Child of Silence

by Abigail Padgett

  “And I called my editor,” Tally went on. “I need to get a few answers from you, and then call him back. He's doing some research in the meantime. Get back in the car, Bo. You're going to get pneumonia out here.”

  Bo crawled inside, shivering. “What questions?”

  “How do you know Delilah Brasseur, and what did she tell you?”

  Bo reached over to the backseat and smoothed Weppo's hair. Clenched in his fist was a red felt-tip pen.

  “I don't know her,” Bo said with a sigh. “She left a message for me. She said I should take Weppo, ‘the baby’ is what she said, and go someplace where nobody could find us until Tuesday. She said it would be over Tuesday.”

  Comparisons to angel-messages promoting flights into Egypt were unavoidable. Bo resisted the urge to explain that Delilah Brasseur might be such an angel, and that Bo herself might be the agent divinely selected to carry the child out of harm's way. “Grandiose,” such delusions were called. And that sense of divine mission—the dead giveaway of mania.

  “Brasseur was the Rowes' housekeeper for years,” Tally explained. “The old family retainer.”

  “She said she knew about Weppo,” Bo went on. “She said she called ‘the daddy’ and he came and took Weppo. She was scared, really scared. She said. . .” Bo paused to control her voice, “it was all up to me.”

  “But how does she know you?” Tally pressed.

  “I don't know. I left my card with the maid at the Rowes' house, but that wasn't Delilah Brasseur. I remember voices. The maid was a much younger woman.”

  “But the maid may have known Brasseur. Must have. The maid gave Brasseur your card, and she called you.”

  “I guess,” Bo conceded. Reality was dull, compared to the delusionally divine voice on the answering machine.

  “There is nothing but reality!” a familiar German accent warned inside her head.

  “Okay, okay,” Bo answered.

  “Okay what?”

  “Okay, so Brasseur called me,” Bo hedged, “but we still don't know anything.”

  “She said it would be over by Tuesday. Tuesday's the election. The attacks on your Wilhelm back there have something to do with the election. Tia Rowe and the election. But what?”

  Bo glanced at the car's padded ceiling. “You're asking me? Probably the only truly ripe candidate for four-point restraints for four hundred miles in any direction? All I know is, I had to save Weppo. I want him to learn ASL and go to Gallaudet and become the first deaf President of the United States.”

  “You're crazy,” Tally nodded, “but you've got guts. I'm going to park you and the boy with your Indians, assuming we find them, and then get back to that pay phone. If we can get this story together we may just stop Tia Rowe.”

  Tally's headlights sliced the gloom of a silent main street and came to rest on a shabby, two-story hotel. Bo could see the place in its heyday, horses tethered in front, sun-hardened prospectors with gold nuggets in pouches tied secretly about their necks. Were there gold mines up here? She thought so. Lone Pine had the look of a mining town, its halcyon past obscured by layers of dust and faded paint.

  “The hotel will have a night clerk,” Tally noted sensibly. “He'll know where Garcia’s street is.”

  Leaving the car running, she sprinted into the darkened building.

  Bo tipped the mirror toward herself and pulled a brush through her hair. She didn't look that bad, she decided. Exhausted, but not wild-eyed wacko. Not yet. In shadows at the periphery of the mirror's reflection, something moved. Bo spun around in time to see the rear wheels of a car vanish around a corner. No taillights. The car's lights weren't on. Why would somebody be driving around musty little Lone Pine, California, in the middle of the night with no lights on? Terror slammed through Bo like an iceberg surfacing from freezing, watery depths. It was them! It had to be.

  Sliding into the driver's seat, Bo put the car in gear and honked. Behind a dust-filmed second-story window a light flickered on, and then off again.

  “Get in!” Bo yelled as Gretchen Tally emerged from the hotel's lobby, puzzled. “They're here!”

  “Who's here?” Tally questioned, diving into the moving car.

  “The killers. It's them. I saw a car back there behind us, in the mirror. With no lights on. They're here!”

  Tally's look was wary, sympathetic.

  "I don't see any car. I think you're imagining it. Try to calm down. I've got directions to this Charlie Garcia's house. And there is a pow-wow going on, so we may have the right place—”

  “I'm not imagining it!” Bo insisted.

  “Okay. Turn right at this corner and follow the road two miles up into the hills. Then there's a dirt road called Coyote Spur that goes off to the right.”

  Bo flipped off the lights and propelled the car up a long, open grade toward the hulking foothills beyond.

  “Indians say that mountains walk at night,” she mentioned. Ahead the purple-gray forms seemed to waken, shudder a little as if throwing off sleep. For one of them to have moved, hugely and slowly, off toward Death Valley to the east, or north toward Mono Lake with its jagged salt-crystal pillars jutting from murky water, would not have surprised Bo. Walking mountains might just be a part of nature. Killing children was not.

  Tally jotted notes furiously in a tiny spiral notebook.

  “So, you found a receipt from Jamail's on the ground near where the child was abandoned, right?”

  “Yeah,” Bo replied vaguely. The hills stretching west from Lone Pine were two hundred million years old, she remembered from a ranger's lecture during her last visit. The number was incomprehensible. Nothing could really matter, in comparison to such vast age.

  “And after the attack on the boy in the hospital you flew to Houston where you were told by a clerk at Jamail's that the receipt bore an accounting code designating the Rowes. Then you went to the Rowe mansion in River Oaks where you gave your card to a maid and left. Is that right?”

  “Right,” Bo answered flatly.

  The reporter's words didn't really tell the story. The words seemed silly, pointless.

  “I saw billboards for Tia Rowe,” she tried to explain. “Her eyes . . . there's something wrong with her. She isn't. . . human.”

  “If you start telling me Tia Rowe's an alien from an old Star Trek segment or something, I'm going to have to assume you're not what we call a reliable informant.” Tally grimaced. “I'm going to have to assume I'm out in the middle of God-knows-where with a seriously disturbed woman who has kidnapped a child. I am, in fact, an accessory to that kidnapping. You're not going to tell me Tia's an invader from the Crab Nebula, are you, Bo?”

  “No,” Bo answered. “Nothing like that.”

  People, she acknowledged for perhaps the millionth time in her life, brought a different measure to bear on things said by those with psychiatric histories. You had to be coldly precise, avoid colorful turns of phrase. Or else there would be the meaningful exchange of glances, after which you would be dismissed like a quaint but useless toy. And even the trustworthy Gretchen Tally was one of “them,” the ones who held the reins of reality.

  “I am convinced,” Bo stated in the unpunctuated syntax of a computer-generated voice, “that Weppo was in that house until Delilah Brasseur discovered something that led her to believe he was in great danger. She called Weppo's father to come and rescue him. I think the father stole a car in Houston and then drove to San Diego and hid out for a few days with Weppo in a shack on the Barona Reservation. I think the father tied Weppo to a mattress there and then left, meaning to come back. But he never came back because he died from an overdose of some street drug.”

  “You sound like a computer,” Tally said, cringing. “It gives me the creeps. But I think you're right. I think Weppo's father was Kep Rowe. My editor's checking it out with the San Diego Police. Kep's been arrested in Houston, more than once, on drug charges. The prints are being faxed to San Diego right now. If it's Kep, we have a story.”

 
“Why would somebody want to kill Tia Rowe's grandson?” Bo asked, shaving a right turn onto a dirt road identified as Coyote Spur only by a whitewash sign painted on a boulder.

  “The question is,” Tally pondered, “why didn't anybody know there was a Rowe grandchild?”

  “Wild oats,” Bo guessed. “An illegitimate child. Isn't that the sort of thing they still cover up in the South?”

  “Maybe,” the reporter conceded. “But Delilah Brasseur called Kep to get the child away from danger in Houston. That means the child was in Houston to begin with. Hidden in Houston. But from what? What for? And where's the mother?”

  Amid a roughly circular jumble of granite outcroppings Bo discerned a cinder-block house surrounded by cars and pickup trucks. Some of the trucks had camper shells. Others were parked to shelter tents from the wind. The pow-wow.

  “I don't know anything more than I've told you,” Bo droned.

  The landscape might have been the moon.

  “I hope this is the right place,” Tally said. “Are you sure these Indians will let you and Weppo stay? Will you be safe?”

  “We aren't safe anyplace,” Bo replied. “But Annie will help. I know she will.”

  As Bo eased the car quietly among the parked vehicles, a shape moved near the back of the house. An ancient woman in long skirts and a man's overcoat. She moved slowly out of the shadows and then merely stood in the moonlit circle of rocks.

  Bo was suddenly aware that the dreamlike enclosure contained not one, but fifty pairs of eyes, alert and watchful. The somnambulant scene masked a deep interest, and a sympathy palpable in the air. They'd been waiting. Annie Garcia and her people had known they were coming, and waited in silence.

  In a trance Bo gathered the sleeping child from Tally's car, and approached the old woman.

  “Good luck,” the reporter whispered.

  Bo nodded, as Gretchen Tally slid into the driver's seat and turned to leave.

  “Welcome,” Annie Garcia pronounced softly. “I knew you would come. There is still much danger, or you wouldn't have driven here. My grandson Charlie, he knows a place to hide.”

  Bo watched as a sleeping truck stirred and moved toward her. Behind its wheel was a man with Annie's cheekbones and wide skull, but much younger.

  “There are coats, blankets, food ready for you,” he said. “Get in. We will hide you.”

  Bo held Weppo warmly against her body as Annie Garcia's grandson edged the truck out a dirt trail toward the hills to the north. In the alkaline, moon-washed landscape Bo searched for Lois Bittner's reality and did not find it.

  What she found was planetary rubble. A forsaken wasteland where things infinitely older than the boned jellyfish named “human” breathed and had life. What could this be, if not a pattern in which she was merely a function? Bo felt herself rocking slightly. The comforting, primitive motion of the very young, the very old, and the very disturbed.

  “We'll be there in about half an hour,” the man said. “Mine shafts, up in these hills, you could hide in them forever.”

  The word echoed like light on the senseless jumble of rocks outside. “Forever, forever.” It would be all right, to live among the moon-torn rocks. To become something else, go back to a crystalline self deep inside, be a stone.

  Weppo stirred against her, his warm head pushing at her chest.

  But not him. He has to have a life. You've got to hang on, for him.

  After a while the truck ground to a halt on a hill amid other, identical hills, shining and lost.

  “Up there.” The man pointed to a small hole in a landslide of rocky debris. “You can hide. No one will find you. When it is safe, we will come for you.”

  Bo struggled into a leather jacket and shouldered the backpack Charlie Garcia handed her. Weppo whined groggily as she stuffed him into another jacket and slung him over her shoulder. He clung to her like a peevish monkey.

  As the truck pulled away she wondered what Lois Bittner would say about all this, and laughed. On a rock near the opening of the mine tunnel scuttled a figure she would have sworn was her dead sister, Laurie.

  33 - Desert Shadows

  Andrew LaMarche sucked air through his teeth and watched the road below. A few cars, pickups, an occasional eighteen-wheeler hauling produce the hard, mountainous way to Nevada. So far no faded blue BMW propelled by a wild Irishwoman with a deaf child.

  At intervals the helicopter’s pilot zagged off into the desert and swept searchlights over the monotonous desolation, as if actually looking for something amid the chollas and broken granite. It was a ruse suggested by Rudy Palachek, to explain the presence of a USMC helicopter trailing a public road in the middle of the night. Any observer, even an official one like the California Highway Patrol, would assume they were a search patrol on federal orders, probably tracking a drug run out of Mexico. Swooping searchlights and the slicing churn of helicopter rotors were common nocturnal events in Southern California. No one, except those for whom the lights searched, took much notice.

  LaMarche surveyed the desert landscape somberly. A bizarre terrain of mineral rubbish and resinous, spiky plants. Sharp shadows laid by the full moon made a black-silver crazy quilt of the ground below. How would this look to Bo? To a woman grappling with an octopuslike mania whose embrace would only exaggerate the desert's eeriness? And those hideous Joshua trees. They looked, he remembered from a microbiology lab, like the tentacled freshwater organisms called hydras. Sea serpents named in Greek mythology. When Hercules hacked off one of their nine heads, two replaced it. A dry sea, peopled by monsters. Is that how Bo would see this? Was she terrified, alone with the boy out here? Unaccustomed to imaginative thought, he found it rather enjoyable. But Bo wouldn't. Not now.

  “Wait a minute,” Rudy Palachek yelled above the rotors. “I think we've got something.”

  LaMarche noted Palachek's broad hand drop to clasp the butt of an M-14 rifle on the floor. A Leupold Vari-X III sniper scope mounted on the barrel would give Rudy a distinct advantage over men armed with handguns. And in the cool, moonlit desert there would be no distortion from heat mirages. Rudy Palachek could pick off a cowboy killer from a long, long way. And given the chance, he would.

  But the car below them was deserted. Abandoned at the edge of the road. The helicopter leaned into a circle and landed on packed sand thirty feet away.

  LaMarche scuttled under the whipping blades and approached the silent car, Rudy following. Beneath his right hand the hood was cool.

  “They've been gone for at least an hour, probably more,” he yelled.

  Rudy tried a door, then stood back and blew out a rear window with the M-14.

  In the glass-littered interior LaMarche found crayons, coloring books, and a drawing of a taco, done in blue. Napkins from a Mexican restaurant in San Diego. A dozen or so cassette tapes, most of them Bach. The odor of French cigarettes and shampoo. He felt like a sneak thief, some scurrilous invader in a private space that belonged to a woman who was a stranger. A woman who loved Bach and would risk her life to protect a nameless child. He would like, he realized, to be invited into the life of such a woman. More than that, he would be honored. But first he had to find her. If she were still alive.

  “Looks like somebody else's been here,” Rudy Palachek shouted, pointing to tracks in the sandy shoulder behind Bo's car. The clear outline of tire treads. Bare patches in gravelly debris indicating foot traffic. But no blood. No cratered holes where bullets exploded. And no tracks leading into the desert.

  “Somebody caught up with her here, but didn't kill her,” LaMarche theorized. “But who? Why? Why would she leave her car and go with somebody? The killers would've shot them both right here. It was somebody else.”

  “Tank's empty,” Rudy noted after checking with a creosote bush branch. “She ran out of gas. Maybe somebody just picked them up. Who wouldn't? A woman and a kid out here? Anybody'd stop, give them a ride.”

  Bo had let her car run out of gas. Why? LaMarche couldn't make sense of
it. She'd had the presence of mind to feed the child, even provide toys for him. How could she forget to fuel a car that was their only means of escape?

  “She'll get to Lone Pine, to that Indian woman,” he decided aloud. “If she's hitchhiking now with the boy, that's still where she'll go.”

  “We'll be there in twenty minutes,” Palachek predicted, tight-lipped. “But the bullet-boys are ahead of us. Let's go!”

  As the helicopter climbed noisily out of rock-strewn nothingness LaMarche experienced an awareness that his entire life since Sylvie's death might be compared to this desert. But no longer.

  34 - Dead End

  The shape that might have been Laurie, or might have been a trick of moonshine and breathless shadow, vanished between the time Bo looked down to assure her footing on the pebbly ground and then looked up again. Her heartbeat was rapid; she felt a little dizzy from the climb toward the small dark niche in the hillside above. But that was okay. Always okay to walk, climb, move. Necessary, even.