Strawgirl Read online

  STRAWGIRL

  Novels by Abigail Padgett

  Child of Silence

  Strawgirl

  STRAWGIRL

  ABIGAIL PADGETT

  Grateful acknowledgment is given for permission to quote from "In Response to Those Who Say The Mad Are Like Prophets," by Pamela Spiro Wagner, © 1993, from CAMI, the Journal of the California Alliance for the Mentally III. Permission granted by Dan E. Weisburd, editor and publisher.

  Copyright © 1994 by Abigail Padgett All rights reserved.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Padgett, Abigail.

  Strawgirl / Abigail Padgett.

  Title: Strawgirl. PS3566.A3197S77 1994

  813'.54—dc20 93-24179

  CIP

  In Memory of a Friendship

  Joan Garfinkel Glantz and Dassia Porper

  Acknowledgments

  To Adirondack poets Adelaide Crapsey and Jeanne Robert Foster, and Hudson River painter Charlotte Buell Coman, for the inspiration of their work.

  To the Iroquois Indian Museum of Schoharie, New York, for research assistance.

  To Mary Schifferli of the Albany Institute of History and Art, Albany, New York, for discovering women artists of the Hudson River School.

  To Robert Pell Dechame and Fort Ticonderoga Director Nicholas Westbrook for their gracious permission to view privately held work of artist Ella Ferris Pell.

  To Professor Marilyn J. Ireland of San Diego's California Western School of Law, for technical legal advice.

  Note: Shadow Mountain and its Seekers exist only in my imagination. The lodge, however, is really there in the guise of Hemlock Hall, near the town of Blue Mountain Lake, New York.

  ". . . and in the bloodshed of a yawning barn there is only straw, all there is, and she grasps for it."

  Pamela Spiro Wagner

  Chapter 1

  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 The outdated phones too quiet, the footsteps of other investigators in the hall too unhurried.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."

  The act, which wasn't entirely an act, worked. Head-ducking, a simple primate conciliatory gesture learned from watching Gorillas in the Mist, had proven useful to Bo more than once in defusing aggressive humans.

  "So how come you stopped the lithium?" Estrella inquired with slightly less feeling. "You've been doing okay."

  "Some people with mood disorders have to take medications all the time," Bo explained. "I just have to take it some of the time, and the side effects aren't exactly fun."

  Estrella adjusted a mother-of-pearl comb in her sleek coif and narrowed her eyes. "What side effects?"

  Bo saw no civilized way to avoid answering the question.

  "Weight gain, for one. On lithium I tend to feel like a jumbo marshmallow with the personality of a road kill. I long to pick up small objects in less than two minutes and react to cataclysmic world events in under a week. It's sort of like snorkeling in potato soup."

  "And it doesn't help your love life either, right?"

  "Es ... !"

  "Well, I knew it was something."

  "Es, I keep telling you I don't want a love life, as you so quaintly put it. Too many complications. I want to paint, that's all. Did I tell you two of the Indian primitives sold last week? I'm thinking of spending the money on a weekend at an elegant spa like the movie stars go to. You know, where they feed you grapes and pack you in warm mud?"

  "You can do that in my backyard for free," Estrella suggested. "So tell me why you're so antsy about that cult workshop this morning."

  The ordinariness of the day was wearing on Bo. The endless, nonsensical details juggled in elaborate patterns behind which, she sensed, other things hid.

  "It was just so stupid ..." she began as Madge Aldenhoven knocked, opened the door and swept into the small office in one efficient gesture.

  "I think you're going to be glad you attended the workshop on Satanism, Bo," the supervisor announced in tones resonant with vindication.

  "Why is that, Madge?" Bo queried, scanning the ceiling for cobwebs.

  "Your new case is a molest. The little girl was just brought to St. Mary's in an ambulance, badly injured. We have reason to believe this case may involve ritual abuse because some sort of bizarre symbol was painted on the child's abdomen. There's an older sister. What little information we have suggests that the most likely perpetrator is the mother's live-in boyfriend, known to be a member of a cult. I want you to go to St. Mary's immediately and assess the situation. It will probably be necessary to pick up the sister from school while the family is still at the hospital. Do your best. This is going to be a messy one."

  Bo admired a pearl and lapis ring on Aldenhoven's hand as it slid a new case file onto the desktop. The ring went well with a Chinese-blue linen mantua the supervisor wore over a simple knit sheath dress the color of alabaster. Madge, who never went out of the building, never confronted the reality documented in reports she merely read, could cultivate the illusion that this was a desirable line of work. Madge could dress as though she were the ladies' wear buyer for a conservative department store. It was, Bo acknowledged, a healthy self-deception. Across the manila folder's orange band the words "FRANER, SAMANTHA, 3 YEARS 6 MONTHS/HANNAH, 8 YEARS 1 MONTH" had been penned in heavy black marker. A chemical scent drifted from the fresh ink, dissolving the day's facade like rain on a dusty window. It wasn't an ordinary Wednesday after all. Bo had known it all along.

  "I don't want this case," she told Estrella when Madge had closed the door behind her. An odd feeling, similar to panic but full of sadness, rose in her throat. Another unthinkable set of horrors to sort through. Against the deceptive vapidity of the day the new case loomed like a signpost to hell, offering no hope in any direction. "I don't even want to work here," she groused with a petulance that seemed to have come from nowhere. "I can't face another molest case, with or without Satanic conspiracies. I just want to stay home and paint pictures."

  Bo listened to herself and heard the whiny voice of a spoiled brat. Still, the words were true. The case file on her desk shimmered poisonously.

  "I knew it!" Estrella pounced on the moment. "You're off your medication and you're getting weird. You never let work get to you before. You need the lithium, Bo. You can't handle this job without it."

  "Maybe," Bo pondered, stuffing the unread case file into a battered briefcase and grabbing her keys, "and then maybe there's just something peculiar about today ..."

  "May first," Estrella pointed sharply to a wall calendar. "We don't celebrate the Russian Revolution here, and Cinco de Mayo is still four days off. Nothing noteworthy about today."

  Bo's lips curled upward in a knowing grin. May first? Beltane! The day Caillech Bera ceased her wintry wailing and turned to stone until the following All Hallow's. Bo could almost hear her Irish grandmother telling the tale.

  "Aye, an' old Cally's a-turned to stone some lonely place tonight, her staff a-lost i' the gorse. We'll not see 'er for all the bright summer, we won't, not hear 'er, neither!"

  A comforting revelation, Bo smiled broadly. With the ancient symbol of madness put out of commission by a warming sun, people might safely walk the land wit
hout lithium. People might just quit whining and hang on to whatever jobs were paying their rent.

  "Thanks, Es," Bo waved at the door. "You're more help than you know."

  Chapter 2

  During a recently completed renovation, St. Mary's Hospital for Children had retained the services of an image consultant. Bo, swiftly assessing that the hospital's parking lot was full, eased her dowdy blue BMW into the only remaining parking spot—one marked RESERVED FOR CLERGY. Then she stuck out her tongue at the smiling magenta wooly mammoth whose painted fiberboard figure adorned every light pole. "Mabel," as the logo had been named by the image consultants, held strings to multicolored balloons in its long-extinct trunk, and wore a stethoscope around its neck. Bo found the creature aesthetically atrocious.

  "Why," she'd asked Dr. Andrew LaMarche, director of the hospital's child abuse unit, "would a children's hospital in southern California use a logo depicting an extinct elephant that never set foot south of Schenectady, New York?"

  LaMarche had, uncharacteristically, laughed aloud over his roasted Anaheim chili at a five-star steak house on the one occasion in six months on which Bo had agreed to dinner with him.

  "The idea," he explained, "was that children would see a prehistoric, long-haired elephant as strange, like being in the hospital is strange. And that the smile and bright colors would make the strangeness friendly. Of course the thing is hideous, but the concept's sound. Young children, basically, are able to identify familiar/unfamiliar and friendly/unfriendly constructs. It's helpful to adorn the hospital with repetitions of a figure that's at once unfamiliar and friendly. Hence, Mabel!"

  Bo sneered dramatically at the Mabel smiling into her windshield and pulled the Franer case file from her briefcase. Samantha Alice Franer, it told her, was a three-and-a-half-year-old Caucasian female who had been brought to St. Mary's Hospital after her mother, Bonnie Corman Franer, had taken her to a local pediatrician. The pediatrician, Susan Ling, M.D., had phoned the police after arranging for an ambulance to transport Samantha from her office to St. Mary's. According to Susan Ling's report, Samantha Franer had suffered internal injuries consistent with a sexual assault perpetrated sometime the previous day. According to Susan Ling, those injuries were serious.