Turtle Baby (30 page)

Bo inhaled steam from her coffee cup. "I don't know him," she admitted. "But the picture Martin painted of Terrell during their workshop in the desert was scarcely that of a depressed man contemplating suicide. And I have trouble connecting this ..." She tapped her left arm under the sleeve of her navy sweatshirt. "... to a border-hopping Australian entrepreneur with a museum-quality home, a svelte, adoring wife, and an adoptive child on the way. It's possible that Terrell took himself out, Eva, but I find it hard to believe he wrote what I saw on the computer screen."

"Let me see your arm again," Eva sighed as Bo obligingly pushed up her sleeve.

"I agree that the choice of words is juvenile and affect-laden," she nodded after pondering Bo's outstretched arm. "But I never met the man and my sensitivity to English nuance is permanently compromised by the fact that I've spoken Canadian French since I was five years old. That's fifty-five years. Who do you think wrote the note?"

"I don't know. Kee might have. She has an odd, childlike quality. Except that would implicate her in her husband's death, and Chac's, and the attempt on Acito. And that's the hitch. Kee would not have harmed a baby, especially an Indian baby. It's not possible. That rules her out, even if her apparent devotion to Terrell doesn't."

"And ...?"

"And so that leaves Chris Joe Gavin."

Bo spooned a prodigious mound of fresh salsa atop the scrambled eggs placed before her by a waitress in gleaming orthodontic braces and a parochial school uniform.

"Do you think the boy is responsible for Terrell's death, and the others?" Eva asked, attacking her chorizo sausage omelette.

"I don't know what I think," Bo sighed. "And there's no way to prove anything. Chris Joe looks like the obvious culprit. An out-of-control adolescent male, jealous, resentful, bitter. But Chac's song, the folk tale in the last verse ... it seems to point to Terrell, so he probably did commit suicide. Bottom line, we're probably never going to know what really happened."

"Can you live with that?" Eva asked.

Bo grinned at a sprig of parsley adorning the refried beans on her plate. "I doubt it," she answered.

Two hours later she arrived at work on time, wearing a pale yellow cotton-blend shirtwaist bought three years ago for the interview that landed her this job. The social worker costume. Wash-and-wear niceness. The dress did little to buffer Madge Aldenhoven's voice, now shrill with bureaucratic outrage.

"The one case I could have transferred out today has just blown up!" she informed Bo, pacing in the tiny office as Estrella pretended to read a three-page, single-spaced directive from County Administration regarding reimbursement vouchers for repairs on county-owned office equipment. A copy of the directive had been in the mailbox of every county employee that morning. A small forest, Bo thought, had gone into yet another ton of paper that nobody would read. Madge seemed ready to perform acts of violence, a fact that only reinforced Bo's satisfaction in her choice of the idiot dress. No

one would assault a kindly social worker in a buttercup yellow shirtwaist.

"We should have sent this damned Indian baby over to Indian Child Welfare in the beginning," Madge went on. "Now we're going to be stuck with this case for months."

More like years, Bo thought to herself, but merely said, "I thought you'd set Acito up for a pre-adopt foster home. What happened?" In the foggy morning sunlight pouring weakly through their office window Madge looked like a puppet being walked up and down on invisible strings. The shadow twitching behind her seemed gnomelike and out-of-sorts.

"The parents of that dead lunatic who was legally the baby's father phoned the hotline this morning from someplace in Louisiana. They left a message saying they can't take the baby right now, but they will under no circumstances release him for adoption. We're stuck."

Bo wished the faces on her bulletin board, every one of them undoubtedly labeled "lunatic" by earlier versions of Madge Aldenhoven, could come to life if only for a moment. She particularly wished Walt Whitman would step down onto her desk and bellow the endless entirety of Song of Myself at Madge until she either got the message or locked herself permanently in her office.

"And whoever walks a furlong without sympathy walks to her own funeral ..." Bo recited, examining her nails and altering the gender of the possessive pronoun to fit the situation, "... drest in her shroud." The shroud part was particularly apt, she thought. Madge was wearing a blousy, belted shift of tan kettlecloth. Easily mistaken for a shroud in the wrong light.

"I'm not in the mood for whatever it is that you're doing, Bo," the supervisor snapped. "And what happened to your arm?"

At Eva's suggestion Bo had stuck a large butterfly Band-Aid over Munson Terrell's suicide note, which had proven resistant to removal. Outback Odyssey's promotional pens had apparently been filled with indelible ink.

"Blood work," Bo sighed dramatically. "Isn't it amazing what modern medicine ..."

"They don't draw blood from the front of your arm." Madge frowned.

"Psychiatric blood tests are different," Bo lied, smiling at Charlie Parker and his saxophone above her desk. "You know, lunatic blood?"

Estrella appeared to choke on a sip of coffee.

Madge stopped pacing. "I'm sick of your nonsense, Bo. You'll get a new case within the hour, and I expect you to complete the investigation today. In the meantime I want a case plan for the Indian baby. Foster care says there aren't any long-term homes available right now. They're going to do a recruitment program sometime this year, but right now there's nothing. Try Indian Child Welfare. It may not be too late to let them take him."

Bo spun her desk chair so the full impact of her social worker costume would not be lost on Madge. "What a mess," she said sympathetically as Estrella bit a half-moon out of her Styrofoam coffee cup. "Those grandparents sure botched things up. Too bad the placement he's in now is only certified for short-term. They seem to enjoy fostering, and might agree to keep him ..."

"I'll have foster care reclassify them as long-term," Madge said. "What was their name?"

"Uh, it begins with a D," Bo answered, pulling Acito's case file from the collection on her desk and feigning no memory of the distraught Dooleys. "Here it is—Dooley. David and Constanzia Dooley."

Madge was at the door. "Can you convince them to keep the child until this legal difficulty with the grandparents is straightened out?"

"I'll give it a try," Bo said brightly. "We need to get this case out of the way."

When Madge had closed the door behind her Bo and Estrella mimed high-fives across the space where their supervisor had paced. The legal problem with the grandparents, with knowledgeable handling, could drag on for years. The State of Louisiana would accept jurisdiction over Acito, based on the Singletons' residence there. Then it would grant the State of California, County of San Diego, "courtesy supervision" of its ward, there being no money to transport him to Louisiana and no desire on the part of that state to assume the financial burden of his care. After a few years the courts would insist that permanent arrangements be made for the child, at which time the Dooleys' case for adoption would be insurmountable, particularly if the grandparents made it known that they wished the child to remain with the Dooleys.

An archaic law designed to prevent "bastardy" had given Acito an appropriate home. A woman's legal husband, the law insisted, was legally the father of her children even if that were a physical impossibility. The law said that Dewayne Singleton, imprisoned in Louisiana, had nonetheless managed to father a child in Mexico. When the mother, and then Dewayne, died, Dewayne's parents became Acito's next-of-kin. They could, as had Chris Joe Gavin's mother, prevent Acito from being placed by San Diego County's Child Protective Services under the direction of San Diego County's Juvenile Court, for adoption.

Bo sighed, and then phoned the Dooleys.

"It isn't foolproof," she warned. "But it's the best I can do. Good luck."

The Dooley's understood, they said, and then whooped with joy.

The new case Madge brought in fifteen minutes later was merely the last entry in a case file already thicker than the San Diego phone book. "Opiela," it said simply on the orange band where the names of children were usually written. The single word was enough.

"Oh, no!" Bo winced. "Not again!"

"Afraid so," Madge nodded, eyeing the case file with a disdain equal to Bo's. "This time a neighbor found one of them, the ten-year-old girl, sleeping in a ramada in his orange grove. The neighbor phoned police when the girl refused to go home, claiming her mother's boyfriend hangs around the house all day in his underwear, drunk."

"Is she afraid he'll hurt her?"

"No." Madge shook her head. "The girl says she's afraid she'll hurt him. Says it's all she can do to keep from pouring hot coffee into his shorts. Hearing this, the police, of course, took her into custody. I'm afraid the protective issue this time may center on the boyfriend, not the child."

"I'll go talk to Marjorie," Bo told her supervisor. "Get her to throw the drunk out. It doesn't sound petitionable."

Marjorie Opiela and her eight children had been on the receiving end of Child Protective Services for a decade, to no avail. Robustly unconcerned with twentieth-century standards for diet, cleanliness, and school attendance, the Opielas continued to thrive a hair's-breadth short of the cloudy line beyond which the term "child abuse" might legally be employed.

One or another of the children was referred to CPS with astonishing regularity by doctors, teachers, truant officers, neighbors, and police for problems ranging from head lice to petty theft. Nearly every worker in the system had at some point tried to convince Marjorie Opiela to clean her crumbling barn of a house occasionally, and to force her children to wear shoes. The worker who'd decorously left a packet of birth control information on Marjorie’s kitchen table had been run off with a broken canoe paddle. Bo regarded the case as an opportunity to ponder Munson Terrell's death, since there was documentably no point in devoting thought to the colorful, recalcitrant Opielas.

"Interview the girl at the receiving home and then go on up to Leucadia and talk to the mother," Madge said. "If there's no grounds for a petition, we'll close it and you'll have another one this afternoon."

"Great," Bo replied without enthusiasm. At least the trip to the northern coastal community of Leucadia would be pleasant. It would take her along the beaches, past Torrey Pines State Reserve, near Andrew's condo. She wondered what she was going to do about Andrew, and decided to table the conflict until later. The decision was rendered moot when the phone's muted bell thumped seconds later.

"Bo," the familiar voice began carefully, "I was pleased when Eva called last night to tell me what had happened. I mean I was pleased that she was with you. It must have been upsetting, finding Terrell's body. But I'm sure you're relieved that the mystery is resolved. I thought you might like to meet me for lunch to celebrate. I mean to celebrate the resolution of the case, not Terrell's death. Ah, mon dieu. I'm not doing well, am I?"

Bo smiled and drew a series of collar pins on the margin of her desk calendar. "We do need to talk, Andy, but I've got to run up to Leucadia on a new case. I can't meet you for lunch. How about dinner? You know, I'm not really convinced about Terrell's death. I want you to take a look at the suicide note. I've got it on my arm—"

"You've got it on your arm?" Andrew LaMarche's voice attempted to suggest that suicide-note-laden arms were only marginally out of the ordinary.

"I copied the note on my arm; there wasn't any paper. But I don't think Terrell wrote it. Why don't you meet me for dinner at—"

"I've got a better idea. I made some peanut soup last night, and an oyster rarebit, as well as a pan of coffee fudge. The soup and rarebit are in the freezer, but you could stop by on your way back from Leucadia and ..."

Bo recognized the throbbing of her Achilles' heel, and gave in to it with abandon. "Coffee fudge! I'll be there. But you must have been up half the night cooking. How come?"

"I was, um, concerned that you, ah, well, I was worried about you, Bo."

"We'll need a salad," Bo replied. "And a long talk about how I hate it when people worry about me. Nothing, however, could keep me from trying coffee fudge."

"There's a spare key inside the doormat. Just pull up the C in 'WELCOME.' It's fastened with Velcro. The key's right there, and you can leave the soup and rarebit on the counter to thaw."

"Okay, but wouldn't it be quicker just to microwave it?"

"A microwave thaw overcooks everything except the center." A hint of self-congratulation surfaced in his voice. "I rather hoped you'd see the effort I expended in sublimating my need to race to your side and hover last night. Cooking, I think, will do nicely until the harpsichord kit arrives. I do love you, Bo."

"Cooking is brilliant," she agreed. "And tonight we'll talk about the lengths to which I'll go in a lifelong struggle for autonomy. In the meantime Estrella's going to be in the office all day in case Chris Joe Gavin calls."

"What?"

"Tell you about it later. Gotta run."

As Bo placed the receiver in its cradle the Alfred Stieglitz photo of Georgia O'Keeffe pinned to her bulletin board seemed to smile knowingly. Enduring relationships with men tended to be an uphill climb for independent women, the smile suggested, especially independent women riding mood swings that demanded frequent solitude. But it was always fun to try.

Kara Opiela, cooling her heels at San Diego's Hillcrest Receiving Home, couldn't understand what the big deal was. All she'd said that she'd like to pour hot coffee on Cole Durocher's weenie, not that she was going to. Besides, he was always too drunk to feel it, anyway. She would specifically like to get home before Friday, when her oral report on the life cycle of the tapeworm was due at the university-sponsored science camp she was attending. Bo regarded the request as reasonable.