Strawgirl by Abigail Padgett Read Free Book Online Page B

exhibited by the group in California's law enforcement agencies reflected nothing so much as a familiarity with American television. Eva found herself staring into the stacked wood.
    Could she be wrong about Paul? Could her fondness for the quiet, lonely man have obscured her judgment? Could Paul Massieu be a pederast, a child-molester, the rapist and murderer of a little girl?
    As she lit a match to the kindling she stripped herself of the layered identities that might blind her to a distasteful truth. Like barely perceptible cloaks, she removed the personae of psychiatrist, Bolduc Chair in Social Psychology at the Seminaire de Sainte Jeanne d'Arc, and author of the popular self-help series, The Meaning of Your Life , as well as a highly praised biography of the Christian mystic Hildegard of Bingen. When the intellectual trappings of forty years had fallen away, Eva addressed her core being—a mature Iroquois woman. The fire caught and flared, its dancing light a filigree on her broad hands.
    "What do I want?" she thought inwardly to a gallery of masks floating near her subconscious. "Do I need to believe in the normalcy of this man's personality so much for the sake of my own research that I've overlooked a terrible inadequacy? Have I wanted the project more than the truth?"
    The Iroquois mask Eva named "Pride," an elongated visage woven of age-darkened willow with mere slits for eyes and a clown's wide smile, did not drift into view behind her closed eyes. She'd more than half expected it, the quality called pride
    having been a continual stumbling block in her adult life. But it wasn't there. Nothing was there. Just a reversed-out image of flames, black on a gray background. If Eva Broussard had failed to perceive a disturbing sickness in Paul Massieu, there was nothing in her mind to account for it. Still, she acknowledged, there was always the minuscule margin for error. The margin in which wholly inexplicable events could occur. This might be one of them, but Eva was prepared to contend that it wasn't. Eva was comfortable with a ninety-eight percent certainty that Paul Massieu was innocent.
    Rising from the stone hearth, she stretched bronze, muscular arms toward Night Heron Lake, now gray marble beneath a patchy scarf of fog, and thought about the other victims of Samantha's killer. The child's death would destroy the mother. That realization scarcely required the plethora of professional sensitivities possessed by Dr. Eva Blindhawk Broussard.
    Bonnie Franer had been beaten by a drunken sod of a father on a bleak farm outside Syracuse, New York, until marrying at nineteen an arcade games salesman she'd met at the truck stop where she worked as a cashier. Eight years later and three months into the pregnancy that would produce Samantha, Seth Franer had taken the remaining two hundred dollars in their bank account and vanished. A postcard from Niagara Falls informed Bonnie that he was sorry, but he guessed he was just a rolling stone. He wouldn't be back. The day the postcard came Bonnie Franer had taken her daughter Hannah to kindergarten, returned home, and swallowed a hundred and thirty-six over-the-counter sleeping pills. A neighbor found her vomiting on the rickety wooden porch of the Franers' rented duplex in Troy, New York. After her stomach was pumped, the defeated woman's only fear was that she had harmed the child growing within her. Now that child was dead.
    Eva Broussard shivered slightly and hugged herself against the flimsy substance of Bonnie Franer's life. Nothing had been given the woman to uphold her during difficulty. No family or cultural ties, no education, no financial resources. No substance of any kind. The woman was prey to every vagary of emotion, every whim in the shifting winds of her time. When Paul Massieu met Bonnie Franer working the food concession at one of Eva's lucrative self-help lectures in Buffalo, he'd fallen in love with his own need to protect something. A cultural