Moonbird Boy (Bo Bradley Mysteries, Book Four)

by Abigail Padgett

  "I'm Bo Bradley, and I want you to know how sorry I am about your loss," Bo said, extending one hand as the other held Molly's straining leash as the dogs performed their investigatory sniffing ritual. "I know this is a terrible time for you."

  The hand that clasped Bo's was cool and firm. "Thank you," Ann Keith answered. "The only thing that has kept me going since Adam's attorney called to tell me that my son was dead is that Charles is still alive. I still have a grandson. You can't imagine how important that is to me, and how frightened I am. Please, shall we sit down somewhere and talk?"

  Bo looked at the postcard expanse of Dog Beach under a cloudless blue sky, waves breaking against the stone jetty extending toward a bobbing white buoy, a young couple watching two golden retrievers chase sandpipers, and wondered how Mort Wagman could be dead and his mother standing here holding three terriers on matching red leashes. The two realities were mutually exclusive, she thought. A clean, morning beach. A frightened, grieving woman. With dogs.

  "Let's go over there." She pointed to the beach boundary where the San Diego River emptied into the sea. "We can sit in the sand and the dogs can run free."

  Molly, attempting to keep up with the Jack Russells, fell squarely on her nose twice before Bo picked her up and carried her across the expanse of sand. "My dog, my fox terrier, died just over a month ago," Bo said as they struggled through the soft sand. "And somebody's been using that fact to harass me, playing tapes of a barking terrier on my answering machine among other things. Are you that person?"

  Ann Keith's face paled visibly. "How clever of you to disarm me with polite offers of sympathy before leveling accusations of demented cruelty. I have no idea what you're talking about, nor any idea why you'd assume I would do such a thing. Please tell me where my grandson is and we can terminate this interview right now!"

  She had stopped cold in the sand and removed her dark glasses to glare at Bo from Mort Wagman's deep blue eyes. The effect was unnerving, but Bo ignored it to search the woman's face for telltale signs of subterfuge, evasion, malice. The signs were absent.

  "I apologize," Bo said. "Last week I followed Zachary Crooked Owl and another man to your home in St. Louis and saw the dogs. That's when it occurred to me that you might have something to do with these things somebody's doing to me. I'm sure they're connected in some way to Ghost Flower's problems and Mort's death, but I don't know how. There may be a connection to MedNet, and to the shark attack on Hopper Mead. But right now I don't know anything, and confronting you with that was a way to eliminate one variable, quickly."

  Ann Lee Keith's head was tilted to one side in, Bo thought, a terrierlike attitude of puzzlement. "You followed someone named Crooked Owl to my home?" she repeated. "A shark attack? And who is Mort? Nothing you have said to me since we left the parking lot has made any sense whatever. And I still know nothing about my grandson."

  "Let's just sit down," Bo said, throwing a piece of driftwood for the Jack Russells. "Some of what I have to say may be upsetting. But first let me tell you that Charles, whom I know as Bird, is fine. I may be able to arrange for you to see him after we talk. But first I need to know why Mort deliberately severed his ties with you."

  "Who is Mort?" Ann Keith asked again, sitting cross-legged in the sand and shaking her head. "You keep saying that name."

  Bo sat Molly between herself and the other woman and found a stick for the puppy to chew on. "I knew your son, Adam, as Mort Wagman," she began. "We were in a psych rehab facility together, Ghost Flower Lodge. Mort's lawyer may not have explained all of this to you when he called to tell you what had happened. It's run by the Neji Band of Kumeyaay Indians in the desert about an hour from here. Mort, er, Adam and I became friends, Dr. Keith. He was kind to me even while he was sick. I thought of him as a brother, sort of. I'm doing my best to look out for his son."

  "Oh, God, Mort Wagman, of course." Ann Keith bit her lip and tried to control the tears spilling from beneath her sunglasses. "That's exactly what he'd call himself. I just can't believe he's gone, Bo. Mort Wagman. God, of course."

  "He was kind," Bo said quietly, taking the other woman's hand. "He was smart and funny and successful, too. But what I'll never forget is that he was kind to me."

  "Thank you, Bo. And please call me Ann. I want to hear everything you can tell me about my son."

  "He had schizophrenia," Bo began.

  "I know that. What I don't know is everything that's happened to him in the last two and a half years. I hired detectives, everything. They couldn't locate him. I was afraid he was dead and Charles lost somewhere with strangers."

  Bo explained Mort's career as she watched the Jack Russells running toward a seagull. They looked like white birds in formation, their movements perfectly synchronized against the background of water. Molly scampered to join them and they slowed to play with her briefly before she turned and ran back to Bo.

  "He went off his meds to do a commercial?" Ann Keith said in disbelief.

  "Yeah, for a lot of money. And your detectives couldn't have tried very hard to find him, Ann. He did stand-up comedy in clubs; he was on TV, for crying out loud. How could they miss him?"

  Sighing, Ann Keith took off her shoes and poured sand through her fingers onto her feet. "Because I told them to look in the wrong places," she said. "I told them to look in flophouses and SROs, state mental hospitals, filthy board-and-cares, even jails. I have a description of every unidentified young white male corpse buried in every potter's field in this country in the last two years," she went on, arching her head backward, eyes tightly shut. "There are hundreds, Bo. And so many of them are just labeled 'John Doe, known to be mentally ill, no address.' With every report I'd rejoice that it wasn't Adam, and then I'd remember that it was somebody, and that there was another mother somewhere, or father, brother, or sister..."

  "It must have been hell for you," Bo acknowledged. "I don't understand why Mort, why Adam put you through that."

  "When he left with Charles he wrote me a long letter explaining that he had to be on his own, free of my control. He told me not to worry, that he'd be in touch again when he'd made a life for himself, when he felt like a man. I got one postcard over a year ago, from New York City. He said he and Charles were fine and he was 'almost there.' Then nothing until about three months ago."

  "And?"

  "It was a letter, with a Las Vegas postmark. He said he was working, that he had plenty of money. He said he was ready to come home again, for a visit. He said," she paused to inhale deeply, "that he would be bringing a young woman to meet me, that they were talking about marriage. Then I heard nothing until a stranger phoned in the middle of the night saying that Adam was dead and if I didn't withdraw my support for... he said 'this Indian deal'... I'd never see Charles again. Later Adam's attorney in Los Angeles called about... about the burial. I arranged to have Adam's body flown to St. Louis and buried next to his father. Then somebody left a note in my mailbox..."

  Bo frowned. "That was Zach. I was there, Ann. I saw them leave that note."

  "Then you can help put this Zach in jail."

  Bo wiped sand from Molly's nose with her shirttail. "What's your connection to MedNet?" she asked.

  In the silence that followed, the Jack Russells careened in an arc against the edge of the sea and then ran like small white deer to fling themselves beside Ann Lee Keith on the sand.

  "It's a long story," she answered over the sound of panting, "involving a man named Alexander Morley."

  "Morley died last night of a heart attack in Phoenix."

  "Good." The older woman smiled bleakly. "On my next vacation I'll take a trip to dance on his grave."

  "And the story?"

  "May shock you," Keith said softly.

  Chapter 29

  Bo squinted at the sun, which seemed to be creating elongated bubbles in the stratosphere. She could see them at the edge of her field of vision, pulsing in and out of visibility. An optical illusion, of course. It meant she needed to get out of
the glare.

  "I'm not easily shocked," she told Ann Keith, "but I am, among other things, manic-depressive, and the sun is beginning to do weird things with the air. Usually it's still cloudy at this time of the morning. My apartment is only a few blocks from here. Would you mind if we...?"

  "Of course," Ann Keith said, standing immediately and clipping the terriers to their red leashes. "Light sensitivity seems to be shaping up as a cornerstone of manic-depressive illness, doesn't it? It's even been documented in children of manic-depressive parents and may actually be a causal factor in the etiology of the illness."

  "You seem to know a lot about this," Bo said, carrying Molly with one hand wrapped under the round, pink stomach. The puppy made paddling motions with her paws.

  "I'm a neurophysiologist ... or was."

  "Was?"

  "What I am now is merely a teacher of neurophysiology. I'll tell you the whole story. It's surprising that Adam didn't tell you himself."

  "Neither of us was in great shape when we first met," Bo said. "I'm afraid he wasn't making a lot of sense and I wasn't listening, anyway."

  "No wonder you got along so well," Ann Keith laughed.

  It was a rich, husky laugh that sounded, Bo thought, like wooden poker chips poured onto a felt table. Her father had a box of wooden poker chips, red, white, and blue. She could almost see the colored discs drifting in the air beside an empty lifeguard tower on the beach to her right. It was definitely time to get out of the sun.

  "Your home feels comfortable; I like it," Keith said after they were settled in Bo's living room. Molly had gone to her box for a nap, and the Jack Russells were positioned like Victorian statuary at the feet of their mistress.

  "So tell me," Bo said, breathing mist from the iced Coke in her hand.

  "Adam was always a strange child," Keith began without preamble, carefully placing her iced tea on one of the raffia coasters Bo had found at a garage sale for a nickel apiece. "He never outgrew his night terrors, had learning problems that defied diagnosis, but also occasional bursts of talent and brilliance, especially where words, word games, poetry, drama, that sort of thing were involved. Adam never knew his father, my husband, Duncan. Dunk was killed in the crash of a private plane when Adam was a year and a half old.

  "When Adam was three he began to memorize cigarette commercials on television. Then it was a fascination with the names of plants, which he'd invariably recite in three syllables. 'Oak' was 'the oak tree,' 'tulip' was 'to a lip,' etc. Nothing clinical, you understand, just strange. Accompanying this was a complete inability to comprehend parts of a whole, fractions. To the moment of his death I imagine that Adam still thought one fourth plus one fourth equaled two eighths. So by his sophomore year in high school he was in remedial math classes while making A’s in English and, particularly, in French. He was nearly obsessed with French, listened to French popular music, subscribed to Paris Match."

  Here she stopped to watch for some reaction from Bo. When there was none, she said, "Do you know what ‘mort’ means in French?"

  "Um, dead," Bo answered. "But that doesn't necessarily mean he named himself 'dead.' He may have chosen 'Mort' because of Mort Sahl, the famous stand-up comic. Maybe Sahl was his inspiration."

  "Please let me finish, Bo," Ann Keith said, stroking one of the terriers with a trembling hand. "Adam's schizophrenia hit during the summer after his sophomore year. It hit suddenly, it hit hard, and it never let up. He was only sixteen. By the time he was eighteen he'd been hospitalized over thirty times, nearly starved to death in the streets once before the police found him, had to have two toes amputated after they froze. Every medication available at the time was tried, nothing worked. On his eighteenth birthday Adam told me he didn't want to live if there was no hope he'd ever get well. He was barely shaving, just a skinny, terrified boy. A month later he tried to kill himself."

  Bo was silent, felt her apartment walls detach from the ordinary world and become nothing but a space in which she and Ann Lee Keith already knew a reality too painful to define for those on the outside. Her sister, Laurie, Bo remembered with love, had been a slender youngster of twenty when her acute depression left her no option but death.

  "There were subsequent attempts," Keith continued, her head bowed, "each more serious than the last. Adam was missing for weeks at a time, living in the streets. Late in that year he brought a girl to the house. He said the girl was pregnant, and that it was his child."

  "Bird's mother," Bo interjected. "Who is she? Where is she

  "She called herself Frito," Ann Keith sighed. "I arranged for her to enter a church-sponsored residential program for pregnant teenagers. She told the staff there that her name was Cyndi Lauper, but of course that's just the name of a singer they all admired. That's the name on Charles's birth certificate, on the line where it says, 'Mother.' Cyndi Lauper. She was, obviously, a deeply troubled young woman. She used drugs, left the program several times only to return when she was sick and hungry. The day after Charles was born, she left and didn't come back. A month later her body was found in an abandoned building frequented by drug users. I like to think that she fought to stay alive long enough to give birth to her baby. Her body is buried in our family plot. Anyway, after she left they called me to come and get the baby, or else convince Adam to release him for adoption.

  "Adam was lost in his own torment, not competent to make that, or any, decision. I had taken the legal steps necessary to sign the release form myself, but something made me find Adam and force him to accompany me to the facility where they were keeping the baby. He was psychotic that day, but fighting hard to keep it under control. When he saw the baby, he..."

  Bo studied the melting ice in her Coke as the other woman took a deep breath and then said, "These memories are so difficult now. You don't happen to have a cigarette, do you?"

  Bo grinned. "As a matter of fact, yes. It was your son, by the way, who badgered me into quitting. But I got a little manic the other night and bought a pack. Only smoked one. They're out on the deck."

  "It figures," Ann Keith nodded minutes later, pacing the redwood boards still shaded by the building and taking shallow drags on one of Bo's cigarettes. "He was always trying to get me to quit. I finally did, but he never knew. Amazing how one never stops craving them, isn't it?"

  Bo had pulled a deck chair into the shade for herself. "What happened when he saw his son?" she prompted.

  "He began to cry, to sob. The baby looked so much like him, you see. I don't know what was going through Adam's mind, but he finally said three things. He said the baby would be named Charles, because Baudelaire wrote ‘Fleurs du Mal’, and Duncan, for his father. He begged me not to send the baby away. And then... and then he begged me either to find a way to help him, or to let him die. It was an ultimatum. He was absolutely desperate and absolutely serious. I knew that the next suicide attempt would be the last."

  "But there was no suicide," Bo said. "Adam got better."

  Ann Keith lit another cigarette and watched a pelican glide by, far at sea. "I've never told anyone what I'm about to tell you," she said. "It can't be proven; Adam's body has been cremated. And if you repeat this, I'll deny ever having said it."

  Bo measured the woman, the manicured hands and red linen blazer, the intelligent blue eyes that both were and weren't Mort Wagman's eyes. Ann Lee Keith had once been a woman of great feeling, even drama, Bo recognized. That earlier personality lay in patches now beneath the mature one, hammered by experience to a steady, muted glow. Ann Keith was a survivor, Bo sensed, and a decent person.

  "Why would you tell me whatever this is?" she asked.

  "You have the power to give my grandson to me, or to keep him from me. If I were in your position I would want to know everything I could before making that decision. You have asked why Adam severed contact with me for over two years. I could lie to you, blame his behavior on the illness. But you'd know I was lying, wouldn't you? Meanwhile, I believe my grandson is in danger. Surely you can see
that nothing but the whole truth will do now."

  Intuition throbbed around Bo. It felt like a warm cloak on the skin rather than a process of the mind. It was what her grandmother had called "the sight," even though, Bo thought, it involved feeling more than vision.

  "I've already seen the whole truth," Bo said, standing to face her friend's mother. "I saw it in your son's kindness and see it now in your courage. Don't tell me your secret. It isn't necessary in any event. The court will release Charles to you; you're his grandmother, you want him, and you can provide for him. Meanwhile, I'll release him to you immediately. All it will take is a phone call."

  The Jack Russells were circling, curious, aware that something had changed. Bo scratched one behind his ear as she watched Ann Keith stub out her cigarette thoughtfully. The activity of the dogs and the scent of cigarette smoke reminded Bo of Mort at the lodge, pacing in a circle beside her, urging her to quit smoking, telling her he'd stop pacing if... But there was something else. Mort had said something else, Bo remembered. He'd said dogs circle around because their ancestors circled to nest in high grass. He paced in a circle, he said, because somebody, "somebody in my family," he said, put animal brains in his head.

  Bo felt her eyes move upward from the dog to those of Ann Keith in dawning realization. Dr. Ann Lee Keith, a neurophysiologist renowned for her research on fetal cell implants! The deck, the dogs, the sea—everything seemed to diminish and fade in contrast to the awareness unfolding in Bo's mind.