Child of Silence (19 page)

Tia Rowe gazed at the immense insect on her wall and thought about Deely Brasseur. The housekeeper she'd only kept on because
somebody
had to clean up after Mac and his disgusting, drunken messes. Tia wasn't about to do it, and neither would anybody else she could hire. Deely did it so she could spend half her life up in the attic fawning over Julie's brat, an imbecile that should have been aborted.
Would
be aborted, now.

She wondered how Deely had figured it out, when Tia had told her the Rowes would no longer require her services. Had Deely seen the bags of quicklime stacked in the garage? What would that mean to an ignorant old black maid? No, Deely couldn't have known the purpose for which Tia Rowe needed sixty pounds of calcium oxide. No one had known.

And it would have been so easy, once Deely was gone. A simple overdose of the Thorazine Tia used to keep the boy quiet up there. She flew down to Brownsville every few months and then slipped over the Mexican border into Matamoros where she could buy the drug over the counter. No questions. Untraceable.
So
easy. And the body could have stayed in the attic until Mac finally died and Tia could move on. The quicklime would have eaten away the four-year-old's remains in less than a week. That had been the plan. Until some stupid, shuffling servant caught on, and got Kep involved, and then ran off to hide. Deely would have to be silenced. But that could wait.

Nobody, Tia was certain, would believe Deely Brasseur, even if she told what she knew.

“A child in my attic?” Tia would frown and then murmur, “You know, we had to let Deely go, poor thing, right before Mac's death. She's, well. . . not right in the head, you know? But of course, I want y'all to feel free to look in the attic, if you want...”

Kep had been no problem, until Deely dragged him into the nonsense about the child. A drug addict, out of his mind most of the time. As his mother, Tia could have had him committed and assumed guardianship over the fortune he would inherit at twenty-three, anytime. She hadn't really intended for Kep to die, at least not at first. Only the idiot child her daughter had perished giving birth to. A retarded monster whose pointless existence could ruin everything.

Selecting a comfortable gown from her closet, Tia switched off the phone and slipped easily between creamy satin sheets. There would be no more coded messages tonight. And tomorrow it would all be over.

She wondered how long it would be before somebody identified the body now tagged in a San Diego morgue as her son’s. Maybe they never would. It scarcely mattered. What mattered was to look good for the show of stalwart grief she would stage tomorrow. And for that she needed a good night's sleep.

“I'm afraid there will be no choice but to terminate Bo's employment with the department,” Madge Aldenhoven told Estrella Benedict with finality. “I know she may have saved the boy's life at the foster home, but this melodramatic behavior sets a precedent others will feel obliged to imitate. Bo isn't the only worker with an endangered child on her caseload, you know. All these children are in danger, or we wouldn't be dealing with them in the first place. I'm sure you can see—”

“I don't believe you!” Estrella screamed into her kitchen phone while Henry paced behind her. “I called to tell you what's happening and you tell me you're going to fire Bo! She's out there someplace right now, risking her life to keep this kid alive, and you—” Estrella couldn't go on.

“She's out there behaving like some damned
hero
in spite of my clear directions to stay off this case,” Aldenhoven continued angrily. “There's more to consider here than just one child. There are over six hundred workers in this system, and every one of them is involved with children who may get killed! The primary rule is never to get emotionally entangled in a case. And we all know Bo has trouble maintaining appropriate emotional responses. . .”

“What you're saying is,” Estrella said, seething, “that the system comes before the children. That Bo should have let this kid get killed rather than violate the rule. Is that right?”

“If you want to put it that way,” Madge replied shakily. “You know I actually like Bo personally, but—”

“But you're going to fire her for trying to save a kid's life? That is, if she isn't already dead? You're
loca
, Madge! You've been in the system so long you think it's a fucking religion, but it's not. It's just a fucking rotten job. And Bo is a hero! She's—”

“She's incapable of following instructions, and that's what counts, in this fucking rotten job!” Aldenhoven screamed back, out of control. “My decision is final.”

“You don't even care if Bo gets killed,” Estrella sobbed. But Aldenhoven had hung up.

A chill, shadowy wind blew the smell of snow down from the Sierra and through a chink in the window of a small room where Annie Garcia lay on her great-granddaughter's bed. She didn't sleep, but merely waited. Something was coming up out of the desert, from Coso where the Ancient Ones painted magic on the canyon walls, from Bitter Lake where the Paiute lost at last the hopeless battle for this strange, arid land.

The girl slept with friends in a tent outside—a re-creation of the woven-twig dwelling Annie's grandmother had slept beneath in a spring long ago, and named herself White Flower for the twining clematis. In the old times girls took flower names for the ritual of entry into womanhood, and Charlie encouraged his daughter to do so. “Paintbrush, then,” the girl had chosen for the red-orange desert plant she loved. And she'd dutifully stacked piles of wood outside the tent five times a day. Piles of wood measured to her own height, as tradition demanded. Nobody had done such a ritual since before Annie's birth, but Charlie had gotten books from the library. This was what the books said Paiute girls did. Annie could see sense in it—the lifting and stretching would help diminish menstrual cramps.

Annie laughed with the snow-wind in the little room. The wind from a place where her grandmother had lived. Charlie wanted the old way, but not entirely. Not the young men in eagle feathers squatting silently at the foot of his daughter's blankets, asking for her hand in marriage, now that she was a woman. Charlie had skipped that part. Not that it would make any difference. Life was life, and would have its way. In the snow-wind Annie felt the breath of her grandmother twining down, joining her laughter, stretching further into the future through the young girl outside who would be called Paintbrush. It was good, whatever it meant.

But the thing in the desert, that wasn't good. Something terrifying, complex. Like a woven basket unraveling. The need to remember the pattern, mend the break even as it tore loose. Impossible.

Annie had been named Sees the Dark as a child, high in the snow-wind. She saw now, and was ready.

Bo woke from a dream in which her back was breaking beneath the weight of an entire mountain range. Straightening, she realized she'd passed out bent over double, her head pressed against the dash. The resultant pounding ache between her temples reminded her of continents breaking apart, earthquakes, tidal waves. And where in hell was she?

From Gretchen Tally's car, parked in the gravel surrounding a vacant gas station, she saw what appeared to be a scrubby ghost town. Lightless houses. Shapes of darkened cars hunched on a grayly backlit street. A movie set. If she got out of the car, the forms would be revealed as cardboard cutouts. A fake town, shimmering hollowly under the huge blind eye of the moon. In the backseat a frizzy halo of hair erupted from a sleeping bag she recognized as her own. Weppo!

He's here
.
It's okay
.
Stop imagining things
.
Get it together
.

In a phone booth that seemed real enough, Bo could see Gretchen Tally poring through a pencil-thin directory while holding an elf-sized flashlight in her teeth. Her face, illuminated from the nose up, looked like a nursery rhyme moon.

“Hey, diddle, diddle. . .” Bo hummed.

That won’t do
,
Bradley
.
Clean it up
.

But it wouldn't clean up. Images, distortions, strangeness loomed at Bo from all sides. Things being both what they were and what they meant, or might mean. Distilled and tangential at the same time. Gretchen Tally in the phone booth now a laughing manikin fortune-teller at a carnival. Eerie and portentous. A child's nightmare.

Shit
!
Eat something
!
Take something
!
Do something
!
This isn't going to cut it
.
You can't get crazy
—
not yet
!

“I found a Charlie Garcia in the phone book,” Gretchen Tally yelled as Bo sprang out of the car and sprinted around it. “Why are you running around the car?”

“Clears my head,” Bo gasped. The air was like ice water in her lungs, against her skin. Probably a good idea. In the old days, she remembered from some textbook, they threw psychotic patients into icy lakes. Those that didn't die from shock and exposure often benefited from the experience. At least that was the theory. Bo flapped her arms and ran faster.

“And I called my editor,” Tally went on. “I need to get a few answers from you, and then call him back. He's doing some research in the meantime. Get back in the car, Bo. You're going to get pneumonia out here.”

Bo crawled inside, shivering. “What questions?”

“How do you know Delilah Brasseur, and what did she tell you?”

Bo reached over to the backseat and smoothed Weppo's hair. Clenched in his fist was a red felt-tip pen.

“I don't know her,” Bo said with a sigh. “She left a message for me. She said I should take Weppo, ‘the baby’ is what she said, and go someplace where nobody could find us until Tuesday. She said it would be over Tuesday.”

Comparisons to angel-messages promoting flights into Egypt were unavoidable. Bo resisted the urge to explain that Delilah Brasseur might be such an angel, and that Bo herself might be the agent divinely selected to carry the child out of harm's way. “Grandiose,” such delusions were called. And that sense of divine mission—the dead giveaway of mania.

“Brasseur was the Rowes' housekeeper for years,” Tally explained. “The old family retainer.”

“She said she knew about Weppo,” Bo went on. “She said she called ‘the daddy’ and he came and took Weppo. She was scared, really scared. She said. . .” Bo paused to control her voice, “it was all up to me.”

“But how does she know
you
?” Tally pressed.

“I don't know. I left my card with the maid at the Rowes' house, but that wasn't Delilah Brasseur. I remember voices. The maid was a much younger woman.”

“But the maid may have known Brasseur. Must have. The maid gave Brasseur your card, and she called you.”

“I guess,” Bo conceded. Reality was dull, compared to the delusionally divine voice on the answering machine.

“There is nothing but reality!” a familiar German accent warned inside her head.

“Okay, okay,” Bo answered.

“Okay what?”

“Okay, so Brasseur called me,” Bo hedged, “but we still don't know anything.”

“She said it would be over by Tuesday. Tuesday's the election. The attacks on your Wilhelm back there have something to do with the election. Tia Rowe and the election. But what?”

Bo glanced at the car's padded ceiling. “You're asking me? Probably the only truly ripe candidate for four-point restraints for four hundred miles in any direction? All I know is, I had to save Weppo. I want him to learn ASL and go to Gallaudet and become the first deaf President of the United States.”

“You're crazy,” Tally nodded, “but you've got guts. I'm going to park you and the boy with your Indians, assuming we find them, and then get back to that pay phone. If we can get this story together we may just stop Tia Rowe.”

Tally's headlights sliced the gloom of a silent main street and came to rest on a shabby, two-story hotel. Bo could see the place in its heyday, horses tethered in front, sun-hardened prospectors with gold nuggets in pouches tied secretly about their necks. Were there gold mines up here? She thought so. Lone Pine had the look of a mining town, its halcyon past obscured by layers of dust and faded paint.

“The hotel will have a night clerk,” Tally noted sensibly. “He'll know where Garcia’s street is.”

Leaving the car running, she sprinted into the darkened building.

Bo tipped the mirror toward herself and pulled a brush through her hair. She didn't look that bad, she decided. Exhausted, but not wild-eyed wacko. Not yet. In shadows at the periphery of the mirror's reflection, something moved. Bo spun around in time to see the rear wheels of a car vanish around a corner. No taillights. The car's lights weren't on. Why would somebody be driving around musty little Lone Pine, California, in the middle of the night with no lights on? Terror slammed through Bo like an iceberg surfacing from freezing, watery depths. It was them! It had to be.

Sliding into the driver's seat, Bo put the car in gear and honked. Behind a dust-filmed second-story window a light flickered on, and then off again.