Strawgirl

by Abigail Padgett

  "So it would seem," Andrew LaMarche agreed happily.

  Chapter 8

  "Where are we going?" Bo inquired through cool, road-scented air whipping her hair into tangles a forklift couldn't separate. LaMarche had removed the Jaguar's roof in what she assumed was an attempt at savoir faire.

  "Santa Ysabel," he replied as the last, muted bars of Respighi's “Pines of Rome” faded from the car's speakers. Bo found the music an uncomfortable reminder. Her ex-husband, Mark, an aspiring choreographer of radio drama, had as a graduate student read the athletic final chapter of John Updike's Rabbit Run over the climactic music so many times Bo couldn't hear it without gasping. Later Mark Bradley had produced an award-winning series of Navajo children's stories, recorded over tracks of Indian flute, wind, and an occasional howling coyote. Bo knew the recordings were inspired by Nicholas and Jaana, his children of a second and happy marriage to a hearty nutritionist from Minnesota whom Bo never ceased envisioning in a Wagnerian chorus. Mark's wife's name had been Ingrid Soderblom. Impossible not to think of metal bras and the entire Wagnerian Ring Cycle. With a smile, Bo forced her attention to the present.

  "Santa Ysabel? We're having dinner at a mission?"

  Andrew LaMarche's gray eyes glowed with a pewterlike patina, signaling his enjoyment of the moment as well as his knowledge of a pleasant answer to her question. The answer would, she knew, not be given without some tangential discourse. It was his style. Bo wondered if the discomfort with straightforward speech, the maddening verbal perambulations, had something to do with his French-speaking childhood. Or maybe he was nervous. Or maybe he just liked to talk.

  "The church was built as an asistencia, or sub-mission in 1818," he said as if Bo had asked for a detailed history of California missions instead of the location of her next meal. The glow in his eyes became a twinkle. "Fascinating, really. They say pirated gold is buried among the old graves, although no one has ever—"

  "Andy," Bo employed the familiar name out of desperation, "we've been driving for thirty-five minutes, I have enough dirt in my teeth to plant geraniums and my hair's something mice would kill to nest in. Why are we going to Santa Ysabel?"

  "Duhon Robicheaux's in town with his Cajun band. There's a fais-do-do," the baritone voice explained with excitement. "I hope you like andouille."

  The setting sun created pastoral landscapes in shades of gold as the car sped up the slow grade from the San Diego suburb of Ramona into shadow-mottled foothills. Chinese coolies had labored, Bo remembered, beside Irish immigrants to wrest tourmaline, garnet, topaz, and gold from these hills. Hungry, she wondered how the two groups had managed to combine menus at mining camp chuckwagons. Sweet-and-sour finnan haddie? Steamed soda-bread rolls stuffed with thousand-year egg paste? In her side mirror she could see the Palomar Observatory looming whitely in the distance behind the car. Its two-hundred-inch Hale reflector telescope nightly scanned the heavens for things not visible to the naked eye. The facility's pale dome looked like a huge soup bowl inverted in the hills. Bo decided to ignore it.

  "What in God's name is a fay-doe-doe and how would I know if I liked an-dewey? Is it edible?" Hunger had become a nagging irritant.

  "The best food north of Ponchatoula," LaMarche replied as he navigated a turn onto a dusty mountain road that quickly lost itself in rolling meadows. "I'm scheduled to keynote a conference in New York this weekend. Supposed to be there today, in fact, to revise the agenda or something. But I rescheduled the flight for tomorrow just so I wouldn't miss this!" At a barnlike structure beside a dilapidated general store whose rusting gas pumps still wore the round glass heads popular during the Depression, he parked the maroon Jag among at least a hundred pickup trucks. "And a fais-do-do is just a big get-together. Food, dancing, a little wine ..."

  Bo remembered her own admonition to spend the evening in revelry in order to forget the cherubic corpse on an operating table. She'd followed her own advice, and yet it seemed wrong.

  LaMarche noticed her downcast gaze and nodded. "We'll talk about it later. Right now we'll eat, enjoy. It isn't over, you know. It won't be over until Samantha's killer is imprisoned. The other prisoners," his thin lips were ashen beneath his mustache, "will see to an appropriate punishment."

  Both sets of eyes stared at nothing as physician and social worker allowed themselves the unprofessional fantasy of revenge. Even the most hardened criminals sometimes felt revulsion at the rape of a child. And lacking a restraint characteristic of the general population, they wouldn't hesitate to mete out a biblical punishment. It was likely that Samantha's killer, released to a general prison population, would relive his victim's torment a thousand times.

  The satisfaction of the fantasy made Bo half sick.

  "Enough," LaMarche said with finality as an accordion wheezed to life inside the building followed by the scratchy tuning of violins. "Duhon's going to cheer you up!"

  Having made a conscious decision to forget Samantha Franer for at least an hour, Bo cocked an eyebrow at the dustbowl parking lot with its army of trucks and grinned. The interior of the huge shed, which had from its pervasive scent been used to store apples from nearby orchards, was lit by a series of emergency lights whose extension cords all snaked to a single generator. Long tables covered in newspaper lined the walls, and a flatbed farm wagon served as a bandstand. Over the sweet apple smell Bo noticed a pervasive odor of hot, buttery flour.

  "What's that smell?" she sniffed appreciatively.

  "Roux." He was steering her toward two empty folding chairs at one of the long tables.

  "Roo?Kanga's baby in Winnie the Pooh? They're cooking baby kangaroos here? I'm calling the animal cruelty people—"

  "It means ... it's a dark, sticky sauce made of butter and flour," he answered her jibe seriously. "How about some shrimp étouffée?"

  "Does it have roo in it?"

  The answering smile was warm. Almost, Bo realized, seductive.

  "No, ma chérie, no roux."

  You've always been a sucker for an accent, Bradley. Remember that Portuguese environmentalist who played pan pipes and got you to donate a month's salary for the protection of freshwater clams from a dam proposal? Try not to forget that.

  "Shrimp sounds fine," she agreed. "And after dinner you'll provide the promised explanations about the Franer case?"

  "Dinner, a little wine, maybe a two-step. Then ..." He was busy acknowledging greetings from some of those present who seemed to know him, but greeted him as Jacques.

  "I come around sometimes when there's a Cajun band," he explained. "It reminds me of summers I'd spend down in the bayous with my uncle. His name was Pierre Auguste, but everybody just called him Oncle Gus. He could catch snakes right out of the water with his bare hands, and my aunt would make a mouth-watering jambalaya out of them ..."

  "Snake jambalaya—my all-time favorite," Bo said with a wide-eyed smile. "And I'm really Princess Anastasia, heir to the vanquished Russian throne. We used to catch beluga caviar, barehanded of course, right out of the Volga. What a coincidence!"

  "Mais non," came the amused reply. "I'm serious."

  His gray eyes wore a pleasant, faraway look. A look not related to the unremarkable red wine they were drinking from jelly glasses. Andrew LaMarche was plainly enjoying himself.

  "You come out here to get away from it all, don't you?" Bo asked. On the dance floor people from three to ninety waltzed and two-stepped energetically. "It's a different world. Away from what you see at the hospital ... like today?"

  "Yes." His look shifted to one of concern. "And what do you do, Bo Bradley? How do you get away?"

  Bo jabbed a boudin sausage on her plate with a plastic fork. "I jog," she informed the sausage. "Mostly I paint. Usually things like this ... things from other worlds."

  "Maybe you'll paint a Cajun sausage?" he joked.

  Bo looked straight ahead and sifted the remark for unpleasant innuendo. There was none. A silly comment, not a crude come-on. She wondered if she'd been out of circulation so
long she was anticipating trouble that didn't exist. Or else the absence of lithium was allowing a manicky hypersexuality to surface, coloring every innocuous encounter with a brush of eroticism. Bo hoped not. The guy was just being nice in his courtly, old-fashioned way.

  Several lively two-steps later, she began to wonder if her politically correct, non-animal-tested deodorant would withstand the exertion. Her hair was soaked at the neck and curling ferociously.

  "Let's go outside," LaMarche suggested with flawless timing. "I do want to talk seriously about what happened today."

  In the moonlit parking lot a cool breeze ruffled the taffy-colored homespun shirt Bo had hurriedly tucked into her old jeans. Lighting a cigarette, she watched its smoke dissipate beneath a towering cottonwood beside the still-raucous building. "So why did you go off half-cocked over the Franer case today?" she asked. "And why did you do that curious sculpture of the ape carrying the baby?"

  LaMarche leaned thoughtfully against the cottonwood as Bo sat on a truck bumper the size of a church pew.

  "I have no children," he began, looking at a point above her head. "And the ape is a sort of metaphor, I guess, for what we do. The attempt to rescue children from the côté noir, the dark side of human nature, or ourselves. It's always there. And we often fail. We failed today."

  Bo chose to ignore the enigmatic first statement in favor of the one she deeply understood. "We didn't fail," she said. "You didn't fail. There was nothing you could have done. Dr. Ling's report clearly stated that Samantha's injuries were life-threatening long before she got to the hospital. Don't blame yourself for her death."

  "I don't," he went on, watching the sky as if it were making gestures he couldn't decipher. "The failure doesn't lie in the child's death. That shouldn't have happened, but it did. I'm not sure anything could have prevented it. Certainly no medical intervention could have saved her. But the failure I'm talking about is something different." He lowered his gaze to Bo's face. "The failure that resulted in my behavior today is in the way we look at things. We're blind. We only see what we expect to see, even if it's not really there. I saw that in myself today. It made me angry."

  "What are you talking about?"

  The suddenly moody doctor was lapsing into abstraction.

  "I had a child once, Bo," he muttered abruptly. "I never saw her. Her name was Sylvie. She drowned in a bathtub in New Orleans while I was still with the Corps in Vietnam. Her mother, who was not my wife, left her alone only a little while. Apparently she'd been trying to bathe her toys. She was two."

  Bo listened to dust settling on cottonwood leaves and did not move. After a while she said simply, "I'm sorry, Andy."

  "Whoever violated Samantha blew apart the entire world for everyone connected to her," he continued through clenched teeth. "Her whole family and everyone close to her. The murdering bastard raped and killed more than just one little girl. He raped and killed the world for those people!"

  His hands, Bo noticed, were knotted into fists.

  "That's how you felt when your daughter died, isn't it?"

  "I don't deny that her death propelled me into pediatrics, and then into the field of child abuse. It was a way of holding the world together, of trying to make sense of the senseless. Until you ... until recently, it's been my whole life ..." His voice trailed off.

  Bo shifted uneasily on the truck's bumper. There was no denying the intensity of his words, but there was something else. Something very personal in the narrative, and it was directed at her. An appeal? More like a declaration. So powerful in its vulnerability and candor it felt like a threat, abrading a boundary she hadn't realized was there, but now wanted to keep intact.

  "You've identified with the parent in this case," she stated the obvious, creating a palpable wall between them. A wall behind which she could play social worker all night if necessary. A wall that would blunt the intimacy he offered. "I can understand that. But why does that lead you to believe this Paul Massieu isn't the perp? Why else would he run?"

  The change of subject wasn't lost on LaMarche, who crossed his arms over his chest and shook his head as if reprimanding himself. After a lengthy examination of the Cottonwood's higher limbs, he turned again to Bo. "In French it's called le monde," he began softly. "That means 'the world,' but no one's world is the same. The assumption that we share an identical world is at the root of most problems, especially the serious ones."

  "What has this to do with the Franer case?" Bo asked, lost.

  "Everything. Please hear me out, Bo. It's important."

  The decision to listen had to be made consciously. With a brain always scanning the external environment and its own stores of imagery for constant stimulation, even in periods of relative calm such as this one, it was too easy to grasp subtlety after subtlety and nothing more. Too easy to catch merely a mood and then move on. Not easy at all to open the mind in slow silence while another spoke. Bo looked at the man who'd saved her life and that of a deaf little boy six months in the past, and decided she owed him that much, if not the deeper bond he'd reached for only minutes earlier. With a deep breath she exerted the Herculean effort necessary to mute the sweep of her mind. "All right," she said quietly.

  He had been watching. "Estrella told me you've stopped taking the lithium, Bo. Do you think—"

  "We're not here to talk about lithium. What was it that you wanted to say about the world and Samantha Franer?" It was difficult to arrest the lecture framing itself for delivery to Estrella Benedict first thing in the morning, but Bo managed.

  "As a young man I lived in a world where men accepted no responsibility for pregnancies in women to whom they were not married. This same world included a corollary mythology that held that all female people, simply by virtue of certain bodily organs, were magically able to provide years of tedious daily care for children. Had I moved one inch outside that world, my daughter might still be alive."

  "You're still blaming yourself—" Bo began.

  "Let me make my point. You're now in another world—the world of child abuse investigation, its legality. That world makes assumptions based on previous cases. That's the way law works. In your world it's assumed that the perpetrator in a molest is the mother's live-in boyfriend because very often it is. But what if somebody from another world falls into yours? Will you bother to try looking through his eyes before deciding what's real?"

  "You seem to have forgotten that I have a rather special relationship with this issue," Bo bristled. "I have a psychiatric disorder, a passport to more worlds than most people see on a three-continent tour. In addition to that, my undergraduate degree is in art history. Sophomoric lectures on cultural perspective are scarcely necessary. I've already considered the possibility that this case isn't typical. But how do you explain the fact that Paul Massieu ran?"

  "What about his world, Bo? What if he ran because something in his reality, and that of Bonnie and Samantha and Hannah, demanded that he return Hannah to it?"

  Bo's ears flattened against her skull as a strand of awareness spun out ahead of her. She couldn't keep up with it, but its message was clear. "What did Bonnie Franer tell you?" she asked, watching him now as closely as he had watched her.

  "The woman loves her children, Bo. She's weak, a longtime victim. That love is her only strength. She has literally nothing else. She allowed Paul Massieu into her life precisely because he would never hurt the girls. He offered them love and protection. She didn't care what else he did, or what he believed in—"

  "How can you ...? " Bo interrupted. "Bonnie Franer is an extremely fragile personality, prone to depression, probably self-destructive at times. You can't have had time to interview her in any depth, anyway. How can you trust her assessment ...? "

  LaMarche kicked an exposed root of the cottonwood. "What if Paul Massieu has simply returned Hannah to a world, the only world he knows where she'll be safe?"

  The knowledge racing ahead had taken on form. Bo felt her eyes widen in the dark at what he was telling her.<
br />
  "You know where Massieu is! Bonnie Franer told you, and you're withholding the information!"

  There was no denial.

  "Think about what I've said, Bo. Just think about it. Looking at things differently may just make it possible for you to stay in this line of work. You're good. But without a broader view the pain and disgust will break you. I don't want that to happen."

  "Andy," Bo said as the senselessness of a child's death took on even more sinister ramifications, "if you're right and Paul Massieu really isn't the perp, then who is? Who destroyed that little girl? What world does he live in?"

  Andrew LaMarche stretched his angular hands at his sides and turned the palms slowly skyward. "I don't know," he answered.

  From the door of the sprawling shed a sonorous waltz drifted liquidly on violin strings. Bo hated the warm flush that crept up her cheeks at his earlier compliment, and the dismay that accompanied any possibility of Paul Massieu's innocence. Domestic child sexual abuse was nothing unusual; it was her turf. But the notion of a "stranger molest" opened doors on a bewildering darkness. She wondered why the idea of a child eviscerated by the sexual demands of a trusted, familiar adult seemed less horrific than the same crime perpetrated by a stranger. The answer lay in LaMarche's words. The familiar, however repugnant, constituted her world. But what if this crime had its origins in a different one?

  "That's the last dance." LaMarche gestured toward the spilling light. "Would you do me the honor?"

  In his arms Bo felt an odd sense of kinship, as if they were compatriots in some film noir struggle involving World War II resistance fighters. Dim lighting. Frenchmen in berets and baggy shirts. Edith Piaf singing "Non, Je Ne Regrette Rien" from a cabaret stage. The feeling was smoky, warm ...

  Snap out of it, Bradley. You're tired and your brain's turning to oatmeal. That really is Piaf. What happened to the band?

  "Duhon always ends with that recording," Andrew LaMarche said, leading her toward the door with his right arm firmly around her waist. "It's his trademark."