A Grave Talent (16 page)
Authors: Laurie R. King
The house was slightly more ornate than Kate had anticipated, a bit larger, its landscaping somewhat more elaborate than what she imagined commonplace for a farmhouse. From meeting Vaun's aunt at the hospital and having seen the amount of money that was transferred monthly from Vaun's account, she had expected it to be well maintained, and indeed it was: bright white rail fencing that stretched out into the distance, three nicely blending colors of paint that brought out the house's gingerbread details, a flawless acre or so of lawn encircled by wide flower beds and at the moment edged by several hundred tentative daffodils, slightly flattened by the recent rains. A small pond sparkled through the bare branches of a curve of trees. Kate switched off the engine, and she and Hawkin got out to sounds of rural life: quacks and honks from the pond, the rumble of distant machinery, the sharp snarl of a far-off chain saw, then the evocative, nostalgic screak of a screen door, followed by a familiar voice.
"You didn't have any trouble finding us, then?" said Vaun's aunt, in what sounded to Kate like a common greeting. She turned and smiled at the grandmotherly figure and was struck, as she had been at the hospital in the small hours of Saturday, by how precisely the woman fit the image of a farm wife, with graying hair, round figure, full cheeks, and calm brown eyes.
"Not at all, Mrs. Jameson. Your directions were clear, even to a city girl."
"Good. You're looking considerably better. How is your back?"
"Doing very well, thanks."
"I must say I hadn't expected to see you up and around so soon, after how you looked the other day."
Kate grinned. "We old San Franciscans are made tough."
"So I see. I didn't get a chance to thank you, then."
"Not necessary."
"Not for you, perhaps. I have a feeling that your job is thankless often enough, that's no reason for me to add to it. Would you like some coffee? I was just about to put it on." She moved easily from the honest gratitude into the role of hostess, and Kate shifted with her.
"Thank you, that would be nice."
Hawkin had stood oblivious to the exchange, looking out over the distant fields. Turning back from the top of the porch steps, Kate could see a red tractor making its way through a green field, pulling after itself an unrolling ribbon of rich brown.
"You have a beautiful place here," she offered.
Rebecca Jameson looked faintly surprised, and half turned to survey her vista with the new eyes of a stranger. A small, worried frown came between her eyebrows at the sight of the tractor, and she shook her head slightly and turned back to Kate with a smile.
"It is beautiful, isn't it? A person forgets to look at it, somehow, when she's so wrapped up in day-to-day things." She looked again, as if to fix the memory of it in her mind, and then she led Kate and Hawkin through the screen door, which slapped shut behind them, across the throw rugs and gleaming wood floor of the hallway, and back into the big, warm kitchen. A cat slept on a chair in the sun, a clock ticked on the wall, faint smells of breakfast bacon hung in the air, and a man's voice came in monologue from somewhere in the house. The farm wife took a brightly enameled electric coffee percolator and ran water into it, filled its basket with grounds from a green can, and plugged it in. She reached for cups, and paused.
"Did you have breakfast?"
"We did, thank you," Kate replied firmly. Hawkin was still silent, exploring the view from the window, the whatnots on a shelf, a display of trophies and ribbons, the cat on the window seat.
"Then you won't want more than something to go with the coffee for the moment. We'll eat at one," she added. "You wanted to talk with Ned and Joanna too--they'll come then. Meanwhile you've got me and Red to talk to. Red's my husband," she explained unnecessarily, and came to the table with a large bowl of thick oatmeal-and-raisin cookies that instantly transported Kate back into childhood, when she'd lived next door to the neighborhood grandmother. "Did you see her this morning?" she asked abruptly. Hawkin put a small gold baseball trophy back on its shelf.
"Your niece? No, not since last night," he said.
"I talked to the hospital an hour ago. They said there was no change. 'No change.' " She chewed at her upper lip, staring down at the bowl. Kate looked for something to say, but Mrs. Jameson just shook her head and tried to smile. "I think Red's off the phone now. I'll just go get him."
The percolator chuffed and gurgled, Hawkin prowled around, and Kate ate a cookie. Voices from upstairs grew closer, followed by the hum of machinery and then the whisper of tires on the wood floor. Mrs. Jameson came back into the room, followed by her husband.
Red Jameson had once been a big man, and even now his wide shoulders filled the chair, his back was straight, his big hands powerful. Only his legs were small, wasted, and inert on the footrests. His thinning hair hinted at the shade that had given him the obligatory nickname, and though his skin had probably not been pale and freckled since babyhood, it remained finely textured under the weathering, like well-cured deerskin. He was younger than Kate had expected, in his middle fifties. The only heavy lines in his face were those next to his mouth, and they spoke not of age but of an intimate familiarity with pain.
"Red, this is Miss Martinelli, and Alonzo Hawkin."
Jameson's handshake was gentle for such a large man, though the skin was hard with callus. His eyes looked over Kate, then met Hawkin's.
"Becky tells me you've come about my niece," he said. His voice was low and pleasant, and Kate had a brief image of him reading aloud to a group of children. "Are you investigating the murders of those three little girls, or Vaun's... what Vaun tried to do to herself?"
The words were too direct for his wife, who moved off abruptly toward the kitchen. Hawkin met his gaze and gave him an equally blunt answer.
"At present we are working under the assumption that they are related, Mr. Jameson."
The man nodded, and allowed himself to be distracted by his wife putting the pot of coffee and a jug of cream on the table. They sat down at a round pine table set with gingham placemats. Hawkin pulled out the chair next to Kate's and lowered himself into it, fussed with the coffee, refused a cookie, and waited for the social necessities to subside. When they did he continued with his thought.
"For lack of an alternative, as I said, we are forced to assume that what appears to be a suicide attempt on the part of your niece is related to the deaths of Tina Merrill, Amanda Bloom, and Samantha Donaldson. I am convinced that the relationship is there, although I am far from certain about its nature. There are too many uncertainties, most of which have their roots here, in your niece's past."
Red Jameson's blue eyes narrowed at Hawkin's careful choice of words. The inevitable suspicion and mistrust of police investigators he must have had was put aside as he opened his mouth to speak, glanced at his wife, and looked back at an imperturbable Hawkin.
"Are you--what sort of a 'relationship' are you talking about?" he asked cautiously.
"Mr. Jameson, we are beginning to think that she did not try to kill herself."
Kate watched as a series of emotions borne on a wind blew through the room, settling first on the husband's face, then on the wife's, to be replaced by another on his. First puzzlement, as the words sank in, then speculation as he and then she reviewed Hawkin's words and realized that he had not been suggesting an accident, then an instant of relief before the thud of fear hit, and two pinched faces stared at Hawkin, tight with apprehension and battered by the brief storm that had just passed through. The husband found his voice first.
"You think somebody... But who?"
"Yes, Mr. Jameson, I think there's a strong possibility that someone tried to kill Vaun. I don't know who yet-- whoever it was is a very clever person. And before you ask, there's a guard on her at all times, and the hospital is exaggerating her condition to anyone who asks. As far as anyone else knows, she's on the edge of dying. You may see it in the papers. It's not true. It's just a way of protecting her."
"You think someone would try again?" Mrs. Jameson sounded appalled.
"If it was an attempt at murder, it was no spur-of-the-moment thing. It was carefully planned, and yes, that sort of person would indeed try again."
"But why?"
It was a cry of pain, and Hawkin responded by allowing his own frustration and exhaustion to show through.
"I don't know, Mrs. Jameson. Not yet. I do intend to find out. With your help."
The room rippled with the effect of his last phrase. Red Jameson sat slowly up in his chair, shoulders straightening, chin up. His wife grabbed at the idea as if it were a life ring in a stormy sea, and Hawkin her rescuer, about to tell her what to do. Five minutes earlier they had both been closed, wary, and would have parted with information grudgingly, if at all. Now they saw Hawkin and Kate as their champions in the cause and would withhold nothing.
Kate reached for her coffee and swallowed deeply to hide her face. Pray God these two would never know how thin was the evidence supporting Hawkin's declaration: a sliver of wood, the lack of pills, a pot of stew. Pray God they would not have to be faced with a future Hawkin who had withdrawn from the confident opinion that had just won their support, an opinion that she knew he only half held, but which was very, very useful in opening up this vital source of information. Manipulating people without an outright lie was never easy, but Hawkin was a clever man. The coffee tasted suddenly sour, but she drank it all.
"How can we help?" the hostess asked eagerly.
"Just tell us about her," Hawkin said simply. "What was she like as a child, how did she change as an adolescent, her friends, her painting. Anything that comes to mind."
"You should see her studio, then--the shed where she painted," she offered. "And I have photograph albums, if you like? Is that what you want?"
"Exactly right. However, I'm also hoping to see one or two of her teachers at the high school this afternoon, which leaves us short of time. Casey, why don't you go have a look at the studio with Mr. Jameson while Mrs. Jameson and I go through the albums."
Kate was mildly surprised at his division of labor, and Mrs. Jameson began to protest that the ground was too muddy, but her husband growled at her and she subsided. Kate held the kitchen door for him as he pulled on a billed cap with "Samuels Feed n' Seed" stitched on the front. He rolled down the ramp onto the concrete path that wound around the house and spidered off in various directions, pointing his chair towards the older, wooden barn. Kate walked beside him in the clear spring sun.
The small shed had three steps leading up to it, and Kate had to push the chair up the rough boards that had been nailed down as a ramp. She felt a sharp pain in her back as the stitches pulled, and she cursed silently, hoping that the double gauze pads she'd had Lee tape on that morning would absorb the blood.
It was an unlikely place to have nurtured such a talent, she thought as she followed Jameson through the narrow door: white paint on coarse plank walls and ceiling, a bare bulb on a wire, ancient linoleum with odd tacked-down seams, salvaged from somewhere else; a narrow metal-framed bed in one corner, once painted dark green but chipped now, still laid with a lumpy mattress with blue ticking and loose buttons, three blankets folded neatly at the foot.
Three things made it the home of an artist. One was the massive storage cabinet that almost hid the south wall, a cruder version of the storeroom in Vaun's house on Tyler's Road. This one was built of various thicknesses and qualities of plywood, painted white, and its two tiers of slotted racks still held a number of paintings. Then on the opposite wall the rough planks had been cut away for three large, metal-framed sliding windows that opened up the shed and made it a place of clear, even light. They were almost identical with the window from which Kate had taken a sliver of redwood three days before. Below the expanse of windows lay the third and unmistakable sign of this structure's most recent life: a midden of drops, dribbles, and smears that obscured the faded linoleum entirely near the windows and trailed off to a thinner layer of footsteps and drops as it reached the middle of the room. Jameson saw her looking at the motley surface.
"Becky wanted to clean it up, but I told her not to bother. We've left it like it was. We don't need the space, not really, and I think Vaun likes to see it when she comes. She sleeps here sometimes, though we kept her old room for her in the house. Becky comes in every month or so to make sure the mice aren't moving in, and she does a quick dust and a mop once or twice a year. Silly, I suppose, not to use the space, but somehow we couldn't bring ourselves to clear it out after--when Vaun left, and after a while it just got to be habit. Silly, I guess," he repeated, but he didn't sound embarrassed by this tangible evidence of sentimentality, and his face was relaxed in the silent air that smelled faintly of ancient paint (or was that imagination?) and of the sun-soaked farmyard breeze that moved through the open door behind them. Kate realized that a comment was not necessary.
"Did you put these windows in for her?" she asked.
"I helped her. She paid for them herself--her first sale, it was. She was sixteen. She used to paint some of the kids in school, and one time she did a really nice one of the daughter of the fellow who owns the lumberyard in town. A few weeks later she started asking me if she could have some of the money from her parents' insurance settlement to make this shed more usable for painting in--Becky wasn't too happy about Vaun's getting all that on the floor of her bedroom, as you can imagine." He gestured at the floor and chuckled. "I hated to see her eat into the money, even for that, so I said why didn't she take the painting over to Ed--Ed Parker, his name is--and see if he'd trade it for some glass. She liked that picture, but she liked the idea of windows even more, so she thought about it for a couple of days and then wrapped the picture up in one of Becky's old tablecloths and went down to see him. She came back two hours later, riding proud in his delivery truck with those three windows. She helped me put them in, and when we finished, she looked at them for the longest time and went over and slid them open and shut a few times, and then she just stood there with her back to me and said 'thank you,' real quiet. My own daughter would have hugged me or jumped up and down, but Vaunie was always different. It was okay, though. It was enough, that 'thank you.' She really meant it. Not just putting in the glass for her, but everything attached to those windows." A lost past echoed in his voice, gone.
"She hasn't changed much, has she?" mused Kate, thinking of her own experience of the woman's understated intensity.
"She hasn't changed at all. A little bit quieter, but everything she's been through has only made her more of herself. The only time she's been at all different was when she was hanging around with that Andy Lewis."
"What happened to him, do you know?" Kate asked it in as offhanded a manner as possible and was not prepared for the violence of his response.
"Don't know, don't care. He was a slimy little bastard, pardon my French, and I told him that if I caught him on my land I'd empty a load of buckshot into him."
"When was that?"
"The week Vaun was sent to prison. I saw him in town, standing around with some of the kids who used to kiss his--who used to look up to him. His father died when Andy was small, I think, and his mother was a weak little woman who never said no to him, so I guess it's not surprising he turned out the way he did. He went away not too long after that, I remember. Took all the money he could find in the house and disappeared. Broke his mother's heart, wouldn't you know? She died the next year."
"He gave Vaun drugs, didn't he? Marijuana, LSD? Why was he never prosecuted for that?"
Jameson sat staring out the window. The red tractor had come into sight, still far off, the black-brown trail unfurling in its wake. He muttered something under his breath.
"I beg your pardon?"
"I said, It's too wet. I told Ned this morning he'd just make a mess of it, but off he went."
Kate, bewildered, followed his gaze for a clue, and then realized that Ned was the son, and he must be referring to a disagreement over the wetness of the soil. She waited for a long moment while they both watched the tractor pull (struggle?) up a rise and then disappear down the far side.
"Mr. Jameson..."
"Yes, I heard your question, Miss Martinelli. He wasn't prosecuted because there was no evidence, and nobody would squeal on him. They were all either in love with him or scared to death of him, and the sheriff couldn't get anything on him. Yes, I think he gave her drugs. I know that for the five months she was hanging around with him, from December to the end of April, she was not herself." He circled abruptly away from the window wall to the stored paintings and without hesitation pulled out one from near the right side, set it upright, and fished out another, smaller one from a few slots down. He set it to the left of the first and pushed his chair around next to Kate.
"The one on the left is dated October; the one on the right is from the following March, when she was still involved with him. She always dated her paintings when she finished them, on the back. Still does, I think."
The smaller painting was a deceptively simple study of a girl, almost a young woman, sitting with her back against a tree trunk, one knee up, a gaudy paperback in one hand. She was dressed in shorts and a white cotton shirt. Her right hand was absently fiddling with a lock of her light brown hair, and her eyes were both on the book and far away. Simple, unassuming, intimately personal, it was the work of a mature artist.
The larger one was still technically superb for the work of such a young painter. Its subject was another young woman, this one seated at a mirror, grimacing openmouthed as she applied a wand of makeup to her eye. She wore a tight, sleeveless knit shirt, and a bra strap peeked from the edge of it. The colors of the palette were harder, the brush work slightly coarser, but it was a finished painting that many artists would have been proud of. The difference appeared when the two were put side by side.
The earlier painting was a gently humorous glimpse of a girl on the edge of womanhood, a look at the potential, the choices, the dreams that lay before her. Her back slumped with the unself-conscious grace of a child into the curve of the tree, and though her legs were brown and a Band-Aid could be glimpsed on one shin, their positioning was somehow deliberate, an experiment with seduction. The indication of as yet unnoticed breasts lay under the fabric of her grubby T-shirt. In different hands, adult ones, male ones, it would have edged into nostalgia, cuteness, even verged on pornography. This painting, however, was too utterly honest, and could only have been made by someone who was painting a self-portrait, though the face was not her own.
The larger one was the vision of another set of eyes altogether. Where the first girl was growing into her womanhood, this one was grabbing it by the handful. The nubs on her chest pushed against the too-snug shirt; the viewer suspected padding. Too much makeup, inexpertly applied, served not to enhance her womanliness but rather to underscore her denial of what she was, and her carefully disarranged hair brought to mind snarls and tangles rather than evoking a bedroom scene. It was graceless, hard, a nonetheless powerful statement of political and sexual rebellion. The first painting revealed the complexity of a life from within, a loving, accepting vision of an individual and the stage she was passing through. It was not particularly profound, but very human. The second painting called harsh judgment on a life from without, a sarcastic condemnation of someone who was trying to be something she was not. The first was confident, sure, and open; the second angry, pitiless, and completely without empathy for the human being depicted.
"I see what you mean," she said drily. "You'd say, then, that these two are representative of her state of mind at those two times?" She sounded like a prosecuting attorney, she thought, annoyed. Still, it was risky to place too much emphasis on two paintings, and after all, didn't every teenager go through that period of scornful rebellion? True, few had the ability to express the state so eloquently, but the talent and the temperament that had produced the March painting did not necessarily depend on chemicals to see the vision. Her own eyes were not sufficiently trained in either art or psychology for her to feel confident in judging the potential imbalance in that later painting, but the madness in it seemed more anger than psychosis. She wished Lee were here to advise her.
"Representative?" Jameson was saying thoughtfully. "You mean was all of her stuff like that," he pointed at the larger one, "during those months? I guess so. She didn't do all that much then--started a lot and then scraped them off the canvas, mostly. There's only that and a couple others."
"Any unfinished ones?"
"Vaun never left anything unfinished. If she didn't like it she'd scrape it off or throw the canvas into the incinerator, but once she was satisfied she'd put her name on it and never touch it again." He paused, thinking, and Kate held still, though she ached to sit on the bed.
"It was like her eyes changed during that time. Not how they looked, though that too, but it was like there was someone else behind them. She was always kind of strange, the way she'd look at you. Put a lot of people off, especially when she was small. You ever had your portrait painted, or drawn?"
"Once, yes."
"Well, you know how it feels to have someone staring at you, while you're sitting there frozen, and then they get up and look at your nose for a while, like it's some troublesome piece of machinery they're trying to figure out, and then they go back to the easel, and a few minutes later they're standing over you staring at your eye, but they're only seeing the shape and the color of it, and you're not there at all, not looking out of that eye, you're just buried underneath the cornea and the iris or whatever, wondering where to look and feeling like a damned fool?"
Kate burst out laughing, and went to sit on the edge of the bed. It was surprisingly firm.
"Vaunie was a bit like that all the time. You always had the feeling that at least part of her was studying your face and the wrinkles in your skin and the hair that came out of the end of your nose and the way your mouth moved when you made words, and it was very off-putting sometimes. I'm sure it was one of the reasons she had so few friends. But at times it was even more than that, and it would seem like she was still studying your face and your hands and the way you walked, and you'd feel self-conscious, and then you'd begin to get the feeling that she was also looking through your eyes right into your brain, that she was studying the way you looked on the inside too. Not physically, though she could do that too. I remember one night she sat with her sketchbook and drew the bones of my hand, and then she attached the muscles to the bones, and then the skin, and ended up with my hand, perfect--it was eerie. But I mean that she seemed to be memorizing the inner things that make a person work as well as the outer way he looks, and how the two come together, like the bones and the muscles and the skin. There were times, even when she was little, when you'd catch her studying you so seriously and you'd wonder if she knew about how a barn full of hay made you feel, or how it felt to be in bed with your wife, or how deep-down angry the thought of your wife's old beau made you. Not even
if
she knew, but
how
she could know those things. Like you were being taken apart, a little impersonally but with respect, and affection. Does that make any sense at all?" he asked somewhat desperately.
"Oh, yes," she said emphatically. He seemed encouraged, and went on.
"Well, that was how Vaun was. Odd, but I never worried too much about her. I mean, anyone who could see people like that," he gestured at the small painting, "she might get hurt herself, but she'd never deliberately hurt another person. I didn't think it so clearly at the time, but I've spent a lot of time mulling it over since then, and I can put it into words now, but it was how I thought then.
"And then around Christmas she began to change. Christmas is a big thing with us, and we always have a lot of relatives and noise and fun. Vaun was always quiet, but she seemed to enjoy it, the excitement of the little kids and all. She did a couple of nice paintings about Christmas, in earlier years. But that year--I remember it like it was yesterday--it was such a shock. We were sitting around in the morning with the presents and the wrapping strewn around, Ned helping a cousin set up his train, the girls with a new tea set, and I looked over at Vaun and she was just sitting like a statue, looking at everyone, so cold, it made my guts turn to ice. Not scornful, like teenagers do--it was different. I've had two teenagers of my own, and I taught wood shop in the junior high for years, so I know all about scornful looks. This was something else altogether. Cold, and far away, like she was taking notes on the habits of human beings for a bunch of Martians. It scared the hell out of me, and it put the whole day off balance, for everyone.
