Child of Silence (15 page)

It was the least he could do.

“Don't speed; stay with the traffic,” Bo told the BMW as she joined the northbound traffic on Sunset Cliffs Boulevard. The landscape crawled beside her like a slow-motion travelogue. The San Diego River, flat as a mirror. Dog Beach on the left, where a man in a three-piece suit stood ankle-deep in sand, watching a long-haired dachshund sniff the cadaver of a small shark. Mildred loved Dog Beach. Bo hoped Estrella would take the little dog on outings there if something happened, and she couldn't do it herself.

The thought of Mildred alone brought tears to her eyes. She wanted to pull off the road and cry. Mildred had been a birthday gift from Mark, thirteen years ago. In another life, before a trucker hauling Vermont marble to a construction site in Poughkeepsie discovered Mary Laurie O'Reilly, dead beside the New York Thruway.

The little fox terrier was a link to a past Bo liked to remember. A time when she and Mark were going to work with native people. Bo had done a painting of a Navajo mother and child that UNICEF wanted to buy for their Christmas card series. It would have launched a career in socially aware art. But then Laurie was dead and Bo couldn't stem the crashing tide of thoughts—the racing, crazy roller-coaster ride of ideas and feelings coming so fast she couldn't finish a sentence. Finally, she hadn't been able to talk at all and was hospitalized for three months. The only thing that hadn't changed when she came out was Mildred.

Far out to sea the marine layer hovered, a gray band of haze curving with the horizon. From its depths Bo thought she could hear the distant wail of Caillech Bera. The hag, haunting every windswept crossroad.

The image roused something deep within Bo.

“Aye, an’ ye'll not be havin' me this time, Cally!” she yelled through trembling lips. “Ye'll have ta wait!”

Her grandmother's words. The familiar brogue. A source of strength when there was nothing else.

Bo wiped her tears on the sleeve of her sweatshirt and negotiated the complicated series of curving turns that would take her through the resorts fringing Mission Bay and into the old community of Pacific Beach. Minutes crept by with glacial stealth. Traffic. Out-of-season tourists with boogie-boards who'd turn blue after two minutes in the Pacific and then tell everyone back home they'd been surfing.

Finally. A right turn on Garnet, up a block, a left on Bayard—4917.

The house was a bungalow like all the others in the area. Wood frame, painted in gray and cream. A deck on the second story would provide a view of the sea. A child's bicycle with training wheels lay on its side in the grass. The Chandlers had children, or a child, of their own.

Bo parked the BMW across the Chandlers' driveway, but left the motor rµnning.

What in hell now
,
Bradley
?

Lights on. Cars in the drive. Everything looked normal. Dinnertime. They were probably eating. No squad cars, no Surf 'n' Sun rental cars. The men with guns hadn't arrived yet. But they would, and soon.

Bo rummaged under the seven-grain bread in her purse and found her ID badge. Clipping it to her sweatshirt, she hurried up the walk and knocked at the door. The man who answered sized her up in seconds, his eyes betraying that wariness Bo knew only too well.

Too late she remembered her uncombed hair, freshly washed and flying from her head in an electric tangle of silver-red curls. Bleary eyes from crying. No makeup. Dressed in sweats. Not a pretty picture.

Richard Chandler had seen what she was immediately. A crazy. Inappropriate. To be feared.

“Just came by to drop off a box ofclothes,” she mentioned casually. It was standard, when a child was placed in foster care. The social worker would bring the child's things from home, when possible, to save San Diego County the expense of providing wardrobes for thousands of kids every year. Except Weppo hadn't come from home. There were no clothes, no toys, no artifacts of a history.

Richard Chandler looked puzzled.

“What clothes?” he asked. “I don't see any clothes.”

“In the car,” Bo mumbled lamely. “Wanted to make sure I had the right address. . .”

You’re blowing it
,
Bradley
.
Do something
.

But what? The guy wasn't going to let her in the house. And anything she said would be written off as incomprehensible raving, even though Chandler would know about the attack on Weppo in the hospital. She wouldn't be able to speak slowly enough to be taken seriously, wouldn't be able to make sense.

“There's danger,” Delilah Brasseur's words thrummed in the air. “So much danger it can't be told. Don't let nothin' happen to my baby. . .”

Bo glanced nervously at an immense jade plant beside the steps. Its fat, green leaves seemed ready to split from the pressure within them.

“Well?” Richard Chandler scowled.

And then a scream. A guttural, familiar, croaking scream as a little boy with huge tan eyes and hair like spun wire propelled himself past the man in the door and into Bo's arms.

“Weppo!” she breathed, hugging the small body tightly.

She wanted to cry, yell, sob, give expression to the tumult of emotion raging in her. And that would be the worst thing she could do.

“Let's go get your things out of the car,” she chirped at the boy in her arms, casting what she hoped was a sweet smile over her shoulder at the balding man in khakis standing in the door. “Just a few things. We can carry them, can't we, tiger?”

All the back end workers called little boys “tiger.” Bo hoped she sounded like one of them.

Richard Chandler had seen her badge. Didn't want to appear rude to the agency employing and paying him and his wife to care for foster children. Bo hoped the Chandlers were new at foster parenting—a pro would tackle her to the ground before permitting what she was about to do.

Pretending that the passenger's-side door was locked, Bo shrugged in mock exasperation and carried Weppo to the driver's side, and put him down. Predictably, he scrambled into the car as soon as she opened the door. Kids would do that. Especially a kid accustomed to confinement. Cars were a promise of movement, of something interesting to do.

Richard Chandler's scowl deepened as he started down the walk.

“Hey!

No time left.

Bo flung herself into the car and jammed the gearshift into drive. The door slammed shut by itself when her foot hit the gas.

Get out of here
!

Up to the corner of Bayard and Law. Right on Law three blocks to a street with no sign. Right again. Bo felt like a rat in a maze. Chandler would be after her. Maybe he'd call the cops first. As a licensed foster parent he would have been trained to do that. Surely he'd do that. But where should she go?

Weppo watched her, wide-eyed, from the passenger seat. Trusting. Interested.

“Don't let nothin' happen to my baby,” a contralto voice whispered over the hum of the engine.

“Don't worry, Delilah Brasseur, whoever you are, “ Bo yelled aloud. “I've
got
your baby.”

Quit yelling and go somewhere
,
Bradley
.

But where? Interstate 5 was the main artery out of town. North, toward L.A., and south to Mexico. But that would be the first place the cops would look. Forget 1-5.

Turning left on Grand, Bo followed the crowded street inland from the coast until it forked. The left fork was Balboa, which wended upward toward the residential community of Clairemont. Houses, apartments, condos, quiet shopping centers. The central bedroom community of San Diego. Nobody would expect her to flee there.

Weppo grinned and made the beer-drinking sign. The ride was a treat. He wanted a snack to celebrate.

At the corner of Balboa and Genesee Bo swerved into a gas station. If she were going somewhere, she'd have to have gas. Weppo jumped up and down on the front seat as she pumped, making his beer sign over and over.

It's dinnertime
,
Bradley
.
He's hungry
.
But who taught him that sign
?

College kids favored it. Bo remembered the drug addict in a squash-colored car. “White male. Young. Maybe twenty-three,” Bill Denny had said. The right age. Had he taught Weppo. . . ? Another memory intruded.

“I called the daddy to come get him, an’ he did, but if somebody tried to kill the child out there, that mean the daddy already come to harm.”

The daddy
!

Bo shivered, paying for the gas. The young man dead of an overdose on a downtown street had been Weppo's father. But who was he? Why had the housekeeper for the Rowes called him to take Weppo away? Away from what?

Bo thought of warm coals beneath gray ash in a fireplace. A SpaghettiOs can. Weppo's father
had
meant to come back.

In the car the boy was growing impatient.

“Eat! Now!” the hand sign demanded.

“Your father is dead,” Bo pronounced through tears.

Weppo rubbed his stomach under a navy blue T-shirt with “San Diego Padres” imprinted on it, and signed adamantly. Across the parking lot fronting a Kohl's department store was a small Mexican restaurant. Bo eased the BMW behind it and parked.

“We'll eat,” she smiled, cupping her right hand toward her mouth in the double movement that meant both eat and food in American Sign Language. Weppo copied the sign exactly, although Bo was sure he hadn't made the mental connection between the sign and the thing it represented. That would take time.

“And this,” Bo pointed to the building, “is a restaurant.” She made the crossed-fingers sign under her lips. Weppo duplicated it, studied the building's interior, looked at the cook dropping bent tacos into vats of hot oil, made the sign again.

Their chicken tacos would be ready in three minutes.

In the ladies' room Weppo attended to toileting with dispatch and then watched Bo attempt to make herself look less like the Madwoman of Chaillot. If the cops caught up with them, she wanted to look presentable for jail. As she shakily drew lipstick across her lips, the boy tugged on her shirt, pointed to his chin and drew his finger downward in a crook—the ASL sign for red.

The lipstick did little to create the illusion of calm, collected sanity she would need. She hadn't slept in two days. Even with the flesh-colored coverup stick, the skin around her eyes appeared greenish purple. Corpselike. Demented.

In the car she pulled apart another sedative and poured a little of its white powder into her Coke. Shed nurse it, drink it slowly on the way. The way to where?

Weppo, invigorated by his taco and orange juice, bounced on the front seat. There was no way to keep him still, keep him in his seat belt. And it was dangerous.

Overwhelmed, Bo eyed her drugged Coke and thought of offering the little boy a sip. No wonder somebody'd had him on Thorazine. He was all over the place.

But then Laurie had been that way too. It was still no excuse for drugging a child.

At a variety store in the shopping center Bo stopped again and took Weppo inside. Coloring books, paper, crayons, felt-tip pens, and a flashlight. It might work. From the trunk of her car she took the sleeping bag always kept there, and unrolled it across the backseat.

“There!” she signed, lifting him in. “You stay there.”

Back on Balboa the streetlights were on, and the illuminated highway signs: “163 North,” one indicated.

Where did that go? Bo tried to remember. Didn't it turn into 15? She'd been on 15 before, on her way. . .

That's it
,
Bradley
.

Fifteen would take her out of town, into the desert. Fifteen was the way toward the Coso rock drawings, toward Owens Valley and Lone Pine. That's where she'd go. To the mystical figures painted on rock a thousand years ago. Bo could hear them sing to her. A chant of quiet, arid calm. And wasn't Annie Garcia in Lone Pine? For a pow-wow? Maybe Bo could find the old Indian woman somehow. Maybe Annie, and the rock drawings, would help her.

This is craziness
,
Bradley
.
Delusion
.
Do you know what you're doing
?

Bo turned on the radio. Mozart. It would do.

Once she got somewhere, got Weppo to safety, she'd call Estrella. And if the police had captured the killers, she'd turn herself and Weppo in. But not until then.

In the dusk she saw the gleaming edge of a full moon rising.

Great
.
As if everything else weren't enough
.

A full moon is not the friend of brains with strange chemistry. Bo knew the danger like a half-forgotten tune. The genesis, in fact, of the word “lunatic.” She swallowed a sip of the Coke and sighed. There would be nothing poetic in this moon. Not for her. There would be nothing but danger.