Child of Silence

by Abigail Padgett

  Climbing the broad brick steps beneath white pillars supporting a Georgian pediment, Bo was unnerved a second time by the door. Its color had been identified in her childhood crayon box as Indian Red. To her artist's eye, the color was an assault. The door's brass knocker had been crafted to resemble a cluster of grapes. Bo grabbed it anyway, and knocked.

  “Yes?” A uniformed maid inquired.

  “May I speak to Tia Rowe?” Bo didn't really expect to speak to the much-publicized candidate.

  The entry hall bore the unmistakable imprint of a decorator who had fought and lost the battle to meld the house's architecture to someone's, probably Tia Rowe's, demand for a “Country French” look. A reproduction Louis XIV tapestry screen in which Breton peasants sculled through a maze of vines stood beside a cherry table whose cabriole legs seemed bent under the weight of an oversized brass spittoon full of chrysanthemums. Bo shuddered.

  Tia Rowe, with her flat billboard eyes, also possessed the artistic sensibilities of a nouveau riche pack rat. Bo cast about for something to say, some way to gain entry.

  On a wall beneath the first landing of an elegant staircase, a jarring collection of framed antique photographs failed to create warmth and appeared merely shabby against bright wallpaper featuring more tortuous vines, lavender blossoms, and sunflowers. One of the photographs seemed familiar.

  “Miz Rowe don't allow no reporters at the house,” the maid insisted, and began to close the door.

  “Wait!” Bo exhaled.

  The sepia-toned studio portrait of a boy in knickers and a belted jacket was more than familiar—it was Weppo! It didn't just look like the wiry-haired child in the hospital bed, it was that child. The same unmistakable hair, the same wide eyes and pale, thin lips. The boy in the picture was a few years older than Weppo, maybe six or seven. But it was Weppo at six or seven. And at the turn of the century!

  “I'm not a reporter,” Bo explained. “I'm here because of the boy, because of Weppo,” she gestured toward the picture. “Please!”

  Bo saw the reaction, the involuntary pull of scalp muscles behind the ears. The moment of recognition. And then panic. The maid knew exactly what Bo was talking about, and was terrified.

  “Go on outta here,” she whispered. “Go ‘way! It ain't safe.”

  Jamming a toe of her boot against the door, Bo slipped one of her business cards with her home number written on it into the young black woman's hand.

  “Somebody tried to murder him,” Bo hissed through clenched teeth. “Call me.”

  The door closed in her face.

  15 - Chivas, Neat

  Only two people were present in Houston's Oak Arbor Country Club bar when it opened at 11:00. One of them was the bartender.

  “The usual, Mr. Rowe?” he inquired as if there were the remotest possibility that Mac Rowe would start his day with anything other than scotch, neat, with a water back. It was common knowledge that Mac never drank the water. It was also common knowledge that this would not be the aging playboy’s first drink of the day.

  MacLaren Rowe rested his elbows on the massive bar salvaged from a long-vanished resort hotel in Galveston, and nodded absently. He felt like one giant chicken dropping. The sharp pain in his stomach was getting worse. And he looked as bad as he felt.

  With Deely gone, he couldn't find anything. The cuffs of a stained shirt flapped without cuff links over trembling fingers. He had to hold the glass with both hands.

  “Election's in three days,” the bartender noted conversationally. “Looks like the missus'll be our next state senator, huh?”

  Everybody on staff at the heavily paneled Oak Arbor Club continued to refer to Tia Rowe as Mac's “missus.” A polite tribute to four generations of Rowe membership in a club so rooted in Southern tradition it would still accept Confederate money. The truth was, Mac had known for two decades, if Tia Rowe were married to anything, it was to the Rowe shipping fortune, accumulated when slaves still loaded bales of raw cotton onto vessels bound for Europe from Galveston. And the Rowe fortune was gone, drained into Tia's wardrobe, Tia's decorators, Tia's thousand charitable and cultural endeavors that were never substantial enough to be acknowledged beyond the society pages.

  Mac Rowe hadn't regarded Tia as his wife in longer than he could remember. The thought gagged him, like the idea of bedding a bag of broken glass.

  “We'll see.” He smiled crookedly. “How about another scotch?”

  Tia might win, he acknowledged to himself. She wanted it badly enough and whatever Tia wanted, Tia got. He'd signed over a power of attorney to her the last time he wound up detoxing at that pansy-ass health spa in San Antonio. Before he got out, Tia'd sold the last of the Rowe property—three square blocks of hand-fired brick warehouse, right on the Galveston Strand—to a mall developer. The money had financed her campaign and an endless parade of consultants, promoters, handlers. A win would present Tia Rowe with ample opportunity for replenishing the coffers and supporting herself in the style to which he had accustomed her.

  But first she had to win the election. And it was close. Last week's poll had shown Bea Yannick running only six percent behind. A Yankee yokel with nothing but a grassroots organization, Yannick had come out of nowhere and put the fear of God into Tia Rowe.

  Secretly Mac was glad Yannick had dragged his wife into deep water. With any luck, she might drown. Mac often wished he'd killed her himself, years ago. She'd brought him down, just like his mama said when he announced his marriage to the flamboyant Northerner. Mac pondered how much further down he could go before the end, and realized he didn't care.

  Deely had left, suddenly. And the imbecile child his daughter had produced was gone too. Mac didn't care about the kid, but Deely had cleaned up after Mac, kept his clothes clean, made sure he had a meal now and then. The new maid didn't know her ass from a soup can and jumped out of her skin at the fall of a shadow.

  Mac ordered another scotch, just to kill the pain in his gut. He wondered how Tia was going to bankroll the final days of the campaign. There was nothing left, but Tia kept buying more TV slots, spending like she owned a bank.

  And maybe she did.

  There was, he admitted, one helluva lot Mac Rowe didn't know about his wife.

  16 - Return Flight

  The rental car had developed an annoying squeak somewhere near the left rear wheel. It made Bo think of toys. Old, forgotten toys with squeaking wooden wheels pulled across the floors of attics. She wanted to paint old toys— antiquated trucks and trains and jack-in-the-boxes, dusty rocking horses and glass-eyed dolls with cracking faces. Abandoned toys that might come to life in some dark moment and whisper secrets too evil for human tongues. She could see the painting, done in grays. The doll's mouth, a clown's hat, the frightened eye of the rocking horse—these alone in red. A grim picture, horrifying in its message.

  “Is it just me, or is there something wrong in that house?” she asked the steering wheel.

  “It's you, it's you. . .” the squeak whined monotonously. “Crazy, crazy, crazy.”

  Bo glanced at the sky and realized that she couldn't see the sun. Only an amorphous sphere of light beyond a curtain of haze. Dampness. Ooze. Everywhere.

  She wasn't going to be able to keep it together much longer. She had to get home.

  “Return, 12:45 p.m. But you just rented the car this morning,” the clerk at the rental car counter noted.

  Bo ran her tongue slowly over her upper teeth. “Thank you. I'm aware of that. Your job is to be aware that I'm returning the car.”

  “Just sign here,” the young woman replied edgily. In her uniform she looked oddly like the clerk at Jamail's. Maybe a sister. Or maybe the same person working two jobs?

  It happened frequently. People seeming to be other people, as if individuality were merely a tactical disguise beneath which the same personalities might hide. Anywhere. Everywhere. Over and over. In a full-blown mania, Bo recalled with chagrin, a stranger in a parking lot might be her barely remembered first-grade
piano teacher. Or a UPS deliveryman the priest who had buried her sister. The thing was to keep it to yourself. Not run toward complete strangers yelling, “Mrs. Doonan? Father Ondek? Oh, I'm sorry, but you looked so much like...”

  Lois Bittner hadn't been able to explain it.

  “Who knows?” she said with a shrug. “May be just a psychological mechanism. Your psyche is on overload from too much stimulation, and so you create comforting, familiar faces. Or else in that hyperaware state you're picking up things about strangers that really are identical to people you've known, and so you perceive them as looking identical. Who knows? Just remember to keep quiet about it. Reality is that strangers are just strangers. Leave it at that.”

  The plane wouldn't board for half an hour. Bo wandered into an airport gift shop, drawn by attractive displays arranged and illuminated to produce precisely this effect. Well, maybe not quite this effect, Bo thought. The little room gleamed. Colors clamored for attention from the covers of magazines and paperbacks. A rack of candy, pinlighted from above, promised toothsome ecstasy. Bo tried on a ten-gallon hat and admired herself in a strategically placed mirror. She looked terrific, an Irish cowgirl. With a hand-crafted feather band, the hat would come only to $238.

  Just the thing to wear to court, you lunatic. Get out of here before you buy electric pencil sharpeners shaped like armadillos for everybody at the office.

  Lois Bittner had told Bo of a man, another manic-depressive, who'd bought Waterford wine decanters costing over half his annual salary for everyone on the faculty at the junior college where he taught Introduction to Accounting. That the man didn't even know most of his fellow instructors was irrelevant. Bo could understand. It was that wild, intense, I-love-everything feeling that came just before things went into warp speed. Just before slipping over into that realm of ominous insight where poisoned trees might glow with radiation from acid rains unleashed by murderous corporations and their puppet politicians. Where nobody would listen and the pain of ceaseless awareness could render you mute and frozen. Paranoid. Catatonic. But not quite.

  Bo kept to herself the fact that not once had her “delusions” been anything but an amplified truth that normal people could deny, buffer, filter down to tolerable levels.

  “Manic-depressives just lose the ability to ignore,” Dr. Bittner had explained to her. “The world might be a very different place,” she mused once, gazing out her office window at a bleak February afternoon, “if everybody lost that ability just a little bit.”

  Bo bought an armload of Houston newspapers and loped away from the gift shop as though it were the gateway to hell, then deliberately took a wrong turn that would provide fifteen minutes of brisk airport hiking until it was time to board the plane. The exercise would help, and nobody would find the notion of a woman dashing through airport corridors even remotely strange. Everybody dashed in airports. Even those who weren't running from madness.

  “Please direct your attention to the video screens for a brief explanation of our safety procedures,” the cabin attendant urged over the plane's PA system after Bo had boarded and found her seat. No one paid the slightest attention, including Bo. If the plane crashed, they'd all be dead anyway. The plane's safety equipment, flotation devices, and emergency exits would be discovered to be jammed, dysfunctional, and not inspected since the craft's maiden flight in 1983. Bo could hear the eleven o'clock news report. “... investigation of the tragic October airline disaster that claimed 158 lives revealed today that safety mechanisms that might have saved half the doomed passengers failed to operate. . .” It was just a fact of life. Bo found it comforting that for once everybody else knew the truth too.

  After the plane forced itself off the ground, Bo opened Weppo's case file on her tray table. On a clean narrative sheet she wrote what she knew so far.

  “Four-year-old deaf boy is found tied up in a mountain shack. He has had no ASL training, but somebody has taught him to say his name, which comes out like Weppo. He's smart; I'm sure of it. He hasn't been starved or abused, but he's very pale. (Kept indoors somewhere?) Whoever brought him to the shack and tied him to the mattress fed him SpaghettiOs and built a fire to keep him warm before leaving him alone there. Whoever it was probably tied him to the mattress to keep him from running away. Whoever it was intended to come back, but didn't.”

  “Annie Garcia remembered the license number of a car she saw. A car stolen in Houston and found in San Diego with a dead drug addict in it. I found a grocery receipt from a Houston grocery where the car was parked. This can't be sheer coincidence. The receipt must have fallen out of the car. This would mean that the dead druggie stole the car in Houston, bought the SpaghettiOs in Houston, has something to do with the Rowes since he used their account to charge the food at Jamail's, and is the one who left Weppo to die in that shack. Except he didn't mean to leave him to die. Then what did he mean? To go down into San Diego and get drugs and then come back? Maybe.”

  “So who is this dead guy? Maybe a servant, handyman, driver for the Rowes? Did he kidnap Weppo from the wealthy family?”

  “And who is the child in the old Rowe photographs? A relative, obviously, unless I imagined it. A relative the little boy has replicated genetically. But why wouldn't the influential Rowes have notified the police, the media, if a child related to them had been kidnapped?”

  Wait a minute! Maybe they did.

  Clambering over a couple who looked eerily like Roy Rogers and Dale Evans, Bo headed for the in-flight phone on the wall between cabins. Sometimes the police got gag orders for the media in kidnapping cases. And any judge would have seen the merit in a gag order for this case. With the state senate election in three days, a gag would save the state of Texas the expense of a second election after Yannick's people claimed media coverage of a Rowe kidnapping threw the close election to Tia.

  Remembering the billboard eyes, Bo was stunned by another thought. What if Tia Rowe staged the kidnapping in order to get miles of free media just before the election? Bo knew a soulless psychopath when she saw one. Those charming, manipulative characters incapable of anything but self-interest. Tia Rowe was one of them, Bo would have bet on it.

  “Houston Police Department,” a young male voice answered briskly. “Desk Sergeant Tromley.”

  Bo dropped her voice an octave.

  “I've got some information on the Rowe kidnapping,” she whispered. “Let me talk to the investigating officer.”

  If a kidnapping had been reported, the HPD would be set up to receive precisely this sort of call.

  “What?” the voice replied.

  “The kidnapped Rowe Child.”

  “Rowe? Just a minute. . .”

  Bo could hear the desk sergeant talking to someone else in the background.

  “Something about a kidnapped Rowe child. . . ?”

  “It's just some loony,” the older voice responded. “The Rowe kids're grown. One of em's—”

  Bo hung up quickly. Whoever Weppo was, his absence from Houston had not been reported to the Houston police.

  Roy and Dale were, uncharacteristically, poring over a racing form as Bo returned to her seat.

  “Happy trails,” she murmured.

  Roy appeared puzzled.

  “I think Happy Trails is in the third race at Belmont,” Dale explained cheerfully.

  “Thanks for the tip.” Roy grinned.

  Bo buried herself in the newspapers she'd bought at the airport. They all told the same story. Tia Rowe, wife of shipping heir MacLaren Rowe, was in a closely contested race for a senatorial seat vacated two months ago. Rowe's opponent, Bea Yannick, was a Catholic grandmother of four, widowed when her oil-exec husband was transferred to Houston from the family enclave in Pennsylvania during the boom, and promptly dropped dead. Yannick had stayed, raised seven kids alone, gone to law school, chaired the school board, and launched an unsuccessful campaign to introduce the notion of zoning to Houston. The attempt, Yannick said, was prompted by the existence of a thriving massage parlor a
nd drug dealership across the street from a public school attended by two of her grandchildren. The media coverage suggested that Yannick was a gutsy Yankee who, while well liked, couldn't overcome the aristocratic Rowe name.

  A counterculture paper called The Bayou Banner gave a different picture. Tia Rowe, according to an investigative reporter named Gretchen Tally, was a conniving egotist whose campaign platform had a designer label and no substance whatever. Without violating the strictures of good journalism Tally managed to suggest that a financially distressed society matron known more for catered brunches than informed opinions might find the temptations of political power overwhelming. Hadn't a Big Bend mining consortium already under attack by environmental groups contributed generously to the Rowe campaign? And what about Tia's sudden friendship with the wife of the president of a paper conglomerate methodically denuding central Texas of its few remaining forests? The widely publicized “future” of a Rowe win in the senate, the radical reporter suggested, would be Tia Rowe's, not Texas's. Bo sensed that Tally was on to something, and fought her way over the beaming couple to make one more phone call.