Stork Boy by Abigail Padgett

Author:Abigail Padgett
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: French mystery, mystery women sleuth, romantic suspense, psychological thriller, international mystery, Bi-Polar
Publisher: Abigail Padgett
Published: 2019-04-05T00:00:00+00:00

Chapter Fourteen

Neither woman said anything as Bo settled the elderly nun in her car, then folded and stashed the walker in the trunk. The old woman sat rigidly upright as Bo drove away from St. Laurent. She stared straight ahead as she removed her short-veiled headpiece and tossed it to the backseat floor. The gesture filled the car with a swirling weight.

“Tell me why you’re so upset about this boy who is suspected of killing Paul Theriot,” she said in unaccented American English.

Bo didn’t answer immediately, also staring at the road ahead. Something had shifted, invisible tectonic plates underlying her perception moving only slightly, but she felt the alteration. The nun was different, fierce and fragile as an ancient statue suddenly belted to a car seat. Fear and determination pulsed almost visibly from her eyes.

“You can trust me,” Bo said, not sure it was true.

“That remains to be seen,” the older woman answered. “What is your connection to the boy?”

“None,” Bo said. “I don’t know him at all. What I know is how it feels to be treated as if I’m radioactive because I have a psychiatric disorder. So does this boy, apparently. The perfect scapegoat. In his situation, at his age, I would have run from the police, too.” The concise recitation of bare truth, absent the usual, buffering omissions, felt clean. It was as if she and the old woman had already agreed to dispense with every tedious move in the social game. “Do you think he can really get away?”

“No. I think he’s likely to starve or die of exposure, hiding in the mountains.”

Bo slowed to pass a man in a Van Gogh straw hat riding a bicycle. The mountains looming behind her seemed suddenly cruel.

“That can’t be allowed to happen. I’m going to help him,” she said. “At home that’s my job, helping children. I’m a child abuse investigator in San Diego. As far as I’m concerned, the behavior of the police is child abuse.”

“And I’m a fugitive,” the woman beside Bo said, both hands griping the seatbelt across her chest. “But I want to help. It may be the last interesting thing I do, but first you and I have business. Would you like to know my real name?”

“Not if my knowing it puts you in some kind of jeopardy,” Bo replied, unpracticed in dealing with raw honesty. The scene was feeling surreal, as if pieces of disparate films had been spliced together and then shown at the wrong speed. Her response had been that of an imagined character in a spy movie.

“Eliane Brenner Hoffman, Lani to my friends, assuming any of them are still alive. And everything I do now will, as you say, put me in jeopardy. And you as well,” the woman who was no longer a nun named Sister Jeanne Noëlle pronounced with gravity. “What was your name again?”

“Bo Bradley.”

The name was all wrong for a spy, contributing to Bo’s confusion. The awkwardly spliced scenes taking place in a rented car and a foreign country couldn’t be real.

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