Free Strawgirl by Abigail Padgett Page A

you talking about?"
    The suddenly moody doctor was lapsing into abstraction.
    "I had a child once, Bo," he muttered abruptly. "I never saw her. Her name was Sylvie. She drowned in a bathtub in New Orleans while I was still with the Corps in Vietnam. Her mother, who was not my wife, left her alone only a little while. Apparently she'd been trying to bathe her toys. She was two."
    Bo listened to dust settling on cottonwood leaves and did not move. After a while she said simply, "I'm sorry, Andy."
    "Whoever violated Samantha blew apart the entire world for everyone connected to her," he continued through clenched teeth. "Her whole family and everyone close to her. The murdering bastard raped and killed more than just one little girl. He raped and killed the world for those people!"
    His hands, Bo noticed, were knotted into fists.
    "That's how you felt when your daughter died, isn't it?"
    "I don't deny that her death propelled me into pediatrics, and then into the field of child abuse. It was a way of holding the world together, of trying to make sense of the senseless. Until you ... until recently, it's been my whole life ..." His voice trailed off.
    Bo shifted uneasily on the truck's bumper. There was no denying the intensity of his words, but there was something else. Something very personal in the narrative, and it was directed at her. An appeal? More like a declaration. So powerful in its vulnerability and candor it felt like a threat, abrading a boundary she hadn't realized was there, but now wanted to keep intact.
    "You've identified with the parent in this case," she stated the obvious, creating a palpable wall between them. A wall behind which she could play social worker all night if necessary. A wall that would blunt the intimacy he offered. "I can understand that. But why does that lead you to believe this Paul Massieu isn't the perp? Why else would he run?"
    The change of subject wasn't lost on LaMarche, who crossed his arms over his chest and shook his head as if reprimanding himself. After a lengthy examination of the Cottonwood's higher limbs, he turned again to Bo. "In French it's called le monde ," he began softly. "That means 'the world,' but no one's world is the same. The assumption that we share an identical world is at the root of most problems, especially the serious ones."
    "What has this to do with the Franer case?" Bo asked, lost.
    "Everything. Please hear me out, Bo. It's important."
    The decision to listen had to be made consciously. With a brain always scanning the external environment and its own stores of imagery for constant stimulation, even in periods of relative calm such as this one, it was too easy to grasp subtlety after subtlety and nothing more. Too easy to catch merely a mood and then move on. Not easy at all to open the mind in slow silence while another spoke. Bo looked at the man who'd saved her life and that of a deaf little boy six months in the past, and decided she owed him that much, if not the deeper bond he'd reached for only minutes earlier. With a deep breath she exerted the Herculean effort necessary to mute the sweep of her mind. "All right," she said quietly.
    He had been watching. "Estrella told me you've stopped taking the lithium, Bo. Do you think—"
    "We're not here to talk about lithium. What was it that you wanted to say about the world and Samantha Franer?" It was difficult to arrest the lecture framing itself for delivery to Estrella Benedict first thing in the morning, but Bo managed.
    "As a young man I lived in a world where men accepted no responsibility for pregnancies in women to whom they were not married. This same world included a corollary mythology that held that all female people, simply by virtue of certain bodily organs, were magically able to provide years of tedious daily care for children. Had I moved one inch outside that world, my daughter might still be alive."
    "You're still blaming yourself—" Bo began.
    "Let me make my point. You're now in