The Glory Hand (26 page)

'I didn't see any men.'

He means he doesn't believe you. But he's got to.
Her mind reeled back, stumbling over the strange, inexplicable things that had happened since she'd come to Casmaran. 'The girls at camp . . . Abigail bounced off the lake, and then they took Robin away . . . and now she's just like them. She's got this . . . this
tit
under her arm . . . And then they killed the kitten and put the blood . . .'

'Hey take it easy.'

She hated his condescending tone. But when he slipped his arm around her, she allowed him to hold her close to him. 'You've got to believe me . . .' Her words trailed off into sobs, and he didn't let her go. 'I'm not crazy.'

'Of course you're not.'

'Why do they want to hurt me? Why do they want to
kill

me?'

'Nobody wants to hurt you.' His embrace loosened suddenly.

'Jake listen to me . . .'

'Wait . . .' He had noticed the crumbling artifacts in the sawdust and let go of her, kneeling down for a closer look.

'Jake . . .' He began sorting through the filthy debris as if he had forgotten she was there. His face took on a look she hadn't seen in him before - intense, haunted - as if he were the one on the edge of hysteria. Cassie watched as he rummaged among old picture frames from which the rats had already stripped the canvas. Slowly he lifted out a painting which had survived the ordeal in the ice house better that the others.

It struck Cassie that perhaps the rats had spared this one because even they found the images repulsive: fading, ethereal figures of naked women in murky greens and browns, their flesh cadaverous, their limbs contorted, dancing in ecstacy. Some of the women played musical instruments- a primitive harp, a strange violin, the twisted horn of a ram - while others coupled obscenely with dogs and goats. And in one corner of the unfinished canvas was a strange candelabrum that caught her eye. Its five candles looked like a hand, with each fingertip ablaze. Somehow it evoked the pointed, silver fingers of her mother's ring.

The image, at once alien and oddly familiar, forced her to say the sentence aloud for the first time: 'Miss Grace has my mother's ring.'

But Jake didn't hear her. He was leaning the canvas against the rusty blade, handling it as gently as if it were a masterpiece, studying it with fascination. Without tearing his eyes away from the contorted figures, the bizarre musical instruments, he murmured, 'You'll be okay, Cassie. It was probably just too soon to leave home . . . after what happened to your mother ... It probably would have been better if you had stayed with your father this summer.'

Sensible, Cassie thought., Sensible bullshit. He was just saying it to get rid of her. It was as if his sudden infatuation with the obscene painting meant that he, too, was betraying her.

She started up the ramp, out of the shack, the pain in
her
leg beginning to ease. But before she left, she stole one
look
back over her shoulder. Jake was gazing at the painting with feverish intensity, his head tilted slightly to one side, as if
he
were listening to the music those strange instruments in
the
picture were playing. As if their music had captured him.

Chapter 22

Something stupid. Barbara was certain Jake was about to do something incredibly dumb. But then, she thought, wasn't calling it that really just a lie, a way of denying the truth? She feared Jake was going to kill himself.

For hours, all the way from Bangor airport, the forest had been telling her it had been a mistake to let him come here alone. In the gray overcast of late afternoon, the wilderness seemed hostile and unyielding, so much less 'civilized' than the forests on Long Island where she had grown up. In a strange way, the brooding shadows, the twisted alleys of mossy tree trunks, reminded her more o the back streets of New York City, where Jake had been raised, than it did of the manicured woods of her native Great Neck.

Save him.

Maybe that was why she had become a curator of art in the first place: a need to rescue fragile things after everyone else had given up on them. At thirteen, her parents marriage had fallen apart, as threadbare as the Bayeux tapestry. And in the ten years after that, her mother an( father had died, each slowly, each painfully, of cancer. 'Beyond saving,' the doctors had said. After that, she hat devoted herself to preserving things fashioned of gilt or parchment or silver vermeil, because in her life the things that had really mattered had all been beyond her power to save.

And Jake. She had married him after that disastrous concert at Lincoln Center. Perhaps, she suspected, her purpose had been to save him too. When he tried to kill himself with an overdose five years ago, she hadn't ascribed it to his failure as an artist, but to her failure as a wife. Today, the danger had become more urgent than gradual decay. The threat was sudden. Immediate.

Save him.

She rechecked the scrap of paper where she'd scrawled the directions to the cabin, and turned off the main highway onto a narrow side road, the asphalt pocked with holes. Accelerator foot to the floor, she forced the rented Chevette ahead: 55 ... 65 ... 70. Reckless, she thought. Definitely not her style. She was usually more cautious and methodical than most men - certainly more than Jake. Her cool-headedness had assured her steady, deliberate rise through the pecking order at the Met. Today's rush of female intuition took her by surprise, but she listened to it.

Save him.

On a hairpin curve, a steel sign riddled with bullet holes from some amateur hunter spelled out DANGER. Outside her window, she glimpsed a shattered railing where a car had gone over the brink.

When she had talked to Jake on the phone, she had read the danger signs. The edge of hysteria in his voice - she was sure it masked despair. The last time she had heard him so euphoric had been the night they had called her from Bellevue Emergency.

The road shifted from gravel to dirt, and dead-ended at a lake. Even the long, dreary ride hadn't prepared her for this cabin: the rusty tin roof, the rotting wood of the walls - it was little more than a hovel. Enough to push any dyed-in-the-wool New Yorker off the deep end, she thought. She parked her car beside the pickup.

Switching off the ignition, she felt her eagerness to see him replaced by a sudden attack of doubt, she studied her haggard face in the rearview mirror as if it were a medieval artifact too far gone to be worth saving. Strands of auburn hair plastered her forehead in the muggy heat that persisted into dusk. Usually she played down her natural beauty, using little makeup, as if her lustrous dark eyes and long lashes, if, enhanced, would interfere with the impression of shrewd competence she wanted to convey. But on the plane from New York today she had put on more makeup than usual, telling herself that it was because Jake hadn't seen a woman in nearly two months, that he deserved it, but really, she knew, out of her own insecurity. After the sweaty drive, her mascara and eye shadow were smudged, giving her a wild, confused look. It would have to do.

Her high heels sank into the dust of the clearing as she stepped from the car. There had been no time to change from her silk shirtwaist dress; she had taken a taxi directly from the museum to La Guardia for the flight to Bangor. She hefted a shopping bag out of the trunk and carried it up the rickety steps to the porch.

Standing there, with the shopping bag in one arm, she impulsively pulled out the two silver barettes that held her hair austerely back from her face, and let it fall around her shoulders, the way she knew Jake liked it. When she knocked on the door, it opened to her touch.

The cabin was dark and she groped for the cord of the bare bulb overhead. The mess appalled her. So this was what happened when she wasn't there to pick up after him. She put down the shopping bags and set to work, straightening the chairs at the plywood table, throwing crumpled papers into the carton that passed as a trash bin. It was only after she had folded a filthy sweatshirt and laid it on the unmade bed that she realized the reason she was cleaning so compulsively. She was looking for something. By the mattress she spotted his shaving kit, and hastily zipped it open. She had been right. A plastic jar of valium was inside. Still full, thank God. She slipped it into her purse.

'What the hell are you doingT

He was standing in the doorway, his tape recorder slung over his shoulder. She stepped forward and kissed him, but his lips were cold, unresponsive, and he gripped her arms so tightly that it hurt. She had expected him to be unshaven and unwashed, of course. What surprised her was his sullen strength, a strength hinting at a violence she had never seen in him before.

'You shouldn't have come,' he said. 'I told you not to come.'

'1 did come, and I should have.' She wanted to slap him, to send him back outside to make a second entrance and start all over again. 'The way you sounded on the phone . . . Jake, you sounded . . . weird.' She hugged his sweaty body. 'Phew,' she laughed. 'Doesn't this place have a shower?'

He squirmed out of her arms and walked over to slide the tape recorder on top of the Moog. 'I told you. I haven't had time. I've been working around the clock.'

'Don't get me wrong.' She ran a hand along his bearded cheek. 'You stink. But that doesn't mean I don't like it.' Something was wrong. His body was tense, his eyes avoiding hers, and he turned his head so that her next kiss glanced off his cheek.

She sat down on the mattress in the corner. Maybe that was it, she thought. As much as anything, he had come here to escape the trouble he had been having in bed, and now she was walking in as though she suddenly expected him to perform. 'Look, tonight we don't have to ... I mean, I'm wiped out from the trip. All I want to do is collapse.'

He ignored her, carrying in a painting about three feet square that he had leaned in the doorway. She walked over and studied it with a professional eye. The dancers were hard to make Out in the shadows, as if the murky oils absorbed what little light there was. 'Something to cheer up the place?' She laughed. 'No, I know. You're switching careers - that's what you've been keeping from me.'

He shook his head. 'One of the artists who stayed here before ... He must have painted it.'

'Before I met you, when I was in grad school, I did some art therapy. I ran this project at the Bridgewater Institution for the Criminally Insane.' She hesitated then decided to make a joke of it. 'This kind of reminds me of some of the stuff I saw.' Her smile faded. 'The uneven brushstroke, the distorted perspective, the morbid choice of colors . . . Not to mention the subject matter. The whole thing's pretty sick, don't you think?'

Jake didn't answer, absorbed by the painting, and she ran a thumbnail along the edge, revealing a pastel layer of paint beneath the thick overlay of sickly greens and grays. 'I'd say the artist went through some kind of transformation. It's almost as if at first he had a light, even a euphoric concept. Then a darker, more bizarre vision took hold . . .' She stopped: Didn't Jake see she was talking about him? 'Jake, we've been married for ten years. Tell me what's wrong.'

'I told you, Barbara . . .' His voice sounded distant, more distant than when he had been talking to her on the telephone hundreds of miles away. 'Nothing's wrong . . .'

She sighed and handed him the shopping bag. 'I thought you'd sell your soul for this.' She pulled out a pastrami sandwich wrapped in tin foil. 'I didn't have time to run over to the Carnegie Deli, but I did my best.'

As she cleared the table to make way for the pint containers of cole slaw and potato salad, she rambled on, talking about the VIP opening at the museum, about Otto, the medieval-instrument curator whose office was next to hers, and his latest esoteric acquisition. When she found herself gossiping about the neighbors down the hall, with Jake still barely responding, she stopped.

'All right, you made your point. You're pissed off that I came. But I'm here.' She glanced back at him, expecting him to be devouring the sandwich, surprised to see that he'c left it untouched on the table. Turning his back to her, he had begun cleaning the recording heads of the Nagra with a tiny brush. The cicadas outside the cabin had started up, and the sound seemed to speed his work.

'Jake, come home with me.'

'No.'

'Then I'm staying.'

'Out of the question.'

'Jesus Christ! Last month you were afraid to come up here without me. Now you're trying to get rid of me. What the hell's going on?'

When he had finished threading a fresh tape onto the tape recorder, he turned to her, his anger gone, replaced by a strange serenity. 'I don't expect you to understand.'

'Try me.'

'I've been doing incredible work up here in the past few days, Barbara. Incredible.'

'What kind of work?'

'I've found something here . . . something wonderful.'

She eyed him suspiciously. 'Like what?'

'Music . . .'

'Music?'

'Coming from the forest at night. . .'

'Right.'

'Barbara, after dark I hear these weird instruments. I don't know what they are, or where they're coming from, but they give me something, a spark I can use in my own work, the spark I've been missing.'