Turtle Baby (Bo Bradley Mysteries, Book Three)

by Abigail Padgett

  There was something about Kee Terrell, Bo admitted. Something caged and pacing beneath the unruffled surface. But it was old and lived-with, like a secret handicap to which the woman had long ago adjusted. And from her response, it seemed that Kee Terrell had little contact with a young Maya singer named Chac, and no awareness at all of her husband's role in the conception of a Little Turtle. The response was superficial, but then, Bo suspected, so was Kee Terrell.

  Bo admired what she suspected was a real Santero George Lopez table beside a stone fireplace over which hung a Pop Chalee painting of saguaro cacti in fanciful colors. The desert plants were rendered with such graceful delicacy and joy that they seemed to dance beneath a stylized, almost Oriental moon. On both sides of the fireplace, mission doors led to the deck. The entire west wall was glass, overlooking the canyon and half filled by a towering live oak. Before it sat a bronze life-size painted sculpture of an aged Indian woman holding a basket of rabbits. Bo tried to imagine what it would be like to live in such a house, own such exquisite things, and failed.

  "It's my own blend," Kee mentioned, placing pottery cups and teapot on a glass-topped coffee table. "I mix it with fresh mint from the canyon." Beneath the glass was a shelf displaying tiny fetish animals, mostly bears.

  "Had to put them someplace," Kee went on, nodding at the fetishes. "Mundy and I are anticipating the arrival of an heir, as he puts it, so we're child-proofing the house. Everything breakable or edible out of reach." Her smile was sweet, even gleeful.

  Bo felt momentarily like the only woman alive and under seventy who wasn't pregnant. A marvelous feeling. "So you're expecting the heir early next year?" she smiled, mentally calculating how long it should take somebody as flat-bellied as Kee Terrell to produce a baby. And calculating how uncomfortably information about the existence of a previous "heir" might be received at the moment. Or any moment.

  "Oh, I'm not pregnant!" Kee explained with enthusiasm. "Mundy and I feel strongly that an atavistic attachment to one's own DNA is arrogant and pathetic. There are so many beautiful children orphaned by mindless violence, especially in Third World countries. So we're adopting!"

  "That's wonderful," Bo said, wondering why she felt like a guest at a high school symposium on world problems. "And I know you must be busy, so I'll just leave my card in case you or Mr. Terrell think of any familial connections to Chac that we might explore." The spicy tea in her cup reminded Bo of Christmas with its scent.

  "I'll ask Mundy when he gets home tomorrow. He's running one of our workshops this weekend. Motivational seminars, really, with a spiritual dimension for which so many are seeking these days. I do the workshops for women, and we both do the mixed groups. Here, let me get you one of our fliers. You might enjoy coming to one."

  Bo glanced at the slick brochure. The front was decorated with a Mimbres Indian turtle design that seemed fraught with meaning. Had Munson Terrell designed a business brochure to honor his unacknowledged son? An inside page outlined the benefits of a women's workshop called "Spirit Colour."

  "You use British spellings?" Bo asked as Kee showed her out.

  "Mundy's Australian." Kee nodded. "We use some Australian Aboriginal themes in the seminars, and he thinks the spellings give our print materials a certain panache."

  "He's probably right," Bo agreed. "And please call if you think of anything that may help us."

  On the way home Bo stopped at the Ocean Beach Library and took out its only book on Maya hieroglyphics. Back at her apartment she changed into jeans and a T-shirt, and went downstairs to get her mail before drifting into the familiar trance-state from which a painting would be born.

  The Mimbres turtle floated before her eyes, its cross-hatched shell obscuring something. A face. Chac's face, staring out from behind the spidery lines. The Mimbres turtle wouldn't do, Bo realized. There would be a turtle in this painting, but it would have to be Maya. And the painting itself would be a portrait of Chac, a gift for Acito to take with him into his new life when the adoptive parents were chosen.

  Deep in thought, Bo gave only surface attention to the mail stuffed in its metal rectangle. Bills. Fliers from a local carpet-cleaning outfit and a place that did something with brakes and mufflers. A museum catalogue from Boston. And an envelope, hand-addressed to "Barbara J. Bradley," the name on her CPS business card, used nowhere else except tax forms. The envelope bore a San Diego postmark from the day before and no return address.

  Bo tore it open, still framing Chac's portrait in her mind. Inside were a Wells Fargo Bank statement for an account in the name Elena Rother, and a note written in blue ballpoint on a sheet of spiral notebook paper.

  "Chac names her murderer in music," it said. "Listen."

  The note was signed with the initials "G.P."

  Bounding up the steps of the apartment building, Bo opened her door and dashed to the phone. Elena had been Chac's real name! The bank had a twenty-four-hour service line. And the account held $3,246.29, with an available ATM withdrawal limit of $250. Bo waited on the line for one of the service operators who unaccountably worked on weekends. A lure for customers in San Diego's endless banking wars, Bo assumed.

  "San Diego County Department of Conservatorship," Bo lied when the operator answered. "Calling to confirm Acito Singleton as minor co-signatory on this account." There was no such thing as a county department of conservatorship, and babies undoubtedly couldn't co-sign on bank accounts, but it sounded official.

  "We list a Tomas Acito Bolon on that account," the woman told Bo, "in addition to Elena Rother and Christopher J. Gavin. But no Singleton."

  "Thank you," Bo said, and hung up.

  So Chac had a San Diego bank account under an assumed name, set up so that Acito, under her maiden name, could have access to the money without probate in the event of Chac's absence or death. But of course it would be Acito's caretaker who would access the money. Bo noted the Tijuana address on the bank statement. It was the same one she had visited on Monday. Chris Joe Gavin's address in the dirt-paved alleyway. But why would he sign with the initials "G.P."?

  Bo stood in her living room and stared into a blank canvas on its easel near a southern window. The G could stand for Gavin, but what was the P? Or maybe the bartender, Jorge, had sent the note. Jorge in English would be George. But what was his last name, and if he had access to Chac's money, wouldn't he have used it for her burial expenses in Tijuana instead of taking a collection from the impoverished staff at the bar? Or wouldn't he simply have taken the money for himself? But Jorge had no way of knowing her name, Bo thought. And maybe the note's author was Munson Terrell, who might have established the account secretly for Chac and Acito, and who now wanted the resources used for the son he couldn't claim.

  Bo paced through the pool of light admitted by the window, and cleared her mind. A trick learned to diminish sensory overload, the constant bane of minds prone to mania. Breathing from her diaphragm, she imagined a single pinlight at arm's length before her, and stretched her mind toward it. The welter of questions subsided, leaving only a cool silence. In it an image rose, seen on a battered guitar case beneath a shelf of jars. "C.J. Gavin," it said. "Henderson, KY, GHOST PONY RULES!"

  "Ghost Pony," she said aloud. "G.P."

  Chapter Twenty-two

  "Calm Snake," a lineage god —Popol Vuh

  Bo phoned Estrella, describing the contents of the mysterious envelope and asking her to complete the promised translation of Acito's lullaby as quickly as possible.

  "I'll do it right now," Es answered, sniffling. Her voice was an octave lower than usual and bore a suspicious huskiness.

  "Es, are you crying?" Bo asked. "What's the matter?"

  "My sister is here," Estrella whispered. "She blew up when I told her I wasn't going to quit work when the baby's born. She says I'm unnatural and the baby will grow up to be a mass murderer."

  Bo felt her face conform to what she liked to call "the homicidal maniac smile." "Put your sister on the phone, will you, Es? I just want to
..."

  "Never mind, Bo." Estrella laughed. "She wouldn't survive. But it's good to hear a voice from the real world. You understand, it's our mother who's agreed to be the paid nanny while I work. Mom says she'd love to earn enough for a trip to Lourdes her altar society's planning for two years from now, and she wants a wide-screen TV. She even mentioned a facelift. She's thrilled, but my sister ..."

  "Your sister’s jealous," Bo named the obvious, "because your life is more interesting than hers. By the way, I'm going out to the desert this afternoon. Canyon Sin Nombre. You know the drill. I'll call you about those lyrics when I get back, okay?"

  Bo had years ago begun the habit of informing Estrella and Henry of her desert trips, her intended destination. In the event that she failed to return, her friends could tell the sheriff's department where to look. As an additional precaution she always took along a plain white king-sized flat sheet, purchased at a thrift store for this purpose. Aerial searchers could easily see the sheet stretched out on the desert floor, where they might miss a person or even a vehicle.

  "Are you going to camp?" Estrella asked.

  "I don't think so. I just want to brood about a painting I'm working on. It's for Acito. But I might be back late. Don't worry unless I don't call you tomorrow morning."

  "Roger," Es agreed. "And Bo, if Chris Joe really is the one who mailed that stuff to you, then he's in San Diego, right?"

  "He was yesterday, anyway."

  "What if he's the one who poisoned Acito and murdered Chac, and now he wants to be punished? What if he's trying to tell you how to catch him?"

  Bo balanced the phone between her chin and shoulder while putting the finishing touches on a corned beef and Swiss cheese sandwich on the kitchen counter. "I don't know," she said. "What if he is?"

  "He'd be dangerous. You said he was just a teenager. He could be crazy, Bo. Maybe he was in love with her and killed her rather than lose her. A first love can be awful, and now he has nothing left."

  "You've been reading gothics again, and anyway, he's not going to be out in the desert," Bo said with finality. "Talk to you later."

  At the door she realized one more call was in order, given the altered nature of her relationship with a Cajun pediatrician.

  "This is Bo Bradley," she told Andrew LaMarche's answering service. "Please tell Dr. LaMarche that I will be out today, but will call him tomorrow." She was glad he hadn't been at home. The gesture made her feel caring, even noble. A do-right sort of person.

  After loading Mildred, the desert gear, and a cooler of edibles into the Pathfinder, Bo backed the vehicle into the sand-strewn alley behind her apartment building and got a garden hose from the locked laundry room. Fastening the coiled green plastic to a hose bib, she unscrewed the lid of the water jug in its frame attached to the car, and filled it. The jug's lip was bent, making it difficult to resecure the lid.

  "Shit!" she exhaled forcibly, jamming the lid crookedly several times before succeeding in getting it straight. There would have to be a new jug, she decided. Next week, no later.

  Driving east on I-8 into the mountains surrounding San Diego, Bo thought about Chris Joe Gavin. Raised in Kentucky foster homes since his toddler days, he wouldn't remember the troubled girl who had been his mother. Or would he? Had Chac's resemblance to some barely remembered image brought up powerful and conflicting feelings his adolescent psyche couldn't handle? Chac's devotion to Acito might have triggered a resentment, Bo thought. A resentment intensified by puppy love gone ballistic when he realized the new recording contract would take Chac away from Tijuana, and from him.

  Bo sighed. "Freud is dead," she told Mildred, sleeping in the passenger's seat. "And all I really know is that boy was in love with Chac, and she trusted him. I don't know why he was in Tijuana or why she was living with him when she obviously had enough money to rent something a cut above that plywood tent."

  Flipping on the radio, Bo watched as boulders replaced hillside houses beside the highway where it climbed out of Alpine toward the last suburban village. In the distance behind her a light sea-haze hung over the city. From a distance, San Diego looked shrunken and cramped inside a cage of white freeways. Ahead lay the Anza-Borrego Desert, silent and frozen in time. Bo sighed, feeling a tightness in her hands relax. A loosening of clamps inside her shoulders and behind her ears. The desert, its stark, swift dangers and dizzying lack of human reference was to her a sanctuary. Probably, she grinned at her reflection in the windshield, because it mirrored the landscape of her neurobiologically peculiar brain.

  An hour later she passed the last landmark on a deserted road called S2, before the offroad descent into a canyon so desolate its Spanish name meant simply "without name." The landmark was an informative marker beside the road noting the existence some two million years ago of giant camels, rhinos, and sabertooth cats in the area of the Anza-Borrego desert now called the Carrizo Badlands. Bo dreamed of finding giant camel bones there one day. Maybe doing a Georgia O'Keeffe-style painting of a fossilized camel skull in the sand, red-orange Western sunlight blazing through the eye sockets.

  At the gravelly, unmarked turnout, she engaged the four-wheel drive and nosed the Pathfinder over the canyon's rim. Just a jeep track angling straight down through sand and rock. Bo had been to Canyon Sin Nombre once before with a group from the Sierra Club, but never alone. A sense of adventure rushed like a cool breeze along her bare arms. It was hot at the canyon's rim, but below was a splendid jumble of sandstone corridors and exposed fossil-shell reefs, narrow granitic slot-canyons and wind-carved amphitheaters. Less scorching down there in the jagged shadows that, more than anything, cooled Bo's mind.

  Andrew wouldn't approve, she knew. Estrella and Henry had long ago accepted her need to seek out lonely places. Places where the racket and incessant interpersonal demands of normal life did not exist. Her friends could not understand the needs of a brain that, even when medicated, was still prey to stimulus in a way normal brains were not. But they could offer their presence at the periphery of her strangeness, and simply agree to call the authorities if she didn't come back. Andrew LaMarche, bound to her by the complex attachments of masculine romantic love, would fight against the distance, the inscrutable difference between them. He would want to protect her. A male, he was programmed by nature to do so. He would not understand that protection from sensory overload, even at the cost of desert dangers, was to her a lifeline.

  "I may be in over my head this time," she told Mildred. "I don't want to hurt him, but eventually, just because I'm the way I am, I will."

  The dog nodded somberly, sniffing the air from the open window.

  On the canyon floor Bo experimented with the four-wheel's capability in sand, then rock. Numerous fresh tire tracks snaked along the jeep trail, indicating the presence of what seemed like hordes of other people somewhere in the craggy silence. Bo crossed a vestige of an old stagecoach track, and tried to remember what the ranger had told the Sierra Club group. Something about a particularly dangerous area at the end of Arroyo Tapiado. An area of twisting caves and blind valleys ending in swallow holes. The caves, the ranger said, were safe in dry weather. But the tortuous, water-cut valleys accessible only through sinkholes in the cave ceilings were an invitation to lonely death. Other sinkholes had formed in the impassable valleys above the caves, covered only with fragile plates of worn sandstone. A fall through one of these would leave the victim trapped in an uncharted cave under a blind desert gorge where no human had been since the 1800s when scouts for the stage line went into the area searching for shortcuts, and never came out.

  Shuddering, Bo stayed widely east of the area, and selected a slot canyon off the Arroyo Seco del Diablo creek bed, now dry and glistening in the sun. Parking on firm, rocky ground, she let Mildred run on the clear creek bed for a while, and then lifted the dog into a modified infant carrier strapped to her back. Desert canyons were no place for domestic animals to run free. And the temperature in the parked car would soon surpass tolerable limits f
or a small, old dog. Over her shoulder Bo gave Mildred some water in a paper cup, drank some herself from a canteen clipped to her belt, and hiked into the canyon.

  Its walls, one hundred fifty feet high in places, cast layers of shade on a floor littered with the bulbous, connected concretions that were like strings of stone pearls. Softball-sized and valueless, they formed themselves of minerals around a nucleus in sedimentary rock, and then merely sat there for millennia. Bo thought of them as a discarded first attempt at pearls, formed by nature in its childhood and then forgotten. Like the lumpen clay pot made by small hands that would later shape a Ming vase. The canyon ended a half mile later in a dry fall that captivated Bo's eye with its play of subtle color. Only a deep growl emanating from the backpack alerted her to a coiled form in one of the wind-carved grottoes in the canyon wall twelve feet from her right shoulder. A rattlesnake. Its tail, hanging languorously from the ledge, snapped upward at Mildred's growl, the rattles vibrating with a sound at once unobtrusive and absolutely bone-chilling.

  "Oh, shit," Bo whispered. Frost seemed to be crawling up the back of her neck, under her skin. The ancient enmity between snake and woman. "We were just leaving," she said politely, and meant it. The rattler didn't look, but flicked its tongue, tasting their intrusion on the air. In its niche, it might have been some holy sentinel, Bo thought. Placed there as a warning. Its image seemed carved on the backs of her eyes.

  Back at the creek bed Bo ate lunch, spritzed a wide arc of straight ammonia on surrounding rocks from a spray bottle, and unfolded a cot in the shade cast by the Pathfinder. She'd read about the ammonia trick somewhere, but doubted its efficacy in defining territory as an animal would do with urine. It might at least momentarily confuse a predatory mammal, she thought. But mostly it allowed her an illusion of shrewd outdoorsiness, like a pioneer woman or somebody in an ad for thermal underwear.

  Grabbing the book on Maya hieroglyphics and settling with Mildred on the cot, Bo shifted her attention to the problem at hand. A dead singer and an orphaned baby with too many fathers.