bo squinted into the darkness. "Ah," she said. "For the harpsichord. Which one?"

He pointed, as she had known he would, to the right. "Wait till you see it!" he began, handing Molly to her and digging a flashlight from the Jaguar's glove box. "Come on. I've got the key."

Bo found the prospect less than appealing. "Andy." She smiled dramatically. "I've been out of a psych rehab program, near which my friend was incidentally murdered, for less than a week, and somebody's chasing me around in the fog trying to scare me back in. The only relative I can find for my friend's son is a grandmother whose career sounds like a science-fiction thriller of dubious taste, and I've just made a serious commitment I'm not ready for to a new dog, not to mention you. Now you want me to prowl around what looks like the Bates Motel in the dark with only a flashlight that's sure to go dead the second we hear the creaking door slam shut, followed by low, malevolent laughter. Let me sum it up this way: hell will freeze before I leave this car."

"Oh," he said, jaundiced by the streetlight. "Well, of course. We'll come back tomorrow and see it in daylight. I didn't realize it would look this disreputable at night. I quite agree with you, Bo. This is ill-advised." Masterfully contained disappointment throbbed in every word.

In Bo's lap Molly circled restlessly, then clambered to the floor. "I think she needs to go out," Bo sighed. "And I didn't bring her harness and leash."

Andrew quickly unbuckled his belt, pulled it from his jeans, and leaned to loop it over the dog's head. "Emergency collar," he said. "I just had the car detailed, including the carpets. Be right back." In seconds he was following the little dog onto a path through the weeds, leaning to hold the end of his belt.

"Hell just froze," Bo told the Jaguar's black floor mats, and climbed out into the dark. "Wait for me!" she called, feeling like the heroine of a bodice-ripper. The incredibly stupid heroine who, in hoop skirt and thirty crinolines, dashes after the hero into thickets of briar and poison ivy because the swash of his buckle increases her heart rate.

"Success!" Andrew called happily from beneath a large Torrey pine. Molly, flinging pine needles behind her with abandon, wagged expectantly as Bo approached.

"Good girl," Bo told her. "Good dog. Now can we get out of here before the guy with the prosthetic hook shows up?"

"Of course," Andrew said, not moving.

Away from the obscuring glare of the streetlight the house was more visible, less ominous. A two-story mock Tudor, someone had nonetheless wrapped a wide porch around the three sides from which ocean views were possible through the pines. Bo couldn't help envisioning a rope hammock slung in one corner. Lemonade set out on a wicker table. Adirondack chairs on the lawn.

"Oh, Andy," she said admiringly, "that porch reminds me of my family's summer place on Cape Cod."

"It reminded me of the Garden District in New Orleans where I grew up," he nodded. "And look at this." Strolling casually through pine needles toward a driveway on the house's north side, he pointed to a detached two-car garage, also mock Tudor. "A previous owner converted the garage loft to a small apartment for the rental income. A granny flat, they call them here. I'm going to install a skylight," he said, inhaling the salty, pine-scented air as if he'd just arrived from the Sahara and didn't live two miles down the same coast, "in case an artist friend of mine would care to rent the apartment as a studio."

The word "bribe" formed itself nastily in the back of Bo's throat and sat there, while a warring part of her brain said, "Must you translate everything he offers you into a threat? Relax."

"Of course the renovations will take months," Andrew went on, ignoring her unease, "and whether you decide you'd like to live with me here, or live in the apartment, or use the apartment as a studio from time to time, or none of the above, I hope you'll at least agree to help me with decisions about fixing the place up. I'm not very good at that sort of thing, and you are. No strings, Bo." He was all business, a veritable model of detachment.

No strings, he said. Bo looked at Molly sniffing warily at a hole in the ground, Andrew proud and nervous about a major decision, the soft lights of nearby houses in which people were linked, wrapped, woven, and tied to each other and to still other people in a huge web that could either support or strangle any individual at any time. There were strings. There was no escaping strings. The trick, Bo thought, was to pick the right ones and cut away the rest.

"I love your porch, Andy," she sighed. "And I love you. But I can't cope with this right now. Too much is happening; I'm overwhelmed. I just want to take Molly and go home."

"Of course," he said, pointing the flashlight toward the weed-lined path. "After you."

At her apartment there was nothing taped to the door, no barks on the answering machine. Molly settled into her box after dragging one of Bo's dirty sweatshirts from the closet floor and stamping around on it in a circle. Bo allowed the puppy to have the sweatshirt in the box, thinking of Mort Wagman as the dog circled again and then curled up to sleep. Ancestral dogs had circled to flatten nests in tall grass, Mort said. Bo imagined prehistoric, saber-toothed dachshunds with woolly coats, circling in prehistoric grass.

"Bo?" Andrew inquired from the bed where he was unaccountably reading the Sunset guide to container gardening Bo had bought when the idea of a small farm on the deck seemed appealing. "Why are you giggling?"

"There were no ancient dachshunds," she said, falling into bed beside him.

"The name is German for badger hound, but I think they were originally bred in France from basset hounds and terriers," he nodded, "although they may have descended from the medieval spit dog, which is said to have originated in ancient Egypt. There's a long, low-slung dog on the statue of an Egyptian king. The dog's name is inscribed as Tekal, and in Germany Teckel is the affectionate name for dachshunds. So it may be that there were ancient dachshunds, you see."

"Andy," Bo sighed, snuggling against him, "why do you know everything?"

"I don't know," he answered happily, turning off the light and kissing her with an expertise he hadn't, she was sure, learned from a book.

In the morning Andrew found a manila folder wedged into Bo's apartment door on his way to get the paper. "I'm going to kill this bastard if I ever get my hands on him!" he muttered, crumpling the entire folder in his fist. "I'll dump whatever this is in the trash downstairs. I don't want you to—"

"Andy," Bo said from the kitchen, "isn't there some rule about doctors not murdering people? And don't throw it away yet. Let me see it first."

"Why?"

"Because it's probably something I was expecting. Let me see it."

"It's from the police," he said after tearing the top from the crumpled folder.

"Andy!"

"Well, here. But why would the police...?"

Bo ran both hands through her short curls and sighed. "I have a job that involves working with the police," she reminded him. "And this report may shed some light on what's happening to Ghost Flower. Could you take Molly down while I make the coffee? Here's a paper towel and a baggie.

"I'm not sure I can handle this," he groaned, fastening the yellow harness around the gamboling puppy.

"For crying out loud, Andy, you're a pediatrician. Don't you ever change diapers?"

"No," he answered without, Bo thought, any real grasp of the issue. "The nurses do that."

Reality check, Bradley. He may be wonderful, but he's still a man. They assume all women were born with a natural affinity for bodily wastes.

"Then it's time you had a lesson." She beamed. "Here's the bag."

After a quick shower Bo toweled her hair and decided she should have cut it years ago. Short, it dried by itself and saved her stretches of morning time better suited to facing a life that at the moment seemed about as orderly as a buffalo stampede.

"Bo," a feminine voice called through the door, "it's Jane. I came by just in case you hadn't changed your mind, but I saw Andy downstairs, and ..."

Bo opened the door. "You knew I'd never make it through the night," she said accusingly. "Would you like some coffee?"

"Only a heart of anthracite could resist that puppy," Jane agreed, her green eyes betraying not a shred of guilt. "So we sort of set you up. She's perfect for you, Bo. Your hair even matches her fur. And thanks for the offer, but I've got to open the shop. See ya!"

"Aliens are controlling my life," Bo told Mildred's picture. "But she's a sweet dog, Mil. And I know you wouldn't want me to be alone." It was true, Bo thought, and then wondered if she'd ever be alone again at all. A ring from the phone seemed to suggest that she wouldn't. Nobody called at seven in the morning, ever. Except maybe the creep with the tape.

"Look, you pathetic jackal," Bo yelled into the phone, "I've about had it with your sick jokes. Who are you, anyway?"

"This is the child abuse hotline," a puzzled male voice answered. "Is this Bo Bradley?"

"Uh, yeah. I thought you were somebody else. What's wrong?"

"A Dr. Keith has been calling since six, says she can't wait for the switchboard to open at eight. She wants you to call her at her hotel immediately. Here's the number."

Bo copied the number secure in the knowledge that her reputation at work for eccentricity had just taken a quantum leap. And she wasn't even crazy. Out of courtesy she pretended not to hear the hotline worker's whispered, "Jeez!" as he hung up. Then with studied calm she carried her coffee into the bathroom, took the cap off a vial of pink pills, and swallowed one. Valproate, marketed under the name Depakote. A common acid that would curb her brain's propensity to grab random stimuli from everywhere. Unfortunately, the pills couldn't do anything to curb the morning's real-life activities.

"I must see you at once," Ann Lee Keith insisted when Bo called. "It's terribly urgent. I believe the people responsible for my son's murder may also try to hurt Charles. I flew into San Diego last night. I really must see you now."

Bo remembered an earlier case, another little boy almost assassinated in the same hospital where Bird was probably eating his breakfast while she talked to his grandmother. It could happen. It had.

"I'll make sure precautions are established to protect Bird, er... Charles," she said. "And I'll be happy to meet you at my office as soon as I can get there."

"This will sound rather strange," Dr. Keith went on, "but what I have to tell you will take some time, and I have dogs with me. Is there a park or other outdoor area where we could meet?"

"Dogs?"

"I told you it would sound strange."

"You were right," Bo agreed. There was something about the woman's voice she liked. And the attitude. Straightforward and self-effacing at the same time. Also openly eccentric. And she was Mort Wagman's mom.

"There's a beach for dogs here," Bo told her, giving directions. "I'll meet you there in half an hour."

Madge would not approve of professional meetings on dog beaches, Bo knew. Madge would erupt in a frenzy of decorum and recite things about the dignity of social work.