Child of Silence

by Abigail Padgett

  Bo was elated. “And this Velk? Who is he? Does he know anything about Weppo?”

  Bill Denny shook his head. “Nah. When the auto theft guys called him yesterday to tell him his car was found here he just said he went to a movie one night, and when he came out, his car was gone. But—”

  “The car was found yesterday in San Diego? Where?”

  Bill Denny pushed the loose frame of his aviator glasses up an aquiline nose and sighed. “Downtown. Early morning. Some wino was gonna sleep in it. But if you'd slow down and let me finish, I'd tell you the big news.”

  Bo bit her lower lip and was silent.

  “The wino found a stiff in the car. White male. Young. Maybe twenty-three. OD'd on some bad stuff he'd just bought on the street. The needle was still in his right hand. Lotta tracks. The guy was a heavy user. Medical examiner'll do an autopsy on Monday.”

  Death. Everywhere. Bo could see the nightmare settling in a nest made of the bones of poets. Could see a painting of the scene she might do herself. The feverish, spavined mare. Screaming. Nesting on a mound of bones.

  “Watch out, Gormfhlaith,” her grandmother's voice cautioned in Gaelic. In the ancient tongue her name meant “strange woman.” It was appropriate, she acknowledged. Totally.

  “Are you okay?” Bill Denny inquired.

  Under the detective's red nylon windbreaker Bo noted the bulge of a gun. And a rumpled T-shirt. Bill Denny had been pulled out of bed like the rest of them. She wished she could be as calm.

  “There wasn't anything to identify the. . . the corpse, in the car?”

  Denny yawned. “Nothing. Clean as a bone in the desert. And besides, there may be no connection between the stiff and the kid. We've got some Indians downtown, street types, druggies. Maybe one of them borrowed a car from our guy in Houston and drove home to see Mom. Maybe the guy was up on the reservation making a drug drop. There's still nothing to connect him to the kid.”

  Bo knew Denny was right. Annie's message hadn't brought them any closer to solving anything. She felt like throwing up.

  And then she remembered something—the grocery receipt.

  “Is there a grocery in Houston called Jamail's?” she asked the detective.

  His eyelids were at half mast.

  “How should I know? I've never been in Houston. Why?”

  “I found a receipt,” Bo raced through an explanation, “up at the reservation. And SpaghettiOs. They were on the receipt.”

  “Spaghetti on a receipt.?” Bill Denny was beginning to look wary. Bo wanted to strangle him. Why were they all so slow?

  “If I give you the receipt, will the police check it out?” She tried to slow down.

  “Sure. No problem.”

  “When?”

  “Monday, probably. This case will have to go through the assignment desk. I'm backed up for weeks. The department'll assign another detective. It'll take a while.”

  Monday! He’ll be dead by Monday!

  Across the hall the pale child with wild, wiry hair touched a red plastic truck, a red notebook, the red print on a hospital menu, and then signed “red.”

  “Excuse me.” Bo smiled at the detective, and went to Weppo's door.

  It was going to be up to her. She'd known it somehow all along. The message in the fog. Caillech Bera wailing... to her. The rest of them didn't understand, were too slow, simply couldn't see. She would have to solve the mystery of Weppo's identity quickly, if he were to survive. And she would have to do it alone.

  “Kid's crazy about colors,” Palachek mentioned. “I just thought I'd entertain him for a while until the excitement dies down, see if he could pick up a little signing. He loves it. But all he wants to know are colors.”

  “Where did you learn to sign?” Bo asked the beefy ex-Marine.

  “My aunt was deaf,” he explained. “From Rocky Mountain spotted fever. She lived with us. We all learned to talk on our hands.”

  Incredible.

  “Bo?”

  It was Madge, her eyes following Bo narrowly.

  “I've decided to take you off this case. We'll let the higher-ups handle it. It's too dangerous, after the threat on your door. . . and you, well, I just think it's best.”

  How much do you know, Madge? How much do you suspect?

  The supervisor's gaze was critical, judgmental.

  “Dr. LaMarche does not agree.”

  “Absolutely not!” Andrew LaMarche seethed. His tie was askew and his chin revealed a salt-and pepper stubble. “Ms. Bradley actually cares about this child, unlike some of your other…”

  Madge stiffened as Bo shot the doctor a look of gratitude. What she saw in the man's face was surprising. Fondness. Concern. A disarming genuineness. Andrew LaMarche, she realized with bemused amazement, actually liked her. Or was she imagining that too?

  The intense state she was sliding into could produce a knock-your-socks-off romantic interest out of thin air. Was it only three years ago, Bo tried to remember, that she'd responded avidly to a similar look on the face of a marine biologist ten years her junior, only to tire of the affair with equal abruptness three weeks later? The manic's pattern of hypersexuality. To be avoided at all costs.

  Andrew LaMarche, she decided firmly, was just a workaholic pediatrician with a messy situation on his hands. A messy situation dumped by fate into the lap of the one person with sufficient vision to comprehend its urgency. The one person mysteriously destined to protect this deaf little boy. Still, she wished she could tell the overwrought doctor about what she was going to do to help the boy. Something in his changeable gray eyes, now slate-colored from exhaustion, would see the sense behind the madness. Bo trusted her judgment on that, and was grateful for the fact of it. Andrew LaMarche was on her side.

  “There is nothing but reality,” she mumbled to herself.

  “What?” LaMarche asked.

  “I said, I have to make a phone call.”

  In minutes a long-distance directory assistance operator confirmed Bo's grasp of the information provided by Bill Denny. There was a grocery in Houston called Jamail's. Three more calls and Bo had reservations on an oddball flight to the Texas city leaving in less than two hours. A San Francisco-to-Houston-via-San-Diego carrier downed in San Diego when its landing gear refused to retract. They were fixing it, even though the San Diego airport was closed, technically, until 6:00 a.m. Too good to be true. A weekend, she could fly to Houston and back without anyone knowing where she had gone.

  “Don't worry.” She waved to Andrew LaMarche.

  “You too, Madge.”

  They looked like puppets as she left, marionettes dangling on invisible strings in a hospital corridor. Already a great distance from her.

  “There is nothing . . .” Lois Bittner's warning began, but Bo snuffed it.

  Yeah, but this is my reality. Who's to say it isn't the real one?

  There was no answer.

  13 - The Bayou

  Deely Brasseur stirred some “dirty rice” over a butane stove and broke an egg into the steaming bean-and-rice mixture. The sun came up slow in the swamp. Easy. Like the breathing of someone asleep. No light touched the raggedy, nasty curtains yet, and Deely cooked by the light of a candle. Just one candle, so as not to draw attention. But the sun's light would steal on. One more night was gone.

  The Atchafalaya Swamp had its secrets, and Deely was one of them, hidden among its cypress stumps and Spanish moss like a snake. Her nephew Raveneau's place, over the state line from Texas into Louisiana. Just a fishing shack. But safe as a prayer. They wouldn't find her there. Deely smoothed the cotton skirt over her ample belly and bowed her head.

  “Thanks to the Lord,” she intoned, “for this here food. Watch over my baby, wherever he be.”

  The child might as well be hers, even with his pale white skin. She alone had cared for the poor, sickly thing after the mama was called. Cared for the mama too. Right up to the child's birth when Julie Lynn Rowe, at seventeen, hemorrhaged to death in her own attic. Miz Rowe
had said there couldn't be no doctor. And the baby had cried and cried.

  “Wilhelm,” Julie whispered. “His name is Wilhelm, for our grandfather.” And then she was dead. That was four years ago. Deely ate in silence.

  Some folks was given one thing to deal with in life, and some folks another. She'd done her best to deal with what she was given—a secret locked in an attic. But when she saw the bags of quicklime hid in the garage, she knew her best wouldn't be good enough. Not anymore.

  She'd made a phone call when she saw what was going to happen. It would defy God, what was going to happen! And it worked, as she hoped it would. Julie's brother, Kep, all wide-eyed and stumbling from the drugs, came and took the child away. Deely had done what could be done.

  Now she feared for her life, and hid, and waited for it to be over. Outside, the first light gleamed dully on swampwater gray as gunmetal. Deely opened her Bible to the part about Moses. About how when the mama couldn't hide her baby no more from Pharaoh, she put him in a little handmade boat down among the bullrushes, and hoped someone would feel pity. And someone did. Moses' mama's plan worked. Deely prayed hers would too.

  Marguerite would send word soon, from Houston.

  It wouldn't be much longer.

  14 - Houston Heat

  The airport was swollen with the spoor of mildew as Bo disembarked from the plane at 9:30. The odor hit her like an oozy wind, like the air from a bag of damp, forgotten swimsuits. Decay, mold, fungus. This city, she determined, must be like a huge toadstool spawned in the brackish sludge of below-sea-level wetlands. The realization made her think of the gills she and every other mammal had possessed before birth. Houston's air made her wish she still had them. A fitful nap on the plane had been troubled by an increasing unease, paranoia, and knifelike sensory perceptions the lithium wouldn't diminish soon enough. At one point she'd wakened to the sharp scent of rotting peaches, although of course there were no rotting peaches immediately noticeable on the plane. There would be, sixteen rows away, a child with a lollipop or a woman wearing some fruity perfume. The man in the aisle seat to Bo’s left had meticulously folded his Los Angeles Times so that only half a column headline was visible.

  Detroit Mar

  Drops Not

  The meaningless words leaped at her repeatedly like flickering strobe lights. She couldn't ignore them.

  Over El Paso a woman in the seat in front of Bo had adjusted her seat-back so many times Bo could only conclude that the woman actually wanted to be strangled by an irate fellow passenger before touching ground. The in-flight magazine provided distraction; Bo memorized its editorial roster to focus her attention, and wondered idly why they'd chosen a printer in Chibougamau, Quebec.

  She was delighted when the plane finally taxied to its gate at Houston's Intercontinental Airport, and she could move. Moving, walking, provided sensory experience that was real. Diminished that weird playground shrinks loved to call “internal stimuli”—the fascinating, then gradually terrifying panorama of intense perceptions created in a brain no longer able to filter, arrange, and categorize the million messages coming at it. A brain that would seize any stimulus—an odor, a color, a snatch of conversation—and amplify it randomly.

  It was good to walk, but the heat was astonishing. Especially in a wool skirt and boots.

  Must you always look like the publicity agent for a foreign circus, you jerk?

  It hadn't occurred to her that Houston might be warmer than San Diego. Among the litany of other things that hadn't occurred to her, it seemed a mere oversight. Nothing compared to the oversight that had brought her here. The one in which she'd forgotten that this particular grandiose delusion would without doubt cost her her job while racking up astronomical credit card charges. Which would have to be paid. And with what? Bo glanced at her image in a vending machine mirror and wondered if, after twenty years of struggle, the idiosyncratic wiring in her brain were going to win after all. The specter of herself as a lunatic bag lady lurked relentlessly just below consciousness. A doppelgänger, a dark and ruined twin. Nothing lay between her and that ever-present ghost but hard-won insight.

  You re delusional, Bradley. But you're here. Eat something, pop your lithium, and see what you can find out. Then get back to San Diego and pretend this never happened.

  Over rubbery and unnecessarily yellow scrambled eggs in an airport coffee shop, Bo looked around. A lot of Stetson hats and cowboy boots. A chantlike drawl in conversations. A propensity for repetition in verb phrases.

  “Ah told him, ah said, Jack, ah said. . .”

  Bo could, after three minutes, replicate the Texans' drawl precisely. Just another perk from a mental disorder that would guarantee many of its victims employment as actors. There was always an up side. She clung to the thought as she negotiated the rental of the cheapest car possible.

  Houston's phone directory gave a Shepherd Drive address for the grocery called Jamail's. Bo bit the end off a ballpoint pen while plotting her course on a map provided by the rental car service. The airport was in the middle of nowhere, miles from the city.

  On the long, humid drive she noticed a plethora of billboards promoting the candidacy of a woman named Rowe for a seat on the state senate.

  “Reclaim the future; VOTE ROWE!” the signs urged. The candidate looked competent enough. Sleek. Shrewd. Mature and tough, yet costumed in a soft blouse accented with a floppy bow that managed to suggest warmth, humor. But the eyes. . . Even with professional makeup and a heavily filtered camera lens, there was no disguising the emptiness of those wide-set eyes. A chameleon's eyes that would reflect whatever you wanted to see. A manipulator's eyes, cool as caves.

  Bo only saw one billboard for Bea Yannick, Rowe's opponent. She looked for all the world like an ex-nun who could, if necessary, kick ass.

  “I'd vote for Yannick in a second,” Bo mentioned to the dashboard, and clicked on the radio. An incredibly long version of “Mamas, Don't Let Your Babies Grow Up to Be Cowboys” lasted to the Westheimer exit off the 610 loop.

  From the long road behind her the skyline of Houston had looked like a gleaming miniature landscape of chrome Legos and milk cartons painted black. The city's splendid architecture was dwarfed to toy size by endless sky. In fact, the cluster of steel-and-glass buildings appeared to be sinking even as it struggled upward. The sky was pushing it down.

  It occurred to Bo that Texas songs were always about the sky because there simply wasn't anything else. No hill, no mound, not even a ripple of earth to break the dizzying sweep of the eye toward infinity. “Flat,” she decided, was a term insufficient to the terrain. It was more than that. It was actually a negative pull, an inverted gasp of ground beneath a firmament so boundless it might threaten the sanity of even those who weren't already pushing the edge.

  To her right, below the 610 loop, a broad tube of greenbrier and blackberry vines woven over loblolly pines, black hickory, and oak trees snaked under the overpass. Nearly strangled by poison ivy, a small sign identified the winding jungle as Buffalo Bayou. Impossible not to wonder what buffalo might do in a bayou. She exited the freeway on Westheimer; a street named Buffalo Speedway answered the question. They would speed.

  Bo shook her head. This wouldn't do. Fortunately, the grocery was less than a mile away.

  The store's parking lot teemed with Mercedeses and other cars too pricily obscure for Bo to name. Boys in white dress shirts carried even the smallest packages for the grocery's well-dressed patrons. No one seemed to notice the heat.

  Money, Bo concluded. Megamoney. Jamail's was not in a slum. Taking the grimy receipt from her purse, she went inside.

  “That?” a gum-chewing cashier answered. “Sure, it's ours. Whaddaya think? It's the Rowes' account too.” She pointed to a code at the top. “M-A-C-R-O. That's MacLaren Rowe. The Rowes. You know.”

  Bo didn't know.

  “Tia Rowe?” The girl was growing impatient. “Her name's all over town!”

  “You mean the one that's running for—?”
>
  “Yeah. That's her.”

  “Uh, do the Rowes live near here?” Bo pressed.

  “Yeah. . . over in River Oaks. Why do you wanna know?”

  Cover your tracks, Bradley.

  “They've contributed so much to owah food drive for the homeless,” Bo drawled sweetly. “Of co-wus they wanted to remain anonymous, but Ah'm afraid this receipt gave them away. Such de-ah people!”

  Bingo!

  The Rowe mansion was Georgian Colonial, its brick facade buffered by leatherleaf mahonia shrubs and two geometrically placed magnolia trees. Bo would not have been surprised to see Scarlett and Rhett lusting in one of the upstairs windows tucked under overhanging eaves. She was surprised, though, to see an aluminum attic vent set in the shake shingles. It spoiled the house's lines.