Child of Silence (18 page)

“Stay with me,” she called to them with her mind as the car ate mile after mile of desert road. “I may need you.” The strange trees, one after another, seemed to bow in acknowledgment. As if they'd known for centuries this would happen, and were ready.

Weppo had crawled inside the sleeping bag and fallen asleep. Bo could see tufts of his hair blowing in the breeze from her open window. Angel hair. Burnished gold wire. The stuff of which a bridle might be woven to fit a unicorn. Or a torque for a daughter of Lir.

Bo remembered the children of the ancient king—children turned to swans and doomed to fly forever in rains of ice over black and storm-tormented winter lakes, until the day when the mountains would open again, and the lost faerie kingdoms would be restored to the world.

“Aye, an’ ye're one,” her grandmother had crooned sadly. “Ye an’ wee Laurie too. Ye're like swans, the children of Lir.”

Bo felt like a swan, soaring low over a lake bottom frozen in arid silence. Ahead the Paso Mountains might hold deep within their prehistoric hugeness some faerie kingdom, some kind and splendid race of beings whose mirth and poetry would restore balance to a world gone mad with greed.

At the turnoff for the China Lake Naval Weapons Center— the once-sacred land of a vanished people who'd left symbol-tapestries painted on rock—Bo felt the car stall and catch again. A cough in the engine. A hiccup.

You re out of gas
,
idiot
!
This is what they were waiting for
.

A glance at the fuel gauge confirmed it. Empty.

Your stupidity is monstrous
.
You are crazy
.
Because of you
,
they're going to kill him
.

The car coughed and stalled again. Slowed. Died.

Through wild tears Bo eased it off the road and appealed one last time to the weird trees and the forgotten figures painted on canyon walls thousands of years ago.

“Now!” she begged them as the car behind slowed, and stopped. A falling star high above left a brief arc, but nothing else moved. Bo leaped over the seat and flung herself on the boy in the sleeping bag as footsteps approached on the gravelly shoulder of the road. Inside the blood roar in her ears Bo, heard the laughter of Caillech Bera.

A chuckle, actually.

Words.

“You must be Bo Bradley,” a woman's voice said cheerily. “I've been following you for hours. Sorry if I scared you, but you never stopped for gas, and I didn't want to lose you. . .”

Wakened by 125 pounds of frantic weight on top of him, Weppo croaked peevishly and blinked at Bo, then the stranger.

A slightly overweight woman with close-cropped reddish blonde hair. Sparking blue eyes. Jeans and a sweaty T-shirt imprinted with the sentence “I Don't Have to Go to Hell When I Die; I've Been to Houston!” The woman looked like neither a Joshua tree nor a rock-drawing.

“I'm Bo Bradley, all right,” Bo gasped, “but who are you?”

“Gretchen Tally.
Bayou Banner
. You called me in Houston, left a message about somebody trying to murder a Rowe child. My editor's desperate to stop Tia Rowe from winning that senate seat. That's desperate with a capital D and that rhymes with C and that stands for corrupt, if you know what I mean. You're our last hope for keeping her out of power. The paper flew me here with its last dime and instructions to use
anything
. So what've you got? The only Rowe kid left around is Kep. Where is he?”

“Who's Kep?” Bo asked thickly. The sedative had taken its toll on her ability to speak. The words felt like dustballs stuck to her tongue as she climbed out of the car into chill desert air. Weppo stumbled out as well, and sleepily went behind the car to relieve himself. Tally checked Bo out, and frowned.

“Is something the matter with you?” she questioned bluntly.

“Nothing that rebirth as a gnome in another galaxy won't cure,” Bo answered. “Look, I'm as mad as a hatter, manic. Off the wall. I'm serious. I really am a manic-depressive, and this is not, as they say, one of my better days. But you've got to believe me, somebody's trying to kill this kid. You've got to help us. My car's out of gas. I thought you were the killers. We have to get to Lone Pine. Delilah Brasseur said it'd be over by Tuesday—”

“Slow down, slow down,” Gretchen Tally admonished. “I believe you. I want to help you and the kid, so talk slow. You mentioned Deely Brasseur; she was the Rowes' housekeeper. If there's anything fishy in that house, she's the only one who'd know. What did she tell you?”

Weppo came around the car, shivering and giggling while signing, “Food! Blue food, yellow food, pink food, purple food...”

Bo grabbed her purse and the seven-grain bread off the front seat and signed bread for Weppo.

“Brown,” he signed back, and nibbled unenthusiastically on a slice.

“He's deaf,” Bo told Gretchen Tally. “Nobody's ever taught him to sign. Until now.”

“Let's get in my car and get going,” the reporter suggested. “You'll explain all this to me as we go. Meanwhile, I want you to see something. . .”

With Tally's help Bo moved the sleeping bag and Weppo's toys to the other car and then locked her own. She wondered if she'd ever see it again, or if it would be appropriated by the Joshua trees for trips to wherever Joshua trees went.

“Look,” the other woman indicated, handing Bo a Houston newspaper. On its front page was a photo of Tia Rowe in black, her eyes concealed behind a veil. The headline read, “Shipping Heir MacLaren Rowe Succumbs to Heart Attack.” The article beneath the picture promised that the widow, despite an untimely burden of grief, would carry on the tradition of the Rowe name by remaining in the closely contested state senate race to be decided on Tuesday, also the day for which MacLaren Rowe's funeral had been scheduled.

“She's won the damn thing.” Tally grimaced, pulling onto the road. “She'll slide in on the sympathy vote. Unless you've got something to tell me that'll make a difference. Now, for starters, what did the Brasseur woman tell you, who's this deaf kid, and where’s Kep Rowe?”

Bo took a deep breath.

“This deaf kid is Weppo. He was nearly murdered last night in a hospital room by one of two men and a mercury-tipped hollow-point bullet shot from a silenced Smith & Wesson .38,” Bo recited as one long word. “I've never heard of Kep Rowe. I assume he has something to do with Tia Rowe, Houston's answer to toxic waste. The lady with rattlesnake eyes. The one person who might actually find employment decorating rest rooms for third world bus stations. The—”

“All right!” Gretchen Tally laughed. “God, I wish I had a tape recorder. Can you slow down at all?”

“Probably not,” Bo replied. She trusted Gretchen Tally completely, the manicky radar full-blown now, picking up nothing but competence and solid intelligence in the chunky woman. But the release from responsibility Tally provided wasn't helping Bo's grip on reality. “I'm really going off, ' she told the reporter. “I'm going to take part of another sedative, but it'll probably knock me out for a while. Just get us to Lone Pine. We've got to find a woman named Annie Garcia. She's a Paiute. She's the one who found Weppo tied to a mattress up on the reservation. . .”

Bo found the capsules in her purse and again poured more than half out of one into the car's ashtray.

“Here's a Coke to knock that back with.” Tally offered a can from a small cooler between the seats. “But stay awake long enough to tell me why Weppo has anything to do with Tia Rowe. Kep Rowe is the son, incidentally.”

“I found a grocery receipt from Jamail's,” Bo began after swallowing the capsule, “near where a car that we later found out was stolen in Houston and a wino found a dead drug addict in was parked...”

The words didn't sound right, the syntax all wrong.

“I'm not making any sense, am I?” she asked Gretchen Tally.

“Enough. Go on before you're out cold.”

“After they shot at Weppo, the cops told me nobody'd investigate until next week, and I knew there wasn't time, so I flew to Houston and found out the receipt was the Rowes', and the maid wouldn't let me in, but there was this picture, this old photograph on the wall—appalling wallpaper—of a little boy, late 1800s, early 1900s—and it looks just like Weppo! I mean, they're identical. And—”

“That's probably the famous Wilhelm Marievski, Tia's father,” Gretchen interjected. “The Polish artist. An abstractionist. Had his own ‘school’ in Chicago. His paintings are worth a fortune now. Tia—her real name's Skiltia—was the only child.”

Bo could feel the drug dragging her into sleep, but she fought it. “Wilhelm.” Something about the name. . . She forced her mouth to pronounce it slowly, and then watched herself in the car's exterior side mirror. There it was! Lip-reading her own mouth, she saw the syllables—-"We-eh-po!”

“That's Weppo's name!” she told Tally. “His name's Wilhelm!'

“I still don't know of a connection to Tia. She and that pathetic lush of a husband only had two kids—Kep and Julie. Julie died, about four years ago. I wasn't around then. I was still in school—journalism, Indiana University—but I dug out the old clips. Supposedly it was a brain tumor. But there's something fishy about that story. And Kep's a chip off the old block, except his thing's drugs instead of booze. Hey, didn't you say something about a dead drug addict?”

Bo could not stay awake any longer.

“The dead druggie was Weppo's father. I'm sure of it,” she managed to pronounce. “The killers are still after Weppo. Danger. . . just get us to Lone Pine. . . find Annie ... if anything happens . . . Joshua trees. . .” Bo was gone, slumped on the seat like a damp envelope.

“We'll get there,” Gretchen Tally reassured herself more than Bo Bradley. She needed to get to a phone. If this deaf boy was Kep Rowe's son. . . She shivered and turned on the car's heater. The story taking shape in her mind was too much for a green cub reporter. She had to call her editor. But it couldn't be...It was impossible. Nobody could be that vile. Nobody.

A palmetto bug, oily black as the prehistoric sludge in which its ancestors had frolicked, skittered across Paris-yellow rosebud wallpaper and came to rest just below an ornately framed watercolor of willow trees under a Roman bridge. The bug waved inch-long glassine feelers in the direction of a woman seated at a dressing table, plucking already perfectly arched eyebrows.

Tia Rowe ignored the bug as she had ignored countless others before it. The oversized roaches were part of every domestic landscape in Houston. People learned to live with them. And Tia Rowe could live with
anything
, provided there was something in it for her. That was obvious. Hadn't she lived for twenty-five years with the drunken joke of a man whose funeral arrangements she had just completed?

The funeral director, dripping solicitousness, had pointed out several times too many that an election day memorial service might be considered “inappropriate” by many of the “fine, old families” expected to attend. Tia had hunched further beneath a stifling black cape donned for the occasion, and sniffled into a lace handkerchief. Something about travel arrangements, out-of-town relatives, a dear cousin—Mac's best friend, really, who couldn't possibly make connections from Barbados on such short notice, if at all. He'd need to be one of the pallbearers, of course. Unless he really couldn't make it. And who did the funeral director suggest as a standin?

She'd managed to appear grief-stricken, a little flighty, but determined. Precisely the image she wanted. The director had capitulated, even to the viewing to be held from 3:00 to 6:00 Monday afternoon.

The day before the election, Tia Rowe would stand beside her husband's mahogany casket and solemnly receive the condolences of Houston's society. From time to time she'd courteously step outside with a dignitary—the mayor, a state representative, a bishop, and converse in muted tones.

She'd already notified photographers from both major papers exactly where to stand in order to capture these moments for the evening editions. Every voter in Harris County who could read a newspaper Monday night would go to the polls on Tuesday impressed with the image of Tia Rowe as an aristocrat, one tough lady, who could keep it together when the going got rough.

In his lifetime Mac Rowe had not done her a greater kindness than dying three days before the election.

She whipped a silver-and-ebony brush through her hair and then carefully smoothed beeswax facial cream around her eyes. Too bad she couldn't have known Mac would choose this particular day to die exactly as the doctor had warned seven months ago.

“Your husband will be dead from massive internal hemorrhaging within the year,” Foster Rhynders had told her quietly after a dinner party at the club, “unless he stops drinking.”

She wished she'd known it would be today. She wouldn't have panicked about losing the election. Wouldn't have been in such a rush for the money to pay off some of the astronomical campaign expenses and secure credit for the eleventh-hour media blitz her staff told her she needed to defeat that tedious hausfrau Yannick.

But everything was under control now. Except for the messy business in California. And that would be finished tonight, they'd told her. For what she was paying them, it had better.