Strawgirl (Bo Bradley Mysteies, Book Two)

by Abigail Padgett

  "Mine too," Bo nodded sleepily, aware that he was kissing the top of her head occasionally as they walked to the car, and too tired to break the mood.

  On the way home Bo heard the Jaguar's motor murmuring "le monde" repetitively. Something about the notion, the insistent syllables of it, kept breaking and spreading in her mind like an egg. The man beside her was harboring a secret. Why? Because there were different worlds? It made little sense, but then what did? A broad view, then. Blurry, gentle. Maybe wise. Lois Bittner, Bo smiled to herself, would probably approve. Madge Aldenhoven would vaporize with rage.

  "Thanks for the evening," she nodded as LaMarche saw her to her door. "I'll think about what you said."

  He left with a polite nod. No future dates set. No promises to call or be called. It was good. And, Bo reminded herself, it was over. Andrew LaMarche just didn't fit into her world. Nobody did.

  Inside, the answering machine on the tiled counter between her living room and lilliputian kitchen was blinking.

  "Bo?" Madge Aldenhoven's voice announced, "you're going to have to fly to New York tomorrow. The police have captured the perp in the Franer case at some cult hideout in the Adirondacks. We're sending you to retrieve the sister. Your plane leaves at 6:19 A.M. for Albany. I'll meet you at the office at 5:00 with the tickets."

  In the neon glare of her bathroom Bo stared at a pharmacist's brown plastic bottle half full of pinkish tablets. Lithium. A surefire way to remain uninvolved, to stop the French "le monde" thumping in her brain. But did it need to be stopped?

  Maybe LaMarche was right. Maybe there was another way to view the broken lives that fell across her desk in orange-banded case files. Maybe more to it than disgust and helplessness. The possibility felt like new canvas, stretched and beckoning.

  Bo tossed the pills in her carry-on bag for the journey, just in case. Then she fell in bed humming a French song about having no regrets, and fell asleep wondering what life would be like without them.

  Chapter 9

  Eva Broussard lay sleepless upon a large bent-twig bed that had belonged to one of the lodge's Prohibition-era owners. A Pittsburgh glove manufacturer with stern views on temperance, the man had given his ideas immortality in the property's deed. No alcohol could be served within the lodge walls while the government of the United States remained intact. The troubled woman turned softly, imagining a bloodless coup at that very moment in Washington, D.C. A large cognac, she thought, might muffle the incessant mating whistles of the thousand spring peeper frogs calling, bog to bog, through the Adirondack night. Hannah Franer lay asleep on a cot beside the antique bed.

  In shadow the child seemed merely a younger version of the mother. The same fine blonde hair drifting across the pillowcase. The same wide-set hazel eyes, full lips, and over-large nose that reddened at the slightest emotion. Eva wondered if the similarity between mother and daughter extended to what lay inside—that core being some might name "soul." If so, extreme caution must be exercised now. For Hannah Franer's future would lie squarely in the ways she learned to deal with the pain of the present. And even that wasn't complete. Eva was certain there would be at least one more devastating blow for the child to absorb. Grimly certain.

  Soundlessly she slipped to an open casement window. Below the lodge Night Heron Lake appeared to hold floating beneath its surface scattered sparks of light identical to those in the sky above. At the water's edge a pale glacial boulder left there twelve thousand years ago by a retreating wall of ice seemed a small, abandoned moon.

  "I know nothing," the rangy woman whispered in French to the stone sphere. "We don't live long enough to know anything. Our little jelly brain is just a chemical flash, like heat lightning. But you," she addressed the stone intently, "have had time to observe a great deal. And you aren't talking." On the night wind a whiff of hemlock drifted into the room. Beavers at work, damming some upper tributary of Shadow Creek. The little mammals' engineering feats seemed elegant and full of meaning compared to the chaos that lay before Eva Broussard.

  The New York State Police had burst into the lodge only minutes before Paul Massieu would have made his escape across the glassy darkness of Night Heron Lake. A lightweight canoe was prepared and waiting. The anthropologist had, as was a sort of ritual among the Canadian Seekers, canoed the chain of lakes from Montreal to this wilderness outpost where he'd first seen "Them." A covert return to Canada by the same watery route seemed the safest. It would never have occurred to New York lawmen routinely checking I-87 as a courtesy to the state of California that their prey was paddling a handmade canvas canoe beneath silent miles of red spruce.

  But Paul Massieu was no wizard of stealth. He'd left a paper trail as wide as the Hudson River connecting him to an organization incorporated as "Shadow Mountain Interests" with an Adirondack mailing address. When a ticket agent at San Diego International Airport told Dar Reinert, "Sure. The French guy and the little girl? Bought tickets to Albany, New York, ETA 6:27 P.M. Albany time," it had taken only two phone calls to get an address and a New York warrant.

  "You should not have run, Paul," Eva insisted through pursed lips at Albany's homey airport terminal. "It can only be interpreted as evidence of guilt."

  "Bonnie begged me to get Hannah back here when she called from the hospital. That was before Sammi ... before we knew ..." His voice broke with emotion. "The doctor who tried to save Sammi, this doctor had already told Bonnie they'd take Hannah away, put her in a foster home. I'm not Hannah's real father; this doctor told Bonnie they'd never let me get Hannah back, even if ... He told Bonnie the police are certain I'm the one who ..." His eyes rolled upward as a shudder rippled across his bulky shoulders. "... who raped a three-year-old baby that I loved as if she were my own ... They'd never let me have Hannah, and they won't let Bonnie have her, either, now. Bonnie's going to crack under this. I know it."

  People at the airport were beginning to stare at the weeping man with a terrified little girl clinging to his hand.

  "We'll talk later," Eva suggested quickly. "We need to take Hannah home now."

  "They know about us," he sighed in despair. "They know we're Seekers and they think we're crazy. It's one of the reasons they think I'm crazy enough to ..."

  "Yes." The older woman nodded.

  It had been something of a risk, establishing a community of people devoted to the exploration of an experience that couldn't have happened. But the rugged moors of upstate New York had cradled unconventional notions before. In a rocky field near Palmyra Joseph Smith talked to an angel named Moroni, and the Mormon Church was conceived. In Victorian Arcadia, Brockport, Ithaca, Syracuse, and Buffalo, the first American mediums communed with spirits and initiated an idea that would spellbind the Western world. There was something in the land, Eva sensed, and in the ominous cloud paths forever drifting across the river valleys. Something "otherly" her own people had seen fit to honor with rituals against madness, especially at the darkest time of the year. That something had turned up again, she was sure, on the ever-receptive screen of the human mind in the form of frail but magnetically powerful beings who seemed to have come from space.

  But Eva Broussard could trace social patterns in history as well as she could follow pheasant tracks in the hedgerows of her childhood. Ideas spawned in the shadow-mists of New York State never stayed there. Those that did, died. There had been no further sightings. It was time to go elsewhere, and the group had selected California for the state's renowned openness to unorthodox ideas. A desert location for privacy and an ascetic wildness that might free the group to shape whatever philosophy it would make of its joint experience. A desert location within driving distance of the Goldstone Tracking Station in Barstow, where NASA scientists watched as a computer program sifted a million radio bands of celestial static for the telltale, nonrandom blips that would prove we are not alone in the universe. Blips that could only be created by nonearthly intelligence. Eva Broussard wanted to interview those scientists, include that perspective in her research.
Wanted it deeply.

  Paul Massieu had been sent to purchase the land. Eva felt concern when he announced that Bonnie and the children would go with him, but they preferred to remain together. Bonnie was sure she could get a part-time secretarial job to pay for trips to Disneyland and the thousand things she wanted the girls to see. And as a lifelong resident of New York State, Bonnie Franer had hated to be cold. The prospect of a winter in sunshine was too attractive to forestall. Now her younger daughter lay dead while the other clung to the man accused of the crime. Eva Broussard had driven them away from Albany and into the Adirondack deeps, weighted with apprehension. The act that robbed Samantha Franer of her life had also slammed like a fist through Eva's fascination with a collection of strangers and their encounters with tin men in the woods. A psychological inquiry that had seemed sufficient to occupy the rest of her life paled before the anguish of the man and child now huddled in her car. Eva felt a cold, murderous resentment for the man who had shattered their lives, whoever he was. He had shattered hers as well.

  Later Eva took Hannah alone to the five-sided tower and gave her, one by one, the strings of Iroquois grieving beads she'd woven for the child after the news of Samantha's death. In candlelight reflected from two hundred panes of hand-blown glass in the tower's windows, she gently recited the words in Iroquois and in English. The words Hayenwatha had given to a people who lived in cloud-shadows and sometimes perished of a terrible grieving that would only later be named depression.

  "Samantha is gone and cannot return," she began the soft, chanting ritual. "Samantha has died. And you hurt so much that tears blind your eyes. With these words I wipe the tears from your eyes so you can see. These beads are my words for your eyes, Hannah."

  The child took the woven rush with its irregular purple beads carved from the shells of the quahog clam. Wrapping dry, tremulous fingers about the small strip, she buried her head against Eva Broussard's ribs and sobbed. Eva sank to the floor, rocking the child against her and humming a song her own grandmother had sung in the dark. A story of the Huron prophet Deganawida in his canoe of white stone. Deganawida with a speech impediment so profound he must carry his voice with him in the person of Hayenwatha, the translator mystic. The story gave form to an Iroquois reverence for sensitive communication and human interdependence. It was also, Eva had realized years ago, an excellent therapeutic model.

  After a while she said again, "Samantha is gone and cannot return. Samantha has died. And you hurt so much there's a roaring in your ears that drowns out everything else. With these words I silence the roaring so you can hear. These beads are my words for your ears, Hannah."

  When the third strip of beaded rush had been given to the child, so that her throat choked by pain might be opened for speech, Eva Broussard breathed deeply and contemplated the words she would next pronounce. They were truly necessary, she concluded. And she was prepared to undertake the responsibility.

  "As the oldest woman of this tribe," she recited, stretching the definition of tribe to fit the emergency, "I adopt you and make you one with us. I adopt you. You are now a child of the longhouse people, member of the Heron Clan, great-granddaughter of Naomi Blindhawk, granddaughter of Eva Blindhawk. You belong to us now. I am your grandmother. You have a home forever."

  When the New York State Police arrived to take Paul Massieu away in handcuffs, they demanded to take Hannah Franer as well.

  "The child is my granddaughter, an Iroquois of the Onondaga Reservation," Eva Broussard had said, her black eyes fierce beneath a leather-banded scarf. "She cannot be taken without permission of the tribal council. And she is safe here."

  A veteran of clashes with radical Mohawks near the Canadian border, the trooper was not without experience in dealing with the state's original citizens. And there were recent federal laws ensuring that the children of native peoples could not be removed from the jurisdiction of their tribes. A century-late acknowledgment that to strip a human being of his or her language, culture, and mythology is a kind of death. He glared at the blonde child snuffling in the Indian woman's skirts. She didn't look like an Indian, but then neither did a lot of the people he'd seen sitting on tribal councils. Each tribe had its own rules for determining who was one of them and who wasn't. The kid had straw grieving beads pinned to her Minnie Mouse sweatshirt. He'd seen the Iroquois beads before; it was enough. California wouldn't like it, but he wasn't about to stir up another confrontation between Indians and New York State's government.

  "Okay," he rumbled, "but you're responsible for her safety. And they'll come after her from California, anyway. You'll have to turn her over then."

  By 4:00 A.M. the lake and sky were merely graying patterns without identity. Nothing moved among the shaded tracings that in daylight would be trees, lake, sky. Shaking the thick stubble framing her head Eva strode purposefully back to the twig bed. The steps she had taken were meant to protect Hannah's fragile being from irreversible harm. Eva was confident that her decisions were correct, but now what? Her thinking had run down like bog water, reedy and thick with odd skitterings. No point in seining it anymore tonight. There was too much turbulence to see what might come next.

  Chapter 10

  Descending over the Hudson River on its approach to the Albany airport, the Boeing 767 provided a spectacular view. Sleepily Bo eyed the streams of hazy, gilded light bathing the valley below. She'd been dozing since the plane change in Chicago, and was unprepared.

  "I'll be damned!" she breathed in amazement. "So this is what they were doing!"

  Her companion in the aisle seat pulled a brimmed Red Sox cap further over an already low forehead and grimaced. The off-center set of his shoulders beneath a brown nylon jacket made clear his intent to create distance between himself and this redhead who talked to herself.

  "I mean the Hudson River School," Bo explained, pulling her hair from her face with both hands. "This light! This is what they painted! You know ... Thomas Cole, Asher Durand, Charlotte Coman ...?"

  The man shifted his weight further into the aisle and sighed miserably. It was clear to Bo that whatever interest he might have in the renowned artists of the region was eclipsed by a deeper fascination with his own shoes.

  "And even they never got to see the light from up here," she concluded, "since there were no planes in the nineteenth century."

  The man appeared to be painfully at prayer.

  Beyond the scratched window rivers of light, cream-colored, pinkish, sometimes deepening to pale honey or muted flax, poured through clouds and spilled on the rising ground below. The effect was stunning. Bo thought of sending Madge Aldenhoven a thank-you note quoting something from Washington Irving. The light was astonishing, and a little eerie. No wonder so many had tried to capture it in paint. Bo wondered if the shape-shifting quality of the sky had anything to do with whatever Paul Massieu's cult was up to. Aldenhoven had provided an address, but no other information about the activities of the group.

  Debarking into moist spring air, Bo reminded herself to rein in some of the elation buoying her steps. The day was, in fact, a bit too wondrous. The sky entirely too awe-inspiring with its washes of golden light. Too much goodness sloshing around, and it could only be coming from one source—her own brain.

  You're here to pick up an eight-year-old with a dead sister, not to rejoice in spring, Bradley.

  In the airport's parking lot Bo did a series of stretches beside the beige rental car, and thought about neurochemistry. Her near-religious awe at the sky could be a trained artist's response to unusually brilliant light patterns, or it could be something else. It could be that first heady surge of euphoria that would later become a torrent of racing impressions and feeling. Mania.

  "It's too bad, but the truth is, you must always be suspicious of feeling too good," Lois Bittner stated flatly years ago. "Most manic-depressives like the euphoria so much they don't want it to stop. The problem is, it won't stop, like a carousel spinning faster and faster. You must always stop and dissect you
r euphoria, Bo. It's the minefield between you and a battle you can never win. Sometimes it will be safe, just a little surge of glee like other people experience. And sometimes it will be your last warning. Learn to tell the difference."

  Bo slid behind the wheel of the nondescript Ford and admitted that twenty years after her first skirmish with manic depression, she still couldn't tell the difference. Moreover, she was sick of worrying about it. If things got worse, she'd deal with it. In the meantime it was sheer joy to be herself again, free of the numbing medication that, however necessary, made her feel like a senile otter swimming in glue.

  A map provided by the rental car agency provided easy access to a six-lane freeway unimaginatively named 90 West. Bo admired the lush greenery bordering the road and adorning its median. Southern California, more desert than its chambers of commerce would like known, could not in its dampest moment produce such fervent, undulating greens. She wondered why Massieu's group, whatever they were, had decided to relocate. And how they would respond when she took from their midst the child Massieu had broken every law to return to them.

  Bo plumbed her memory for information on religious cults and Utopian communities. Terms such as "wide-eyed idealists" and "vegetarian mystics" readily came to mind. Could a child-rapist arise from within such a context? Of course. Pedophiles might be anywhere. But was Paul Massieu the rapist whose violence destroyed Samantha Franer? Maybe. But if he weren't, then who was?

  A shadow fell sleekly over the road, turning the emerald trees to moss. What if Andrew LaMarche were right? What if Massieu had abducted Hannah for reasons other than guilt? Then Samantha's killer was free to rape, perhaps kill, again. Might, in fact, be doing so at this very moment.

  To her right Bo noticed a red barn in a field beside the road. On its side were painted three huge shamrocks, outlined in white. In spite of herself Bo reacted exactly as her grandmother would have done.