Child of Silence (11 page)

And maybe she did.

There was, he admitted, one helluva lot Mac Rowe didn't know about his wife.

The rental car had developed an annoying squeak somewhere near the left rear wheel. It made Bo think of toys. Old, forgotten toys with squeaking wooden wheels pulled across the floors of attics. She wanted to paint old toys— antiquated trucks and trains and jack-in-the-boxes, dusty rocking horses and glass-eyed dolls with cracking faces. Abandoned toys that might come to life in some dark moment and whisper secrets too evil for human tongues. She could see the painting, done in grays. The doll's mouth, a clown's hat, the frightened eye of the rocking horse—these alone in red. A grim picture, horrifying in its message.

“Is it just me, or is there something wrong in that house?” she asked the steering wheel.

“It's you, it's you. . .” the squeak whined monotonously. “Crazy, crazy, crazy.”

Bo glanced at the sky and realized that she couldn't see the sun. Only an amorphous sphere of light beyond a curtain of haze. Dampness. Ooze. Everywhere.

She wasn't going to be able to keep it together much longer. She had to get home.

“Return, 12:45 p.m. But you just rented the car this morning,” the clerk at the rental car counter noted.

Bo ran her tongue slowly over her upper teeth. “Thank you. I'm aware of that.
Your
job is to be aware that I'm
returning
the car.”

“Just sign here,” the young woman replied edgily. In her uniform she looked oddly like the clerk at Jamail's. Maybe a sister. Or maybe the same person working two jobs?

It happened frequently. People seeming to be other people, as if individuality were merely a tactical disguise beneath which the same personalities might hide. Anywhere. Everywhere. Over and over. In a full-blown mania, Bo recalled with chagrin, a stranger in a parking lot might be her barely remembered first-grade piano teacher. Or a UPS deliveryman the priest who had buried her sister. The thing was to keep it to yourself. Not run toward complete strangers yelling, “Mrs. Doonan? Father Ondek? Oh, I'm sorry, but you looked so much like...”

Lois Bittner hadn't been able to explain it.

“Who knows?” she said with a shrug. “May be just a psychological mechanism. Your psyche is on overload from too much stimulation, and so you create comforting, familiar faces. Or else in that hyperaware state you're picking up things about strangers that really are identical to people you've known, and so you perceive them as looking identical. Who knows? Just remember to keep quiet about it. Reality is that strangers are just strangers. Leave it at that.”

The plane wouldn't board for half an hour. Bo wandered into an airport gift shop, drawn by attractive displays arranged and illuminated to produce precisely this effect. Well, maybe not quite this effect, Bo thought. The little room gleamed. Colors clamored for attention from the covers of magazines and paperbacks. A rack of candy, pinlighted from above, promised toothsome ecstasy. Bo tried on a ten-gallon hat and admired herself in a strategically placed mirror. She looked terrific, an Irish cowgirl. With a hand-crafted feather band, the hat would come only to $238.

Just the thing to wear to court
,
you lunatic
.
Get out of here before you buy electric pencil sharpeners shaped like armadillos for everybody at the office
.

Lois Bittner had told Bo of a man, another manic-depressive, who'd bought Waterford wine decanters costing over half his annual salary for everyone on the faculty at the junior college where he taught Introduction to Accounting. That the man didn't even know most of his fellow instructors was irrelevant. Bo could understand. It was that wild, intense, I-love-everything feeling that came just before things went into warp speed. Just before slipping over into that realm of ominous insight where poisoned trees might glow with radiation from acid rains unleashed by murderous corporations and their puppet politicians. Where nobody would listen and the pain of ceaseless awareness could render you mute and frozen. Paranoid. Catatonic. But not quite.

Bo kept to herself the fact that not once had her “delusions” been anything but an amplified truth that normal people could deny, buffer, filter down to tolerable levels.

“Manic-depressives just lose the ability to ignore,” Dr. Bittner had explained to her. “The world might be a very different place,” she mused once, gazing out her office window at a bleak February afternoon, “if everybody lost that ability just a little bit.”

Bo bought an armload of Houston newspapers and loped away from the gift shop as though it were the gateway to hell, then deliberately took a wrong turn that would provide fifteen minutes of brisk airport hiking until it was time to board the plane. The exercise would help, and nobody would find the notion of a woman dashing through airport corridors even remotely strange. Everybody dashed in airports. Even those who weren't running from madness.

“Please direct your attention to the video screens for a brief explanation of our safety procedures,” the cabin attendant urged over the plane's PA system after Bo had boarded and found her seat. No one paid the slightest attention, including Bo. If the plane crashed, they'd all be dead anyway. The plane's safety equipment, flotation devices, and emergency exits would be discovered to be jammed, dysfunctional, and not inspected since the craft's maiden flight in 1983. Bo could hear the eleven o'clock news report. “... investigation of the tragic October airline disaster that claimed 158 lives revealed today that safety mechanisms that might have saved half the doomed passengers failed to operate. . .” It was just a fact of life. Bo found it comforting that for once everybody else knew the truth too.

After the plane forced itself off the ground, Bo opened Weppo's case file on her tray table. On a clean narrative sheet she wrote what she knew so far.

“Four-year-old deaf boy is found tied up in a mountain shack. He has had no ASL training, but somebody has taught him to say his name, which comes out like Weppo. He's smart; I'm sure of it. He hasn't been starved or abused, but he's very pale. (Kept indoors somewhere?) Whoever brought him to the shack and tied him to the mattress fed him SpaghettiOs and built a fire to keep him warm before leaving him alone there. Whoever it was probably tied him to the mattress to keep him from running away. Whoever it was
intended
to come back, but didn't.”

“Annie Garcia remembered the license number of a car she saw. A car stolen in Houston and found in San Diego with a dead drug addict in it. I found a grocery receipt from a Houston grocery where the car was parked. This can't be sheer coincidence. The receipt must have fallen out of the car. This would mean that the dead druggie stole the car in Houston, bought the SpaghettiOs in Houston, has something to do with the Rowes since he used their account to charge the food at Jamail's, and is the one who left Weppo to die in that shack. Except he didn't mean to leave him to die. Then what
did
he mean? To go down into San Diego and get drugs and then come back? Maybe.”

“So who is this dead guy? Maybe a servant, handyman, driver for the Rowes? Did he kidnap Weppo from the wealthy family?”

“And who is the child in the old Rowe photographs? A relative, obviously, unless I imagined it. A relative the little boy has replicated genetically. But why wouldn't the influential Rowes have notified the police, the media, if a child related to them had been kidnapped?”

Wait a minute
!
Maybe they did
.

Clambering over a couple who looked eerily like Roy Rogers and Dale Evans, Bo headed for the in-flight phone on the wall between cabins. Sometimes the police got gag orders for the media in kidnapping cases. And any judge would have seen the merit in a gag order for this case. With the state senate election in three days, a gag would save the state of Texas the expense of a second election after Yannick's people claimed media coverage of a Rowe kidnapping threw the close election to Tia.

Remembering the billboard eyes, Bo was stunned by another thought. What if Tia Rowe staged the kidnapping in order to get miles of free media just before the election? Bo knew a soulless psychopath when she saw one. Those charming, manipulative characters incapable of anything but self-interest. Tia Rowe was one of them, Bo would have bet on it.

“Houston Police Department,” a young male voice answered briskly. “Desk Sergeant Tromley.”

Bo dropped her voice an octave.

“I've got some information on the Rowe kidnapping,” she whispered. “Let me talk to the investigating officer.”

If a kidnapping had been reported, the HPD would be set up to receive precisely this sort of call.

“What?” the voice replied.

“The kidnapped Rowe Child.”

“Rowe? Just a minute. . .”

Bo could hear the desk sergeant talking to someone else in the background.

“Something about a kidnapped Rowe child. . . ?”

“It's just some loony,” the older voice responded. “The Rowe kids're grown. One of em's—”

Bo hung up quickly. Whoever Weppo was, his absence from Houston had not been reported to the Houston police.

Roy and Dale were, uncharacteristically, poring over a racing form as Bo returned to her seat.

“Happy trails,” she murmured.

Roy appeared puzzled.

“I think Happy Trails is in the third race at Belmont,” Dale explained cheerfully.

“Thanks for the tip.” Roy grinned.

Bo buried herself in the newspapers she'd bought at the airport. They all told the same story. Tia Rowe, wife of shipping heir MacLaren Rowe, was in a closely contested race for a senatorial seat vacated two months ago. Rowe's opponent, Bea Yannick, was a Catholic grandmother of four, widowed when her oil-exec husband was transferred to Houston from the family enclave in Pennsylvania during the boom, and promptly dropped dead. Yannick had stayed, raised seven kids alone, gone to law school, chaired the school board, and launched an unsuccessful campaign to introduce the notion of zoning to Houston. The attempt, Yannick said, was prompted by the existence of a thriving massage parlor and drug dealership across the street from a public school attended by two of her grandchildren. The media coverage suggested that Yannick was a gutsy Yankee who, while well liked, couldn't overcome the aristocratic Rowe name.

A counterculture paper called
The Bayou Banner
gave a different picture. Tia Rowe, according to an investigative reporter named Gretchen Tally, was a conniving egotist whose campaign platform had a designer label and no substance whatever. Without violating the strictures of good journalism Tally managed to suggest that a financially distressed society matron known more for catered brunches than informed opinions might find the temptations of political power overwhelming. Hadn't a Big Bend mining consortium already under attack by environmental groups contributed generously to the Rowe campaign? And what about Tia's sudden friendship with the wife of the president of a paper conglomerate methodically denuding central Texas of its few remaining forests? The widely publicized “future” of a Rowe win in the senate, the radical reporter suggested, would be Tia Rowe's, not Texas's. Bo sensed that Tally was on to something, and fought her way over the beaming couple to make one more phone call.

“Tally's not in,” a traditionally cranky editor snarled. “Wanna leave a message?”

“I've got something on Tia Rowe that may interest her,” Bo announced. “A Rowe child, victim of an attempted murder yesterday in California.” Bo gave both her home and office numbers and hung up. The message had been tantalizing enough to ensure a return call from the most jaded newshound.

“Attempted murder by two men in hospital.” Bo completed her chronology of events surrounding the child. It was the piece that didn't fit.

For the rest of the flight Bo nursed a series of canned fruit juices that tasted more like cans than juice, and stared out the window. No slowing the racing thoughts now. Might as well watch clouds. She was ahead of the lithium by weeks. It would kick in eventually when it built up to blood level, but what would happen in the meantime?

Maybe Weppo might actually be safe in the confidential foster home Madge would have selected for him by now. A foster home licensed for secrecy, for the protection of children whose parents were violent, predatory, criminal. Bo pretended to believe that a system with thousands of employees and a computer network accessible to seven other agencies could keep Weppo's whereabouts a secret. She had to believe it, had to let go of the little boy. If she didn't, what lay ahead for her would almost certainly involve nightmarish mental disintegration, a psychiatric hospitalization, the loss of her job.

A bag lady stared back at her from her own reflection in the scratched airplane window. Mad, ruined, incoherent. That terror was always there. Would always be there.

“No way!” she resolved fiercely. She'd get home, check in with the shrink at the clinic, get a couple of sedatives, go home and sleep.

A call to Bill Denny's unit at the SDPD would put the cops on the trail of the Rowe connection, if there really was one. If she wasn't imagining the whole thing.