Turtle Baby

His hair is ebony. His skin is ruddy brown. He is unmistakably Mayan, even at eight months. They call him Acito, or little turtle. In fact, he seems to be as hard-shelled as his animal-spirit namesake. Lucky for him, because he's just survived a near-fatal poisoning. The lab analysis reveals that the toxin found in Acito's body is a rare, deadly herb that has to be carefully cultivated, harvested, and stored. There is no doubt that someone was trying to kill the child. As she pulls strings and makes deals to place Acito in a loving home, Bo must ask herself the unthinkable: who would want to murder a little Indian baby? Could it be the seemingly modest Latino couple paid to care for him? Or his elusive mother, an exotic folk singer clawing her way to the top of the Mexican music scene? Or the strange yanqui hillbilly who performs with her? And where - and who - is Acito's father? Finally, what could possibly be the motive? Despite the not entirely unwelcome distraction of a love affair, Bo pursues a trail of misty clues to the Mexican border town of Tijuana. Here her instincts - and the heightened perceptions that ever haunt and guide her - direct her into a seething brew of drugs and prostitution, stealth, and ambition. But ancient traditions and evil spirits hover over the case, even when Bo escapes to the desert to seek solace from her own demons. And they will lead her to the answers she seeks...in the lair of an obsessed and duplicitous killer.

TURTLE BABY

NOVELS BY ABIGAIL PADGETT

Child of Silence

Strawgirl

Turtle Baby

Moonbird Boy

The Dollmaker’s Daughters

Blue

The Last Blue Plate Special

Bone Blind

ABIGAIL PADGETT

Excerpts from the Popol Vuh, translated by Dennis Tedlock, copyright © 1985 by Dennis Tedlock, used with permission of the Balkin Agency, Inc.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Padgett, Abigail.

Turtle baby / Abigail Padgett.

p. cm. ISBN 0-89296-580-0 1. Government investigators— 2. Women detectives—California—San Diego—Fiction. PS3566.A3197T87 1995 813'.54—dc20

California—San Diego—Fiction. —San Diego—Fiction. 3. Child abuse— 4. San Diego (Calif.)—Fiction. I. Title.

94-30948 CIP

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

To Kay Redfield Jamison, Ph.D., Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine, for her work on manic-depressive illness.

To Dennis Tedlock, translator of the Maya Popol Vuh, for bridging two worlds.

To Douglas Dennis (deceased), formerly staff writer, The Angolite, Louisiana State Penitentiary, for technical advice on Louisiana prisons.

TURTLE BABY

Prologue

Daybringer

The darkness behind the hills grew pale and silver, like the hair of an old woman brushed down from the sky. The Milky Way, which the Maya called the Sac be, faded and then vanished. Where before there had been that wide, white road above, now there was only a moist gray chill. A transitional queasiness in which night terrors were almost, but not quite, forgotten.

Chac had followed the Milky Way all night, barefoot on the streets of Tijuana. A smooth brown stone, loaf-sized, hung in a sling between her thin shoulder blades from the mecapal cutting into her forehead. She could not put the stone down in the dark. That much was clear, a self-imposed rule she could not explain and did not question. The stone with its weight borne in the woven band across her brow kept her rooted in the world with her baby, Acito. This world, now. A place so lonely that at twenty-two she sometimes felt ancient and hollow. Used up. Disconnected from everything except Acito. Just the ghost of a ruined Maya Indian, following a road in the night sky.

But it was all right. The burden of the stone kept her away from the drug, the white powder that was like a warm, blind wind in her veins. She had not used heroin in over two years, but the fear she felt now made a hunger for it shriek in her bones. A fear of the loneliness she endured before Acito's black eyes told her how pretty she was. How needed.

Chac had not known that she was alone, or cared, until those eyes melted the walls around her and called her back. Now there was nothing but fear of losing him. And now, unless she was smarter and more careful than she had ever been in her life, that was going to happen. She was going to lose him.

But the stone kept her feet on the road of rutted dirt and her mouth breathing darkness in and out for Acito, just as her mouth had breathed air for him when he lay curled and squirming in her belly. She wouldn't give up, wouldn't break. Only a few more days and she could escape with her baby. There would be money. Just a few more days.

For now, light had come, and her burden could be put down. She'd made it through another night. On the potholed street a stream of fluid splashed to the ground from between two gnarled feet visible beneath a corrugated tin wall. The city called "Aunt Jane" was waking.

Chac raised the woven strap from her forehead and placed the stone from its fabric sling on the ground near a pile of old tires. She had left hundreds of stones in the streets of Tijuana, each a relic of her survival and a prayer for her baby's future. Each a burden of time carried honorably, as befit a Maya woman.

"My white nun," her father, Tomas, had called her the popular name for the cream-colored orchid that grew in the Peten rain forests of Guatemala. "My little white nun."

And her mother, Josena, had called her mi chica linda, "my pretty girl," so that she would know she was a fine little girl and not just an animal born to slavery in the baking fields of the fincas. Her mother, who wore the purple-embroidered white huipil of their village near Lake Atitlan, even though she was from Coban where the traditional loose blouse was made of lace and embroidered in many colors.

"What you are hides in your heart," Josena Bolon had told her nine-year-old daughter only days before a soldier's bullet tore through Josena's heart. "The dress you wear is like a mask for your soul. If you wish to keep secret what is inside, cover yourself outside like all others about you and make no noise."

Chac's mother had taught her to speak and read Spanish, and explained the dishonor of a woman who would sell her body to a man. A dishonor to the woman's soul, which was like the surface of water, a bridge between the physical and spiritual worlds.

The rhythm of her long arms swinging at her sides as she strode toward Chris Joe's little room reminded Chac that she was still alive in spite of all that had happened. She had dishonored her soul in ways her mother could not have imagined. She had sold her body to a hundred faceless men who stank and dripped sweat and then were gone. She had sung for them and straddled them, her mind afloat on the sky she'd pumped from a needle into her arm. But not one of them had touched her secret self, hidden inside. No one had touched that self, ever, except Acito, whose eyes were like her father's.

With his eyes Acito had told her she was that white orchid again, the monja blanca. She was his mother. Acito had given life to her, as much as she had given life to him. They were bound in that giving, equals even though he was new and helpless, waiting for her to set the terms of his world.

And she would. Soon. There was already money, saved in a San Diego bank under the name Elena Rother. She had chosen the surname in memory of a missionary priest murdered, like her mother, by Guatemalan soldiers. The Maya had sent his body back to Oklahoma for burial, but had cut out his heart, which they loved, to keep near Lake Atitlan forever.

Soon there would be a contract with an American recording company. Enough money to ensure that Acito's belly would never be swollen with starvation or with the million white pinworms Chac had seen kill her little brother on a hot afternoon while their parents worked in the finca. They'd buried him in a cardboard box beside one of the fields at night, so the foreman wouldn't know. That night Josena Bolon had chewed her hands in the dark to muffle her sobbing, and weeded coffee plants the next day as if nothing had happened.

The American record company would give enough money to shelter Acito, keep him clean and safe. The money would send him to school where he would speak English and play games. He would grow in a place with no white worms, where soldiers would not come and blast out the heart of his mother. Only a few more days.

Until then Chac would carry her fear like a stone on her back, and keep her baby hidden where no one would find him. Away from her. Over the border in America where brown-skinned people lived in hidden webs across the two great cities of San Diego and Los Angeles and moved by night, always telling softly where they were, where they would be tomorrow. Chac could find her baby in that web at any time, but most Anglos couldn't even see it. Acito was safe there, she was sure.