Child of Silence Page 14

  “He's deaf,” Bo told Gretchen Tally. “Nobody's ever taught him to sign. Until now.”

  “Let's get in my car and get going,” the reporter suggested. “You'll explain all this to me as we go. Meanwhile, I want you to see something. . .”

  With Tally's help Bo moved the sleeping bag and Weppo's toys to the other car and then locked her own. She wondered if she'd ever see it again, or if it would be appropriated by the Joshua trees for trips to wherever Joshua trees went.

  “Look,” the other woman indicated, handing Bo a Houston newspaper. On its front page was a photo of Tia Rowe in black, her eyes concealed behind a veil. The headline read, “Shipping Heir MacLaren Rowe Succumbs to Heart Attack.” The article beneath the picture promised that the widow, despite an untimely burden of grief, would carry on the tradition of the Rowe name by remaining in the closely contested state senate race to be decided on Tuesday, also the day for which MacLaren Rowe's funeral had been scheduled.

  “She's won the damn thing.” Tally grimaced, pulling onto the road. “She'll slide in on the sympathy vote. Unless you've got something to tell me that'll make a difference. Now, for starters, what did the Brasseur woman tell you, who's this deaf kid, and where’s Kep Rowe?”

  Bo took a deep breath.

  “This deaf kid is Weppo. He was nearly murdered last night in a hospital room by one of two men and a mercury-tipped hollow-point bullet shot from a silenced Smith & Wesson .38,” Bo recited as one long word. “I've never heard of Kep Rowe. I assume he has something to do with Tia Rowe, Houston's answer to toxic waste. The lady with rattlesnake eyes. The one person who might actually find employment decorating rest rooms for third world bus stations. The—”

  “All right!” Gretchen Tally laughed. “God, I wish I had a tape recorder. Can you slow down at all?”

  “Probably not,” Bo replied. She trusted Gretchen Tally completely, the manicky radar full-blown now, picking up nothing but competence and solid intelligence in the chunky woman. But the release from responsibility Tally provided wasn't helping Bo's grip on reality. “I'm really going off, ' she told the reporter. “I'm going to take part of another sedative, but it'll probably knock me out for a while. Just get us to Lone Pine. We've got to find a woman named Annie Garcia. She's a Paiute. She's the one who found Weppo tied to a mattress up on the reservation. . .”

  Bo found the capsules in her purse and again poured more than half out of one into the car's ashtray.

  “Here's a Coke to knock that back with.” Tally offered a can from a small cooler between the seats. “But stay awake long enough to tell me why Weppo has anything to do with Tia Rowe. Kep Rowe is the son, incidentally.”

  “I found a grocery receipt from Jamail's,” Bo began after swallowing the capsule, “near where a car that we later found out was stolen in Houston and a wino found a dead drug addict in was parked...”

  The words didn't sound right, the syntax all wrong.

  “I'm not making any sense, am I?” she asked Gretchen Tally.

  “Enough. Go on before you're out cold.”

  “After they shot at Weppo, the cops told me nobody'd investigate until next week, and I knew there wasn't time, so I flew to Houston and found out the receipt was the Rowes', and the maid wouldn't let me in, but there was this picture, this old photograph on the wall—appalling wallpaper—of a little boy, late 1800s, early 1900s—and it looks just like Weppo! I mean, they're identical. And—”

  “That's probably the famous Wilhelm Marievski, Tia's father,” Gretchen interjected. “The Polish artist. An abstractionist. Had his own ‘school’ in Chicago. His paintings are worth a fortune now. Tia—her real name's Skiltia—was the only child.”

  Bo could feel the drug dragging her into sleep, but she fought it. “Wilhelm.” Something about the name. . . She forced her mouth to pronounce it slowly, and then watched herself in the car's exterior side mirror. There it was! Lip-reading her own mouth, she saw the syllables—-"We-eh-po!”

  “That's Weppo's name!” she told Tally. “His name's Wilhelm!'

  “I still don't know of a connection to Tia. She and that pathetic lush of a husband only had two kids—Kep and Julie. Julie died, about four years ago. I wasn't around then. I was still in school—journalism, Indiana University—but I dug out the old clips. Supposedly it was a brain tumor. But there's something fishy about that story. And Kep's a chip off the old block, except his thing's drugs instead of booze. Hey, didn't you say something about a dead drug addict?”

  Bo could not stay awake any longer.

  “The dead druggie was Weppo's father. I'm sure of it,” she managed to pronounce. “The killers are still after Weppo. Danger. . . just get us to Lone Pine. . . find Annie ... if anything happens . . . Joshua trees. . .” Bo was gone, slumped on the seat like a damp envelope.

  “We'll get there,” Gretchen Tally reassured herself more than Bo Bradley. She needed to get to a phone. If this deaf boy was Kep Rowe's son. . . She shivered and turned on the car's heater. The story taking shape in her mind was too much for a green cub reporter. She had to call her editor. But it couldn't be...It was impossible. Nobody could be that vile. Nobody.

  29 - The Candidate

  A palmetto bug, oily black as the prehistoric sludge in which its ancestors had frolicked, skittered across Paris-yellow rosebud wallpaper and came to rest just below an ornately framed watercolor of willow trees under a Roman bridge. The bug waved inch-long glassine feelers in the direction of a woman seated at a dressing table, plucking already perfectly arched eyebrows.

  Tia Rowe ignored the bug as she had ignored countless others before it. The oversized roaches were part of every domestic landscape in Houston. People learned to live with them. And Tia Rowe could live with anything, provided there was something in it for her. That was obvious. Hadn't she lived for twenty-five years with the drunken joke of a man whose funeral arrangements she had just completed?

  The funeral director, dripping solicitousness, had pointed out several times too many that an election day memorial service might be considered “inappropriate” by many of the “fine, old families” expected to attend. Tia had hunched further beneath a stifling black cape donned for the occasion, and sniffled into a lace handkerchief. Something about travel arrangements, out-of-town relatives, a dear cousin—Mac's best friend, really, who couldn't possibly make connections from Barbados on such short notice, if at all. He'd need to be one of the pallbearers, of course. Unless he really couldn't make it. And who did the funeral director suggest as a standin?

  She'd managed to appear grief-stricken, a little flighty, but determined. Precisely the image she wanted. The director had capitulated, even to the viewing to be held from 3:00 to 6:00 Monday afternoon.

  The day before the election, Tia Rowe would stand beside her husband's mahogany casket and solemnly receive the condolences of Houston's society. From time to time she'd courteously step outside with a dignitary—the mayor, a state representative, a bishop, and converse in muted tones.

  She'd already notified photographers from both major papers exactly where to stand in order to capture these moments for the evening editions. Every voter in Harris County who could read a newspaper Monday night would go to the polls on Tuesday impressed with the image of Tia Rowe as an aristocrat, one tough lady, who could keep it together when the going got rough.

  In his lifetime Mac Rowe had not done her a greater kindness than dying three days before the election.

  She whipped a silver-and-ebony brush through her hair and then carefully smoothed beeswax facial cream around her eyes. Too bad she couldn't have known Mac would choose this particular day to die exactly as the doctor had warned seven months ago.

  “Your husband will be dead from massive internal hemorrhaging within the year,” Foster Rhynders had told her quietly after a dinner party at the club, “unless he stops drinking.”

  She wished she'd known it would be today. She wouldn't have panicked about losing the election. Wouldn't have been in such
a rush for the money to pay off some of the astronomical campaign expenses and secure credit for the eleventh-hour media blitz her staff told her she needed to defeat that tedious hausfrau Yannick.

  But everything was under control now. Except for the messy business in California. And that would be finished tonight, they'd told her. For what she was paying them, it had better.

  Tia Rowe gazed at the immense insect on her wall and thought about Deely Brasseur. The housekeeper she'd only kept on because somebody had to clean up after Mac and his disgusting, drunken messes. Tia wasn't about to do it, and neither would anybody else she could hire. Deely did it so she could spend half her life up in the attic fawning over Julie's brat, an imbecile that should have been aborted. Would be aborted, now.

  She wondered how Deely had figured it out, when Tia had told her the Rowes would no longer require her services. Had Deely seen the bags of quicklime stacked in the garage? What would that mean to an ignorant old black maid? No, Deely couldn't have known the purpose for which Tia Rowe needed sixty pounds of calcium oxide. No one had known.

  And it would have been so easy, once Deely was gone. A simple overdose of the Thorazine Tia used to keep the boy quiet up there. She flew down to Brownsville every few months and then slipped over the Mexican border into Matamoros where she could buy the drug over the counter. No questions. Untraceable. So easy. And the body could have stayed in the attic until Mac finally died and Tia could move on. The quicklime would have eaten away the four-year-old's remains in less than a week. That had been the plan. Until some stupid, shuffling servant caught on, and got Kep involved, and then ran off to hide. Deely would have to be silenced. But that could wait.

  Nobody, Tia was certain, would believe Deely Brasseur, even if she told what she knew.

  “A child in my attic?” Tia would frown and then murmur, “You know, we had to let Deely go, poor thing, right before Mac's death. She's, well. . . not right in the head, you know? But of course, I want y'all to feel free to look in the attic, if you want...”

  Kep had been no problem, until Deely dragged him into the nonsense about the child. A drug addict, out of his mind most of the time. As his mother, Tia could have had him committed and assumed guardianship over the fortune he would inherit at twenty-three, anytime. She hadn't really intended for Kep to die, at least not at first. Only the idiot child her daughter had perished giving birth to. A retarded monster whose pointless existence could ruin everything.

  Selecting a comfortable gown from her closet, Tia switched off the phone and slipped easily between creamy satin sheets. There would be no more coded messages tonight. And tomorrow it would all be over.

  She wondered how long it would be before somebody identified the body now tagged in a San Diego morgue as her son’s. Maybe they never would. It scarcely mattered. What mattered was to look good for the show of stalwart grief she would stage tomorrow. And for that she needed a good night's sleep.

  30 - Bureaucracy

  “I'm afraid there will be no choice but to terminate Bo's employment with the department,” Madge Aldenhoven told Estrella Benedict with finality. “I know she may have saved the boy's life at the foster home, but this melodramatic behavior sets a precedent others will feel obliged to imitate. Bo isn't the only worker with an endangered child on her caseload, you know. All these children are in danger, or we wouldn't be dealing with them in the first place. I'm sure you can see—”

  “I don't believe you!” Estrella screamed into her kitchen phone while Henry paced behind her. “I called to tell you what's happening and you tell me you're going to fire Bo! She's out there someplace right now, risking her life to keep this kid alive, and you—” Estrella couldn't go on.

  “She's out there behaving like some damned hero in spite of my clear directions to stay off this case,” Aldenhoven continued angrily. “There's more to consider here than just one child. There are over six hundred workers in this system, and every one of them is involved with children who may get killed! The primary rule is never to get emotionally entangled in a case. And we all know Bo has trouble maintaining appropriate emotional responses. . .”

  “What you're saying is,” Estrella said, seething, “that the system comes before the children. That Bo should have let this kid get killed rather than violate the rule. Is that right?”

  “If you want to put it that way,” Madge replied shakily. “You know I actually like Bo personally, but—”

  “But you're going to fire her for trying to save a kid's life? That is, if she isn't already dead? You're loca, Madge! You've been in the system so long you think it's a fucking religion, but it's not. It's just a fucking rotten job. And Bo is a hero! She's—”

  “She's incapable of following instructions, and that's what counts, in this fucking rotten job!” Aldenhoven screamed back, out of control. “My decision is final.”

  “You don't even care if Bo gets killed,” Estrella sobbed. But Aldenhoven had hung up.

  31 - White Flower Twining Down

  A chill, shadowy wind blew the smell of snow down from the Sierra and through a chink in the window of a small room where Annie Garcia lay on her great-granddaughter's bed. She didn't sleep, but merely waited. Something was coming up out of the desert, from Coso where the Ancient Ones painted magic on the canyon walls, from Bitter Lake where the Paiute lost at last the hopeless battle for this strange, arid land.

  The girl slept with friends in a tent outside—a re-creation of the woven-twig dwelling Annie's grandmother had slept beneath in a spring long ago, and named herself White Flower for the twining clematis. In the old times girls took flower names for the ritual of entry into womanhood, and Charlie encouraged his daughter to do so. “Paintbrush, then,” the girl had chosen for the red-orange desert plant she loved. And she'd dutifully stacked piles of wood outside the tent five times a day. Piles of wood measured to her own height, as tradition demanded. Nobody had done such a ritual since before Annie's birth, but Charlie had gotten books from the library. This was what the books said Paiute girls did. Annie could see sense in it—the lifting and stretching would help diminish menstrual cramps.

  Annie laughed with the snow-wind in the little room. The wind from a place where her grandmother had lived. Charlie wanted the old way, but not entirely. Not the young men in eagle feathers squatting silently at the foot of his daughter's blankets, asking for her hand in marriage, now that she was a woman. Charlie had skipped that part. Not that it would make any difference. Life was life, and would have its way. In the snow-wind Annie felt the breath of her grandmother twining down, joining her laughter, stretching further into the future through the young girl outside who would be called Paintbrush. It was good, whatever it meant.

  But the thing in the desert, that wasn't good. Something terrifying, complex. Like a woven basket unraveling. The need to remember the pattern, mend the break even as it tore loose. Impossible.

  Annie had been named Sees the Dark as a child, high in the snow-wind. She saw now, and was ready.

  32 - Lone Pine

  Bo woke from a dream in which her back was breaking beneath the weight of an entire mountain range. Straightening, she realized she'd passed out bent over double, her head pressed against the dash. The resultant pounding ache between her temples reminded her of continents breaking apart, earthquakes, tidal waves. And where in hell was she?

  From Gretchen Tally's car, parked in the gravel surrounding a vacant gas station, she saw what appeared to be a scrubby ghost town. Lightless houses. Shapes of darkened cars hunched on a grayly backlit street. A movie set. If she got out of the car, the forms would be revealed as cardboard cutouts. A fake town, shimmering hollowly under the huge blind eye of the moon. In the backseat a frizzy halo of hair erupted from a sleeping bag she recognized as her own. Weppo!

  He's here. It's okay. Stop imagining things. Get it together.

  In a phone booth that seemed real enough, Bo could see Gretchen Tally poring through a pencil-thin directory while holding an elf-sized flas
hlight in her teeth. Her face, illuminated from the nose up, looked like a nursery rhyme moon.

  “Hey, diddle, diddle. . .” Bo hummed.

  That won’t do, Bradley. Clean it up.

  But it wouldn't clean up. Images, distortions, strangeness loomed at Bo from all sides. Things being both what they were and what they meant, or might mean. Distilled and tangential at the same time. Gretchen Tally in the phone booth now a laughing manikin fortune-teller at a carnival. Eerie and portentous. A child's nightmare.

  Shit! Eat something! Take something! Do something! This isn't going to cut it. You can't get crazy—not yet!

  “I found a Charlie Garcia in the phone book,” Gretchen Tally yelled as Bo sprang out of the car and sprinted around it. “Why are you running around the car?”

  “Clears my head,” Bo gasped. The air was like ice water in her lungs, against her skin. Probably a good idea. In the old days, she remembered from some textbook, they threw psychotic patients into icy lakes. Those that didn't die from shock and exposure often benefited from the experience. At least that was the theory. Bo flapped her arms and ran faster.