Strawgirl (6 page)

"I've called for a psychiatric consult." LaMarche conceded the point while ignoring Bo's discomfiture. "Mrs. Franer will be taken to County Psychiatric. I hope this will end the involvement of Child Protective Services with this unfortunate woman."

Bo regarded the man who'd sent long-stemmed roses to her office and phoned every week since saving her life in an unusual case the previous fall. A tin statue would have produced more warmth.

"Nothing would please me more, Doctor," she emphasized the title, "but a child has been killed. The district attorney will order the immediate filing of a sibling petition. Fifteen minutes after I leave here, Hannah Franer will legally be in the custody of San Diego County's Juvenile Court for her own protection. It's my case until she's found and her safety is protected."

"You're destroying innocent people. Can't you see that?"

"At least one innocent person has already been destroyed," Bo said as she pushed past him. "Or had you forgotten?"

In the parking lot Bo found a small picture of St. Theresa under her drivers-side windshield wiper. On the back a large hand had penned, "This is clergy parking, bozo! Fr. F. Goodman"

Climbing on the hood of her car, Bo tucked the prayer card onto the left foot of Mabel Mammoth, clambered down and lit a cigarette.

"I have the most noxious job on the planet," she told the creature, "involving not only malignant acts and vile individuals, but pompous pediatricians and priests who should still be playing video games after school. Someone has slaughtered a child, and I have a sense that everyone connected to the case is locked into dead-end viewpoints that are obscuring the truth. I don't know why I feel that way, Mabel, but I do. Is it because I stopped the lithium? Am I getting too imaginative here? And is there any chance I can find a job somewhere that doesn't surpass Dante's Inferno in wretchedness?"

The magenta mammoth said nothing but continued to smile at an oleander blooming profusely at its feet. Bo sighed and scrounged through the jumble of tape cassettes in her glove compartment until she found the one she was looking for. Carmina Burana. Its "O Fortuna" had been the anthem of her adolescent rebellion, wholly approved by her violinist mother.

"If you've got to lurk about in excessive eye makeup," Margot O'Reilly had said one long-past Boston morning, "then I suppose it's best you lurk to some enduring music."

Bo drove the few blocks back to her office with a dog-Latin chorus to spring and fate blasting from her car. Its invocation of rebellion created a focus for her discomfort with everything so far connected to the Franer case. A child brutally dead, her mother plunging into a hellish depression, her sister vanished with the only suspect, and the odd coincidence of a Satanic workshop the same day a purportedly Satanic case turned up. None of the pieces really fit. But then they never did. Not at first. Bo decided to start eliminating pieces, narrow the field. And she knew just where to start.

Back in her office she nudged the door closed and picked up the phone. "Information for Quantico, Virginia, please. I'd like the number for the Federal Bureau of Investigation's task force on ritual crime."

It was after 5:00 in Virginia, but somebody answered his phone anyway. And in ten minutes provided Bo with enough information to tar and feather Cynthia Ganage. Not that anybody would listen.

Bo mentally filed what she'd heard and then stared into her own green eyes in the mirror on the office door. Those eyes didn't always see exactly what everybody else saw. The brain behind them was different, its neural pathways prone to the odd bypass, the occasional derailment. But that brain, her brain, her self, would never cling to an insubstantial fantasy to avoid facing a truth. The realization was centering, like opening the door to a personal integrity she'd known was there but couldn't name. She was pretty tough, she acknowledged, to be able to face a world in which human behavior could not be blamed on a Satan. One tough crazy lady. She wished everyone else involved in the Franer case could say the same.

An early ground fog already drifted luminously in the stand of paper birch east of the lake path. Towering behind her, Eva Broussard felt more than saw the thick, crumbled silhouette of Shadow Mountain. Its vastness had taken form countless millions of years in some unknowable past. Webbed at its base by veins of glassy quartz and pink feldspar, its highest peak was of a rare stone found also in lunar rock samples—anorthosite. In a leap of near-mindless concatenation Eva had at one point allowed herself to wonder if the moon rock itself might somehow figure in the curious experience related by Paul Massieu and the others. The Adirondack peaks consisted of some fifteen hundred square miles of erosion-resistant, metamorphosed anorthosite. A huge expanse. Did it in its massiveness create a magnetic field capable of producing realistic hallucinations? The theory made as much sense as any. Which wasn't saying much. After three years Eva Broussard had yet to frame a coherent theory of why a number of demonstrably rational people insisted they'd had contact with extraterrestrials on or near Shadow Mountain.

Padding across the porch to the inlaid maple floor in fringed moccasins pulled on against the evening chill, the graceful woman knelt to lay a fire in the largest of three fireplaces. There would be a community meeting after dinner to deal with the grim news of Samantha Franer's death. Later she would drive to Albany to pick up Paul Massieu and Hannah at the airport. After settling Hannah, Paul would flee to Canada. The decision had not been an easy one to make. Yet everyone was certain Paul was innocent, and that by the time he could be extradited from Canada, Samantha's real murderer would have been apprehended. The level of confidence exhibited by the group in California's law enforcement agencies reflected nothing so much as a familiarity with American television. Eva found herself staring into the stacked wood.

Could she be wrong about Paul? Could her fondness for the quiet, lonely man have obscured her judgment? Could Paul Massieu be a pederast, a child-molester, the rapist and murderer of a little girl?

As she lit a match to the kindling she stripped herself of the layered identities that might blind her to a distasteful truth. Like barely perceptible cloaks, she removed the personae of psychiatrist, Bolduc Chair in Social Psychology at the Seminaire de Sainte Jeanne d'Arc, and author of the popular self-help series,
The Meaning of Your Life
, as well as a highly praised biography of the Christian mystic Hildegard of Bingen. When the intellectual trappings of forty years had fallen away, Eva addressed her core being—a mature Iroquois woman. The fire caught and flared, its dancing light a filigree on her broad hands.

"What do I want?" she thought inwardly to a gallery of masks floating near her subconscious. "Do I need to believe in the normalcy of this man's personality so much for the sake of my own research that I've overlooked a terrible inadequacy? Have I wanted the project more than the truth?"

The Iroquois mask Eva named "Pride," an elongated visage woven of age-darkened willow with mere slits for eyes and a clown's wide smile, did not drift into view behind her closed eyes. She'd more than half expected it, the quality called pride

having been a continual stumbling block in her adult life. But it wasn't there. Nothing was there. Just a reversed-out image of flames, black on a gray background. If Eva Broussard had failed to perceive a disturbing sickness in Paul Massieu, there was nothing in her mind to account for it. Still, she acknowledged, there was always the minuscule margin for error. The margin in which wholly inexplicable events could occur. This might be one of them, but Eva was prepared to contend that it wasn't. Eva was comfortable with a ninety-eight percent certainty that Paul Massieu was innocent.

Rising from the stone hearth, she stretched bronze, muscular arms toward Night Heron Lake, now gray marble beneath a patchy scarf of fog, and thought about the other victims of Samantha's killer. The child's death would destroy the mother. That realization scarcely required the plethora of professional sensitivities possessed by Dr. Eva Blindhawk Broussard.

Bonnie Franer had been beaten by a drunken sod of a father on a bleak farm outside Syracuse, New York, until marrying at nineteen an arcade games salesman she'd met at the truck stop where she worked as a cashier. Eight years later and three months into the pregnancy that would produce Samantha, Seth Franer had taken the remaining two hundred dollars in their bank account and vanished. A postcard from Niagara Falls informed Bonnie that he was sorry, but he guessed he was just a rolling stone. He wouldn't be back. The day the postcard came Bonnie Franer had taken her daughter Hannah to kindergarten, returned home, and swallowed a hundred and thirty-six over-the-counter sleeping pills. A neighbor found her vomiting on the rickety wooden porch of the Franers' rented duplex in Troy, New York. After her stomach was pumped, the defeated woman's only fear was that she had harmed the child growing within her. Now that child was dead.

Eva Broussard shivered slightly and hugged herself against the flimsy substance of Bonnie Franer's life. Nothing had been given the woman to uphold her during difficulty. No family or cultural ties, no education, no financial resources. No substance of any kind. The woman was prey to every vagary of emotion, every whim in the shifting winds of her time. When Paul Massieu met Bonnie Franer working the food concession at one of Eva's lucrative self-help lectures in Buffalo, he'd fallen in love with his own need to protect something. A cultural anthropologist specializing in the nineteenth-century United States, he'd seemed to grieve for everything lost in time. Suffrage banners, quart-sized beer bottles, the Elizabethan dialect still spoken on the Outer Banks of North Carolina before a causeway to the mainland was built. Everything lost filled him with a helpless urgency to protect it, save it from an annihilation already accomplished. Bonnie Franer and her daughters had represented a fragility he could protect. Until now.

Over the mantel a small oil painting reflected the flames below. A gloomy local New York State landscape painted on cardboard in 1874 by an artist named Ella Pell who would later achieve renown in the great salons of Europe. Eva had discovered the painting among rubbish stored in the tower when she bought the lodge. Probably, she thought, a gift of the artist to the lodge's first owners. Perhaps a gift to the woman who'd died falling from the tower itself. Paul Massieu had insisted that the painting be framed and hung.

In its lower left corner dim figures occupied a small boat, dwarfed by looming, mist-covered mountains and the lampblack surface of the lake. But the seated figure, a woman in a black hat, wore at her neck a scarlet kerchief. The minuscule banner, barely visible in its dark field, was to Eva a symbol for the very striving she'd come here to document. A frail emblem of hope in a tumult of darkness. But there would be no hope for Bonnie Franer now. Too much had hurt that defenseless soul for too long. And Paul Massieu could no longer protect her.

The little picture with its single thread of color was for the inquisitive Broussard an apt standard for their whole endeavor. An unusual, perhaps irrational endeavor. Now perhaps doomed. Idly she adjusted the painting on the stone wall and remembered her first meeting with the somber anthropologist.

He'd come unannounced to her office in Montreal three years ago.

"I want you to tell me if I'm insane," he'd explained in the familiar Canadian French. "I'll pay whatever the standard rate is for such things."

A soft-spoken man of about thirty-five, dressed in rumpled corduroys, a forest green turtleneck sweater, and the predictable professor's tweed jacket. Strong, clean-shaven jaw. Shaggy black hair showing inherited evidence of male pattern baldness. Raven-dark eyes with thick, curling lashes. Black French, Eva decided. Or part Indian, like herself. Whatever his genetic heritage, it, and a mutilated right hand injured, he said, on an archaeological dig, gave him a sinister quality that was misleading. Paul Massieu would prove himself to be one of the gentlest men Eva had ever met. He'd hunched his wide shoulders and clasped stocky hands, the right of which was missing the little finger, in his lap as she outlined the reasons his request couldn't be met.

There was in actuality no measurable quality named "sanity." The term could be defined only by its absence or impairment, and even that was subject to wide fluctuations based on social and cultural expectations. Certain patterns of behavior had been given certain names, and certain medications were known to control certain symptoms. But literally no one could define sanity, much less measure it.

"But you're a psychiatrist, aren't you?" he'd insisted.

"Among other things," Broussard answered. "Tell me why you've come to me."

Paul Massieu had leaned forward nervously, his elbows on his knees. "I remembered something that happened a year ago. Something that couldn't have happened, and yet the memory is there ... details, feelings, everything. So either it did happen, or I'm somehow making up this whole memory, and I'm crazy."

"And you want me to ...? "

"I read one of your books. You sound, well, practical. I want somebody objective. Somebody who's not connected to any of this weird stuff ..."

"Connected to what weird stuff?" Broussard had inquired, curious.

Massieu straightened his shoulders. "To any of these people running around saying they've seen flying saucers and creatures from other planets."

"I'm afraid you've come to the wrong place," Broussard began professionally. "I really can't—"