Moonbird Boy (Bo Bradley Mysteries, Book Four)

by Abigail Padgett

  "Yeah, I'm at the airport," Bo hedged the answer to her psychiatrist's question. "Peoria? I thought he said Petrolia. It's up in Northern California. I'll call you tomorrow, okay?" There was no point in worrying her shrink, who was in constant contact, Bo knew, with Andrew.

  She had given Dr. Broussard permission to discuss her progress with Andrew. It only seemed fair not to exclude him. But neither of them would readily grasp the rationale behind her presence in St. Louis. They both loved her and she returned their feelings, but neither really understood how different from theirs her balance was, and how deadly their commonsense approach to life sometimes felt. Mort Wagman had understood, and that, Bo nodded solemnly at the pay phone, was what made him a brother.

  On the plane she curled next to the window and dozed, an image of small white terriers leaping behind her eyes.

  Chapter 18

  Bo stretched and wrinkled her nose at an airplane headache as her flight made its approach through shining fog toward San Diego's Lindbergh Field. She still wasn't tired, and the fog seemed to swirl and clutch at the plane in vaporous despair. Not a good sign.

  "This is our lucky night!" the pilot announced after touching down on the runway. "I've just heard from the control tower; we're the last plane in. As of now the airport's closed due to fog."

  Several passengers cheered, but Bo continued to watch the wispy streams of water vapor as they swept past her window. There were shapes lost in the whiteness, half-formed things dissolving, dimensionless. She could feel their rage and grief. "Lost souls," her grandmother said when the fog drifted over Cape Cod and Bo and her little sister, Laurie, curled in the old woman's lap. "It's them that never was, it is, and them that was but isn't more."

  A thrill of bathos made Bo shiver as she waited to exit the plane. The airport was built over a marshy trail the Kumeyaay had followed from village to summer village along the water. Now the trail was lost, and with Zach's betrayal the last band of quiet Indian storytellers would become "them that was but isn't more." Already something wept in the fog, outraged. Or maybe it had been there all along.

  In the drive to her Ocean Beach apartment Bo decided to take a mild sedative and go to bed. Her imagination was locked in high gear, spinning out skeins of feeling. Dr. Broussard had warned her to rest, close the doorway to mania now gaping open. But she hadn't rested. She'd flown halfway across the continent and back, placed herself in literal and neurochemical danger. And for what? Not really for Mort or Bird, she admitted, but for a sense of movement, of being fully alive. It was worth it.

  When she unsnapped her purse to retrieve the apartment key, she saw the handful of colored leaves tucked beside her wallet. A receipt from Steak'n'Shake. And a napkin covered in questions the answers to which might just save a lost soul dissolved in fog. That soul, she smiled as she climbed her apartment steps, might even be hers.

  After drawing a hot bath Bo threw twelve chamomile tea bags into the tub, and then soaked in the aromatic water. Chamomile was supposed to be soothing, but she hated tea. Bathing in it seemed a reasonable alternative. There had been no further barks on her answering machine. She'd taken the sedative, and it would kick in in an hour or so. Everything seemed orderly, uneventful.

  Actually, she realized while toweling her hair, everything seemed stiff and strangely lifeless. Boring. Her hairbrush was old. The perfume bottles in the corner of the sink-top were dull with dust. Her terrycloth bathrobe was uninspiring, and even her toothbrush seemed withered and drab. A hunger for new things, new colors and shapes, expanded gleefully in her mind. Too late to go shopping, she knew, but there was the all-night supermarket only blocks away.

  The feeling was a kind of ecstasy unweighted by any link to consequence. Buoyant. Clean as morning light. And impossible to hate despite knowing what it was, a brain-bath of chemicals that in ordinary combinations merely attached pleasure to the

  acquisition of necessary things. But those chemical combinations weren't ordinary now. They were a river. And riding it required skill.

  Okay, Bradley, enjoy a manic spending spree. It'll be harmless if you confine it to ten dollars. Twenty, max.

  Dressed in clean sweats and tennis shoes, Bo took her keys and one twenty-dollar bill from her purse. The credit cards would remain behind. Also the checks. She'd learned several times in the past how it felt to pay, literally, the price for this experience. But it couldn't be stopped. Nobody, she thought, could resist the joy of it, the heady, generous fun. But it could be controlled. Sort of.

  The supermarket throbbed with fluorescent light as she approached the automatic doors and enjoyed their woosh-clicking sound. A thousand objects gleamed for her approval. But it had to be real things, not food, and that eliminated most of the brightly lit aisles. Peripherally Bo wondered why food didn't count, wasn't attractive. Why it had to be solid, physical things that would last awhile. There was no reason.

  In the health care aisle she examined racks of toothbrushes, finally selecting one in clear blue plastic with bold diagonal stripes in white across the handle. It reminded her of Andrew, and the thought of him made her smile. He'd be home soon. She'd welcome him with a new toothbrush to be kept at her apartment. The toothbrush would be a symbol for the continuity of their relationship. Toothpaste, too.

  In the travel-size section Bo picked out three miniature tubes of toothpaste, a tiny can of mint shaving gel, and a bag of six disposable razors with blue handles. These she combined with other toiletries, a blue plastic spatula from the housewares aisle, and a collapsible cheese grater that fit into its own little canvas pouch for storage. He liked to cook, after all. Finally she selected a large white colander to hold the gifts, and headed for the checkout lane. Nineteen dollars and sixty-three cents. Delightful.

  Outside, the fog had thickened to a cottony gray presence that muted sound and diffused light in vaporous blurs. Bo could smell the sea, its salt and iodine and tangled kelp, blowing inside the wall of mist that parted and closed around her at every step. She'd walk home on the beach, she decided. She'd run with the fog where it rose from black water to become pale and glistening confusion. It was an image of manic depression, she thought. The dark cold and its frenzied mists. She'd run along that line, be the thing entire. For once, she belonged to the real world completely.

  It was easy to walk two blocks along familiar, lighted doorways, but at the seawall Bo realized that she couldn't see her feet. They were there; she could feel them. But the absence of visual affirmation made her suddenly clumsy. Reaching into mist, she pulled off her shoes and held them up like rabbits pulled from a hat. They were still warm from contact with feet already alien and untrustworthy against the invisible surface of the ground.

  In the sand it was better. Something about the gritty texture shifting under her weight was familiar and reassuring. And besides, the steady thrum of visual disorientation had become pleasantly scary. Bo slipped her shoes into the plastic bag with her gifts for Andrew and then swung the white bag in a circle about her. It was like casting a spell. Like some lonely blessing and exorcism at once.

  "Aye, and it's your spawn I am, Cally," she whispered in her grandmother's Irish brogue to a crone named Caillech Beara who once haunted the myths and foggy crossroads of Scotland and Ireland, "but I'll neither be dead nor mad when mornin' comes. I've a work to do here, old poet. I've a friend's murder to see to and his wee boy to watch. It's just walkin' here we are. You'll be gone in the light, you will."

  The whispered speech to an ancient goddess of death and madness had come from nowhere, but provided a sort of grounding. Wrapped in fog, Bo knew she wasn't lost. It was a game, nothing more. And a way of setting boundaries. For luck she swung the bag around her head one last time before leaving the wet sand where waves hissed and retreated unseen.

  Except this time the heavy bag nicked something in its arc around her head. Bo felt the touch. Just a palpable thump, inconsequential and tiny against the plastic frame of the colander. It had been behind her, on the right. The
bag had hit something close behind her. Except there couldn't be something there. She was walking along the littoral at the water's edge, twenty yards from the wooden uprights supporting a volleyball net close to the sidewalk. And there was nothing else on Ocean Beach tall enough to reach her shoulders.

  In the fog she could see nothing, but she knew the beach from memory. Soon she would see the white framework of the Ocean Beach Pier looming out of the gray mist. The volleyball net was nowhere near her. But something else was. Something just out of sight in the drifting blanket of microscopic water. A cold net trembled and slid over Bo's back, up her calves, across her scalp. She wanted to run, but the net quivered against her muscles, sapping their strength. The net was in her eyes. And there was something, somebody, behind her in the fog.

  Run, Bradley! It could be anybody. You could be raped, beaten, killed out here. You're not stupid. Lose yourself in the fog. Run!

  Bo felt her heels digging into sand as she propelled herself away, felt the spray of fine grit from each pounding step. A sharp rock dug into her instep, then another scraped her toe. She could hear the crash of the sea at her back. She was running in the right direction, toward the seawall and the sidewalk where hundreds of tourists would stroll in tomorrow's sunlight. She was almost there; she could sense it. And then she heard something. A sound that paralyzed her lungs and dissolved something behind her knees, sending her sprawling in the sand.

  A dog. A small dog barking inside the fog behind her. The same frightened bark she'd heard on the phone. Bo felt sand in her teeth, in her eyes. The dog sounded like Mildred. But Mildred was gone. And the noise was coming closer. As she scrambled on hands and knees toward a muzzy pink light ahead, Bo was certain she heard one other sound. An empty, cruel chuckle.

  Then there was only the crash of surf, and a car ahead on sibilant tires. As Bo flung herself over the seawall she noticed the white plastic handles of the grocery bag wrapped like a tourniquet around her right hand.

  Chapter 19

  Alexander Morley could feel the Sunday morning sunlight pooling on St. Luke's wide limestone aisle as he sat beside his wife. Seventh pew, Gospel side. They'd sat there every Sunday for years. And for years he'd gifted the suburban Episcopal church with new kneelers, organ repairs, choir robes, and tuck-pointing. He'd chaired the financial committee and headed the fund drive for a new educational wing. He knew the church better than did the succession of priests who stood in its pulpits. It felt like a second office.

  As one of the priests read the collect for the Feast of St. Luke, Morley nodded to himself. St. Luke had been a physician, as he was. But St. Luke could not have written a check to cover the new air-conditioning system in a church honoring his name. Alexander Morley had written the check. A deep pleasure in the fact stretched into reverie.

  Things were developing on the Indian deal. He'd assigned Bob Thompson the task of packaging it, creating the prospectus that would attract buyers for the program. A formality. And a ruse. MedNet already owned this Indian loony bin, whatever it was. The Indians had tried hooking up with the mob, offered them a gambling franchise on adjacent land, but Morley had easily put a stop to that. And Henderson had already reached a tentative agreement with the Japanese.

  They'd buy the franchise with an under-the-table commitment to a ten-year consulting contract with MedNet. Plus, they'd agreed to purchase all medications and lab work from MedNet holdings, which meant expansion into the Japanese market with a built-in profit margin from the start.

  Morley was glad he'd met Walt Henderson at the club and immediately sensed the man's similarity to himself. It was, he thought, a repetition of the day Randolph Mead had met a smart young doctor named Morley many years ago. Henderson was young, only in his forties, and hadn't received his medical training at an impressive school. It didn't matter. He had an attitude Morley recognized at once. Unlike Morley's own children, Henderson knew the rules.

  With an imperceptible sigh, Alexander Morley acknowledged that Randolph Mead had taught him that lesson as well.

  "Business sense isn't inherited," Mead explained cheerfully after birdying the seventh hole of a Palm Springs golf course long ago. "I made the mistake of marrying at sixty and siring a son who already thinks he's slightly superior to God and a daughter who lives only to rescue things that have mange. They're still little children, but I have no hope that either of them will change sufficiently to be able to manage a business. That's why I've already established trust funds for them, and why I'm turning MedNet over to you."

  When Morley nodded thoughtfully, Mead had gone on.

  "When the time comes," he said, selecting one of three custom-made drivers for the next fairway shot, "remember that your own children will have been raised in luxury, which produces either arrogance or idealism. What it doesn't produce is hunger, and that's what our little enterprise runs on."

  His eyes narrowed as he jammed a monogrammed tee into the ground. "At your retirement, your only job is to find a man as hungry, and therefore as unscrupulous, as you are."

  Morley had understood then. He understood now.

  Musing pleasantly, he realized that it was also time to do something about Bob Thompson. The man was a pathetic, drunken womanizer and a detriment to the corporation. A salesman, nothing more. Morley had detested him for years. Now he could dispense with him.

  "He that soweth little shall reap little," the priest said, heading into the long ritual of Holy Communion.

  Morley braced himself for the verbose Anglican precision of prayers he could recite verbatim but had never really heard. Only occasionally did a phrase from the altar actually make sense. Like sowing little and reaping less. He'd sowed mightily in MedNet, put everything he had into it after Randolph Mead had taken him into the company just as he would now take in Walt Henderson. And he'd reaped everything he wanted. Now with retirement just ahead, he'd replace himself on the board with a man who had the guts and vision to fill his shoes. Henderson was that man.

  There was a swell of rustling as two hundred people slid onto kneelers. A dull hush. Morley knelt beside his wife and placed his hand over her clasped fingers on the back of the pew before them. The gesture created an appropriate image. It was the only time he touched her.

  "We acknowledge and bewail our manifold sins and wickedness," he intoned, admiring the diamond bracelet on his wife's wrist. The bracelet said a great deal about Alexander Morley, he thought. And "sins and wickedness" fit Bob Thompson perfectly.

  It was going to be simple. Just let Thompson exhaust himself putting together the Indian setup, and then pull the whole thing out from under him with Henderson's coup. Make it look as though Henderson saved them from Thompson's incompetence. As though Bob Thompson was just too boorish and provincial for the international market, which was the only market left.

  Kines and Brockman would see through it, of course. They already knew Thompson's head was on the block, but wouldn't lift a finger to save him. Why should they? MedNet stock would provide each of them a luxurious retirement. They'd follow Alexander Morley as they always had. He'd made them rich.

  "Lift up your hearts," said the priest as light spilled through colored glass onto a limestone floor that reminded Alexander Morley of his secret. The private, chant-filled monastery where he cherished his soul.

  Chapter 20

  Bird sat on the floor between two of the seven beds. He'd counted the beds; they were all alike. It was like the dorm at his school where kids stayed if their parents lived someplace far away. But this wasn't Tafel. The lady said this was a group home. She said it when she came that morning in her stupid, ugly car to take him away from the old man named Dutch.

  Dutch was nice and didn't care when you hit things. He had some kind of bag hanging from a chain in a shed, and real boxing gloves. Dutch would let you go in there and hit the bag over and over after he tied the gloves on. That was pretty neat.

  But Dutch had a grown-up kid named Gwen, and Gwen had a baby that got sick, and Dutch said he
was real sorry after Gwen called him on the phone, but he couldn't keep Bird at his house because he had to go to this town far away where Gwen and the sick baby lived. Bird could tell from the way Dutch talked on the phone that he was scared the baby would die. It would be like daddy. The baby just wouldn't be there anymore. Slowly Bird began to swing his shoulders from side to side, hitting his head against the beds.

  "As I was sailing down the coast," he sang to himself, "Of High Barbaree, I chanced to see a Muffin Bird A-sitting in a tree." It didn't sound right without daddy saying it, too, but there were other kids coming in the door and the words were better than the way they looked at him. Three boys, bigger than him. They smiled all together in a way that made the room feel cold.

  "Oh, mournfully he sang, And sorrowful he sat," Bird went on, banging his head in time with the poem's meter. "Because he was a-frightened of The Crum-pet Cat!"

  Something hit him on the chest. A pencil. One of the boys had thrown a pencil at him. Bird closed his eyes and hummed the meter of the poem through clenched teeth. It was iambic, daddy said. The sound. He said iambic was like duh-DUH, duh-DUH, like the way his head felt hitting the mattresses.

  "Hey!" one of the boys said. "You crazy? You look crazy. What's your name?"

  "It's time for dinner," another one said. "We always have chicken on Sunday. Don't you want some chiiick-en?"

  Bird kept humming the poem. It didn't quite block out the chicken part.

  "Chicken, chicken," the first voice taunted. "Crazy chicken.

  Bird knew no one else was in the room without looking. He could smell what was going to happen. A smell like waking up in the dark knowing everything had been moving until you opened your eyes. A metal smell that hurt the back of your nose.

  "Hey! Get up, chicken!"

  The first boy hit him on the shoulder with his fist. Bird kept his eyes closed and flailed at them with his hands, kicked at them. But they kicked back, hard, yelling, "Chick-EN, chick-EN," in iambic until Bird couldn't hear them anymore.