Mr. Clarinet

"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.

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.