Strawgirl (10 page)

Later Eva took Hannah alone to the five-sided tower and gave her, one by one, the strings of Iroquois grieving beads she'd woven for the child after the news of Samantha's death. In candlelight reflected from two hundred panes of hand-blown glass in the tower's windows, she gently recited the words in Iroquois and in English. The words Hayenwatha had given to a people who lived in cloud-shadows and sometimes perished of a terrible grieving that would only later be named depression.

"Samantha is gone and cannot return," she began the soft, chanting ritual. "Samantha has died. And you hurt so much that tears blind your eyes. With these words I wipe the tears from your eyes so you can see. These beads are my words for your eyes, Hannah."

The child took the woven rush with its irregular purple beads carved from the shells of the quahog clam. Wrapping dry, tremulous fingers about the small strip, she buried her head against Eva Broussard's ribs and sobbed. Eva sank to the floor, rocking the child against her and humming a song her own grandmother had sung in the dark. A story of the Huron prophet Deganawida in his canoe of white stone. Deganawida with a speech impediment so profound he must carry his voice with him in the person of Hayenwatha, the translator mystic. The story gave form to an Iroquois reverence for sensitive communication and human interdependence. It was also, Eva had realized years ago, an excellent therapeutic model.

After a while she said again, "Samantha is gone and cannot return. Samantha has died. And you hurt so much there's a roaring in your ears that drowns out everything else. With these words I silence the roaring so you can hear. These beads are my words for your ears, Hannah."

When the third strip of beaded rush had been given to the child, so that her throat choked by pain might be opened for speech, Eva Broussard breathed deeply and contemplated the words she would next pronounce. They were truly necessary, she concluded. And she was prepared to undertake the responsibility.

"As the oldest woman of this tribe," she recited, stretching the definition of tribe to fit the emergency, "I adopt you and make you one with us. I adopt you. You are now a child of the longhouse people, member of the Heron Clan, great-granddaughter of Naomi Blindhawk, granddaughter of Eva Blindhawk. You belong to us now. I am your grandmother. You have a home forever."

When the New York State Police arrived to take Paul Massieu away in handcuffs, they demanded to take Hannah Franer as well.

"The child is my granddaughter, an Iroquois of the Onondaga Reservation," Eva Broussard had said, her black eyes fierce beneath a leather-banded scarf. "She cannot be taken without permission of the tribal council. And she is safe here."

A veteran of clashes with radical Mohawks near the Canadian border, the trooper was not without experience in dealing with the state's original citizens. And there were recent federal laws ensuring that the children of native peoples could not be removed from the jurisdiction of their tribes. A century-late acknowledgment that to strip a human being of his or her language, culture, and mythology is a kind of death. He glared at the blonde child snuffling in the Indian woman's skirts. She didn't look like an Indian, but then neither did a lot of the people he'd seen sitting on tribal councils. Each tribe had its own rules for determining who was one of them and who wasn't. The kid had straw grieving beads pinned to her Minnie Mouse sweatshirt. He'd seen the Iroquois beads before; it was enough. California wouldn't like it, but he wasn't about to stir up another confrontation between Indians and New York State's government.

"Okay," he rumbled, "but you're responsible for her safety. And they'll come after her from California, anyway. You'll have to turn her over then."

By 4:00 A.M. the lake and sky were merely graying patterns without identity. Nothing moved among the shaded tracings that in daylight would be trees, lake, sky. Shaking the thick stubble framing her head Eva strode purposefully back to the twig bed. The steps she had taken were meant to protect Hannah's fragile being from irreversible harm. Eva was confident that her decisions were correct, but now what? Her thinking had run down like bog water, reedy and thick with odd skitterings. No point in seining it anymore tonight. There was too much turbulence to see what might come next.

Descending over the Hudson River on its approach to the Albany airport, the Boeing 767 provided a spectacular view. Sleepily Bo eyed the streams of hazy, gilded light bathing the valley below. She'd been dozing since the plane change in Chicago, and was unprepared.

"I'll be damned!" she breathed in amazement. "So this is what they were doing!"

Her companion in the aisle seat pulled a brimmed Red Sox cap further over an already low forehead and grimaced. The off-center set of his shoulders beneath a brown nylon jacket made clear his intent to create distance between himself and this redhead who talked to herself.

"I mean the Hudson River School," Bo explained, pulling her hair from her face with both hands. "This light! This is what they painted! You know ... Thomas Cole, Asher Durand, Charlotte Coman ...?"

The man shifted his weight further into the aisle and sighed miserably. It was clear to Bo that whatever interest he might have in the renowned artists of the region was eclipsed by a deeper fascination with his own shoes.

"And even they never got to see the light from up here," she concluded, "since there were no planes in the nineteenth century."

The man appeared to be painfully at prayer.

Beyond the scratched window rivers of light, cream-colored, pinkish, sometimes deepening to pale honey or muted flax, poured through clouds and spilled on the rising ground below. The effect was stunning. Bo thought of sending Madge Aldenhoven a thank-you note quoting something from Washington Irving. The light was astonishing, and a little eerie. No wonder so many had tried to capture it in paint. Bo wondered if the shape-shifting quality of the sky had anything to do with whatever Paul Massieu's cult was up to. Aldenhoven had provided an address, but no other information about the activities of the group.

Debarking into moist spring air, Bo reminded herself to rein in some of the elation buoying her steps. The day was, in fact, a bit too wondrous. The sky entirely too awe-inspiring with its washes of golden light. Too much goodness sloshing around, and it could only be coming from one source—her own brain.

You're here to pick up an eight-year-old with a dead sister, not to rejoice in spring, Bradley.

In the airport's parking lot Bo did a series of stretches beside the beige rental car, and thought about neurochemistry. Her near-religious awe at the sky could be a trained artist's response to unusually brilliant light patterns, or it could be something else. It could be that first heady surge of euphoria that would later become a torrent of racing impressions and feeling. Mania.

"It's too bad, but the truth is, you must always be suspicious of feeling too good," Lois Bittner stated flatly years ago. "Most manic-depressives like the euphoria so much they don't want it to stop. The problem is, it won't stop, like a carousel spinning faster and faster. You must always stop and dissect your euphoria, Bo. It's the minefield between you and a battle you can never win. Sometimes it will be safe, just a little surge of glee like other people experience. And sometimes it will be your last warning. Learn to tell the difference."

Bo slid behind the wheel of the nondescript Ford and admitted that twenty years after her first skirmish with manic depression, she still couldn't tell the difference. Moreover, she was sick of worrying about it. If things got worse, she'd deal with it. In the meantime it was sheer joy to be herself again, free of the numbing medication that, however necessary, made her feel like a senile otter swimming in glue.

A map provided by the rental car agency provided easy access to a six-lane freeway unimaginatively named 90 West. Bo admired the lush greenery bordering the road and adorning its median. Southern California, more desert than its chambers of commerce would like known, could not in its dampest moment produce such fervent, undulating greens. She wondered why Massieu's group, whatever they were, had decided to relocate. And how they would respond when she took from their midst the child Massieu had broken every law to return to them.

Bo plumbed her memory for information on religious cults and Utopian communities. Terms such as "wide-eyed idealists" and "vegetarian mystics" readily came to mind. Could a child-rapist arise from within such a context? Of course. Pedophiles might be anywhere. But was Paul Massieu the rapist whose violence destroyed Samantha Franer? Maybe. But if he weren't, then who was?

A shadow fell sleekly over the road, turning the emerald trees to moss. What if Andrew LaMarche were right? What if Massieu had abducted Hannah for reasons other than guilt? Then Samantha's killer was free to rape, perhaps kill, again. Might, in fact, be doing so at this very moment.

To her right Bo noticed a red barn in a field beside the road. On its side were painted three huge shamrocks, outlined in white. In spite of herself Bo reacted exactly as her grandmother would have done.

"
Dia's muir dhuit
," she pronounced the traditional "Mother of God be with you" salutation. "Even though ye've forgot the true sign!"

Bridget Mairead O'Reilly had told her granddaughters a hundred times that no true child of Eire would display any symbol but the harp. Still, the popular American symbol for all things Irish reminded Bo of her heritage. A heritage in which intuition had value. And her intuition was suggesting a picture in which a sexual pervert was free to select his next victim from a population of children in training pants.

The appalling notion did not diminish as Bo directed the little car to the right on Route 30, across the Mohawk River and through the town of Amsterdam. Miles later the thought had become an unprovable certainty. A sign announcing the manufacture of "Havlick Snowshoes" in a village provided the final straw. Bo had forgotten the reality of snow. Webbed contraptions for walking on it seemed, at best, apocryphal. Could there really be a company with employees at this very moment constructing snowshoes? Shepherd's crooks? How about butter churns? Everything was relative.

"Le monde," Andrew LaMarche's phrase rumbled pointedly in the wind from the open car window. The world. A world. One of many. This one contained snowshoes, an unknown cult, and a bereaved child who must be returned to the jurisdiction of the California court that had assumed the burden of protecting her from her sister's fate. Except that if Paul Massieu were innocent, then Hannah Franer was in no peril. And the swift action of police in two states and Bo's own hurried journey were exercises in futility. Like snowshoes in San Diego.

An informative marker placed by the state of New York informed Bo that the damming of the Sacandaga River had permanently immersed several small towns. She glanced at the steel-gray water and wondered what worlds were lost beneath it. Comparisons to the system for which she worked were inescapable. As Andrew LaMarche had pointed out, no one had bothered to ask about the world in which Samantha Franer lived. They merely obliterated it with their own. And their own was one in which the perpetrator in a molest was usually the mother's boyfriend, especially if he were odd in some way. And especially if he then kidnapped the victim's older sibling and fled across state lines. That was the world of the juvenile court, the police, the agencies of child protection. It was, Bo conceded as Shadow Mountain rose bluely in the distance, only one world.

"Ye ken things," her grandmother had explained. "It's in the family. Be sure to heed what ye ken."

"He's still out there," Bo thought with distaste. "I'm running all over the country, Reinert's probably on another case already, LaMarche is in a tux somewhere giving lectures over chicken-in-aspic, and this sick slimebag is going scot-free!"

An hour later she found the "cult hideout" Madge Aldenhoven had described. It was a sprawling Victorian camp with two boathouses and ten smaller cottages nestled between the looming mountain and a lake strewn with little islands. To her dismay, none of the people lounging on the wide porch of the main building seemed to speak English.

"I need to speak with the person in charge," she informed a grandmotherly woman in a hickory rocker. "I know Hannah Franer is here. I have to return her to California."

The woman's clothes were American, and she involuntarily pursed her lips at the mention of Hannah's name.

"No, no," she fumbled to hide an issue of
People
magazine she'd been reading. "No English." The second word was pronounced "Ing-glish." The Midwest, Bo guessed. Not rural.

An immense bearded man clad in a monk's robe covered by an Indian blanket rose from a small table where he was either taking apart or assembling a vegetable steamer.

"
Je m'appelle Napoleon Pigeon
," he announced, his French accent unmistakably native. "
Et vous
?"

"Mr. Pigeon," Bo spluttered, marveling at the name, "I'm Bo Bradley from San Diego's Child Protective Services. I'm here to escort Hannah Franer back to San Diego where she is in the legal custody of the juvenile court. Could you take me to her?"

"
Je ne parle pas anglais
," he answered, revealing tobacco-stained teeth. One upper incisor had been set with a gold quarter moon that caught and reflected the setting sun. Beneath bushy eyebrows the man's aquamarine eyes glowed with a wild, undirected kindness.