Strawgirl (9 page)

"Let me make my point. You're now in another world—the world of child abuse investigation, its legality. That world makes assumptions based on previous cases. That's the way law works. In your world it's assumed that the perpetrator in a molest is the mother's live-in boyfriend because very often it is. But what if somebody from another world falls into yours? Will you bother to try looking through his eyes before deciding what's real?"

"You seem to have forgotten that I have a rather special relationship with this issue," Bo bristled. "I have a psychiatric disorder, a passport to more worlds than most people see on a three-continent tour. In addition to that, my undergraduate degree is in art history. Sophomoric lectures on cultural perspective are scarcely necessary. I've already considered the possibility that this case isn't typical. But how do you explain the fact that Paul Massieu ran?"

"What about
his
world, Bo? What if he ran because something in his reality, and that of Bonnie and Samantha and Hannah, demanded that he return Hannah to it?"

Bo's ears flattened against her skull as a strand of awareness spun out ahead of her. She couldn't keep up with it, but its message was clear. "What did Bonnie Franer tell you?" she asked, watching him now as closely as he had watched her.

"The woman loves her children, Bo. She's weak, a longtime victim. That love is her only strength. She has literally nothing else. She allowed Paul Massieu into her life precisely because he would never hurt the girls. He offered them love and protection. She didn't care what else he did, or what he believed in—"

"How can you ...? " Bo interrupted. "Bonnie Franer is an extremely fragile personality, prone to depression, probably self-destructive at times. You can't have had time to interview her in any depth, anyway. How can you trust her assessment ...? "

LaMarche kicked an exposed root of the cottonwood. "What if Paul Massieu has simply returned Hannah to a world, the only world he knows where she'll be safe?"

The knowledge racing ahead had taken on form. Bo felt her eyes widen in the dark at what he was telling her.

"You know where Massieu is! Bonnie Franer told you, and you're withholding the information!"

There was no denial.

"Think about what I've said, Bo. Just think about it. Looking at things differently may just make it possible for you to stay in this line of work. You're good. But without a broader view the pain and disgust will break you. I don't want that to happen."

"Andy," Bo said as the senselessness of a child's death took on even more sinister ramifications, "if you're right and Paul Massieu really isn't the perp, then who is? Who destroyed that little girl? What world does
he
live in?"

Andrew LaMarche stretched his angular hands at his sides and turned the palms slowly skyward. "I don't know," he answered.

From the door of the sprawling shed a sonorous waltz drifted liquidly on violin strings. Bo hated the warm flush that crept up her cheeks at his earlier compliment, and the dismay that accompanied any possibility of Paul Massieu's innocence. Domestic child sexual abuse was nothing unusual; it was her turf. But the notion of a "stranger molest" opened doors on a bewildering darkness. She wondered why the idea of a child eviscerated by the sexual demands of a trusted, familiar adult seemed less horrific than the same crime perpetrated by a stranger. The answer lay in LaMarche's words. The familiar, however repugnant, constituted her world. But what if this crime had its origins in a different one?

"That's the last dance." LaMarche gestured toward the spilling light. "Would you do me the honor?"

In his arms Bo felt an odd sense of kinship, as if they were compatriots in some film noir struggle involving World War II resistance fighters. Dim lighting. Frenchmen in berets and baggy shirts. Edith Piaf singing "Non, Je Ne Regrette Rien" from a cabaret stage. The feeling was smoky, warm ...

Snap out of it, Bradley. You're tired and your brain's turning to oatmeal. That really is Piaf. What happened to the band?

"Duhon always ends with that recording," Andrew LaMarche said, leading her toward the door with his right arm firmly around her waist. "It's his trademark."

"Mine too," Bo nodded sleepily, aware that he was kissing the top of her head occasionally as they walked to the car, and too tired to break the mood.

On the way home Bo heard the Jaguar's motor murmuring "le monde" repetitively. Something about the notion, the insistent syllables of it, kept breaking and spreading in her mind like an egg. The man beside her was harboring a secret. Why? Because there were different worlds? It made little sense, but then what did? A broad view, then. Blurry, gentle. Maybe wise. Lois Bittner, Bo smiled to herself, would probably approve. Madge Aldenhoven would vaporize with rage.

"Thanks for the evening," she nodded as LaMarche saw her to her door. "I'll think about what you said."

He left with a polite nod. No future dates set. No promises to call or be called. It was good. And, Bo reminded herself, it was over. Andrew LaMarche just didn't fit into her world. Nobody did.

Inside, the answering machine on the tiled counter between her living room and lilliputian kitchen was blinking.

"Bo?" Madge Aldenhoven's voice announced, "you're going to have to fly to New York tomorrow. The police have captured the perp in the Franer case at some cult hideout in the Adirondacks. We're sending you to retrieve the sister. Your plane leaves at 6:19 A.M. for Albany. I'll meet you at the office at 5:00 with the tickets."

In the neon glare of her bathroom Bo stared at a pharmacist's brown plastic bottle half full of pinkish tablets. Lithium. A surefire way to remain uninvolved, to stop the French "le monde" thumping in her brain. But did it need to be stopped?

Maybe LaMarche was right. Maybe there was another way to view the broken lives that fell across her desk in orange-banded case files. Maybe more to it than disgust and helplessness. The possibility felt like new canvas, stretched and beckoning.

Bo tossed the pills in her carry-on bag for the journey, just in case. Then she fell in bed humming a French song about having no regrets, and fell asleep wondering what life would be like without them.

Eva Broussard lay sleepless upon a large bent-twig bed that had belonged to one of the lodge's Prohibition-era owners. A Pittsburgh glove manufacturer with stern views on temperance, the man had given his ideas immortality in the property's deed. No alcohol could be served within the lodge walls while the government of the United States remained intact. The troubled woman turned softly, imagining a bloodless coup at that very moment in Washington, D.C. A large cognac, she thought, might muffle the incessant mating whistles of the thousand spring peeper frogs calling, bog to bog, through the Adirondack night. Hannah Franer lay asleep on a cot beside the antique bed.

In shadow the child seemed merely a younger version of the mother. The same fine blonde hair drifting across the pillowcase. The same wide-set hazel eyes, full lips, and overlarge nose that reddened at the slightest emotion. Eva wondered if the similarity between mother and daughter extended to what lay inside—that core being some might name "soul." If so, extreme caution must be exercised now. For Hannah Franer's future would lie squarely in the ways she learned to deal with the pain of the present. And even that wasn't complete. Eva was certain there would be at least one more devastating blow for the child to absorb. Grimly certain.

Soundlessly she slipped to an open casement window. Below the lodge Night Heron Lake appeared to hold floating beneath its surface scattered sparks of light identical to those in the sky above. At the water's edge a pale glacial boulder left there twelve thousand years ago by a retreating wall of ice seemed a small, abandoned moon.

"I know nothing," the rangy woman whispered in French to the stone sphere. "We don't live long enough to know anything. Our little jelly brain is just a chemical flash, like heat lightning. But you," she addressed the stone intently, "have had time to observe a great deal. And you aren't talking." On the night wind a whiff of hemlock drifted into the room. Beavers at work, damming some upper tributary of Shadow Creek. The little mammals' engineering feats seemed elegant and full of meaning compared to the chaos that lay before Eva Broussard.

The New York State Police had burst into the lodge only minutes before Paul Massieu would have made his escape across the glassy darkness of Night Heron Lake. A lightweight canoe was prepared and waiting. The anthropologist had, as was a sort of ritual among the Canadian Seekers, canoed the chain of lakes from Montreal to this wilderness outpost where he'd first seen "Them." A covert return to Canada by the same watery route seemed the safest. It would never have occurred to New York lawmen routinely checking I-87 as a courtesy to the state of California that their prey was paddling a handmade canvas canoe beneath silent miles of red spruce.

But Paul Massieu was no wizard of stealth. He'd left a paper trail as wide as the Hudson River connecting him to an organization incorporated as "Shadow Mountain Interests" with an Adirondack mailing address. When a ticket agent at San Diego International Airport told Dar Reinert, "Sure. The French guy and the little girl? Bought tickets to Albany, New York, ETA 6:27 P.M. Albany time," it had taken only two phone calls to get an address and a New York warrant.

"You should not have run, Paul," Eva insisted through pursed lips at Albany's homey airport terminal. "It can only be interpreted as evidence of guilt."

"Bonnie begged me to get Hannah back here when she called from the hospital. That was before Sammi ... before we knew ..." His voice broke with emotion. "The doctor who tried to save Sammi, this doctor had already told Bonnie they'd take Hannah away, put her in a foster home. I'm not Hannah's real father; this doctor told Bonnie they'd never let me get Hannah back, even if ... He told Bonnie the police are certain I'm the one who ..." His eyes rolled upward as a shudder rippled across his bulky shoulders. "... who raped a three-year-old baby that I loved as if she were my own ... They'd never let me have Hannah, and they won't let Bonnie have her, either, now. Bonnie's going to crack under this. I know it."

People at the airport were beginning to stare at the weeping man with a terrified little girl clinging to his hand.

"We'll talk later," Eva suggested quickly. "We need to take Hannah home now."

"They know about us," he sighed in despair. "They know we're Seekers and they think we're crazy. It's one of the reasons they think I'm crazy enough to ..."

"Yes." The older woman nodded.

It had been something of a risk, establishing a community of people devoted to the exploration of an experience that couldn't have happened. But the rugged moors of upstate New York had cradled unconventional notions before. In a rocky field near Palmyra Joseph Smith talked to an angel named Moroni, and the Mormon Church was conceived. In Victorian Arcadia, Brockport, Ithaca, Syracuse, and Buffalo, the first American mediums communed with spirits and initiated an idea that would spellbind the Western world. There was something in the land, Eva sensed, and in the ominous cloud paths forever drifting across the river valleys. Something "otherly" her own people had seen fit to honor with rituals against madness, especially at the darkest time of the year. That something had turned up again, she was sure, on the ever-receptive screen of the human mind in the form of frail but magnetically powerful beings who seemed to have come from space.

But Eva Broussard could trace social patterns in history as well as she could follow pheasant tracks in the hedgerows of her childhood. Ideas spawned in the shadow-mists of New York State never stayed there. Those that did, died. There had been no further sightings. It was time to go elsewhere, and the group had selected California for the state's renowned openness to unorthodox ideas. A desert location for privacy and an ascetic wildness that might free the group to shape whatever philosophy it would make of its joint experience. A desert location within driving distance of the Goldstone Tracking Station in Barstow, where NASA scientists watched as a computer program sifted a million radio bands of celestial static for the telltale, nonrandom blips that would prove we are not alone in the universe. Blips that could only be created by nonearthly intelligence. Eva Broussard wanted to interview those scientists, include that perspective in her research. Wanted it deeply.

Paul Massieu had been sent to purchase the land. Eva felt concern when he announced that Bonnie and the children would go with him, but they preferred to remain together. Bonnie was sure she could get a part-time secretarial job to pay for trips to Disneyland and the thousand things she wanted the girls to see. And as a lifelong resident of New York State, Bonnie Franer had hated to be cold. The prospect of a winter in sunshine was too attractive to forestall. Now her younger daughter lay dead while the other clung to the man accused of the crime. Eva Broussard had driven them away from Albany and into the Adirondack deeps, weighted with apprehension. The act that robbed Samantha Franer of her life had also slammed like a fist through Eva's fascination with a collection of strangers and their encounters with tin men in the woods. A psychological inquiry that had seemed sufficient to occupy the rest of her life paled before the anguish of the man and child now huddled in her car. Eva felt a cold, murderous resentment for the man who had shattered their lives, whoever he was. He had shattered hers as well.