Child of Silence

by Abigail Padgett

  A jagged crater disfigured the wall behind him. Rudy looked at it with distaste, and then with renewed fear. In the seven-inch crater was the barest silvery film. Its almost imperceptible sheen caught the light and glistened. Rudy shuddered. The guy had meant business. The sick bastard son of a bitch was a bona fide killer. The silver sheen, Rudy Palachek knew, was mercury.

  A hollow-point bullet packed at the tip with a poison so toxic to the human nervous system that a flesh wound could kill. And the deadly package had missed them both by less than two inches.

  10 - Another Bad Night

  Something woke Bo, although she couldn't identify it immediately. An odorous ringing. Her bedroom smelled like colcannon, the buttery combination of potatoes, cabbage, onions, and cream that her grandmother had loved to concoct. The scent washed her in nostalgia. And it kept ringing.

  Bo shook her head. Nobody'd cooked colcannon for her in fifteen years. And the ringing was a phone!

  She'd gone by the university psychiatric clinic late in the afternoon. Had the initial bloodwork done, got the lithium. It was a safety net, and she'd decided she needed it. Things were getting too haywire, like this potato-scented sound that brought tears to her eyes with its memories. Crazy. She felt the loss of her grandmother as though the feisty old woman had just died. And her parents. And Dr. Bittner. Laurie. AIDS victims. Baby harp seals dead on Canada's frozen coasts. The Black Forest in Germany withering in acid rain. An overwhelming sadness. A bitter, insurmountable loss.

  In a psychiatric setting, she mused, somebody would write, “Inappropriate affect, tearful for no reason. . .” on her chart. But there were plenty of reasons, always. And always it was best to block them, keep them from flooding your mind. If you could. The damn lithium, already in her bloodstream, would take three weeks to have any effect.

  “It's a quarter of one,” she snarled into the bedside phone. “This had better be important.”

  “Ms. Bradley? This is Andrew LaMarche.”

  It was going to be bad news. She could tell from the grim tenor of his voice. The scent of grieving in the room. The howling of a mythological crone her people nicknamed Cally over the sea outside.

  “What's happened?” Had Weppo died? The light in those bright eyes gone flat? Bo gripped an edge of the plaid sheet and noticed that her knuckles were white.

  “Somebody tried to kill the boy,” LaMarche pronounced unevenly. “Somebody came in this hospital, two men, armed, for the sole purpose of killing a child. And they shot an orderly. His name was Brad Sutin. He was only twenty-one. He's dead.”

  Two men? Maybe you weren't imagining it after all.

  “But Weppo.. . ?” Bo fought a deep need to scream.

  “There was a special-duty attendant, a man I knew in the service named Palachek. He saw it coming and hit the floor. He was holding your boy. He saved the child's life.”

  The nightmare. Not to be understood. But Weppo was alive, not like Laurie so finally still in velvet and Irish lace.

  “I'll be there in twenty minutes,” Bo replied. A taste of salt alerted her to the fact that she'd bitten her lip.

  “A semi-jacket hollow point .38 packed with le mercure—” the doctor was raging in a bilingual frenzy. Bo wondered where he was from.

  “I'll be there as soon as I can,” she repeated, and hung up.

  She had to go, for a multitude of reasons.

  Weppo was, legally, in nobody's hands at the moment. Nobody had legal jurisdiction yet over a child who'd come close to death twice in the last twenty-four hours. Twice!

  “And the third's the charm.” She rolled her Rs bleakly. The racial memory of a thousand Celtic ancestors thrummed in her skull. That was the reason Celtic designs were often in fours—to trick fate. Weppo would not survive a third brush with death.

  And the legal tangle would take all night.

  St. Mary's would have procured a permission-to-treat from a judge when the boy was brought in. In the absence of a parent or legal guardian, it was the only way they could legally provide care for the child. But St. Mary's had no responsibility to protect Weppo from assassins. In fact, the hospital's real responsibility lay in protecting the hundreds of other children under its roof from the danger now represented by a deaf four-year-old. A four-year-old somebody was trying to murder. If his medical condition were stable, St. Mary's would have to discharge Weppo immediately. But discharge to whom?

  It was a weekend. Legal limbo. No court in session. The paperwork that would assure San Diego County's custody of Weppo wouldn't be filed until Monday, under normal circumstances.

  Normal?

  Bo allowed herself to laugh hysterically while pulling clean clothes from a laundry basket. Lois Bittner had pointed out several hundred times, “When you're feeling crazy, is best to look sane.” Good advice.

  Bo put together her sanest outfit—a luxuriantly draped wool skirt and leather boots that, with a silk blouse and blazer, made her look like a spinster professor of English literature at some preppy East Coast university. Very sane. She looked around for the matching briefcase and found it, unaccountably, in the bathroom closet behind a stack of furnace filters. Bo wasn't sure her wall furnace had a filter, but they'd been on sale. She tried to confine her typically manic spending sprees to practical items. The filters managed to convey a spirit of practicality, lying there in the closet. A focus. Bo felt better.

  She'd have to call a district attorney from the hospital, and then go to the office and complete the eight different forms necessary to secure the court's and the Department of Social Services' custody of Weppo. The D.A. would have to sign them, grant the petition. Only then could plans be made for Weppo's next move.

  Bo picked up the phone.

  “Madge!” she yelled into Aldenhoven's answering machine at home. “I know you're asleep, but wake up! It's an emergency! Somebody's tried to shoot my NPG at St. Mary's, and killed an orderly. We need a petition now, and how do I find a foster home that can protect him? Somebody's trying to kill him, and St. Mary's is going to want to discharge him first thing in the morning. I'm on my way there now. Get up!”

  Mildred hadn't stirred from her bedside basket as Bo opened the door to a hazy fog less dense than the night before. Something was taped to the outside knob. A flier, Bo assumed. A new pizza parlor. A car wash. She pulled the white sheet loose and glanced at it absently.

  It was a picture, cut from a magazine. A picture of a fox terrier. The dog's head had been ripped off. The words “STAY THE FUCK AWAY” were block-printed in pencil across the bottom.

  Oh, shit!

  Running back inside she grabbed Mildred still wrapped in her blanket, and stuffed dog-and-blanket inside her jacket. So much for looking sane.

  “No way!” she promised the dog. “This is crazy!”

  11 - “Grandmother, Persevere . . .” —Kiowa Song

  Annie Garcia sat halfway down the bus's left side, against the wall. It had been difficult, changing buses in Los Angeles, but a Mexican had helped her with her plastic bags full of clothes. She'd given him one of the tuna sandwiches Maria packed for the trip. Annie didn't like tuna anyway.

  Outside the tinted windows darkness roiled and flowed across the desert floor. Nothing to see, and she'd seen it before. To see the desert, Annie had been taught well as a child, you have to touch it. With your feet and hands and eyes. The desert will not sing its stories for a passing glance.

  Maria had not wanted Annie to take the bags of clothes.

  “Why do you want to haul all that stuff up to Lone Pine?” Joe had asked as he heaved the bags into the truck for the trip to the little bus station in El Cajon. “You'll just have to haul it back.”

  But Joe was Barona, not Paiute.

  Maria merely saw, and said nothing. “Behind the blanket” it was called. The Paiute way of not being there in your mind.

  Annie shifted her weight on the scratchy seat and tried again to sleep. Ten hours on a bus was agony. She was glad it was the last time.

 
; Lodging her tongue in the gap left by a broken tooth thirty years ago, she hummed softly. The sound in her head helped her drift off. Not really asleep, but not awake. She heard the cry-dance singers, and saw a star. A dark star against a white background. Just a small, plain star with figures on both sides—numbers. She could see a 3, and a 5, and a 1. There were others, but they were too hazy. The star was smaller than the numbers, and above them. It wasn't much of a star.

  The bus stopped briefly in Mojave and its lurch made the image shatter like bits of a mirror. But she remembered. A star and 3,5,1. A spirit-message. Annie sighed. Why did the spirits choose for their endless gifts old people who only wanted to rest? Why not the young, who'd be awake and paying attention? And what did it mean, this star?

  The bus rounded a corner and narrowly missed a car parked on the street. Annie watched the maneuver, detached. But then it came to her. The license plate! The plate on the parked car reminded her of that other car. The one the white woman wanted to know about. The white woman who said she was loco, and worked to take care of hurt little children. How loco could that be? The spirits must like the white woman, and the child who couldn't hear. The star and the numbers were on the yellow car!

  In the darkened bus Annie forced herself to remember until the rest stop at Inyokern. The card the woman had given her was in her purse. With wrenching effort she crept from the bus when it stopped in the shadowy little desert town and found a phone.

  “Child Abuse Hotline,” a young male voice answered. “Yes, we’ll accept charges.”

  “I call Barbara Bradley,” Annie read the name off the card, “about the little boy who can't hear.”

  “You have a message for Bo Bradley?”

  “Yes.”

  “Well, tell me and I'll get the message to her. Who may I say it's from?”

  Whites and their rude, abrupt ways. Who knew who it was from? It was from the spirits.

  “The license plate on the yellow car. . .” Annie tried again.

  “Wait a minute. Who is this?”

  “I found the child.” Annie identified herself proudly. “I saved his life! And tell her a 3 and a 5 and a 1 and a star. I'm going to Lone Pine now, going to a pow-wow.”

  “I need to know who—”

  Gently Annie replaced the receiver. The white woman would be happy to get the spirit message. And Annie would be happy to get a cup of vending machine coffee.

  The hotline worker doodled threes and fives and ones on a notepad and considered whether or not to convey the message to Bradley over in the court unit. The call was obviously a joke. Or some crazy on Bradley's caseload. Probably a schizophrenic. He'd read somewhere that they talked in numbers.

  Then he remembered that Bo Bradley worked in Madge Aldenhoven's unit. “Monster Madge,” who'd get you fired for not completing a DSS315 phone memo form as the procedures manual required.

  The hotline worker had just bought a new car. With stiff payments. Quickly he filled out the DSS315 and dropped it in the out basket. Then, to be doubly efficient, he phoned

  Bradley's office. She wouldn't be in at 2:00 in the morning, but he could log the call and cover his tail.

  “Bueno,” Estrella Benedict answered yawning, forgetting where she was. “I mean Child Protective Services, Bo Bradley's desk.”

  “What are you doing in the office at this hour?” The hotline worker was amazed.

  “An emergency. What in hell do you think we're doing? Folk dancing? What's up?”

  “Got a message for Bradley. Just came in long-distance. A crazy, I think. An old woman. Said she was going to a pow-wow in Lone Pine. Something about a yellow car. And a star. She said, ‘3, 5, 1, and a star.’”

  The worker could hear a small dog yipping in the background. Why would there be a dog in the office? It must be true what everybody said about the court investigators. Too much stress.

  “Wow,” Estrella breathed. “That's the Indian! I'll get the message to Bo over at the hospital. Thanks!”

  The hotline worker hung up, shaking his head. Barking dogs at the office at 2:00 a.m.? Indians with stars? Maybe he'd go back to school. Maybe computers.

  12 - Sliding Toward the Edge

  “My God, that's great!” Bo exclaimed into the third floor nurses' station phone as Estrella relayed Annie Garcias message. “Let me get it down.” She gestured to Police Detective Bill Denny, who was standing with LaMarche and Madge Aldenhoven. “A 3, a 5, a 1, and a star, right?”

  Andrew LaMarche, having examined Weppo and arranged for an army of private security guards who would patrol the hospital until further notice, could not bring himself to leave. The shooting reminded him of a past in which people were blown to bits for obscure reasons in Asian jungles. He'd joined the Marines after his freshman year at Tulane. Now he tried to remember why. Something to do with adventure, with a need for discipline, with a young man's hunger for a concept of honor. He'd wanted to learn about honor. And he had. Its antithesis could be found in the armed invasion of a sanctuary for children. The fact made him deeply angry, and deeply concerned for the deaf little boy somebody was determined to kill.

  As Madge Aldenhoven orchestrated by phone the legal intricacies of the boy’s status, he listened and somberly made medical recommendations the Department of Social Services would be obliged to follow. Among these was a strong suggestion that Weppo's foster care arrangements include extensive training in American Sign Language. Aldenhoven, efficient even at 2:00 a.m., made a note of the recommendation. It would be included in the court orders now hurriedly being prepared.

  Bo watched the two of them from the nurses' station. LaMarche rumpled and steely-eyed. Madge out of character in mindlessly donned sweatshirt and immense khakis that must belong to her husband. As she talked on the phone Madge held up the pants with her free hand. To keep from laughing Bo thought about Annie Garcia.

  How had the old Indian woman done it, she wondered. How had she called up a visual memory that could have had no meaning for her when it was encoded? No reason to remember.

  Tucking the receiver under her chin, Bo handed the slip of paper to a San Diego P.D. detective named Denny. “This may be part of a license number from a car seen near where the boy was found,” she told him.

  “I'll see if we’ve got anything,” Denny responded, and headed for a wall phone.

  “Bo, are you. . . okay?” Estrella whispered in the empty office, as if somebody might overhear, guess the secret. “I mean, this is enough to make anybody crazy, having a kid on your caseload shot at!”

  Bo cupped a hand over the phone's mouthpiece. “No, I'm not okay. Not since early this morning. But I've got the lithium already. I'm on top of it.”

  She knew she was talking too fast, showing too much feeling. Estrella didn't miss it.

  “Oh, sheet!” she shouted. “Bo, you've got to get away from this. Get away from Madge before she figures out there's something wrong with you. She'll crucify you.”

  “I know,” Bo agreed. “But, Es, I just have this feeling. If you could see him, see Weppo. . . he's so... alone.”

  “He's not alone! He's got the three biggest bureaucracies in San Diego on his side. Cops, social workers, doctors. He'll be fine. But you won't...”

  Bo could see the boy, awake in his room across from the nurses' station. An armed uniformed cop stood at the door. Rudy Palachek was inside, teaching the child to sign colors. They'd mastered red. Weppo was still alive and had learned to sign a color. Bo couldn't find words to explain the miracle.

  “Es,” she whispered, “I can't walk away from this. I'll be all right. Don't worry.”

  “I will worry. Get home as soon as you can. Or come over to our place. I'll have Henry make up the guest bed. And don't worry about Mildred. She's right here, and she's going home with me. Nobody's going to hurt her. Henry will see to that. You know how he loves her.”

  “Thanks, Es,” Bo whispered. After hearing of the threat, Madge had arranged for Estrella to pick up the dog from the hospital before
going over to the office to help draft the voluminous paperwork required by the situation. A district attorney was on his way to sign the petition. Bo experienced an exaggerated wave of affection for her coworkers that brought tears to her eyes.

  A small voice warned, “Delusional. Don't get smarmy!” But Bo didn't have time to listen. Bill Denny was waving the scrap of paper bearing a star and three numbers.

  “Gotta go, Es.” Bo hung up the phone.

  Madge and LaMarche appeared to be arguing as Bill Denny passed them. Bo heard her name in the conversation.

  “Bingo!” Denny smiled grimly. “A stolen car. Registered in Houston to a guy named Barry Velk. He reported it stolen two weeks ago to the Houston ED. The star was the big clue. Texas plates, the older ones, have a star over the numbers. This one was 351-687. Squash yellow, just like you said. A Mercury. And. . .”