Janek looked at Sullivan sharply. "For me it wasn't a story, Harry. It was a murder case just, like all the others."
"Yeah, sure, I know you say that. But—"
"Forget it."
Sullivan lowered his head. When he spoke again, his tone was meek. "I hope you'll reconsider, Frank. Maybe later, when you're feeling your old self again . . ."
Janek waited until Sullivan raised his head and then met his eyes straight on. "Don't hope for that, Harry. It's not going to happen."
At first when he looked at the crayons Monika bought him, thirty pristine pastel crayons neatly organized by color in an elegant compartmentalized wooden box, he felt loath to touch them lest he violate their perfect order. But after he sat down on the chaise, propped the large spiral-bound pad of paper against his knees, and ran his fingers across the surface of a sheet, it seemed to cry out for color.
His first sketches were tentative and sloppy. But still there was a satisfaction in using his hands to try to reproduce the purity of the terrace view. And the longer he drew, the more he enjoyed it. It was a technique worthy of being mastered. He thought of the combination of intensity and patience exhibited by his father when he sat at his bench working on broken accordions in the little repair shop he'd operated on Carmine Street. Perhaps, he thought, if I imitate the way Dad used to squint at the exposed insides of old accordions, I'll manage to get the swing of it.
Monika, careful not to disturb him, busied herself inside the house, preparing food she'd bought in town. Then she went out to swim and jog along the beach. When she returned two hours later, he showed her his latest sketch of the view. The sea and sky, divided horizontally by the horizon, were a simple study in blues. She liked it, and so did he.
"I'm pleased," she said. "You're enjoying yourself."
"Yeah, I am," he admitted.
She kissed his shoulder and went back inside the house. At midday she brought out a tray of tortillas, guacamole, and beer. They ate and laughed, then retired to their bedroom to make love and then to nap.
At three, well oiled with sunscreen, he returned to the terrace for another round of drawing. But this time, instead of portraying the view, he tried to sketch his dream.
He tore off several sheets before he was satisfied with the general design. When he finally felt he'd gotten it right, he began to fill it in.
"It really does look like a nightmare," Monika said when she came out onto the terrace with her book.
Janek stopped drawing. "I don't have the hand for this."
"No one expects you to draw like an artist, Frank. Just try to make it schematic."
"This is pretty much it," he said. He pointed to a small table set before the portrait. "I think the objects were here."
"Well, that's something, isn't it?"
"What do you mean?"
"You never mentioned a table before."
Janek nodded. She was right; he hadn't mentioned it because he hadn't remembered it.
"Well, they had to be set out on something, didn't they?" Monika smiled. "Keep drawing, Frank. Sooner or later you'll work it out."
By the end of the afternoon he had not resolved the objects in terms of their shapes, but he had positioned them, indicated by X's, in a straight line on the table.
He showed the sketch to Monika. She studied it. "The arrangement's strange," she said. "Maybe that's important."
"What do you mean?"
She shook her head. "The way everything is lined up, the table, the painting, the niche. It's hieratic, almost like the apse of a church. The table could be the altar. And the objects—"
He leaned toward her. "Yes?"
"They're equally spaced, symmetrically set out. Almost like relics. Or offerings . . ."
"Offerings to the portrait?"
She thought about that. "Perhaps. But I think it goes deeper. Suppose, instead of the portrait, there was something else in that niche, a sculpture or a painting of Christ on the cross. You wouldn't say the gold chalices on the altar were offerings to the painting. You'd say they were offerings to Jesus or to God."
Janek sat up. "That's it!" he said. "What I saw were offerings to the woman in the picture."
"Who is she?"
"Beverly told Aaron it was a portrait of her mother, who died a few years ago." He paused, then pointed to the table in the sketch. "I don't think there was a table here. I think I saw something else. Something like a table, but with a different shape beneath. I'll try and draw it."
He turned over a page of his pad, then started feverishly to draw. She stood behind him as he tried out a shape, crossed it out, tried another and still another.
"In the police photos there wasn't anything beneath the picture. Aaron thinks it took him about two minutes to reach me after he heard my shot. Beverly got to the bedroom just after I fell. If there was something there, she'd have had time to move it."
He drew an oval, then drew a rectangle over it.
"If she moved it, it couldn't have been very big," Monika said.
"I think it was big. But maybe it was lighter than it looked."
"Where could she have hidden it?"
He shrugged, drew a bookcase, then redrew it so its bottom half stuck out. "It could have been portable, on wheels, or something like a card table that folds up." He drew an angry slash across the page. "Shit, I don't know!"
Monika, behind him, massaged his shoulders. "Let it go for now, Frank. You've done enough today."
"It's so maddening. I can almost see it. But not quite."
"Of course, it's maddening. Like forgetting someone's name even when you can see his face."
"Exactly!"
"What do you do when that happens?"
"Rack my brains till I come up with his name."
"If that doesn't work?"
"I forget about it awhile."
"Then?"
"It usually comes to me later when I'm thinking about something else or doing something strange like eating peas."
"When you're consciously thinking about something else. Meantime, the subconscious part of your brain is processing the problem. You can let the same thing happen here, let your subconscious take over and do the work. Eventually the solution will come, probably sometime tonight."
"Then what?"
"Then on to the next problem. You see, the wonderful thing about drawing an encrypted dream is that it gives you a chance to break down a big riddle into smaller and more manageable parts. What you want to do is get the table right, then go on to the objects."
He gazed at her. "Anyone ever tell you you're terrific?"
"Oh, all the time," she said. "My patients are always telling me that."
"You're kidding!"
She smiled. "Shrinks are used to hearing endearments. But when I hear them from you, Frank, I know they're real."
That night they ate dinner in the house, then drove down to the village to walk. A Mexican boy with gleaming teeth approached them on the street. He showed them a tray of handmade silver jewelry. When Monika showed interest in a pair of earrings, Janek bought them for her. The boy held out a cracked piece of mirror so she could look at herself as she put them on.
Later they stopped outside a modest bar that fronted on the beach. There was a light breeze that made the palms sway and churned up the smooth surface of the Gulf. Someone was playing a piano inside. "Looks like a decent saloon," Janek said.
The place was half filled. The high season wouldn't begin until Christmas. Janek and Monika took a table between the bar and the pianist, a young black woman with a red scarf tied around her head. She was playing the kind of restful dinner music that doesn't require much attention.
Janek grinned. "I'm glad we could have this week together." He paused. "Do you really have to fly home on Christmas?"
"I wish I didn't," she said. "But I have patients waiting and an early class the following day."
He looked at her. "I usually spend my holidays alone."
She leaned across the tab
le and kissed him. "Not this year."
When the waiter brought their margaritas, Monika asked him in Spanish about the pianist. The waiter said she was a gringo. "But a nice one," he added.
Janek turned to look at the piano.
"I wonder . . ."
"What?"
"That table I drew, the table that wasn't a table—I wonder if it could have been a piano." He took a sip from his drink. "I don't see how it could have been. A piano's much too big. Hard to hide a piano even if it's on wheels." He took another sip. "Still, it had that piano shape, like a little upright, you know, with the objects arranged on the top just below the bottom edge of the painting."
He summoned the waiter, borrowed a ballpoint, made a quick sketch on his cocktail napkin. He turned it so Monika could see. "Something like that," he said.
She stared at the sketch. "Didn't you tell me the portrait seemed bigger in the dream than in Aaron's photographs?" Janek nodded. "We know the portrait didn't change. It's the same one you saw. But suppose there was a piece of furniture just under it, something that because of its scale made the picture seem bigger than it was."
Janek nodded. "Take that piece of furniture away, and the portrait would appear smaller. It's still life-size, but in the dream it looms over everything." He thought a moment. "Suppose it wasn't a real piano. Suppose it was a miniature or a model. That would be enough to confuse the scale, at least at a quick glance. And if it was a miniature piano, she could have hidden it."
"Hidden the relics, too, dispersed them around the room."
"Yes . . . the relics." Janek finished off his drink. "I like that word. Relics offered up to the image of her mother in the little chapel she constructed in her bedroom niche. Consecrated relics, you could say, or sanctified ones. Perhaps more than relics. Perhaps trophies, trophies of acts committed in her mother's honor. Mementos of sacrifices. Tributes offered in thanks or to appease."
He looked at Monika, nodded. "You were right this afternoon when you used the word 'hieratic.' That bedroom was a fucking shrine."
That night he didn't dream about the whole room, only about the portrait. In his dream the woman's face came alive, her eyes blinked open, and her mouth opened and shut mechanically like a doll's. He woke up drenched in sweat.
In the morning he gulped his coffee, then hurried out to the terrace to draw. He sketched the painting and an under-scale piano beneath it and then made X's on the piano's top. How many trophies had there been? He drew various quantities. When that didn't work, he took another approach. There had been seventeen Wallflower killings in all. He drew seventeen X's on top of the piano. Too crowded. But there had been only seven victim clusters. When he drew seven X's, the design looked right.
He turned the page, started to draw on another sheet. He drew basic geometric shapes: cubes; boxes; cylinders; spheres. Then he started to put them together. The work possessed him. Soon he forgot where he was. He tried various combinations of shapes, filling a dozen sheets by noon. Then, exhausted, he pushed back the pad and tried to look at his sketches objectively.
He believed he had successfully rendered three of the relics, or trophies as he thought of them now. One was a small book, another a large book, and the third a piece of paper with printing on it. Assigning them to the first, third, and fourth positions, he drew them into his master drawing, replacing the first, third, and fourth X's on top of the piano. Examining his master drawing again, he was pleased. The three trophies looked right, in their correct positions, too. He put down his pad and sat back exhausted. He had worked five hours straight.
That afternoon, after making love, he and Monika followed steps, cut from stone outcroppings, straight down from their little house to the beach. It was only when he was in the water and tasted its saltiness that he realized his eyes hadn't teared up in the twenty-four hours since he'd started working with the crayons.
At the end of the afternoon, back on their terrace, relaxing with margaritas in their hands, he showed Monika what he'd accomplished in the morning.
"Two books and a piece of paper. All rectangular and more or less flat," she commented. "You're doing fine, Frank, going about it methodically, working from abstract shapes. So far so good. But if you get stuck, you might want to give up control of your crayon, let it loose on the paper. It's a method I sometimes use to get patients to free-associate. You'd be amazed at the powerful material that spews out. Of course, if you do let yourself go, doodle or draw at random, it won't be the crayon that's guiding your hand; it'll be your subconscious."
They drove down to Cozumel for dinner, choosing the same quiet fish joint they'd enjoyed their first night on the island. As they ate, Monika asked him what bothered him most about Kit and Aaron's explanation of the Wallflower crimes.
"Too neat," he said. "Real life isn't like that. Real life, as you know, is very complicated, with all sorts of twists and turns, trails that split off and dead-end or tail back. But this Diana Proctor story comes out slick, almost like a novel. Whenever I see a structure like that, I ask myself, 'Who's the writer here?'"
"Why do you call it slick?"
"First, the way it was revealed. Right after the shoot-out, Aaron goes down to the basement. There he finds this incredibly complete paper trail in almost perfect secretarial order that accounts for each and every ice pick and Wallflower homicide. Diana flies into Seattle; the ticket stubs are there. She rents a car at the airport, returns it the following morning; the receipt is neatly stapled to the ticket stubs. Aaron asks the Seattle cops to check the mileage between the airport and Cynthia Morse's condominium; the answer that comes back is exactly half the distance that shows up on Diana's car rental slip. That's the kind of perfection you don't usually find in real life."
"She was a librarian. Librarians are organized."
"Sure, but this is better than organized. Every time she went out she knew exactly where to go, never got lost, never made a slip. A killer working on her own, even a highly organized one, can't be that precise. But if she was working with someone else, war-gaming her missions, then such superb execution might he possible."
"So it's the perfection that bothers you?"
"And all the papers that back it up."
"But Beverly couldn't know you'd go into her house and fight it out with Diana."
"Of course not. And she also couldn't know how it would end up if we did. I could have injured Diana, in which case she'd have been available for questioning, and then Beverly's role, if she played one, would probably have come out."
"What are you saying, Frank?"
"That Beverly might have been planning to get rid of Diana, leaving the whole neat paper trail so we'd pin everything on the girl. By a fluke I got to Diana first. But that's speculation. There're other things that bother me, too."
"What?"
"Why did Diana shave her head and body and go around in a wig? We're supposed to believe she was some sort of austere self-styled ninja. It's possible. But maybe there's another explanation. Maybe the shaving was part of a system of control."
"Beverly's control?"
He nodded. "Then there're the victims. I've got a whole lot of problems with them. We can account for the homeless man, and we know Diana had some sort of relationship with Jess. But what about the three victim clusters connected to Beverly Archer? If Diana was operating on her own, how did she come up with those particular people? Did she choose them at random from the hundreds of names she found in Beverly's papers, or was there a reason she chose those particular three? Then you have to ask yourself how Beverly could have been so blind to what Diana was doing. Sullivan's people came up with a couple of cases where a serial killer committed murders while in treatment with a shrink. But this is different. Beverly was an experienced therapist who knew her patient very well. She'd been treating the girl for six years straight, had her living in her basement, was seeing her four times a week. You're a psychiatrist, Monika. Can you imagine being that familiar with a patient without sensing something b
ad was going on?"
Monika thought about it. "Patients can be very deceptive. But you're right—it's extremely difficult to imagine that. I also wonder how someone as young as Diana could become so expert at subterfuge."
"That's why I think Beverly was a collaborator, even the brains behind the whole series. The problem, of course, is to prove it. To do that, I have to know why, what she was up to, what her game was all about."
"What do you think it was about?"
"You read Beverly's paper on shaming incidents. She seemed to specialize in patients traumatized by shaming events in their pasts. Doesn't an obsession like that usually come from within?"
"It can, certainly. Shrinks who concentrate on homosexuals often are homosexual. Shrinks who specialize in sadomasochism tend to be haunted by that type of fantasy."
"Well, suppose Beverly was as traumatized by shaming incidents as any of her patients? Suppose, to rid herself of her obsession, she decided that the people who had humiliated her should be killed? Suppose she recruited Diana in Carlisle, created a dependency, then arranged for the girl's release so she could send her out on missions of revenge? The targets would be her old tormentors, even as far back as her childhood."
"I thought Aaron said Beverly hadn't been in favor of Diana's release."
Janek nodded. "There's another thing that's slick. It's like it was all a setup from the start. Beverly carefully laid down a paper trail at the hospital that would throw police suspicions off, then laid down a second paper trail in Diana's room in the basement that would cinch the story the girl was acting on her own."
"You're talking about something extremely fiendish, a conspiracy that goes back years."
"Yeah." He grinned. "And now there's another character. The mother in the portrait, the one behind the piano altar, who gets trophies offered up to her of the people Beverly had Diana kill."
Early the next morning, a Sunday, Janek hurried out to the terrace to draw. When his abstract geometric shapes didn't join into anything recognizable, he changed his approach and, employing Monika's method, freed his crayon from conscious control and let it loose upon the paper.
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