At once Micky raised her head and opened her eyes, loath to be seen in a humbled posture.
Offering no explanation for her absence, F returned to her desk and settled in her chair without making eye contact. She did glance at Micky’s small purse as if nervously wondering whether it contained semi-automatic weapons, spare ammunition, and supplies necessary to endure a long standoff with the police.
“What’s the child’s name?” F asked.
“Leilani Klonk.” Micky spelled both names — and decided not to explain that the surname had evidently been invented by the girl’s deranged mother. Leilani s story was complicated enough even when condensed to the bare essentials.
“Do you know her age?”
“She’s nine.”
“Parents’ names?” ‘
“She lives with her mother and stepfather. The mother calls herself ‘Sinsemilla.” Micky spelled it. ,
“What do you mean—’calls herself?” >
“Well, it can’t be her real name.”
“Why not?” F asked, staring at the keyboard on which her poised, fingers waited to dance.
“It’s the name of a really potent type of weed.”
F seemed baffled. “Weed?”
“You know — pot, grass, marijuana.”
“No.” F plucked a Kleenex from a box, blotted her sweat-damped neck. “No, I don’t know. I wouldn’t. My worst addiction is coffee.”
Feeling as though she had just been judged and convicted again, Micky strove to keep her voice calm and her response measured: “I don’t do drugs. I never have.” Which was true.
“I’m not a policeman, Ms. Bellsong. You don’t have to worry about me. I’m only interested in the welfare of this girl.”
For F to bring to the case a crusader’s determination, she had to believe Micky, and to believe Micky, she had to feel a connection between them. At the moment, they seemed to have nothing in common except that they were women, but shared gender alone didn’t generate even the most feeble current of sisterhood.
In prison she had learned that the subject in which dissimilar women most easily found common ground was men. And with some women, sympathy could be earned most quickly when you mocked men and their pretension. So Micky said, “A lot of guys have told me dope expands your consciousness, but judging by them, it just makes you stupid.”
Finally F looked away from the computer. “Leilani must know her mother’s real name.”
F’s face and eyes were as unreadable as those of a mannequin. This studied vacancy and refusal to be charmed conveyed more contempt than might have been seen in the most vivid expression of disdain.
“No,” Micky said. “Leilani never heard her called anything but Sinsemilla. The woman’s superstitious about names. She thinks knowing someone’s true name gives you power over them.”
“She told you this herself?”
“Leilani told me, yeah.”
“I mean the mother.”
“I’ve never exactly spoken to the mother.”
“Since you’re here to report her for child endangerment of one kind or another, may I assume you’ve at least met her?”
Quickly plugging the dam of anger that sprang a leak in response to F’s rebuke, Micky said, “Met her once, yeah. She was real strange, doped to the eyeballs. But I think there’s also—“
“Do you have a last name for the mother,” F asked, returning her attention to the computer, “or is it just Sinsemilla?”
“Her married name is Maddoc. M-a-d-d-o-c.”
Flatly, absent the slightest note of accusation, F asked, “Do you have a history with her?”
“Excuse me? History?”
“Are you related to her, perhaps by marriage?”
A bead of sweat slid down Micky’s left temple. She blotted it with her hand. “Like I said, I just met her once.”
“Ever dated anyone she’s dated, fought over a boyfriend, been involved with an ex-spouse of hers — any prior history she’d be sure to bring up when I talk to her? Because everything comes out in the open sooner or later, I assure you, Ms. Bellsong.”
The cats watched Micky, and Micky stared at F, and F appeared to be prepared to gaze forever at her computer.
The ignorant, cruel, and stupid people to whom F had referred earlier, the rabble that motivated her to paper her walls with cat posters, now included Micky. Maybe it was the prison record that put Micky in this category. Maybe it was an offense she had given without intention. Maybe it was just a matter of bad chemistry. Whatever the reason, she was on F’s list now, and she knew the woman well enough to suspect that F made her list with a pencil that had no eraser.
Finally, Micky said, “No. Nothing personal between Leilani’s mother and me. I’m just worried about the girl, that’s all.”
“The father’s name?”
“Preston.”
F’s face at last became marginally more expressive than the screen in front of her, and she looked at Micky again. “You don’t mean the Preston Maddoc.”
“I guess he is. I’d never heard of him until last night.”
Eyebrows arched, F said, “You’d never heard of Preston Maddoc?”
“I haven’t had a chance to read up on him yet. According to Leilani… well, I don’t know, but I guess he must’ve been accused of murdering some people, but he got away with it somehow.”
The light texture of surprise in F’s face quickly smoothed away under the trowel of bureaucratic neutrality, but the caseworker was not entirely able to soften her voice, which cut with a honed edge of disapprovaclass="underline" “He was acquitted, Ms. Bellsong. Not guilty in two separate trials. That isn’t the same as ‘getting away with it.’ “
Micky found herself on the edge of her seat again, hunched in that supplicatory posture once more, but she didn’t straighten her shoulders this time or slide back on the chair. She licked her lips, discovered they were salty from perspiration. She felt as if she’d been basted. “Ms. Bronson, I don’t know about him being acquitted, but I do know there’s a little girl who’s been through a lot in her life, and now she’s stuck in this godawful situation, and someone has to help. Whatever Maddoc was supposed to have done, maybe he didn’t do it, all right, but Leilani had an older brother, and he’s gone missing. And if she’s right, if Preston Maddoc killed her brother, then her life is on the line, too. And I believe her, Ms. Bronson. I think you’d believe her, too.”
“Killed her brother?”
“Yes, ma’am. That’s what she says.”
“So she’s a witness to a murder?”
“No, she didn’t actually see it. She—“
“If she didn’t actually see it, how does she actually know it happened?”
Counting on patience to prevail, Micky said, “Maddoc took the boy away and then came back without him. He—” > Took him away where?”
Into the woods. They were…
“Woods? Not very much in the way of woods around here.”
“Leilani says this was in Montana. Some UFO contact site—” “UFO?” Like a nest-building bird worrying threads from a scrap of fabric, F seemed determined to pick relentlessly at Micky’s story, though not with the intention of building anything, seemingly for the sheer pleasure of reducing it to a scattering of scrambled fibers. In the service of this goal, she seized upon the mention of UFOs. Her eyes sharpened a hawk glare fit to pin a mouse from a thousand feet; and if she’d had slightly less self-control, her next two words would have come out as a birdy screak of cold delight. “Flying saucers?”
“Mr. Maddoc is a UFO buff. Alien contact, that weird stuff—“
“Since when? Seems if this were true, the media would’ve made a lot out of it. Don’t you think? They’re pretty merciless, the press.”
“According to Leilani, he was into this UFO stuff since at least back when he married her mother. Leilani says—“