Strawgirl by Abigail Padgett Page A

in French to the stone sphere. "We don't live long enough to know anything. Our little jelly brain is just a chemical flash, like heat lightning. But you," she addressed the stone intently, "have had time to observe a great deal. And you aren't talking." On the night wind a whiff of hemlock drifted into the room. Beavers at work, damming some upper tributary of Shadow Creek. The little mammals' engineering feats seemed elegant and full of meaning compared to the chaos that lay before Eva Broussard.
    The New York State Police had burst into the lodge only minutes before Paul Massieu would have made his escape across the glassy darkness of Night Heron Lake. A lightweight canoe was prepared and waiting. The anthropologist had, as was a sort of ritual among the Canadian Seekers, canoed the chain of lakes from Montreal to this wilderness outpost where he'd first seen "Them." A covert return to Canada by the same watery route seemed the safest. It would never have occurred to New York lawmen routinely checking I-87 as a courtesy to the state of California that their prey was paddling a handmade canvas canoe beneath silent miles of red spruce.
    But Paul Massieu was no wizard of stealth. He'd left a paper trail as wide as the Hudson River connecting him to an organization incorporated as "Shadow Mountain Interests" with an Adirondack mailing address. When a ticket agent at San Diego International Airport told Dar Reinert, "Sure. The French guy and the little girl? Bought tickets to Albany, New York, ETA 6:27 P.M. Albany time," it had taken only two phone calls to get an address and a New York warrant.
    "You should not have run, Paul," Eva insisted through pursed lips at Albany's homey airport terminal. "It can only be interpreted as evidence of guilt."
    "Bonnie begged me to get Hannah back here when she called from the hospital. That was before Sammi ... before we knew ..." His voice broke with emotion. "The doctor who tried to save Sammi, this doctor had already told Bonnie they'd take Hannah away, put her in a foster home. I'm not Hannah's real father; this doctor told Bonnie they'd never let me get Hannah back, even if ... He told Bonnie the police are certain I'm the one who ..." His eyes rolled upward as a shudder rippled across his bulky shoulders. "... who raped a three-year-old baby that I loved as if she were my own ... They'd never let me have Hannah, and they won't let Bonnie have her, either, now. Bonnie's going to crack under this. I know it."
    People at the airport were beginning to stare at the weeping man with a terrified little girl clinging to his hand.
    "We'll talk later," Eva suggested quickly. "We need to take Hannah home now."
    "They know about us," he sighed in despair. "They know we're Seekers and they think we're crazy. It's one of the reasons they think I'm crazy enough to ..."
    "Yes." The older woman nodded.
    It had been something of a risk, establishing a community of people devoted to the exploration of an experience that couldn't have happened. But the rugged moors of upstate New York had cradled unconventional notions before. In a rocky field near Palmyra Joseph Smith talked to an angel named Moroni, and the Mormon Church was conceived. In Victorian Arcadia, Brockport, Ithaca, Syracuse, and Buffalo, the first American mediums communed with spirits and initiated an idea that would spellbind the Western world. There was something in the land, Eva sensed, and in the ominous cloud paths forever drifting across the river valleys. Something "otherly" her own people had seen fit to honor with rituals against madness, especially at the darkest time of the year. That something had turned up again, she was sure, on the ever-receptive screen of the human mind in the form of frail but magnetically powerful beings who seemed to have come from space.
    But Eva Broussard could trace social patterns in history as well as she could follow pheasant tracks in the hedgerows of her childhood. Ideas spawned in the shadow-mists