Child of Silence

by Abigail Padgett

  How could she find out where Weppo was? Who would tell her?

  Bo ran through the sequence of people who would know. Madge. The discharge clerk. Bill Denny. Useless. There was a conspiracy to keep her away from Weppo. A conspiracy that would ensure his death.

  She could see his huge eyes pleading with her, as they'd done in the hospital when he made the beer-drinking sign and then threw the cup on the floor, angering the nurse.

  The nurse!

  A last chance, and a feeble one. But a chance.

  “I'd like to talk to the charge nurse who was on yesterday morning,” Bo told the third-floor nursing student who answered. “I don't remember her name, but she offered to lend me some books, and I'm really interested. . . Uh, this is Barbara O'Reilly. I work for Child Protective Services. You know. . .”

  The use of her childhood name carried a ring of honesty while avoiding immediate recognition.

  “Sure,” the student nurse replied. “That's Susan Cooper. She's always reading those religious books. Her home number's 570-5782.”

  “Thanks,” Bo said carefully, and hung up.

  Susan Cooper was overjoyed at Bo's change of heart.

  “God works in mysterious ways,” she murmured. “I just knew when I saw you looking at Dr. Hinckle's book yesterday morning that you were special.”

  In the length of time it took Susan Cooper to pronounce “special,” Bo could have retiled the kitchen.

  “Well, I thought about Dr. Hinckle, working on this case,” Bo sing-songed, replicating Cooper's inflection. “You know, I sometimes feel a need for guidance, seeing all these poor children...”

  “Oh, I'm sure you do! And that sweet little deaf boy— how's he doing?”

  Nurse Sailboat didn't know Bo was off the case. This was it. The one chance.

  “A wonderful foster home,” Bo twittered. “Such loving, caring, people! Did you get to meet them when they came to get Weppo?”

  “The Chandlers? I sure did! They came right before my shift was over at 3:30. They seemed so nice.”

  Bo tried to remember to breathe, and went for the goal.

  “A lovely home too. I was so glad that Weppo would get to be close to... you know. . .”

  “The beach? Yes, that'll be a treat for the little guy, and there’s that fabulous ice cream place right on Garnet. . .”

  Garnet—that meant Pacific Beach.

  Bo replaced the receiver and checked her purse. Lithium. Sedatives. She stuffed the seven-grain bread on top of the drugs with one hand, and found the Cs in the phone book with the other. Richard and Caroline Chandler lived at forty-nine seventeen Bayard in Pacific Beach. One beach community north of Bo, a five-minute drive.

  Bo hit the door running. She might just make it. There might be just enough time.

  23 - Estrella

  Estrella Benedict stroked the smooth fur of the fox terrier in her lap. Mildred was safe. But what to do about Bo? Surely Bo wasn't still asleep. She should have called by now.

  Letting the dog have the brocade chair, Estrella rose to pace the length of her living room, again.

  “We just got the carpet,” her husband, Henry, remarked from the couch. “You're wearing a path.”

  “Cute,” she replied. “Muy Undo. I'm worried about Bo. She hasn't called.”

  “So call her,” Henry Benedict suggested.

  “She won't answer, even if she's there. Not when she gets, you know, a little out of it. She just stays in that apartment and paints those Indian things, doesn't answer the phone. She says it's good for her.”

  “Then it's probably good for her.”

  A man of few words and clear ideas, Henry readjusted the sights on the rifle he'd just cleaned, and snapped it back in the gun rack inside a custom-made cabinet. He left the cabinet unlocked.

  “Do you want to drive over there again?”

  “No.” Estrella sighed. “We were just there two hours ago. I didn't see her car. Maybe she's gone to a motel, like Madge said. But Madge never really talked to her, just left a message. I don't think Bo got the message about what happened to Angela Reavey. I know she'd call me. And she'd come to get Mildred. She'd never leave Mildred this long unless something was wrong.”

  “Madge'll call when they know more about Reavey,” Henry pointed out the fourth time in an hour. “Until then there's nothing we can do but wait.”

  Henry Benedict hoped the men who had shot the child would come to his house looking for his wife's friend. He was ready. Earlier he'd surprised two Jehovah's Witnesses by shoving them off the porch with the screen door and then training a rifle on them as they sprawled on the lawn. Estrella knew she'd laugh at the scene later when she could describe it to Bo. The men had left a stack of little magazines and a Bible on the grass in their haste to retreat. Henry had bitten a plastic toothpick in half and spit the pieces on the lawn.

  “Damn,” he'd sighed. “Wish it'd been the dirtbags that shot up the hospital.”

  “I'm going to call Madge,” Estrella spoke directly to the new maroon carpeting under her feet.

  “Madge's at the hospital with Reavey's supervisor. You know that,” Henry, rather than the carpet, replied.

  An elaborate beveled mirror over the fireplace, a wedding present from two aunts in Culiacán, reflected slices of the room. Estrella entertained the idea of breaking it over her husband's head. She had to do something, call somebody.

  “Andrew LaMarche liked the way Bo handled this case,” she mentioned.

  “So?”

  “So I'm going to call him.”

  Henry Benedict picked up a paperback history of the Civil War he'd been reading earlier. He knew his Latina wife. Impulsive, and she'd just reached the flash point. There would be no stopping her. So he didn't try.

  Andrew LaMarche accepted the call, patched through from his service.

  “Bueno,” Estrella began excitedly, her accent deepening. “I'm Bo Bradley's friend. We share an office. I'm worried sick. I think something's wrong. I think Bo's tied up somehow in this case with the deaf boy and may get hurt.”

  Andrew LaMarche listened somberly. He knew about Angela Reavey, and felt a growing shame at his use of her name in yesterday's well-choreographed attack on Child Protective Services. The surgeon attending Reavey had phoned, at LaMarche’ s request, to say that the woman's condition was critical, but she had a chance.

  And now this.

  Bo Bradley was missing. LaMarche remembered the woman's deep excitement about the deaf boy. And her anger at his arrogance. He admired Bo Bradley. The thought of her coming to harm was painful.

  “What do you want me to do?” he asked Estrella.

  “I don't know,” she answered, wound down now. “But there's got to be something.”

  “I'll think on it,” LaMarche offered.

  It was the least he could do.

  24 - Foster Care

  “Don't speed; stay with the traffic,” Bo told the BMW as she joined the northbound traffic on Sunset Cliffs Boulevard. The landscape crawled beside her like a slow-motion travelogue. The San Diego River, flat as a mirror. Dog Beach on the left, where a man in a three-piece suit stood ankle-deep in sand, watching a long-haired dachshund sniff the cadaver of a small shark. Mildred loved Dog Beach. Bo hoped Estrella would take the little dog on outings there if something happened, and she couldn't do it herself.

  The thought of Mildred alone brought tears to her eyes. She wanted to pull off the road and cry. Mildred had been a birthday gift from Mark, thirteen years ago. In another life, before a trucker hauling Vermont marble to a construction site in Poughkeepsie discovered Mary Laurie O'Reilly, dead beside the New York Thruway.

  The little fox terrier was a link to a past Bo liked to remember. A time when she and Mark were going to work with native people. Bo had done a painting of a Navajo mother and child that UNICEF wanted to buy for their Christmas card series. It would have launched a career in socially aware art. But then Laurie was dead and Bo couldn't stem the crashing tide of though
ts—the racing, crazy roller-coaster ride of ideas and feelings coming so fast she couldn't finish a sentence. Finally, she hadn't been able to talk at all and was hospitalized for three months. The only thing that hadn't changed when she came out was Mildred.

  Far out to sea the marine layer hovered, a gray band of haze curving with the horizon. From its depths Bo thought she could hear the distant wail of Caillech Bera. The hag, haunting every windswept crossroad.

  The image roused something deep within Bo.

  “Aye, an’ ye'll not be havin' me this time, Cally!” she yelled through trembling lips. “Ye'll have ta wait!”

  Her grandmother's words. The familiar brogue. A source of strength when there was nothing else.

  Bo wiped her tears on the sleeve of her sweatshirt and negotiated the complicated series of curving turns that would take her through the resorts fringing Mission Bay and into the old community of Pacific Beach. Minutes crept by with glacial stealth. Traffic. Out-of-season tourists with boogie-boards who'd turn blue after two minutes in the Pacific and then tell everyone back home they'd been surfing.

  Finally. A right turn on Garnet, up a block, a left on Bayard—4917.

  The house was a bungalow like all the others in the area. Wood frame, painted in gray and cream. A deck on the second story would provide a view of the sea. A child's bicycle with training wheels lay on its side in the grass. The Chandlers had children, or a child, of their own.

  Bo parked the BMW across the Chandlers' driveway, but left the motor rµnning.

  What in hell now, Bradley?

  Lights on. Cars in the drive. Everything looked normal. Dinnertime. They were probably eating. No squad cars, no Surf 'n' Sun rental cars. The men with guns hadn't arrived yet. But they would, and soon.

  Bo rummaged under the seven-grain bread in her purse and found her ID badge. Clipping it to her sweatshirt, she hurried up the walk and knocked at the door. The man who answered sized her up in seconds, his eyes betraying that wariness Bo knew only too well.

  Too late she remembered her uncombed hair, freshly washed and flying from her head in an electric tangle of silver-red curls. Bleary eyes from crying. No makeup. Dressed in sweats. Not a pretty picture.

  Richard Chandler had seen what she was immediately. A crazy. Inappropriate. To be feared.

  “Just came by to drop off a box ofclothes,” she mentioned casually. It was standard, when a child was placed in foster care. The social worker would bring the child's things from home, when possible, to save San Diego County the expense of providing wardrobes for thousands of kids every year. Except Weppo hadn't come from home. There were no clothes, no toys, no artifacts of a history.

  Richard Chandler looked puzzled.

  “What clothes?” he asked. “I don't see any clothes.”

  “In the car,” Bo mumbled lamely. “Wanted to make sure I had the right address. . .”

  You’re blowing it, Bradley. Do something.

  But what? The guy wasn't going to let her in the house. And anything she said would be written off as incomprehensible raving, even though Chandler would know about the attack on Weppo in the hospital. She wouldn't be able to speak slowly enough to be taken seriously, wouldn't be able to make sense.

  “There's danger,” Delilah Brasseur's words thrummed in the air. “So much danger it can't be told. Don't let nothin' happen to my baby. . .”

  Bo glanced nervously at an immense jade plant beside the steps. Its fat, green leaves seemed ready to split from the pressure within them.

  “Well?” Richard Chandler scowled.

  And then a scream. A guttural, familiar, croaking scream as a little boy with huge tan eyes and hair like spun wire propelled himself past the man in the door and into Bo's arms.

  “Weppo!” she breathed, hugging the small body tightly.

  She wanted to cry, yell, sob, give expression to the tumult of emotion raging in her. And that would be the worst thing she could do.

  “Let's go get your things out of the car,” she chirped at the boy in her arms, casting what she hoped was a sweet smile over her shoulder at the balding man in khakis standing in the door. “Just a few things. We can carry them, can't we, tiger?”

  All the back end workers called little boys “tiger.” Bo hoped she sounded like one of them.

  Richard Chandler had seen her badge. Didn't want to appear rude to the agency employing and paying him and his wife to care for foster children. Bo hoped the Chandlers were new at foster parenting—a pro would tackle her to the ground before permitting what she was about to do.

  Pretending that the passenger's-side door was locked, Bo shrugged in mock exasperation and carried Weppo to the driver's side, and put him down. Predictably, he scrambled into the car as soon as she opened the door. Kids would do that. Especially a kid accustomed to confinement. Cars were a promise of movement, of something interesting to do.

  Richard Chandler's scowl deepened as he started down the walk.

  “Hey!

  No time left.

  Bo flung herself into the car and jammed the gearshift into drive. The door slammed shut by itself when her foot hit the gas.

  Get out of here!

  Up to the corner of Bayard and Law. Right on Law three blocks to a street with no sign. Right again. Bo felt like a rat in a maze. Chandler would be after her. Maybe he'd call the cops first. As a licensed foster parent he would have been trained to do that. Surely he'd do that. But where should she go?

  Weppo watched her, wide-eyed, from the passenger seat. Trusting. Interested.

  “Don't let nothin' happen to my baby,” a contralto voice whispered over the hum of the engine.

  “Don't worry, Delilah Brasseur, whoever you are, “ Bo yelled aloud. “I've got your baby.”

  Quit yelling and go somewhere, Bradley.

  But where? Interstate 5 was the main artery out of town. North, toward L.A., and south to Mexico. But that would be the first place the cops would look. Forget 1-5.

  Turning left on Grand, Bo followed the crowded street inland from the coast until it forked. The left fork was Balboa, which wended upward toward the residential community of Clairemont. Houses, apartments, condos, quiet shopping centers. The central bedroom community of San Diego. Nobody would expect her to flee there.

  Weppo grinned and made the beer-drinking sign. The ride was a treat. He wanted a snack to celebrate.

  At the corner of Balboa and Genesee Bo swerved into a gas station. If she were going somewhere, she'd have to have gas. Weppo jumped up and down on the front seat as she pumped, making his beer sign over and over.

  It's dinnertime, Bradley. He's hungry. But who taught him that sign?

  College kids favored it. Bo remembered the drug addict in a squash-colored car. “White male. Young. Maybe twenty-three,” Bill Denny had said. The right age. Had he taught Weppo. . . ? Another memory intruded.

  “I called the daddy to come get him, an’ he did, but if somebody tried to kill the child out there, that mean the daddy already come to harm.”

  The daddy!

  Bo shivered, paying for the gas. The young man dead of an overdose on a downtown street had been Weppo's father. But who was he? Why had the housekeeper for the Rowes called him to take Weppo away? Away from what?

  Bo thought of warm coals beneath gray ash in a fireplace. A SpaghettiOs can. Weppo's father had meant to come back.

  In the car the boy was growing impatient.

  “Eat! Now!” the hand sign demanded.

  “Your father is dead,” Bo pronounced through tears.

  Weppo rubbed his stomach under a navy blue T-shirt with “San Diego Padres” imprinted on it, and signed adamantly. Across the parking lot fronting a Kohl's department store was a small Mexican restaurant. Bo eased the BMW behind it and parked.

  “We'll eat,” she smiled, cupping her right hand toward her mouth in the double movement that meant both eat and food in American Sign Language. Weppo copied the sign exactly, although Bo was sure he hadn't made the mental c
onnection between the sign and the thing it represented. That would take time.

  “And this,” Bo pointed to the building, “is a restaurant.” She made the crossed-fingers sign under her lips. Weppo duplicated it, studied the building's interior, looked at the cook dropping bent tacos into vats of hot oil, made the sign again.

  Their chicken tacos would be ready in three minutes.

  In the ladies' room Weppo attended to toileting with dispatch and then watched Bo attempt to make herself look less like the Madwoman of Chaillot. If the cops caught up with them, she wanted to look presentable for jail. As she shakily drew lipstick across her lips, the boy tugged on her shirt, pointed to his chin and drew his finger downward in a crook—the ASL sign for red.