Mr. Clarinet

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.

Max stopped scribbling and stared blankly at the paper in front of him.

"Vincent Paul?" Max said as casually as possible. He looked briefly at Chantale, who caught his eye and directed his gaze to a set of photographs hung in an upper-left-hand corner.

"Yes. You know him?" asked Caspar.

"Only by reputation," Max said, and stood up. He pretended to stretch his arms and neck. He walked around the table to the photographs on the wall, shaking imaginary pins out of his hands.

There it was, in a corner, second in from the edge of the wall, a family photograph—Claudette, aged about three, Mathilde and Caspar, looking happier and an age younger, Alexandre Thodore in priest's collar, and, in the middle of them, sitting down, probably so he could fit into the shot, Vincent Paul, bald and beaming. The priest had his arm around part of his huge back.

Max guessed what it meant—Vincent Paul had been donating some of his drug millions to Little Haiti—but he'd keep it to himself.

He returned to his place.

"After we'd searched as much we could we asked the marines for help," said Mathilde. "I mean, we're both American citizens, so's Claudette, but you know what happened? We saw a captain and all he wanted to know was why we'd left the U.S. for a 'shithole like this'—that's what he called it. Then he told us the soldiers 'were too busy to help,' that they had 'democracy to restore.' On our way back to our car we walked by a bar and there was a whole bunch of marines in there, busy 'restoring democracy' by getting loaded on beer and dope."

"What happened with Vincent Paul?"

"We went to him after the U.S. Army turned us down."

"Why didn't you go to him first?"

"I—" Mathilde began, but Caspar cut her off.

"How much do you know about him?"

"I've heard good and bad, mostly bad," Max answered.

"Same as Mathilde. She didn't want us going to him."

"It wasn't that—" Mathilde began, but caught the don't-try-and-deny-it-again look her husband was giving her. "OK. With the troops here and everything, I didn't want it known that someone like him was out looking for our daughter. I didn't want us getting arrested as accessories or sympathizers."