Child of Silence
Authors: Abigail Padgett
Tags: #Mystery, #San Diego, #Bipolar Disorder, #deaf, #Suspense, #Piaute
| Child of Silence | |
| Bo Bradley [1] | |
| Abigail Padgett | |
| Warner Books (1992) | |
| Rating: | *** |
| Tags: | Mystery, San Diego, Bipolar Disorder, deaf, Suspense, Piaute |
First in the award-winning Bo Bradley mystery series, CHILD OF SILENCE introduces the much-loved sleuth whose big heart and quirky wit help her deal with both an impossible job and a psychiatric disorder her Irish grandmother called "the sight." An amateur artist, Bo would rather be painting, but when a child is in danger she risks everything, even her life.
Thirty miles east of San Diego, in the dusty heart of the California high desert, lies the Barona Ranch Indian Reservation. This is desolate country, marked by lone pines, winding canyons, and granite hills. It is here that the boy was found, tied to a mattress in an abandoned mountain shack.
The case is assigned to Bo Bradley, a child abuse investigator with San Diego’s juvenile court system. It is meaningful job, and it pays for Bo’s few indulgences, like her books on Indian lore and the huge canvasses for her paintings, based on ancient Native American rock drawings.
Bo takes her profession seriously, and she abides by its cardinal rule; never get involved with the child-victim. This has not always been easy for a sensitive woman whose emotions ride perilously close to the surface. Now, with this four-year-old boy, it proves impossible.
He is a non-Indian who calls himself Weppo, and he has been classified as mentally impaired, making him a high risk for abuse. But something in Weppo’s intense gleaming gaze strikes a deep chord in Bo. She knows that look. In the eyes of her late, deaf sister, she has seen it before. Weppo is not at all impaired; he is deaf.
Inspired by this new knowledge, Bo sets out to interview the Paiute mystic, the woman they call “Seize the Dark,” who found the boy. Driving along pine scented trails into the Indian country she so loves, Bo feels as if a strange force is leading her onward, an intuition that builds when she meets “Seize the Dark” and the old crone confides that “spirits” led her to Weppo; “I saw the boy with blood on his mouth.”
After visiting the shack, Bo wonders, had the deaf child been tied up because there was no other way of saying “Stay here. I’ll be back”? An inner voice tells her as much. And she knows she must listen, for it also tells her that Weppo is in great danger.
A poisoned-tipped bullet soon proves the point–as two thugs break into the hospital and attempt to murder the boy. Pushed beyond the point of no return and into a dangerous manic state, Bo bends the rules and swings into action.
Risking personal involvement and professional ruin at the hands of her by-the-book supervisor, she vows to unearth the truth surrounding this child of silence. It is a mission that will take her from the ancient sands of the California desert to the gilded mansions of Houston’s political set and back, as Bo Bradley mounts a desperate struggle to save Weppo–and herself–from certain death.
Child of Silence
Abigail Padgett
Quoted lines of the Paiute chant by Wovoka are used by permission of the Bear Tribe Publishing Company in cooperation with The Draco Foundation and are taken from Evelyn Eaton's “Snowy Earth Comes Gliding” © 1974 by The Draco Foundation.
Copyright © 1993-2010, by Abigail Padgett All rights reserved.
Child of Silence
originally appeared in print by: Mysterious Press books are published by Warner Books, Inc., 1271 Avenue of the Americas, New York, NY 10020, a Time Warner Company. The Mysterious Press name and logo are trademarks of Warner Books, Inc.
First printing: January 1993
Ebook produced in the United States of America
Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form, or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise), without the prior written permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book. The scanning, uploading, and distribution of this book via the Internet or via any other means without the permission of the publisher is illegal and punishable by law. Please purchase only authorized electronic editions, and do not participate in or encourage electronic piracy of copyrighted materials. Your support of the author’s rights is appreciated.
Digital Editions (.mobi and .epub) produced by:
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,
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Cover Design by: Deron Lee Associates,
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Author Photograph by: michèle magnin
Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data
Padgett, Abigail.
Child of silence / Abigail Padgett.
p. cm.
ISBN 0-89296-488-X I. Title.
PS3566.A3197C48 1993
8i3'.54—dc20 91-51186
CIP
To writers Mary Austin and Evelyn Eaton, who at different times loved and wrote about a lost desert valley in California and its native people, the Paiute.
To Dr. Dennis Agallianos of Vermont's Brattleboro Retreat - gentleman and wisest of shrinks - for psychiatric technical advice.
To Dr. Tom Humphries of the San Diego Community College District for technical advice on hearing impairment.
For Ruth Cavin
And in memory of Tarot D
3:00 a.m. Fog
Wisps of fog drifting through the open balcony doors of Bo Bradley's San Diego beach apartment wafted aimlessly and then evaporated. But not before settling damply on her unruly mane of silvery auburn hair. And not before capturing the attention of an almond-shaped structure called the amygdala, nestled deep within Bo's brain.
More highly evolved in dogs than in people, the amygdala responds to scent. In the more imaginative, it can create whole movies out of a whiff of yeast muffin or a hint of perfume. And prone toward the manic end of a manic-depressive disorder, Bo Bradley was never short of imagination, even in sleep.
Irritated, she stretched her lanky forty-year-old frame beneath the Black Watch plaid sheets she'd found on sale at a linen outlet just last week. She pulled the edge of the top sheet over her nose. Too late. Images called by the scent of fog from inaccessible memory crowded into other landscapes and became mutations. Bo began to dream.
It was the old cottage at Chequesset Neck on Cape Cod Bay where she’d gone every summer as a child. The salt-breezy cottage with its ships-prow porch where her grandmother told stories of Billingsgate sea witches and Gypsy fortune-tellers. Except in the dream the cottage was in ruins, its clapboard roof fallen in on hollow rooms strewn with broken glass.
There was no one in the ravaged rooms but her sister, Laurie, screaming that eerie, croaking scream of hers. A child-Laurie, screaming alone in the ruined cottage. And she was wearing the dress. Gray velvet with the Carrickmacross lace collar that had belonged to their grandmother. The dress Laurie had really worn at twenty. The dress she would wear forever.
Bo wakened to the booming of her own heart and the echo of a scream. Her throat hurt. The scream, she assumed, must have originated there.
“Here we go again,” she muttered at a digital clock radio greenly promoting the fact that it was the middle of the night and Friday as well. “I'm not up for this. I'm really not.”
It was Laurie again. Or the memory of Laurie. Or guilt over Laurie. Or some damn thing. Whatever. But after twelve years Bo knew what to do. Twelve years after Laurie's body had been found in a rest area off the New York Thruway with a garden hose running from the exhaust pipe of her car through the drivers-side window, Bo knew exactly what to do. Her all-time favorite shrink, the inimitable Dr. Lois Bittner, had told her how to manage these “occurrences.”
“Immediate exercise!” the wiry little woman yelped cheerfully, as if exercise were the equivalent of a quarter pound of fudge - something to
brighten
over. “Take control! Increase your heart rate. Pump up your body. Don't let the mood pull you into tangential thinking. Remember, der iss
nutting
but reality.”
Lois Bittner, Bo remembered fondly, invariably lapsed into an accent you couldn't cut with an industrial-strength laser when she waxed enthusiastic. Which was often.
Pulling paint-smudged sweats over a tattered old T-shirt of Mark's she sometimes slept in, Bo fumbled for her Nikes under the bed and took a deep breath. Her grandmother would have sniffed at Dr. Bittner.
“It's the sight,” Bridget Mairead O'Reilly explained to her granddaughter. “A gift. Those as has it, well. . . they seem to
know
things, to
see
things as others can't.”
It would be fun, Bo thought, to lock the two matriarchs in a room and let
them
fight over where to draw the line between intuition and madness. The Irish Catholic grandmother and the German Jewish psychiatrist. Maybe then she could get some sleep. Too bad they were both dead.
In her basket on the floor near an easel, Bo's elderly fox terrier, Mildred, blinked groggily and attempted to wag her stub of a tail.
“Never mind,” Bo reassured the dog. “It's the middle of the night. You don't have to get up. I'm fine.”
Mildred sighed and allowed her white fur eyelids to close. On the easel an egg-tempera pictograph of a bighorn sheep appeared to do the same. “Or am I?” Bo questioned as she opened the door of her apartment to a swirling wall of fog. At this hour it was hard to tell.
Beneath her feet the crooked stone steps that in daylight would angle charmingly toward gull-strewn rocks hissing with foamy breakers were invisible. She felt her way down, holding the railing and fighting a suspicion that familiar paths may not always lead where they always have. What if, unaccountably, the steps just led nowhere? Off into oblivion? Into a black hole? The fog moved in sinuous clumps like a living thing struggling toward some destination of its own.
Warning signals went up. Just little ones, but the snick of their ignition was almost audible. This was it. The thing to watch out for. The acceleration of imagination beyond the boundaries of comfort.
“Cut the crap,” Bo admonished several thousand neural synapses inside her skull. “There is
nothing
but reality!”
It usually worked. It and a lot of exercise, a relentlessly healthy diet, and rigorous elimination of stress. What a joke.
Bo laughed, imagining Dr. Bittner’ s probable response to her current job as a child abuse investigator for San Diego County's Juvenile Court. If there were a more stress-ridden, emotionally wracking form of employment on earth, Bo couldn't name it. Bittner would have calves, Bo knew. Whole litters of them! But Lois Bittner was dead. And the job paid Bo's rent, as long as she didn't let it get to her.