With Child

The room was awash with children, along with a number of maternal types planted around the edges like boulders. Rosa Hidalgo moved surely through the small multicolored heads, avoiding the clutter of blocks and toys that covered the floor like debris from a shrapnel bomb.

'That's great for today. Thank you all. How about lunch now? Eh, amigos,' she said in higher tones, 'you hungry? Burritos, peanut butter, tuna fish, and tell Angelica what you want to drink.' She began folding away tape recorder and mike while various boulders moved forward to scoop the abandoned toys into containers and the children, all of them small, marginally verbal, but astonishingly noisy, washed off to the next room, where her daughter, a tall girl of perhaps seventeen, presided with an immense dignity over sandwiches and pitchers of drink.

'Have you eaten, Kate? Jules? There're vegetarian burritos; I hope that is all right. I use adzuki beans. Jennifer, this is Kate. Show her where things are, would you? Tami, I know you need to leave, but I must clarify something. When Tom junior was talking about the dog, was he saying—'

Although Kate was no more hungry than she had been thirsty when offered the Coke upstairs, she ate two of the superb fat burritos, which were everything their fragrance had advertised, and refused a third only at the thought of the already-straining waistband of her trousers.

'Do you have a child here, Kate?' asked the woman whom Rosa had addressed as Jennifer.

'Sorry? Oh, no. No, I don't have any children. I'm a friend of Jules, the girl over there. She lives upstairs. Do you know how much longer —'

She was interrupted by a rapid escalation of shrieks from the next room, at which point Jennifer was suddenly just not there, only her plate teetering on the edge of the sink. Kate rescued it, and was relieved when she saw that the furious quarrel at the children's table was the signal for a mass departure. Twenty minutes of potty visiting and prying toys from clenched fists later, Kate was finally alone with Rosa Hidalgo.

'Whew! Madre, I need a cup of coffee. How about you?'

Kate thought a slug of bourbon more like it, but she accepted the lesser drug with thanks. It was real coffee, from a press-filter machine, thick and gritty and exactly right.

'I thought at first you were running a nursery in here.'

'Twenty three-and-a-half-year-olds, it sounds more like the monkey house in the zoo. Every six months, they come here in the mornings for a week.' She paused, reviewing the syntax of the sentence. 'Twice a year, I have them here, every morning for a week.'

'Must seem quiet when the week is over,' Kate commented.

'Madre, my ears, they sing. Next February will be the last time. I wonder if I will miss them.'

'You said it was for a thesis?''

'Yes, I am tracing the development of gender characteristics, which boys play with toy cars and which girls prefer dolls, comparing them with the results of a number of other researchers doing similar studies. I have been following this group since they had one year.'

'Since they were one year old, Mama,' corrected her daughter, clearing dishes in the background.

'Since they were one year old. Thank you, Angel. My English suffers after one of these sessions,' she remarked to Kate, her pronunciation more precise than ever. 'It is a symptom of stress. Angel, go and get your suit on; we , will go for a swim. You, too, Julia. Leave those dishes; we'll do them later. Now' - she turned to Kate when the door had closed behind the girls - 'you will please tell me what problem you are helping Julia with, what is troubling her, and why she did not go to her computer class today.'

'I think you're aware that Jules made a friend in the park this summer, a homeless boy.' Rosa Hidalgo nodded. 'Well, he's disappeared, and she's concerned. She came to ask me to look into it. I'm with the police department,' she added. 'In San Francisco. I work with her mother's … boyfriend.'

'Alonzo Hawkin, yes. And you live in San Francisco?' Kate nodded. 'I see. And she went during school hours that I might not know.'

'She thought you'd worry.'

'She was correct. Why do the bright ones always do such awesomely stupid things?' The shake of her head was the gesture of an experienced mother rather than that of a trained psychologist. 'What will you do, about the boy?'

'There isn't much I can do, to tell you the truth. Talk to the local sheriff's department, put his description out over the wire if he doesn't show up in a few days, see if he's shown up in L.A. or Tucson.'

'That does not sound very hopeful.'

'Juvenile runaways are nearly impossible to trace. I haven't said anything to Jules, but I think she is aware of the difficulties. She also seems aware of the dangers, though if anything, I'd say she has an overly dramatic view of the threats to the boy. AIDS and hepatitis are more likely than the murdering maniac she visualizes.'

Rosa Hidalgo's gaze narrowed to attention at Kate's last words, and she spoke sharply.

'What precisely did she tell you?'

'I think she was worried about a serial killer torturing him to death. Something like that.'

'Madre de Dios,' she muttered, shaken.

'I told her that was completely unlikely,' Kate hastened to say. 'And really, it's a credit to her that she's concerned about him. It doesn't even seem to be anything romantic, just that she feels responsible for a friend she's just realized she badly misunderstood. She's a good kid. Don't come down too hard on her for lying to you.'

'If 'coming down hard' means expressing anger, then no, I will not. I will, however, strongly urge her mother and Alonzo to educate her as to the dangers the world holds for young girls. Talking to a boy in a well-populated public park is one thing; taking a bus to San Francisco without telling anyone is quite another. Her mother has a strong tendency to be overly protective, and to avoid unpleasant topics with her daughter. She must be shown that it only makes the darkness beneath Julia's brilliance all the greater. I shall speak to Alonzo about it, I think. It was very perceptive of you to see beneath the armor of Julia's mind, Ms Martinelli.'

For a cop, Kate supposed she meant.

'The name is Kate. Here, let me give you my phone number, in case anything else comes up. That's my number at work, and - do you have a pen? This,' she continued, writing on the back of the card, 'is my home number. I have to run, but would you tell Jules I'll call her tomorrow night? Maybe you'd better give me your number, too,' she said, taking back the pen and writing down the number. As Rosa escorted her to the door the two girls reappeared, clutching scraps of bright nylon and brighter towels. Kate sidled past them into the hallway and, reassuring Jules that she was going to look into Dio's absence, that she would be in touch, and that she would be discreet, she made her escape.

Kate parked on the far side of the park from the swimming pool, in case Jules ended up there. Kate had no intention of allowing Jules to tag along while she followed her nose to what might turn up as a two-day-old decomposing corpse bent over a spray-paint canister. Jani - and Al - would not thank her for that.

However, a circuit of the park, which took less than half an hour, brought no whiff of the utterly unmistakable, primally unnerving smell of a rotting human being. The park was partly grass and playground, partly scrub woodland around an arroyo - masses of tick bush, madrone, live oak, and great billows of poison oak beginning to take on the spectacular red of its autumnal coloring. She went back to the car and drew out a mechanic's coverall that she kept there, more as emergency-clothing-cum-rag than because she worked on the car in it. It was made of tightly woven gabardine, and as she zipped it up, she felt as if she had stepped into a sauna. She also put on socks and running shoes and a pair of driving gloves. She thought of tying her hair in a towel, but decided that would be just too awful. She locked the car and walked along the road that wrapped the wilderness portion of the park until she found a vague deer trail, then pushed her way into the stifling, hot, dusty, fragrant brush. When that trail petered out, she reversed her steps and tried another.

Forty minutes later, she found the boy's lair. He must have been immune to poison oak, because Kate had to swim in the stuff, and twice she had gone past the low entrance before registering that one of the branches seemed even more dead than the others.

There was a tent, brown and dusty and pushed in among the bushes on all sides, carefully zipped up, but with the flaps only casually draped across the door and left down at the windows. She cleared her throat and said the boy's name loudly, but the only movement was a blue jay over her head. With a beat of apprehension she pulled up the door flap and looked through the screen into the tent, claustrophobic in its branch-crowded windows. There