Child of Silence Page 4

  “Four,” Bo wrote in the case file and dated the quote. “There's almost no time left.”

  LaMarche leaned into the conversation, puzzled. “Time for what?”

  “The imprinting stage for language is birth to five,” Bo began, unable to restrain her enthusiasm. “ASL, American Sign Language, is a language, just like English or Spanish or French. And kids learn languages best between birth and five. It goes really sour after puberty too. And Weppo's a boy. Boys are worse for some reason. God knows why. It may have something to do with brain lateralization, which, as you know—”

  LaMarche felt his hackles rising. “Wait a minute,” he interrupted. “What makes you think you know so much about it? Do you realize you're diagnosing?”

  Bo's enthusiasm drained away like water through sand. The man was impossible.

  “Dr. LaMarche, why do you affect that accent?” she inquired through clenched teeth. “It does detract just a soupçon from your Hitleresque image, you know.”

  Bo bit her tongue. Irish temper or manic irritability, it wasn't going to help the deaf boy in the hospital bed.

  “I'm sorry, doctor.” She shifted clumsily to a manipulative simper as LaMarche glanced angrily at his watch.

  Doctors!

  “I didn't mean to lose it completely. It's just that the little guy needs so much help, and right away, if he's going to have a chance. It would sure speed things up if you'd write a medical recommendation for ASL training. . .” She batted her eyes and stifled a grin. She sounded like Blanche Dubois in Streetcar, which wasn't surprising. Her enactment of the role twenty years ago in a college production had been her last occasion to simper.

  Unfortunately, Andrew LaMarche's education had included drama.

  “It was wise of you to choose social work over acting as a career,” he mentioned, stretching tanned fingers in apparent boredom. “Your soothing inanities have failed to impress me. I'm a hopeless elitist cochon, I'm afraid. I prefer that diagnoses be performed by doctors.”

  Bo closed the case file with a snap. Who did this posturing, arrogant creep think he was, Descartes?

  “Cochon means pig, doesn't it, doctor?” She allowed her eyes to widen and pinion his maniacally. Everybody with a history of psychiatric admissions knew how to do “the look.” A guaranteed conversation-stopper. “More pompous boar than pig. You haven't heard a word I've said. And you never will due to the little-known tragedy of ego-deafness! I'll have the D.A. subpoena you if we need your testimony on Weppo's case. But I doubt that'll be necessary, since you don't want to know anything about him.”

  LaMarche watched her storm through the glass doors and across the cafeteria. “Pompous boar?” he remarked to his coffee cup. “Mon Dieu!” He decided he liked her.

  In her car Bo crammed a cassette of Bach's third Brandenburg Concerto into the tape deck. Then she breathed deeply. It helped.

  But she was going to have to slow down. Nothing could be worth the risk she was taking. The risk of delusional overinvolvment with a case. A risk that could quickly acquaint her with unemployment, professional and personal ruin. Nothing could be worth that. Not even a deaf boy whose wide eyes reminded her so much of Laurie's.

  7 - Annie

  Bo had forgotten Andrew LaMarche by the time she left the convenience store near St. Mary's at 11:45. A pint of chocolate milk and an unusually fresh cinnamon bagel gave a whole new cast to the day. She'd take a run out to the reservation, interview the woman who found the boy, and then transfer the case. Period. No heroics. No craziness.

  The rush of affection she felt for the child, the messianic conviction that she alone had been chosen to save him— these were just typical manic delusions. Delusions so compelling and insistent they could not be ignored. But delusions nonetheless.

  Coaxing the rickety BMW east on I-8 toward the mountains that shielded San Diego from the murderous desert heat beyond, Bo pondered the human condition. How much of life's drama would ultimately be understood as the product of brain chemistry? The notion was taboo and probably always would be. The notion that all human behavior, inspired or bestial, had its origins in electrical brain impulses and not in realms of myth. A humbling notion, accepted at last only by those for whom all other options have failed. And a comforting notion, once accepted. Still, Bo reflected, it was odd that this particular case had fallen to her.

  The car, overheating in its long climb from San Diego's coastal environs to the higher, drier suburb of El Cajon, relaxed as Bo turned northward off the freeway. El Cajon— “the coffin” in Spanish. Bo shuddered, wishing Estrella hadn't told her what the town's name meant. It was never wise to think about coffins. Bo had seen too many.

  First her grandmother's, with the scent of good Irish whiskey wafting over the wake. Then Laurie's, too unthinkable even now. And finally her parents' together, after a faulty wall furnace in a Yucatan resort hotel filled their sleeping lungs with carbon monoxide. Bo's mother had planned the trip for months. She wanted to research Mayan folk music. At the funeral at least twenty-three people had mentioned the unfortunate similarity of their deaths to Laurie's. To curb the disquieting train of thought Bo drew measured breaths of faintly pine-scented air, and exhaled slowly.

  Beyond the last suburb of chain-linked subdivisions separated by older mountain homesteads, the road curled gently into another time. From its appearance, Wildcat Canyon Road might still boast actual wildcats, stagecoaches, maybe a Spanish friar harvesting pine nuts in dusty brown robes.

  The pignola pines, clustered in the chaparral between live oaks, cottonwoods, and manzanita, had provided tasty nutmeats to mix with leached acorn meal in Native American cuisine. Now the tiny morsels went for ten dollars a pound in trendy San Diego culinary boutiques.

  At the Barona Reservation Bo discovered a collection of unnumbered dwellings. A cement-block government-issue house here, a trailer there. Winding roads leading off into the dry autumn hills with no clue as to who lived where.

  Stopping at a gas station, Bo asked a bronze little girl with a yellow popsicle where Maria and Joe Bigger Fox lived.

  “Two houses up. Around the bend on the right,” the child answered easily.

  Weppo couldn't do that, couldn't name things and their relation to each other. And he never would if somebody didn't teach him.

  Bo considered the little girl's black eyes, her lips and clean white teeth forming words. The complexity of it! The unimaginable network of reactions involved in a child understanding a question and framing in a microsecond a picture of the answer. But this child could hear. She'd heard her mother's voice while still in the womb. She'd learned to speak naturally by reproducing human voices around her. And that facility gave her access to reality. But like Laurie, Weppo lacked that facility. Like Laurie, he was locked behind a glass wall watching things that could make no sense because the things had no names. Bo shivered. Nobody should have to live without language. Things were hard enough with it.

  “You okay, lady?” the little girl inquired.

  “Yeah, I'm fine.”

  Right. I've been sent here by mysterious forces to rescue a child that is not mine from a silence that was my sister's. I’m nuts!

  The last of the morning haze burned off as Bo parked in the driveway of Maria and Joe Bigger Fox, who were not inclined to chat.

  Maria, tall and rugged in a baggy white T-shirt and jeans, walked with a dancer's gliding movement to her husband's side and remained standing as Bo sank into a cracked Naugahyde recliner. The woman's feet, Bo noted with ill-disguised interest, were clad in lacy high-heeled mules for which Carole Lombard might have traded her eyeteeth. The ensemble, complemented by a thick braid of graying hair over Maria's shoulder, seemed ingenuous. Even chic. Like the costume of a mature, diamond-hard rock singer.

  “Mama came down from that old house at about a quarter to six,” Maria Bigger Fox confirmed without emotion. “Said she found a kid up there and had to use the phone. She called 911.”

  The narrative was neither hostile n
or discernibly interested. Merely fact. Bo allowed her own awareness to range over the wide, dark faces, the whole atmosphere of the plain little house, seeking some clue or nuance. Something unsaid or hidden. There was nothing. The husband regarded her from a lopsided green couch in front of a TV, his face as blank as its gray screen.

  “Did you notice anything unusual in the neighborhood during the night before Mrs. Garcia found the boy?” Bo asked. The imposition of the term “neighborhood” seemed culturally intrusive. This rugged, silent terrain was a community, but nothing as confining as what “neighborhood” implied. Bo felt a blush of chagrin creeping up her freckled cheeks.

  Joe Bigger Fox was as big as a wrestler and looked for all the world like Jay Silverheels doing Tonto, except that his hair was pure white.

  “No,” he replied with finality. It was clear that he had nothing else to say.

  There was, Bo acknowledged ruefully, simply an emptiness in the space between her and the middle-aged Indian couple. As if they were really somewhere else and had replaced themselves with lifelike holograms. The plain living room might be a theatrical set. Bo knew her grasp of the interaction was accurate. She'd seen it before—the Indian way of dissociating from all things white. The misunderstandings. The inevitable power of the dominant culture over the exploited one.

  Bo sighed. The Bigger Foxes weren't lying or hiding anything. They just wanted her to leave.

  “Well, thanks.” She terminated the interview politely. “Could I speak to Mrs. Garcia now?”

  Maria glanced through an open window at a trailer behind the house. “She might be asleep. She's an old woman. She sleeps a lot.”

  “I could come back later,” Bo offered.

  The Indian woman shook her head. “She won't be here later. She's leaving, on the bus. Going up to Lone Pine for a pow-wow.”

  “Lone Pine?” Bo was incredulous. She'd been there herself only a few months ago and the coincidence had a prophetic flavor. “Why is she going to Lone Pine?”

  “My mother and I are Paiute,” Maria Bigger Fox explained patiently, as if speaking to a dense child. “Lone Pine is a town but large sections of it are Paiute Reservation. Independence, Bishop, on up to Mono Lake, and over into Nevada—all Paiute land. Our people are there.”

  Bo made a feeble attempt at sorting through what information she possessed on California's native people, and discovered a black hole. The Barona had been a local tribe renamed for a Spanish city by Father Junípero Serra or some other coastal padre, but who were the Paiutes?

  Her master's thesis at Holyoke had involved a summer of field work among the Iroquois in upstate New York. And she and her ex-husband Mark had spent the first year of their marriage teaching at a Navajo mission school near Los Alamos. None of which gave her a clue about the people in front of her.

  “Go on out and talk to her,” Joe Bigger Fox rumbled, pointing to the fourteen-foot 1948 Igloo trailer set on crumbling concrete blocks. It had once been silver but now displayed a uniform oxidized powdery gray, pocked with amoebas of rust. A devil's-claw cactus leaned against its side.

  “Thank you,” Bo repeated, wondering if courtesy demanded a gift of tobacco. It would if these people were Navajo, but they weren't. “Uh, would you like some cigarettes?” She grabbed a fresh pack of Gauloises from her purse.

  The Indians looked puzzled.

  “French cigarettes?” Joe Bigger Fox accepted. “I guess so.”

  Bo left the pack on the Formica-topped coffee table and exited, feeling vaguely idiotic.

  Why don't you just ask them to autograph your copy of Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee, you bimbo!

  A couple of mountain jays screeched laconically in a coast live oak towering over half-buried boulders behind the small trailer. The tree's vast lower branches had been propped up with cut logs. Joe Bigger Fox must have done that, Bo decided approvingly. At over sixty feet in height, the tree could be a century and a half old. Annie Garcia's trailer appeared only slightly less venerable.

  “What do you want?” a raspy voice not unlike that of the jays called out.

  “I'm Bo Bradley, from Child Protective Services,” Bo shouted against the trailer's closed door. “I need to talk to you about the little boy you found.”

  The door was opened by the oldest woman Bo had ever seen. One of Macbeth's witches. An elemental, sculpted in leather. Except this one was wearing track shoes and at least four sweaters over a voluminous corduroy skirt Bo herself might have worn in junior high. Each of the sweaters, Bo noted, bore an identical brown ring at its collar. The trailer's gloomy interior was redolent with the smell of coffee.

  “Thank you for talking to me.” Bo hunkered on the floor and opened Weppo's case file. There was nowhere to sit except two miniature benches facing a miniature table affixed to the wall. One of the benches was buried under a pile of clothes. And Annie Garcia would need to sit on the other one. “Can you tell me how long the boy was up in that house?”

  The old woman sat on the empty bench. Her eyes showed the telltale milkiness of cataracts.

  “Them spirits, they told me something was wrong,” she began. “But I went in anyway. I saw the child with blood in its mouth. It might have been a devil, but it wasn't, huh?” Annie cocked her wide brown skull with its high cheekbones toward Bo. “Do you think there's devils?” The words came out in a chuckle.

  Bo paused to consider the question, and to buy time. The woman was playing with her, acting crazy to see what she'd do. Beneath the milky glaze the old eyes watched closely. Bo looked straight back and answered truthfully. Nothing less would do.

  “There are some weird things, but I don't think there are devils. Mostly, I just don't think we understand much.”

  “Do you understand about this boy?” The ancient face seemed suddenly wise, as if the woman behind it knew something she wasn't saying.

  “You know more about what happened to him than I do,” Bo replied. “All I know is that you found him. It's likely that you saved his life. Can you tell me anything about how he got here or who was with him or what happened?”

  “I told them men,” Annie Garcia pronounced, “I never saw that kid at all before I went up there this morning.”

  Men? What men? The woman must mean the deputy and the paramedic.

  “Said they was police,” Annie mentioned as if she'd heard Bo's thoughts. “They came after the boy was gone in the ambulance.”

  Maybe the Sheriff's Department had assigned detectives to investigate, and they'd been up here already? Not a chance. There would be no criminal investigation unless Weppo died or could be shown to be the victim of physical or sexual assault—felony child abuse. Everything else would fall to CPS to investigate. There just wasn't enough manpower in the San Diego County Sheriff's Department to waste detectives on an abandoned child.

  “Did these men use that word? ‘Police’?”

  The Barona Reservation was beyond the jurisdiction of the San Diego Police Department, and squarely within the jurisdiction of the Sheriff’s Department. And Sheriff’s Department detectives would never identify themselves as police.

  “Yeah.” Annie Garcia was sure.

  “Were they wearing uniforms?” Bo went on. She needed to know who else was investigating the case, if somebody were. In child abuse investigations it wasn't unusual for several sets of people to be out gathering information at once—schools, visiting nurses, an occasional private eye in messy divorce cases, all in addition to law enforcement and CPS.

  “Nah.”

  “Suits and ties?”

  “Nah. Just clothes.”

  Terrific. Two men in clothes.

  Bo gave up.

  “Have you seen people up at that house before?”

  “Yeah. Sometimes.”

  The woman wasn't being deliberately obtuse. She was Indian, and therefore prone to answer only what she was asked, if that. Indians, Bo knew, were comfortable with allegorical thinking, but put off by the abruptness of whites.

  “I'd like
to hear,” Bo mentioned softly, “about how it was the last time you saw anyone near that place where you found the boy. How was it, then?”

  It worked.

  “Under the cotton wood, where the trail begins . . . ?” Annie began.

  Bo nodded.

  “There was a car.”

  Bo felt her ears lie back, and waited.

  There had been a yellow car, Annie Garcia said, the color of a squash. A white man drove it and it had been there yesterday, but not this morning. The car did not, she was almost sure, have California license plates.

  A few acorns clattered off the trailer's curved roof as Bo wrote the information in Weppo's case file. It wasn't much.

  “If you remember the license number, or the state, or anything else, please call me,” she mentioned, and placed her card on the little table. The CPS hotline number was imprinted on it in red.