Turtle Baby Page 13

  "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?"

  His eyes were soft as he stroked her hair with the back of his fingers. "No. I'd hoped this would be a celebratory dinner for us, Bo. I intend to ask you to marry me again, sometime between the vichyssoise and the green chile sorbet."

  "Green chile sorbet!"

  "Touché." He grinned, heading for the kitchen. "Better stay on your toes if you want to duck this old Cajun. Do you realize you still haven't said 'Andy, don't start that again'? So how about honeymooning in Spain?"

  "Why Spain?" Bo asked, wondering why she had to fall for this strange anachronism of a man who was giving her a headache the like of which she hadn't experienced since she was a virginal teenager determined to stay that way.

  "Always admired El Greco," he answered. "Does that mean yes?"

  "No. But Spain sounds like fun. Andy, how much do you know about genetics?"

  "It's nothing unusual," he said over cold soup in museum-quality champlevé bowls, "but you've lost me." The warm gray eyes showed no concern over being lost.

  "You have beautiful eyes," Bo said. "But this is important. I think I know who Acito's father is. At the foster home tonight I noticed that the hair growing in over his right temple is white. That's hereditary, isn't it?"

  "Usually, yes. It's called piebaldism. A chromosomal anomaly occurring in furry mammals, including the human variety. Odd that we didn't notice it when he was in the hospital. And how does that—"

  "Don't you remember Chac's manager, the Australian? He's got a hunk of white hair on the right side of his forehead! He's the daddy, Andy."

  In the candlelight a chafing dish produced wafts of savory aroma as Andrew removed the lid. "I'm afraid I was captivated by someone else, Bo," he said. "I only remember that his name was Terrell and that he seemed devastated by Chac's death."

  "Maybe that was an act. Andy, maybe he wanted to get rid of both Chac and Acito before his wife found out what he'd been up to. Maybe Chac was blackmailing him. Why else would he be down in Tijuana managing the career of a bar singer with an unsavory history? She couldn't have made it this far in the music business without a lot of financial backing. It fits, Andy."

  "There was a woman with Terrell in the bar the night Chac died." Andrew frowned. "May have been the wife. The jealous wife, angry enough to poison her rival. Stay out of it, Bo. I don't want you stirring up danger."

  "Umm," she answered. The Irish stew he'd prepared with Italian sausage was delicious. The fact was also celebrated by Mildred's quivering stub of a tail as she devoured morsels of the stew's meat from a bowl Andrew placed next to another containing imported water on the kitchen's limestone-tiled floor.

  After dinner Bo walked Mildred beneath the Torrey pine and admired the moon through its branches. "He's not like the others, is he?" she remarked to the dog. "None of them noticed you, or remembered that you might like some water. I'm not even sure he's real."

  The question was resolved a half hour later as Andrew led Bo up the steeply curving road of the nature preserve across from his condo, and onto a sandy path. "I wanted you to see this," he said. "Au fond de mon coeur, until you, this place has been my heart of hearts. It is lovely, n'est-ce pas?"

  Bo watched the moon's rippled trail narrow and fall over the Pacific horizon. Behind them, the scent of sage mingled with pine drifted from a darkened grove of the silent Torrey pines. Below the promontory where they stood a wrinkled badland of young sandstone fell seven stories to the moonlit beach below, where a solitary beachcomber seemed fragile and lost. "Oh, Andy," she sighed against his mouth, understanding that the odd vibration she felt in his arms was not a psychiatric symptom, but something ancient and beyond comprehension. "It is."

  Andrew LaMarche, it turned out, was magnificently real.

  Sometime later from a sandy hollow
in the grove, Bo saw a pair of mule deer dart through a tattered patch of moonlight. "Andy, look!" she whispered.

  His eyes never left the curve of her hip, curled against him in the dark. "I am," he said, tucking his silk shirt over her garmentless body for warmth. She noticed that the tucking stopped just short of her breasts.

  It was only the following morning when she dragged herself from his bed toward the promise of coffee brewing in the kitchen that she noticed one of her gold earrings was missing.

  "I'll see if I can find it later," he blushed, "if you'll tell me where on earth you found condoms with rosebuds on them."

  "Hillcrest," she answered, admiring the fact that he managed to appear elegant in the morning, even wearing nothing but a towel.

  And the coffee was the best she'd ever tasted.

  Chapter Twenty

  One Fox

  "I don't believe I said I'd do this," Martin St. John lamented for the fourth time since rising at six on Saturday morning for a last rehearsal. Rombo was bent over eggs Benedict, laughing.

  "Don't pick up your coffee cup as if it were Meissen, Marty, just grab it," he chortled.

  "You know perfectly well it is Meissen," Martin answered. "This is never going to work. I'm going to get out there in the desert and be sacrificed. Tied to an anthill with starving young wolves inside my shirt. Probably trussed with cactus spines and cooked over a mesquite fire. Bo will never forgive herself, but then she couldn't have known what might happen to a gay man at a masculinity workshop, right?"

  Rombo wiped tears of laughter on his cuff before going to the kitchen for fresh coffee and dessert croissants. The hilarity had begun the night before when seven of their friends arrived to coach Martin in macho behavior for his undercover assignment in the desert. By the evening's end, Martin had been given a hard hat, a roll of stick-on tattoos, three pairs of Fruit of the Loom briefs, a pack of unfiltered Camels, and a 1954 publicity photo of Marlon Brando leaning on a motorcycle, sneering. At the end their friends serenaded Martin with several choruses of "Stout-Hearted Men." Rombo couldn't resist carrying the evening's spirit over into breakfast.

  "Don't forget to destroy as many irreplaceable desert plants as you can for no apparent reason, and talk about your plan to produce a line of targets featuring the young of endangered species. These guys'll love ya, Marty. Trust old Rom. I know my men!"

  Martin sighed. "Look, this is serious. Bo wants the inside story on Terrell. She thinks I'll fit in with the group at least enough so he won't think I'm a spy. That's all that matters. I'm just supposed to participate in whatever they do, and try to get a sense of this guy."

  "You'll do fine," Rombo said, inhaling the steam from his coffee appreciatively. "I'm proud of you for helping Bo, and in that outfit nobody will dream you don't even own an automatic weapon!"

  Martin stood and struck a bodybuilder's pose in his khaki shorts and denim shirt. "Dr. Livingstone, I presume?" he intoned, as a car's horn honked outside. "Oh, God, it's them. My carpool to our rendezvous with the four-wheel at the edge of Canyon Sin Nombre. Terrell said we'd go in two or three groups, set up camp, and then go off alone on individual 'symbol quests,' whatever that means. Then we're going to do a sweat lodge. I can't believe I let Bo talk me into this. Rom, if I don't return, tell the puppy about me, okay? Tell him I died fighting for truth, justice, and the American way."

  Rombo hugged his partner and handed him a duffel bag full of bottled water and fresh fruit. "It's only one night, Martin. And it is a good cause. See you tomorrow afternoon!"

  Martin squared his shoulders, adopted what he imagined would be the attitude of a French Legionnaire about to be shot, and stomped out the door in borrowed hiking boots that were too big even with three pairs of socks.

  "Try to avoid teenage rattlesnakes," Rombo called a last warning. "They haven't learned to control the venom yet, you know. They just shoot all they've got. Certain death. You can recognize them because they'll be the ones listening to rap music."

  "Of course." Martin sighed, and hurried to the waiting car.

  Chapter Twenty-one

  Skull Owl, the Messenger

  After a casual Saturday morning breakfast Bo drove down to the sea from Andrew's condo, pondering what to do next. She'd begged off on spending the day with him, claiming a need to work on a nonexistent case. Probably wise not to let the relationship take on trappings of something it could never be, she thought. Wise not to wallow in those first heady days when intimacy might form the remembered core of something more serious. To her surprise and to his credit, he'd merely nodded and said, "Of course."

  In the morning light the beach was a ribbon of clean white sand, scalloped at its edge by blue-green waves. A few beachcombers strolled the littoral, their heads bent toward tangles of kelp. Knee-deep in water and spaced widely along the shore, three fishermen cast lines into the sparkling surf. A postcard picture. Irresistible. Bo parked the car along California's Old Highway One, secured Mildred's leash to her collar, and clambered down the seawall rocks. Beneath her bare feet the sand felt cool, as though the night before still hid there.

  She'd taken her morning medication with Andrew's coffee, and its initial effect made her feel, as usual, somewhat dull. Comfortably sluggish. Like an overfed goldfish in warm tap water. A light breeze suggested that the day might be well spent doing nothing. Maybe a hike in the hills behind Eva's, or a new painting roughed out on the gessoed canvas waiting at home. The painting felt right.

  Bo picked up a stick and scratched in the wet sand where foam from a receding wave hissed and evaporated. Squiggles at first. Then a face with a bent nose and huge, wild eyes staring into Bo's. From her memory came stretched, long ears with pegs in the lobes. Pegs made of bone. A headdress of quetzal feathers. A Maya face, drawn from some museum visit filed in her brain, trying to speak from the sand.

  "What can I really do?" she asked, staring into its grainy eyes. "Munson Terrell, or his wife, or Dewayne Singleton, or Chris Joe Gavin, or somebody else I don't even know about has murdered one of your people in a Mexican bar. Poisoned her and the Little Turtle as well. But I'm not a cop. I don't know how to track a murderer, and even if I did, I have no authority to do anything about it."

  The wind, blowing sand in swirls over the Maya face, made a sound like a wooden flute. Distant and eerie behind the sunlit air. The fierce eyes seemed to fade.

  "All I can do is make sure Acito has the best chance for a future. I think that's what Chac ..."

  But the face was gone, smoothed away by a small wave. Where it had been was only wet sand now, pocked with the airholes of submerged bean clams. As Bo watched, a seagull feather tumbling in the breeze rested briefly on the faceless sand. Then the feather blew into the surf and was swallowed. The whole scenario took less than three minutes and left Bo breathless.

  "We'll keep this to ourselves," she told Mildred, "but medication or not, I know what that meant. I have to do something, stay with this thing and not drift off into my meds or the arms of pediatricians. They're counting on me."

  Mildred did not ask who "they" might be, and Bo wasn't sure she could have answered, anyway. The Maya, maybe. About whom Bo knew practically nothing.

  In the car she ran a brush through her windblown hair and searched in her purse for the slip of paper Estrella had provided yesterday. The slip containing an address for Munson and Kee Terrell, the former of whom would at this moment be en route to the desert with his band of merry men. "Let's go see how much the missus knows about a Maya baby with her husband's hair," she said.

  The Terrells' house, built at the top of a winding hill street in the upscale San Diego community called Rancho Sante Fe, made Bo salivate. In weathered natural cedar, it nestled against the hill in unassuming levels that seemed to have sprung up by themselves. In its facade a two-story paned window topped by an arch of glass revealed gray-washed vaulted ceilings beamed with twisted wood milled to look as though it had been found in some desert wash. To the left of a curved and cobbled drive
way, the edge of a cantilevered deck could be seen stretching over the wooded canyon beyond. Bo sighed as she approached and rang the doorbell. The house, with its light and solitude, was, so far, a dream.

  The woman who answered the door did nothing to dispel the illusion.

  "Yes?" She smiled in the open, self-assured way Bo remembered from the Tijuana bar. Barefoot in 501s and a black silk tank top, she looked like an Italian model. Emaciated and waiflike. Bo acknowledged privately that with luck she could probably fit both arms into jeans as slim as Kee Terrell's, but not a leg. At least not an entire leg.

  "I'm Bo Bradley, from Child Protective Services," she sighed, showing her badge to a woman who at thirty-something could still play Beth in Little Women without foundation garments. "I need to speak with Mrs. Terrell about the death of a singer in Mexico Thursday night."

  "I'm Kee Terrell," the woman said, inspecting Bo's badge. "But I don't understand what your agency has to do with Chac's death."

  Bo scanned the response, the woman's face, and overall presentation for nuance. There was a zinging nervousness, a tendency to shallow breathing, a hollowness around the eyes. But these, Bo sensed, were always there. Her words hadn't brought them up.

  "Chac was the mother of an eight-month-old boy," she went on, casting about for something official-sounding to say next. "Of course we're anxious to locate any relatives who may be willing to assume custody of the baby, and thought that Mr. Terrell, as Chac's manager, might know if such relatives exist."

  Close, Bradley. You're shaving it to the bone here. But if she knows, it may show.

  "Please, come in." Kee Terrell nodded. "I remember something about a baby, I think. But then Mundy's done all the work with Chac. He handles the music promotions. It's a separate business entirely. We were both so upset by her death, you know. Mundy had such hopes for her career, which was booming, and then this drug thing."