Mr. Clarinet

Max looked briefly out of the window and back to the room. He took in the bed—low, blue spread and a white pillow, rag doll peeking out from over the throw. He noticed the throw was smooth everywhere but in the middle, where it had been sat on and crumpled. He imagined either parent coming in and playing with the doll, soaking up their daughter's memory and crying their eyes out. He'd put money on Caspar being the more frequent visitor.

"The day she disappeared…I went to wake her up. I came in the room and saw her bed was empty and her window was wide open. Then I looked out and saw Toto—our dog—lying on the ground, near the swing," Mathilde said.

"Was anything broken in the house? Glass?"

"No."

"What about the front door? Had it been forced?"

"No."

"Did you notice anything about the lock? The keys don't often turn all the way after they've been picked."

"It worked OK. Still does."

"And it was just the three of you in here?"

"Yes."

"Anyone else have the keys to this place?"

"No."

"What about the previous owner?"

"We changed all the locks."

"Who changed them?"

"Caspar did."

"And you're sure you locked the front door that day?"

"Yes. Certain."

"Is there a back way in?"

"No."

"What about the windows?"

"Everything else was closed. Nothing was broken."

"What about a basement?"

"Not here."

"What's behind the house?"

"Empty lot. There was an art gallery, but it's closed down. The wall's fifteen feet high and covered with barbed wire."

"Barbed wire?" Max mumbled to himself. He looked out of Claudette's window at the wall. There were spikes running along it but none of the coils of razor wire he'd seen around the neighboring houses.

"I refused to have it," Mathilde said. "I didn't want it to be the first thing my daughter saw when she woke up."

"It wouldn't have made much difference," Max said.

He went back outside and walked over to the gate. There were bushes to the right. They would have made a noise if the kidnappers had landed in them. The kidnappers therefore came over the left-hand side of the wall, where the drop was ten feet into clear ground. They probably used a ladder to get up from the street.

They had to have scoped the place out before they came in. That's how they knew where the dog kennel was and which side to go over.

Typical predator behavior.

Max turned around and looked back at the house. Something in 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 Lycée 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.