Strawgirl

by Abigail Padgett

  "Dia's muir dhuit," she pronounced the traditional "Mother of God be with you" salutation. "Even though ye've forgot the true sign!"

  Bridget Mairead O'Reilly had told her granddaughters a hundred times that no true child of Eire would display any symbol but the harp. Still, the popular American symbol for all things Irish reminded Bo of her heritage. A heritage in which intuition had value. And her intuition was suggesting a picture in which a sexual pervert was free to select his next victim from a population of children in training pants.

  The appalling notion did not diminish as Bo directed the little car to the right on Route 30, across the Mohawk River and through the town of Amsterdam. Miles later the thought had become an unprovable certainty. A sign announcing the manufacture of "Havlick Snowshoes" in a village provided the final straw. Bo had forgotten the reality of snow. Webbed contraptions for walking on it seemed, at best, apocryphal. Could there really be a company with employees at this very moment constructing snowshoes? Shepherd's crooks? How about butter churns? Everything was relative.

  "Le monde," Andrew LaMarche's phrase rumbled pointedly in the wind from the open car window. The world. A world. One of many. This one contained snowshoes, an unknown cult, and a bereaved child who must be returned to the jurisdiction of the California court that had assumed the burden of protecting her from her sister's fate. Except that if Paul Massieu were innocent, then Hannah Franer was in no peril. And the swift action of police in two states and Bo's own hurried journey were exercises in futility. Like snowshoes in San Diego.

  An informative marker placed by the state of New York informed Bo that the damming of the Sacandaga River had permanently immersed several small towns. She glanced at the steel-gray water and wondered what worlds were lost beneath it. Comparisons to the system for which she worked were inescapable. As Andrew LaMarche had pointed out, no one had bothered to ask about the world in which Samantha Franer lived. They merely obliterated it with their own. And their own was one in which the perpetrator in a molest was usually the mother's boyfriend, especially if he were odd in some way. And especially if he then kidnapped the victim's older sibling and fled across state lines. That was the world of the juvenile court, the police, the agencies of child protection. It was, Bo conceded as Shadow Mountain rose bluely in the distance, only one world.

  "Ye ken things," her grandmother had explained. "It's in the family. Be sure to heed what ye ken."

  "He's still out there," Bo thought with distaste. "I'm running all over the country, Reinert's probably on another case already, LaMarche is in a tux somewhere giving lectures over chicken-in-aspic, and this sick slimebag is going scot-free!"

  An hour later she found the "cult hideout" Madge Aldenhoven had described. It was a sprawling Victorian camp with two boathouses and ten smaller cottages nestled between the looming mountain and a lake strewn with little islands. To her dismay, none of the people lounging on the wide porch of the main building seemed to speak English.

  "I need to speak with the person in charge," she informed a grandmotherly woman in a hickory rocker. "I know Hannah Franer is here. I have to return her to California."

  The woman's clothes were American, and she involuntarily pursed her lips at the mention of Hannah's name.

  "No, no," she fumbled to hide an issue of People magazine she'd been reading. "No English." The second word was pronounced "Ing-glish." The Midwest, Bo guessed. Not rural.

  An immense bearded man clad in a monk's robe covered by an Indian blanket rose from a small table where he was either taking apart or assembling a vegetable steamer.

  "Je m'appelle Napoleon Pigeon," he announced, his French accent unmistakably native. "Et vous?"

  "Mr. Pigeon," Bo spluttered, marveling at the name, "I'm Bo Bradley from San Diego's Child Protective Services. I'm here to escort Hannah Franer back to San Diego where she is in the legal custody of the juvenile court. Could you take me to her?"

  "Je ne parle pas anglais," he answered, revealing tobacco-stained teeth. One upper incisor had been set with a gold quarter moon that caught and reflected the setting sun. Beneath bushy eyebrows the man's aquamarine eyes glowed with a wild, undirected kindness.

  Uh-oh.Basic fanatic here, Bradley. Probably hasn't eaten meat since his pet canary died in 1963 and spends his days trying to communicate with lichen. Harmless, but you're wasting your breath.

  "Thanks anyway." She smiled and moved toward a screened door festooned with millwork. Inside, groups of people read or played cards in a large L-shaped living room boasting no fewer than three stone fireplaces. The floor and ceiling bore designs of elaborate inlaid maple. The walls appeared to have been papered in canvas. Everyone smiled and nodded politely as Bo entered. Everyone who spoke, spoke in French. Flustered, Bo remembered that the lodge was only about an hour's drive from the French-speaking Canadian province of Quebec. Unfortunately there was no eight-year-old girl in sight.

  "I'll be back," Bo announced irritably. She was certain that at least half the fifty people present understood her perfectly.

  A scent of ginger and garlic drifted from a kitchen behind the spacious dining room. It reminded Bo that, diet or not, she was starving.

  "I'll bring the police if necessary."

  Nobody batted an eye. They weren't afraid of her, and merely murmured among themselves phrases she couldn't understand.

  Defeated, Bo stomped back to her car and considered her options. She could involve the local police. They would have to accompany her to the lodge if she requested their help. They could kick in the door, seize the child, arrest anyone who obstructed the process. Madge Aldenhoven, in fact, would insist on it. Bo Bradley would prefer to avoid it.

  Back in the village named Night Heron for the lake below, Bo rented a room in a motel called the Iroquois Inn. Then she deliberately placed a call to San Diego's Child Abuse Hotline rather than to Madge Aldenhoven's office number.

  "Just tell Madge I've run into a snag, but nothing big, and I'll call her tomorrow," she reported briskly. Then she hung up before the hotline worker could ask for her phone number.

  A photograph of a buck whitetailed deer in snow stared from above the motel's bed. Bo stared back and wondered what to do next. How to get inside the group without causing further trauma to the child. LaMarche had said he'd be in New York City today, addressing a conference on child abuse. By now he'd be at the speaker's table of a banquet crawling with experts on matters not normally discussed at banquets. With an abandon she chose not to dissect, Bo placed a call to LaMarche's service in San Diego and left the address and phone number of the Iroquois Inn.

  "I need a French translator on the Franer case," she said. "Please ask Dr. LaMarche to phone me."

  In the pine-paneled coffee shop of the inn she enjoyed an enormous hamburger and four cups of decaf while penning a postcard to Madge Aldenhoven. The postcard featured a yellow-rumped warbler eating a caterpillar.

  "It's a different world here," she noted. "Love, Bo."

  Chapter 11

  At 7:00 social worker Rombo Perry placed his office phone neatly atop a midnight blue corduroy throw pillow stuffed in the bottom drawer of his desk. Then he placed a matching pillow over the offending instrument and kicked the drawer shut. On his desk was a steaming thermos of hazelnut coffee Martin had left for him at the admitting desk only an hour ago.

  Other staff on the 3:00 to 11:00 shift at San Diego County's grimly underfunded psychiatric facility usually went out for their union-mandated half-hour dinner break. Sometimes Rombo went along, more for the sake of goodwill than desire to eat greasy burritos in somebody's car. But usually he barricaded himself in the immaculate cubicle of his office, read the paper, relaxed. He and Martin would have a light snack when he got home at 11:30. Maybe a Parmesan omelette or a small salad tossed in rice vinegar. They'd worked it out years ago. A sensible schedule for a couple in which one ran a catering business from home and the other was bound by the strictures of hospital work.

  Rombo was proud of the fact t
hat in five years he'd never missed a day of work. His clients could count on him, just as Martin could. An ordinary, decent, hardworking man was all Rombo had ever wanted to be. And now, after years in which an addiction to alcohol made that goal impossible, Rombo had it all. For a near-sighted thirty-eight-year-old gay man who'd never top a hundred and sixty pounds no matter how much iron he pumped, it was a pretty good life. Especially, Rombo grinned to himself, for a gay man burdened with a name you'd only give to a St. Bernard. Sober for seven years now. With Martin for five. A meaningful job that he liked. Rombo Perry was content.

  Unfolding the afternoon edition of San Diego's only daily, he nudged his new black wireframe glasses upward on a boxer's crooked nose. The front page carried the story he was looking for. The story about the new patient, Bonnie Franer.

  Somebody named Dr. Cynthia Ganage was quoted repeatedly as believing Bonnie Franer's three-year-old daughter had been the victim of a "sexual Satanist." Ganage insinuated that a large Satanic cult might be operating in San Diego. For that reason, she told reporters, she would immediately relocate her professional offices from Los Angeles to San Diego. She had, in fact, already leased office space in an unfinished downtown office building. Until she could move in she would continue her practice from a suite at the elegant U.S. Grant Hotel.

  "As a specialist in the ritual abuse of children," Cynthia Ganage said, "I've pledged full cooperation with police and Child Protective Services."

  Rombo shook his head. As a psychiatric social worker he was familiar with the interface of myth and mind. During psychosis people sometimes said they actually were popular religious figures, or had been singled out for special responsibilities or for persecution by such figures. Once stabilized, Rombo's clients were uniformly puzzled by the clarity of their experiences. "I know there aren't any devils," one had told him years ago, "but that doesn't change the fact that every third person on the bus is one. Don't ask me how, but I can tell. I know it's crazy, but it doesn't feel crazy; it feels like the most real thing I've ever known!" The human brain, Rombo acknowledged, was wired for terrors so deep and joys so exultant that names must be given to cap the sanity-threatening experiences. Devil—God. And whole cultures would react like Pavlov's dogs when one of the names was mentioned.

  Disclaimers by the police department's public relations liaison did little to buffer the impact of the newspaper story. Neither did a sidebar on page four featuring the president of the San Diego Ecumenical Council warning against sensationalism in spiritual matters. The paper had handled it with kid gloves, but nothing could diminish the tabloid aura of the story. No mention was made of the fact that the mother, Bonnie Franer, was in a locked psychiatric facility under suicide watch. Rombo was sure the omission reflected nothing more than Cynthia Ganage's ignorance of the situation. Had she known, she would have used the fact to advantage, as she was using the primitive facts of human psychology. Ganage was, Rombo assessed with distaste, a real pterodactyl. A media harpy of the most repugnant stripe. The knowledge only reinforced his sense of protectiveness toward Bonnie Franer.

  He'd done the intake interview himself, not that it was actually an interview. The poor creature had merely hunched on a chair in his office, rocking and clawing at herself with pale, trembling fingers. She'd said nothing. Later he'd sat with her until the sedative took effect and she collapsed on her bed in a drugged sleep.

  They could only keep her for seventy-two hours. Then the law required her release. It would be Rombo Perry's job to discharge Bonnie Franer to some intermediate setting where she could receive support and care. Except there wasn't any such place. Rombo knew he'd discharge this client to the street with an antidepressant prescription in her pocket, just like all the others. There wouldn't even be money for cab fare. There wasn't really enough to keep the understaffed crisis unit open. The county had been juggling funds for years, and psychiatric services were invariably the first on everybody's cutback list.

  To say that nobody cared about people with psychiatric problems, Rombo acknowledged for perhaps the ten thousandth time in his career, was to put it kindly. What people really wanted, he suspected, was for the neurobiologically ill simply to vanish. Get out of sight. Go away. Die. They were just too unpleasant. They raised too many questions, demolished too many myths.

  As a young man Rombo Perry had thought the stigma attached to homosexuality was about as virulent as hate could get. He'd learned to fight because of it. Been a promising welterweight in college and later, working the Chicago boxing scene, before the booze dragged him down. But being gay, he realized later, was a picnic compared to being labeled mentally ill.

  Snapping the paper shut he decided to check on Bonnie Franer and warn the psych techs to keep the Union-Tribune out of sight. It would only upset the tormented mother to see it.

  In the lounge a few people were watching a TV movie featuring singing pirates. A man in jeans and a cowboy hat, admitted yesterday with a tentative diagnosis of obsessive-compulsive disorder, spoke animatedly on the wall phone by the water fountain. He seemed to be negotiating the sale of a tractor.

  "How is Mrs. Franer doing?" Rombo asked the tech heading out of the nurses' station with a clipboard, battery-powered thermometer, and a portable blood pressure cuff.

  "Fine twenty minutes ago," the woman answered. "Groggy, but calm. I'm about to go around again."

  On orders from the admitting physician, Bonnie Franer would be monitored every twenty minutes. Her vital signs and mental status would be noted, and the information filed in her chart. If she became agitated she would receive additional medication. Straitjackets hadn't been used for a quarter century.

  "I'll check on her," Rombo volunteered. "You go ahead and do the others."

  The door was slightly ajar and the room dimly lit by a fifteen-watt night-light that could not be turned off. Gently Rombo pushed the door open and whispered, "Mrs. Franer? It's Mr. Perry, your social worker. How are you doing?"

  The rumpled bed was empty, and Rombo's first assumption was that the woman had wakened and left the room in search of a bathroom or the water fountain. But then, even though his graduate training had included thorough analysis of this possibility and he'd been to countless workshops on its prevention, he gasped and froze at the reality.

  Bonnie Franer's body hung unnaturally still across the wire-webbed window, framed by a yellow sodium light on the street outside. A hospital bedsheet straining at her neck was snagged by its selvage edge to the top of one of the window bars. From the sharp angle at which her head lolled against her gaunt chest, Rombo knew her neck was broken. Instinctively he ran to gather up her weight, anyway, and ripped the sheet loose from its mooring on the vertical bar.

  "Nurse!" he yelled over his shoulder. Running feet answered immediately. And pointlessly.

  Bonnie Franer, sedated and stripped of belts, shoelaces, all pointed or sharp objects, confined in a space containing no breakable glass, mirrors, accessible electrical circuits, lamp cords, or weight-bearing objects more than three feet off the floor, had succeeded in taking her own life. Rombo lay the lifeless body on the bed and felt a chill spread in patches over his skin. The frail woman who'd sat rocking in his office wasn't there anymore. Whoever she was, whatever her life had been, was gone. The chill circled his right calf and then reproduced itself on both of his ears. The word "suicide" framed itself again and again in his mind, and wasn't enough. The word couldn't begin to encompass the complexity that lay before him.

  As two nurses, a psych tech, and the patient in cowboy boots hovered over the bed, Rombo tried to make sense of what had happened. She'd climbed up on the seldom-used radiator, apparently, and pushed out the screen at the top of the window. Then she'd tried to tie the sheet around one of the vertical bars covering the window from the outside, but the knot hadn't held. At the lurch of her weight the knot had pulled loose, but a fold of the fabric over the top of the bar had caught and ripped through to the tightly woven selvage edge. That had been sufficient to support he
r hundred and two pounds. The patient in cowboy boots was beginning to wring his hands and pace in a precise diamond pattern beside the bed.

  "Come on," Rombo said, wrapping an arm about the man's shoulders, "let's go get some juice and try to calm down, okay? This has nothing to do with you. Nothing at all." Shivering, the man acquiesced.

  "Martin, I feel really strange," Rombo stammered into his office phone an hour later, after Bonnie Franer was pronounced dead and swiftly wheeled away on a sheet-draped gurney. "I can't seem to get it, why this woman would do that ..."

  "You work in a psychiatric hospital," the familiar voice said. "These things happen."

  "I know that." Rombo felt another amoebic chill under his left arm. "But Martin, I told one of the patients this had nothing to do with him. I think I was really talking to myself, Martin, and I don't understand. I've survived being called 'fag' my whole life, my father hating me until he died, and the booze ... I've stayed alive and it's okay now, Martin. I made it through. And this woman's daughter was murdered, but she might have made it, too. Why did I make it, and she didn't?"

  There was a brief silence. "I don't know," came the final reply. "Nobody knows. But I'm going to make a shrimp bisque and chill you a bottle of that sparkling herb stuff you like. We'll talk about it when you get home."

  Chapter 12

  President Lincoln lilacs enjoyed an unprecedented popularity in the well-kept yards of Night Heron Village. Their heady aroma filled Bo's tiny motel room when she awoke to a knock at the door at 5:00 A.M. Never rhapsodic about morning, she managed to utter only one syllable in the general direction of the sound.

  "Whaaa?" she said blearily.

  "Your translator," a deep voice replied. The speaker bore telltale signs of being awake. Bo sighed.

  "I don't believe this!" she yelled at the door. "It's five o'clock in the morning!"

  "Got your message," Andrew LaMarche explained with grating enthusiasm. "Grabbed a red-eye out of JFK into Albany and rented a car. But not before I picked up some fresh bagels and a thermos of coffee. Thought we'd have a picnic ..."