Strawgirl (2 page)

The act, which wasn't entirely an act, worked. Head-ducking, a simple primate conciliatory gesture learned from watching Gorillas in the Mist, had proven useful to Bo more than once in defusing aggressive humans.

"So how come you stopped the lithium?" Estrella inquired with slightly less feeling. "You've been doing okay."

"Some people with mood disorders have to take medications all the time," Bo explained. "I just have to take it some of the time, and the side effects aren't exactly fun."

Estrella adjusted a mother-of-pearl comb in her sleek coif and narrowed her eyes. "What side effects?"

Bo saw no civilized way to avoid answering the question.

"Weight gain, for one. On lithium I tend to feel like a jumbo marshmallow with the personality of a road kill. I long to pick up small objects in less than two minutes and react to cataclysmic world events in under a week. It's sort of like snorkeling in potato soup."

"And it doesn't help your love life either, right?"

"Es ... !"

"Well, I knew it was something."

"Es, I keep telling you I don't
want
a love life, as you so quaintly put it. Too many complications. I want to paint, that's all. Did I tell you two of the Indian primitives sold last week? I'm thinking of spending the money on a weekend at an elegant spa like the movie stars go to. You know, where they feed you grapes and pack you in warm mud?"

"You can do that in my backyard for free," Estrella suggested. "So tell me why you're so antsy about that cult workshop this morning."

The ordinariness of the day was wearing on Bo. The endless, nonsensical details juggled in elaborate patterns behind which, she sensed, other things hid.

"It was just so stupid ..." she began as Madge Aldenhoven knocked, opened the door and swept into the small office in one efficient gesture.

"I think you're going to be glad you attended the workshop on Satanism, Bo," the supervisor announced in tones resonant with vindication.

"Why is that, Madge?" Bo queried, scanning the ceiling for cobwebs.

"Your new case is a molest. The little girl was just brought to St. Mary's in an ambulance, badly injured. We have reason to believe this case may involve ritual abuse because some sort of bizarre symbol was painted on the child's abdomen. There's an older sister. What little information we have suggests that the most likely perpetrator is the mother's live-in boyfriend, known to be a member of a cult. I want you to go to St. Mary's immediately and assess the situation. It will probably be necessary to pick up the sister from school while the family is still at the hospital. Do your best. This is going to be a messy one."

Bo admired a pearl and lapis ring on Aldenhoven's hand as it slid a new case file onto the desktop. The ring went well with a Chinese-blue linen mantua the supervisor wore over a simple knit sheath dress the color of alabaster. Madge, who never went out of the building, never confronted the reality documented in reports she merely read, could cultivate the illusion that this was a desirable line of work. Madge could dress as though she were the ladies' wear buyer for a conservative department store. It was, Bo acknowledged, a healthy self-deception. Across the manila folder's orange band the words "FRANER, SAMANTHA, 3 YEARS 6 MONTHS/HANNAH, 8 YEARS 1 MONTH" had been penned in heavy black marker. A chemical scent drifted from the fresh ink, dissolving the day's facade like rain on a dusty window. It wasn't an ordinary Wednesday after all. Bo had known it all along.

"I don't want this case," she told Estrella when Madge had closed the door behind her. An odd feeling, similar to panic but full of sadness, rose in her throat. Another unthinkable set of horrors to sort through. Against the deceptive vapidity of the day the new case loomed like a signpost to hell, offering no hope in any direction. "I don't even want to work here," she groused with a petulance that seemed to have come from nowhere. "I can't face another molest case, with or without Satanic conspiracies. I just want to stay home and paint pictures."

Bo listened to herself and heard the whiny voice of a spoiled brat. Still, the words were true. The case file on her desk shimmered poisonously.

"I knew it!" Estrella pounced on the moment. "You're off your medication and you're getting weird. You never let work get to you before. You need the lithium, Bo. You can't handle this job without it."

"Maybe," Bo pondered, stuffing the unread case file into a battered briefcase and grabbing her keys, "and then maybe there's just something peculiar about today ..."

"May first," Estrella pointed sharply to a wall calendar. "We don't celebrate the Russian Revolution here, and Cinco de Mayo is still four days off. Nothing noteworthy about today."

Bo's lips curled upward in a knowing grin. May first? Beltane! The day Caillech Bera ceased her wintry wailing and turned to stone until the following All Hallow's. Bo could almost hear her Irish grandmother telling the tale.

"Aye, an' old Cally's a-turned to stone some lonely place tonight, her staff a-lost i' the gorse. We'll not see 'er for all the bright summer, we won't, not hear 'er, neither!"

A comforting revelation, Bo smiled broadly. With the ancient symbol of madness put out of commission by a warming sun, people might safely walk the land without lithium. People might just quit whining and hang on to whatever jobs were paying their rent.

"Thanks, Es," Bo waved at the door. "You're more help than you know."

During a recently completed renovation, St. Mary's Hospital for Children had retained the services of an image consultant. Bo, swiftly assessing that the hospital's parking lot was full, eased her dowdy blue BMW into the only remaining parking spot—one marked RESERVED FOR CLERGY. Then she stuck out her tongue at the smiling magenta wooly mammoth whose painted fiberboard figure adorned every light pole. "Mabel," as the logo had been named by the image consultants, held strings to multicolored balloons in its long-extinct trunk, and wore a stethoscope around its neck. Bo found the creature aesthetically atrocious.

"Why," she'd asked Dr. Andrew LaMarche, director of the hospital's child abuse unit, "would a children's hospital in southern California use a logo depicting an extinct elephant that never set foot south of Schenectady, New York?"

LaMarche had, uncharacteristically, laughed aloud over his roasted Anaheim chili at a five-star steak house on the one occasion in six months on which Bo had agreed to dinner with him.

"The idea," he explained, "was that children would see a prehistoric, long-haired elephant as strange, like being in the hospital is strange. And that the smile and bright colors would make the strangeness friendly. Of course the thing is hideous, but the concept's sound. Young children, basically, are able to identify familiar/unfamiliar and friendly/unfriendly constructs. It's helpful to adorn the hospital with repetitions of a figure that's at once unfamiliar and friendly. Hence, Mabel!"

Bo sneered dramatically at the Mabel smiling into her windshield and pulled the Franer case file from her briefcase. Samantha Alice Franer, it told her, was a three-and-a-half-year-old Caucasian female who had been brought to St. Mary's Hospital after her mother, Bonnie Corman Franer, had taken her to a local pediatrician. The pediatrician, Susan Ling, M.D., had phoned the police after arranging for an ambulance to transport Samantha from her office to St. Mary's. According to Susan Ling's report, Samantha Franer had suffered internal injuries consistent with a sexual assault perpetrated sometime the previous day. According to Susan Ling, those injuries were serious.

Stuffing the case file back into a saddle-stitched cowhide briefcase whose brass clasp was the Mayan snake-head glyph for rain, Bo tugged down the cuffs of her black knit slacks and headed toward the hospital's lobby. A sound truck from local TV station KTUV was parked in front of the hospital's sliding glass doors.

"Uh-oh ..." Bo breathed uneasily, and grabbed for the case file again. No TV news team worth its journalism credentials would sink to invading a hospital where children lay sick and in pain. Not unless the story were irresistible. And TV station "K-TOUGH," as it chose to be known, had built a reputation on scooping San Diego's most bizarre, or bloodthirsty, events.

"A symbol of some sort has been painted on the child's lower abdomen in what appears to be yellow Magic Marker," Dr. Ling's report went on. "It is a strange face surrounded by spikes. This may or may not have any bearing on the child's injuries, which I do not hesitate to define as having resulted from rape."

"Shit," Bo said flatly as the automatic doors opened with a whoosh. Dr. Ling, obviously new to San Diego County and its procedures for reporting child abuse, had phoned her report directly to the police instead of to the Child Abuse Hotline. In the systemic relay of the report to an assignment desk and then back out to detectives in the field, the information might have been carried on one of the standard police radio bands. Accessible to anyone with a short-wave radio who happened to be listening. And somebody had been listening. The sound truck made that evident.

"It's somebody from Child Protective Services!" a voice noted from a cluster of people surrounding the lobby information desk. Bo watched a woman approaching her from the group. She was followed by an unshaven boy with stringy blond hair wearing a Grateful Dead T-shirt and carrying a Minicam. The woman was still wearing the oversized ecru silk jacket she'd chosen for the morning workshop. Bo had hoped never to see the matching bleached lizard three-inch heels again. It was Dr. Devil, the sensationalist psychologist from L.A. who could find Satan-worshippers at any convenience store but clearly couldn't grasp the concept of cruelty-free footwear. A sound bite of the woman being gummed to death by geckos flashed across Bo's brain.

"I'm afraid I've forgotten your name," Bo said, cheerfully jerking her elbow out of the woman's well-manicured grasp. "What on earth are you doing here at St. Mary's?"

Besides skating on a child's pain right into your own personal spotlight?

"Cynthia Ganage. Doctor Cynthia Ganage," the woman announced urgently. At close range Bo could see lipstick in two shades, skillfully applied with a brush, a dusting of blush over flawlessly creamy cheekbones, smallish hazel eyes set too close together but widened by artful application of gray eyeliner. The hammered hoop earrings were not brass, but gold. "As you know from my workshop this morning," Ganage went on,

"I'm a psychologist specializing in the cult-related ritual abuse of children."

Ganage's voice, Bo realized with renewed contempt, was just loud enough to be heard by two newspaper reporters hurrying through a side door from the ambulance bay. The lobby of St. Mary's was gradually assuming the frenzied atmosphere of a shark tank at feeding time.

"I'd love to chat, but duty calls," Bo smiled with patent insincerity, handing her identification badge to a security guard at the elevators.

Cynthia Ganage raised her voice another two notches. "Are you here to investigate the Franer case? From available information I'm certain that Satanism is involved. I'm here to volunteer my professional services, free of charge—"

As the elevator doors smothered the blonde woman's words, Bo took deliberately deep breaths and reminded herself that sensationalism was not really a criminal offense, even though it should be. In publicly revealing the child's name and details of the case, Cynthia Ganage had just violated every protocol observed by police and Child Protective Services personnel alike. Staring at the Mayan snake-face clasp on her briefcase, Bo decided that compared to Ganage the snake was actually cute.

"I'm here on the Franer case," she said at the fifth-floor nurses' station. "Is the child still being examined? I need to speak with the mother, too. I assume she's with Samantha?"

"The child's still in surgery," a heavyset black nurse with whom Bo had worked on previous cases answered quietly. A look in the hooded eyes issued a warning. Bo had seen the look before. The silent language of medical personnel.

"Put the walls up," it said. "Get ready to face the intolerable."

"You can go on down to the observation deck," the nurse suggested. "See how much longer it'll be. The mother's in the surgical waiting room."

Every nuance of the softly spoken words told Bo things were not going well. Nodding, she forced herself to walk through the unmarked door at the back of an office behind the nurses' station. The door opened into a short corridor that led to a small observation cage through which activities in the operating room could be observed. The observation chamber, always dark, held a row of chairs bolted to the floor for silence, and a speaker projecting voices from the brightly lit operating arena below. It was, Bo thought, like entering the interior of a Christmas tree ornament.

"... unable to effect substantive prophylactic measures already described ..." the familiar voice of Dr. Andrew LaMarche pronounced slowly as Bo made herself focus on the scene seven feet beneath her. Something wasn't right. The green-clad surgical team was too quiet, moving too slowly. The surgical nurse empty-handed. The anesthesiologist failing to monitor his bank of screens, which appeared to be blank. One surgeon walking away, another closing a wide incision across the child's abdomen with unusually large stitches. The little girl's skin was as pale as the cap of short blonde curls above her closed eyes. She seemed more representational than real, a chunky Raphaelesque cherub on an unfinished canvas. In the intense operating room lights the tousled blonde curls seemed crystalline. Like spun glass. Bo fought a realization that blurred her vision. The realization that the child's body was merely an empty and fading husk from which the personality of someone named Samantha Alice Franer had already fled.