Child of Silence Read online

  Child of Silence

  Abigail Padgett

  Quoted lines of the Paiute chant by Wovoka are used by permission of the Bear Tribe Publishing Company in cooperation with The Draco Foundation and are taken from Evelyn Eaton's “Snowy Earth Comes Gliding” © 1974 by The Draco Foundation.

  Copyright © 1993-2010, by Abigail Padgett All rights reserved.

  Child of Silence originally appeared in print by: Mysterious Press books are published by Warner Books, Inc., 1271 Avenue of the Americas, New York, NY 10020, a Time Warner Company. The Mysterious Press name and logo are trademarks of Warner Books, Inc.

  First printing: January 1993

  Ebook produced in the United States of America

  Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form, or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise), without the prior written permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book. The scanning, uploading, and distribution of this book via the Internet or via any other means without the permission of the publisher is illegal and punishable by law. Please purchase only authorized electronic editions, and do not participate in or encourage electronic piracy of copyrighted materials. Your support of the author’s rights is appreciated.

  Digital Editions (.mobi and .epub) produced by: Kimberly A. Hitchens, [email protected].

  Cover Design by: Deron Lee Associates, [email protected]

  Author Photograph by: michèle magnin

  Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data

  Padgett, Abigail.

  Child of silence / Abigail Padgett.

  p. cm.

  ISBN 0-89296-488-X I. Title.

  PS3566.A3197C48 1993

  8i3'.54—dc20 91-51186

  CIP

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  To writers Mary Austin and Evelyn Eaton, who at different times loved and wrote about a lost desert valley in California and its native people, the Paiute.

  To Dr. Dennis Agallianos of Vermont's Brattleboro Retreat - gentleman and wisest of shrinks - for psychiatric technical advice.

  To Dr. Tom Humphries of the San Diego Community College District for technical advice on hearing impairment.

  For Ruth Cavin

  And in memory of Tarot D

  1 - 3:00 a.m. Fog

  Wisps of fog drifting through the open balcony doors of Bo Bradley's San Diego beach apartment wafted aimlessly and then evaporated. But not before settling damply on her unruly mane of silvery auburn hair. And not before capturing the attention of an almond-shaped structure called the amygdala, nestled deep within Bo's brain.

  More highly evolved in dogs than in people, the amygdala responds to scent. In the more imaginative, it can create whole movies out of a whiff of yeast muffin or a hint of perfume. And prone toward the manic end of a manic-depressive disorder, Bo Bradley was never short of imagination, even in sleep.

  Irritated, she stretched her lanky forty-year-old frame beneath the Black Watch plaid sheets she'd found on sale at a linen outlet just last week. She pulled the edge of the top sheet over her nose. Too late. Images called by the scent of fog from inaccessible memory crowded into other landscapes and became mutations. Bo began to dream.

  It was the old cottage at Chequesset Neck on Cape Cod Bay where she’d gone every summer as a child. The salt-breezy cottage with its ships-prow porch where her grandmother told stories of Billingsgate sea witches and Gypsy fortune-tellers. Except in the dream the cottage was in ruins, its clapboard roof fallen in on hollow rooms strewn with broken glass.

  There was no one in the ravaged rooms but her sister, Laurie, screaming that eerie, croaking scream of hers. A child-Laurie, screaming alone in the ruined cottage. And she was wearing the dress. Gray velvet with the Carrickmacross lace collar that had belonged to their grandmother. The dress Laurie had really worn at twenty. The dress she would wear forever.

  Bo wakened to the booming of her own heart and the echo of a scream. Her throat hurt. The scream, she assumed, must have originated there.

  “Here we go again,” she muttered at a digital clock radio greenly promoting the fact that it was the middle of the night and Friday as well. “I'm not up for this. I'm really not.”

  It was Laurie again. Or the memory of Laurie. Or guilt over Laurie. Or some damn thing. Whatever. But after twelve years Bo knew what to do. Twelve years after Laurie's body had been found in a rest area off the New York Thruway with a garden hose running from the exhaust pipe of her car through the drivers-side window, Bo knew exactly what to do. Her all-time favorite shrink, the inimitable Dr. Lois Bittner, had told her how to manage these “occurrences.”

  “Immediate exercise!” the wiry little woman yelped cheerfully, as if exercise were the equivalent of a quarter pound of fudge - something to brighten over. “Take control! Increase your heart rate. Pump up your body. Don't let the mood pull you into tangential thinking. Remember, der iss nutting but reality.”

  Lois Bittner, Bo remembered fondly, invariably lapsed into an accent you couldn't cut with an industrial-strength laser when she waxed enthusiastic. Which was often.

  Pulling paint-smudged sweats over a tattered old T-shirt of Mark's she sometimes slept in, Bo fumbled for her Nikes under the bed and took a deep breath. Her grandmother would have sniffed at Dr. Bittner.

  “It's the sight,” Bridget Mairead O'Reilly explained to her granddaughter. “A gift. Those as has it, well. . . they seem to know things, to see things as others can't.”

  It would be fun, Bo thought, to lock the two matriarchs in a room and let them fight over where to draw the line between intuition and madness. The Irish Catholic grandmother and the German Jewish psychiatrist. Maybe then she could get some sleep. Too bad they were both dead.

  In her basket on the floor near an easel, Bo's elderly fox terrier, Mildred, blinked groggily and attempted to wag her stub of a tail.

  “Never mind,” Bo reassured the dog. “It's the middle of the night. You don't have to get up. I'm fine.”

  Mildred sighed and allowed her white fur eyelids to close. On the easel an egg-tempera pictograph of a bighorn sheep appeared to do the same. “Or am I?” Bo questioned as she opened the door of her apartment to a swirling wall of fog. At this hour it was hard to tell.

  Beneath her feet the crooked stone steps that in daylight would angle charmingly toward gull-strewn rocks hissing with foamy breakers were invisible. She felt her way down, holding the railing and fighting a suspicion that familiar paths may not always lead where they always have. What if, unaccountably, the steps just led nowhere? Off into oblivion? Into a black hole? The fog moved in sinuous clumps like a living thing struggling toward some destination of its own.

  Warning signals went up. Just little ones, but the snick of their ignition was almost audible. This was it. The thing to watch out for. The acceleration of imagination beyond the boundaries of comfort.

  “Cut the crap,” Bo admonished several thousand neural synapses inside her skull. “There is nothing but reality!”

  It usually worked. It and a lot of exercise, a relentlessly healthy diet, and rigorous elimination of stress. What a joke.

  Bo laughed, imagining Dr. Bittner’ s probable response to her current job as a child abuse investigator for San Diego County's Juvenile Court. If there were a more stress-ridden, emotionally wracking form of employment on earth, Bo couldn't name it. Bittner would have calves, Bo knew. Whole litters of them! But Lois Bittner was dead. And the job paid Bo's rent, as long as she didn't let it get to her.

  And all else failing, there was always the damned lithium. She'd had to take it before, more tha
n once; she'd do it again when the inevitable necessity arose.

  “But I'd rather not,” Bo sang determinedly into the fog as her feet found the narrow path to the Ocean Beach Pier. The last time she'd had to take the famous salts to calm her racing mind, her supervisor at work, the American Gothic Madge Aldenhoven, complimented her on her sudden “maturity.” Chronic ringworm, Bo mused, would be preferable to Madge's brand of maturity. What Madge meant was nothing more than tidy paperwork and blind obedience to the bureaucracy. Bo had never been renowned for tidy paperwork or obedience to anything.

  The Ocean Beach Pier loomed whitely out of the fog, promising a good jog. Bo knew every board of the creaking old pier, and could run it blindfolded. The smooth increase in her heart rate was comforting. It would reduce the restlessness, drain the content of the crazy dreams. A little.

  A dark heap under a fish-cleaning sink appeared suddenly and turned out to be a pile of kelp. Someone fishing had undoubtedly hauled it up and left it there, its rubbery green leaves browning at the edges. Bo stopped to toss it over the rail. It vanished instantly into the white mist and made no splash when it hit the water. The fog simply swallowed it.

  Still, behind the white swirls Bo could swear she felt something happening. Something vague and distant, but nevertheless desperate. Something about Laurie. It made no sense and that, Bo knew, was dangerous.

  Her grandmother would have lit a candle and rattled a few rosaries. Bo chose instead to increase the pace of her jog and wondered idly if she'd inadvertently propel herself over the rail at the end of the pier and vanish in fog, like the kelp.

  The weird feeling wasn't going away.

  A gong buoy beyond the twin breakwaters to her right clanged in the manner relished by Victorian poets. Eerie and prophetic. Bo couldn't see the buoy but knew its shape—a small blue Eiffel Tower lurching in the swells.

  “Oh, shut up,” she told it.

  At the end of the pier she leaned on the railing and breathed fog. Except for the buoy there was no sound. Her throat still hurt and numerous small headaches twitched sporadically behind her eyes. A dawning awareness that she might be physically sick rose like a warm, pink sun. Sore throat and headache? Bingo!

  “I'm not getting manic, I'm getting sick,” Bo told the pier railing with enthusiasm. “It's the flu!”

  And regardless how stuffy, drippy, achy, and miserable it might be, the flu was a piece of cake compared to that other alternative. Hands down.

  On the return jog Bo forced her attention into the labyrinth of the mundane with its comforting boredom. She'd try to catch another three hours of sleep and then maybe get to the office early. She couldn't stay home; she'd used all of her sick days in pursuit of her current fascination—the primitive paintings.

  A bit of rock at a museum exhibit had started it. Just a meaningless spiral-shaped squiggle etched on a rock many centuries before the first white explorer would claim the land for condos and shopping malls. Bo had felt the bit of rock, the inexplicable spiral on its surface, pulling at her. Had felt some antediluvian hand arching in her own fingers. The need to create images, the artist's need. She welcomed it, familiar as her first tin tray of watercolors. Art was the only language she knew that could be understood on either side of the line marked “sanity.”

  “Where is this from?” she asked, dragging the museum docent to the display case. “Were these done by Anasazi People, or does anybody know? Are there any more drawings? How do I get there?”

  The docent had to pull a file from a dusty cabinet.

  “. . . Mojave desert. .. a valley in the Coso Range, now part of the China Lake Naval Air Station. It's about five hours north of here, up toward Death Valley,” the woman explained. “Nothing is known of the people who left the drawings. Tribes now living in the region do not regard the creators of the drawings as ancestors, and refer to them merely as ‘the old ones.’”

  Bo spent two days doodling spirals on interoffice memos before capitulating to the fascination. A fictitious bout of bronchitis bought her a four-day weekend. Plenty of time for exploring a silent desert canyon whose walls were galleries of forgotten art. Spellbound, Bo longed to bring the images out of silence, give them new life on her own canvases. She wished she didn't have to work. She wished she could make a living with her painting.

  “But so what?” she commented to one of San Diego's homeless, irritably trying to sleep on a fishing bench. “I mean, it could be worse, right?”

  “Right, lady,” the man muttered dismally. “It could be worse, like if you don't get the hell outta here!”

  Bo chose not to explain the public nature of the pier and her right to be there despite fog and wee hours.

  It was going to be okay. She'd go to work, stay in the office all day, finish up the paperwork trailing the ten cases she'd investigated already this month. Take it easy. It would be a good day. It would be good to have the flu.

  Mildred was waiting at the door when Bo returned, a bundle of leaps and wags. Gathering the little dog in her arms, Bo buried her face in comforting, furry warmth.

  “Aye, an’ there’s a banshee after me for sure,” she joked as the dog cocked an ear curiously at her brogue.

  “It’s Caillech Bera a wailin’ in the fog.”

  The reference to the ancient Celtic goddess of death and madness failed to achieve the level of parody Bo had intended. In fact, the words seemed oddly, and quite sanely, true.

  2 - “The Crow Has Called Me . . .” —Arapaho Ghost Dance

  Dawn sieved through the leaves of coast live oaks off Wildcat Canyon Road on the Barona Ranch Indian Reservation thirty miles east of San Diego. The light roused mountain jays, quail, and one sluggish crow. The crow swooped erratically to land on the roof of a ramshackle trailer. Its cawing wakened the woman inside.

  “What does Little Black Eagle want with an old woman?” Annie Garcia muttered to herself.

  At seventy-nine she had little use for spirit-messages, especially before she’d had her coffee. And maybe it wasn't a spirit-message, but just a crow. It was hard to separate the old Paiute ways from modern ways, in her mind. Mostly, she didn’t try. Sometimes, she thought she was a girl again, sleeping with her grandmother beneath a blanket of woven rabbit skins in the lonely Sierra reaches beyond Yosemite. Sometimes she only wished she were.

  Her body hurt in more places than she could name. She could feel every interstice of bone and bone. Her chest ached; her breath was short. A cry-dance lay not far in the future, and Annie knew it would be for her—the somber Paiute circle-dance around a fire in which her belongings would burn.

  But not today.

  She forced a gnarled foot to find her shoes beneath the cot—men's Adidas her oldest daughter, Maria Bigger Fox, got for her in a thrift store in El Cajon. The shoes were loose and comfortable for walking. Annie liked to walk.

  After a trip to the chemical toilet behind the trailer, she began. It wasn't too far. Just past Maria and Joe’s cement-block house, up Wildcat Canyon Road, and onto the dirt track to the old house.

  She walked up to the house whenever she could. It reminded her of one she and Charlie rented in Three Rivers years ago when the kids were little and he made some money in the almond groves.

  The path looked safe today. The car that somebody parked at the trailhead was gone.

  People slept at the old house sometimes. Indian kids with beer who shot guns at the walls. Knots of hungry Mexicans on their way north to work. But almost never a white, like the one with the car.

  Leaning against a cottonwood, Annie paused to get her breath in the early-morning damp. Her heart trembled briefly and then resumed a painful thumping she could feel in her knuckles. A spadefoot toad stared at her from its hole in the ditch beside the path. Annie stared back and then kicked a shower of dust and granite pebbles at its bulging head. The toad was so ugly it made her laugh as she struggled uphill.

  But the laugh subsided when she saw the house. It was just an adobe shell crumbling amid granite boul
ders and shrubby manzanitas with their smooth, mahogany-colored limbs. The bullet-pocked walls and gaping windows were as familiar to Annie as her own wide and crumpled face. But something was wrong.

  A spirit shook her suddenly and then moved away through the oaks in a shower of tear-shaped acorns that rattled on the licheny boulders. It was too quiet!

  There was no sound. No gray squirrels scrabbling among the dry October leaves. No jays screeching in the oaks. No crows swooping and cawing in the whole expanse of ashen sky.

  A chill moved up Annie’s spine like a hand of feathers under her skin. The spirit had warned her.