Strawgirl

Bo Bradley watched the day unfold with the wary eye of a Cornish hen touring a fox farm. Days were never this benign; something was peculiar. She had been leery of the day since it started. An ordinary Wednesday, stolidly constructing itself of midweek events so unremarkable they seemed fake. Early-morning San Diego traffic drifting inland too smoothly. Coffee in the chilly Department of Social Services cafeteria too aromatic. The outdated phones too quiet, the footsteps of other investigators in the hall too unhurried.

It wasn't the lithium, couldn't be. The medication she took when necessary to control symptoms of a manic-depressive disorder could do that. It could blur the razor-sharp edges of reality, slow the frenzied input of detail to a manageable, waltzy tempo. It could make everything seem sluggishly
nice
. Except she'd stopped taking the lithium eighteen days ago. So far so good. But this dreamy, dull Wednesday was hiding something. Bo acknowledged the prescient feeling, blunted for the last six months by medication, as a familiar if unpredictable friend.

The feeling had brought a grin to her face when at 8:15 supervisor Madge Aldenhoven burst into the office Bo shared with one other child abuse investigator, flapping an interdepartmental memo in one hand.

"Bo, you're third on today's rotation for new cases. You won't get one until this afternoon, and I know your paperwork is caught up. Please don't waste my time and yours trying to weasel out of what I'm about to ask you."

Aldenhoven had tucked a stray wisp of floury hair into an otherwise impeccable chignon and smiled beatifically. Bo recognized the look as one turn-of-the-century artists would have lavished on the faces of dewy-eyed mothers surrounded by hordes of children in formal attire. The supervisor's gaze was directed at the neat row of orange-banded case files between plastic, county-issue bookends on Bo's desk. A painting of Madge Aldenhoven in biblical robes sweetly cradling a copy of the Department of Social Services procedures manual took shape in Bo's mind. The painting would be done in thick oils, with an ornate gold-leafed frame. Bo sighed and experienced the bone-deep antipathy that characterized her relationship with her supervisor. The daily jousting of bureaucrat and iconoclast without which the job might just be tolerable.

"You know the department is sponsoring a workshop today on Satanic cults and child abuse," Madge went on, waving the memo as if it were a command from the White House. "Estrella was going to represent our unit, but we got another toddler trapped on the freeway median last night ..."

"And the mother?" Bo asked with genuine concern. Mexican families illegally crossing the border from Tijuana to San Diego's southernmost community often made a run for it across the eight lanes of Interstate 5 to the scrubby, unpopulated safety of the flatlands on the other side. Some didn't make it.

"Hit by a bakery truck in the northbound lane," the supervisor answered briskly. "Fortunately not fatal, just broken bones. The two-year-old was thrown clear, made it to the median. Estrella's over at St. Mary's with him now."

Bo's officemate, Estrella Benedict, was the Spanish-speaking investigator in Madge Aldenhoven's unit, and Bo's best friend.

"Sure," Bo said, brushing an imaginary bit of lint from the arm of her chair, "I'll go sit through your devil worship seminar for Es. Do I get extra points if I bring back a bloody ceremonial dagger or cloven hoof still reeking of sulfur?"

It had been impossible to keep the cynical edge from her answer, and Aldenhoven's renowned insubordination sensors hadn't failed to go off the scale in response.

"Don't take that attitude, Bo," Madge warned from the door. "The department's brought an expert on the subject down from Los Angeles at great expense. Representatives of the police department will be there as well. It's a serious topic. Bound, printed guidelines for recognizing Satanic abuse will be distributed. I want to be sure our unit has its own copy." Bo could see one of Madge's contact lenses drifting precariously off center against the hyacinth-colored iris. Tracking the lens's progress precluded proper attention to the woman's words, which continued. "You've been doing so well these last six months. I'd like to keep it that way."

Bo folded the workshop memo into an origami swan and left it dead center on the gray Formica surface of her desk.

The workshop itself had been ludicrous. A rented hotel conference room with Berber carpet on the walls and what appeared to be woven steel wool on the floor. Lukewarm coffee, several dozen cops and social workers with preformed personal ideas about the devil, and a presentation that in Bo's opinion had not changed since the thirteenth century.

"Some of you will find this hard to believe," a very blonde psychologist named Dr. Cynthia Ganage told the group, "but right now, today, right here in the United States... there is a growing and powerful Satanic conspiracy." The psychologist was so fashionably dressed and made up, her expression so glowing, it occurred to Bo that she might be picking up a little money on the side doing bathroom cleanser commercials.

"I don't find this hard to believe," Bo whispered to a social worker from the probation department seated beside her, "I find it impossible to believe!"

"Shh," the woman replied, writing "Satanic conspiracy" in purple ink on a lavender legal pad. "That's how they operate. They know people won't believe it."

"... even at the highest levels of society," Ganage continued, "and the principal Satanic ritual invariably involves sexual defilement, torture, and sometimes murder ... of innocent children."

"Oh, God," Bo sighed.

"Praise God," said the social worker from probation.

"You're not going to believe this!" Bo told Estrella when she returned at noon. "I've seen a lot of nuts in my day. I've
been
a nut in my day. But nothing can touch this overdressed psychologist the department imported from la-la land. The woman's either delusional or she's found the best money-maker since junk bonds. According to her, every school, church, daycare center, even 'the United States government,' is crawling with secret Satanists panting to torture children. Not to mention rock stars, pop bands, and everybody connected to the entertainment industry!"

"Does that include TV evangelists?" Estrella grinned over a steaming cup of instant noodle soup on her desk. The sun streaming through miniblinds over their single window sliced Estrella's braceleted arm with wavy black and white lines.

"I think it includes the Pope," Bo sighed. "But what really bugs me is that this woman is billing enormous consulting fees to stand around in a five-hundred-dollar suit showing pictures of rock bands whose lyrics, if played backward on the wrong speed underwater, may or may not contain messages urging people to sacrifice babies."

"Wanna know what bugs me?” Estrella queried vaguely, examining in a thin band of sunlight the chipped polish on a manicured nail.

"What?" Bo answered, distracted by her own reflection in the mirrored office door. Her appearance had not altered appreciably since she'd checked it that morning. Silver-red shoulder-length curls in typical disarray. Changeable green eyes that today had adopted a shade Bo ruefully identified as “cucumber.” Less-than-flat midriff and thighs that, if not stopped, would soon resemble Dickensian sausages. Even the loosely cut hip-length jacket she wore nearly every day could not re-create her prelithium lankiness.

"What bugs me," Estrella told the cup of Ramen noodles, "is when manic-depressive friends of mine stop taking their medication and don't tell me."

Bo turned slowly from the mirror and tossed a Xeroxed pamphlet entitled “Casework Intervention in Ritual Abuse” onto her desk. The pamphlet's jacket, of folded legal-size yellow card stock, was decorated with a clip-art head of a little boy in a sailor cap, circa 1939, facing the head of a horned devil with an obscenely protuberant tongue. "How did you know I stopped the lithium?" she whispered.

"When I'm not dancing in cantinas, feeding my faithful burro, or strewing rose petals in dusty religious processions," Estrella sang in an accent as broad as it was phony, "I have been known to see what is in front of my face!" The dark eyes looked straight at Bo. "So why didn't you tell me?"

Bo studied the back of one freckled hand as if the answer were written there. "I knew you'd worry?" What was it about psychiatric problems, she pondered, that caused people with no medical training whatever to dispense pharmacological opinions so freely?

"You knew I'd worry," Estrella repeated as if translating a difficult phrase from High German. "Why should I worry? You almost got yourself killed in a mine shaft last year, crazy as a tumbleweed on that case with the deaf boy. You almost blew it permanently, but why should I worry?"

Bo sat in her desk chair and spun to face an exquisitely dressed woman of Hispanic parentage who was about to assault her with a Styrofoam cup of lukewarm Ramen noodles. "I'm sorry, Es," Bo said through the tumble of hair shielding her penitently bowed head. "I should have told you."