A Desperate Silence (Dr. Sylvia Strange Book 3)

by Sarah Lovett

  She spoke to the pink shoes. "This room is a place where children can play . . . or talk about what's going on . . . or just hang out." She cupped her hands together, then produced what she hoped were the corresponding verbs in Spanish: "Jugar, hablar, relajar."

  There was no visible reaction.

  Sylvia let the silence settle before she changed gears. She expelled air noisily from between her lips, then slipped off her shoes, exposing toenails polished to a gleaming fuchsia. She scooted on her butt toward a table covered with a tray of sand, toys, paper, and crayons. "Some kids like to use this tray of sand to make a world."

  The first response was a whimper. But the pink shoes eventually began to move. Painfully slow baby steps, at first. Start and stop. It took those shoes a good two minutes to travel the length of the couch, finally emerging at one end.

  She stood wide-eyed, her gaze darting around the room only to land repeatedly on Sylvia. The child appeared to be on the verge of bolting; Sylvia calculated the distance to the locked door. But instead of seeking escape, the girl took another tentative step forward with one hand clutching the arm of the couch. Her tongue flitted across her mouth before disappearing between trembling lips. She sighed, and her narrow chest rose and fell with a shudder. She hunched forward and reached out to touch one of Sylvia's polished toenails—then pulled her hand back abruptly.

  Sylvia spoke softly. "Hello there." This was her first real view of the child outside the hospital setting.

  She was wiry and tough, like a sunburnt weed. Fine bones and lack of weight made her look smaller than her actual size. In addition to the pink shoes, she wore a white cotton shirt trimmed in bright red. Her red pants were decorated with white racing stripes. The clothes were new, and Sylvia caught the faint but distinctive scent of fabric sizing. The knuckles of the child's right hand were scraped raw where scabs had been picked or torn away. Her skin was bronze, bruised and scraped above her left eye and on her chin—but the swelling had eased. Her lower lip was trapped between gapped white teeth. Dark hair reached midback, thick and tangled. She wasn't exactly pretty. Stray tendrils framed boyish features—nose a tad too big, mouth wide and supple, full brows dark as charcoal. But her dusky eyes held a hint of the woman's beauty that was to come. If she survived that long.

  Now those expressive eyes spoke only of fear and exhaustion. The child's countenance was distorted by anxiety so intense it seemed to be a permanent feature. Her fear was contagious.

  Sylvia had seen this level of terror in a few other children—like the six-year-old boy who witnessed his sister's decapitation. The killer had locked the boy in a closet with a warning that he would come back. The boy had been discovered four days after the murder, cowering silently in darkness, soiled and feverish with fright.

  Sylvia felt a hollow dread work its way up her abdomen. What horrors had this child witnessed? She took several deep breaths before framing her next question: "Would you like to play with the toys?"

  The child gave a shiver of a nod, barely perceptible. When at the same time her brown eyes cut to the sand tray, Sylvia knew her words were understood.

  The child picked up a fabric doll from the lap of a wicker chair and moved warily toward the sand tray. The doll was pressed tight to her tummy like a baby trapped outside the womb; with her free hand the child fingered and discarded tiny plastic figurines, human and animal. Each movement was tightly contained; there was none of the easy exploration typical of children. Finally, she placed the doll in the far corner of the tray, where the plain cloth face gazed blankly out at the world—an eerie witness to the child's stifling distress.

  Now she began a stilted sorting through the remaining toys. Plastic birds, horses, soldiers, and superheroes tumbled onto the floor. When the toy baskets were empty, the child picked up a piece of rough drawing paper from a stack on the table. She selected a box of crayons from a shelf. She pivoted suddenly toward Sylvia, her small arms held tightly at her sides. Then she walked away from the table, oddly stiff-gaited, disappearing again behind the couch.

  From Sylvia's undergraduate classes she remembered the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis of "linguistic relativity": the language a person uses not only expresses but controls the way he or she thinks about the world. What if that language is silence?

  For the next few minutes, the child's furious scribbling was audible, along with her breathing—the huff and puff of concentration.

  Sylvia let her work in solitude until the session was almost over. When she was about to try to engage her again, the pink shoes abruptly reemerged from their hiding place. Empty-handed, the child crossed the room. Her small fingers closed around Sylvia's palm; the touch sent electricity through the psychologist's body. A faint alarm went off in her mind—this isn't a child you can keep at a therapeutic distance.

  Minutes later the child left the office with her foster mother, and Sylvia looked behind the couch. She saw tiny bits of paper wrapping and broken crayons scattered everywhere, but there was no sign of a drawing.

  She got down on her hands and knees and squeezed into the space between wall and sofa. She ran her fingers along the floor. Nothing.

  Just when she was sure the child had taken away the drawing and some of the crayons, she noticed a white paper sliver visible in a seam of the couch. It was there, neatly folded and waiting, like a secret message.

  The child had colored a sprawling village against a mountain. The rigidly narrow walls of one particular house stood above the others; its roofline was flat, the three small windows set high—and they were darkened and covered with vertical bars like a prison. The house had no door—no access, no "mouth." The sky in the picture hung low and ominous, as if threatening to envelop the solitary building.

  The drawing reminded Sylvia of the work of the Mexican muralists—strong, sensuous, disturbing. The vivid colors and rich shapes of the swirling clouds over jagged hills took her breath away. The child wasn't just artistic—she was gifted.

  Sylvia concentrated on analyzing the work's psychological presentation. The dark enclosures were consistent with a child who was disturbed, who had experienced trauma. The clash of sophisticated perspective and primitive imaging indicated regression. The "contained" message was clear: the four walls of the house encased family secrets.

  Three X's traversed the white space below the house—the letters were connected and seemed to represent a fence or barrier. On the crest of a jagged mountain peak rising up behind the house, a cruciform stabbed the sky.

  At the bottom of the page, the child had drawn a tiny, dark crescent moon. Just below the moon, she'd signed her name.

  S E r E n a.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  EL PASO POLICE Department narcotics cop William Robert Dowd punched in the last number on the pay telephone and waited for the short, high ring. His fingers trembled around the piece of dirty black plastic in his hand. Overhead, a neon taco flickered faintly—commas of yellow cheese spilling down a red-rimmed taco shell every few seconds. The lights gave off a steady hum that Dowd heard between rings in the sudden lull of traffic on Avenida Juárez. Exhaust fumes caught in his mouth and killed the taste of fast-food grease. From the alley next to the taquería Bobby Dowd scanned the street. Cars and trucks were backed up, headed for the bridge across the Río Bravo—a.k.a. the Rio Grande—into El Paso, Texas.

  Impatiently Dowd counted six rings, seven. Then a deep voice said, "¿Sí?"

  "I need to see you," Bobby Dowd said.

  "If it ain't my old pal Wile E. Beep-beep, 'mano."

  From the husky sound of the other man's voice, Dowd knew Victor Vargas was smoking one of his funky cigarettes—his Negritos or Delicados. And Vargas sounded tired. He sounded like he believed Bobby Dowd might be coked up. Bobby swallowed. "It's got to be today."

  "No puedo. Not today."

  Bobby Dowd slapped his thigh nervously. Across the street, a hooker was promoting her stuff to a punk in a Mustang; she kept pace with the car, strutting toward the bridge in cheap stilett
o heels and sequins. At the opposite end of the alley, three street kids were squabbling over trash. Dowd said, "Big Tuna is hunting coyote."

  Vargas made no effort to mask the anger in his voice. "No shit? You're a little late, pendejo coyote. I got my own problemas con el fish."

  Bobby bit his tongue and let silence fill the next few spaces. He was afraid Vargas would cut him loose. Then the shaking would spread from his hands to his teeth—he wouldn't be able to stop the monkey chatter.

  Help me. For a bad moment, Bobby thought he'd spoken his plea aloud, but the words echoed safely in his head. He knew he'd fallen too far into the abyss known as deep cover. He'd done one too many lines, taken one too many needles in the name of narco cop turned bad.

  He'd never intended for it to go this way. When he'd started out, the boundaries had been clear. Still wet behind the ears, fresh from the academy, a training project with the feds, he'd taken to undercover work. I can do this. I can stand on the line and never cross it. I can straddle the border between the good guys and the bad guys and never lose my balance. What the hell had he been thinking?

  Bobby spat on the sidewalk, then hunched low into his ribs as a Juárez city patrol unit cruised slowly past. When had he gone from being a straight-ahead cop to being a cop with a habit? A junkie. A freak. But still a cop who desperately needed to pass on information.

  He played his card. "I heard something—about Snow White."

  Somewhere, at the other end of this electromagnetic encounter, Vargas expelled smoke with a shudder.

  Bobby pressed. "Snow White and a little dwarf in danger."

  Vargas was silent a moment, absorbing information that carried heavy weight. Finally, he said, "I'll find you—two, maybe three hours."

  Dowd tried to quell the panic that danced a tango in his stomach. He spoke softly, "TNT-time, Roadrunner. Don't forget your ole pal Wile E." He dropped the phone, letting it swing on its coiled wire cord. He glanced at the street, then he started down the alley. He had ten blocks to cover to his usual spot for a meeting with Vargas—but he had hours to kill. He moved with a casualness that belied his truly miserable state.

  Unfamiliar fingers of self-pity stroked his skin. He needed a shot of tequila to loosen him up so he could function. One or two shots and he could truly refocus. His feet began to move faster, each step taking him closer to a bottle and that zone of higher consciousness.

  He could still turn it all around. Bobby Dowd clung to that hope, he fanned it like a spark. It wasn't too late. He just had to talk to Victor Vargas. The funny thing was, of all the cops Dowd had known—on either side of the border—Vargas was the one he trusted most. When they'd first met, Vargas had mocked the rookie's black-and-white world. The Mexican lived in a realm that was solid gray, where you never knew if you were crossing the line because the line shifted every second.

  No . . . Victor Vargas was no saint, but he had a kind of wild honor. And he had something pumping in his chest, something that closely resembled a heart.

  It wasn't too late to save the life of Paco's little dwarf . . .

  A hazy picture wavered in front of Bobby's eyes like a desert mirage: Paco sitting with another man at a back table at Rosa's place . . . they were three quarters of the way through a bottle of rough tequila and the bookkeeper was telling crazy stories that made the other man laugh. Stories about treasure hidden in a straw house—that made the other man joke about the three little pigs. Stories about books with magic powers, and a little girl—or was the little girl the one who was magic?

  Paco had told wild stories to a lost man, to a narco cop named Bobby Dowd.

  And now Bobby had the horrible knowledge that he'd failed Paco and his little girl. Failed them badly.

  He stumbled as he crossed the street behind a low-slung sedan. He heard the mellow tones of Conjunto Bernal flowing from someone's radio. He glanced at a sign as he turned the next corner. Five more blocks to a safe haven. He was off the hard stuff for good. No more crack, no more black.

  Two hookers called to him in Spanish as he crossed their territory; he knew by their voices they were stoned—black tar, chiva, Mexican white, whatever their pimp supplied. When Bobby didn't respond the hookers laughed and lazily peppered him with insults.

  Three more blocks and a place to disappear.

  He felt the tail before he recognized the low throb of a Mercedes engine. Without looking back, he automatically picked up pace, scanning for an escape route. From the corner of his eye he caught sight of a narrow opening between buildings. He had no idea if it was a dead end or a way out, but he cut sideways, out of options. Running flat out, he heard footsteps behind him. He ducked past a pile of trash, past a pair of street cats tangling. Their agonized yowls should have made his hair stand up, but all he heard was the sound of footsteps at his heels.

  As he ran, Bobby Dowd braced himself for a bullet or a blade between his shoulders. But the end of the tunnel came first—the dead end. Nobody shot him. Instead, they slammed him into the filthy cinder-block wall. Pain electrified every nerve in his body—he flashed on Wile E. Coyote ramrod stiff and dynamite-charred but still breathing—and then darkness kissed him on both eyes.

  CHAPTER SIX

  AT TWO O'CLOCK, Sylvia finished a turkey sandwich in her office and thought about closing up for the day. She had fulfilled her obligations—the court custody hearing and the session with Serena. Nothing else was on her schedule, the open page in her appointment book was blank. It would stay that way. Albert Kove might have lured her prematurely from her sabbatical—she had allowed that to happen for the child's sake, but she still had a book to finish, a contract to fulfill.

  In the hour since Serena's departure, Sylvia had organized files and made one phone call to her editor in New York for a long-distance discussion of a deadline extension. Broken Bonds: The Search for the Lost Father—the book was nonfiction like her first, but less academic, more personal. It was based on a series of case studies; the individuals included inmates, a teacher, a doctor, a few high-profile faces. Sylvia's personal story opened and closed the book—or would if the private investigator she'd hired to track down her long-missing father would get on the stick. It was difficult to write a last chapter when you didn't know how the story ended.

  When it came to extending the book's deadline, Sylvia's editor had been sympathetic but uncooperative, offering only a ribald riddle in parting: "What did Little Red Riding Hood say to the Big Bad Wolf? Hurry up and eat me before Grandma gets home."

  Sylvia sat back in her chair. The office was quiet. Kove was in a session with a client. Marjorie, the Forensic Evaluation Unit's secretary, had walked two blocks to the downtown post office to mail letters. Sylvia rested her feet on the desk, aiming scraps of wadded paper at the wastebasket. Absently, she studied the view of the Diego Building's courtyard. The apricot trees had lost most of their leaves, while the foliage of the Russian olive shimmered in the watery sunlight. But her mind wasn't on the shifting light or the fall colors. Her thoughts centered on Serena.

  For the past hour, the child's drawing had lain on Sylvia's desk. Repeatedly, the grim, moody image had caught her eye and her imagination. Now she let her fingers play over the crayon colors, twisting the page, turning the world upside down . . . her focus softened—and the cross, the house, the letters disappeared. Sylvia sat forward. The reversed image swam in her vision. Positive. Negative.

  When she let the white background surge forward in her view, the X's resembled eyes, the house became a snout, the cross jutted out like the forked tongue of a beast. Consciously or not, the child had drawn the face of a demon.

  Sylvia flipped through her Rolodex and reached for the telephone. She dialed an international exchange and listened to the short, quick rings. A sleepy-sounding woman answered, indignantly spouting French. Sylvia didn't understand one word of the tirade. She simply repeated, "Dr. Tompkins, merci," until her peer was summoned to the telephone.

  Margaret Tompkins was a child psychiatrist who
taught at the university in Albuquerque when she wasn't living in Paris.

  After a quick greeting, Sylvia went straight to the point: "I'm working with a child—court-ordered. I may not have much time with her." She filled Margaret in on Serena's background—as much as they knew. The psychiatrist came back with a dozen questions. During a pause that seemed longer because of the miles between them, Sylvia said, "Margaret, last winter, when you presented your paper to the A.P.A. . . . two of the case studies were selectively mute children."

  Margaret Tompkins sneezed and said something incomprehensible. It took Sylvia a moment to realize the psychiatrist was talking to someone in French. She waited and finally heard words she understood.

  "You think this is selective mutism?" Another sneeze. "That will be interesting for you. I wish I was a bit closer so I could look at her myself." She sniffled. "You described abnormality in her physical movements—"

  "She seems . . . stiff."

  "A frozen gait? And she's not communicating verbally—we don't know if she was verbal in her home situation—and we don't have a normal situation for comparison. At the moment, no family background, no reports from school, no medical history." Dr. Tompkins blew her nose. "Well, my dear, you've got your work cut out for you."

  "What about field research?"

  "A few papers have been published, but there really aren't reams floating around out there. I am glad they stopped calling it elective mutism—everyone thinks these kids won't talk because they're just plain stubborn. Not true." She sniffled again. "Try the Internet. Chess and Thomas published something; it's more than ten years old, but it still holds water."

  Selective mutism described children who were physically capable of speech and who might even be socially dominant inside the family setting—but they became "frozen" out in the world. If Sylvia remembered correctly, the rare childhood disorder had several basic parameters: a close-knit and often culturally alienated family situation; an overprotective mother figure and an overly attached child; identity and personality issues for a child who tended to be shy, withdrawn, and oversensitive from birth.