Strawgirl Page 3

  Eva Broussard sat motionless in one of the hickory rockers on the broad porch below the tower. The story of the consumptive bride was to her a soothing mantra, a mental chant possessing infinite avenues for inquiry. Had the Victorian lady jumped, or fallen? Was she pushed? And why a tower of five sides, crafted with such obvious architectural difficulty, buttressed between second-story casement windows? Had the tower been, really, a prison? Had death been the only possible escape?

  Eva pondered a similar, if evolutionarily recent, human hunger for a way out of biological bondage. The hunger for something beyond the demands, and then decay, of flesh. That hunger had produced religions. And it had undoubtedly produced the experience that brought her here to document its influence on a hundred people. A hundred people who had in the Adirondack night seen beings who seemed not of this planet. A hundred people frightened and exalted, forever altered, longing for a return of the strange visitors who might, just might, know a way out other than death.

  A tall, ropelike woman of mixed French-Canadian and Iroquois blood, Eva exhibited the tensionless grace of a high-wire artist even when still. But her otter-brown eyes were pure French, a Gallic amalgam of passion and rationality. Tugging a creamy knit turban from her head, she ran bronzed fingers through two inches of stubby, chalk-white hair. The chemotherapy that had caused her ebony mane to fall out in clumps was a necessary hedge against a cancer that might or might not abridge a life already sixty years in the making. But it had drained the color from her hair forever. Not that it mattered.

  A uniquely beautiful woman by any standard, Eva had cherished only that part of her body which lay behind her eyes. Her mind—superbly trained, boundlessly curious, always rational. She had observed no evidence that her mind would survive her bodily death, however desirable that hope might seem. And after the sharp warning implicit in cancer, the realization had brought her to this odd locale in the mountains of New York State, where she watched and documented a particular groping of the human soul toward understanding. The endeavor would be the last work of her life; its significance was paramount to her. She wanted to leave behind a record, something useful to future generations. The study would be her legacy.

  Eva Broussard did not believe that actual spacecraft had brought extraterrestrial beings to earth. The near-impossibility of transporting anything with physical mass across cosmic distances precluded that occurrence, and probably always would. Neither did she dismiss all claims of sightings as error or delusion. Hadn't the pioneering psychologist Carl Jung suggested that the first sightings in the 1940s might herald a change in the human brain? Perhaps that change, occurring for unknown reasons in some people but not in others, enabled certain individuals under certain circumstances to perceive weightless images beamed from elsewhere in the universe. And perhaps these images, routinely described as "silvery" and only visible at night, had been here all along, their creators waiting millennia in the past for the brain of a race of apes to mature. To "see." Eva's curiosity about those who "saw" and about how that experience would reorder their behavior was the thrumming pulse of her life. The only thing she cared about. Until now. Before today's phone call from California. Before the incomprehensible death of Samantha Franer.

  Eva searched her mind for a link to the child, some particular memory that would define the personality now vanished. But there was nothing. A healthy, attractive little girl, toddling energetically behind the other children last summer when members of the group with school-age children were present. Eva remembered chubby exuberance, platinum curls, an obvious contrast with the older sister, Hannah, who was shy and reclusive. But nothing more. Samantha had still been a baby, and Eva did not share the traditional womanly fascination with barely verbal people. The sadness, she realized as conflicting winds raised angled ripples on the lake below, lay in the fact that whatever Samantha Franer might have become was now an impossibility. In the face of that, Eva wondered if her own intellectual pursuits might not seem ludicrous.

  She had purchased the lodge for its proximity to areas of the Adirondacks in which sightings were reported. Paul Massieu and others who'd seen lights, saucer-shaped vehicles, and frail, shimmering humanoid figures while alone on some mountain escarpment spent as much time as possible at the compound, assessing their similar experiences. The expenses of utilities, food, and a kitchen staff from nearby Night Heron Village were shared on a monthly basis by everyone present. And in exchange for accommodations the Seekers willingly signed releases and underwent exhaustive interviews with Dr. Eva Blindhawk Broussard, who had never seen one of the silver people, but who took their stories seriously. Each Seeker provided a social and family history as well as medical and psychiatric records, and agreed to update all information twice yearly for the next decade. A comprehensive database. An intriguing longitudinal study that promised to provide clues to the psychosocial bedrock of an important shift in human awareness. A paradigm shift that as yet made no sense, although one day it would. The same could not be said of Samantha Franer, whose future had been canceled. Eva pondered a suprahuman ethic that permitted immortality for computerized data, but allowed an innocent life to be snuffed by another's depravity. The model brought her to her feet in rage at its cruelty.

  Skating barefoot across a lawn only faintly green with spring grass, Eva Broussard stopped beside the woody spill of Madagascar periwinkle, legacy of a woman whose death, like Samantha's, remained a mystery. Amid the million pale green leaves not a single bud had emerged. It was too early.

  It was, she admitted, gazing over the lake her own Iroquois ancestors had named, probably too early for many things. Too early to comprehend a human behavior that could result in the death of a child. Certainly too early to comprehend the human endeavor to find a link with the universe. The purpose for which she'd bought Night Heron Lodge, nestled beneath Shadow Mountain. The purpose for which a hundred people came there to stare into the sky and wait for visitors who might come again. Who might have answers to questions about life and death. Who might show the way out.

  That it was too early had been made clear by the unconscionable death of a little girl. That death might destroy the group. It would curtail the intent of Eva Broussard's carefully framed research. It would confuse the mystery that had by whatever means created an experience that several rational people interpreted as visitation by nonearthly beings.

  Now outsiders would come, asking questions for which there would be no solid answers. The Seekers on Shadow Mountain would be dragged into a very earthly, and very ugly, reality. They would be ridiculed, labeled. The bond of their common experience would be eroded. Worse, they would be accused of complicity in one of the most loathsome crimes possible—the sexual violation and murder of an innocent child. Beside that reality the hope of an end to cosmic loneliness seemed pitifully premature.

  Eva Broussard pulled a blade of grass and held it to the waxy, dimming sun. What possible set of facts, she thought, could explain the senseless horror of Samantha Franer's death? From the darkening lake a chill breeze wrapped her skirts about her legs. There was no answer.

  Chapter 4

  According to a check run by police on the address given St. Mary's Hospital, Bonnie Franer had signed a six-month lease on the three-bedroom house in a quiet central San Diego neighborhood shortly after Christmas. Dar Reinert shared the information with Bo as he drove and wolfed a Mounds bar. The candy's sweetish coconut smell gave the interior of the car a sickly tropical flavor.

  "Why would Franer have signed the lease rather than Massieu?" Bo said from the passenger's seat, trying to ignore the odor. She felt oddly uninvolved with the case, and yet pulled toward some dimension of it that seemed peripheral. Something distant, almost cerebral. If she really decided to quit her job, she realized, this would be her last case. Maybe the nagging tug toward irrelevant facts was just a way of making the break. At least it wasn't manicky. She felt none of the dramatic emotional response that would signal a need for lithium.

  "We ran a ch
eck. Massieu's Canadian, not a U.S. citizen," Reinert replied, easing his eight-cylinder Olds diagonally across the driveway of the house. "Some people will only rent to legal citizens. Cuts down on the problem of a bunch of illegal Mexicans renting a place and tearing it apart."

  Bo considered launching an argument that "illegal Mexicans" were no more likely to tear a house apart than, say, "legal Norwegians," but abandoned the idea. What Reinert suggested was often true. A cultural dilemma created when agrarian people from villages as yet unblessed by electricity or modern plumbing walked hundreds of miles to work north of an invisible line called "U.S.-Mexico Border." Unsophisticated people, who might keep chickens in the laundry room of a rental house or cook them over Sterno in the living room. Reinert's expansive maroon car, she noticed, effectively blocked any possible exit from the closed, two-car garage.

  "Nobody's here," she said. The beige stucco ranch with its fading brown shutters and bare, weedy lawn provided a wealth of information. Keenly aware of nuance, Bo missed none of it. "They haven't lived here long, and they don't intend to stay." A network of cracks in the unwatered lawn created a miniature badland. "There aren't any bikes or toys in the yard, which means they haven't bought any. And no personal touches. The house looks exactly as it did when they rented it."

  "Whaddaya mean?" Reinert sniffed, watching the living room picture window for movement. "Place looks okay to me."

  "That's the point," Bo went on. "People invariably mark their living spaces, personalize them. A butterfly decal on the mailbox, plaster St. Francis in the yard. Maybe a plant or a lamp visible in a window. Something that changes the physical structure into a habitation. This place is just a structure. The people haven't created any identity here. Their hearts are someplace else."

  "So?" Reinert opened his door.

  "So they're not going to stay. It's temporary, like a motel room. Nobody feels compelled to personalize a motel room; there's no point."

  "Women pick up stuff like that." The detective nodded fondly as Bo followed him toward the slightly warped front door. She kept to herself the fact that any man with a diagnosis of manic depression would probably exhibit the same sensibilities. It came with the territory.

  The house seeped a sort of breathy grayness, the hallmark of places where no one is. There would, Bo sensed as Reinert removed the Ruger from beneath his blazer, also be no dog or cat. The grayness lacked even an animal presence.

  Dar Reinert's fist thumped on the hollow-core door as he bellowed, "Massieu? Open up. Police."

  Beside the drab rental the adjoining property seemed to have been groomed as a set for a country-and-western video. A picket fence banked with waist-high scarlet geraniums bordered a verdant lawn punctuated by an artistically placed bird-bath, a small gazebo of white lath, and an unidentifiable piece of antique farm equipment. From a bed of Charlotte Armstrong roses between the geraniums a salty male voice roared, "There's nobody home over there! They've been gone since 7:00. You won't need that gun!" The man, about eighty and dressed in painter's pants and a pajama shirt, grinned sheepishly from his position flat on the ground amid the roses. "Been skittish around guns since the war," he explained. "Lost an eye at Pearl."

  Bo wondered for the millionth time in her life just how she was able to know, without even caring, that the old codger was lying. He had a glass eye, all right. But he hadn't lost the real one defending Pearl Harbor.

  "It's an acute sensitivity to tone and presentation," Lois Bittner had tried to explain years ago. "You're a walking litmus test for imperceptible clues that anyone else would miss. Have you given any thought," the wiry psychiatrist lapsed into her characteristic accent, "to a chob as a chypsy?"

  Bo smiled to herself as Reinert made easy work of unlocking the flimsy door with the edge of his tie clasp.

  "Isn't this illegal?" she said.

  "Door was unlocked," the detective recited. "I feared that the older child might be alone in the house, injured and unable to call out. On that cause I entered the premises accompanied by a representative of Child Protective Services, Ms. Bradley."

  Reinert's written report of the entry would say precisely that. But they couldn't stay beyond a few minutes or remove any evidence.

  The living room, carpeted in a threadbare chartreuse shag, was completely empty. A dining ell to the left contained a Formica table and four mismatched chairs that could have been purchased in any thrift store in North America. Four plastic placemats in a sunny yellow showed evidence of regular cleaning, and matched a basket of silk daisies in the table's center. The kitchen was equally tidy, if devoid of personality. There was nothing about the place to suggest that anybody really lived there. There was also nothing to suggest diabolical secrets.

  "I don't get a sense of anything unwholesome going on here," Bo said tentatively. Houses sometimes seemed to whisper of events they had sheltered. This one merely yawned. "What makes you think this Massieu's involved in a cult?"

  Reinert was checking the contents of the refrigerator. "The mother told the admitting clerk at St. Mary's that they were in San Diego so Massieu could buy some land out in the desert for this New York group she called the Seekers."

  "So? California's full of people seeking something different. It's the primary pastime. Crystals, channeling, past lives, Eastern mysticism, Zen dentistry—it's just openness, curiosity. What's wrong with that?"

  "People get a little too curious, you ask me," Reinert answered enigmatically from a cabinet beneath the sink. "Makes 'em crazy."

  Marveling at the non sequitur, Bo chose not to respond to it and congratulated herself. There would be no point in explaining to Dar Reinert what "crazy" really meant or that it could not be the result of curiosity, a quality already erroneously damned for its ability to kill cats. Moving into a hall accessible from both kitchen and living room, Bo inspected a bathroom situated between two bedrooms. On a shelf was a half-used pack of pink bathroom tissue and a large bottle of baby shampoo. Bo remembered pale curls and shivered. The baby shampoo would have been for Samantha. On the toilet seat and on the floor bright red stains were drying.

  "Dar," she whispered, "better see this."

  "Mother said she was bleeding this morning," he said gruffly behind her. "Bastard must've torn her up last night. She goes to bed. The blood pools in her abdominal cavity while she's sleeping. Then when she gets up ..."

  Bo touched the door frame in an attempt to curb a wave of nausea. What had been done to Samantha Franer did not bear close scrutiny. Not without throwing up, at least.

  You've seen this before, Bradley. Remember your job is to protect the sister. Let the police worry about the perp.

  "Well, well, looka here ..." Reinert singsonged from one of the bedrooms. The tone made it clear that he'd found something he was looking for.

  Bo smoothed her forehead with the heels of both hands. "What is it?" she asked, entering the room Samantha and Hannah Franer had obviously shared. Red, white, and blue Raggedy Ann sheets adorned a double-bed mattress on the floor. Above a red-enameled bureau whose half-open drawers revealed children's socks, Tshirts, pajamas, hung a face. Or a head. A thing woven of straw with protuberant, empty eye sockets, a sharp nose, and an oval mouth that appeared to be blowing. Bo recognized the mouth as similar to one in an Irish children's book her sister, Laurie, had loved. The north wind's mouth in a cloud, gusting winter over Lough Derg. The memory of Laurie was, as usual, unsettling.

  "I dunno what the hell it is," the detective snarled at the hollow eyes, "but didn't the pediatrician's report say somebody painted a spiked face on the poor kid's belly before he raped her? This looks like a spiked face to me, made of straw or something. So what does that say?"

  "I don't know what it says," Bo answered. The straw face seemed to tell some story far removed from the terrible stains in the bathroom. A story Bo sensed in the same way she could tell, even in windowless rooms, when clouds covered the sun. But a closer story was that Hannah Franer, if she were still alive, had just entered a wo
rld Bo knew very well. A world in which there only used to be a little sister.

  "It says these people are into some weird stuff that may involve sex with children. Ritual abuse stuff. That psychologist, Ganage, says they do it because destroying innocence pleases Satan, or something like that. And with this devil mask right here in the kids' room, it's safe to guess Mom might just have gone along with it. Time for a warrant—at least accessory to felony child sexual assault. I'm gonna call it in ..."

  Bo watched the straw mask. It stared wildly at nothing, howling soundlessly. Things were moving too fast, assumptions being made with senseless velocity. Accustomed to occasional manic episodes in which her own perceptions accelerated beyond the boundaries of reality, Bo now felt like an inert stump rooted in a hurricane. Something was off, wrong, skewed. Why was everybody in such a hurry to jump on the devil worship thing? The situation, Bo gauged uneasily, was assuming the framework of mania. Too fast. Out of control. But recognizing it didn't mean there was anything she could do about it.

  "I want you to interview the mother as soon as we get back to the hospital," Reinert said from the kitchen where he was on the phone arranging a warrant for the arrest of Bonnie Franer. "I hear you're magic getting the truth outta people. I want you to break her. Now. Before she gets a lawyer."

  It was perfectly legal. The cops and CPS workers did it whenever necessary. A suspect could not be interrogated by police without counsel. But a social worker could interview the suspect in order to secure information that might affect the welfare of that suspect's children. Whatever was said in that interview would be submitted to juvenile court in a confidential report prepared to document recommendations for the child's placement and protection. In theory, that report could be seen by no one outside juvenile court. In practice, the report or even the social worker could be subpoenaed to other courts, and the CPS worker could simply tell the cops anything she or he thought they needed to know. In actuality, if Bonnie Franer chose to tell Bo Bradley that her live-in boyfriend, Paul Massieu, raped her three-year-old daughter, Samantha, in a Satanic ritual involving bug-eyed masks, she might as well have told KTUV's evening news.