A Grave Talent (7 page)

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Vaun Adams lived in one of the few houses on the Road that looked like a place to live in rather than an experiment or a fantasy, despite the gleam of photovoltaic panels on the roof and its almost unreal air of perfect simplicity. It lay on top of a hill half a mile up from the Road. A footpath wound through redwoods and opened up on a broad acre or two of vegetable beds and fruit trees, surrounded by a high wire fence. Some of the beds had a few straggly lettuce heads, beets, and broccoli growing in them, and one tree showed a handful of premature white dots on its branches, but the rest was neatly mulched over for the winter.

The house looked more at home on the site than the garden did, as if it had grown from the ground under the supervision of the wise trees. Simple, long, wood and glass, its back set actually down into the earth so that its two stories appeared low, it was a structure both distinctive and totally unobtrusive. Kate wondered where Adams had found an architect who did not insist on a splashy signature and wondered, too, if in houses as in clothing the simple and well-made were the most expensive.

There was a face looking down at them from the stretch of upstairs window.

"She's seen us," Hawkin noted.

"She could hardly miss the sound of that truck."

"Looks almost Japanese, doesn't it?"

"The house? It does, now that you mention it. I was thinking it looked deceptively simple."

Hawkin nodded. "Solid. It sure wasn't built by the guy who did the leaky dome or that place with the turrets and gargoyles."

The entrance was tucked under an upstairs deck. A small, mesh-covered pond with a few bright koi swimming in it lay next to the front door. Hawkin reached for the bell rope, but the door opened first.

Christ, she's gorgeous, was Kate's first thought, followed immediately by, She looks like one of those living dead looking blankly into the camera outside Dachau or Buchenwald. Her glossy black curls were slightly too long and tumbled onto her shoulders and around a pair of startling, icy blue eyes that revealed nothing whatsoever of the thoughts behind them. Her cheekbones were high and thin, her skin pale, her mouth a fraction too wide for the rest of the face. A heavy, loose, brown sweater with flecks of color spun into it and a smear of blue paint on one sleeve emphasized the slimness of the body it covered and revealed long hands with short, square nails. She had soft, dark brown corduroy trousers on her long legs, cloth shoes on her feet, and a deep, even voice as she stood back from the door.

"I wondered when you would come for me."

"Miss Adams?" Hawkin, too, seemed taken aback by her appearance and words.

"Yes. Come in."

"You were expecting us, then?"

She shut the door and turned to face him. Her eyes were as calm and as vulnerable as those of a dead woman, but there was a slight smile at the corners of her mouth.

"Come now, Inspector Hawkin. If three dead girls are found within a few miles of a woman who was convicted of murdering a little girl, she'd have to be a considerable fool to expect that the police would ignore her. I've been expecting you for weeks."

"You know my name."

"And Inspector Martinelli's. Tommy Chesler was here last night and told me all about you. I was about to stir up the fire and make myself some coffee, but when I heard you coming I thought I'd better wait to see if you planned on taking me in, 'for questioning,' as they say. I don't like to leave the house with a fire going," she added simply.

"No, go ahead," said Hawkin. "Unless, of course, you're planning on confessing to the murders." Kate thought it a joke in very poor taste, if it was a joke. Vaun Adams did not react, other than smiling the half-smile and turning to lead them through a dark hallway and out into a spacious, high-ceilinged living room.

"That's not too likely. I don't suppose you want any coffee?"

"That would be nice, thank you."

"Breaking bread with a convicted murderess?" She smiled wryly and knelt down to load two split logs into the large, freestanding iron fireplace. A wide-bottomed black kettle sat on the flat top.

"You have paid your dues, Miss Adams."

She paused and studied him from under the hair, a log forgotten in one hand.

" 'Paid my dues.' I haven't heard that phrase in years. Nearly ten years of my life gone as dues for the privilege of rejoining a society that neither wants nor trusts me. Rather high membership fees." Her mildly amused voice might have been discussing a slight inconsistency in the plot of a play.

"High compared with the price paid by Jemima Brand?" Hawkin smiled gently, but his eyes were hard. Vaun Adams looked down at the log in her hand and finished the job, opened the stove vent, stood up, and brushed off her hands.

"No, I would not consider the price high, if it had been I who killed her. But then I realize that nearly all felons claim that they were falsely accused, so I won't bore you with that. This will be a few minutes," she gestured toward the kettle, "and I'm sure you want to ferret about in my things. I give you my permission. I won't even ask you for a warrant. Just don't touch the wet paint on the canvases upstairs, or the charcoal. There are a couple of drawings I haven't sprayed yet." She disappeared through a swinging door, which revealed a glimpse of kitchen sink and cabinetry before it shut. Kate and Hawkin looked at each other and shrugged.

"Do you want to 'ferret'?" Kate asked him.

"Not much point, I shouldn't think. I would like to see the house, though."

The house was well worth looking at, regardless of any evidence it might contain. The room they were in was a space of immense calm and simplicity, open to the rough, beamed ceiling two stories above their heads, its sides made of smooth redwood boards laid vertically, with large, uneven quarry tiles underfoot. One wall, to Kate's left, was glass. Its opposite, behind the freestanding wood stove (now radiating a comfortable antidote to the gray day outside) was an expanse twenty-two feet high entirely of redwood, broken only by the rectangular outline of the kitchen's swinging door and by one wide painting. A couple of thick, subtle Oriental carpets, a cluster of soft chairs and matching sofa, two low tables and a small cabinet were the only furniture, although the house's end wall ahead of them had built-in cabinets running the length of it, ending at a door that led (judging from a glimpse through its window) to a wood pile. Kate walked a few steps into the room and turned around to look up above the doorway through which they had come. To her surprise it appeared that the entire space above the rest of the house was one large, open room, divided from the living room below by a simple, waist-high railing, on the other side of which stood a pair of heavy easels. Various people along Tyler's Road had mentioned that Vaun Adams painted, but Kate had hardly expected to find her studio taking up one third of the floor space of a generously sized house.

As she turned back to Hawkin her eye caught on the painting above the wood stove. It was actually a triptych, three panels depicting a mossy stream bed in which a minimum of brush strokes and a nearly monochromatic palette of grays and greens managed to convey an air of mystery and anticipation. Kate drew it to Hawkin's attention with a dry comment.

"Unicorns and starry maidens it ain't. If that's her work, she's very good."

There were three other rooms on the lower floor. On the right-hand side of the hall as it went to the front door was Vaun's bedroom. A subtly colored patchwork quilt made of hundreds of tiny squares lay on the double bed, its corners knife-sharp. The top of the bedside table held an electric lamp and a clock; a small gray vase with a sprig of dried flowers and grasses sat atop the narrow, chest-high dresser. All else, even the walls, was bare, polished wood, with the exception of one small, very old-looking painting on the wall above the bed, a Virgin and Child. Kate forced herself to open drawers and closets, a thing she always disliked, but inside things were equally neat--not with the recent tidiness of the nervous housekeeper faced with an unwelcome and judgmental guest. Kate was familiar with the rapid neatening of strewn magazines and the quick dusting of obvious surfaces. This was a compulsive order, the obsessive tidiness of a woman who could not go to bed at night knowing there was disorder in the house, lest she be whipped away during the night and other eyes see the evidence of her debauched way of life. Looking at the straight line of shoes on the closet floor, Kate would have bet that Vaun Adams never wore a safety pin in her brassiere. Had she always been this way, or was it only recent? Since December? Kate closed the closet door and went across the hall to the bathroom.

After the austere bedroom, this room seemed positively flamboyant, tiled in warm oranges and browns with a brilliant batik shower curtain and mat in the same colors. The furnishings here were also minimal: two towels and a face cloth, hairbrush, comb, toothbrush, toothpaste, soap, one bottle of shampoo, and nailbrush, all precisely aligned. No water spots or rust stains in the bath tub; no soap smears on the taps or porcelain. The only profligacy was a cupboard startlingly full of medications, both prescription and over-the-counter: vials at the top, three kinds of antibiotics; aspirin, Tylenol, Bufferin, and a codeine-and-Tylenol mix; cough syrups; half a dozen antihistamines with their fluorescent caution stickers (do not operate heavy machinery; do not take with alcohol), a handful of nasal sprays and drops; antacids, both liquid and chewable tablets, and a liquid laxative; nine bottles of assorted vitamins; a snakebite kit; wart removal drops; three small bottles of liquid charcoal and one of syrup of ipecac, for accidental poisoning; and on the lower shelf tubes of antiseptic cream and ointments for sore muscles, for burns, bites, stings, and sunburn, for yeast infections and athlete's foot; and an unspecified cortisone preparation. Nothing illegal; nothing more narcotic than the mild codeine prescription, six months old and less than half gone. No tranquilizers. Kate closed the cupboard door with a smile. That Vaun Adams was a hypochondriac was the most human side of the artist that she'd seen yet.

She opened the doors under the sink and rummaged through the pharmacopoeia there, mostly outdated, raising her eyebrows at a pair of disposable hypodermic syringes, still in their wrappers, each with a glass ampoule taped to it. Kate squinted thoughtfully at the printing on the glass and put them back.

She spent a few minutes writing the names of various doctors and pharmacies in her notebook, closed up the drawers and doors, and went back out into the hallway. A noise came from the room to her left, on the side away from the living room, so she followed that and came upon Hawkin, hands in his pockets jingling the coins, running his eyes over the walls of the combination office and library.

One corner of the room was chewed off by the overhead stairs, and below that was an oddly angled window. It probably gave a brief flood of light in the early morning, but now, the other window being a narrow, chest-high strip the length of the room but barely above the grasses that grew on the hillside cradling the back of the house, the room was inadequately lit for any serious reading. Nonetheless, the walls were solid bookshelves, broken only by the door, the windows, a small oak rolltop desk, and its matching filing cabinet.

Hawkin signaled Kate to close the door, and asked her what she had found.

"Very precise lady, not even any hairs in her comb," she commented. "One area of nerves, though. She's got a small pharmacy in her bathroom, everything from headache to ingrown toenails, with a concentration on sinus and lungs. Nothing hard, nothing illegal. Couple of needles, but they seem to be for allergic reaction to bee stings. How about you?"

"A very precise taste in music," he reflected. "Clearly divided, at any rate. Sing-along stuff, folk music from the sixties and the stuff they put on the radio and call mellow rock--muzak for yuppies--lots of fiddly instrumentals, Vivaldi, some Haydn, all the Mozart piano concertos, both of Glenn Gould's Goldberg recordings, that kind of thing." Kate nodded, catching the drift if not the specifics. "And then music to be overwhelmed by--huge, pounding stuff that doesn't leave you any room to breathe. Four different versions of Verdi's
Requium
, no less, and three of Mozart's. Great stuff to sublimate depression and keep the mind off of suicide. Three separate shelves, all in alphabetical order. What about the books?"

Wondering uneasily how much of Hawkin's last comments had been rooted in personal experience, Kate turned to the shelves. Here, too, order prevailed: general art history books here, volumes on specific artists (alphabetized) there; psychology there, novels here. The art world took up at least two-thirds of the shelves and represented a massive investment of money. Oversized books with many color plates ran the gamut from Egyptian and primitive to Frankenthaler and de Kooning, with a heavy emphasis on the European masters of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Slick, expensive, serious books, not something Kate would have expected to find on Tyler's Road. She leafed through a few of them and found two with writing on the flyleaf:
Art in the Making: Rembrandt
was signed, "With love from Gerry," and a very worn copy of
The Art Spirit
by Robert Henri was inscribed, "To my dear niece on her seventeenth birthday, with love from Uncle Red."

Second in number were works on psychology, ranging from college textbooks (two of them familiar to Kate from her own shelves) to popularized pseudopsychology to abstruse academic tomes with multisyllabic Latinate titles that seemed to deal with the more obscure varieties of madness. Running a poor third, and placed on shelves behind the door, was an eclectic gathering of fiction: Doris Lessing and Dorothy L. Sayers, Elie Wiesel and Isak Dinesen, a few Updikes, some Steinbeck, a couple of early Steven Kings. Some of them were old friends, some Kate had never heard of, and she could see no particular method in the selection.