Moonbird Boy (17 page)

Bo chose not to share with her psychiatrist how meager that likelihood was. "Thanks, Eva," she said, and hung up.

The phone rang almost immediately. It was the weekend duty worker at the receiving home.

"Your Wagman case is in St. Mary's Hospital for Children," he informed Bo. "The foster father was called to an out-of-town family emergency and had to leave. Apparently there wasn't another foster home available for an acting-out kid right away, and we're full. Something's been wrong with your phone all day, so the placement worker called your supervisor. Aldenhoven gave the okay for a temporary group home placement, and—"

"A group home!" Bo interjected. "Bird's only six years old! What happened? Why is he in the hospital?"

"Three kids beat the hell out of him. He's got a broken rib, but they say he'll be okay. I'm afraid I don't know anything else."

"Oh, shit," she yelled, and slammed the phone down. "Group home" was a euphemism for "trainer jail." Older kids too young for juvenile incarceration centers, seriously troubled kids already lost to normal human interaction—these were sent to county-run group homes after they'd bombed out of five or six foster care placements. Some of them had already committed violent crimes. All of them seethed with resentment and quickly formed pecking orders in which the weakest was routinely tormented. Bird had been a lamb thrown to hyenas.

Bo drove inland toward the hospital through carloads of people returning from an afternoon at the beach. Couples, families with sandy kids and wet dogs. A parade of pleasant normalcy to which she would never belong and which, in fact, seemed rather tedious. But that life was critical to the healthy development of children, and her exclusion was largely her own choice. Bird, who might one day battle demons similar to hers, was being denied the right to join or reject the parade.

He was being systematically traumatized, she thought, by a system created to protect him. On the heels of his father's death he'd been in three placements in as many days. Even a well-adjusted, normal six-year-old wouldn't be able to handle that. And Bird wasn't normal. Now he'd been beaten so badly he had to be hospitalized, and nothing lay ahead for him but more of the same.

Parking illegally in a yellow zone, Bo tore into St. Mary's Hospital vowing to find Mort Wagman's family Monday morning, period. Maybe this Dr. Keith was Bird's mother. Bo

couldn't imagine Mort nearly seven years ago, when his illness would have been at its worst, romancing a doctor, but stranger things had happened. That failing, she'd call Mort's lawyer, threaten him with a malpractice suit or something, force him to remove Bird from the system and get him into a good private facility.

At the hospital's information desk she noticed that her hands were shaking. Bird had been in a good private facility. No matter what Zach had done, the Neji would have cared for Bird until she could do her job and find his family. But the law said he couldn't stay there. The law said he had to be protected. Bo wondered how insane it would sound if she screamed, "I hate systems!" in the visitors' elevator.

Bird was woozy when she loped into the room he shared with another little boy. The other boy's parents sat beside his bed, the father reading aloud from Winnie-the-Pooh. The mother smiled at Bo and said, "Josh has just had an emergency tonsillectomy. What happened to your little guy?"

"Assault," Bo answered. "Probably with intent to kill."

Bird recognized her. "Bo," he whispered, his blue eyes glassy with sedation above a hospital gown printed in race cars, "some boys kicked me."

"I know," she said, hoping he wouldn't notice the tears spilling over her lashes, "but you're still the Muffin Bird, aren't you, the Moonbird, too? Nobody gets that Bird down."

"Except Crumpet Cats, Bo. You gotta watch out for them."

Crumpet people, too. And they're everywhere.

What had happened to Bird wasn't unusual, only extreme. Children instinctively formed packs and then shunned the different ones, the ones who couldn't conform. Adults were only slightly less obvious while doing the same thing. And if there were a club, Madge Aldenhoven would be its president. Bo stroked Bird's fine, raven-colored hair and enjoyed a fantasy of pouring sugar into her supervisor's gas tank.

Madge had only followed the Department of Social Services procedures manual. Bird had to go somewhere, and there was nowhere for him to go. Nobody wanted a kid with ADHD any more than anybody wanted an adult with schizophrenia. Too difficult and unpleasant. Madge had approved nothing more than standard procedure. And standard procedure had broken a little boy's rib. Bo wasn't going to let it break his heart as well.

When visiting hours were over she got a copy of Bird's medical record from the nurse and drove home. The night wasn't as foggy as it had been yesterday, but it still made her feel alone, creepy. There would be no furry presence to greet her, no little life demanding love and care. The apartment would be empty. And there might be disembodied barking that wasn't really there.

Get a grip, Bradley. If it happens again, go stay in a motel. At least then you'll know for sure whether it's real or not.

There were two messages on the answering machine, both from Jane and Mindy at the dogwash. "Your phone's been down all day," Mindy's voice told her. "Give us a call as soon as you can."

The second message was from Jane. "Hey, check in, will ya? There's something here for you. Give us a call or come on over, okay?"

What "something"? Was somebody really playing tricks here? Who would leave a package at the dogwash? Bo fell in bed exhausted but uneasy. The apartment was empty, yet it felt as though trouble were breathing in its corners. Trouble just waiting. She set the clock radio and then listened to the rebroadcast of a local talk show taped earlier in the day, just for the reassurance of voices.

An oceanographer was talking about the shark attack a few days ago. It was perhaps distasteful, he said, but the remains of Hopper Mead's right leg had been retrieved from the cadaver of a great white shark washed up on a Mexican beach near Ensenada. There was some confusion as to the cause of death, although he was convinced that Mead had died from injuries inflicted by the shark. Before accepting questions from callers, he wanted to remind female water sports enthusiasts that ocean swimming at "certain times of the month" was ill-advised.

"Oh, for crying out loud!" Bo muttered into her pillow. "You're not saying Hopper Mead got her leg torn off because she was menstruating, are you?" Another obvious win for the guys. They'd never have babies, but, by God, they wouldn't attract sharks, either. Bo turned off the radio and went to sleep with a familiar, and comfortable, sense of injustice.

An hour later the phone rang. The sound bathed Bo in chill even before she was fully awake. By the time the message tape clicked on after the fourth ring, she was sweating. It was there again, the dog barking. A little dog. A terrier. The barking sounded the same as it had on previous occasions. Exactly the same. The rapid barks escalating, and then a particularly piercing yip, as if the dog were suddenly hurt or threatened. After the sound stopped, its echo filled her apartment, reverberating in her skull. Especially that sharp yip.

The dark felt like a boat around her, rocking. Why did the dog always sound the same? With her face buried in a damp pillow, the reason dawned on her. It was a tape! Somebody was playing the same tape over and over into her answering machine. Somebody had followed her on a fogbound beach in the dark and invisibly triggered a tape player. And he'd laughed at her terror. He'd been close enough to touch her, to sense her fear. And he'd laughed.

Bo remembered a cruel chuckle floating in the fog like audible teeth, like the smile of the Cheshire Cat just hanging in wet air. He knew her. He had to. He knew about Mildred, knew what would send her over the edge. And he knew where she lived. He'd watched her last night, followed her. He might be nearby right now, waiting to see her lose control, run to her car, try to escape.

In moonlight the yellow sunflowers on her sheets turned gray as she curled her knees toward her chest and locked her arms about them. It made no sense, and senselessness was terrifying. Somebody wanted to hurt her. Somebody wanted to drive her mad. A stranger hiding in mist wanted to see her insane, screaming, lost.

As she pushed her forehead against her knees, she heard a sound. A knock, soft and tentative. The silence that followed had a pulse, she realized. A throbbing she could almost see in the outlines of doorways, furniture. Then she heard it again, slightly louder. A knock at her door. How many times in the literature of human drama, she thought, had this moment been immortalized? A thousand closed doors spun toward her, each with an intolerable truth begging at its outer side. A drowned husband, long-dead child, or worse, nothing. Where something was hungered for, nothing.

Well, whatever it was, Bo decided, would soon meet its match. Forcing herself to unfold and stand up, Bo moved silently to the kitchen and fumbled in a drawer. Her hand found a corkscrew, a garlic press, and something scratchy she couldn't identify. The corkscrew would have to do. Pulling its two flanges upward, she exposed the length of pointed, spiral steel, locked both hands tight around the flanges, and strode to the door.

"Who in hell are you?" she bellowed. "Don't think I won't kill you if you keep this up!" It occurred to her that the threat sounded real.

"Bo? It's Andy. What's wrong?"

Andy? Andy with a recording of terrier barks? Unconvinced, she lowered her arms and looked through the door's tiny viewer. A haggard, familiar face looked back.

"Oh, God, Andy!" she breathed, unlocking the door and staring, wide-eyed.

"Bo, why are you holding that corkscrew?" he asked, extending a sheaf of wilting yellow roses toward her. "And what have you done to your hair? God, how I've missed you!"

In his gray eyes Bo saw storms of devotion waiting to enfold her, join her against anything. Dropping the corkscrew, she pulled him inside and into her arms. The roses fell at her feet.

"You're still in Germany," she whispered against his unshaven cheek. "You can't be you."

"I'm here, Bo," he answered, kissing her. "Whatever's happening, I'm here."

"I'm so glad," Bo sighed with unfeigned enthusiasm.

But in the dark beyond the open door something waited, she remembered. Something her lover's presence could not dissipate. A danger so cruelly intimate that, sooner or later, she would be compelled to face it, alone.

Bo awoke amid a tangle of sunflower-patterned sheets and the arms and legs of her exhausted lover, who was going to appreciate the toiletries she'd bought for him, she thought. His scruffy, three-day beard was peppered with gray and made the usually impeccable pediatrician look like an aging wino. Singing "Molly Malone" under her breath, she slipped from her bedroom into the kitchen and measured twice the usual amount of coffee into one of the new unbleached filters made from recycled pine industrial pallets. She'd bought the filters from a door-to-door counterculture salesman who said he was working off bad karma from an earlier incarnation as John Milton. Irresistible.

"As she wheeled her wheelbarrow through streets broad and narrow," Bo hummed the Irish song as she picked up the phone. "Singing cockles and mussels, alive, alive-o." The St. Louis Directory Assistance operator provided numbers for all three universities. Only two of them, she told Bo, had medical schools. Bo called St. Louis University's switchboard first and learned that no Dr. Keith was connected to that school. Then she called Washington University. Bingo. A Dr. Ann Lee Keith was on the faculty. Professor Keith taught neurophysiology, Bo learned, and would be in class today. Bo left her home and office numbers, and an urgent message to call.

By the time the coffee was ready, Andrew LaMarche had showered and was shaving over the sink in Bo's dressing alcove.

"The razors and shaving gel are deeply appreciated," he said from inside a cloud of steam. "But what am I supposed to do with the cheese grater and colander?"

"Grate cheese, drain spaghetti," Bo answered. "I really got them because they match your toothbrush."

A puzzled silence indicated his unwillingness to grapple with this.

"You know," she explained, "like in magazines. A wooden table decorated with one peacock feather, four blue wine glasses imported from a village in Czechoslovakia, a high-tech eggbeater, and a daguerreotype of Mary Todd Lincoln in an old velvet frame. It all creates a mood, an image; it's advertising art."

"I don't see a feather anywhere," he replied. "But the coffee smells artful. I'll stir it with the spatula."

"The spatula is blue," Bo insisted. "It was a composition."

"I love your compositions," he smiled, managing to look dapper even in her yellow terrycloth bathrobe with the satin starfish appliqué she'd always hated.

Breakfast consisted of coffee and a selection of Gerber's baby cereals Bo had bought for Mildred. Decorating the counter where they sat were eight real autumn leaves, each protected from drying out by a coat of car wax. Andrew frowned into his barley cereal as Bo explained the leaves and what had happened in St. Louis.

"Have you informed the Sheriff’s Department about this?" he asked.

"What am I going to say? That Zach and somebody I saw on TV flew to St. Louis and knocked on the door of a house? Neither traveling nor knocking on doors is a crime. I am going to call the Sheriff’s Department this morning, though. I want to know what they've turned up regarding Mort's death. Then I'm going down to the County Administration Center and do some checking on Ghost Flower Lodge. If they have a business license in addition to their license as a board-and-care, there'll be some information. Who's on their board, tax status, that sort of thing."

"I'm not officially back until next week," Andrew said, "but I'll check in at the hospital and make sure I'm informed of any plans for your boy, Bird. I may be able to arrange for the necessary psychiatric evaluation today. If he actually does have attention deficit hyperactivity disorder, the diagnosis should be made as quickly as possible."