Turtle Baby (Bo Bradley Mysteries, Book Three)

by Abigail Padgett

  An eternity of silence in which the pain in her knees became a kaleidoscope of throbbing color, a surgery with no anesthesia. But she couldn't move. Any sound would alert the watcher above, and any movement might dislodge the precarious balance of the slab. The fall below could be five feet and could be two stories. It scarcely mattered.

  The footsteps walked to the end of the ridgeline, then back, but no further. Whoever it was knew of the danger in traversing these hidden valleys, Bo thought through the flashes of light her knees were creating behind her tightly clenched eyes. Whoever it was, wasn't stupid. Or patient.

  After Bo had counted to sixty twenty times, stroking Mildred's neck with her left hand in time to the count, the footsteps noisily descended the wash into the big cave, and were gone. Bo waited for five more counts of sixty before pulling herself out of the collapsed sinkhole beneath the mesquite, and then lying flat against the valley wall to distribute her weight evenly.

  "We're not budging from here until it's light," she whispered to Mildred. "Whoever that is may be sitting down there in that cave, waiting to blow us out of the opening when we go back down."

  The dog stirred uncomfortably in the backpack, and then draped herself over Bo's shoulder and went to sleep.

  Hours later Bo felt the personality of the sky shift in that way only discernible to those who have been awake all night for reasons not related to work. The ill, the grieving, the manic, and the terrified. A sudden absence of weight, felt in the ears, followed swiftly by murky grayness where before there was only black. Dawn. Often employed as a symbol for the slow crawl of the human race out of an evolutionary darkness in which reason was not an option. Standing again on the ridgeline of a lost desert escarpment, Bo wondered exactly how far that race had come. From the east radials of pale orange light spilled over a tattered horizon and through the eye sockets of a human skull lying on the ground at her feet.

  "Thank you," she addressed the empty, protective shell of someone who had died here alone and long ago. "You saved my life." Turning the skull to face a sunrise that seemed symphonic, she adjusted Mildred in the carrier and started toward the open sinkhole. The little dog's eyes were somewhat filmy, Bo noticed, and the skin beneath her fur was slack. Dehydration. To be expected in a frail, old mammal unaccustomed to eight-hour spans in zero-humidity desert warmth.

  "Don't worry, we've got five gallons of water strapped to the car," she told the dog. "Hang in."

  At the lip of the sinkhole Bo threw down a rock, then waited to hear responsive movement in the cave. There was nothing. No sense of anything alive in the stony silence below. Carefully Bo descended the wash and hurried through the vaulted chamber at whose end a round opening now seemed to pulse with light.

  Terrell's group was still asleep, mere rumpled forms in sleeping bags surrounding a dead fire. Bo tried to identify Martin among them, but failed.

  In minutes she was at the Pathfinder with its needed water jug. But as she reached to unclip the bungees holding it in its wire frame, she noticed something anomalous. She was sure she'd succeeded in fastening the troublesome cap on the plastic jug correctly. She remembered standing in the alley behind her apartment, struggling with the damn thing after she filled the jug. It had taken several tries to get the cap on straight. But now it was crooked. Someone had opened the water jug, but hadn't removed it, then carelessly replaced the defective cap. The water level was the same as it had been yesterday. Bo remembered a poisoned baby, a shot of tequila laced with almond-scented death. The memory made her back away from the plastic jug as if it were radioactive.

  Unlocking the car, she gave Mildred the last two ounces of water left in the canteen, and backed out into Arroyo Tapiado. If she were right, someone had just come close to killing the closest thing to unconditional love Bo had ever known. An animal, but nonetheless there when the symptoms of a brain disorder drove everyone else away. Bo felt threads of ice shoot along a thousand neural pathways and pool in her hands. She could kill, she realized as the veins in her hands stood out, throbbing. She could actually kill anybody who would poison her dog.

  Chapter Twenty-five

  "The crowded life" —Popol Vuh

  Dewayne Singleton sat upright and carefully shook the sand from his shoes again. The shoes were important. He couldn't have left the hospital like he did if he'd still been wearing those thin slippers. But the big man, the nice one who kept getting Tylenol whenever Dewayne complained about the pain in his legs, that one had said shoes might help the pain. He'd gone and got a pair of tennis shoes for Dewayne even though it was time to go to bed. He'd said he wouldn't be there in the morning because his shift would be over at 11:00, and he wanted Dewayne to have the right shoes. They would play volleyball on Saturday morning outside, he told Dewayne. Important to have the right shoes, especially with the Haldol giving him those muscle cramps. Dewayne just nodded and decided not to tell the man he didn't know how to play volleyball.

  And then on Saturday morning, when he was outside in the courtyard wearing those shoes with that red plastic visitor's badge still in his pocket, Allah sent a miracle. Or something did. A big group of black people came. They didn't come all at once, but in groups of three or four pretty close together. Dewayne didn't know why they were there, but he knew they didn't know each other. Something about the way their bodies

  moved around inside the group, leaving spaces that said they were strangers. Something about the way they cut their eyes when they were watching each other do their thing, which was about talking about God.

  Without really meaning to do it, Dewayne watched one of them in a nice shirt and shiny brown shoes go up to a woman and start talking. It was so easy to start letting his body move just like that man talking, sort of pick up on him and his little gestures. Mama always said it was some kind of gift, the way Dewayne could do that.

  After a while he rolled down the sleeves of his plaid shirt over the plastic hospital bracelet on his wrist, and went up to a white boy who kept pacing up and down, staring at the ground.

  "Do you know about the love of God?" Dewayne said to the boy just like the man in the nice shirt had said it. "Do you know the Bible has answers to all your questions?"

  The boy didn't look up and just whispered, "Get fucked, asshole."

  But one of the women in the group heard and smiled at Dewayne, her wide, dark face nodding like a mechanical fortune-telling Buddha he saw once at a carnival he and Buster went to in Breaux Bridge. "Praise," she said.

  Dewayne smiled at her and nodded just the same and said, "Praise," right back. Then he followed the boy up and down, saying anything he could think of once in a while, but mostly just pretending. Finally the boy stopped and whispered, "Man, you don't leave me alone with this fucking shit, I'm gonna kick your balls off."

  "Praise." Dewayne nodded, and drifted toward the woman, whose flowered dress and perfume reminded him of Mama. The staff people, even Mr. Rambo, were playing volleyball with the patients in the center of the courtyard while the rest of the patients and the visitors milled around the edges. On a stone picnic table somebody was setting out lemonade in paper cups, and cookies.

  "Wish I could stay for refreshments," the woman said, "but I can't. Got to be going." Dewayne could hear the fear hidden in her voice. She was afraid, wanted to get out.

  "I got to be going, too," he answered softly, duplicating her pronunciation. "Praise, got to meet my wife."

  "You from the South?" she asked, looking around to see if any of the other visitors were ready to leave yet. The way her eyes just slid over the patients let him know what she was afraid of. Like if she really looked at one, it would do something terrible to her.

  "Praise, yes I am," he answered, and then added, "My wife from aroun' here, though."

  The woman was making a decision. "Well, you sure do have the Lord's spirit, praise His name. I think I'm ready to go."

  Dewayne smiled at her while looking for staff out of the corner of his eye. The only one who really knew him was
Mr. Rambo, still playing volleyball, facing away from the door with the guards. "I'll walk with you," he said, pulling the visitor's tag from his pocket and palming it so that the woman could see it, but no one else could.

  "You s'posed to have that fasten to your shirt," she told him, getting ruffled as a way of not noticing her own shaking hands and the way she was leaning with her whole body toward that door. As an afterthought she said, "Praise God."

  "It kep' fallin' off," Dewayne answered, following her to the door. "His name be blessed." Mama had said that a lot. It seemed to fit in.

  The guard opened the door and took their badges. He was listening to the radio and talking to another guard who was counting some kind of papers. The woman in the flowered dress signed her name on the clipboard, and handed the pencil to Dewayne. He signed his name next to one that said, "Daniel Glover," and then realized he should have signed "Daniel Glover" instead of "Dewayne Singleton." But his handwriting was messy, and the guard didn't look. Later they'd see that Dewayne Singleton had signed out, and that was honest. The guard had pushed a buzzer then, and let them out the second door.

  Putting his shoes back on, Dewayne sat in the sand and tried to remember what he'd done after that. It was all blurry. He'd run, once he got away from the hospital parking lot. Tore off that plastic bracelet. Run to a big freeway ramp, got a ride in a truck with a fat Mexican man who wanted him to work someplace planting palm trees. When Dewayne said he hated palm trees, the man stopped and put him off next to a park that was on some kind of bay. And some people at a picnic gave him a whole plate of fried chicken and a can of orange pop when he said he couldn't drink the beer because of his religion. That was yesterday, before he spent the night walking in sand. Back and forth. Wondering what to do next.

  People seemed pretty nice here in California. Dewayne found himself bowing to the east when the sun came up and asking Allah where all the evil ones were, that the Angel Jabril was going to kill. Then he watched some boys on little sailboats just big enough to stand on, riding the blue water. Even though the muscles in his arms were jumping like snakes in a hot zinc bucket, he didn't think that was because of the infidels. He thought maybe Jabril had already been here, and the evil was gone. He would need to leave, too, he decided, and headed toward the freeway.

  Chapter Twenty-six

  Spilt Water

  After stopping for water at a closed gas station, Bo drove straight home. Only after Mildred was fed and comfortably curled like a white fur donut in her basket beside Bo's bed did Bo go back outside with a pair of tongs and an empty spice bottle. The bottle had, she remembered, contained whole cloves before she'd used them all in an abortive attempt to rescue a mildewed beach towel from its characteristic stench.

  After baking for two weeks inside a plastic bag in the sun on her deck, towel and cloves had been tossed in a dumpster, now smelling like mildewed cloves. So much for herbal remedies. Bo wondered why they never worked for her when they seemed to work for everybody else. Especially for somebody poisoning mothers and babies, and getting away with it.

  Holding the bottle with the tongs, she dipped water from the jug attached to the Pathfinder's rear door, and then capped the bottle with its plastic stopper. If she were right and the water were poisoned, she realized, the jug should be emptied before somebody got into it. Maybe a child, or one of the beach-area homeless. Bo hauled it out of its cage, carried it to a storm sewer on the street, and dumped its contents. Then

  she backed the car over it and tossed it in the same dumpster that had received the ruined beach towel a year ago.

  Smashed, she figured, nobody scouring the dumpsters for usable trash would be tempted. If she were wrong about what had happened to its lid out in the desert, then she had just completed an elaborate and wholly senseless ritual, which if witnessed, might create suspicion about her sanity. Bo grinned as she climbed the stairs back to her apartment. That suspicion could easily be documented as fact.

  Heading for the phone, she realized 7:00 A.M. was really too early to call Dar Reinert at home. She'd wait a while before calling the detective to find out how one arranged forensic tests for poison on a Sunday. The answering machine light was blinking frantically. Six calls from Andrew in escalating degrees of possessive concern about her whereabouts, one from Estrella merely asking Bo to call before noon on Sunday or else she and Henry would phone the sheriff's department "as per agreement, and one from Eva Broussard saying a group of expatriate Guatemalan Maya were camping on the property and might be a source of some background information on Chac. Estrella, Eva suggested, should come along since the Indians seemed to know some Spanish, but no English.

  Estrella answered on the second ring, relief audible in her voice. "Madre de dios," she exclaimed. "Bo, I'm not sure I can cope with your desert camp-outs in my delicate condition, and Henry's even worse. Remember the girl that mummified out there? I kept seeing you turned to leather like an old suitcase, and Henry dropped several references to the habits of vultures. You said you weren't going to stay all night ..."

  "I'm sorry, Es," Bo said. "I didn't have any choice. Somebody was trying to kill me."

  In the ensuing silence Bo heard her friend marshaling the resources necessary to remain calm while cultural habits learned with her first language clamored for emotive

  expression. The battle took more than a half a minute. "What?" Estrella finally exploded.

  "Look, I need for you to go with me up to Eva's to interview some Guatemalans she's snagged crossing her property on their way north from the border. I'll tell you about it on the way, okay?"

  "I'll be ready in an hour." Estrella sighed. "Have you called Andy? He's not used to this, you know."

  "I'll call him right now." Bo nodded. "And thanks, Es."

  Bo found a cup, a museum souvenir from Santa Fe, in the dishwasher. Unclear as to whether she'd run the dishwasher since last week, Bo rinsed the cup and admired its Kachina doll design. Missing as usual from all the popular Kachina souvenirs was the Stone-Eater Kachina, Owanja-Zrozro. The mad one.

  The Hopi had recognized and reified the reality of psychiatric disorder in their mythology; but the museum had conveniently left the mad Kachina off their spiffy cup. Bo filled the flawed item with freshly brewed coffee and phoned Andrew LaMarche, whose relief was mixed with predictable anger. Bo decided to spare him the real story in the interest of a more pressing issue.

  "This is the reason I avoid serious relationships," she explained, not masking the annoyance she felt. "Of course you were worried, but you can't be. Not with me. I'm different, Andy. I care for you, but I can't bond with you at the hip. My life works as long as I have a good shrink, the right meds, and the freedom to take care of myself in ways you're going to find weird. Peace and quiet, being alone, painting—are like oxygen to me and come before everything else. Without them, I fall apart. Normal people in relationships don't like to play second fiddle to anything, especially to something as embarrassing as a psychiatric disorder. But that's the way it is."

  Come on, Bradley. Attila the Hun could have handled that with more delicacy. What are you trying to do, drive him into the arms of perky size 6 grant coordinators who will enhance his career while keeping him up nights for reasons more attractive than stark fear?

  Maybe she should have been a little pathetic, she thought, played on his sympathy. Except that was dishonest, and he needed to know the truth before things got any more complicated.

  "In that case," he pronounced somberly, "I need to rethink a few things."

  Bo's heart lurched. She didn't want to be rethought, just accepted. Always the stumbling block.

  "Pine-needle basketry is a possibility," he went on, "although I've given some thought to music. Always wanted to build a harpsichord. And then learn to play it, of course."

  Bo wasn't sure whether his deadpan delivery reflected a by-now incomprehensible anger or a controlled, if arcane humor. "Harpsichord?" she said, lost.

  "Yes. I'm going to need something to do
during those long nights when you're prowling snake-infested wastelands in pursuit of peace. When the harpsichord's finished, I may start on a pipe organ. The condo will be too small, of course, but I've been thinking of buying a house ..."

  "Oh, Andy," Bo breathed, relaxing. "I thought ... well, you know what I thought. Can you really put up with this, with me?"

  "Only if I start on the harpsichord right away. Incidentally, aren't we supposed to have dinner with Rombo and Martin tonight? My flight for New Orleans leaves at eight twenty. Dinner will have to be early."

  "I'll phone them and move the time up," Bo answered, simultaneously making a judgment call. "And, uh, Andy, two more things. I've changed my mind about going to Louisiana with you. I'd like to go. I need to talk to Dewayne Singleton's family, and they're there. Maybe somebody at the prison where he was, too. So is the invitation still open?"

  He was delighted. "I'll arrange for your tickets immediately," he said. "We'll spend the night in the Quarter. Now what was the second thing?"

  "The real reason I didn't make it back last night was, well, I was sort of hiding out in a blind canyon from somebody with a rifle who seemed to be, uh, trying to kill me. I'll tell you all about it at Rombo and Martin's, okay?"

  "Bo, I'm not a young man," Andrew mentioned raggedly. "I'm not sure my heart can survive too much of this. Are you sure? Who was it?"

  "I never saw the face," Bo explained, "just the gun barrel. And I think whoever it was may have put something in the water jug on my car, too. I've got a sample of the water and I'm going to call Dar to find somebody to test it." She felt her voice drop a half octave. "I almost gave some of that water to Mildred, Andy. There are rules about things you simply cannot do in the desert. Poisoning water is probably at the top of the list. I want to kill whoever it was. I really do."

  "I'll be at your place at three." He sighed. "Pack the coolest clothes you have. We'll talk about this at Rombo and Martin's, and then I'm getting you out of here before it's too late."