Turtle Baby (Bo Bradley Mysteries, Book Three)

by Abigail Padgett

  In 1492, the book began, there were eighty million indigenous people in the Americas. A century later only ten million remained, thanks to diseases brought by European invaders. In Guatemala there were less than four million Maya left today, working as near-slaves on plantations or being absorbed into the predominant culture as ladinos, acculturated Maya who no longer observed the old ways. Locked between the past and future, ladinos were shunned by the traditional Maya as traitors and ignored by the dominant, Spanish-speaking culture. Chac, Bo assumed, would have been one of these. Acito, as an American baby of Maya birth, would have no standing in his mother's homeland at all.

  The Maya glyphs, carved over centuries in cities now lost beneath jungle overgrowth, were fascinating. Bo studied the strange faces, bird heads, and dismembered hands. Arcane and puzzling, they told of a world in which time was the reason for being. In which time was measured, honored, and symbolically carried by the ritualized behavior of its people, the Maya. Even contemporary Maya, Bo read, are self-effacing and modest, preferring to allow time itself to order events. The concept was difficult. Bo felt her eyelids drooping as a pleasant breeze swept the image of the snake and its warning from her mind.

  "We'll just take a little nap," she told the already-sleeping dog beside her, and sighed into the vast and nurturing desert silence.

  Chapter Twenty-three

  "Just let it be found..."—Popol Vuh

  On Saturdays the Torrey Pines State Reserve was crowded with joggers, cyclists, hikers, birders, and, it seemed to Andrew LaMarche, everyone else in San Diego who could claim any interest whatever in fresh air. Trails that on fogbound weekday mornings were home only to wood rats and mule deer now resounded with shrieking children and keen-eyed senior citizens yelling, "It's a brown towhee, Marvin! Fourth one today."

  He had just wanted to be alone. To revisit the scene of that first lovemaking and search for Bo's earring. After a quarter century of monklike emotional austerity, he thought, it was time to permit himself the luxury of some fanciful behavior. To celebrate the first step in his claiming for his own the most spirited, courageous, warmhearted, and stubborn woman he had ever met. Hard to accomplish amid hordes of weekend nature buffs.

  On a sturdy lookout platform below the trail a wedding was in progress, the bride and groom in traditional attire, the clergyman's robe billowing in Pacific sea winds banking off the eroded cliffs. Andrew followed the sandy path to its curve near the grove of pines that had survived drought and bark-beetles, waited to see if the cleric would be borne aloft in his black gown, and smiled. He would marry Bo there, he decided. The unorthodox setting would please her with its wildness. Her hair would catch the wind and glow like copper...

  "Have you noticed that some of the sea dahlias are still in bloom?" a brisk voice asked. "And I'm afraid you really can't go off the trail here, tempting as that may be." The speaker was a tiny woman with short gray hair and a tan suggesting much time spent outdoors. Her khaki sunhat was adorned with pins and badges from nature preserves on three continents, and her green polo shirt bore a cloth badge saying, "Torrey Pines Docent Society."

  "Ummm," Andrew replied, sharing with the docent a view of his left foot damningly placed beyond the trail edge in a patch of what must be, he feared, sea dahlias. "My, uh, mother lost an earring up here yesterday, in that grove. She was, uh ..."

  "Collecting pine needles?" The woman's sparkling blue eyes left no doubt as to the failure of his schoolboy alibi. "I'm sure she'd be interested in our Native American basketry seminar at the lodge. The Torrey pine needles, as you probably know, are long and attached in bundles of five. The Kumeyaay Indians may have used them for decorative baskets, but we aren't sure. In any event, your mother should not have gone off the trail."

  From beyond a sandy mound to his left, Andrew heard something call "Chi-ca-go" in a reedy alto voice. His foot seemed frozen in the dahlias.

  "California quail," the docent stated with enthusiasm. "Nests on the ground in grass-lined hollows. You can see what damage tramping around might do."

  "Of course," he conceded, pulling the offending foot back onto the trail. "I suppose there's no way of retrieving the earring. I probably couldn't have found it, anyway."

  A kind, if knowing smile lit the docent's face. "It's irregular," she nodded, "but if we go in from the northeast loop of the trail near the birdbath, I think it will be all right. But only for a few minutes. How fortunate your 'mother' is to have such a devoted son."

  Unaccustomed to blushing, Andrew's first reaction to the tingling rush of blood into his neck and facial capillaries was to suspect the presence of a rare tumor somewhere in his body, suddenly secreting gallons of serotonin. The substance, he remembered aimlessly, not only caused blushing but was believed to figure largely in the mood swings of manic depression. He wondered how often Bo felt as uncomfortable as he did at the moment. "Thank you," he said to the docent. "I appreciate your help."

  There was nothing to do but follow the sprightly woman up the trail and into a now sun-dappled grove of Torrey pines. It wasn't difficult to find the sandy hollow he'd shared with Bo in romantic circumstances now blasted by sunlight and the good-natured docent's running narrative on sandstone formations and the medicinal uses of a plant called yerba buena. Its leaves, she remarked as Andrew sifted quartz sand between his fingers, contained acetylsalicylic acid.

  "Aspirin?" he asked in a stab of courtesy.

  "Yes," the docent answered. "Most people don't know that's what aspirin is."

  "I'm a doctor," he mumbled, wishing the earring would turn up and offer an avenue of escape.

  "You'd be surprised at the variety of medicinal plants growing in the chaparral. Why there's conchalagua for fever, poppy root for toothache, and of course the poisonous ones." She appeared to be looking for a particular specimen. "Don't see one in here in the grove, but there's plenty of jimsonweed about. Contains datura. Quite deadly. Did you know that during the French Revolution some of the more foresighted among the aristocracy carried an extract made of this plant so they could commit suicide if they were captured?"

  LaMarche couldn't remember when he'd heard such grim information presented so lightheartedly. "No," he answered. "I didn't know that. And I'm afraid the earring is a lost cause. Again, thank you so much ..."

  "Here," the docent said, taking a flier from a canvas bag slung over her shoulder as they walked back to the trail, "let me give you one of our brochures on 'Dangerous Plants of the Chaparral.' I think you'll find it quite interesting."

  "Thank you. I'm sure I will." He smiled as the woman headed vivaciously toward a group of German college students watching the conclusion of the nuptials over the sea.

  "Guten Tag," she called to them as Andrew LaMarche hurried around a wind-carved sandstone hill and then sprinted past a hundred yards of sagebrush to his waiting car.

  At home he tossed the flier on the coffee table and glanced at the empty spot near the hearth where last night Mildred's bed had created a sense of messy hominess. In the shadow of a smooth knot of driftwood he'd placed there because he liked it and didn't know what else to do with it, something gleamed in the bright afternoon sunlight. A gold hoop earring, half buried in the carpet's pile.

  "Great," he sighed, shaking his head and wondering how long he should wait before calling Bo.

  Chapter Twenty-four

  Broken Place

  Bo awakened to a comfortable coolness and noticed that shadows cast by the canyon's western rim had stretched nearly across its floor. The sun was no longer visible, although its pulse still lit the sky and dripped washes of white gold, copper, and silver smoke over the tilted rubble and smooth canyon walls to the east. Nothing moved but the light. She stretched on the cot and watched it fade, breathing deeply and stroking the dog at her side. Throughout her body an unaccustomed sense of peace shimmered palpably, as if beneath her skin she were nothing more than a river of quicksilver, smooth and gleaming.

  "It doesn't get any better than this," she
sighed as Mildred sat up and yawned. The portrait of Chac she would do for Acito seemed to have formed in her mind like a dream. The singer in her huipil, striding through a moonlit desert landscape. From a Maya tumpline across the figure's forehead would fall a sling at her back, cradling a turtle whose shell would be a swirl of stars. The picture felt oddly real, as though Bo had actually seen it in her sleep and was remembering rather than imagining it.

  Reluctant to leave the silent, darkened desert, Bo gave Mildred more water, drank some herself from the canteen, and found a bag of trail mix in the car. Raisin-peanut with carob chips. An acceptable dinner, she thought, even though the carob chips had melted. Lacking only an appropriate wine.

  "Next best thing," she smiled at Mildred, taking a fat pink pill from her pocket and swallowing it with warm water. "Ycchh." The Depakote, lacking not only bouquet but social elegance, would nonetheless contribute to a chemical equilibrium in which Bo could continue to function. But for how long? Eventually, she knew, the mania would come rushing again like debris-laden floodwater in the neural ditches of her brain. Or worse, the depression. Lighting a cigarette, she inhaled deeply and then blew smoke against the night sky. For the moment, it didn't matter.

  When this case is over you'll quit smoking, Bradley. You'll take up figure-skating or tai chi as a replacement, and lose ten pounds in a month by living on tofu and exotic grains. Just find Chac's killer, and everything will fall into place.

  Watching the smoke dissipate, she noticed another column of smoke rising from the valley floor to the northwest. A campfire, she realized. Just south of West Mesa in one of several rock-strewn amphitheaters formed by a million years of flash floods and earthquakes that were not recorded because there was not yet anyone around to take notice. Curious, Bo loaded the cot and Mildred into her car and drove south along Arroyo Seco del Diablo to its barely discernible intersection with the old overland stage route. She didn't turn her lights on. Why alert the distant camping party to her presence? They might be a bunch of gun-happy drunks. They also might be, she grinned in the dark, Munson Terrell and his macho workshop. Too tempting.

  Turning onto the old stagecoach road, she followed it in the dark until cutting off at Arroyo Tapiado and heading northwest again, toward the ancient caves and a flickering fire. A hundred yards from the edge of the amphitheater, from which rhythmic drumbeats could now be heard, she eased the Pathfinder into an eroded cleft. Putting Mildred in her backpack infant carrier, and locking the car out of habit, she snapped the keys to the edge of her jeans pocket and crept closer to the scene unfolding a hundred feet down a sandstone wall.

  Bo felt her lips pull toward her ears in a broad grin saved from its destiny as a laugh only by decorum. Indelicate to sneak up on people and then laugh aloud, even if they did look like the casting call for Indians in a grade-school Thanksgiving pageant. Martin St. John actually seemed rather svelte in his leather breechcloth, dancing with the others about the fire. And Munson Terrell, his lock of white hair gleaming in firelight, could have won the competition for a Playgirl centerfold. Still, the spectacle of fourteen white men in nothing but breechcloths and ankle bells, chanting and dancing around a fire, gave Bo something that felt like mental hiccups. A need to giggle.

  Breathing from the diaphragm, she crawled backward far enough to be unseen, and sat on the ground. There was no point in staying. She couldn't hear anything they might say, and Martin was there to glean any useful information Terrell might drop, anyway. Shaking her head with amusement, Bo had just started back toward the hidden car when she saw it. Something moving beyond a wind-carved window in a mudstone pillar. Something dark, narrow, and perfectly straight. As she watched, the object arced downward from a pivotal point behind the pillar and came to rest gently just above a boulder at the amphitheater's rim. A rifle barrel. Aimed into the group below.

  Scuttling back to her vantage point, Bo tried to assess the situation. The men were moving faster now, bobbing and stamping erratically. Only one remained stationary. The drummer. Munson Terrell. If the rifle were equipped with a telescopic sight, any one of them could be picked off easily, but Terrell was a sitting duck. A slight movement of the rifle barrel recalled the message implicit in the snake's tail earlier. "Warning," it said. "Now!" In two seconds, Bo realized, somebody, probably Munson Terrell, would be shot. Would be dead.

  Grabbing a chunk of loose sandstone the size of a college dictionary, she tossed it with both hands over the side of the amphitheater wall. It tumbled to a stop fifteen yards down, lodged against an outcropping of metasedimentary schist from the ancient topography below the sandstone. In seconds the scrabbling landslide of smaller rocks in its wake ceased. The dancers had neither seen nor heard it. But someone else had.

  Mildred, sensing Bo's fear, began to climb out of her carrier. Bo hooked her left thumb over her shoulder in the dog's collar, and watched as the gun barrel angled silently away from the scene below. It seemed to be following a magnetic tug created by the frenzied drumbeat echoing in Bo's heart. The rifle was now pointing at her!

  "Oh, shit," she whispered as the drumming abruptly stopped. In the silence that followed she merely crouched in the ground amid the rubble, and didn't move. The gun barrel swept snakelike back and forth, seeming to smell rather than see her presence. A rifle shot now would alert Terrell's group below, Bo realized. But the drumming might start again at any moment. Better to make a move now than later. But what move?

  An open space of about twenty-five feet lay between her and the nearest broken mass of rock in the direction of the car. Even in the dim light of a waning quarter-moon, the flat expanse seemed endless and perfectly deadly. Her blood, she noted without wanting to, would look black, spilled in this eerie light.

  The rifle's owner was invisible behind the windowed pillar, and had the additional advantage of being able to stand. Still, there was no indication that Bo was any less invisible among the rocks. Slowly she inched backward from rock-shadow to rock-shadow on her knees and one hand, still holding the trembling dog firmly on her back.

  "Don't bark," she hummed through her teeth in a barely audible and patently fake falsetto. The "nice dog" voice. "Don't bark, don't growl, don't whine. Good dog. Good dog, Mildred."

  As abruptly as it stopped, the drumming started again. Slower this time, accompanied by a sort of whooping chant in which the men called something that sounded like "kowa key" into the dark, over and over. Their voices seemed dramatically gravelly. It occurred to Bo that she hadn't survived a terrifying brain disorder for forty years only to die to the ludicrous soundtrack of a male-bonding ritual. No, it would be Bach, or nothing.

  On her feet now, she dashed for the shadow of a boulder to her right. Footsteps from the area of the pillar made it clear that the rifle's owner was moving in the same direction. An acid taste filled Bo's throat. The only safety lay in getting to the car, and that was impossible. Running, she darted between rocks and broken slabs that had once been canyon walls. Overhead a thin cirrus cloud dimmed the moon's light to a uniform gray that almost obscured the immense hole in the canyon wall before her. One of the caves the ranger had mentioned to the Sierra Club group. Dark and featureless as the world behind a mirror. Bo scrambled through the opening and slid twenty feet down a sloped ledge to land on the dry floor of a subterranean wash that angled narrowly upward. Far ahead she could see a lessening of darkness that would mean a sinkhole in the cave's ceiling, and she crept toward it, following the narrow walls carved by floodwater rushing under collapsed desert sandstone. Looking over her shoulder, she saw the dimly lit cave mouth stabbed by a dark, straight line. The rifle barrel.

  Fighting panic, she moved steadily toward the break in the ceiling. A shot in here would be muffled by tons of debris. Terrell's group wouldn't hear it. She and Mildred would die. Their bodies wouldn't be found for years, if ever.

  "If we survive this, I'm going to buy a gun," she breathed to the dog panting over her shoulder. "I hate guns and nobody with a history of depressive episode
s should have one, but at this rate I won't live long enough to commit suicide."

  A lick on the neck was sufficient motivation to climb the wash beneath the sinkhole, and emerge in a landscape Bo hadn't imagined in her worst psychosis. Slender ridgelines intersected each other in a maze of blind canyons leading nowhere. Dry falls plummeted fifty to a hundred feet into sheer-walled holes full of broken rock. At her feet Bo saw cannonball-sized concretions, some worn free and movable. One, about five yards ahead on the ridgeline, seemed to be staring at her in the faint light.

  "Oh, not now," Bo said angrily to her own brain, prone to symbolic overinterpretation of everything even under normal circumstances. Whatever those were. The round white rock continued to stare as falling pebbles below indicated the presence of a second climber in the wash leading up through the collapsed sinkhole.

  It was staring, Bo realized as panic made her head feel as though it were floating. Because it wasn't a rock at all, but a skull.

  Moving toward it on feet that felt glassy, she tried to make sense of it. Why would a skull be sitting on a ridgeline in an impassable badland without its skeleton? Beside it on the ground was a single black feather. And halfway down the adjacent valley wall was a scrubby mesquite bush with an abandoned nest in its branches, its roots hanging like pale threads into blackness beneath. Bo ran and fell the fifteen feet to the mesquite, grabbed its trunk with one hand, and slid into the hole beneath it, her knees on the jagged edge of the slumped sandstone slab that had probably collapsed a century after an explorer had first fallen through it. His skull would have been carried to the surface by a coyote or mountain lion exploring the recently accessible tunnel below. Above, someone kicked one of the round, white concretions off the ridgeline. Bo heard it crash over her head and come to rest at the bottom of the blind valley. Then silence.