Strawgirl (14 page)

"And Paul isn't delusional?" Bo croaked in disbelief.

"My question as well," echoed Andrew LaMarche.

"And Paul's," Eva continued, sitting to pour more tea. "He came to me fearing that he was going mad. You'll have to trust my assessment that he shows no evidence of any psychiatric disorder. I can't explain what happened to him. But my purpose in establishing this community is to study that experience."

The sound of padding feet alerted them to the presence of Hannah, a leggy wraith in her sweatshirt and underpants. Glaring at LaMarche, the child looked questioningly at Bo and then flung herself against Eva. The dark flesh around her eyes made her look made-up, like a classic Oriental dancer. The effect was eerie.

"I'm right here, Hannah," Eva reassured the child. "And I'm glad to see you. Why don't you get your jeans and shoes now, and then you and I will see what's in the refrigerator to drink."

As Hannah scuttled away, Eva turned to face Bo. "I will come to California," she said. "I will see to it that Hannah is in the jurisdiction of your agency. It will be better for her to see that Paul is alive, in any event. But she must stay with me."

"What are you going to do?" Andrew LaMarche asked after Eva had coaxed some orange juice into Hannah and taken her out to walk near the lake.

"There are options." Bo sighed. "California may not be the best one. Eva could take Hannah up to Canada for a while. It would take weeks, even months for the paperwork to extradite them back to California. Hannah must stay with Eva if she's to come out of this at all intact. She's like the mother ..."

"I can see that." LaMarche nodded, buttoning the cuff of his shirt recently returned from the lodge's dryer. "She's a nervous, delicate child ..."

Bo shook her hair, now a mat of damp tangles. "She's not
delicate
, for God's sake, Andy, it's more serious than that. If anything she's tough as nails to have made it this far. When will people stop embroidering these cute little terms for life-threatening situations?"

His puzzled look alerted Bo to the intensity of her own words.

"I'm on a soapbox, right? I'm overreacting. She's just a kid with a lot of losses. But Andy," Bo slapped the table where the tea service sat cooling, "it's more than that. The mother's a suicide. That doesn't happen in regular people no matter what the stress. It takes a certain ... imbalance. Hannah's got the problem, too. I've seen it. My sister ..."

Bo stopped herself and toyed with the hem of the caftan she was wearing.

"I'd forgotten," LaMarche said softly. "Didn't she ...?"

Bo looked up from the wool fabric. "Not an easy word, is it? As manic depression goes, I was lucky. I got the mania, mostly. Laurie got the depression. And yes, she committed suicide when she was twenty."

The gray eyes showed pain. "I'm sorry, Bo. No wonder you're upset."

Bo stood and walked to a window overlooking a small creek. Its splashing filled the silence. "Just trust me on this, Andy. I'm going to have to do something a little irregular."

"Irregular? What are you talking about?"

"Eva wants to take Hannah back to California, to be near Paul. She's right when she says it will improve Hannah's sense of security. The child has lost her sister and her mother within twenty-four hours. Paul Massieu has been a father to her. He's all she has left."

"But Paul's in jail."

"There'll be a bond. Surely Eva will pay it. Paul will be free until his trial, if the real perp isn't caught first."

"So what's the problem?"

Bo pushed up the sleeves of the woven caftan, and then pulled them back down. Her hands were still cold. "The problem is the system. My system. The one that sent me here to bring Hannah back."

LaMarche leaned back in his chair and crossed his arms across his chest. The body language of mistrust. Bo had expected it.

"I can certify Eva Broussard as a temporary foster parent, and she's already established a relational claim to Hannah by adopting her into her tribe as an Iroquois. That relationship will stand. It's legal. Or at least I think it is. The problem is that even though I can certify Eva, and even though she's technically Hannah's grandmother now, CPS will never allow Hannah to stay with Eva."

LaMarche shook his head. "Why not?"

"Because it's not the way the system works. In particular it's not the way my supervisor works. Madge goes by the book. Temporary foster care certifications are only used in emergency situations when a close relative or family friend steps in to save a child from going to strangers. And while I think Eva matches that profile, Madge won't. If I take Hannah back as Eva's grandchild, Hannah will have to go to an Indian foster home for weeks, maybe months, while Eva establishes residency and jumps through hoops for foster care licensing. Hannah's mental state is too fragile for that, or for any foster home. It would destroy her."

"You may be projecting, Bo. Kids are resilient. They snap back more easily than—"

Bo grabbed a copy of
Adirondack Magazine
and threw it against the twig chair. "Why did I know I could count on you to remain stone deaf to what I'm saying? Hannah isn't just a kid, she's a special kid who's just lost her world, to quote a pediatrician I once knew. She has to remain under the care of the one person with whom she feels secure. If she's torn away and sent to strangers, we could lose her."

"You're not suggesting," his tone was distant, professional, "that Hannah may try to ... harm herself, are you?"

"Eight-year-olds, even troubled eight-year-olds, rarely attempt suicide," Bo said through clenched teeth. "But they do learn to live in fantasy, fail to cope. If Hannah is ripped from the last person she has on earth and forced to live among strangers right now, she may very well vanish into a world of her own making. Some dim world inside her own head. That cannot be allowed to happen."

"This little girl isn't you, Bo. More to the point, she's not your sister. You've lost your objectivity." LaMarche's voice bore an impersonal sympathy. "Maybe you should rethink your decision to stop the lithium. You're getting too involved."

Bo felt the flush racing up her cheeks, her hair rising imperceptibly from her throbbing scalp. "Here is what we're going to do," she said in a deliberate monotone. "I'm going back alone today. I will say that Eva has fled to Canada with Hannah. The two of them will secretly fly out later, and rent a place. We'll secure Paul Massieu's release, and Hannah will be able to spend time with him. I'm convinced this plan is in Hannah's best interests. I ask only that you keep your mouth shut. Will you do that?"

His bushy eyebrows became one bristled rope above his eyes. "You're asking me to jeopardize my entire career by withholding information from the police and Child Protective Services, and all on the word of a ..." He bit his lip and looked at the floor.

"Of a crazy woman? That's what you were going to say, wasn't it? Overlooking, of course, the fact that you've already withheld information from the police . . ." Bo stood straight and felt an astonishing calm in spite of her outrage. Why had she not expected this from him? She'd certainly expected it from everybody else. Tears swam in her eyes but she blinked them away. "Yes, I'm asking you to bend the rules on the word of a crazy woman. On the word of a woman who's been in psychiatric hospitals, in restraints, even. A woman who has to take psychiatric medication at times, and who isn't taking any at the moment. Are we abundantly clear about what I'm asking?"

Andrew LaMarche didn't return her direct gaze, but instead rose and walked to the door. "I'll keep quiet if you'll agree to let me check on Hannah at least weekly. That's the only way I can go along with this. But Bo," he turned to glance at the stairs from which a Gregorian chant drifted, "nobody's going to believe you."

"Oh, yes they will," Bo whispered as the door closed behind him.

On a low table near the plaid love seat was a phone. After dialing 619 and the information number, Bo took a deep breath. "Could I have a new San Diego listing for a psychologist named Cynthia Ganage?" she asked, and wrote the number on a matchbook advertising snowshoes.

In his small office with its view of bamboo plants screening the boy's club dumpsters, John D. Litten signed a name carefully to each of a stack of documents. The quality-control response form for a supplier of volleyball nets. A work order for the June groundskeeping contract service, identical to the May work order. Copy for a classifieds ad that would notify job-seekers that the Bayview Boy's Club needed one bus driver, weekends, and a short-order cook, weekdays four to six. The name he signed was "James Brenner," a halfback who died at fifteen of an undiagnosed heart valve deformity during a high school football game in Dalton, Georgia, fourteen years ago. John Litten's signature, an efficient scrawl practiced to resemble that of a doctor, gave no clue that its writer had once been Jonny Dale Litten of Estherville, South Carolina. Jonny Dale had lived with Gramma in a trailer on "Poot Hill," right over the dump. John D. lived in a downtown loft apartment overlooking San Diego Bay. A loft apartment in a building gutted and refurbished with exposed beams and brushed-chrome doors to attract architects, photographers, designers. Half the units in the building were used as offices, empty at night. No one around to hear anything. And John D. Litten was very, very careful.

At the slightest hint of trouble he moved on, followed the wind to the next big city where he could be invisible and do exactly what he wanted. And it was time to move again. The memory of yesterday began to throb in his crotch. The delicious child, pink as a rosebud as she giggled and squirmed in his lap. He'd lost control, but it was so good! Too bad the kid had died. He hadn't meant to go that far, but it was just too good to stop. And the videotape, showing a masked clown named Goody at erotic play with a naked cherub, would be worth some bucks later. Big bucks.

Beneath the Formica-topped desk John Litten felt a stiffening inside the gray tropical worsteds he always wore with the navy blazer. A navy blazer identical to one worn by the director of United Way. And the chief of the club's advisory council. And the Methodist minister from a wealthy suburban church who came two Wednesday nights a month to teach a Bible class. John Litten knew exactly how to blend in, to look like what people wanted to see. Except his blazer had a Pierre Cardin label and his gray tie with pinpoint navy polka dots was pure silk, from Saks. Underneath, he wasn't identical at all; he was better. Classier. And smarter.

The hallmark Litten jug ears had been surgically trimmed and contoured to lie attractively flat against his head. The baby-fine mouse-colored hair was razor-cut and given volume by an imported thickener. His crooked, rotting teeth had been capped by the United States Navy, which had also taught him how to order and distribute supplies. John Litten could get a job just about anywhere.

Stepping across the office to lock the door, he unzipped his pants and masturbated quickly into a flyer advertising tumbling mats. The flyer showed a girl in leotards, doing a cartwheel. He came almost as soon as he grabbed himself, thinking about yesterday. Then he zipped his pants, stuffed the flyer to the bottom of his wastebasket, and unlocked the door. The kid was the best he'd ever done, better than anything in his

whole life. He felt like superman, like a king. He wondered if part of that was because he'd rammed himself through the very core, some barrier there, and into death. He'd never killed by mistake before. John Litten didn't make mistakes. He wondered if killing with your cock was like some kind of key to another world. Or maybe it was just killing, period.

Word was all over the papers that some psychologist was blaming devil-worshipers for what happened to the kid. A devil-worshiper who lived with the kid's mother and a sister. John Litten thought about that as he examined the shine on his black hand-sewn loafers. The psychologist wasn't stupid. People loved to hear pooky like that. People could face anything but the truth. He'd known that since he was four and Gramma saw what he did to her one-eyed old cat named Scoot. She just dug a hole in the sunflowers along the front fence, and buried Scoot with the rope still around his scrawny neck. And said, "I know it was an accident, Jonny. I know you didn't mean to hurt Scoot. You was just playin', up in that tree."

Everybody in Estherville said Jonny Dale was a liar just like his no-good whore of a mother. They said she just dropped her bastard like some little, screaming turd and took off. Jonny knew he was the bastard. And after a while he figured out that bastard meant smart.

Four years later they found Dewey Ray Clyde, the shell-shocked Korean war vet, burned up in the rusting truck cab down at the dump where he liked to drink till he passed out. They said he'd blown himself to kingdom come down there by dropping a cigarette into his jar of hundred-proof. Gramma had believed that, too, even when Jonny didn't try to hide the gasoline can. From then on Jonny Dale knew exactly how stupid people could be. How much people only wanted to see what they wanted to see. It was always easy to figure out. Usually, they'd just tell you.

"Jonny, I expect you to come to school on time, and do your lessons."

That was Mrs. Myer, who had a rubber stamp in the shape of a clown's head and ink pads in different colors. Jonny Dale liked the clown head stamped on his second-grade spelling papers when he got all the words right.