Mr. Clarinet

that bedroom wasn't right. Something didn't fit.

He started walking toward the house, putting himself in the mind of the kidnapper who had just poisoned the dog. Claudette's room was to the left of the front door. How many of them had come for her? One or two?

Then he caught sight of Mathilde through her daughter's window, standing with her arms crossed, watching him advance.

No windows broken. No locks picked. No doors forced. No way in around the back. How had they entered the house?

Mathilde opened the window and started talking to him. He didn't hear her. As she'd started to speak, she'd accidentally knocked something off the sill, something small.

Max walked over and looked down at the ground. It was a painted wire figurine of a man with a birdlike face. Its body was orange, its head black. The figurine didn't have a left arm, and, when he studied it closer, it didn't have a full face.

He'd just begun to understand what had happened.

He picked up the figurine.

'Who gave her this?' Max showed it to Mathilde.

Mathilde looked lost. She took the figurine and closed her hand around it, sweeping the windowsill with her eyes.

Max went back into the house.

There were half a dozen more wire birdmen lined up on the windowsill, by the bed, hidden by the glare of the sun coming through the glass. They were the same shape and color, except for the last one, which was broader because it was two figurines?the birdman and a little girl in a blue-and-white uniform.

'Where did she get these?'

'At school,' said Mathilde.

'Who gave them to her?'

'She never gave me a name.'

'Man, woman?'

'I thought it was a boy, or one of her friends. She also knew a couple of children from Noah's Ark.'

'Noah's Ark? The Carver place?'

'Yes. It's a few roads down from the Lycee Sainte Anne?that's Claudette's school,' Mathilde said, and gave Max the name of the street.

'Did your daughter ever mention anyone talking to her near the school? A stranger?'

'No.'

'Never?'

'No.'

'Did she mention Ton-ton Clarinet?'

Mathilde sat down heavily on the bed. Her bottom lip was trembling, her mind churning. She opened her hand and stared at the figurine.

'Is there something you're not telling me, Mrs. Thodore?'

'I didn't think it mattered?then,' she said.

'What?'

'The Orange Man,' she said.

Max searched the drawings on the walls anew, in case he'd missed one of someone with half a face, but he'd seen everything there was to see there.

He thought back to the story of the kids who'd disappeared in Clarinette. The mother said her son had told her that 'a man with a deformed face' had abducted him.

'Max?' Chantale called out from the doorway. 'You need to see these.'

Caspar was standing next to her with a tube of rolled-up papers in his hands.

* * *

From the way Claudette had told it, her friend, The Orange Man, was half-man, half-machine. At least his face was. He had, she said, a big gray eye with a red dot in the middle. It came so far out from his head he had to hold it with one hand. It made a strange sound too.

Caspar said he'd laughed when she'd told him. He had a thing for sci-fi films?Robocop, Star Wars, and the two Terminator films were his favorites, and he often used to watch them on video with his daughter, despite Mathilde's protests that Claudette was too young. To him, The Orange Man was a hybrid of R2D2 and the Terminator when his face comes off and reveals the machine beneath. Caspar didn't take it seriously, because he didn't believe his daughter's friend was any more real than those movie robots.

Mathilde was even less inclined to believe in her daughter's stories about The Orange Man. When she'd been her daughter's age, she had had an imaginary friend too.

Neither of her parents worried unduly when, in the last six months before her disappearance, Claudette began drawing more and more pictures of her friend.

* * *

'You never saw him? The Orange Man?' Max asked the Thodores, all of them back at the dining table, the drawings spread out before them. There were over thirty of them?from tiny crayon sketches to big paintings.

The basic design was of an orange stick person with a huge head. The head was D-shaped and made up of two joined-up vertical halves?a rectangle on the left and a circle on the right. The circle resembled a face, albeit an indistinct one?a slit for an eye, another for the mouth, no nose, a lopsided triangle passing as an ear. The other half was more detailed and scary-looking. It was dominated by a large, swirling circle where the eye should have been, and a mouth of sharp, upward-pointing fangs, closer to daggers than teeth. The figure's body was missing its left arm.

'No.'

'Did you ever talk to her about him? Ask who he was?'

'I used to ask her if she'd seen him sometimes,' Caspar said. 'Usually she'd say yeah she had.'

'Nothing else? She mention him being with anyone else?'

They both shook their heads.

'How 'bout a car? She say if he drove?'

Again, a shake of the heads.

Max looked back at the drawings. They weren't in any kind of order but he could see what had happened, how The Orange Man had first gained Claudette's trust before moving in on her. The initial drawings showed the man from a distance, in profile, standing tall among three or four children, all in orange, head flat in front and round at the back; a protuberant beak where a nose should have been. The children became fewer?down to two, then, most frequently, one?Claudette herself, standing before him, just like the figurine on her windowsill showed. In all the group pictures, the children stood apart from the man, but in the ones where it was just The Orange Man and Claudette, they were holding hands. The paintings showing Claudette's family life chilled Max to the core. She depicted The Orange Man standing right in front of the house, next to the dog, or with the family when they'd gone to the beach.

Claudette knew her kidnapper. She'd let him into her bedroom. She'd gone willingly.

'She say why she called him 'The Orange Man'?'

'She didn't call him that,' Caspar answered. 'I did. She brought home one of these pictures one day. I asked her who it was of and she said it was her friend. That's what she called him?mon ami?my friend. I thought she meant a school friend. So I said, 'Hey, you're friends with an orange man,' and it stuck.'

'I see,' Max said. 'What about her friends? Did they ever talk about The Orange Man?'

'No, I don't think so,' replied Mathilde. She looked at Caspar, who shrugged his shoulders.

'Did any other children go missing from Claudette's school?'

'No. Not that we know of.'

Max looked at his notes.

'What happened the day of the?when you noticed Claudette was gone? What did you do?'

'We went looking,' Caspar said. 'We went house-to-house. Pretty soon we had a posse out helping us?neighborhood people, all canvassing, stopping people in the street, asking questions. I think, by the end of the day, between us, we'd covered every inch of two square miles. Nobody saw nothing. Nobody knew anything. That was the Tuesday, the day she went missing. We spent the next two weeks just looking for her. One of the guys here, Tony?he's a printer. He made these wanted posters, which we put up all over. Nothing.'

Max scribbled a few notes.

'Were any ransom demands made?'

'No. Nothing. We didn't have much, outside Claudette and each other,' Caspar said, his voice slipping on a tear, a wobble going through his tough exterior. Mathilde took his hand and he clasped it back. 'Are you gonna find her for us?'

'I promised your brother I'd look into it,' Max said, giving both of them an impassive look that was meant to flatten any hope they had.

'How are you coming along with the Charlie Carver case?' Mathilde asked.

'What do you mean?'

'Any leads?'

'I'm not at liberty to discuss that, Mrs. Thodore. Client confidentiality. I'm sorry.'

'So you think it's the same people?' Caspar asked.

'There are similarities but there are differences,' Max replied. 'It's too soon to say.'

'Vincent Paul thinks it's the same people,' Caspar said, matter-of-factly.