Strawgirl

by Abigail Padgett

  "I'm Bo Bradley, from Child Protective Services," Bo began, clutching the trembling fox terrier firmly. "And although I know the police have already been here—"

  But Mildred, propelled by centuries of canine honor, chose to ignore the message in Bo's grip. A series of imperious barks was accompanied by much thrashing of terrier legs and a resultant small rip in the sleeve of Bo's sweatshirt. The orange cat climbed over the girl's head, causing the child to giggle and stumble against the leg of the baby, who howled in indignation. The woman narrowed her eyes and looked at Bo as if she were there to sell something unpleasant.

  "I'll just put the dog in the car and get my identification," Bo said. It occurred to her that this might be the worst interview she'd ever done. A fiasco. The woman obviously spoke Spanish, which Bo did not. And their introduction could only be described as "not conducive to confidence." Bo wondered if her own lighthearted approach might be construed as harebrained. Maybe she was getting a little silly, exuberant, overconfident. A little manic. What was she doing on a Saturday, on her own time, checking out leads with grass stains on her rump and a dog in her arms? A bad sign. Or was it?

  Maybe she'd just fallen into the situation through a series of conversations and was exhibiting praiseworthy devotion to her job.

  When hell freezes, Bradley. Your devotion to this job is precisely as deep as your checking account. What are you really here for?

  The image of a little girl with wide-set eyes handing Bo a strip of beaded rush materialized and then vanished. Hannah had been able to reach out from the papery shell of her own threatened survival. To reach out and offer comfort to another whose pain she understood. In that act, Bo realized as she shoved Mildred into the fading BMW, the child had secured a human bond that demanded Bo's best. Nothing crazy about that. But she'd keep an eye on her thoughts, just to be sure. The minute she started feeling grandiose or dispatched by mystical forces, she'd back off. At the door the little girl hopped from one foot to the other while explaining that her mama had been giving her brother, Jesus, a bath and was now "putting pants on him."

  Bo checked her own response to this news for any hint of seeping religiosity. There was none. Latin people routinely named baby boys Jesus. The girl, Bo mentally bet the BMW and a year's rent on her apartment, would be named Maria.

  "I will be there soon," the woman's voice called from inside the house. "Luisa, take Papa Cat to the yard."

  Bo cursed herself as an ethnic bigot while Papa Cat eluded Luisa by leaping atop a television and overturning a backlit representation of the Sacred Heart in a frame of starched red lace.

  "What do you want?" the woman asked as she emerged from a hall to the right of the living room, still carrying the baby. Jesus, now clad in a disposable diaper and tiny white dress shirt, smiled and offered Bo the remainder of his bottle. From the scent wafting through the door, it was grape juice. Bo sighed and reminded herself that symbolism exists entirely in the mind of its observer.

  "I'm from Child Protective Services," she repeated, showing her ID badge. "I'd like to talk to you about Samantha Franer."

  The woman grimaced. "The police, they already be here," she said. "I tell them all the children do good here. I take care of them. And I have a helper. This bad thing did not happen to the child here." The dark eyes dropped to a point below the handle of the security door. "No man work here," she whispered, glancing at Luisa, now rolling on a flowered couch with the cat. "No man."

  "But could you just tell me," Bo began, "is this your house? Are you a licensed daycare center? How are children referred—?"

  "I don't want talk," the woman said, turning from the door. "I already talk to police." In the woman's back, the tense set of the wide shoulders under a thin blue sweater, Bo recognized controlled emotion. But what emotion? Grief? Fear? Whatever it was, a fierce determination held it in check. It was curious, unaccountable. And impenetrable.

  Bo headed back to her car and noticed Luisa, opening the heavy security door to wave. At her open car door, Bo waved in return as something orange streaked from the house and across the yard toward the oleanders. Mildred, aroused from a nap by Bo's return, was standing on the front seat, her forelegs braced against the dash. Mildred did not fail to see the streak. With a look of delight, the dog catapulted out the open car door, around the BMW's dented rear bumper, and into the oleander. A trail of barking led downward, into the canyon.

  "What next?" Bo asked a cloudless sky as she struggled past twenty yards of dense, white-flowered shrubbery. "You're too old for this," she yelled at the echoing barks. "Remember your arthritis, and you're going to get burrs." There was a predictable absence of response.

  The fenced backyard of the daycare center boasted a swing set, large sand box, and several small play tables. At the back of the yard a gate in the chain-link fence opened to a narrow trail leading down into the canyon. Bo edged her way around the perimeter of the fence and began a dusty descent toward the now-stationary cacophony of barks. Mildred had, apparently, treed Papa Cat.

  Except the noise had its origin off to the left of the path, halfway up the canyon's side where there were no trees. Only fragrant sage bushes, prickly pale green tumbleweeds, scrub, and rocks. Beyond the trail the canyon wall was treacherous. A terrain of loosening concretized sandstone spall, compacted under tons of seawater when San Diego had been an ocean bed. Bo slipped as a football-sized clump of dirt broke raggedly under her weight and tumbled to rest against what looked like a giant mayonnaise jar full of brown water. It was a giant mayonnaise jar full of brown water. Bo stared at the object as comprehension rose sluggishly in her brain. Tea. Somebody was making sun tea in a jar where there should be no people or jars, much less tea. Mildred's barks, tiring now, were only a few yards ahead. Rounding a particularly unstable outcropping, Bo found the dog yipping upward at something on a ledge behind which a crude cave had been dug. The some thing was not an orange cat. It was a gargoyle, a hunkering figure Bosch might have painted if Bosch had painted urban hermits.

  "Oh, my God no." Bo gasped as a sunburned face stared wildly from beneath a thatch of filthy reddish hair. The huge eyes under bleached-out lashes were more frightened than her own. But she'd seen eyes like that before. She knew what to

  do.

  Chapter 19

  At eight o'clock Bo found herself seated across from Solon Gentzler on the balcony of a La Jolla seafood restaurant whose chef, if rumors were to be believed, knew not only the secret of perfect sole blanchaille, but also the more intimate secrets of several San Diego society matrons. From the distracting flash of moonlight on diamonds about the area, Bo guessed that a few of the matrons were hanging around for another glimpse of his culinary style.

  "I love haddock," Gentzler said with enthusiasm, shrugging off a rumpled suit jacket bearing a Beverly Hills label, "but I'm going to have the shark bisque and then just a simple poached flounder with capers. How's the wine?"

  Bo gazed down the length of her own freckled arm to a crystal balloon glass in whose depths a pale golden liquid said poetic things about sun and rain in California's northern valleys. Her hair, she acknowledged, was reflecting candlelight in precisely the way her shampoo intended. And the merest dab of imported scent, strategically placed, was perhaps not the only reason Gentzler's animated gaze kept drifting to the V of a casual little green silk blouse that cost a fortune and gave her eyes a sealike depth. While she knew perfectly well where this evening would lead if she opted for that direction, Bo chose not to analyze her presence in a candlelit restaurant with a lawyer too young to remember where he was when Kennedy was assassinated. Whatever happened, Solon Gentzler would not burden it with cumbersome considerations. Like marriage.

  "The wine's lovely," she answered. "But I'm having trouble with the concept of a tuna salad that costs $27.50. Do you realize how much tuna you could buy for $27.50? People are starving, Sol, and we—"

  "It's because it's fresh bluefin," he apologized for the restaurant's politically incorrect extravag
ance, blushing slightly. "And it's on Gentzler, Brubaker, Harris and Gentzler, the family law firm. Brubaker's my sister, incidentally. A CPA as well as an attorney. She'd tell you this dinner is a business expense."

  "Who's Harris?" Bo grinned. "And I thought you worked for the ACLU."

  "Harris is my dear old mother, who graduated law school four years before I did. We call her Harry. And the ACLU work is pro bono. We all do it. It's sort of a family hobby." He leaned back and stared at the darkening Pacific Ocean beyond the balcony. "My zayde, my paternal grandfather, made it out of the death camps. His first wife and baby son didn't. The baby's name was Solon, which explains my old-fashioned name, and why we believe so strongly in what the ACLU does . . ."he turned to smile at Bo, "among which is to make sure people like your Paul Massieu don't get hanged as rapists just because they believe in little green men."

  "Silver," Bo sighed. "Little silver men. I think I'll have the broiled snapper."

  The contrast was still dizzying. The afternoon's terrifying discovery with a man who called himself Zolar and lived in a canyon because a huge network of people in San Diego were trying to control his mind with radio waves. The radio waves, he said, couldn't reach him there. From Zolar to the sort of eatery weekending movie stars were known to patronize. A shift of epic proportions. Bo thought of Andrew LaMarche's le monde and sighed again. There were too many worlds. And Zolar had shown her the grimmest yet. She watched as Solon Gentzler reverently attacked a bowl of bisque the size of a hubcap. Could she tell him about what Zolar had shown her in the canyon? About what she was sure it meant? Would Solon Gentzler believe anything she said after she told him just why she was not uncomfortable chatting with madmen? Too risky. Reluctantly she conceded that she should have returned one of LaMarche's six phone calls, as Estrella advised. It was, after all, his words that had made sense of the bizarre scene Zolar showed her.

  The man in the canyon behind the Kramer Child Care Center was suffering from schizophrenia, no question. Bo knew the symptoms from others met on her own psychiatric sojourns, and he'd told her as much when he named the litany of neuroleptic drugs he'd been given at a "crazy bin." Thorazine, Haldol, and Cogentin to curb the thick tongue, tremors, tics, and muscular convulsions caused by the first two. Zolar knew his way through a psychiatric pharmacy and was having no more of it. Bo wondered what his real name was. And how long it had been since he'd tried to get help for the illness. The drugs he mentioned were the old standbys, used for decades, lousy with side effects that felt worse than the symptoms they were supposed to curb. But the guy was still young and his elaborate paranoia was a good sign that he could respond well to the right medications. Bo's bet was he couldn't be much over twenty-five. He probably wouldn't have been sick longer than seven or eight years. And there were some impressively helpful new medications for schizophrenia now, if only he'd try again.

  "So what is the dog here for?" Zolar had whispered from his cave after Bo defused his anxiety by sitting on the ground and performing her head-ducking act. No threatening eye contact. No aggressive bodily movement. No invasion of his brittle and hard-won psychic sanctuary. Simple courtesy, primate-style. "They don't usually send dogs. Dogs are nicer." At six feet and well muscled, he looked like a healthy if somewhat soiled young giant, lost from myth and unaccountably stuffed into a California hillside. Bo was certain he'd played football in high school, before the pitiless chemistry in his brain made a normal life impossible.

  "Dogs are nicer," she agreed wholeheartedly, looking at the ground. "And this is my dog, Mildred. We're not here to see you. We were at a house up there to ... to try to help a little girl who got hurt." Bo could not have said why she chose to explain her presence in that way. It was simply the truth. A spill of dusty gravel from Zolar's ledge indicated sudden movement. Then a sharp intake of breath.

  "Goody," he intoned raggedly, beginning to rock from the waist. "Goody, Goody, Goody ..."

  Bo gasped and glanced up through the scrim of her own red hair. He was crying. Incredible. How did he know that name? Either he was Goody, or he knew something about Goody. But she'd have to act fast or he'd rock and chant himself into a trance. Another world where no one could reach him. Rising slowly and away from the swaying figure, Bo grasped Mildred to her side and said, "Show us where you saw Goody. We need to know about Goody." The words, pronounced clearly and with agonizing slowness, would either have an effect or they wouldn't. He continued to rock.

  But he knew something. He knew the name by which a murdered child identified her killer. How could he know? Was he that killer? The stock lunatic of countless horror stories, lurking in shadows like a half-remembered nightmare? Bo felt her abdominal muscles tighten at the thought. She didn't want it to be so. But he lived here, close to the daycare center's yard. Had Samantha somehow wandered off into the canyon and then been raped by this disoriented man?

  Just because you don't want it to be so doesn't mean it isn't. Be very careful here, Bradley. Be rational.

  Fat chance.

  Bo summoned her wits and a vast resource of something she couldn't name, and bent them toward the ragged man. She had to know. Now. "Hear me!" she thought ferociously into the air between them. "I'll try to help you. But right now you've got to hear me." Hard to do it without eye contact. Hard to solidify any connection at all with a young man whose sole desire was to avoid a world in which people existed only to plot against him. "Show us something about Goody," she said again, this time aloud.

  The chanting stopped as he clambered down from the ledge and stood ten feet from Bo. "Hi, Mildred," he whispered, holding out his hand toward the fox terrier. "Come on, I'll take you."

  Bo felt a stab of fear. The identical fear, she realized, that others had at times felt for her. The fear of someone who does not share the same, widely agreed-upon reality as everyone else. What did he mean by "I'll take you"? What if he took Mildred? Bo hated herself for her reaction and with an inadvertent appeal to St. Francis, the protector of animals, she set the aging dog on the ground. From the side of her right eye Bo watched the man hunker, pull something from his shirt pocket. Mildred advanced, her docked tail wagging. Bo could hear the booming pulse in her own arteries as if the volume had been turned up. But it was jerky. The guy was just giving Mildred a piece of beef jerky.

  As relief and a bitterly personal remorse washed over Bo, she found herself wondering where he got jerky. And tea bags for his sun tea. A glance at the little shelter revealed a sleeping bag, empty cardboard juice cartons, several bags of puffed rice cakes, a jar of chewable vitamins, and an economy-sized tub of premoistened towelettes, unopened. Not the typical clutter of the homeless mentally ill. It dawned on Bo that somebody must be providing things for him, trying to help. Another in the web of secrets lacing this innocuous urban canyon.

  Seconds later he stood and struck out to the left and downhill from his cave. Bo had expected him to lead them up, to the daycare center, if anything.

  "I'm Zolar," he announced as if the name were a state secret. "But they won't get me."

  "No, they won't," Bo agreed calmly as she struggled to keep up. He was moving swiftly through the rough canyon, his eyes sweeping the terrain as if every shadow might hide untold danger. Bo scooped up the exhausted dog and plunged ahead, wondering if this might turn out to be the ultimate wild-goose chase.

  "There!" he stopped suddenly and pointed. His grubby hand was trembling.

  Bo looked where he indicated and saw nothing. Just more dusty plants, sage, countless rocks, lots of beige dirt. A basic San Diego canyon. Home to owls, rabbits, the random coyote, and people who have nowhere else to go. "Where?" she asked.

  Zolar grabbed a rock and pitched it into a spreading, blue-flowered shrub. "There."

  The shrub was about four feet high at its center, and about six yards beneath where they stood. Odd mounds of rubble, Bo noticed on closer inspection, peeked from beneath its spreading branches. A faint path led toward its western side from the canyon floor where a medium-siz
ed eucalyptus dropped its bark beside the drainage stream. Bo noticed shreds of the peeling bark littering the path. How would the bark get uphill, twenty yards from its source? Unless somebody put it there, to disguise the path.

  Curious, Bo had clambered down to the shrub and found a three-foot opening shored with two-by-fours, concealed behind the spreading branches. Still holding the panting dog, she'd pushed the branches aside.

  "Bo? Are you on the planet?"

  It was Solon Gentzler, offering a basket of sourdough rolls, piping hot. They weren't microwaved, he was sure. He could tell just by touching one.

  "Sorry, I was thinking," Bo belabored the obvious. At an adjacent table a woman in enough tasteful gold jewelry to finance a small emergent nation informed her male companion that she'd had to fire her gardener because he kept sneaking off to visit his wife and children in Mexico. The woman hoped he wouldn't return and salt her lawn in revenge. Bo eyed the salt shaker on the table she shared with Gentzler and toyed with the idea of removing its lid, turning and dumping its contents into the woman's hair.

  "I'm getting irritable," she told the sourdough roll on her bread plate.

  "This case is getting to you." Gentzler nodded. "Have some more wine. We'll take a walk on the beach after dinner. We'll take off our shoes and talk about baseball."

  "I'd like that," Bo replied as a waiter placed a pound and a half of enticing aroma before her. She didn't mention that she'd never been to a baseball game in her life. But Zolar would have. He was the type. Tailgate parties with pretty girls. A Padres baseball cap that he probably wore backward when he was younger. When he still had a life. Bo sighed and cut into the snapper with a pistol-handled knife.

  What she'd seen in the canyon was appalling, and at first indecipherable. A rough cave, hand-hewn like Zolar's, but bigger. Carefully shored with boards. And pink. Somebody had spray-painted the walls and ceiling in a bright pink, and lit the dim space with at least three hundred twinkling white Christmas tree lights. Bo easily found the battery pack that powered the lights, hidden under a big pink rock with a happy face on it. When she switched it on a cheap tape recorder began to play the theme from Sesame Street. Candy wrappers and empty cans of a children's drink called Yoo-Hoo littered the floor beside a rolled-up futon mattress. The mattress was red with white piping, and beside it on an Astroturf mat covering the dirt floor was the cover of a magazine called Naughty Nymphets. Kiddie porn. For a few seconds Bo couldn't make sense of the scene. And then she remembered Andrew LaMarche's explanation of the hospital logo, Mabel Mammoth: "Bright colors make strangeness friendly."