Child of Silence (Bo Bradley Mysteries, Book One)

by Abigail Padgett

  But the answering machine wasn't blinking. No one had called during the night. They should have called, left the coded message that would tell her it was over. Tell her the monstrous child, the mistake standing between her and twenty-six million dollars, was dead.

  Well, they'd call eventually. No point in wasting time worrying about it. Tia Rowe warmed a croissant in the toaster oven and assessed the best possible use of the morning.

  Sunday. Hard to accomplish much on a Sunday. People were at church. . . church! Perfect.

  Tia drank her coffee and set the Quimper cup back in its saucer briskly. An early mass. The widow alone, seeking solace and strength in prayer. She'd wear black, of course, but not the Givenchy. That would be for the funeral home this afternoon. Something tailored, then? No. Something blousy, feminine. Something to suggest a heart broken with grief.

  Finding a Roman Catholic church in the Yellow Pages, Tia left messages for two photographers designating the time and place, and then hurriedly found the gray silk blouse with poufs of white lace at the collar and cuffs. Under the black cape it would be fine.

  Twenty minutes later she saw one of the photographers lounging in a car parked across the street from the rectory of Holy Innocents Church. He ambled from the car as she parked her Mercedes near a cluster of young Georgia pines bounding the church property. A handful of people, well dressed and quiet, chatted briefly on the little church's flagstone steps before entering. Tia covered her head with the cape's hood and ignored the photographer as she walked demurely toward the open doors.

  “Mrs. Rowe?” he called as she expected. The surprise photo, caught by a vigilant journalist at an unusual moment. Tia looked somberly from beneath her cape at the young man beside the steps.

  “Yes?”

  “You're under arrest,” came a voice from behind her as two of the well-dressed men lingering on the church steps pulled her arms back and snapped handcuffs over poufs of white lace.

  The photographer caught the picture, framed by church doors.

  “There's been some mistake,” Tia Rowe pronounced urgently. “You can't do this!”

  “No mistake, ma'am,” came the calm reply. “If you'll just come with us now. . .”

  It couldn't be happening! The plan had been foolproof. Nothing to it. Just get rid of that wretched child, inherit the money, and win the election. Anything, Tia had known, could be bought. Money was all that mattered. Money, and power! She'd almost had both.

  “Your hired boys got caught,” the HPD officer mentioned while handing Tia carefully into a waiting squad car, “up in some California hill country. One of them's dead. The other one talked. And the boy. . . well he's just fine.”

  The boy. Tia's mind wrenched, turned on itself in a paroxysm of hate. An idiot she should have suffocated at birth! Because of that thing she'd kept in her attic, it was over. Senseless, that her plans would be wasted because of a brain-damaged, subhuman monster whose life could accomplish nothing.

  “I demand to speak with my attorney immediately,” she told the squad car's uniformed driver.

  “At the station, ma'am,” he answered.

  Behind them the heavy oak doors of Holy Innocents Church swung shut.

  36 - Weppo

  Bo woke slowly with a headache she recognized immediately as a sedative hangover. In a bed. Clean sheets. Ugly orange-flowered bedspread, but not of the serviceable twill universally selected by psychiatric hospitals. Maybe she wasn't in a hospital. Then why were there flowers everywhere?

  Through narrowed eyes she found the window. Ugly orange curtains to match the bedspread. But no bars.

  Okay, it's not a hospital, but what is it? Where are you? And where’s Weppo?

  With an effort that sent dull spikes of pain through her bandaged hand she pulled herself up on an elbow and was stunned to see Estrella Benedict in a chair beside the bed, grinning.

  “Es? What are you doing here? Where am I? Where's Weppo?”

  Estrella appeared to be caught somewhere between tears and laughter. “Dr. LaMarche called early this morning. Henry and I drove up right away. You've been asleep all day.

  We're in Bishop, forty miles north of Lone Pine. It was the only place LaMarche could find a decent motel.”

  So it was a motel. Of course. Where else would you find plastic “Mediterranean” furniture with reproduction prints of Death Valley under snow? Bo felt tears spilling from her eyes.

  “I thought. . .” she began.

  “No, no,” her office mate crooned, hugging her. “You're not in a hospital. LaMarche sedated you himself. Everything's all right. You just need to rest for a few weeks, take your lithium. It's all under control. And wait until you hear what that reporter—”

  “Weppo.” Bo remembered. “Where's Weppo?”

  Estrella smoothed Bo's unruly hair. “Haven't you heard of creme rinse?” She laughed. “Weppo's fine. Off somewhere with Rudy, seeing the sights. I think they're playing miniature golf at the moment. Don't worry. It's over.”

  Bo thought of the mining tunnel, Annie Garcia on its floor with a hole in her chest.

  “Annie's dead,” she pronounced. “I thought she was Laurie, but. . .”

  “Try not to go over and over what happened,” Estrella warned. “Orders from LaMarche's sister in Louisiana. A shrink or something. He's been on the phone with her for hours, trying to figure out what to do with you...”

  “Do with me!” Bo fumed. “Why in hell does he need to do with me?”

  She was on her feet in spite of the headache.

  “Because he wants to.” Estrella grinned. “I think he likes you, Bo.”

  “How flattering,” Bo sniped.

  Es merely grinned lasciviously. “About time, Bo.”

  In a small refrigerator under the luggage shelf Bo found fruit juice, chocolate eclairs, and Cokes. Estrella handed her a bottle of aspirin.

  “Who did all this?” Bo asked, including the flowers with a sweep of her bandaged hand.

  “LaMarche. Annie's grandson. That reporter, Gretchen Tally. Everybody. You're a hero. Everybody wants to do things for you.”

  “What about Madge?” Bo remembered reality with a lurch. “I suppose I'm out of a job.”

  “Nope. Thanks to your reporter from Houston. God, she's good! Threatened Madge with nationwide coverage—‘San Diego Department of Social Services Fires Top Investigator Who Saved Deaf Boy from Hired Gunmen! Film at Eleven!’ Madge went belly-up when she realized sacking you would hurt the department's image. She even decided you have a work-related injury justifying three weeks' paid sick leave. LaMarche thought of that. Muy astuto, huh?”

  “Muy,” Bo agreed. It was overwhelming.

  “And that woman who called you from Houston?” Estrella went on with enthusiasm. “Delilah Brasseur?”

  Bo remembered. “Does she know Weppo's okay? Has anybody told her?” The nana would be frantic.

  “Tally's paper got a message to her through the preacher at her church. She was hiding out someplace, from that woman . . .”

  “Tia Rowe,” Bo pronounced. The unanswered question.

  “Those flowers are from Brasseur,” Estrella pointed to a bouquet of pink carnations and baby's breath on the night-stand. Bo opened the card.

  “Bless you,” it said simply, “from Deely Brasseur.”

  Bo sank back onto the bed. The aspirins were helping the headache, but also reminding her that she hadn't eaten anything but seven-grain bread in twenty-four hours. She hoped never to see another slice of seven-grain bread in her life.

  A commotion in the hall alerted Estrella, who rose to answer the door.

  “That'll be the crew.” She smiled. “I'm glad you're okay, Bo. That office would've been a frigging pit without you.”

  A small boy in a large red-and-gold sweatshirt with “USMC” embossed across the chest bounded across the room and into Bo's arms.

  “I love you!” she signed, and hugged him hard, unable to let go.

  He squirmed in her arms an
d then looked questioning.

  “Food?” he signed, grinning.

  A bright little boy. Happy. Hungry.

  Reality. Lois Bittner was right. There could be nothing better. How could anyone have wanted to snuff this young life, obliterate it, kill it?

  Rudy Palachek, LaMarche, Henry Benedict, and Gretchen Tally poured in the door amid congratulations.

  “You're one in a million!” Tally enthused. “I just came by to say goodbye. Got to get back to Houston, plan the coverage for Bea Yannick's win by default on Tuesday. People are going to say she didn't really win. She'll need our support.”

  Bo's confusion was evident. “I've been asleep all day,” she said. “What's happened?”

  “Tia's in the toilet!” the young reporter crowed. “Thanks to you, and Deely Brasseur, and your Paiute, Annie Garcia. The doctor'll fill in the details. I've got a helilcopter flight to San Francisco, leaves in twenty minutes. The connection'll have me back in Houston before midnight. And Bo,” the young woman's look was sincere, “there will be nothing in the coverage of this story about your manic-depression, nothing that can hurt you.”

  “I knew that,” Bo offered in acknowledgment. “I knew you could be trusted, although I wish all this secrecy wasn't necessary. Nobody has to lie about having diabetes or glaucoma or even leprosy.” Bo knew she was lecturing, and didn't care.

  “I know, you're right,” Tally interjected, leaving. “Someday people will let go of the idea that brain disorders are the work of the devil. What's important is that we stopped the real devil before she got away with it. See ya!”

  “Tia Rowe is something out of Poe,” Andrew LaMarche commented, closing the door. “According to my sister, she's what used to be called a sociopath—a person devoid of the ability for human closeness, loyalty, love. Incapable of anything but self-interest. Manipulative. Treacherous.”

  “I knew that when I saw her pictures on the billboards,” Bo sighed. “But so what? Nobody locks them up.”

  “And nobody's going to lock you up,” LaMarche stated with more emotion than he had intended. “Charlie Garcia insists that you and the boy attend some sort of memorial ceremony for Annie tonight. I don't think it's a good idea, but—”

  “We'll be there,” Bo answered. It felt right, the idea of joining in a ritual for the wise old woman whose life had touched hers and the child's so deeply. The wise old woman who had, literally, traded her life for theirs. “And then I need to go home, be left alone for a while until the lithium builds up to blood level, whatever that means,” she went on. “I really want to avoid the hospital this time.”

  Andrew LaMarche looked so earnest he could have sold Bibles to penguins. Bo had to laugh.

  “You don't understand,” she said with a grin. “Mania is disturbing, embarrassing for everybody around, but it's not dangerous, at least not at first. You just can't sleep, you talk all the time, laugh and cry. Your thoughts fly out like wild birds from a cage. It's impossible to concentrate. You want to move around all the time. If it's let go, it gets scary. Psychotic. But I'm on the damn pills already. I'll be okay. It's the depression that's dangerous. People kill themselves rather than go through it one more time. A pain you can't imagine. That's when you need a hospital. Do you see?”

  “Not really,” LaMarche admitted. “But you know what you're talking about. I just want you to be all right.”

  The handsome, graying international authority on child abuse looked about as self-assured as a lost sheep. That look of confused concern found on faces that would not run in terror and revulsion from a schizophrenic daughter, a suicidally depressed husband. Bo had seen it before, but never for her. Never. Andrew LaMarche's look touched her so deeply she was afraid to cry, for fear she'd never stop.

  “I'll be all right when I get something to eat besides bread,” she joked, stifling the feeling.

  Rudy Palachek extended a bearlike hand.

  “Henry and I will go on back to San Diego now, in his car,” he explained. “We'll stop at China Lake for your car and I'll drive it back to San Diego. The rest of you'll fly back on a ‘copter tonight after the ceremony for Annie. I hope to see you again, Bo Bradley. I'm proud to know you.”

  Bo accepted the compliment with a nod of her head, and then flung her arms around the ruddy marine.

  “You too, Henry.” She hugged Estrella's husband through tears. “Thanks for bringing Es up to stay with me.”

  The emotional drain was too much. She had to lighten up or else lose it completely.

  As the two men left, a phone on the desk began to ring.

  What next?

  “Convent of the Perpetual Parakeet,” Bo clowned to relieve the tension.

  “Bo? This has to be you!”

  Madge Aldenhoven's voice, chipper as a flea.

  “It probably is, then,” Bo replied. “Madge. I thought you'd never call.”

  “Dr. LaMarche said you'd wake up around six,” the supervisor explained as if she'd never planned to relegate Bo to waiting in bread lines. “I’m glad we found a way around regulations. I'm glad you'll be coming back. We need you.”

  Manic or not, Bo was at a loss for words. Almost.

  “What have you done with the real Madge Aldenhoven?” She laughed. “The shining light of bureaucracies everywhere?”

  “Still here.” Aldenhoven actually laughed in return. “And by the way, I thought you'd like to know—Angela Reavey's going to be okay. See you in three weeks!”

  “The world is strange,” Bo said, and then signed for Weppo, “Let's go eat.”

  Over dinner LaMarche explained the Marievski inheritance that Tia Rowe's father had earmarked for his grandchildren.

  “The amount has quadrupled since the artist's death,” LaMarche noted. “There's been a resurgence of interest in his work. Originals are going at auction now for seven figures. And Weppo now owns hundreds of originals.”

  The artist great-grandfather, from whom the child had inherited talent as well as those caramel-colored eyes.

  “And was Kep Rowe the father? Was he the dead addict in the stolen car like Gretchen Tally thought?”

  “Yes on both counts,” LaMarche replied and then looked down, anticipating Bo's next question.

  “And the mother. . .?” she asked.

  “Weppo's mother is dead,” he answered softly. “She was Julie Rowe, Kep's sister. She died giving birth to him at home, in an attic where Tia had hidden her so no one would know of the pregnancy. Tia wasn't about to let this new obstacle to the Marievski fortune be known. But Deely Brasseur was there. She told all this to Gretchen Tally on the phone this afternoon, while you were asleep.”

  LaMarche took a deep breath and went on.

  “Tia Rowe never knew Kep was Weppo's father. Julie lied about it, made up a name. Only Deely knew the truth. That's why she called Kep when she overheard Tia telling a creditor she'd be coming into a fortune in the near future. Deely saw bags of quicklime stacked in the garage. She'd suspected all along that Tia might kill the child once her husband, Mac, was out of the way. When Tia fired her, Deely knew exactly what Tia planned to do.”

  Bo began to shake, and hugged herself to stop it.

  “Quicklime?”

  “Don't think about it,” Estrella urged. “Just don't! Look. He's right here and he's okay.”

  Weppo, wolfing down a burger and fries, signed “good” enthusiastically, over and over.

  Bo remembered the incongruous aluminum vent in the eaves of the Rowe mansion. More had gone on in that attic than could be measured.

  “That inhuman mother, an alcoholic father,” Estrella pondered, “the two teenagers just turned to each other for love when there was none anywhere else, and the result is Weppo.”

  “Yes,” Bo said, smiling across the Formica table at the pale child. “But his real name is Wilhelm. From now on, let's call him Willy.”

  “Willy it is,” LaMarche boomed happily. “And by the way, Bo, I've contacted my attorney in San Diego. I've applied for guardi
anship for Wep—for Willy. The paperwork will be filed in court first thing tomorrow morning. Aldenhoven didn't seem to think there'd be any problem with DSS. Rudy and his wife, Mary, will care for our boy until we can find good foster parents . . .”

  “Deaf foster parents,” Bo insisted. “A home where everybody signs, and we can visit him.”

  “I'll leave that up to you.” LaMarche grinned.

  She could do it, network with every deaf association in California, find a young couple who'd love and share their lives with the little boy. There was an excellent ASL school near San Francisco. . . and then Gallaudet!