Turtle Baby (16 page)

Davy Dooley looked about forty, with graying dark hair worn in a long braid over the back of a denim shirt. With the exception of the limp, he exuded an outdoorsy athletic vigor Bo associated with forest rangers and tour guides. "On your foster care application you said you were Hispanic?" she mentioned.

"Yep," he answered. "Born in Mexico City. My dad was an Irish missionary priest." His blue eyes crinkled at the edges with laughter. "Guess Mom was a knockout in those days. Still is, for that matter. The church sent Dad back to Ireland and gave Mom a job cooking at an orphanage. When I was three she married an American architectural restoration specialist she met when he was restoring the cathedral reredos, and moved here. But my real father's family wanted me to keep the name, and that's how the world got Davy Dooley, the Mexican stuntman."

"Stuntman?" Bo said, recording the information in Acito's case file.

"Hollywood," Acito's foster father answered, stretching to throw another stick on a small fire in the craftsman bungalow's tiled fireplace. "Indian parts mostly, because I'm dark-skinned. Can't tell you how many horses, cliffs, and waterfalls I've been shot off of. But after I busted my leg up good in the first shoot of the buffalo hunt scene in Dances with Wolves, I knew my stunt days were over. Connie and I have a nice nest egg in some blue-chip investments, but we don't need to touch any of it right now. It's there, though, if we ever get a kid."

Bo watched fog drifting through an open window from the sea. The little summer fire was pleasant, she thought. Just enough to burn off the damp without appreciably heating the room. "What do you mean, 'get a kid'?" she asked.

"I had endometrial cancer when I was only twenty-two," Connie Dooley answered, entering with a sleepy Acito and taking a seat in a rocker beside her husband. "Had to have a hysterectomy. We can't have children, and want to adopt, but it's not easy. We're too old, they say."

"And too unconventional," Davy added. "We don't like nine-to-five jobs, I'm seen as a cripple, and to top it off, Connie's Buddhist."

Bo glanced at the woman, who looked a great deal like her husband except for brown eyes and two braids instead of one. "Wow," she said.

Connie grinned mischievously over the Little Turtle's freshly washed and electric hair. "It's okay," she said. "I chose Buddhism over a PR career in Hollywood that involved years of lying to the press about the sexual and substance-abuse hobbies of beautiful people. Got out just before I made so much money I'd have had to become one of them. Kept the Porsche, though. Nobody's perfect."

Bo laughed, realizing that she liked these people. Backlit by firelight, they looked like an odd version of Rembrandt's The Holy Family.

"I'll just have a look at the baby's room, and then go," she said, accepting the cooing Turtle from Connie's arms. He looked adorable in new pajamas with snaps at the waist and a conga line of ducks in baseball caps across the chest. Bo buried her face in soft black hair and offered a silent prayer to any deity who might be listening that no deadly virus lurked in his blood.

"You can just go ahead and put him down," Connie Dooley told Bo as Davy turned on the bright overhead light in the nursery. A crib was made up, soft coverlet waiting. In a corner of the room the edges of a red plastic "contaminated waste" bag were visible under the lid of a diaper pail.

"We understand about the precautions." Davy nodded somberly. "Until we find out the test results."

Bo lay Chac's Little Turtle on his back in the crib, and admired his Maya nose and coal-black hair. Except something was wrong with his hair. Standing back, Bo tilted her head from side to side, looking. It wasn't just the light. A tuft of hair above his right eye was lighter than the rest, gray-looking. Leaning to examine the anomaly, she brushed back his thick hair. At the scalp the barely visible new growth was white!

Bo gasped and felt her eyes widen.

"What is it?" Connie asked. "Is something wrong?"

"No," Bo attempted a recovery. "I just remembered I left my iron on at home. Gosh, I'd better run."

The Dooleys would think she was flaky, Bo thought as she hurried to the car. But the likelihood paled in comparison to what she'd discovered. Nothing less than the identity of Acito's father!

Dewayne Singleton saw the red plastic visitor's tag fall from the black sweater of a nun who'd come to the hospital to teach the evening crafts class. She'd taken the sweater off in the hall by the nurses' station, and in folding it to fit over her arm she'd pulled loose the spring-loaded clip that fastened the tag to the sweater's neck. It fell to the floor beneath the wooden extension that kept patients from reaching objects on the circular work surface inside the open station. The wooden ledge, Dewayne observed, also prevented the staff from seeing the floor beneath it.

Prison life had taught him to betray no interest in events taking place nearby. To fasten his gaze on an imaginary horizon hanging always twenty feet ahead of him. The pills they'd given him made it easier, although they made the muscles in his legs hurt, too. Looking straight ahead he approached the nurses' station and stepped on the tag. Through the hospital slipper he could feel its metal clip.

"Muscles in my legs and arms be hurtin'," he told one of the people behind the desk. "That normal?"

"Haldol does that," a beefy white psych tech in a Pearl Jam T-shirt answered sympathetically. "Doctor's ordered you to start on lithium tomorrow. Soon as it gets up to blood levels, we can take down the Haldol. Meanwhile, you can have a couple Tylenol if you want."

"Sure," Dewayne said.

The psych tech asked a nurse to unlock the medication safe, and went to fill a small paper cup with water.

"Whoa," Dewayne groaned, leaning to rub his ankles. "Sure do hurt down here in my ankle." While bent over, he retrieved the plastic tag from beneath his foot, stood, and jammed his hands into the pockets of his jeans.

"Here, this should help a little," the psych tech said, handing Dewayne two gelcaps and the cup of water. "You can have some more later if you need it."

"Thanks, man," Dewayne answered, swallowing the pills.

He didn't know what he'd do with the red plastic tag, but it might help him get out. The message from Allah about the curse wasn't so clear now. Just a sort of memory, like you'd remember a dream and not be sure whether or not it really happened. But it must have happened or he wouldn't be here. Allah must have sent him to warn the woman, his wife. Get her out of California. Her and this baby she had. They had to go away.

Dewayne paced beside the dayroom wall, and wondered why the idea sounded so familiar. It had nothing to do with Allah and the Muslim leader at Wade, the Imam who'd showed Dewayne the true way. It was older than that, like from his childhood when Mama would read from the infidels' Bible and tell Dewayne he was a blessing-child sent to warm her heart. The thought of Mama made him cry.

The duty nurse noticed and wrote in Dewayne's chart, "Patient discussing religion all day, agitated and tearful at 7:30 P.M. Rule out manic-depressive illness."

Bo parked the Pathfinder near Andrew LaMarche's Del Mar condo, and sat staring at a Torrey pine bending seaward from a sandy bluff behind the shake-shingled buildings. The ancient trees, she remembered from a seminar on San Diego's native plants, grew nowhere but here and one small island off the coast further north. Slipping an extended version of Pachelbel's Canon into the tape deck, she allowed her head to rest against the seatback and fixed her attention on the tree.

The Canon had been used for everything from TV commercials to background at a memorial service held by a local animal rights group for dolphins enslaved by a Chicago aquarium, but Bo still loved its simplistic theme. The music, if languorously orchestrated, made her think of the Sidhe, the fairy people. In her mind it was a lullaby for the Little Folk, now asleep unseen in Irish glades where no sound but dripping rain might disturb their vanished story.

Relaxed, Bo watched as from beneath the horizon the sun sent red-orange fire that bathed the Torrey pine briefly, then slid away. "The tree remains, but not the hand that planted it." She repeated one of her grandmother's many and frequently quoted aphorisms. Chac's ghost, she hoped, would rest tonight. Maybe find its way to some mythical realm where fairies slept in ferny shadows, and lie down with them. The Little Turtle was safe.

But someone else was not. Chac's murderer, who had also tried to kill a handsome baby boy, could not know how dogged one certifiably mad Irishwoman could be. If the police in two countries chose to do nothing, an underpaid DSS investigator could make life miserable for someone who liked to play with poison. Someone either smart or careless enough to muddy jurisdictional legalities by playing criminal in marginal contexts with people about whom the world doesn't care. A drug-abusing Indian prostitute and her ugly little bastard. That's how it was. But not, Bo smiled at the Torrey pine, for long.

If Andrew LaMarche, surprisingly dressed in an oversized washable silk shirt that made him look more like Lord Byron than an urban pediatrician, was unnerved when Bo arrived at his door with a dog bed and a dog, he quickly recovered. "Ah, hello, Mildred." He smiled, bowing slightly. "How good of you to bring your mistress, on whose clamoring wing rides my faint but willing heart."

"Willing, huh?" Bo grinned against his freshly shaven cheek in an embrace at once sweet and oddly alarming. A foghorn's vibrato, played by a harpsichord. "You've been reading Romantic poets again, haven't you?" The flippant remark did little to assuage the dizzying minor chord thrumming in her chest. Flippancy wasn't going to work in this context.

"Shall we put the dowager's pillow near the hearth?" he suggested, pushing a button on a slate-topped coffee table that caused the gas logs in a small fireplace to ignite with a whoosh.

Bo watched as Mildred sniffed a large black crackleware vase full of sanded tree limbs near the door, and then strolled regally to her bed near the fire. Despite a decorator's rather artsy insignia, Andrew's living quarters were comfortable, Bo thought. Mildred seemed to agree and settled into her bed, one white foreleg stretched possessively toward the gas logs. Or maybe it was just the scent of something simmering in an herb sauce that made the elegantly masculine rooms feel welcoming, even cozy.

"I didn't know you were interested in folk art, Andy," Bo said, admiring a New England glass painting of a wintry country churchyard framed in twigs against the creamy wall over the mantel.

He'd crouched behind a bleached birchwood bar to extract several bottles of wine from a storage rack. "My sister, Elizabeth, sent me that," he said. "Would you prefer the Pouilly-Fuissé, the Chardonnay, the Geisenheimer, or something unusual? I have a ginger, a plum, and a hawthorn, as well as—"

Bo couldn't help herself. "I don't suppose you have a flagon of mead down there, do you? I've a taste for honey. Can't think why, really." Nobody west of Boston's Back Bay would believe mead was anything but an aspect of Norse mythology, she was sure.

He didn't miss a beat. "Mead? Of course. Not a flagon's worth, I'm afraid, but I can offer you both the traditional and a raspberry..." He pulled two small bottles from beneath the bar.

"You win." Bo laughed, shaking her head. "I'll have the Chardonnay. Just tell me how it's possible that you actually have mead in Southern California."

"Ordered three cases last year at Christmas from a meadery in New York State. Gifts for the staff at the hospital. Happen to have a few left." His wide smile was triumphant as he opened and poured the Chardonnay, and then lifted his glass to Bo. "It's about time I had the upper hand." He beamed.

Bo tasted the wine. "It's the last time," she whispered.

"Probably," he agreed, rounding the bar to take her in his arms and kiss her at first tentatively, and then with an intensity she freely returned. Beneath the silk shirt she felt his heart, and a loneliness that pulled her to him more wildly than the eagerness of his lips, sending tympanic echoes of desire deep in her belly. And something else. That same sad keening, felt rather than heard, in the air.

"Bo," he said huskily, pulling her to the twig-framed picture, "my sister is a psychologist."

The remark, she thought, would unquestionably win any awards given for lack of reference. "I know," she said, waiting to hear what his sister had to do with the fact that she wanted to kiss him again. Now. From speakers in a candlelit dining room to the left of the bar Bo heard a muted jazz piano doing "St. James Infirmary." A baritone sax picked up the melody as Andrew took a deep breath and continued.

"She thought I was spending my life compensating for the death of my daughter, so she sent this strange old picture and said if I imagined Sylvie there, in one of those quiet churchyard graves, I might ... what she said was 'draw a boundary creating the past.' Elizabeth said if I could do that, separate the past and keep it apart, I'd be 'more present' on this side of the boundary."

"Unorthodox, but brilliant," Bo replied, kissing the back of his hand. "Elizabeth loves you, Andy, to try so hard to bring you back from that pain."

He'd told her earlier of a little daughter who drowned while washing toys in a bathtub in New Orleans while he was in Vietnam. The child's mother, his high school girlfriend, had simply vanished after that. In some ways so had he.

"It worked, Bo," he said, turning intense gray eyes to gaze into hers. "I came out of it and I wasn't unhappy. But something was missing. I don't know how to explain it," he whispered, wrapping her in his arms again, "but what was missing was you. I knew almost from the beginning that you were half my heart, and the rest of my life."

In the fervent kiss that followed, Bo did not try to make sense of his story, but let him know she wasn't missing, or absent, or anything but present against his pounding heart. After a while she pulled away. "Did you say something about dinner?" she gasped. "Or shall we save that for later?"