Child of Silence (6 page)

“No,” he replied with finality. It was clear that he had nothing else to say.

There was, Bo acknowledged ruefully, simply an emptiness in the space between her and the middle-aged Indian couple. As if they were really somewhere else and had replaced themselves with lifelike holograms. The plain living room might be a theatrical set. Bo knew her grasp of the interaction was accurate. She'd seen it before—the Indian way of dissociating from all things white. The misunderstandings. The inevitable power of the dominant culture over the exploited one.

Bo sighed. The Bigger Foxes weren't lying or hiding anything. They just wanted her to leave.

“Well, thanks.” She terminated the interview politely. “Could I speak to Mrs. Garcia now?”

Maria glanced through an open window at a trailer behind the house. “She might be asleep. She's an old woman. She sleeps a lot.”

“I could come back later,” Bo offered.

The Indian woman shook her head. “She won't be here later. She's leaving, on the bus. Going up to Lone Pine for a pow-wow.”

“Lone Pine?” Bo was incredulous. She'd been there herself only a few months ago and the coincidence had a prophetic flavor. “Why is she going to Lone Pine?”

“My mother and I are Paiute,” Maria Bigger Fox explained patiently, as if speaking to a dense child. “Lone Pine is a town but large sections of it are Paiute Reservation. Independence, Bishop, on up to Mono Lake, and over into Nevada—all Paiute land. Our people are there.”

Bo made a feeble attempt at sorting through what information she possessed on California's native people, and discovered a black hole. The Barona had been a local tribe renamed for a Spanish city by Father Junípero Serra or some other coastal padre, but who were the Paiutes?

Her master's thesis at Holyoke had involved a summer of field work among the Iroquois in upstate New York. And she and her ex-husband Mark had spent the first year of their marriage teaching at a Navajo mission school near Los Alamos. None of which gave her a clue about the people in front of her.

“Go on out and talk to her,” Joe Bigger Fox rumbled, pointing to the fourteen-foot 1948 Igloo trailer set on crumbling concrete blocks. It had once been silver but now displayed a uniform oxidized powdery gray, pocked with amoebas of rust. A devil's-claw cactus leaned against its side.

“Thank you,” Bo repeated, wondering if courtesy demanded a gift of tobacco. It would if these people were Navajo, but they weren't. “Uh, would you like some cigarettes?” She grabbed a fresh pack of Gauloises from her purse.

The Indians looked puzzled.

“French cigarettes?” Joe Bigger Fox accepted. “I guess so.”

Bo left the pack on the Formica-topped coffee table and exited, feeling vaguely idiotic.

Why don't you just ask them to autograph your copy of
Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee,
you bimbo
!

A couple of mountain jays screeched laconically in a coast live oak towering over half-buried boulders behind the small trailer. The tree's vast lower branches had been propped up with cut logs. Joe Bigger Fox must have done that, Bo decided approvingly. At over sixty feet in height, the tree could be a century and a half old. Annie Garcia's trailer appeared only slightly less venerable.

“What do you want?” a raspy voice not unlike that of the jays called out.

“I'm Bo Bradley, from Child Protective Services,” Bo shouted against the trailer's closed door. “I need to talk to you about the little boy you found.”

The door was opened by the oldest woman Bo had ever seen. One of Macbeth's witches. An elemental, sculpted in leather. Except this one was wearing track shoes and at least four sweaters over a voluminous corduroy skirt Bo herself might have worn in junior high. Each of the sweaters, Bo noted, bore an identical brown ring at its collar. The trailer's gloomy interior was redolent with the smell of coffee.

“Thank you for talking to me.” Bo hunkered on the floor and opened Weppo's case file. There was nowhere to sit except two miniature benches facing a miniature table affixed to the wall. One of the benches was buried under a pile of clothes. And Annie Garcia would need to sit on the other one. “Can you tell me how long the boy was up in that house?”

The old woman sat on the empty bench. Her eyes showed the telltale milkiness of cataracts.

“Them spirits, they told me something was wrong,” she began. “But I went in anyway. I saw the child with blood in its mouth. It might have been a devil, but it wasn't, huh?” Annie cocked her wide brown skull with its high cheekbones toward Bo. “Do you think there's devils?” The words came out in a chuckle.

Bo paused to consider the question, and to buy time. The woman was playing with her, acting crazy to see what she'd do. Beneath the milky glaze the old eyes watched closely. Bo looked straight back and answered truthfully. Nothing less would do.

“There are some weird things, but I don't think there are devils. Mostly, I just don't think we understand much.”

“Do you understand about this boy?” The ancient face seemed suddenly wise, as if the woman behind it knew something she wasn't saying.

“You know more about what happened to him than I do,” Bo replied. “All I know is that you found him. It's likely that you saved his life. Can you tell me
anything
about how he got here or who was with him or what happened?”

“I told them men,” Annie Garcia pronounced, “I never saw that kid at all before I went up there this morning.”

Men? What men? The woman must mean the deputy and the paramedic.

“Said they was police,” Annie mentioned as if she'd heard Bo's thoughts. “They came after the boy was gone in the ambulance.”

Maybe the Sheriff's Department had assigned detectives to investigate, and they'd been up here already? Not a chance. There would be no criminal investigation unless Weppo died or could be shown to be the victim of physical or sexual assault—felony child abuse. Everything else would fall to CPS to investigate. There just wasn't enough manpower in the San Diego County Sheriff's Department to waste detectives on an abandoned child.

“Did these men use that word? ‘Police’?”

The Barona Reservation was beyond the jurisdiction of the San Diego Police Department, and squarely within the jurisdiction of the Sheriff’s Department. And Sheriff’s Department detectives would never identify themselves as police.

“Yeah.” Annie Garcia was sure.

“Were they wearing uniforms?” Bo went on. She needed to know who else was investigating the case, if somebody were. In child abuse investigations it wasn't unusual for several sets of people to be out gathering information at once—schools, visiting nurses, an occasional private eye in messy divorce cases, all in addition to law enforcement and CPS.

“Nah.”

“Suits and ties?”

“Nah. Just clothes.”

Terrific
.
Two men in clothes
.

Bo gave up.

“Have you seen people up at that house before?”

“Yeah. Sometimes.”

The woman wasn't being deliberately obtuse. She was Indian, and therefore prone to answer only what she was asked, if that. Indians, Bo knew, were comfortable with allegorical thinking, but put off by the abruptness of whites.

“I'd like to hear,” Bo mentioned softly, “about how it was the last time you saw anyone near that place where you found the boy. How was it, then?”

It worked.

“Under the cotton wood, where the trail begins . . . ?” Annie began.

Bo nodded.

“There was a car.”

Bo felt her ears lie back, and waited.

There had been a yellow car, Annie Garcia said, the color of a squash. A white man drove it and it had been there yesterday, but not this morning. The car did not, she was almost sure, have California license plates.

A few acorns clattered off the trailer's curved roof as Bo wrote the information in Weppo's case file. It wasn't much.

“If you remember the license number, or the state, or anything else, please call me,” she mentioned, and placed her card on the little table. The CPS hotline number was imprinted on it in red.

Annie gazed abstractedly at the painting of daisies in Day-Glo orange on black velvet on the wall. “You care about this child?” she asked.

The question caught Bo off guard.

“Well, yeah. I mean, he's deaf. At the hospital they thought he was retarded. But he's not. In fact, I think he's very bright. . .”

She stood to leave and realized her left leg had fallen asleep. Annie continued to stare at the wall and finally spoke.

“A little child who can't hear,” Annie said. “What will happen to him?”

“He'll be in foster homes,” Bo explained. “Unless I can find out who he is and where he belongs and then pull a few strings to get him sign language training.”

She flexed her left foot and bit her lip at the discomfort. The investigation was going nowhere.

“Do you have children?” Annie asked.

The Indian was getting more information than she was!

“No,” Bo answered.

“Why not?”

The old woman remained motionless, a statue in a tableau nobody would ever see. And Bo had not answered that question in ten years. Not since that last bitter discussion with the man who had been her husband, and whom she tried to put out of her thoughts.

Mark David Bradley, both of whose brothers had chosen to be priests, had said simply, “I want to have kids, Bo. We can have our marriage annulled.”

“I have a mental disorder,” Bo pronounced in the trailer's quiet gloom. “So did my deaf sister. It's called manic-depression. It runs in families. I just couldn't. . .”—she ran a hand through her hair impatiently—“. . . run the risk.”

Mark hadn't understood. Why did she expect this stranger would? The hell she would not put another person through. The hell that had killed Laurie.

“My sister died when she was twenty,” Bo finished the story. “She killed herself.”

The ancient figure at the table didn't speak, but Bo felt something envelop her like a shawl. A warmth. An acceptance. She also experienced a near-certainty that she'd see Annie Garcia again. And soon.

Outside the trailer again, Bo blinked in the sunlight and checked her watch. One o'clock. Amazingly, the world had not turned to dust at the words she'd spoken to the old woman. Everything remained intact. It felt good to have said it. Even though it didn't change anything.

Heartened, Bo decided to take a look around before heading back down to San Diego. Take a few pictures to beef up the court report. From her car she grabbed the county-issue Polaroid camera all the investigators carried to photograph injuries. Then she headed for the trail a quarter mile from the Bigger Fox home.

The climb was invigorating. The house was as she'd expected. A shell of a place like others moldering in unexpected mountain niches where some long-ago settler built a dwelling on a trail long since buried in creosote bushes, scrub oak, and deerweed. A gray squirrel scuttled across the tattered roof as Bo entered and prepared the Polaroid camera for flash.

The mattress was there, all right. And the length of white plastic clothesline that had tied Weppo to it. Bo snapped three pictures of the scene from various angles and squeamishly tugged at the white cord. It came loose easily, but provided no clue as to its origin. Clothesline, Bo admitted, was on a level with aluminum foil, plastic bags, and cheap typewriter paper. Without the packaging, there was no way to identify it.

Something rustled across a boulder outside, and then was silent. She considered briefly how well her Topsiders might stand up to the fangs of a rattler, and smiled. She'd get workmen's comp, anyway.

The mattress was near a stone fireplace that would have been the only source of heat when the house was in use. Idly Bo stirred the ashes with a stick and was surprised to notice the faint orange glow of coals beneath the gray powder. There was a fire here last night.

Suddenly alert, Bo scanned the area more closely. A SpaghettiOs can, raggedly opened with a knife, appeared newer than the other trash littering the floor. Had somebody fed Weppo SpaghettiOs and built a fire before tying him to the mattress and leaving him to die?

She scooped up the ant-infested can and took it outside. She needed to think.

Climbing on a sun-warmed granite boulder, she lay on her back and stared at the sky. A weird day, really.

“So,” she yelled at a hawk suspended on a thermal high above, “what's going on? Am I crazy, or is there a pattern to all this?” The hawk broke and swooped lazily toward one of the Laguna Mountains. Bo followed its flight until it vanished. As a bearer of symbolic messages, she decided, this hawk was in the basement.

The warmth of the granite soothed her almost as much as the feel of a paintbrush in her hand. Madge would spit memos, Bo chuckled. County employees were, she was sure, not allowed to lie around on rocks during working hours. If there was no directive to that effect in the procedures manual, Madge Aldenhoven would write one. Fortunately, Madge wasn't here. In fact, nobody was here. And nobody would be likely to be here. So who would leave a deaf four-year-old here, tied up like a dog?