Child of Silence (16 page)

The gas logs in the terra-cotta fireplace ignited with a whoosh when Andrew LaMarche flipped the switch concealed under one of the coffee table’s hand-painted tiles.

The salty breeze from his balcony doors felt clammy. A tidy, ash-free fire, he hoped, would create a warmer atmosphere. The bachelor condo, furnished scrupulously to his specifications by a decorator brought down from Beverly Hills, seemed more and more like the interior of a glacier.

Over the hilly silhouette of Torrey Pines Reserve to the south, he could see the full moon rising against the bottomless black of a universe he rarely thought about. He had his work. There was no time for anything else.

The condo in the coastal San Diego suburb of Del Mar had been purchased less for its elite address than for its distance from St. Mary’s Hospital. He would need to get away, he'd reasoned five years ago when he assumed the directorship of St. Mary's child abuse program. And he'd been correct.

But Torrey Pines became his home. The reserve, with its scented paths through sandstone badlands, droves of wild-flowers, and rare Torrey pines leaning over the sea, offered all the comfort he needed. A paradise of solitude, always there. The condo was only a place to sleep.

Except he couldn't sleep tonight. Something was gnawing at him. Something about the deaf boy, the unconscionable violence of the attack on the boy and the murder of Brad Sutin, a young orderly just trying to do his job. And something about the CPS investigator, Bo Bradley, who'd named him like an Irish bogey—a pompous boar, or was it “bore?” He felt like a bore. Gutless, in fact. Edgy, angry, watchful.

Accustomed to sporadic naps interrupted by grim emergencies, he'd stretched out on the bed an hour ago and found himself staring at the ceiling. Estrella Benedict's call hadn't wakened him. He'd been lost in thought. The soft roar of the gas jets in the fireplace seemed unable to create any semblance of warmth. The chill, he decided, was psychic, not physical. Might as well identify it. A chill left behind in New Orleans nearly a quarter century ago.

He hadn't thought about his daughter, her nameless grave in a parish paupers' field, in years. What was the point? Sylvie was dead. He devoted his life to other children, ones who might make it.

Sylvie hadn't made it. Sylvie was gone.

She'd been dead for two months before he came home to New Orleans on furlough from Vietnam and heard about her. His child's mother, the perennially exuberant Reena DuBois, hadn't been the one to tell him. Her brother, Joshua, had.

“Ree jus’ couldn't take care of the baby,” Josh wept in an alley behind a French Quarter bar where he played the same Scott Joplin ragtime tunes over and over for tourists. “She lef' the baby alone, goin' out, partyin'. . . you know Ree. . .”

Alone one evening, the two-year-old had drowned in the deep, clawfoot bathtub of her mother's back-street apartment. She'd filled the tub, apparently, in an attempt to bathe her toys.

“Jus' like her daddy,” Josh pronounced bitterly, sneering through tears at LaMarche's immaculate Marine Corps uniform. “She liked things
clean
!”

LaMarche had tried to find Ree for years, and failed. Throughout medical school and after, he'd hired tracers, private investigators. But for nothing. She'd left New Orleans the day after Sylvie's funeral. Vanished. Left no trace.

He stopped wondering if the child were really his at the moment Josh told him how she died. Sylvie was his. Reena DuBois hadn't named her baby after his mother out of spite. And his mother, dead seven years now, had never known about her granddaughter. Her black granddaughter, child of a beautiful young woman addicted to life, to fast times and bright lights.

LaMarche didn't blame Ree, he blamed himself. Ree had done the best she could with who she was. He had done nothing. His rage at every irresponsible parent whose child came through his program at St. Mary's was really at himself. He'd known that all along. Because he'd known all along that Sylvie's death was his fault.

He could have prevented it. Could have acknowledged paternity and provided money and care for the mocha-colored baby in the snapshots Ree sent to him in Da Nang. A pretty little girl, but she didn't look like him. Why had that mattered? She didn't look like Ree either. Just a baby. His family had plenty of money, but he hadn't wanted to embarrass them, bring down what his mother would have called disgrace. And Ree made no demands.

Theirs was a high school affair, begun when Ree was a dazzling cheerleader, the first black on the squad, and he was a second-string basketball player who might play in the fourth quarter if his team were twenty points in the lead, but even then only because everybody in New Orleans knew his social-climbing parents. They'd been friends more than lovers, he and Ree. Exploring the rituals of sex together as if researching a class project.

After he went away to college they got together occasionally on his visits home. Sex was a tradition between them by then. A way of bridging a widening gap.

Ree was wild, slept with anybody she wanted. He hadn't cared, until the phone call in his freshman year, when he'd already signed up with the Marines. It had seemed the most expedient way to place a huge distance between himself and his parents. He'd been obsessed with getting away.

“I'm pregnant,” she told him. “It's your baby.”

“
Mon Dieu
!” was all he could say.

Pierre and Sylvie LaMarche, struggling desperately for acceptance in the historic reaches of New Orleans society, still spoke Cajun French at home. So did their son, Andrew, and his sister, Elizabeth. But the English names hadn't made a scratch on the truth about the LaMarches. Cajun commoners.

His parents were never listed in the social register.

Elizabeth, now a psychologist in Lafayette with a husband and three kids, one of whom had inherited his own fastidious nature, laughed long and frequently at the past.

“Our parents were just pathetic,” she reminded him regularly. “Get a life, Andy! Come out of that noble, elegant shell and look around. Life's fun, but it's short, and you're not getting any younger. In case you hadn't noticed.”

LaMarche strode into his kitchen and opened the refrigerator. It was so clean he could have performed surgery in the vegetable bin. And empty. He rarely ate at home.

But a single Waterford wine glass chilling in the freezer was the final straw. What was he doing, sitting around in Del Mar while madmen shot up hospitals, split open skulls of middle-aged women, tracked a deaf toddler as if he were the Antichrist, and might already have killed a moody Irishwoman who'd had the nerve to call his bluff?

Nothing. He was doing nothing.

Andrew LaMarche closed the refrigerator door softly and made a quiet decision.

It was time to rejoin the human race.

Pressed for an explanation, he could not have said why it was time, but the challenge presented by a pair of flashing green eyes had been a catalyst. He could imagine Bo Bradley going to extreme lengths to protect this deaf boy she was so excited about. Alone, against professional assassins. She would do what she could in this bizarre scenario. And so, Andrew LaMarche decided in the unused gleam of his elegant kitchen, would he.

“This is Dr. LaMarche.” He spoke with quiet authority to St. Mary's discharge clerk. “I'd like an update on a Johnny Doe who will have been discharged to a DSS foster home this afternoon.”

The speaker of his state-of-the-art answering machine amplified the woman's sharp intake of breath.

“I'm sorry, but all information concerning that patient is flagged confidential,” the voice informed him. “I have no way of knowing that you're really Dr. LaMarche. You may have the information, but only in person.”

Irritating, but necessary under the circumstances, LaMarche conceded. Still, he wasn't about to drive all the way back into the city to get information on his own patient.

“I'm afraid I don't have time to come to the hospital in person. But Drs. Smith, Stracher, Dysinger, Cassavant, Zollner, Koblenz, and Araldi are on duty. If you'll call one of them to the phone I'm sure we can confirm my identity.”

An extension was picked up. “Abe Zollner. That you, Andy? What's up?”

“Having a little trouble getting information on a patient DSS had flagged confidential—the boy that was shot at last night. . .”

“It's him,” he heard Zollner tell the clerk.

“The boy was released to a confidential foster home at 3:30 this afternoon,” she told LaMarche.

“The number is 489-6754. I'm sorry about the precautions.”

Nobody answered the phone at the foster home. LaMarche hung up and dialed again, in case he'd made a mistake. Two rings. Four. Five. Finally a breathless male voice answered.

“Hello. Who is this?”

“Dr. LaMarche, from St. Mary's Hospital—”

“How did you find out so fast?” the man gasped. “It just happened. Twenty minutes ago. The police just got here. . . Oh, my God, Timmy, thank God. . .”

The man was upset, nearly hysterical. In the background LaMarche could hear a woman crying, hiccupping, trying to talk. “What's happened?” he asked slowly.

“They came here,” the man exploded. “The guys with the guns, right after that crazy Bradley woman took the deaf boy. I tried to stop her. But she just grabbed him and beat all hell out of here, and then I called the cops and before they got here those guys, those fucking shitbags. . .”

“Was anyone hurt?” LaMarche asked softly.

“No, thank God, not bad. They threw Caroline against a wall, and one of them held a gun to my head, but they thought our son, Timmy, was the deaf kid and if he hadn't yelled ‘Mommy’ they'd have shot him...”

The man was sobbing.

“I'll check in later,” LaMarche said, and hung up.

Estrella Benedict answered on the first ring.

“Bo has apparently kidnapped the boy from the foster home,” LaMarche told her quietly. “Got him out only minutes before the killers arrived. The foster father described her as crazy. Where would she go? Do you have any idea?”

”
“Madre de dios!”
Estrella choked. “Bo got the kid! She saved his life!”

LaMarche sensed that Estrella was conveying the information to someone else, probably her husband.

“But now she's in grave danger,” he prompted. “Where would she go?”

“She wouldn't go to her apartment. Surely she wouldn't. They'd go there first, wouldn't they?”

“Yes,” LaMarche agreed grimly.

“But it's all we've got, right?” Estrella was in gear. “Meet us there. My husband, Henry, has a gun. Bo's place is the last apartment building on Narragansett, on the left, off Sunset Cliffs Boulevard in Ocean Beach.”

“I'm leaving now,” LaMarche said.

It was the first time in two decades that he'd gone out without socks. But he didn't notice.

Weppo clambered, chimplike, between the back and front seats several thousand times by Bo's estimation before 163 became 15 as she had begun to doubt it would. The highway looked alien, unfamiliar.

With each bounce into the front seat, Weppo tugged at her sleeve and held up yet another crayon or marker. He wanted to know the signs for colors, and Bo had successfully shown each one, stumped only by cerulean blue and now magenta.

Was there a sign for magenta? She couldn't remember. Years of signing with Laurie, and she'd forgotten magenta. In the dim glow of the dash lights she saw the little boy regard the crayon seriously and then flip his first and second fingers from his chin toward his chest. The ASL sign she'd taught him for pink. He'd figured it out by himself. It was a miracle, illuminated as if by candlelight in the dark capsule of the car.

The lines were blurring, Bo realized. She wasn't sure who was saving whom, or from what. The wiry-haired, pale child might be an angel. The light in his eyes propelling them to unknown destinations. To safety. An angel signing colors in a nicotine-smelling BMW that had seen better days. Bo wondered if angels could sign, imagined the heavenly host signing the Christmas scriptural message generally attributed to them across Bethlehem's black sky. Their hands would sparkle and flash like a light show. Like Weppo's hands. The image made her grin. And then frown.

Rational, concrete thought was more difficult in the dark. Tenuous. Quixotic. Her mind wanted to, would, create fanciful pictures instead. And her feelings would reflect the pictures, not reality. Or else it was the other way around, and the feelings created the mind-pictures. Either way, it was the last stage before the dissolution, the meltdown of ten million fine wires connecting her to the world everyone else experienced. And that couldn't happen! Not now.

The ice in the druggy Coke had melted. She sloshed the weak solution around in its container and took another deep drink. The sedative wouldn't really help the kaleidoscoping images, the torrents of feeling. Only the lithium would do that, and not until it permeated her bloodstream. Weeks.