Turtle Baby (Bo Bradley Mysteries, Book Three)

by Abigail Padgett

  In the shower Bo thought about the boy Chac had lived with before her death. Of everyone involved with the singer, Chris Joe Gavin was the most enigmatic. A runaway teenager with a history that almost always produced troubled, insecure personalities. How many foster homes had the Kentucky social worker said he'd been in? Enough to leave a gaping hole where a sense of security should have grown. A sense of being wanted.

  In her work Bo had met scores of adults raised in the foster care revolving door, all of them burdened for life with a need for belonging that would never be met. And Chris Joe was still an adolescent. Volatile. His feelings and perceptions distorted by inexperience and hormonal surges that could at times induce depression, delusions, obsessions, the trappings of madness.

  Squishing cream rinse through her hair, Bo enjoyed the pounding of hot water on muscles strained by the night's exertion. Had Chris Joe been the stalker in the desert, she wondered? Had his puppy love for Chac exploded at her death into something vengeful, murderous? The rifle had at first been trained on Munson Terrell. Why would Chris Joe want to kill Chac's manager when Chac was no longer alive? The boy might have known that Terrell was Acito's father, and his longing for Chac had been only too obvious at the time of Bo's visit last week. Did Chris Joe think Munson Terrell had poisoned Acito and then Chac? Maybe Chris Joe knew that Terrell was the murderer, and was hell-bent on vengeance.

  Remembering her own response to the mere possibility of Mildred's death by foul play, Bo acknowledged the universal human proclivity for revenge. But then why had the boy sent her Chac's bank statements and the strange note saying, "Chac names her murderer in music"?

  Stepping out of the shower, Bo wrapped herself in a yellow terry cloth robe and stared into the vanity mirror. Wet, her hair was redwood-colored, laced with silver strands that were rapidly becoming streaks. Time to start dyeing it, or just capitulate to a Mrs. Santa Claus look that would require checkered aprons and tiny, round wire-framed spectacles. Contemplating that option, Bo felt a sudden realization stir to life in her mind. Of course!

  "Hair dye!" she yelled at the steamy mirror, bringing an interrogative woof from Mildred in her basket. "Why didn't I see it before?"

  Chac hadn't been dying her own hair, Bo now understood clearly. The bottle of aerosol hair color spilling from Chac's backpack shortly after her visit with Chris Joe to Acito in San Ysidro hadn't been for Chac, it had been for Acito! Chac was disguising the baby's telltale white streak, his what-had-Andy-called-it? Piebaldism. She'd been hiding the genetic marker that would document Terrell's paternity of her baby. But hiding it from whom? Chris Joe had been with her, would have seen her dyeing Acito's forelock. Chris Joe obviously knew the truth.

  Kee, then. Chac would not want her lover's wife, also his partner in a business that promised to elevate the singer out of prostitution and poverty, to know of his indiscretion. Except Kee had said she'd only heard of the baby. And since she had little contact with Terrell's Mexican musical venture and seldom went to Tijuana for Chac's shows, there was no chance of her seeing Acito, who was kept over the border anyway. So from whom was Chac going to such lengths to hide Acito's paternity?

  Her long-lost husband, Dewayne Singleton? Bo wondered how news of his wife might have traveled to the man, fenced behind razor wire in a Louisiana prison. Was there some kind of secret communication service available to the imprisoned? Probably, Bo thought. Even in a prison, information might be purchased. But Dewayne Singleton would not have had the resources necessary to buy, and the manic irrationality of his motivation was inconsistent with that scenario.

  Dewayne was no Machiavellian plotter. He was ill and delusional. Unless that was an act. Bo was sure it wasn't, but even if it were, Chac could not have known that Dewayne would turn up. And masking Acito's paternity could do nothing to hide the fact mostly likely to enrage an absent husband, the simple existence of a baby not his own.

  Pulling on clean but rumpled khakis from a stack of clothes under a dusty ironing board, Bo shook her head in confusion. The only one from whom Chac could logically have been hiding Acito's noticeable hunk of hair was Munson Terrell. But why? And who had been lurking in desert shadows to kill him as he drummed for the dancers celebrating manhood? With a gasp of horror Bo remembered a cluster of forms in sleeping bags on the desert floor. One of them Martin, her friend. None had moved in the pale gray light of early dawn. Had the killer gone back while she was hiding, and killed them all?

  "Don't overdo it," she warned herself while struggling into a sports bra. "Martin's going to be fine. This will all make sense later. Right now just call Dar and find out if the water was really poisoned, or you just imagined it."

  Reinert would pick up the bottle from inside Bo's screen door, he said. But he probably couldn't get it tested until tomorrow. When Bo told him what had transpired in the badlands, he said simply, "It's got to be Gavin. The kid's nuts, Bo. And running on empty since the hooker bought it. I'll put out an APB, see if we can pick him up on suspicion. Weapons or something. But there's not much we can do on a charge of chasing you around in the desert. Not likely we'll find him, anyway. Kid's used to lying low. Makes ya wonder why."

  Bo phoned Rombo at home and arranged for an early dinner, then left a message at work for Madge saying she had to fly to the funeral of an aunt in Mississippi. A descendant of William Faulkner, actually. On Bo's mother's side.

  Chapter Twenty-seven

  The Bundle of Flames

  The Maya refugees, a band of six men and two women, were waiting on the tiled veranda of Eva's classic mission-style adobe when Bo and Estrella arrived in the Pathfinder. Eva introduced them in halting Spanish, then sat politely to listen. For a while Estrella conversed with the group in Spanish as Bo searched their wide, oval faces for hallmarks of personality. There was courage in the faces. But then, Bo thought, there would be. These were survivors, the ones who would move on rather than stay and be crushed. The pioneer stock. Some would walk a thousand miles only to die. But others would survive and their children would flourish in new places. Chac had been one of these. A survivor.

  As the Spanish conversation continued, Bo turned toward the mountains to the south. Still lost in mist, they seemed to echo with the million footsteps of a soft-spoken army moving northward in tattered clumps. A Third World, it was called, the world beyond U.S. borders, extending through one continent and then the next. A world of people who had been there long before the first European invader. Now quietly invading back.

  None of the Maya looked at Bo as Estrella translated what they had told her. Shy, they stared at the ground and waited to learn what this might be about. Dressed in an odd conglomeration of outdated American clothes—polyester bell-bottoms, T-shirts from athletic events five years ago, a maid's uniform from a downtown San Diego hotel long since converted to single-occupancy welfare housing—they seemed unsure of how to position their arms and legs. One of the women wore a shawl woven of brightly colored yarn, its workmanship still lovely under the grime of a long journey. She alone appeared sure of herself as she gazed at the military field boots on her feet.

  "They're from a village called San Juan la Laguna," Estrella began, "and among themselves they speak a Maya language called Tzutuhil. They—"

  "That's the language Chac said she spoke," Bo interjected. "Remember? She told us at the bar in Tijuana right before she died. Maybe they know who she was. Maybe they know if Acito has relatives who're still there. Chac's real name was Maria Elena Bolon. Ask them, Es. See if Acito has relatives!"

  As Estrella engaged in a conversation that seemed to embarrass the group, Bo indulged in a fantasy. There would be a strong young uncle for Acito, a brother of Chac's. His name would be Jaguar Tooth, or something like that, and his witty, athletic wife, who would remind everyone of Tina Turner, would love Acito. They would welcome their handsome nephew as a son. They would rear him to observe the old ways, to be a splendid Maya Indian.

  The look in Estrella's eyes didn't quite match the fantasy.r />
  "They didn't know Chac," she began, "but they've heard her story. Apparently it's reached the status of folklore along the immigrant trail."

  "They're proud of her." Bo made up the myth. "She survived countless hardships and became a popular singer, a success. Right?"

  Estrella now looked at her feet just like the Maya. "No," she answered softly. "They call her la puta in Spanish. It means 'the whore.' I don't quite understand all they're saying, but apparently the Maya lifestyle, what's left of the old one passed down from pre-Conquest times, is quite rigid." Estrella sighed and glanced bitterly into the hills. "Chac is to them an example of disgrace. They don't care that she survived alone, or that she found a way to bring beauty to the world. They say it's good that she's dead because she was worse than a ladina— she's a Maya who abandoned the old ways. They say time will stop when the last Maya does what Chac did, and becomes ... the word means something like 'arrogant.' "

  "And Chac's family?" Bo asked, disheartened.

  "Dead. Her mother was a teacher in their village, something discouraged by the Guatemalan government because literacy diminishes the pool of underpaid labor necessary to keep the plantations raking in bucks. The story is that Chac saw her mother shot by a government soldier when she was just a kid. The father took her to a city called Antigua and left her at a convent school. Then he went back to their village and drank himself to death. The woman in the shawl—her name's Julia Ixtamel—says supposedly the nuns there taught Chac to sing, but she doesn't believe it because Chac's singing was not the singing of a holy person."

  "Yes it was!" Bo insisted, jumping to her feet and running to the car. "Just listen to this," she yelled, cramming Chac's tape in the deck and turning the ignition key. As Acito's song drifted on the air, Bo realized she was crying.

  "What's the Spanish word for 'holy'?" she asked Estrella.

  "Santo."

  "This music es santo,' she told the Indians, pointing to invisible notes over her head. "That's as santo as it gets. Can't you hear it? Why can't you hear it?"

  The eight bronze faces stared assiduously at the ground. Bo could feel them turning away, going behind some impenetrable wall that excluded her totally. From the group came the whispered word, "loca."

  "Oh boy," Estrella breathed, and wrapped an arm over Bo's shoulders. "This wasn't such a good idea. They never knew Chac, Bo. You have to get to know somebody before you can see that they're not just one thing."

  Eva Broussard had hurried to join Bo and Estrella. "Chac is just a myth to these people," she said. "But she's real to you. They can't be changed by the truth of her life. You already have been."

  Bo leaned to turn off the tape, and sighed. A dry mountain wind ruffled her hair in the silence. "I wanted," she began, "something to be there in them for Acito. Some kind of heritage. Not this."

  "If Chac had wanted their world-view, she would have stayed in Guatemala," Eva stated flatly. "She has left her son something different. Respect that, Bo, and let go of your Hollywood fantasy."

  In their brief friendship Eva Broussard had never spoken so directly. Bo considered it a compliment. "Okay," she agreed, feeling silly about her earlier outburst. "But I don't know what to do next."

  The Indians had stood and were walking slowly toward a campsite visible in a rocky hollow a half mile behind the house. Some of the members of Eva's group, just arrived from New York, beckoned to the men to help them dig a nearby foundation. Julia Ixtamel lagged at the rear, glancing over her shoulder. In the open sunlight Bo saw that the woman's shawl had ribbons woven among its bright strands of yarn. Black satin ribbons, swallowing the yellow light and setting off the colors like fireworks in contrast. Slowly she turned and walked toward Bo, taking off the shawl and folding it carefully.

  "Para Acito," she whispered, pointing to the sky where a lullaby had flown above them. Then she handed the shawl to Bo and left without taking her eyes from the ground.

  Chapter Twenty-eight

  Snatch Bat

  Eva agreed to join the group gathering at Rombo and Martin's that afternoon, along with Estrella and Henry. Bo's hurried call to Rombo confirmed that pizza, while undoubtedly an embarrassment to Martin, would be the only way to feed the crowd assembling to determine the next step in their unorthodox investigation of Chac's death. Near the end of the call, placed from Estrella's kitchen phone, Rombo dropped an informational bomb in Bo's lap.

  "I'm afraid Mr. Singleton walked off Saturday morning, yesterday," he told her. "I know you're going to be upset, but imagine how I feel. For the first time in his life he was getting help, might even have stabilized in a few weeks on lithium. Now God knows where he is or what's happening to him."

  "He was in a locked unit!" Bo exploded. "How could he walk off?"

  "He's smart," Rombo replied. "After he broke out of a Louisiana prison, I doubt that the hospital was much of a challenge. We notified the police and sheriff's departments, but he's probably far away by now. Maybe he went home."

  "Nobody wants him at home." Bo sighed, remembering what the sheriff's deputies in Franklin, Louisiana, had said. "But I'm going to be there tomorrow. I'll teach the family what to do, how to get help for him if he shows up."

  Bad news. Bo paced the length of the Benedicts' kitchen, drinking water from a Tommee Tippee cup Estrella's sister had brought for someone who was at the moment no larger than a thumbnail and still in possession of his or her embryonic tail.

  "Dewayne Singleton eloped from County Psychiatric yesterday morning," she told Estrella and Henry. "I have a bad feeling about this. Really bad."

  "Maybe he was the guy out in the desert last night," Henry suggested.

  Bo sat the baby cup on the counter and watched it rock on its rounded base. "Right," she said. "He just manages to slip out of a locked unit in a psychiatric hospital and find his way to a camp-out on a trackless waste seventy-five miles away and unreachable without Bureau of Land Management maps and a four-wheel drive. Your basic, resourceful psycho. Equipped with radar so he can track down his hapless victims anywhere and hack them to shreds with the lightweight, collapsible meat cleaver he carries everywhere. Of course that's what happened. Why didn't I think of it?"

  "I'm sorry, Bo," Henry said. "I didn't mean ..."

  "I know you didn't. Look ..." She ran both hands through her hair and shook her head. "If it's okay with you, I'll just leave Mildred here and make a little visit to the Terrells before we all meet back at Rombo and Martin's, and then Andy and I will go straight from there to the airport. It wasn't Dewayne out in the desert, and there are only two people left who might be desperate enough to murder Munson Terrell or somebody watching. I want to see one of them."

  "You mean Kee," Estrella stated.

  Bo merely nodded as she left.

  Kee Terrell was working on the cantilevered deck attached to the side of the house when Bo arrived. Painting something on a tarp-covered table. In the bright morning sun Bo could see intricate designs in magenta, lavender, dark blue, and gold.

  "Mundy's not back from the workshop yet," she told Bo at the door. "But I'd love company. Let me show you what I'm doing."

  Bo followed the slender woman to the deck, marveling at the casual confidence with which she greeted an unexpected guest. That welcoming insouciance bred of an assumption that she was, in fact, interesting and attractive, even to surprise visitors on Sunday mornings. Bo wondered how that felt.

  "At first I combed a bright blue over the magenta," Kee began without preamble, gesturing toward a three-foot square of wood atop the tarp. Short table legs nearby, as yet unpainted, suggested that this was to be a low table, obviously a child's. "But the combed lines interfered with the design, so I started over again and ragged it in a darker shade. That way I can just lay on the designs slapdash, without the background dictating which way. What do you think?"

  Her dark eyes were glowing, and Bo noticed a blaze of magenta paint in the expensively cut hair over her right ear. The object on the sawhorse table was delightful
ly covered in folk figures, mostly animals. A gold and white Mimbres rabbit in the center was surrounded by a blue coyote, several buffalo, a Haida bear totem, a smiling fish, Koko Peli with a golden flute, a Kachina whose name Bo couldn't remember, and a fat magenta lizard with blue polka dots and three toes on each foot.

  From long experience Bo drew up a finely honed sensitivity to the reactions of others, and threw out her line. "Are you going to include any Maya figures?" she asked brightly.

  Kee Terrell cocked her head abruptly at the question like a large bird. The gesture threw into relief a pale collarbone under skin that appeared to have no heft to it, no muscle. It seemed to Bo that for a moment the woman's eyes reflected a birdlike glassiness that mirrored the angle of her head. A momentary lapse. But with the sudden movement of her skull Kee had effectively obliterated all evidence of response, if in fact any had been present.

  "Maya? I hadn't thought of it, but maybe," she answered. "Mundy and I have traveled in the Yucatan—great skin-diving off Tulum, by the way—but I don't remember any of the folk imagery."

  Was the reference to Yucatan a deliberate avoidance of reference to Guatemala, or was Kee really just recalling a vacation trip? Bo strolled to the edge of the deck and couldn't contain a gasp as she looked over the side. The house was on the rim of a deep canyon. The drop was about five stories, straight down. "Wow," she breathed, wide-eyed. "Killer drop!"

  "Yeah," Kee agreed. "It's just too dangerous for a child. The contractors will be here next week to take out the rail and benches. We're having a three-and-a-half-foot solid wall put in, topped with plexiglass. We'll still have the view, but nobody will be able to fall off."

  The concern in her eyes, Bo noted, was real. Almost a kind of panic.

  "Maybe we should have gone with chain-link fencing," she went on, jamming a paintbrush behind an ear. "You know about child safety issues. Do you think the chain-link would be safer?"