Turtle Baby

by Abigail Padgett

  "Cooking is brilliant," she agreed. "And tonight we'll talk about the lengths to which I'll go in a lifelong struggle for autonomy. In the meantime Estrella's going to be in the office all day in case Chris Joe Gavin calls."

  "What?"

  "Tell you about it later. Gotta run."

  As Bo placed the receiver in its cradle the Alfred Stieglitz photo of Georgia O'Keeffe pinned to her bulletin board seemed to smile knowingly. Enduring relationships with men tended to be an uphill climb for independent women, the smile suggested, especially independent women riding mood swings that demanded frequent solitude. But it was always fun to try.

  Kara Opiela, cooling her heels at San Diego's Hillcrest Receiving Home, couldn't understand what the big deal was. All she'd said that she'd like to pour hot coffee on Cole Durocher's weenie, not that she was going to. Besides, he was always too drunk to feel it, anyway. She would specifically like to get home before Friday, when her oral report on the life cycle of the tapeworm was due at the university-sponsored science camp she was attending. Bo regarded the request as reasonable.

  Later in Leucadia Marjorie Opiela joined Bo in a cigarette, and proudly displayed the hand-drawn chart featuring tapeworms made of real tape that Kara had prepared for her presentation. The boyfriend, Cole, had been dispatched early that morning. He wouldn't be back, Marjorie assured Bo through a blue haze of smoke. And keeping Kara away from her science camp was plain stupid. Surely Child Protective Services could see that. Bo could.

  "I'll close the case and arrange for somebody to bring her home this afternoon," Bo said. "And Marjorie, tell Kara not to make graphic references to hot coffee and male anatomy in the presence of police again, okay? They freak."

  "I'll try," Marjorie said thoughtfully. "Probably won't do any good, though."

  Driving back down the coast, Bo stopped at Torrey Pines Beach and practiced skipping flat stones in the splash. The beach and sandstone cliffs were, as usual, evocative. Bo thought of St. Bridget's Well near the sea in the west of Ireland, and the little fish in the well that appeared only every seventh year and that few, her grandmother said, could see. But anyone seeing the fish would be cured of all illness, so people came to peer into the ancient well, and hope.

  The story was nice, Bo thought. It would be nice to see a fish in a holy well and be free of the illness that would force her to depend on Depakote, or lithium, or Tegretol, or something, for the rest of her life. Nice even to believe such a well and such a fish were possible, even if she never saw them. All her grandmother's stories were like that. They all felt comfortable, while Chac's story did not. Her grandmother’s stories made what Bo liked to call "deep sense," a vibrato of whole-body understanding that did not require intellectual analysis. Chac's stories of duendes and men eating in front of pregnant women were different, not European, impossible for Bo to decipher beyond intellectual guesswork.

  Why had Chac written a lullaby for her baby with references to an evil spirit Eva said represented something driven mad by nature? Bo thought about her own brain, programmed by an unusual DNA coding to experience excesses of feeling and intense symbolic interpretations of everything it perceived. Feelings and symbolic interpretations that other people, "normal" people, didn't have and couldn't understand. Madness. But was that nature? Was that what Chac meant by the duende in her song? Bo didn't think so. The Little Turtle's lullaby wasn't about psychiatric disorders, but something else. Some evil that Chac had believed threatening to her baby. Was Munson Terrell the duende?

  Bo sliced a flattened oval of black granite into the receding surf and watched it skip sluggishly three times before sinking. The outgoing wave rattled a thousand smooth stones where the beach sloped down to vanish in sparkling saltwater. The sound, repeating with every wave, was like the breathing of something huge. Bo let the chorus of stones hypnotize her, and merely stood staring south along the coastline.

  In the distance beyond the continental hump that was La Jolla, the U.S. coast became the Mexican coast of the Baja Peninsula, ending at Cabo San Lucas. And across the Gulf of California from Cabo, the mainland coast of Mexico stretched south to its terminus in the state of Chiapas. Beyond Chiapas lay Guatemala, where at least a million people might readily understand what a Maya singer's lyrics meant. That she couldn't see that far, Bo thought, was appropriate. She couldn't think that far either.

  Walking back to the car she remembered New Orleans, the accessibility of its gated courtyards to her imagination. That bone-deep understanding of cultural imagery because it was European, because it was familiar. An understanding that became useless twenty miles south of this beach where the gated courtyards were dusty adobe, and the mythological bedrock of reality just different enough to be indecipherable.

  "Damn!" Bo whispered to the Pathfinder's steering wheel as she drove out of the beach parking lot and uphill toward Andrew's condo. Somebody had poisoned a baby and murdered that baby's mother in a club full of people, and nobody was ever going to know, for sure, who that somebody was. And either the same person or somebody else had stalked the desert darkness with a rifle and poisoned a water jug. Had it not been for the jug's defective lid, a devoted old fox terrier would certainly have died as well. Bo didn't find it strange that the thought of Mildred's death enraged her more than the thought of her own. Now Munson Terrell was dead, seemingly poisoned by his own hand, leaving a document admitting his guilt. It was too tidy, Bo thought. But it was finished.

  There would be a cursory internal affairs investigation of Dewayne Singleton's murder by the Oceanside police, but nothing would come of it. After all, he was crazy. Acito would thrive in the Dooleys' love and probably be adopted by them eventually. Tying up the paperwork to ensure that likelihood would present no problem. The system Bo worked for excelled at bureaucratic delay. Other cases would arrive for investigation. Life would go on.

  "I hate it when I feel like this," Bo muttered as she parked near Andrew's front door. "I hate it when I know somebody's getting away with murder!"

  The key was neatly tucked under the welcome mat's C, just as Andrew had described. Bo let herself in and quickly removed the only two items in the freezer, placing them on a towel on the counter. In this uninhabited silence Andrew LaMarche's condo reflected his life. Tidy, tasteful, and lonely. Picking at an edge of the flesh-colored Band-Aid on her arm, Bo wondered again what to do about the domineering pediatrician.

  People didn't change. He'd always think he had a right, even an obligation to shape her experience as he saw fit. Men always did, which was why it was always best to avoid extended contact with any particular one of them. On the other hand, he did seem to be trying. An intelligent, disciplined man. Maybe he actually could learn to relinquish his need for control. Maybe ...

  And maybe the Wee Folk will dance in your hair, Bradley.

  Bridget Mairead O'Reilly had employed the phrase to suggest irrational thinking. Bo thought her grandmother would in all likelihood have used it now.

  The butterfly Band-Aid was nearly off. Bo glanced at the words on her forearm.

  "I'm sorry, my darling, but the colored skies of our love have grown dark at my betrayal ..."

  There was still something not quite right about the words. Something wrong. Bo found herself staring at two words— "colored skies." What was it about "colored skies" that seemed to be screaming in the quiet order of Andrew's kitchen?

  "Colored ..." Bo pronounced experimentally. "Skies ..."

  The words seemed to jiggle as she concentrated. But they were just words. Spelled correctly. In traditional sequence.

  Spelled correctly. Bradley, you brainless slug, that's it! Terrell didn't write that note, an American did!

  Bo ripped the Band-Aid from her arm and ran to the phone in Andrew's living room. An Australian, Munson Terrell would have written "coloured." Hadn't Kee said he deliberately used British spellings in the promotional materials for Outback Odyssey's workshops? And in the stressful moments immediately prior to killing himself, wouldn't he have
automatically written in the form most familiar to him? Bo dialed Estrella's office number jubilantly.

  "Es," she yelled when her friend answered, "Terrell really didn't write that suicide note, because 'colored' isn't spelled 'coloured'!"

  After listening to Bo's explanation, Estrella agreed. "Then it must be Chris Joe," she concluded, "and you'd better call the police right now."

  "I'll do it when I get back. There's no rush."

  Estrella was adamant. "I think there is," she insisted. "Because he called you only five minutes ago. I told him you'd be back after lunch. He wouldn't leave a number, but he said he'd call this afternoon. If you contact the police now they'll have time to set up a trace. I told you it was Chris Joe all along, Bo, and now we know it. He's dangerous. You'd better notify the police."

  "Umm," Bo answered noncommittally, noticing her own gold earring, lost at Torrey Pines, lying atop some sort of flier on Andrew's tiled coffee table. "I'll be back in half an hour."

  Things were starting to fall into place. Bo made an instinctive judgment merely to watch, and wait for a pattern to emerge. Not to think, merely observe. It wasn't easy, she admitted. Without the Depakote it would be impossible.

  Wandering to the coffee table, she picked up the earring and flipped through the flier beneath it. Something from the Torrey Pines Docent Society, entitled "Dangerous Plants of the Chaparral." On the back page was a warning that environmentally unsound interlopers were prone to planting marijuana and other nonindigenous plants in some of the less accessible areas of the preserve.

  Only a month ago, the flier said, park rangers had been shocked to find a stand of the tropical Abrus precatorius in a sheltered south-facing ditch in Fern Canyon. Bits of sterling silver and a small crucifix found webbed in the plants' roots suggested they had grown from the beads of a rosary probably lost there by one of the undocumented Mexican laborers who hid in the canyons on their way north. The attractive, deadly red and black seeds, called "rosary peas," had once enjoyed popular use in the manufacture of rosaries, especially among Latino populations in Florida where the plant was common. A single seed, the flier warned, was sufficient to kill an adult once its colorful outer shell was broken. Visitors were urged to carry nothing but water while hiking in the preserve, and to avoid consuming any of its plants.

  Bo felt a gentle snap in her mind as a strenuously maintained adherence to consensual reality was allowed to fall away, like the tarp covering a sculpture at its unveiling. No one would understand how this had happened. No one would see how obvious in this innocuous, badly printed flier, was the design of a universe in which evil might be thwarted if only people would look at what was right in front of them.

  In her ears and beneath her right foot the memory of a crunch re-created itself. The crunch of a rosary hidden among blankets in a cement-block pen where a teething baby had been given the paraphernalia of Roman Catholicism to play with. A rosary that had years ago been a deathbed gift to a woman, now a grandmother, who in her anger at Bo's clumsiness screamed what sounded like "Tampa," over and over. Tampa was in Florida. Where rosary peas grew wild.

  In Andrew's guest bath Bo bared her teeth at the mirror. Adult teeth, opaque and worn. Not like Acito's two translucent lower incisors and one upper incisor, freshly erupted from a rosy gum. Only two opposing, sharp little teeth, but enough to crack the red and black shell of a pretty, toxic seed.

  "Nobody poisoned Acito!" Bo yelled in the empty condominium. "It was an accident!"

  The green eyes staring back from the mirror were, she admitted, a bit wild. Just the barest gleam of irrationality there, but what the hell? She was right. A momentary breakthrough of manicky sainthood couldn't hurt anything, as long as she enjoyed it in solitude. Closing her eyes, she let her head fall backward and felt the warp-speed pulsing of a million universal intentions on a grid with more dimensions than the three she could understand. Whatever, she was a part of it. One of the pulses. She'd seen what was there to see, and knew what was there to be known. She was alive!

  The manic experience, she reminded herself a few minutes later, was crazy. Time to rein it in, contain the awareness before it got in the way of what had to be done next, which would require icelike rationality. Splashing her face with cold water, she breathed deeply and felt a brief surge of sympathy for people who never had manic breakthroughs. The price was high, but occasionally worth it. Well, very occasionally. Like maybe once.

  Back in Andrew's living room she searched for phone books and finally found them in a hinged bench beneath the front windows. Under "Physicians" in the Yellow Pages she found what she was looking for—a sole doctor whose name matched the one Kee Terrell had mentioned in a note left for her husband last night. Dr. Neil Stoa, the Yellow Pages informed her, specialized in eating disorders.

  "Dr. Stoa's office," the nurse answered. "How may I help you? "

  Bo tried to make her smoker's voice sound twenty years younger than it was. "I, uh, think I need some help," she began. "I've been dieting and working out for a while, and, uh, my period sort of stopped. Is that normal?"

  "Are you an athlete, a runner?" the nurse asked.

  "No. I just really watch my weight."

  "This can happen when a woman's body has an insufficient percentage of fat," the nurse went on cheerfully. "Why don't I make an appointment for you to come in and talk it over with Dr. Stoa?"

  "No. Thank you," Bo concluded, and hung up.

  She'd just wanted to verify it. That women who starved themselves might sacrifice the ability to bear children. It was all falling into place.

  Chapter Thirty-eight

  "There will be no high days and no bright praise."—Popol Vuh

  The Terrell home had turned mauve in the late afternoon sun as Bo knocked loudly on the door. Kee was there, she knew. The cream-colored Mercedes had cruised past Bo's concealed car only fifteen minutes earlier. And Kee was alone. Bo tried not to remember a poisoned water jug in the desert, and what that death would have been like for a small, old dog. Mentally folding the thought into a tiny packet, she pushed it down again behind her eyes. But she could feel it there, throbbing.

  "I'm on the deck," Kee Terrell's high voice called over the front railing. "The door's open. Come on up."

  Bo watched her own sandaled feet cross the Berber carpet and pass the mission doors leading to the deck from the left of the fireplace. Kee, barefoot in a loose black jumper, was huddled against what remained of the rear deck rail.

  "The contractors came ahead of schedule," she whispered, nodding at a gaping hole where the benches and railing had been removed. "They didn't know about Mundy, of course, and I wasn't here when they came. I was, you know, at the funeral home. It's tomorrow, the funeral. Are you going to come?"

  Bo blinked slowly at the question and tried to make sense of Kee's childlike request. It was sincere. Kee Terrell, as usual, was treating Bo Bradley like a friend.

  "I'm afraid not," Bo pronounced in a practiced monotone. "I couldn't stand to be in an enclosed space with you."

  Kee's dark eyes filled with tears. "It wasn't my fault Mundy killed himself," she wailed shrilly. "I did everything right. It's not my fault he got that woman pregnant and then tried to kill the baby so I wouldn't know when I saw its hair. The baby has Mundy's hair, you know. That white streak. Mundy told me she tried to hide it with hair dye so he wouldn't know the baby was his. Can you believe somebody doing that?"

  Bo felt as though she were gossiping with a thirteen-year-old about the behavior of some heartthrob movie star. That sense of overemotional fantasy. Kee shook her head dramatically.

  "What I can't believe is that Chac managed to fight her way out of Guatemala," Bo began softly, "survive prostitution and heroin addiction, make a career for herself singing, and give birth to a lovely, healthy baby, only to be murdered by a selfish brat who thinks she can buy anything, including children to match her artwork."

  "I don't know what you're talking about," Kee muttered, but Bo didn't miss the change
in her eyes. The self-righteous cruelty there.

  "What was your favorite fairy tale, Kee? Snow White? You know, I could have put it together days ago and maybe saved your husband's life if I'd thought about Snow White instead of pretending to understand a Maya story that wasn't mine. But that's what happens when you try to live in someone else's world, isn't it? You screw up, don't you?"

  Bo had been moving closer to Kee as she spoke, pacing her steps to her words.

  "I didn't screw up," the younger woman answered, casting a sidelong look at Bo and rising abruptly. "She did. She was a liar and a thief. I hate her!"

  Bo was again struck by Kee's juvenile peevishness. It was unnerving, attacking what seemed to be a child. Bo had a sense of loose conceptual footing, as if she were roller-skating in grease.

  "What did she steal, Kee? Her own son? How could Chac steal her own son from you?"

  Kee Terrell turned to face Bo, another change creasing her narrow face with a sneer. She seemed to be taking Bo's measure. And she was taking her time. Finally she spoke, this time in the chilling voice of an angry adult.

  "Kylie isn't her son, he's mine. That was the agreement. Mundy arranged it."

  "Kylie?" Bo blurted, laughing deliberately. "Kee and Kylie? Sounds like a twin water-skiing act. You've got to be kidding."

  An already-present darkness hardened in Kee's eyes.

  "Mundy agreed to promote her career, make her a star. All she had to do was let him get her pregnant with my ... with our baby. But when Kylie was born, she lied. She told Mundy she'd been screwing around with other men, and the baby was one of theirs. She dyed Kylie's hair so Mundy wouldn't know, but I didn't care. That baby was mine whether Mundy was the father or not!

  "One night I went down to that filthy bar and told the bartender, Jorge, that I knew she was lying, that the baby was mine. I told him she'd better turn Kylie over to me or I'd make Mundy drop her, pull the money out. That's when she hid Kylie away from me and said he'd been adopted by a family from Mexico City. Then Mundy tried to poison Kylie."