Child of Silence Read Online Free PDF Page A

323.”

    “I think I've got the flu,” Bo mentioned. She scanned the nurses' station for information that might explain the unpleasant impression. “I'll need a gown and a mask and I won't get too close. But I have to see him.”

    “Of course,” the nurse sang and pulled a clean gown and mask from a closet. “But I'm afraid this little one lacks some of the blessings we all take for granted, poor thing. He may be severely retarded.”

    Blessings? Bo's swift gaze pounced on the answer. Beside the intercom was a hard-back copy of something titled Shepherdology: A Map for Your Life . The book's jacket depicted a sailboat aground in the pages of a Bible. The day was running true to form. At this rate, Bo predicted, she could expect to be hijacked to La Paz by extraterrestrials in Elvis costumes before noon.

    “Have you read any of Dr. Hinckle's work?” the nurse asked.

    “Uh, no. Is he a medical doctor or a Ph.D.?’

    Or a charlatan with one hand in the frightened psyches of people like you and the other in a numbered Swiss bank account ?
     
    Laurie had fallen in with one of these when she was in college. A suave phony with a mail-order ministerial degree, he'd convinced the impressionable young woman she didn't need to take the medication prescribed by her psychiatrist for depression. She only needed to give him every cent she had, and trust in God. Bo dreamed of what she would do if she ever ran across the guy.

    “Oh, Dr. Hinckle's just marvelous!” the nurse gushed. “Why don't you let me lend you one of his books? I've got all of them.”

    “No, really, I never have time to read,” Bo lied. “Is 323 this way?”

    She coughed dramatically behind the surgical mask to keep the nurse at a distance and walked toward the kid's room while struggling into the gown. It turned out to be a size meant for juvenile surgical patients. Over her bulky sweater the duckling-and-bunny-imprinted garment served the purpose of a straitjacket. She looked, she thought, like a medical journal ad for a major tranquilizer.
     
    The kid on the bed thought so too. A small but refreshingly sardonic smile crossed his pale lips as he watched her enter the room. He was white as a cave fish and his hair looked like a thatch of rusty steel wool. But the body beneath his hospital gown was sturdy, fleshed-out. Nobody had starved this kid, and he bore none of the telltale scars, bruises, and body tremors of abuse. Under feathery lashes his huge tan eyes betrayed fear, but something else as well. A spark, bright as the sun on desert quartz. In Bo's experience that spark was the only thing that mattered in the end. Still, she wasn't sure.

    “Hi.” Bo smiled uselessly behind the mask. “My name's Bo, like a clown!”

    Kids always grinned at that, but this one merely looked at her, watched her intently. Bo found the boy's look strangely familiar, but couldn't identify it. She noticed the bright plaid restraint vest over the boy's chest. Its ties, Bo knew from her own experience, were secured to the bed frame out of the boy's reach.

    “Why the restraints?” she asked Nurse Sailboat, who was hovering behind and reeking of a perfume that intensified Bo's wooziness. The whole room seemed to be humming now. A sense of immediacy, of compelling importance. But without reference in any rational framework. Objects, the boy himself, appeared to shimmer.
     
    Oh shit ! This is how it begins . Don't let it .

    “He kept flapping his little hands and trying to get out of bed,” Sailboat replied softly. “Of course he's upset, poor thing.”

    Bo wrapped a hand over the cool metal footboard of the boy's bed to regain her equilibrium. The rational course would be simply to document the boy's current condition, return the case file to Madge, and drive straight to the university drop-in psychiatric clinic. That sudden awareness of objects in a room, of the hidden personalities possessed by items of furniture, and the inchoate messages beamed by the