Strawgirl Read online

  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—"

  "Please," his appeal had been direct and unflinching. "You've got to help me."

  She had agreed. And after polygraphs, hypnosis, batteries of tests, and analysis, Paul Massieu, an adjunct professor of anthropology at McGill University who loved camping in the Adirondacks, was revealed to be a marginally introverted personality with no evidence whatever of thought or affective disorder. Either he had been abducted by wraithlike humanoid figures in metallic clothing, and examined by them, or he had hallucinated the experience in whole or in part for reasons completely inconsistent with the entire history and practice of psychiatry. Eva Broussard didn't dismiss that possibility.

  But then, when word of her work with Massieu got out in Montreal's psychiatric community, others began to show up at her office. Most were so impaired that their narratives of extraterrestrial contacts were specious, either attention-seeking or delusional. Still, for every ten of them, one believable witness would appear. A fifty-four-year-old grocer from Malone, New York. A young computer skills teacher from Quebec City who wanted to be a fashion designer. A Roman Catholic grandmother of ten from Mishawawka, Indiana, who'd been on a tour of religious shrines when she, too, saw the strange beings.

  Eva Broussard had gone into seclusion for two months at a Carmelite convent on the St. Lawrence River near Cap-de-la-Madeleine. In silence and barefoot on the old limestone floors she'd considered the nature of cancer, which had claimed her left breast and might eventually claim her life. She had watched her dreams in the Iroquois way for the masked faces who would reveal her deepest need. "To know," the masks had murmured. "Your great need is simply to know." Then she'd pondered the motley collection of frightened people who told of a near-identical experience—contact with beings unlike any known human form.

  An original text of F. H. Bradley's Appearance and Reality arrived from Oxford and was carefully read. Experience, the Victorian philosopher told Eva, is what matters. Thinking about experience is a maze of misleading relational complexity. The experience is what it is; interpretations of it are flawed by attempts to describe it as like something else. Paul Massieu and the others had known an experience. Describing it in relational terms was just the way of the human mind. It might be like science-fiction fantasies familiar to Massieu and the others from novels and movies, but it was not, in reality, any kind of fiction at all. Something had happen
ed in the experience of these people. Eva Broussard decided to spend the remaining years of her life trying to identify what that something was. At sixty she felt that her very life, her experience and training, her travel and writing, had groomed her, prepared her, for precisely this. She regarded her decision to pursue the research as the most exciting moment of her life.

  Within another month she had closed her office and liquidated enough assets to purchase the old Adirondack camp beneath a mountain where Paul Massieu was examined in a silver craft by papery beings with huge, glassy-black eyes. The creatures smelled, he said, like the aromatic spice called mace.

  For Eva it had been a homecoming. Born on the Onondaga Reservation near Nedrow, New York, young Eva Blindhawk had only been taken in by relatives of her father in Montreal at seven, when her mother died of the same cancer Eva herself now fought. In the critical first five years of life she'd been an Iroquois Indian, an Onondaga from whose ranks the chiefa of the six Iroquois nations must, by ancient tradition, be chosen. She'd been the daughter of Naomi Blindhawk and granddaughter of a dream-woman who ordered the midwinter rituals. Tracing her lineage to one of the oldest longhouses, she knew herself a member of the Heron Clan. One of her great-great-grandmothers had named the very lake now hidden in mist below the lodge. Eva Broussard was home. But trouble was winging its desperate way from California. A fugitive man and frightened child, and all that would follow them.

  As members of the community gathered from adjacent cottages and climbed the maple tower stairs for the evening chant, Eva sighed and relaxed. Some of the Seekers, as they called themselves, believed that a technically perfect plainsong in human voice, beamed regularly into space from a transmitter atop Shadow Mountain, would entice a return of the frail, terrifying visitors. The chants, performed at sunrise and at sunset from the five-sided tower, were the most lovely, plaintive sound Eva had ever heard.

  Chapter 7

  Bo had delivered the paperwork on Hannah Franer to the district attorney's office at 3:00 P.M. His signature scrawled across the petition at 3:10 ensured that the eight-year-old girl was legally under the jurisdiction of San Diego County's Juvenile Court. A formality under the circumstances, the legal documents would ensure that police could seize the child without hindrance in the event that she were found. A "sibling petition," no more than a handful of paper in which a county assumed the duties of a parent when the real parent had "failed to protect."

  For the rest of the afternoon Bo worked another case, and brooded. The case involved an abandoned ten-year-old found by police in the closet of a fleabag hotel room where his mother lay dead on the floor, having freebased her way into the next world. The boy, now waiting at the county receiving home for whatever would happen next, said he had no relatives except a father named Lee John who'd "killed some dude" in Iowa, or maybe it was Idaho. When twenty-seven phone calls to corrections agencies in states beginning with I turned up no information whatever on a Lee John or John Lee Crowley, Bo wrote up a court report recommending that the boy be released

  for adoption. Then she stood outside the window of Madge Aldenhoven's office, smoking.

  No one would adopt Jonas Lee Crowley. That was a joke. In fact, hell would freeze before the hypothetical nice couple would welcome into their hypothetical loving home a skinny, snarling boy with hate in his ice-blue eyes, lice in his hair, and a hobby of peeing on shoppers from the top of department store escalators. Jonas would spend the next eight years in foster homes and correctional schools. After that he would be released to the streets where he would unquestionably sire another generation of misery. If there were a way to stop the cycle of ruin she saw every day, Bo couldn't imagine what it might be.

  Her own childhood home in Boston had seemed perfectly awful at the time. A little sister who was deaf, everybody having to use sign language. Her mother, a violinist with the Boston Symphony, constantly practicing in the dining room. The scent of imported tobacco drifting from her father's meerschaum in a living room converted to library for his endless and highly paid research into antiquated patents and copyrights. And a paternal grandmother whose annual summer visits from Ireland wreaked havoc. In retrospect Bo knew her childhood to have been a well-managed haven despite the problems her family faced. This job had forced her to see what hell life could be for children, and the hell those children would later create for their children, ad infinitum. She wished her parents had lived long enough for her to thank them.

  "You look like your best friend es morte." Estrella butchered the common remark while struggling through the parched bushes outside their supervisor's office. "You just smoke out here to irritate her, don't you?"

  "No, I like the view," Bo answered, gazing through a chain-link fence at four lanes of traffic on Genesee Avenue. "It's the best part of this job."

  Estrella grabbed a limb of a relatively healthy bottlebrush tree for balance and stood squarely on two-inch heels. "I hate it when you get nasty," she said. "I think—"

  "I know. You think I should go back on the lithium." Bo ground the cigarette under a shoe and retrieved the smashed filter. "But it's not that. I know when I need medication, and right now I don't. I'm just tired of pretending it's normal to spend my days chatting about things that would gag most convicted felons. I mean, how many people do you know in the real world who schmooze over lunch about how to get evidence of oral copulation on infants? Or show each other pictures of roach-infested diapers, not to mention tire marks on—"

  Estrella grimaced and held up a hand. "Spare me. I work here, too. You just don't think about it, is all. You just do the job and then go home and forget it, which reminds me—"

  "The kid on the case I got this morning," Bo interrupted, tossing the filter into a trash can by the door, "died on the operating table. She looked like a cherub, a Rubens maybe, and she's dead. The mother creates a whole new meaning for the term 'self-hatred,' the boyfriend's run off with the older sister, and that publicity shark of a psychologist is getting miles of exposure screaming 'The devil did it!' Reinert seems to believe there's ritual abuse involved simply because the boyfriend's in some cult, even though we don't know what kind of cult. LaMarche has gone off the deep end defending the suspected perp and the mother ..." Bo paused for a breath, "and even though I've eaten nothing but one Granny Smith apple and a half pint of skim milk all day, I'm still fat. I think it's time to find another job."

  "You're not fat, but hunger can make people mean," said Estrella, unaccountably beaming. "You don't need another job. I think we've found the answer."

  "What was the question?" Bo asked suspiciously. Estrella looked like a cat with the keys to the parakeet sanctuary. "Will you promise me something?"

  "No promises on Wednesday. Old Irish superstition."

  Back in the office Estrella fussed over a tube of lipstick found in the bottom of her purse. "Not even for an amiga who may or may not take care of your dog while you run off to a fat farm this weekend?"

  "You win," Bo conceded. She wouldn't entrust Mildred, her crotchety old fox terrier, to anyone else. "What do I have to promise?"

  Estrella appeared to inspect the glazing of their office window. "That you'll go out with LaMarche the next time he asks you. Just go out and relax and have a good time."

  "Deal." After the day's encounter Bo was sure his interest had waned, perhaps perished entirely. Just as well.

  Later at home in her Ocean Beach apartment, Bo retrieved Mildred from day care with an elderly neighbor, slipped on faded jeans that had, in another life, belonged to her ex-husband, and headed for Dog Beach. The expanse of sand designated for San Diego's canine population had cinched Bo's decision to relocate to the coastal city after federal money for social service programs on New Mexico's reservations dried up. Where else would they set aside a whole beach for dogs? And just up the street was a fashionable dogwash designed specifically for Dog Beach patrons. She'd bought Mildred a vinyl-coated foam life vest at the dogwash boutique, signed a contract with Child Protective Services
, and found a nearby apartment with an ocean view the same day.

  Mildred dug in the sand as if hundreds of prime filets lay just beneath the surface, and barked greetings at a neighboring basset. Bo sat and threw a ratty tennis ball for Mildred until it was appropriated by a show-off Doberman puppy whose owner also owned the local pizza parlor.

  "You owe me one slab with garlic and anchovies," she yelled at the man. "That tennis ball's an antique!"

  "So are my anchovies," he yelled back.

  Offshore a fuzzy gray band hovered at the horizon, moving toward land. The marine layer. Perennial bane of tourists who believed the myth of southern California's endless sun. In fact, until late June San Diego would be awash in weak, salty haze until 11:00 every morning when it burned off, only to return at dusk. It was coming in again. Bo relished the fog's predictability. Found its slow approach comforting as Mildred flung arcs of sand in all directions, including into Bo's hair. Without interest she noticed a pair of denimed legs bisecting the horizon. Ragged cowboy boots that might have been new at the siege of the Alamo. When they didn't move she glanced upward, straight into a shadowed face she associated mainly with Windsor knots and antiseptic.

  "I'm sorry I've been a beast today," said Andrew LaMarche. "If you'll permit ..." The word came out "pear-mit." "I'd like to repair the damage."

  “How? By rounding up a few stray longhorns before the lariat tricks? Don't tell me. Let me guess." Bo sighed. "Estrella has asked you to rescue me from madness by doing John Wayne imitations, right?" Under a mound of sand between her hands Bo imagined she was burying Estrella Benedict slowly, alive.

  "I'd like to take you to dinner," LaMarche suggested in businesslike tones, "and explain my behavior about the Franer case."

  The pediatrician looked, Bo thought, like an ad for designer prisonwear. His blue workshirt lacked only a number stenciled over its pocket.

  "I've been set up," she told Mildred.