Strawgirl (13 page)

Following Eva Broussard up the maple stairs, Bo was not surprised at the woman's next remark.

"You thought I'd be insane, didn't you?"

"Yes," Bo answered, "but you're not."

"And you'd know, wouldn't you?"

"Yes. I have a bipolar disorder, and—"

"And so you don't miss much." Eva Broussard turned and smiled. "A remarkable quality, enviable in many ways. Unusual in a social worker. How did you fall into this job, Bo Bradley?"

"It's a long story," Bo said as they entered a large bedroom in which the little girl still slept on a cot beside a twig bed.

Eva Broussard's black eyes twinkled. "I'd love to hear it later." She laughed softly. "And here's your quarry."

Bo felt as if she'd known the woman for a lifetime, as if she'd found a friend.

For a while both of them gazed at the sleeping child whose straight blonde hair fanned across the pillow. A dusting of freckles punctuated her cheeks flushed with sleep, and her perfectly arched eyebrows were the color of dust. A huge nightgown fell off one shoulder, revealing a bony frame like the mother's. Pinned to the gown's bodice were three odd strips of woven straw with purple beads attached. Bo made a note to ask about them as Eva grabbed some dry clothes for Bo from a bureau.

"Just change in there," she gestured to a hall bathroom. "Then come downstairs and we'll fill you with hot coffee while we talk."

Minutes later Bo descended the stairs in a warm caftan and wool slipper socks, only to confront LaMarche and the Indian woman looking somberly upward, waiting for her.

"What is it?" she asked from the landing.

LaMarche held out his hand. "Bonnie Franer committed suicide last night, Bo. The bastard has killed two people now."

From above a small voice rose, panicky and shrill. "Eva! Where are you, Eva? I'm scaaared!"

"These people have come from California," Eva explained to Hannah Franer, who was huddled cross-legged on the twig bed. "This is Dr. LaMarche, who tried to help Samantha, and this is Ms. Bradley, who wants to help you."

The child's wide-set hazel eyes watched as if from a great distance. The burden of pain lay in them, and a defeated disinterest.

"Oh, Hannah," Bo sighed, joining the child on the bed, "it won't stay this way! Things will get better, they really will ..."

Eva Broussard shot Bo a look. "This is a terrible time for you, Hannah," she began, "and I'm afraid another terrible thing has happened."

Hannah traced patterns with her knuckles on the sheet. "Where's Paul?" she asked softly. "I want Paul and mama. I want to go home." The round, pale eyes glared at Bo accusingly. "Where's Paul and my mom?"

The pleasant, old-fashioned room seemed suddenly cut off from the rest of the lodge, the rest of the world. Bo could almost smell the child's rage and despair. A musty, metallic odor warning of danger. Bo glanced at Eva Broussard for confirmation, and saw the grim nod. Hannah Franer had inherited her mother's fragility. Merely quiet and somber under normal stress loads, the child might break completely now. Bo felt a desperate sense of time running out.

"Paul is okay, but he's been taken back to California," she told the child very slowly. "The police think he's the one who hurt Samantha ..."

"Nooo!" Hannah breathed, trembling. "Paul didn't hurt Sammi. It was Goody. Goody hurt her. She said Goody hurt her," she pointed toward her crotch beneath the baggy nightgown, "down there."

Bo felt her own pulse quickening. "Hannah, who is Goody?"

"Sammi said mama would die if she told. That Goody would kill mama." The hazel eyes were dry and widening in fear. "Where's mama? Sammi told me! He got Sammi dead because she told! Did he get mama? Is mama dead, too? Where's my mama?" The child sat upright among the bedcovers, a tense, narrow sculpture.

"Your mother is in California," Eva Broussard hedged, her bronze eyelids lowered as if she were deep in thought.

"She'd dead, isn't she?" Hannah addressed the question to Eva with a directness that made Bo wince. "She's in California, but she's dead. Goody got her and he killed her!"

"Goody didn't kill your mother," Eva said slowly and clearly. And then, because everything that might happen later would hinge on Hannah's trust of her, Eva Broussard did not lie. "But yes, your mother, too, has died."

Bo, sitting on the bed only inches from Hannah, felt the girl's spirit turn away. Turn inward toward some flat, cool landscape where nothing moved, where there was no sound, where nothing hurt. Like a puppet slack on its strings the child curled upon herself and toppled sideways on the bed. A dark stain spread beneath her hips as she lost control of her bladder. The hazel eyes fell vacant even as Bo watched, as if the person inside simply slid down, and away.

"
Mon Dieu
," Andrew LaMarche uttered raggedly from the doorway. "She's gone into shock!"

"Something like that," the Indian woman replied, gathering the girl in her arms and striding toward the hall bathroom. "Bo, I'll need your help."

Deftly placing Hannah in the deep old bathtub, Eva turned on the water and adjusted its temperature to a tepid level that would cool the child's skin and gently induce a faster heart rate.

"Hold her up while I get the gown off," Broussard directed.

Bo could feel muscle tone over the small bones. Hannah was still with them.

"Bo and I are going to massage you with these washcloths," Eva Broussard explained. "It will help you get some of the hurt out. Let some of the hurt out, Hannah. The water is here to take it away."

Bo watched as Eva kneaded Hannah's pale flesh with a rough cloth, and did the same. Gradually the child's skin turned pink, but the hazel eyes remained empty.

"I am your grandmother now, Hannah," Eva went on. A note of authority rang in her voice. "And this is our way. Samantha and your mother are gone, and your hurt is terrible. You must let some of the hurt out, or you will be very sick. The water is here to take your hurt away ... now."

Bo watched as Hannah turned her head to face the Indian woman. Slowly the small hands formed fists, extended, and curled tightly again. The child's face contorted as tears sprang up and a rasping hiss escaped her bared teeth.

"Hold her," Eva told Bo. "Don't let her hurt herself."

Hannah began to pound the water with her fists, and then to kick. In seconds she was thrashing violently, flinging gallons of water like liquid groundfire from the tub.

"Fine, that's just right," Eva encouraged until the girl relaxed in exhaustion, sobbing quietly.

Only then did Bo notice the crowd of people standing silently in the hall.

"We were afraid the chanting would disturb her," a young woman in a SUNY Albany sweatshirt addressed Eva Broussard, "so we haven't done the morning chant yet. Is she going to be all right?"

"She's much better," Eva answered, taking a stack of clean clothes from the grandmotherly woman Bo had seen on the porch yesterday afternoon. "Aren't you, Hannah?"

It was in the set of the child's shoulders. Bo saw it before the ramifications became obvious. Hannah allowed Bo to help her into clean white panties and her Minnie Mouse shirt, and pointed to the beads still pinned to the nightgown on the floor. Bo retrieved the amulet and fastened it to the sweatshirt as the child watched, but said nothing.

"Hannah?" Eva repeated.

Hannah's wide lips clamped over her teeth for a moment, and then went slack. In her eyes a deep fear struggled with her need to remain attached. Eva and Bo exchanged a glance of troubled acceptance. To push the little girl right now would be disastrous.

"It's okay if you don't want to talk." Bo smiled, hiding her dismay. "We know how scared you are. You don't have to talk until you aren't so scared."

The only person who might lead them to Samantha's killer had just been pulled from the shock of grief only to stop talking. Hannah Franer had elected to become mute, not out of rational thinking but out of a stark terror operating in the deepest channels of her mind. Somebody named Goody had told Samantha her mama would die if she revealed what he'd done to her. But Samantha had told her big sister, Hannah. Bo could almost see the two, tucked in their Raggedy Ann sheets, one of them bleeding internally, sick, frightened. Sammi had told her big sister what the man had done, and then Sammi had died. Next Bonnie Franer had crumbled under the intolerable weight of her distorted grief and taken her own life. And that left Hannah with irrefutable proof that to talk is to die.

"We're going downstairs for a little while," Eva told her after settling her in a clean bed and assigning one of the group to read aloud from a book of poems by Robert Louis Stevenson. Hannah didn't seem to hear.

"Repetitive rhyme and meter are comforting to children," the Indian woman said as she led Bo and LaMarche to an alcove beside one of the fireplaces. "The brain of a child is not like an adult's. Somehow we've lost sight of that." Bo noticed that the woman's hands were trembling as Napoleon Pigeon laid a glazed pottery tea service on an end table, and padded away.

LaMarche noticed as well, and poured the tea with deliberate indolence. The ploy gave Eva time to regain her composure, and gave Bo an opportunity to contemplate what the term "gentleman" must have meant when it still meant anything. Her grandmother, she thought while admiring the twig chair Eva occupied, would have joined Andrew LaMarche at the altar within minutes of his proposal. Any altar. But Bridget O'Reilly's fondness for "the laddies" had been legendary. Bo monitored a similar proclivity in herself like a radioactive isotope. Dangerous when not properly contained.

"Elective mutism in children is fairly rare these days," he mentioned conversationally. "Understandable in Hannah's case, but she will need to be seen by a child psychiatrist as quickly as possible. Bo, I don't see that you have any choice but to—"

"I am a psychiatrist," Eva Broussard interjected. "I don't specialize in children, but I'm the last available adult this child knows and trusts. She must stay with me. The next days and weeks will be critical. Surely you can see that."

LaMarche smoothed his mustache with a thumb and stared into his tea. "Dr. Broussard, could you explain exactly what these people, including Paul Massieu, are doing here? And could you outline your reasons for choosing to believe that Massieu is innocent of Samantha's injuries and death?"

"Andy!" Bo slammed her cup into its saucer, creating a ripple of clove-scented air in the alcove. "You believed he was innocent from the beginning. Has the mother's suicide changed your mind? And have you forgotten that this is my investigation?"

Eva Broussard stood and breathed the steam from her tea. "Dr. LaMarche is asking the obvious questions. Here are the answers. In two years of close professional association with Paul Massieu, I have seen nothing to suggest that he's capable of sexual assault of any kind, particularly sexual assault on a child. His relationship with Bonnie was a healthy one, despite differences in their backgrounds and education. Paul is an unusual man, especially by American standards. More like a European. He does not feel any need to conform to some model he cannot fit. An academic, he teaches cultural anthropology at McGill, devotes his leisure time to camping and the pursuit of numerous interests that center on salvaging cultural artifacts ..."

"What cultural artifacts?" Bo asked, recognizing that kiddie porn might just fall in that category.

Eva Broussard leaned against the fieldstone wall, one moccasinned foot propped behind her. "Adirondack guideboats, old Huguenot cookbooks in French, and eighteenth-century Roman Catholic ghost stories involving Montreal's numerous convents and monasteries. Paul collects original wine label artwork, belongs to an international organization determined to preserve the oldest known names of streets and roads, and actually lost a finger attempting to rescue a millwheel destined for extinction in Vermont. In addition to that—"

"We see your point," Andrew LaMarche admitted from deep within an overstuffed plaid love seat facing Eva. "And none of Paul's interests, insofar as you know, have involved the usual pastimes of pedophiles?"

"No. Paul has no interests that could be used to attract children. No video games, sports or soda fountain equipment, toys or pets. With the exceptions of Hannah and Samantha, I feel safe in saying that Paul has a minimal awareness of children."

Bo couldn't restrain herself. "What was he going to do with a
millwheel
?" she asked.

"I don't know," Eva answered. "It was years ago. Before he came to me for help with the experience that has created this community."

"The San Diego police say Paul's a member of a cult." Bo took the cue. "Is this some kind of cult?" She couldn't shake a sense that the whole interrogation was pointless. That they might as well have been whistling at each other through straws while something terrible grew worse, unchecked.

"Paul and several of the others here report having seen silvery, humanoid figures at night in these mountains. Paul and three others recall being medically examined by these figures. Those with this experience generally attribute it to contact with extraterrestrial life-forms. The experience was intense and transforming for them. They and others who believe in this experience gather here. That's all. Scarcely a cult, as the term is properly used."