Turtle Baby (23 page)

Her dark eyes were glowing, and Bo noticed a blaze of magenta paint in the expensively cut hair over her right ear. The object on the sawhorse table was delightfully covered in folk figures, mostly animals. A gold and white Mimbres rabbit in the center was surrounded by a blue coyote, several buffalo, a Haida bear totem, a smiling fish, Koko Peli with a golden flute, a Kachina whose name Bo couldn't remember, and a fat magenta lizard with blue polka dots and three toes on each foot.

From long experience Bo drew up a finely honed sensitivity to the reactions of others, and threw out her line. "Are you going to include any Maya figures?" she asked brightly.

Kee Terrell cocked her head abruptly at the question like a large bird. The gesture threw into relief a pale collarbone under skin that appeared to have no heft to it, no muscle. It seemed to Bo that for a moment the woman's eyes reflected a birdlike glassiness that mirrored the angle of her head. A momentary lapse. But with the sudden movement of her skull Kee had effectively obliterated all evidence of response, if in fact any had been present.

"Maya? I hadn't thought of it, but maybe," she answered. "Mundy and I have traveled in the Yucatan—great skin-diving off Tulum, by the way—but I don't remember any of the folk imagery."

Was the reference to Yucatan a deliberate avoidance of reference to Guatemala, or was Kee really just recalling a vacation trip? Bo strolled to the edge of the deck and couldn't contain a gasp as she looked over the side. The house was on the rim of a deep canyon. The drop was about five stories, straight down. "Wow," she breathed, wide-eyed. "Killer drop!"

"Yeah," Kee agreed. "It's just too dangerous for a child. The contractors will be here next week to take out the rail and benches. We're having a three-and-a-half-foot solid wall put in, topped with plexiglass. We'll still have the view, but nobody will be able to fall off."

The concern in her eyes, Bo noted, was real. Almost a kind of panic.

"Maybe we should have gone with chain-link fencing," she went on, jamming a paintbrush behind an ear. "You know about child safety issues. Do you think the chain-link would be safer?"

Bo had not thought of her job as involving child safety before, child endangerment being a rather more common topic. "Chain-link's too institutional," she answered, feeling herself being drawn into the conversation as if she and Kee Terrell actually knew each other. As if she weren't really there to assess the woman's potential for murdering her husband. "I think three-and-a-half-foot walls and plexiglass will provide sufficient safety without making your deck look like a tennis court. By the way, when do you expect the child, and how old is he, or she?" Bo was certain that her radiant smile betrayed nothing but the sort of womanly warmth portrayed in TV diaper commercials. Kee's response confirmed it.

"Oh," she began, "there's no telling, but I ... we ... well, everything's ready and it's so hard ... the waiting's just so hard." A quaver in her voice suggested that she was near tears. "Mundy and I have actually talked about just giving up and having our own child. I mean, you know, genetically ours. But we just think that's so disgusting, don't you?"

"Um," Bo hedged, caught off-guard, "I've always supported the concept of zero population growth." The response was several degrees upwind of Kee's politically correct position, but it didn't seem to matter.

"Absolutely!" Kee nodded violently. "Why should European imperialism continue to dominate the planet, enslaving indigenous people and destroying centuries-old cultures? We should adopt their ways, not the other way around."

Bo saw no point in mentioning any of the many situations in which trying to go backward in time doesn't work, nor the failure of the woman's remarks to have anything to do with the topic at hand. "The child you're adopting is from an indigenous population, then?" She smiled, recognizing that the term "Indian" would undoubtedly send Kee into orbit. And elicit a lecture on the Spanish Conquest that might go on for hours.

"Oh, yes." Kee beamed. "Let me show you the nursery. And by the way, have you had any success in locating Chac's family? I asked Mundy after you were here before, and he said he didn't think she had any family."

"We're still working on it," Bo said. Kee appeared to be interested in the search, but Bo felt nothing else hidden in the question. The politically zealous young woman either didn't know that her husband fathered Chac's child, or didn't care. It was almost, Bo thought, as if Kee had created a psychic distance between herself and whatever her husband did in Mexico. As if in Kee's mind Chac, the business, the music, Acito, all of it, were not quite real. But why would she have gone to such lengths to dissociate from it, to pretend it wasn't there, if she didn't know the truth about her husband's activities?

Following Kee through the house toward the nursery, Bo read the label stitched to the back of her Levi's. "25 x 30," it announced. The jeans size of a skinny, long-legged boy, not a woman in her thirties. Bo wondered how she did it.

"You're going to love this," Kee said, opening a distressed pine door on which the lock rail and panels were stenciled in an Indian pony design. The room beyond was a decorator's dream. Particularly, Bo thought, a decorator from New Mexico. Even in its mission days California had not had this much atmosphere.

The soft vinyl floor looked like a mat of pebbles, and was covered at one end of the room by a fluffy acrylic "bear" rug complete with a huge teddy bear head. Beside the rug a carousel horse had been refitted with Indian gear and draped with a real Navajo horse blanket. When Kee flipped a wall switch, the horse moved slowly up and down on its pole.

"There are three speeds," she told Bo. "And of course there's music, too."

"Of course," Bo said, eyeing a collection of antique puppets attractively draped over the sides of a fanciful, color-washed wooden armoire with seemingly hundreds of little doors, drawers, trays, and cubbyholes. The sort of furniture a child would love, with plenty of places for secret treasure. The room's indirect lighting highlighted the armoire, the rug, the Indian horse, several framed originals of Western scenes, and a large, hand-carved crib set against a wall in the center of the room. Something about the crib made Bo uneasy.

"We commissioned this," Kee explained, polishing the footboard with the hem of her paint-stained T-shirt. "It's from my hometown. Jenner. It's up north of San Francisco on Highway One. The woodcarver was this marvelous old man who'd lost a leg on a fishing boat when he was a boy. He said he always carves himself another leg in all the pieces he does, but Mundy and I have looked, and we haven't found any leg in this yet."

"Interesting," Bo mumbled. It wasn't the possible presence of a carved leg that made the crib spooky, but something else. Bo stood near a small stone fireplace across from the baby bed, and tried to pinpoint the source of her discomfort. Kee was saying something about having to order a custom-made mattress, as well as sheets, since the crib was so much bigger than the standard size, when the reason for the odd impression dawned on Bo.

On the wall behind the crib was the painted silhouette of a mission, complete with Spanish bell tower. Against the flat blue paint the crib had the atmosphere of a reliquary rather than a simple sleeping nook. Together the crib and the painted shape framing it created a shrine!

"My God," Bo whispered to herself.

"What is it?" Kee asked. "Is there something wrong? Do you think the bigger mattress will cause a problem? God, I worry about crib death all the time, even though they say now it's some kind of allergy. Is there something that should be changed?"

"No, no. I'm just so impressed with the detail in the carving," Bo babbled. "And the planning you've put into this. What a lucky little, uh, boy or girl!" Bo had barely stopped herself from saying "little Indian."

"Yes," Kee replied flatly. "And I'm so tired of waiting." Her eyes seemed to look straight through Bo to a point not easily discernible. "Just so tired."

Retreating from the nursery, Bo tried to remember what she'd planned to accomplish by coming here. Difficult just to say, "Oh, and yes ... did you happen to be stalking people in the desert with a rifle last night?" She wondered how the cops did it. "Well, I'd hoped to interview Mr. Terrell," she lied. "But I've certainly enjoyed talking with you. And the baby's room is really lovely."

Kee Terrell's eyes betrayed a sense of hurt as Bo eased her way out the door. "I wish you didn't have to go," Kee said, waving now-dried paintbrushes from the deck with a trembling hand. "I'm sure Mundy will be home soon." The last word was pronounced in two syllables, the way a child would say it.

Bo felt as if she'd just been through a house of mirrors in the company of something costumed. That sense of just having missed a sight that's really still there if only you look over your shoulder. Glancing in the rear-view mirror, Bo saw Kee bend to the painted table again. Nothing unusual in the scene. Except for the loneliness of Kee's childlike figure, dwarfed by a cloudless blue sky.

"Look, I still think it was Terrell," Henry Benedict insisted from behind the slab of pineapple and Canadian bacon pizza he was about to demolish. "Just because somebody was out in the desert training a rifle on him doesn't mean he didn't poison Acito and Chac. The guy could have enemies who have nothing to do with this case. If he's into messing around with the ladies too much, the stalker might have been an irate husband."

"But he's not like that," Martin St. John insisted. "Trust me, I just spent two days running around in a breechcloth with this guy. I know him. He wouldn't kill a baby or a woman, and he wouldn't use poison even if he did. He's into this meaning-of-manhood thing in a big way, and I can tell you the very last thing manhood means is killing your own son. He couldn't do it, even to save his marriage. Believe me."

Bo grabbed another piece of the thin-crust Thai ginger chicken pizza before it was too late, and surveyed the group. Martin had returned from the desert sunburned but untraumatized. In fact he'd enjoyed the group, he said, especially after Terrell explained that throughout time a stable percentage of men had been gay, and that somebody had to remain free of childrearing in order to advance civilizations, especially in the arts. Munson Terrell had made a convert of Martin.

"Just exactly what did you do in your breechcloths?" Rombo inquired from the kitchen door. "Or is that one of those 'men's secrets' we don't talk about?"

"They went off alone in the heat to find personal totems, came back, named their totems communally, built a sweat lodge, blessed the sweat lodge, ate, did a sweat lodge ritual, and then danced around in a circle, Rombo," Estrella answered over the top of a beer mug full of sparkling water. "Martin's already described the whole thing. But I don't know why everybody's overlooking Chris Joe Gavin. He's the only one with a motive to do in all three of them—Acito, Chac, and Terrell. Jealousy."

"I'm afraid the boy is the most likely suspect." Andrew sighed. "Bo has checked him out with social services in Kentucky and he's got a troubled history. I wouldn't be surprised if—"

"Wait a minute," Bo said, washing down a bit of spicy chicken with cold beer, "his history seemed pretty impressive to me. Good grades, no problems with the law, people wanting to adopt him. The 'trouble' in his history belongs to a legal system that couldn't get him freed for adoption, and a social services definition of 'foster home' that always means 'not a permanent home.' And why would he have sent me Chac's bank statement and that business about Chac naming her murderer in her music if he'd killed her?"

"Well," Rombo interjected, "why did he run away and hide if he didn't kill her?"

Eva Broussard had been admiring the new wall unit in Rombo and Martin's living room. Leaning against it, she crossed moccasined feet before her and stretched. "We're being somewhat less than methodical," she suggested. "Bo, didn't you tell me the name under which Chac kept her bank account was Rother?"

"Yeah," Bo answered, taking a seat on the couch. "Elena Rother. Why?"

"It may be that Chac knew something, feared something, and constructed symbolic messages in odd niches of her life like this one. Messages that may reflect her world-view, or her wishes for her son, or even information about her murderer. Remember that her mind was not that of a contemporary Westerner, but rather that of a Maya."

"I'm afraid I don't see how a name on a bank account can tell us anything," Henry said, expertly tossing a beer to Andrew.

Bo watched as the man in whose arms she would lie tonight popped the beer can's tab and sprayed the length of his pure linen tie with foam. It seemed safe to hypothesize that Andrew LaMarche in a domestic situation would not be prone to nursing beer cans in front of a television. He couldn't even get one open.

So what, Bradley ? The fact that he's several evolutionary steps up from Stanley Kowalski doesn't mean you need to start shopping for his'n'her recliners. These thoughts can pave the way to hell. Don't think them.

"Father Rother was a missionary priest," Eva explained, stifling a smile as Martin whisked the sodden tie off to the kitchen for soaking in cold water. "He was murdered by Guatemalan soldiers after a meddlesome visitor from his own home parish in Oklahoma contacted the Guatemalan government. This man told the Guatemalan authorities that Rother was helping the Maya to organize and fight back against the system enslaving them. The government responded to this news by ordering Rother killed. He's a folk hero now among Guatemala's native people. It's said that they buried his heart near Lake Atitlan before sending his body home to the States for burial. I can't help wondering what Chac meant by hiding her money under his name."

"Something about betrayal?" Martin suggested from the kitchen. "Maybe she was betrayed by somebody the way Rother was."

"Or perhaps she just wanted a symbolic connection to a strong, heroic figure," Andrew said.

Bo rolled her eyes. "We're never going to know why she used Rother's name, but we can figure out what's in those song lyrics. Es...?"