anthropologist specializing in the nineteenth-century United States, he'd seemed to grieve for everything lost in time. Suffrage banners, quart-sized beer bottles, the Elizabethan dialect still spoken on the Outer Banks of North Carolina before a causeway to the mainland was built. Everything lost filled him with a helpless urgency to protect it, save it from an annihilation already accomplished. Bonnie Franer and her daughters had represented a fragility he could protect. Until now.
Over the mantel a small oil painting reflected the flames below. A gloomy local New York State landscape painted on cardboard in 1874 by an artist named Ella Pell who would later achieve renown in the great salons of Europe. Eva had discovered the painting among rubbish stored in the tower when she bought the lodge. Probably, she thought, a gift of the artist to the lodge's first owners. Perhaps a gift to the woman who'd died falling from the tower itself. Paul Massieu had insisted that the painting be framed and hung.
In its lower left corner dim figures occupied a small boat, dwarfed by looming, mist-covered mountains and the lampblack surface of the lake. But the seated figure, a woman in a black hat, wore at her neck a scarlet kerchief. The minuscule banner, barely visible in its dark field, was to Eva a symbol for the very striving she'd come here to document. A frail emblem of hope in a tumult of darkness. But there would be no hope for Bonnie Franer now. Too much had hurt that defenseless soul for too long. And Paul Massieu could no longer protect her.
The little picture with its single thread of color was for the inquisitive Broussard an apt standard for their whole endeavor. An unusual, perhaps irrational endeavor. Now perhaps doomed. Idly she adjusted the painting on the stone wall and remembered her first meeting with the somber anthropologist.
He'd come unannounced to her office in Montreal three years ago.
"I want you to tell me if I'm insane," he'd explained in the familiar Canadian French. "I'll pay whatever the standard rate is for such things."
A soft-spoken man of about thirty-five, dressed in rumpled corduroys, a forest green turtleneck sweater, and the predictable professor's tweed jacket. Strong, clean-shaven jaw. Shaggy black hair showing inherited evidence of male pattern baldness. Raven-dark eyes with thick, curling lashes. Black French, Eva decided. Or part Indian, like herself. Whatever his genetic heritage, it, and a mutilated right hand injured, he said, on an archaeological dig, gave him a sinister quality that was misleading. Paul Massieu would prove himself to be one of the gentlest men Eva had ever met. He'd hunched his wide shoulders and clasped stocky hands, the right of which was missing the little finger, in his lap as she outlined the reasons his request couldn't be met.
There was in actuality no measurable quality named "sanity." The term could be defined only by its absence or impairment, and even that was subject to wide fluctuations based on social and cultural expectations. Certain patterns of behavior had been given certain names, and certain medications were known to control certain symptoms. But literally no one could define sanity, much less measure it.
"But you're a psychiatrist, aren't you?" he'd insisted.
"Among other things," Broussard answered. "Tell me why you've come to me."
Paul Massieu had leaned forward nervously, his elbows on his knees. "I remembered something that happened a year ago. Something that couldn't have happened, and yet the memory is there ... details, feelings, everything. So either it did happen, or I'm somehow making up this whole memory, and I'm crazy."
"And you want me to ...? "
"I read one of your books. You sound, well, practical. I want somebody objective. Somebody who's not connected to any of this weird stuff ..."
"Connected to what weird stuff?" Broussard had inquired, curious.
Massieu straightened his shoulders. "To any of these people running around
Over the mantel a small oil painting reflected the flames below. A gloomy local New York State landscape painted on cardboard in 1874 by an artist named Ella Pell who would later achieve renown in the great salons of Europe. Eva had discovered the painting among rubbish stored in the tower when she bought the lodge. Probably, she thought, a gift of the artist to the lodge's first owners. Perhaps a gift to the woman who'd died falling from the tower itself. Paul Massieu had insisted that the painting be framed and hung.
In its lower left corner dim figures occupied a small boat, dwarfed by looming, mist-covered mountains and the lampblack surface of the lake. But the seated figure, a woman in a black hat, wore at her neck a scarlet kerchief. The minuscule banner, barely visible in its dark field, was to Eva a symbol for the very striving she'd come here to document. A frail emblem of hope in a tumult of darkness. But there would be no hope for Bonnie Franer now. Too much had hurt that defenseless soul for too long. And Paul Massieu could no longer protect her.
The little picture with its single thread of color was for the inquisitive Broussard an apt standard for their whole endeavor. An unusual, perhaps irrational endeavor. Now perhaps doomed. Idly she adjusted the painting on the stone wall and remembered her first meeting with the somber anthropologist.
He'd come unannounced to her office in Montreal three years ago.
"I want you to tell me if I'm insane," he'd explained in the familiar Canadian French. "I'll pay whatever the standard rate is for such things."
A soft-spoken man of about thirty-five, dressed in rumpled corduroys, a forest green turtleneck sweater, and the predictable professor's tweed jacket. Strong, clean-shaven jaw. Shaggy black hair showing inherited evidence of male pattern baldness. Raven-dark eyes with thick, curling lashes. Black French, Eva decided. Or part Indian, like herself. Whatever his genetic heritage, it, and a mutilated right hand injured, he said, on an archaeological dig, gave him a sinister quality that was misleading. Paul Massieu would prove himself to be one of the gentlest men Eva had ever met. He'd hunched his wide shoulders and clasped stocky hands, the right of which was missing the little finger, in his lap as she outlined the reasons his request couldn't be met.
There was in actuality no measurable quality named "sanity." The term could be defined only by its absence or impairment, and even that was subject to wide fluctuations based on social and cultural expectations. Certain patterns of behavior had been given certain names, and certain medications were known to control certain symptoms. But literally no one could define sanity, much less measure it.
"But you're a psychiatrist, aren't you?" he'd insisted.
"Among other things," Broussard answered. "Tell me why you've come to me."
Paul Massieu had leaned forward nervously, his elbows on his knees. "I remembered something that happened a year ago. Something that couldn't have happened, and yet the memory is there ... details, feelings, everything. So either it did happen, or I'm somehow making up this whole memory, and I'm crazy."
"And you want me to ...? "
"I read one of your books. You sound, well, practical. I want somebody objective. Somebody who's not connected to any of this weird stuff ..."
"Connected to what weird stuff?" Broussard had inquired, curious.
Massieu straightened his shoulders. "To any of these people running around
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