“Sandy, you must be quite tired. You go on now and take a little break.”
“I’m fi—”
“Now, please.”
Sandy’s eyes met mine as she slipped past us and out the office door. Her expression was unreadable.
“Anna is a very bright young woman,” Jeannotte continued. “A bit skittish, but a good intellect. I’m sure she’s fine.” Very firm.
“Her aunt says it isn’t typical for Anna to take off like this.”
“Anna probably needed some time to reflect. I know she’s had some disagreements with her mama. She’s probably gone off for a few days.”
Sandy had hinted that Jeannotte was protective of her students. Was that what I was seeing? Did the professor know something she wasn’t telling?
“I suppose I’m more of an alarmist than most. In my work I see so many young women who
Jeannotte looked down at her hands. For a moment she was absolutely still. Then, with the same smile, “Anna Goyette is trying to extract herself from the influence of an impossible home situation. That’s all I can say, but I assure you she is well and happy.”
Why so certain? Should I? What the hell. I threw it out to see her reaction.
“Daisy, I know this sounds bizarre, but I’ve heard that Anna is involved in some kind of satanic cult.”
The smile disappeared. “I won’t even ask where you picked up that information. It doesn’t surprise me.” She shook her head. “Child molesters. Psychopathic murderers. Depraved messiahs. Doomsday prophets. Satanists. The sinister neighbor who feeds arsenic to trick-or-treaters.”
“But those threats do exist.” I raised my eyebrows in question.
“Do they? Or are they just urban legends? Memorates for modern times?”
“Memorates?” I wondered how this concerned Anna.
“A term folklorists use to describe how people integrate their fears with popular legends. It’s a way to explain bewildering experiences.”
My face told her I was still confused.
“Every culture has stories, folk legends that express commonly held anxieties. The fear of bogeymen, outsiders, aliens. The loss of children. When something happens we can’t understand, we update old tales. The witch got Hansel and Gretel. The man in the mall got the child who wandered off. It’s a way to make confusing experiences seem credible. So people tell stories of abductions by UFO’s, Elvis sightings, Halloween poisonings. It always happened to a friend of a friend, a cousin, the boss’s son.”
“Aren’t the Halloween candy poisonings real?”
“A sociologist reviewed newspaper accounts from the 1970s and 1980s and found that during that time only two deaths could be shown to have occurred due to candy tampering, both by family members. Very few other incidents could be documented. But the legend grew because it expresses deep-seated fears: loss of children, fear of the night, fear of strangers.”
I let her go on, waiting for the link to Anna.
“You’ve heard of subversion myths? Anthropologists love to discuss these.”
I dug back to a grad school seminar on mythology. “Blame giving. Stories that find scapegoats for complicated problems.”
“Exactly. Usually the scapegoats are outsiders—racial, ethnic, or religious groups that make others uneasy. Romans accused early Christians of incest and child sacrifice. Later Christian sects accused one another, then Christians pointed the same finger at Jews. Thousands died because of such beliefs. Think of the witch trials. Or the Holocaust. And it’s not just old news. After the student uprising in France in the late sixties, Jewish shopkeepers were accused of kidnapping teenage girls from boutique dressing rooms.”
I vaguely remembered that.
“And most recently it’s been Turkish and North African immigrants. Several years ago hundreds of French parents claimed children were being abducted, killed, and eviscerated by them, even though virtually no children had been reported missing in France.
“And that myth continues, even here in Montreal, only now there’s a new bogeyman practicing ritual child killing.” She leaned forward, widening her eyes, and almost hissing the last word. “Satanists.”
It was the most animated I’d seen her. Her words caused an image to take shape in my mind. Malachy lying on stainless steel.
“Not surprising, really,” she continued. “Preoccupation with demonology always intensifies during periods of social change. And toward the end of millennia. But now the threat is from Satan.”
“Hasn’t Hollywood created a lot of that?”
“Not intentionally, of course, but it has certainly contributed. Hollywood just wants to make commercially successful films. But that’s an age-old question: Does art shape the times or merely reflect them?
“But isn’t that just part of the increasing interest in mysticism in American culture over the past three decades?”
“Of course. And what’s the other trend that has taken place during the last generation?”
I felt as if I was being quizzed. What did all this have to do with Anna? I shook my head.
