longhouses, she knew herself a member of the Heron Clan. One of her great-great-grandmothers had named the very lake now hidden in mist below the lodge. Eva Broussard was home. But trouble was winging its desperate way from California. A fugitive man and frightened child, and all that would follow them.
As members of the community gathered from adjacent cottages and climbed the maple tower stairs for the evening chant, Eva sighed and relaxed. Some of the Seekers, as they called themselves, believed that a technically perfect plainsong in human voice, beamed regularly into space from a transmitter atop Shadow Mountain, would entice a return of the frail, terrifying visitors. The chants, performed at sunrise and at sunset from the five-sided tower, were the most lovely, plaintive sound Eva had ever heard.
Chapter 7
Bo had delivered the paperwork on Hannah Franer to the district attorney's office at 3:00 P.M. His signature scrawled across the petition at 3:10 ensured that the eight-year-old girl was legally under the jurisdiction of San Diego County's Juvenile Court. A formality under the circumstances, the legal documents would ensure that police could seize the child without hindrance in the event that she were found. A "sibling petition," no more than a handful of paper in which a county assumed the duties of a parent when the real parent had "failed to protect."
For the rest of the afternoon Bo worked another case, and brooded. The case involved an abandoned ten-year-old found by police in the closet of a fleabag hotel room where his mother lay dead on the floor, having freebased her way into the next world. The boy, now waiting at the county receiving home for whatever would happen next, said he had no relatives except a father named Lee John who'd "killed some dude" in Iowa, or maybe it was Idaho. When twenty-seven phone calls to corrections agencies in states beginning with I turned up no information whatever on a Lee John or John Lee Crowley, Bo wrote up a court report recommending that the boy be released
for adoption. Then she stood outside the window of Madge Aldenhoven's office, smoking.
No one would adopt Jonas Lee Crowley. That was a joke. In fact, hell would freeze before the hypothetical nice couple would welcome into their hypothetical loving home a skinny, snarling boy with hate in his ice-blue eyes, lice in his hair, and a hobby of peeing on shoppers from the top of department store escalators. Jonas would spend the next eight years in foster homes and correctional schools. After that he would be released to the streets where he would unquestionably sire another generation of misery. If there were a way to stop the cycle of ruin she saw every day, Bo couldn't imagine what it might be.
Her own childhood home in Boston had seemed perfectly awful at the time. A little sister who was deaf, everybody having to use sign language. Her mother, a violinist with the Boston Symphony, constantly practicing in the dining room. The scent of imported tobacco drifting from her father's meerschaum in a living room converted to library for his endless and highly paid research into antiquated patents and copyrights. And a paternal grandmother whose annual summer visits from Ireland wreaked havoc. In retrospect Bo knew her childhood to have been a well-managed haven despite the problems her family faced. This job had forced her to see what hell life could be for children, and the hell those children would later create for their children, ad infinitum. She wished her parents had lived long enough for her to thank them.
"You look like your best friend es morte ." Estrella butchered the common remark while struggling through the parched bushes outside their supervisor's office. "You just smoke out here to irritate her, don't you?"
"No, I like the view," Bo answered, gazing through a chain-link fence at four lanes of traffic on Genesee Avenue. "It's the best part of this job."
Estrella grabbed a limb of a relatively
As members of the community gathered from adjacent cottages and climbed the maple tower stairs for the evening chant, Eva sighed and relaxed. Some of the Seekers, as they called themselves, believed that a technically perfect plainsong in human voice, beamed regularly into space from a transmitter atop Shadow Mountain, would entice a return of the frail, terrifying visitors. The chants, performed at sunrise and at sunset from the five-sided tower, were the most lovely, plaintive sound Eva had ever heard.
Chapter 7
Bo had delivered the paperwork on Hannah Franer to the district attorney's office at 3:00 P.M. His signature scrawled across the petition at 3:10 ensured that the eight-year-old girl was legally under the jurisdiction of San Diego County's Juvenile Court. A formality under the circumstances, the legal documents would ensure that police could seize the child without hindrance in the event that she were found. A "sibling petition," no more than a handful of paper in which a county assumed the duties of a parent when the real parent had "failed to protect."
For the rest of the afternoon Bo worked another case, and brooded. The case involved an abandoned ten-year-old found by police in the closet of a fleabag hotel room where his mother lay dead on the floor, having freebased her way into the next world. The boy, now waiting at the county receiving home for whatever would happen next, said he had no relatives except a father named Lee John who'd "killed some dude" in Iowa, or maybe it was Idaho. When twenty-seven phone calls to corrections agencies in states beginning with I turned up no information whatever on a Lee John or John Lee Crowley, Bo wrote up a court report recommending that the boy be released
for adoption. Then she stood outside the window of Madge Aldenhoven's office, smoking.
No one would adopt Jonas Lee Crowley. That was a joke. In fact, hell would freeze before the hypothetical nice couple would welcome into their hypothetical loving home a skinny, snarling boy with hate in his ice-blue eyes, lice in his hair, and a hobby of peeing on shoppers from the top of department store escalators. Jonas would spend the next eight years in foster homes and correctional schools. After that he would be released to the streets where he would unquestionably sire another generation of misery. If there were a way to stop the cycle of ruin she saw every day, Bo couldn't imagine what it might be.
Her own childhood home in Boston had seemed perfectly awful at the time. A little sister who was deaf, everybody having to use sign language. Her mother, a violinist with the Boston Symphony, constantly practicing in the dining room. The scent of imported tobacco drifting from her father's meerschaum in a living room converted to library for his endless and highly paid research into antiquated patents and copyrights. And a paternal grandmother whose annual summer visits from Ireland wreaked havoc. In retrospect Bo knew her childhood to have been a well-managed haven despite the problems her family faced. This job had forced her to see what hell life could be for children, and the hell those children would later create for their children, ad infinitum. She wished her parents had lived long enough for her to thank them.
"You look like your best friend es morte ." Estrella butchered the common remark while struggling through the parched bushes outside their supervisor's office. "You just smoke out here to irritate her, don't you?"
"No, I like the view," Bo answered, gazing through a chain-link fence at four lanes of traffic on Genesee Avenue. "It's the best part of this job."
Estrella grabbed a limb of a relatively
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