Turtle Baby (Bo Bradley Mysteries, Book Three)

by Abigail Padgett

  Bo had not thought of her job as involving child safety before, child endangerment being a rather more common topic. "Chain-link's too institutional," she answered, feeling herself being drawn into the conversation as if she and Kee Terrell actually knew each other. As if she weren't really there to assess the woman's potential for murdering her husband. "I think three-and-a-half-foot walls and plexiglass will provide sufficient safety without making your deck look like a tennis court. By the way, when do you expect the child, and how old is he, or she?" Bo was certain that her radiant smile betrayed nothing but the sort of womanly warmth portrayed in TV diaper commercials. Kee's response confirmed it.

  "Oh," she began, "there's no telling, but I ... we ... well, everything's ready and it's so hard ... the waiting's just so hard." A quaver in her voice suggested that she was near tears. "Mundy and I have actually talked about just giving up and having our own child. I mean, you know, genetically ours. But we just think that's so disgusting, don't you?"

  "Um," Bo hedged, caught off-guard, "I've always supported the concept of zero population growth." The response was several degrees upwind of Kee's politically correct position, but it didn't seem to matter.

  "Absolutely!" Kee nodded violently. "Why should European imperialism continue to dominate the planet, enslaving indigenous people and destroying centuries-old cultures? We should adopt their ways, not the other way around."

  Bo saw no point in mentioning any of the many situations in which trying to go backward in time doesn't work, nor the failure of the woman's remarks to have anything to do with the topic at hand. "The child you're adopting is from an indigenous population, then?" She smiled, recognizing that the term "Indian" would undoubtedly send Kee into orbit. And elicit a lecture on the Spanish Conquest that might go on for hours.

  "Oh, yes." Kee beamed. "Let me show you the nursery. And by the way, have you had any success in locating Chac's family? I asked Mundy after you were here before, and he said he didn't think she had any family."

  "We're still working on it," Bo said. Kee appeared to be interested in the search, but Bo felt nothing else hidden in the question. The politically zealous young woman either didn't know that her husband fathered Chac's child, or didn't care. It was almost, Bo thought, as if Kee had created a psychic distance between herself and whatever her husband did in Mexico. As if in Kee's mind Chac, the business, the music, Acito, all of it, were not quite real. But why would she have gone to such lengths to dissociate from it, to pretend it wasn't there, if she didn't know the truth about her husband's activities?

  Following Kee through the house toward the nursery, Bo read the label stitched to the back of her Levi's. "25 x 30," it announced. The jeans size of a skinny, long-legged boy, not a woman in her thirties. Bo wondered how she did it.

  "You're going to love this," Kee said, opening a distressed pine door on which the lock rail and panels were stenciled in an Indian pony design. The room beyond was a decorator's dream. Particularly, Bo thought, a decorator from New Mexico. Even in its mission days California had not had this much atmosphere.

  The soft vinyl floor looked like a mat of pebbles, and was covered at one end of the room by a fluffy acrylic "bear" rug complete with a huge teddy bear head. Beside the rug a carousel horse had been refitted with Indian gear and draped with a real Navajo horse blanket. When Kee flipped a wall switch, the horse moved slowly up and down on its pole.

  "There are three speeds," she told Bo. "And of course there's music, too."

  "Of course," Bo said, eyeing a collection of antique puppets attractively draped over the sides of a fanciful, color-washed wooden armoire with seemingly hundreds of little doors, drawers, trays, and cubbyholes. The sort of furniture a child would love, with plenty of places for secret treasure. The room's indirect lighting highlighted the armoire, the rug, the Indian horse, several framed originals of Western scenes, and a large, hand-carved crib set against a wall in the center of the room. Something about the crib made Bo uneasy.

  "We commissioned this," Kee explained, polishing the footboard with the hem of her paint-stained T-shirt. "It's from my hometown. Jenner. It's up north of San Francisco on Highway One. The woodcarver was this marvelous old man who'd lost a leg on a fishing boat when he was a boy. He said he always carves himself another leg in all the pieces he does, but Mundy and I have looked, and we haven't found any leg in this yet."

  "Interesting," Bo mumbled. It wasn't the possible presence of a carved leg that made the crib spooky, but something else. Bo stood near a small stone fireplace across from the baby bed, and tried to pinpoint the source of her discomfort. Kee was saying something about having to order a custom-made mattress, as well as sheets, since the crib was so much bigger than the standard size, when the reason for the odd impression dawned on Bo.

  On the wall behind the crib was the painted silhouette of a mission, complete with Spanish bell tower. Against the flat blue paint the crib had the atmosphere of a reliquary rather than a simple sleeping nook. Together the crib and the painted shape framing it created a shrine!

  "My God," Bo whispered to herself.

  "What is it?" Kee asked. "Is there something wrong? Do you think the bigger mattress will cause a problem? God, I worry about crib death all the time, even though they say now it's some kind of allergy. Is there something that should be changed?"

  "No, no. I'm just so impressed with the detail in the carving," Bo babbled. "And the planning you've put into this. What a lucky little, uh, boy or girl!" Bo had barely stopped herself from saying "little Indian."

  "Yes," Kee replied flatly. "And I'm so tired of waiting." Her eyes seemed to look straight through Bo to a point not easily discernible. "Just so tired."

  Retreating from the nursery, Bo tried to remember what she'd planned to accomplish by coming here. Difficult just to say, "Oh, and yes ... did you happen to be stalking people in the desert with a rifle last night?" She wondered how the cops did it. "Well, I'd hoped to interview Mr. Terrell," she lied. "But I've certainly enjoyed talking with you. And the baby's room is really lovely."

  Kee Terrell's eyes betrayed a sense of hurt as Bo eased her way out the door. "I wish you didn't have to go," Kee said, waving now-dried paintbrushes from the deck with a trembling hand. "I'm sure Mundy will be home soon." The last word was pronounced in two syllables, the way a child would say it.

  Bo felt as if she'd just been through a house of mirrors in the company of something costumed. That sense of just having missed a sight that's really still there if only you look over your shoulder. Glancing in the rear-view mirror, Bo saw Kee bend to the painted table again. Nothing unusual in the scene. Except for the loneliness of Kee's childlike figure, dwarfed by a cloudless blue sky.

  Chapter Twenty-nine

  Heron Feather

  "Look, I still think it was Terrell," Henry Benedict insisted from behind the slab of pineapple and Canadian bacon pizza he was about to demolish. "Just because somebody was out in the desert training a rifle on him doesn't mean he didn't poison Acito and Chac. The guy could have enemies who have nothing to do with this case. If he's into messing around with the ladies too much, the stalker might have been an irate husband."

  "But he's not like that," Martin St. John insisted. "Trust me, I just spent two days running around in a breechcloth with this guy. I know him. He wouldn't kill a baby or a woman, and he wouldn't use poison even if he did. He's into this meaning-of-manhood thing in a big way, and I can tell you the very last thing manhood means is killing your own son. He couldn't do it, even to save his marriage. Believe me."

  Bo grabbed another piece of the thin-crust Thai ginger chicken pizza before it was too late, and surveyed the group. Martin had returned from the desert sunburned but untraumatized. In fact he'd enjoyed the group, he said, especially after Terrell explained that throughout time a stable percentage of men had been gay, and that somebody had to remain free of childrearing in order to advance civilizations, especially in the arts. Munson Terrell had made a convert of Martin.r />
  "Just exactly what did you do in your breechcloths?" Rombo inquired from the kitchen door. "Or is that one of those 'men's secrets' we don't talk about?"

  "They went off alone in the heat to find personal totems, came back, named their totems communally, built a sweat lodge, blessed the sweat lodge, ate, did a sweat lodge ritual, and then danced around in a circle, Rombo," Estrella answered over the top of a beer mug full of sparkling water. "Martin's already described the whole thing. But I don't know why everybody's overlooking Chris Joe Gavin. He's the only one with a motive to do in all three of them—Acito, Chac, and Terrell. Jealousy."

  "I'm afraid the boy is the most likely suspect." Andrew sighed. "Bo has checked him out with social services in Kentucky and he's got a troubled history. I wouldn't be surprised if—"

  "Wait a minute," Bo said, washing down a bit of spicy chicken with cold beer, "his history seemed pretty impressive to me. Good grades, no problems with the law, people wanting to adopt him. The 'trouble' in his history belongs to a legal system that couldn't get him freed for adoption, and a social services definition of 'foster home' that always means 'not a permanent home.' And why would he have sent me Chac's bank statement and that business about Chac naming her murderer in her music if he'd killed her?"

  "Well," Rombo interjected, "why did he run away and hide if he didn't kill her?"

  Eva Broussard had been admiring the new wall unit in Rombo and Martin's living room. Leaning against it, she crossed moccasined feet before her and stretched. "We're being somewhat less than methodical," she suggested. "Bo, didn't you tell me the name under which Chac kept her bank account was Rother?"

  "Yeah," Bo answered, taking a seat on the couch. "Elena Rother. Why?"

  "It may be that Chac knew something, feared something, and constructed symbolic messages in odd niches of her life like this one. Messages that may reflect her world-view, or her wishes for her son, or even information about her murderer. Remember that her mind was not that of a contemporary Westerner, but rather that of a Maya."

  "I'm afraid I don't see how a name on a bank account can tell us anything," Henry said, expertly tossing a beer to Andrew.

  Bo watched as the man in whose arms she would lie tonight popped the beer can's tab and sprayed the length of his pure linen tie with foam. It seemed safe to hypothesize that Andrew LaMarche in a domestic situation would not be prone to nursing beer cans in front of a television. He couldn't even get one open.

  So what, Bradley ? The fact that he's several evolutionary steps up from Stanley Kowalski doesn't mean you need to start shopping for his'n'her recliners. These thoughts can pave the way to hell. Don't think them.

  "Father Rother was a missionary priest," Eva explained, stifling a smile as Martin whisked the sodden tie off to the kitchen for soaking in cold water. "He was murdered by Guatemalan soldiers after a meddlesome visitor from his own home parish in Oklahoma contacted the Guatemalan government. This man told the Guatemalan authorities that Rother was helping the Maya to organize and fight back against the system enslaving them. The government responded to this news by ordering Rother killed. He's a folk hero now among Guatemala's native people. It's said that they buried his heart near Lake Atitlan before sending his body home to the States for burial. I can't help wondering what Chac meant by hiding her money under his name."

  "Something about betrayal?" Martin suggested from the kitchen. "Maybe she was betrayed by somebody the way Rother was."

  "Or perhaps she just wanted a symbolic connection to a strong, heroic figure," Andrew said.

  Bo rolled her eyes. "We're never going to know why she used Rother's name, but we can figure out what's in those song lyrics. Es...?"

  "The verses are about a white orchid that shelters a turtle with its heart," Estrella explained, sitting on the floor beside Eva and taking a red paper napkin from her purse. "Lots of stuff about forests and a monster called a duende that wants to hurt the turtle, but the orchid protects it. A duende is an evil spirit, sort of, and there are lots of them. This one has something wrong with its feet. The choruses are just the orchid saying, 'I love you, my little turtle,' over and over. The last verse that Chac sang the night she died is strange, though. Something about how sinful it is for a man to eat in front of a pregnant woman. That part doesn't fit with the earlier story. It doesn't make any sense. And then the words are garbled, something about the orchid dying, the duende trampling the orchid. That was right before she ... she died."

  Eva Broussard was nodding slowly, her white hair framing her bronze face like that in a classic Greek portrait. "The duende with its feet on backward is the Maya version of the Northwestern Indian Wendigo story," she said. "It's 'the spirit of the wild,' the madness that can overtake and destroy someone lost in a wild place, in nature. Both versions of the tale involve mutilated feet, although nobody knows why. And there is a Maya folk tale about a lazy man who eats in front of a pregnant woman, offering her nothing. Her hunger pangs are so great that she aborts. The man's punishment is that he must take her home, where he already has a wife, impregnate her, feed her for nine months, and return her to her husband pregnant. Among the Maya, no man will eat in the presence of an expectant mother without offering her some of his food."

  "Henry, did you hear that?" Estrella grinned from her seat on the floor.

  "Chac specifically wanted Bo to hear that song," Andrew said thoughtfully. "Remember? We were about to leave the club, and she called to Bo from the stage."

  Eva arched an eyebrow expectantly at Bo.

  "The answer is in Chac's song, isn't it?" Bo concluded.

  "I think so," Eva said. "Especially if the lyrics she sang that night were altered to create a message. Didn't you say you had a commercial tape that includes Acito's song?"

  Bo was out the door in seconds, grabbing Chac's cassette from the tape deck in her car. Back in the house, Martin slid it into their sound system and Chac's voice filled the room. Bo could see the singer again, her sequined huipil flashing blue sparks in the smoky bar. As the taped lullaby reached its final verse, every eye in Rombo and Martin's living room was on Estrella, the only one who could understand the words.

  Estrella was listening intently. "It's not the same," she whispered over the music. "The business about the duende is still there in the beginning, but the last verse is just about the orchid watching the little turtle grow into a cerro grande, a great hill, and giving shade to his people. There's nothing about men eating in front of pregnant women or the orchid dying. That's not in the recorded version."

  "Wow," Rombo said, puzzled. "So what does it mean?"

  Bo watched five people staring blankly at each other. "We don't have a clue," she admitted. "But we will. We'll figure it out."

  "We'll do that on our way to New Orleans," Andrew said. "We need to get to the airport, Bo."

  On the three-hour flight Bo drifted in and out of sleep as Andrew read a new paperback on the Maya called The Road from Xibalba, waking her regularly to share significant pieces of information.

  Over Yuma, Arizona, he frowned and read aloud a description of Guatemalan army officers removing Maya babies from the government-run refugee villages. Some of the babies would be "adopted" by army personnel, some would be sold to orphanages that would quickly resell them in the international baby black market, and some would be sold directly to baby brokers. The illiterate parents, often unable to communicate even with other Maya refugees because of differing community languages, had no legal recourse, he told Bo.

  "Chac was trying to escape from all that," she mumbled. "Look what she got for her effort."

  Somewhere in New Mexico he said, "Ah. In Maya astronomy the constellation we know as Gemini was called Ac. It means 'The Turtle.' "

  "Yeah," Bo answered, not really waking up. In the darkened plane cabin she imagined Acito asleep in his crib at the Dooleys', a turtle made of stars shining in the sky outside his window.

  By the descent into New Orleans, she'd freshened her makeup in the plane's lurchi
ng cubicle of a restroom, and was ready for a cigarette.

  "The huipil, the sort of blouse Chac was wearing for her act, is actually a Maya symbol for womanhood itself," Andrew explained as they waited to exit the plane. "The opening for the head is the interface between the worlds of myth and reality, the worlds before and after birth. Many of them are woven in a diamond design that has remained unchanged since the seventh century. A shame to think that the entire Maya culture will be lost now."

  Bo gasped as warm, humid air engulfed her in the raised walkway from the plane to the airport terminal. "It's worse than a shame," she replied. "But it's something that can't be stopped. The best we can do is to protect what's left. For us, that's Acito."

  A short cab ride later, Bo was seated beneath an enormous potted ficus in a French Quarter bistro called Galatoire's, inhaling the rich scent from a plate of crab- and shrimp-stuffed eggplant.

  "The city is fascinating if history interests you," Andrew mentioned over a double order of steamed crawfish. "Perhaps you'd enjoy a brief walking tour of the Quarter tonight, or a moonlit visit to the tomb of Marie Laveau in St. Louis Cemetery. She was reportedly a voodoo queen and many people still believe—"

  "Andy," Bo smiled, trailing her fingers down the sides of his face and across his trim mustache, "no graveyards. Let's just let tonight be lovely."

  The tiny Rue de Chartres hotel he'd chosen surpassed Bo's fantasy in opulence. Beyond the open balcony of their room a magnolia tree sent washes of fragrance from its white blossoms, while somebody on the street a block away played bluesy notes on a saxophone. Dimming the light of a fringe-shaded lamp beside the Louis Quinze bed, Bo decided a magnolia-colored silk gown would have been superfluous. Totally.

  Chapter Thirty

  Dark House

  It was dark, and Dewayne could feel the damp ocean air chilling his lungs in a sick, clammy way that felt like a fish market smells. Like dead fish on top of crushed ice, their eyes staring at you like they still were afraid of dying. That dim smell of fishiness everywhere, filling his chest with cold.