Strawgirl

by Abigail Padgett

  Hannah wrapped a hand tightly about the beads pinned to her denim jacket and let her lower lip protrude in a childish pout. Then she turned to glare directly at Bo, her eyes tight and narrow.

  "That's all right," Bo said, nodding. "It's all right to be mad. Maybe tomorrow you could walk on the beach and throw some rocks really hard into the water. I do that sometimes, when I feel like you do. What do you think?"

  A relaxation of the muscles around Hannah's eyes revealed that she was considering it.

  "Good," Bo concluded, rising.

  Eva Broussard removed the calf-length swirl of her lined wool coat and smiled. "You've had excellent training," she told Bo as they followed the crowd through the terminal. "Not everyone could show such sensitivity ..."

  "Not everyone's been told to stop feeling," Bo replied.

  "Ah. The manic depression?"

  "Yeah." Bo sighed. "It tends to give one a different view."

  "Your view is a lifeline for Hannah," Eva Broussard said thoughtfully. "Without you…”

  "Without me she'd be in a San Diego County foster home by now, with strangers. As it is, she's a fugitive from the legal system and in the sole care of someone I don't really know. I've trusted you intuitively, Dr. Broussard, but…"

  "I know you're taking enormous risks in protecting Hannah this way. I'll do everything I can to prove your intuitions valid." As if expecting this line of conversation, Eva Broussard reached into a black leather attaché case suspended from a matching shoulder strap and withdrew a large envelope. "Recognizing the legal difficulties you may face if things don't go as planned, I have provided for you documentation of my academic credentials, a complete professional history, and the names, addresses, and phone numbers of some thirty personal references. These include an archbishop, authorities in child psychiatry from the United States, Canada, and three European countries, as well as the current chief of the Iroquois Nation and a former U.S. president who has long admired my popular-psychology series. Each will support your decision to entrust Hannah to my care, in writing or in person if it comes to that." She smiled. "And please stop calling me Dr. Broussard. You know perfectly well that sounds like the villain in a French thriller involving unethical nuclear physicists."

  Bo took the envelope, grinning. "And here we all thought the next messiah would be another man."

  At the laughter of the two women beside her, Hannah looked up wide-eyed, and then yawned. Just like an ordinary, tired kid. Bo decided that yawn was the most beautiful thing she'd seen in years.

  After settling Eva and Hannah in Del Mar, Bo made the long drive back to Estrella's house on the urban peninsula of Point Loma to pick up Mildred. At the curb she reminded herself not to say anything if the fox terrier had gained weight during her two days with the Benedicts. Estrella and Henry had been known to bake homemade dog biscuits for Mildred. Bo secretly cherished the notion that it was about time for Estrella and Henry to begin a family. An event that would eventually increase the likelihood of chocolate chip cookies as over dog biscuits.

  Estrella opened the door before Bo had a chance to ring the bell.

  "I was afraid you'd miss it," she said, "but you're just in time. Mildred! Mom's here. Bo, come on in the family room. You won't believe this."

  Bo gathered up an elderly dog who behaved as though her mistress had just returned from years as a prisoner of war. "I won't believe what?" Bo asked through heartfelt canine kisses.

  "KTUV's doing one of those special talk shows. And guess what the topic is."

  "Pregnant teenage gang members talking about the impact of international trade on long-term budget reform?Republican nudists supporting greater restrictions on the booming snail industry? I'm too tired to watch TV, Es. I'm just going to take Mildred home and crash."

  "No, you're not. Look."

  As television station KTUV's logo faded over a cozy talk show set, Bo recognized one of the participants, dressed in a power-red tailored suit beside which the three other guests and the set itself seemed uniformly colorless. Cynthia Ganage. Her lipstick matched her outfit precisely. Bo sank into an overstuffed couch as Estrella placed a tray of vegetables and dip on the coffee table.

  "Ganage?" Bo said, reaching for a celery stalk.

  "Si, amiga. And she's not there to talk about split ends."

  "Our guests tonight," the host told the camera in an anchorman's bass, "are Dr. Cynthia Ganage, a psychologist specializing in Satanic child abuse, the Reverend Clyde T. Cleveland of the San Diego Whole Faith Tabernacle, Mrs. Brenda Hines-Gilroy, who has quite a story to tell us, and the Reverend Dr. Sandra Rae Harvey of San Diego's First Unitarian Church. Our topic tonight ..." the camera moved in close, "Satan in San Diego. We'll be right back."

  "Told you you weren't going anywhere," Estrella said, flinging herself beside Bo and pushing a button on the remote control. "I'm taping this for Henry. He had a meeting at the base. Wonder why they invited two preachers."

  "The Unitarian's there for the rational approach, not renowned for its success in dealing with irrational issues. Watch. They'll eat her for lunch."

  "A recent and rather sensational child abuse case has San Diegans thinking about an ancient symbol of evil," the host intoned after four commercials. "But does one isolated case, in which there apparently is a cult connection, although one involving space aliens rather than Satan, mean that America's Finest City is riddled with Satanists? Dr. Ganage?"

  "It's all the same. Where there's smoke, there's fire," Cynthia Ganage said, gazing intently into the camera. "But it's bigger than that."

  Bo could not think of a term to cover the muddle of non sequitur, mixed metaphor, and outright gibberish Ganage was using in lieu of coherent speech. Reverend Cleveland and Brenda whatever her name was, however, nodded as if Cynthia Ganage had actually said something.

  "One of our own child abuse workers, a woman named Bo Bradley, was outwitted by these people at their hideout in upstate New York only yesterday. There can be no question that this is a conspiracy, a nationwide conspiracy," Ganage went on, tossing her shining hair. "And the sister of the child sacrificed here in San Diego has now been kidnapped to Canada. If this isn't a Satanic network, what is it?"

  "A great way to make money?" Bo answered.

  The Reverend Clyde Cleveland, sweating under the studio lights, mopped his narrow pink brow with a wadded handkerchief and spoke in a fearful whisper. The Bible, he said, told of a time when Satan would rule the earth. In his view the escalating reports of Satanic activity around the country suggested that the time was near. He didn't think it unlikely that Satanic headquarters would be in San Diego. That's why, he explained, the mission had been desecrated. Wasn't it one of the oldest churches in the country?

  Ganage and the woman named Brenda nodded as if this, too, made sense.

  "And what do you think, Reverend Harvey?" the host smiled genially. "Is there anything to all this?"

  A diminutive black woman with a streak of silver hair and enormous round glasses, Sandra Harvey clasped her hands and cocked her head at the camera. "Of course there's something to this," she answered. "Take the 'd' off 'devil' and you've got evil, right?"

  Everybody was nodding. Bo nodded, too. "Now make your move," she told the figure on Estrella's TV screen. "You've got their attention."

  "And the highly publicized rape-murder of a little girl makes us all think about evil, where it comes from, how to stop it," Sandra Harvey continued, her words bearing the cadence of some Southern state. "Maybe it's just a little easier to think about if we give it a name like Satan, and convince ourselves that it comes from outside us, outside our social systems, our books and ideas, our collective history as a species. But to externalize—"

  "People worship Satan," the woman named Brenda interrupted, her voice shrill. "They worship Satan in rituals where they make you drink blood and other ... things. They did it to me when I was little. Then they make you forget it. You're crazy if you think there's no Satan!"

  A wild, lost
look in Brenda's blue eyes made Bo wince.

  "We have been warned ..." Reverend Cleveland rasped as Cynthia Ganage held a copy of her book on ritual child abuse before the camera.

  "We'll be right back after these important messages," the host insisted as the scene cut to a commercial for cat litter.

  "So what do you think?" Estrella asked, stretching sleepily inside a purple sweatshirt Bo had handpainted for her in gold Aztec symbols.

  "I think purple's definitely your color, and I think I'm going home."

  "And miss the exciting conclusion?"

  "There won't be a conclusion," Bo said, struggling to lift a sleeping Mildred out of the couch. "There never is. But that clam-onion dip is fantastic, and I appreciate your taking care of Mildred. G'night, Es."

  On the short drive home to her Ocean Beach apartment Bo tried to imagine a painting that would embody all the reactions spinning from Samantha Franer's death. Metallic paper dolls in murky darkness fleeing wrathful Puritan clerics in frock coats above a dusty, abandoned hell where nothing moved except the ghost of Dante Alighieri spending an eternity admiring his creation. A hanged woman on a Tarot card, the background sky raining tears. A little corpse with crystal hair. A painted quilt of a thousand random black rectangles, some glossy, some flat, some opaque, reflecting light in patterns that could make no sense. That painting would be the truth, Bo nodded to herself. A painting of evil. Inscrutable and ineradicable. It felt right.

  Chapter 17

  "Where can you get decent lox in this town?" Solon Gentzler bellowed through Bo's bedside phone at 6:45 A.M. With that voice, Bo thought as she struggled to hold her head off the pillow, he should have been an orator. But then as a lawyer maybe he already was. He sounded seven feet tall and deplorably alert.

  "This must mean it's Saturday morning," she managed to pronounce. The words defined a sad, nearly tragic reality. She was going to have to wake up. "And there are two places for lox. One in La Jolla and one in the college area. Where are you staying?"

  Lois Bittner had introduced Bo to the salty smoked salmon years ago in St. Louis. The orange fish had been folded wetly atop a bagel slathered with cream cheese. One encounter had been enough.

  "Travelodge in Hotel Circle," Gentzler roared amicably. "Where I'm starving."

  "I'll pick you up in an hour," Bo said into a pillowcase featuring opera-pink cabbage roses against which her hair looked like a neon wig. The linens had been purchased at a swap meet during a manic episode two years ago for their astonishingly reasonable price. Bo hated them and used them regularly, hoping they'd fade or come loose at the seams, either of which would justify donating them to a worthwhile charity. Fifty washings later they continued to look brand-new.

  After replacing the phone in its cradle she removed the sheets and replaced them with a beige and cream pinstriped set. Then she folded those back into the linen closet in favor of a dramatic Southwestern design that looked like desert mountains in a hazy sunset. Sand brown, lavender, smoky purple. The message was clear.

  "Do other women get these feelings as randomly as I do, or is it just women with manic depression?" she asked Mildred, still pretending to be asleep in her basket beside Bo's bed. The fox terrier raised one graying brown eyebrow.

  "I mean you even managed an inappropriate liaison with that unwholesome miniature poodle up the street. He had fleas, Mil. And an insufferable attitude. What made you do it?"

  The dog stretched long white legs and yawned. Then she pushed a chartreuse tennis ball from her basket onto the carpet and looked at Bo expectantly. A confusion initiated by Andrew LaMarche, whose Victorian intentions seemed at odds with his underwear, faded but did not vanish entirely.

  "I'll take you out after I shower," Bo told the dog.

  Fifteen minutes later, dressed in white cotton slacks and a white sweatshirt on which she'd stenciled "Aardvark Power" in teal blue acrylic, Bo let the sea breeze dry her hair as she walked Mildred. Yesterday's visit with Paul Massieu in San Diego County's crowded old jail had reinforced Eva Broussard's opinion of the man. He was innocent. Bo was sure of it, even if she couldn't say why. He just seemed so beaten and lost, sobbing in broken English across the plastic barrier between prisoner and guest, his twisted right hand with its missing finger white around the phone that enabled them to talk through the shield. A French Canadian lost in an American nightmare whose origins, Bo knew from a college research paper, lay in seventeenth-century Boston and a power-mad governor named John Winthrop.

  "Why can they think I raped a child because I believe what I have seen? Because I saw those people like papier d'argent, like silver-paper people, on the mountain? Why does this mean that I could kill a child with sex? C'est fou, insane!"

  "Yes," Bo agreed without argument, and then didn't know what else to say. That somebody drew a yellow face on Samantha Franer's abdomen? That five years after the landing of the Mayflower a woman named Anne Hutchinson was exiled to predictable Indian slaughter because she was smarter, more charismatic, a kinder leader, and another gender than the governor of the Boston Colony? That in her absence a culture deeply suspicious of yellow drawings and silver people had come into being?

  "There are no silver-paper people in the Bible," Bo told Paul Massieu, "so your belief in them puts you outside the regular religious system in this country. To a lot of people that automatically makes you evil, and so it makes sense to them that you'd do evil things, like rape children. Do you understand?"

  "No," Massieu had answered, wide-eyed. "I don't."

  "Neither does the ACLU," Bo told him. "Don't worry, they'll help you. In the meantime," she'd lowered her voice so the supervising guard couldn't hear, "let me tell you that Eva and Hannah are here, in hiding, so that as soon as you get out of jail, Hannah can be near you. You can't mention this to anyone. She needs you desperately, Paul. You're all she has now. We're not sure she's going to make it through without permanent damage. She's stopped talking, and ..."

  He'd straightened his huge shoulders and calmed himself at the words. "She's like Bonnie. I know that. She must have gentleness and strength around her. She's like her mother ... like her mother was. I won't fail. I'll protect Hannah."

  When the aging dog tired of chasing her tennis ball Bo picked her up and carried her back to the apartment.

  "You're too old for such exertion," she told the fox terrier ensconced on the freshly made bed, "and so am I. If a pediatrician with a French accent calls, tell him I've taken a vow of chastity that precludes everything, including marriage."

  On the drive inland to pick up Gentzler Bo congratulated herself on Hannah's care. The child and Eva Broussard had settled quietly into the cozy little beach studio last night, and Hannah had fallen asleep to the sound of surf almost immediately. Bo and Eva had talked softly on a patio overlooking the watery curve of the planet.

  "What is this place?" Eva Broussard questioned, laughing. "Where are we?"

  "At the edge of a continent," Bo replied. "And in big trouble."

  "You don't really mean that, do you? You don't feel overwhelmed and incapable. You know you can help this child, that you can do what makes sense."

  "I run on hypomania all of the time," Bo admitted, nodding. "Even when I'm fine, I'm not like other people. Too much energy, too much arrogance. The lithium takes that away, slows me down. I'm not on it right now. And yes, I'm sure that what we're doing is the right thing for Hannah even though I'm breaking rules and could lose my job. I don't care. This makes sense. But there's something else ..."

  "Yes?" Eva Broussard questioned from a chaise lounge where she sipped cognac from a cup embossed with a conch shell design. She exuded openness, interest. "What else?"

  Bo tossed back her hair, lit a cigarette and regarded the other woman. A stranger, but already a friend. It occurred to Bo that beyond Estrella, she had no friends. No husband or lover, no children, no family left alive. She'd been a loner for years, and that was okay. Mildred was good company. But it would be nice to have someone to tal
k to again, like Lois Bittner. Someone wise and different. Someone who could see beyond psychiatric symptoms to what lay beneath. "I'm a little slow right now," she began, "not manicky at all, so I can't put it together. But nothing about this case has felt right from the beginning. Everybody's jumped to conclusions. This woman named Cynthia Ganage is building a professional reputation as a devil-hunter, the police think anything they don't agree with must be criminal, all of a sudden somebody decides to desecrate a church, and the ACLU sees 'landmark case' written all over Paul Massieu, who's really in jail because he thinks he saw little men from outer space in upstate New York. It's a mishmash. Did he really see something up there, Eva? Did you?"

  Gracefully Eva Broussard unfolded her body from the chaise, stood and stretched. "Yes, he did," she answered, "and no, I didn't. What I have seen is my own mortality reflected in the hunger of people for something to bring new ideas, to bring a way out. But their real experience eludes me. I only document it and quite possibly will never understand it. What else about the case bothers you, Bo?"

  In the moonlight the woman's cropped white hair looked like a helmet. Over the Pacific Ocean Orion stood belted with stars.

  "Lots," Bo went on. "Little pieces. The fact that somebody's getting away with murder and nobody cares. The parts that don't fit anywhere, like the face drawn on Samantha's stomach and—" From the screen door to the left of the patio a small, sharp intake of breath was audible beneath a canopy of coral vine.

  "You may come out and join us, Hannah," Eva said quietly. "We aren't keeping secrets. We were only speaking softly because we thought you were asleep and didn't want to wake you."

  The child stumbled into Eva's arms, weeping. Bo noticed the three strands of beads pinned now to a maroon sweater with cream-colored piping. Hannah clutched at the beads with nervous fingers.