Strawgirl (17 page)

It hadn't been easy to get into San Diego County's deteriorating jail to see Paul Massieu. Bo was glad the deputies enlisted to bring him back from New York had mistakenly left him in the same jail as the other man they'd picked up on the trip, whose alleged crime had taken place outside the city limits. In the mix-up she'd been able to fast-talk her way into a technically unauthorized visit, which was also technically a felony, if anybody noticed. But nobody would.

Behind the chipped black-enameled grille in the jail's barren waiting area, only one woman sat amid piles of greasy manila folders. An open bottle of nail polish remover atop an inverted romance novel revealed that Bo had interrupted meditative pursuits best enjoyed in solitude. The other staff were gone for the day. From a dusty radio Willie Nelson's voice, if not his words, was recognizable.

"Yeah, whaddaya want?" the woman said with a lack of bon vivance born, Bo was sure, of innumerable unpleasant conversations with previous visitors to the jail.

Bo undipped the Child Protective Services ID badge from her blouse and slipped it under the grille.

"I have permission to visit a prisoner named Paul Massieu," she said.

"This isn't visiting hours."

"I know. But there are mitigating circumstances that I've already discussed with the desk sergeant. I've agreed to speak with Mr. Massieu in the regular visitors' area to save trouble. You should have an order to that effect."

"Oh, yeah. Just wait."

There was no place to sit. Bo paced the bare corridor, reading and rereading a sign explaining in both English and Spanish that to bring drugs or alcohol into the jail was a felony. The sign matched the one outside the building, which had told her unauthorized conversations with prisoners were also felonious. Felonies seemed popular. Finally the woman bawled "Bradley?" in the empty hallway as if trying to be heard over a crowd. A deputy appeared from a battered metal door and wordlessly indicated another battered metal door, which he unlocked and motioned Bo to enter.

Inside, ten stools bolted to both the cement floor and the wall faced ten small, metal-paned windows. Beneath each window on the left was a wall phone, matched by one in an identical room on the other side of the wall. Well, not quite identical, Bo noticed. The walls of the visitors' side had recently been painted. Baby blue and dirty white. The prisoners-side walls were bare concrete. As Bo stood breathing the rotting grapefruit smell of enamel paint, a door opened on the other side and a prisoner in jail blues approached one of the tiny windows, sat and picked up the phone. Bo sat opposite, and picked up hers.

"Allo?" he said softly. "Oo are you?"

The accent was like Eva Broussard's, only magnified. The voice held a tremolo of fear.

"My name is Bo Bradley. I work for San Diego County's Child Protective Services, and Hannah Franer is one of my cases," she said into the phone, watching his face through the window. "You are the sole suspect in the rape-murder of

Hannah's sister, Samantha. Serious charges, Mr. Massieu. Are you guilty of them?"

The frontal approach.Most likely to produce a telling response, if not a forthright answer. Bo watched as his right hand tightened around the plastic phone receiver held against an impressive upper jaw. The hand wore a patchwork of scar tissue and was missing its little finger. A bulky man, Paul Massieu might have looked simian except for a sort of intellectual refinement that seemed to cloak him like filtered light. He returned her interrogative stare with deep-set black eyes. Outrage, pain, confusion. But no menace. Not a hint of the disguised contempt Bo had seen in the eyes of many men who preyed upon women and children.

"When I met Bonnie," he began, struggling for precision in an uncomfortable language, "Sammi was very little. She did not know her real father. Hannah could remember him, but Sammi could not. I became like a father to Sammi." He breathed deeply and went on. "To have the trust of children is ... is honor,
oui
?"

Bo had to nod in agreement.

"I would never break that honor. You will either believe or not ... I could never hurt a little child. Not in any way."

Behind the riveted playhouse-sized window he exhaled. He'd answered the question. And Bo believed him. San Diego's downtown airport was conveniently only blocks from the county jail, and Bo left Paul Massieu in plenty of time to meet Eva and Hannah's plane from Albany. Eating a bag of sourdough chips near the arrival gate she wondered why a man like Massieu—apparently healthy, intelligent, educated—would think he saw space aliens on a New York mountainside. Bo knew about delusions, about things seeming to have meaning that wasn't ordinarily there. The decaying body of an opossum on a freeway shoulder highlighted and terrible—a symbol of mindless human sprawl and its slaughter of nature. In an Italian restaurant a cheap candle flickering in a red glass had once brought Bo to tears with its message of the frailty of life, and the valor in not giving up. Emotional images. The stock-in-trade of manic depression. Always there.

But Paul Massieu had not seen just a rock or shrub that felt like a message from the universe; he'd actually observed something physical that shouldn't have been there. A hallucination, then. Except that Eva had said Paul didn't use drugs and had no brain injury or disorder that might produce hallucinations. So what had happened to Paul Massieu on that mountain? And for that matter why was it that unusual things always seemed to happen to people hanging around on mountains alone at night? Especially, according to Bo's grandmother, in Ireland.

Bo remembered the story of a now-dead kinsman named Paddy Danaher who threw a loaf-sized stone down a Poule-duve, a fairy-hole, on a mountain called Knockfierna late one night, only to have it thrown back in his face. Paddy Danaher's nose, Bo's grandmother had smiled, was crooked for the rest of his life. The wages of disbelief in shining creatures on mountains. Bo rubbed the bridge of her nose as the plane pulled into its gate.

"Could the silver people on the mountain just be fairies?" she greeted Eva Broussard and the tired, silent Hannah.

"You 'ave 'ad a long day, Bo. No?" Eva answered, her accent as thick as Paul's from exhaustion. "And your maiden name will be something like O'Rourke, am I right?"

"O'Reilly." Bo blushed. "And yes, it's been an interminable day. Let's get out of here before somebody recognizes us. Let's take our young lady safely to her castle on the beach where you both can get some rest. I just came from a visit with Paul," she said, leaning down to make eye contact with Hannah. "He's doing fine. And he can't wait to see you."

The child turned her freckled face abruptly from Bo's, but a nervous smile struggled at the corners of her mouth. Bo dropped to one knee and pulled Hannah gently toward her.

"Look at me, Hannah. I know you're mad at me and that's okay. You're just eight years old and you're tired and hurt and scared. Your mother and sister are gone, you've flown across the country twice in two days, and you feel like everything's just awful. I'd be angry, too. So if you look at me and I see the mad in your eyes, it won't make me get mad back because I understand why it's there. Later maybe we can be friends. Right now it's really okay to show how you feel."

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?"