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 disapproval: “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—“
“Have you asked Mr. Maddoc directly about the boy?”
“No. What would be the point?”
“So you’re operating entirely on the word of a child, are you?”
“Don’t you often do the same in your line of work? Anyway, I’ve never met him.”
“You’ve never met Mr. Maddoc? Never met him or the mother—“
“Like I told you, I met the mother once. She was so high, she was bumping her head on the moon. She probably wouldn’t even remember meeting me.”
“You saw her actually taking drugs?”
“I didn’t have to see her take them. She was saturated. They were virtually squirting out her pores. You ought to remove Leilani from that home if only because her mother’s wrecked half the time.”
On F’s phone, the intercom beeped, but the receptionist didn’t say anything. Another beep. Like an oven timer: The goose is cooked.
“Be right back,” F promised, and again she left the room. Micky wanted to tear the cat posters off the walls. Instead, she hooked a finger in the scooped neck of her pleated shell, pulled it away from her body, and blew down the front of her blouse, on her breasts. She wanted to take off her suit jacket, but somehow it seemed that to remove it would put her at an even greater disadvantage with F. Bronson. The caseworker’s black outfit, in this heat, seemed to be an endurance challenge to visitors.
‘This time F was out of the office only briefly. Returning to her desk, she said, “So tell me about the missing brother.”
Warning herself to check her anger but not able entirely to heed her own counsel, Micky said, “So did you call off the SWAT team?”
“Excuse me?”
“You checked to see if I’m an escapee.”
Unruffled, not in the least embarrassed, F met her eyes. “You’d have done the same in my position. There was no offense intended.”
“That’s not how it looks from my perspective,” Micky replied, dismayed to hear herself pressing for an unnecessary confrontation.
“With all due respect, Ms. Bellsong, I don’t live from your perspective.”
A slap in the face couldn’t have been more to the point. Micky burned with humiliation.
If F had been gazing at the computer, Micky might have snapped back at her. But in the woman’s eyes, she saw a chilly contempt that was a match for her hot anger, obstinacy as unyielding as cold stone.
Of all the caseworkers she might have drawn, she’d been brought head-to-head with this one, as though the Fates were amused by the prospect of two women butting like a pair of rams.
Leilani. She had a duty to Leilani.
Swallowing enough anger and pride to ensure that she would still have no appetite by dinnertime, Micky pleaded, “Let me tell you about the girl’s situation. And the brother. Straight through, beginning to end, instead of questions and answers.”
“Give it a try,” F said curtly.
Micky condensed Leilani’s story but also censored from it the most outrageous details that might give F an excuse to dismiss the whole tale as fiction.
Even as she listened to this Reader’s Digest version, F grew restive. She expressed her impatience by shifting constantly in her chair, by repeatedly picking up a legal pad as though she intended to make notes but replacing it on her desk without writing a word.
Each time that Preston Maddoc was mentioned, F’s brow pleated.
Delicate lines tightened as though they were threads tugged by a needle, forming plicated fans of skin at the corners of her eyes, sewing her lips together as if with fine-draw stitches. Evidently she disapproved of the suggestion that Maddoc might be a murderer, and her disapproval was a subtle seamstress at work in her face.
Her dislike of Micky couldn’t entirely explain her attitude. She seemed to hold some brief for Maddoc, and though she didn’t argue on his behalf, her opinion of him appeared to be beyond reconsideration.
When Micky finished, F said, “If you believe there’s been a murder, why would you come here instead of going to the police?”
The truth was complicated. For one thing, two cops had stretched the facts in her arrest, suggesting she’d been more than a companion to the document forger, that she’d been an accomplice, and the public defender appointed to her case by the court had been too overworked or too incompetent to correct this misrepresentation
