Child of Silence (23 page)

“I know, you're right,” Tally interjected, leaving. “Someday people will let go of the idea that brain disorders are the work of the devil. What's important is that we stopped the
real
devil before she got away with it. See ya!”

“Tia Rowe is something out of Poe,” Andrew LaMarche commented, closing the door. “According to my sister, she's what used to be called a sociopath—a person devoid of the ability for human closeness, loyalty, love. Incapable of anything but self-interest. Manipulative. Treacherous.”

“I knew that when I saw her pictures on the billboards,” Bo sighed. “But so what? Nobody locks them up.”

“And nobody's going to lock
you
up,” LaMarche stated with more emotion than he had intended. “Charlie Garcia insists that you and the boy attend some sort of memorial ceremony for Annie tonight. I don't think it's a good idea, but—”

“We'll be there,” Bo answered. It felt right, the idea of joining in a ritual for the wise old woman whose life had touched hers and the child's so deeply. The wise old woman who had, literally, traded her life for theirs. “And then I need to go home, be left alone for a while until the lithium builds up to blood level, whatever that means,” she went on. “I really want to avoid the hospital this time.”

Andrew LaMarche looked so earnest he could have sold Bibles to penguins. Bo had to laugh.

“You don't understand,” she said with a grin. “Mania is disturbing, embarrassing for everybody around, but it's not dangerous, at least not at first. You just can't sleep, you talk all the time, laugh and cry. Your thoughts fly out like wild birds from a cage. It's impossible to concentrate. You want to move around all the time. If it's let go, it gets scary. Psychotic. But I'm on the damn pills already. I'll be okay. It's the depression that's dangerous. People kill themselves rather than go through it one more time. A pain you can't imagine. That's when you need a hospital. Do you see?”

“Not really,” LaMarche admitted. “But you know what you're talking about. I just want you to be all right.”

The handsome, graying international authority on child abuse looked about as self-assured as a lost sheep. That look of confused concern found on faces that would
not
run in terror and revulsion from a schizophrenic daughter, a suicidally depressed husband. Bo had seen it before, but never for her. Never. Andrew LaMarche's look touched her so deeply she was afraid to cry, for fear she'd never stop.

“I'll be all right when I get something to eat besides bread,” she joked, stifling the feeling.

Rudy Palachek extended a bearlike hand.

“Henry and I will go on back to San Diego now, in his car,” he explained. “We'll stop at China Lake for your car and I'll drive it back to San Diego. The rest of you'll fly back on a ‘copter tonight after the ceremony for Annie. I hope to see you again, Bo Bradley. I'm proud to know you.”

Bo accepted the compliment with a nod of her head, and then flung her arms around the ruddy marine.

“You too, Henry.” She hugged Estrella's husband through tears. “Thanks for bringing Es up to stay with me.”

The emotional drain was too much. She had to lighten up or else lose it completely.

As the two men left, a phone on the desk began to ring.

What next
?

“Convent of the Perpetual Parakeet,” Bo clowned to relieve the tension.

“Bo? This has to be you!”

Madge Aldenhoven's voice, chipper as a flea.

“It probably is, then,” Bo replied. “Madge. I thought you'd never call.”

“Dr. LaMarche said you'd wake up around six,” the supervisor explained as if she'd never planned to relegate Bo to waiting in bread lines. “I’m glad we found a way around regulations. I'm glad you'll be coming back. We need you.”

Manic or not, Bo was at a loss for words. Almost.

“What have you done with the
real
Madge Aldenhoven?” She laughed. “The shining light of bureaucracies everywhere?”

“Still here.” Aldenhoven actually laughed in return. “And by the way, I thought you'd like to know—Angela Reavey's going to be okay. See you in three weeks!”

“The world is strange,” Bo said, and then signed for Weppo, “Let's go eat.”

Over dinner LaMarche explained the Marievski inheritance that Tia Rowe's father had earmarked for his grandchildren.

“The amount has quadrupled since the artist's death,” LaMarche noted. “There's been a resurgence of interest in his work. Originals are going at auction now for seven figures. And Weppo now owns
hundreds
of originals.”

The artist great-grandfather, from whom the child had inherited talent as well as those caramel-colored eyes.

“And was Kep Rowe the father? Was he the dead addict in the stolen car like Gretchen Tally thought?”

“Yes on both counts,” LaMarche replied and then looked down, anticipating Bo's next question.

“And the mother. . .?” she asked.

“Weppo's mother is dead,” he answered softly. “She was Julie Rowe, Kep's sister. She died giving birth to him at home, in an attic where Tia had hidden her so no one would know of the pregnancy. Tia wasn't about to let this new obstacle to the Marievski fortune be known. But Deely Brasseur was there. She told all this to Gretchen Tally on the phone this afternoon, while you were asleep.”

LaMarche took a deep breath and went on.

“Tia Rowe never knew Kep was Weppo's father. Julie lied about it, made up a name. Only Deely knew the truth. That's why she called Kep when she overheard Tia telling a creditor she'd be coming into a fortune in the near future. Deely saw bags of quicklime stacked in the garage. She'd suspected all along that Tia might kill the child once her husband, Mac, was out of the way. When Tia fired her, Deely knew exactly what Tia planned to do.”

Bo began to shake, and hugged herself to stop it.

“
Quicklime
?
”

“Don't think about it,” Estrella urged. “Just
don't
! Look. He's right here and he's okay.”

Weppo, wolfing down a burger and fries, signed “good” enthusiastically, over and over.

Bo remembered the incongruous aluminum vent in the eaves of the Rowe mansion. More had gone on in that attic than could be measured.

“That inhuman mother, an alcoholic father,” Estrella pondered, “the two teenagers just turned to each other for love when there was none anywhere else, and the result is Weppo.”

“Yes,” Bo said, smiling across the Formica table at the pale child. “But his real name is Wilhelm. From now on, let's call him Willy.”

“Willy it is,” LaMarche boomed happily. “And by the way, Bo, I've contacted my attorney in San Diego. I've applied for guardianship for Wep—for Willy. The paperwork will be filed in court first thing tomorrow morning. Aldenhoven didn't seem to think there'd be any problem with DSS. Rudy and his wife, Mary, will care for our boy until we can find good foster parents . . .”

“Deaf foster parents,” Bo insisted. “A home where everybody signs, and we can visit him.”

“I'll leave that up to you.” LaMarche grinned.

She could do it, network with every deaf association in California, find a young couple who'd love and share their lives with the little boy. There was an excellent ASL school near San Francisco. . . and then Gallaudet!

“He probably
won’t
be the first deaf president” she mused aloud. “He's an artist. But he'll be in the
best
galleries.”

LaMarche and Estrella laughed.

It was going to be all right!

From the turnoff onto Coyote Spur leading to Charlie Garcia's house, Bo could see the flames. Vapor trails of leaping orange that turned to smoke and climbed skyward. As LaMarche eased the rental car to a halt near the collection of parked vehicles, shapes of dancers were visible. A circle of people, bundled against the cold, shuffling in a circle counterclockwise around the fire. An old man's voice, chanting in a language Bo had never heard. Hypnotic, the voice tones rising at the end of each phrase and then beginning again. Over and over. A sad, peaceful sound.

As Estrella carried the curious child from the car's backseat and Bo pulled on the leather jacket she'd worn in the tunnel, a figure broke from the circle of dancers and approached.

Charlie Garcia in a plaid wool jacket and feather-banded hat.

“It is an honor that you have come,” he addressed Bo formally. “This is my grandmother's cry-dance, the Paiute way of releasing the spirit of one who has gone. My grandmother hid on the truck, to stay with you and the boy, to defend you. She knew she would die; she had known for a long time. This was the task of her spirit, and she performed it well. Her story, your story, will be told by our children to their children. Because of this, you and the boy are invited to dance with us.”

Bo felt a surge of warmth, of light within her that drew her toward the fire.

“Thank you,” she said simply, and took the child now called Willy from Estrella's arms and set him on the ground beside her.

“Dance,” she signed for him, circling two fingers downward over her open left palm. “We—dance.”

Charlie escorted them toward the fire-lit circle where one somber face after another nodded acknowledgment. The dancers, every other one a man, a woman, a boy, a girl, made room in the circle for Bo and the child. He caught on to the shuffling step easily, and watched the fire as he danced. Bo felt self-conscious at first, but relaxed when she realized no one was watching anymore. They were all lost in the dance, the sonorous, repetitive chant.

From time to time, someone would cry, or make a yipping sound that rose with the smoke into moonlit skies. Across the circle Bo saw Maria and Joe Bigger Fox who would have driven to Lone Pine that morning after hearing of Annie's death. Like many of the dancers, they held in their hands items of clothing. At one point Joe sang the yipping cry, and he and Maria threw the things they held into the fire.

Annie's clothes, Bo realized. Maria and Joe had cared for Annie in her old age, given her a place of dignity in a trailer on the reservation above San Diego. Now they were releasing that responsibility with Annie's spirit, into another realm. But what would Bo release?

A tug at her jacket revealed a young girl, a budding teenager with flowers braided in her dark hair.

“I am Paintbrush,” the girl whispered proudly, “great-granddaughter of Sees the Dark, who died to save you. Here.” She placed something, a skirt, in Bo's hand, and backed away. A full corduroy skirt like one Bo had worn in junior high school. Stained now, with Annie Garcia's blood.

Bo held the garment against her stomach and wept. Beside her a small, frizzy head bobbed and lurched in the slow rhythm of the dance. And the chant wound its way through her, endlessly repeating, until her feet, the others, the fire, the ground, were one thing in a moment with no beginning and no end. Just there, outside of time.

Laurie was in that moment, Bo sensed. Peaceful and fond as a night breeze.

Somehow, it was over.

“Aiyee-ip!” The sound rose up and escaped Bo's lips without her awareness as she threw Annie's garment into the fire.

It was over.

Taking the child's hand, she turned to walk slowly away from the fire, toward Estrella and Andrew LaMarche.

A deaf child would live, and so would she.

It was, really, over.

Abigail Padgett, a former court investigator in San Diego, is the author of nine novels. She is avidly interested in advocacy for the mentally ill, desert preservation and Native American cultures. Child of Silence was the first to feature a sleuth living with manic depression.