But alive, still alive, though her heart was slow and erratic.
“Tommy!” Kate yelled, “I need the nurse. Go find her, fast.”
“You mean Terry Allen? Yes, I think she’s up here today, though she usually works—”
“Go!” she screamed, and he took off, the flashlight skittering its beam across the ground as he ran heavily past the windows. Kate found a bowl in the kitchen and got to work on Vaun. It took an agonizingly long time before Vaun roused enough to vomit, and she sank immediately back into her deadly lethargy. Kate left her lying on her side and retrieved the walkie-talkie. Her back twinged, for some reason, as well as her thigh. She ignored them.
“Hawkin, Hawkin, c’mon Al, I need you.”
“Hawkin here, Casey, what’s up?”
“Vaun Adams has taken some kind of overdose. I emptied her out, but I need medical support right now. Tommy’s gone to get the nurse, but this lady needs a hospital. Is there any chance of getting a medicopter in?”
“The wind’s died down a lot. If you can get a lighted clear area, they should do it. Any chance of that?”
“I can’t leave her now, but when Tommy gets back we’ll do something. This may be him now, gotta go.”
If anything Vaun looked worse, her breathing slow and rasping. The bob and swirl of lights coming up the hill had caught Kate’s eye, and she went to open the front door to Angie and Amy Dodson and a hairy man whom she took to be the absent Tony, returned from Sacramento. She spoke quickly.
“Vaun’s sick. She needs a doctor. There’s a medical helicopter that’ll be here in twenty minutes, but they need a big, flat, clear area with lights around it to land in. Can you do it?”
Angie recovered first.
“The pony’s field, that’s the best place. We’ll make bonfires at the four corners. Would that do it?”
“Ideal, but hurry.”
Angie pulled Amy away, and Tony followed, slower. Her rapid voice came to Kate’s ears. “You take Matilda and ride as fast as you can to the Newborns and to Bobby’s place. Get them up here, tell them to bring some kerosene….”
Kate stirred up the fire and watched Vaun’s chest rise slowly, struggling against whatever it was in her bloodstream. No sign of pills in the basin—they must have been dissolved in something. The whiskey? The woman’s pale face turned slowly bluer, her breath more ragged. Kate laid two fingers against Vaun’s carotid artery and picked up the walkie-talkie with the other hand.
“Al? Look, I’m not going to be able to respond for a while. I’m going to have to start CPR in a minute. She’s losing it.”
“Seven minutes, Casey. Are the lights going?”
“I just saw the first one start, Al. There she goes. Martinelli out.”
The walkie-talkie crashed to the floor. Kate pulled Vaun onto the carpet and started the rhythmic breathing and heartbeat. Fifteen heartbeats, two quick breaths; fifteen heartbeats, two quick breaths. In two minutes Terry Allen came running in with a small bag in her hand, out of breath, and dropped next to Kate to take over the chest compression. Kate turned gratefully to the easier breathing assist, and the two women worked in silence until they felt the distant, subaudible thud of the helicopter beneath the gentle crackle from the stove and their own sounds. It came closer, and when it was directly overhead they felt the pounding of it take over their rhythm, and still they worked, until finally the uniformed paramedics clattered in with what seemed like a crowd of escorts and onlookers. One of them kneeled next to Terry and took over, the other gently pulled Kate to one side and set to work with tanks and masks. Kate knelt there, dully overcome by their competence, aware of Terry stretching her arms and clenching her hands a few times. She walked over to Kate and put a hand on her shoulder.
“Come and sit down until they can look at your cuts.”
Confused, Kate looked down at her thigh, which was still oozing red through her trousers, and her arm, which had stopped bleeding.
“They’re not that bad.” She just wanted to sleep, for a week.
“No, I suppose you could go on leaking all over everything until you collapsed, if you like.”
“It’s just a gash,” she protested.
“I mean the ones on your back, or hadn’t you noticed that there’s blood clear down your leg?”
Kate reached back with her hand, and drew it back red. She felt suddenly weak.
“No, I hadn’t. It must’ve been from the window. Can’t you do something? Just put a butterfly bandage on it or something?”
“That really should be seen by a doctor,” the nurse hedged, in a tone of voice that said she often had done things of the sort without a doctor’s supervision.
“I sure as hell am not going to report you to the AMA, and these two are too busy to notice. Just do something to keep it from getting any worse.”
She allowed Terry to push her onto a stool, where she sat, vaguely aware of a male voice ordering the room cleared, of Terry preparing a hypodermic with novocaine, of scissors on cloth and the needle prick and spreading patches of numbness on her back, of the sure hands and the tug of stitches. All the time, though, she was fully aware only of the body on the floor, the pale chest with its small breasts and blue veins beneath the strong dark hands of the medical technicians who fought hard, impersonally, for her life. At one point she heard a distant voice that she realized had been hers.
“You’re working on another Cézanne,” she told them, “a female Renoir.” The less occupied of the pair glanced up at her curiously. “That’s Eva Vaughn.”
It obviously meant nothing to him, but the other one glanced up, startled, to meet her eyes for an instant. The wide mouth remained slack, the eyes stayed rolled up under the pale lids. Behind her Terry stitched and clipped and bandaged, and disappeared for a few minutes before returning with a soft flannel shirt, slightly too long in the sleeves. She fumbled with the unfamiliar apparatus of the shoulder holster, and eased it off Kate along with the shreds of her shirt, then gently dressed Kate again. Kate never took her eyes off of Vaun.
The hand that had painted Strawberry Fields lay forgotten on the floor like a crushed flower. Kate sat and stared at the slightly curled fingers, the short fingernail edged with blue paint, and knew that she had not been fast enough. When one of the men sat back on his heels, she closed her eyes at the words to come.
“We have a heartbeat.”
It took a second to sink home. Kate’s eyes flared open to see the man’s expression, of faint hope and satisfaction.
“She’s not—she’ll make it?”
“Her heart’s beating. There’s no telling yet what damage there’s been, or when she’ll breathe, but the heart’s going. Let’s get her on the stretcher,” he said to his partner, and to Kate, “You’d better come too, you’re not looking too hot.”
“No.”
“Casey, you need to see a doctor,” Terry protested.
“No. I’m staying here until I’m relieved.”
“Your choice.” The paramedic shrugged. “She’ll be at the General in town.” He secured a blanket and the straps around Vaun. She looked white now, not blue. Terry fretted around Kate until the man suggested that if she would carry some equipment it would save them a trip back up. Kate followed them to the door and stood watching the men navigate their burden down the hillside to the helicopter, whose spotlights overcame the dim remains of the bonfires. She closed Vaun’s front door and turned the key. How long would it be before the anesthetic wore off? she wondered. Better take a look at the place now, while I can still move.
Kate walked like an automaton through each of the downstairs rooms, checking windows, comparing the rooms with what she had seen the day before. Upstairs the studio looked much as it had, tidy, on hold but for the two brooding easels. The slab of glass that the artist used as a palette had moved and grown a smear of brilliant orange-red, and there was a large, white-bristled brush she didn’t remember seeing. The figure on the undraped canvas had evolved into a woman, unid
entifiable as yet. The spiral-bound drawing pad which Hawkin had left on the top of the cabinet under the south window was now on the long table. When Kate lifted the cover, the only drawing was the quick charcoal sketch of her and Hawkin coming up the hill, the tall trees still seeming to flinch away from the ominous challenge of Hawkin’s gaze. She touched it lightly, and found that it had been sprayed with fixative. In the spiral binding there was an edge of perforated paper behind the drawing. Vaun had done at least one other, and torn it out—or, she corrected herself, it had been torn out. No point in looking in the fireplace for it now. She straightened, wincing, and went to check the studio windows, which had sliding metal frames. Each one was firmly caught in its latch until the second to last one next to the storage room, which flew open unexpectedly at her tug and caused her to curse with the awakened pain from a hundred sites down her back and legs and arm and—. She stood still for a long moment until the worst of it had passed, then let out her breath in a hiss and turned back to the window. She wished for her flashlight as she examined the frame and the track, slid the window shut again, pulled at it tentatively. It had latched. She looked more closely at the windowsill and picked up a tiny sliver that lay there, pursed her lips in thought, put it back down where she had found it, and went downstairs to the walkie-talkie. She swore again as she tried to bend down to where it had been kicked, just under the edge of the sofa, but gave that motion up quickly and settled for a sort of sit-and-slump to the floor. The casing looked a bit squashed; she wondered if it still worked.
“Al? Anyone home?”
“Hawkin here.”
“They’re taking her now. They managed to get her heart started again.”
“Thank God. Are you going with them?”
“No, I’m staying here.”
“Tommy Chesler was down at the washout a few minutes ago. He said you’d been hurt.”
“Scrapes and cuts, that’s all.”
“Go with the helicopter, Casey, somebody should stay with her.”
The shots were definitely wearing off, and a wave of weakness and pain and heavy exhaustion washed over her.
“Oh, Christ, Al, she’s not about to take off on us, not for a long time. Damn it, she may be a vegetable the rest of her life.”
“I want you out of there.”
“No.”
“Why the hell not, Martinelli?”
His anger sparked her own, and the truth tumbled out of her.
“I don’t know why not, Al. I have a bad feeling about this, but I hurt and I’ve lost some blood and I know my brain isn’t functioning properly. I can’t think straight, but there’s something here that smells rotten, and if I stay here I’ll be able to see it more clearly in the morning. It’s too late to argue, Al, they’ve already left, and I’m going to sleep for a few hours. And if you call me on this damn thing before seven tomorrow morning I will not be held responsible for your eardrums.”
It was very comfortable, leaning against the sofa in front of the fire, but the upholstery and the carpet were spattered with her own blood and stank sourly of vomit and Kate couldn’t bear to think of sleeping there, or on Vaun’s bed for that matter. She walked across the carpet on her knees to load a few logs into the stove, crawled upright against the armchair, and stumbled upstairs again. The studio sofa was so stained and battered already, a bit of blood and dirt would pass unnoticed. She eased herself down face first, with the walkie-talkie and the probably useless gun close at hand, and fell gratefully into darkness.
The crunch of shoes on glass brought her awake some hours later. She reached for her gun, but the sudden movement of her back muscles lit the flames of the two deep cuts and the thirty-odd needle punctures from the stitches, to say nothing of the bruises. She must have made a noise, because the feet stopped.
“Casey?”
“Al? Is that you? I’m upstairs.”
It was ridiculous, but without adrenaline she could only inch off the couch like an old rheumatic cripple. The anesthetic had most emphatically worn off, and the burn of the glass cuts added to the torn thigh, gouged arm, scraped hip, and several square feet of bruises made her stand very still and wish she could get by with just moving her eyes.
Even in the dim lamplight she must have been a sight. Hawkin stopped abruptly.
“God in heaven, what happened to you?”
“Just a nice hike in the woods, Al. Hey, don’t look like that. It’s mostly mud and bruises. They’ll scare children for a few days but won’t bother me by tomorrow. Really. I’m just stiff.”
“Nearly a stiff, by the looks of it. Let me see your back.”
“Al, I’m fine.”
“That’s an order, Martinelli.”
She started to shrug, thought better of it, and turned to let the dim lamp shine on her back. He lifted the long tail of Vaun’s shirt, peeled back the tape, looked and gently touched one or two spots, and let it fall.
“No internal bleeding? No ribs gone?”
“None. I wouldn’t even have the cuts if I had taken more care with the window.”
“You were in a hurry.”
“I was. Any news of her?”
“The same.”
“How did you get here?”
“Helicopter.”
“I didn’t—” She stopped. “I guess I did hear it, but I thought I was dreaming. You could have left it until morning.”
“And if the wind comes up again? You’d be here for days. Show me what made you want to stick around.”
“A lot of little things. No note, though of course not all suicides leave one. No pills—whatever she took was dissolved. The whiskey bottle looks like it was wiped clean. There’s about an inch in the bottom for the lab to check. She also set the table for dinner and had a pot of some kind of stew on top of the stove, which got pretty scorched before Terry Allen pulled it off. The book she was reading did not strike me as the sort of thing I personally would want to have as my last conscious awareness, while it would be ideal as a way of taking the mind off an unpleasant day. Light and undemanding. Her painting’s not finished, but she worked on it during the day. Then there was this, in the only window that was not securely latched, though it was closed.”
Hawkin picked up the sliver of wood and took it to the light.
“Shaped with a knife,” he commented.
“It looked like it.”
He turned the sliver around thoughtfully between thumb and fingers, and studied her face. She was obviously fighting a losing battle to keep fatigue and pain at bay, but there remained a stubborn set to her mouth and defiance in her eyes. She was tough, this one.
“You don’t want to think she’s guilty, do you, Casey?”
“What I want has very little to do with it at this point,” she said stiffly.
“I wouldn’t say that.”
“Al—”
“But you’re right, of course. It does smell wrong.” He turned away, ignoring the astonished relief that flooded into her face, and spoke into the walkie-talkie.
“Trujillo?”
“Trujillo here.”
“I’ll be leaving your man here tonight, if you’ll tell his wife. Also, I need you to get through to my people and tell them I want Thompson and his crew down here first thing tomorrow, and that it has to be Thompson. I’ll be leaving here in a little while with Casey. I’ll see you at the hospital in the morning. Got that?”
“All clear. How’s Casey?”
“She looks like hell and no doubt feels worse, but she’ll live. Hawkin out.”
Hawkin retrieved Kate’s equipment and found a wool blanket in Vaun’s bedroom to wrap around her shoulders. They left the warmly dressed sheriff’s deputy on guard and walked slowly down toward the glare of lights in back of the Dodson house. Movement helped sore muscles not to stiffen, Kate told herself fiercely, a number of times.
“Several questions come to mind, do they not?” Hawkin mused. “If this is not a suicide attempt, and I think we can safely rule out accide
nt, who would want her dead, and why?”
“Someone here, on the Road.”
“Who knew her habit of a drink before dinner, assuming the lab finds something in the bottle, and who had access to the bottle since last night. I suppose he planned on planting a suicide note and clearing up anomalies like the pot on the stove when he came back. Or she. Or maybe he just wanted to make sure it worked. Maybe he realized that a drug is an uncertain means of killing someone.”
“It must be related to the other murders.”
“Two unrelated murderers in one small area is unlikely, I agree. Revenge? Fear? Or somebody who knew the woman’s past decided to use it to explain her suicide, just taking advantage of an unrelated situation, like he took advantage of the storm, which would have delayed anyone finding her until it was far too late, had it not been for a stubborn policewoman. Woman murderer commits remorseful suicide, case closed.”
“And if the killings didn’t stop?” It was hard to think against the jolting pain of walking on uneven ground, but Kate tried.
“Ah, there’s the prize question, which leads us into a very…interesting possibility. A whole different ball game.” His voice was distant, but when Kate stumbled on the rough track in the bobbing flashlight beam, his free hand was there on her elbow, steadying her.
“You sure you’re okay walking? I can get a stretcher.”
“No, I’m fine, just tired.”
“You realize, of course,” he continued as if the interruption had not occurred, “that one possibility, a small one, I admit, but worthy of consideration, is that Vaun Adams has been the target of all this, that those three little girls gave their lives to set her up for suicide.”
“Oh, come on, Al, that’s…”
“Farfetched? Yes. The work of a madman? That too.”
Kate began to shiver. “But why? Why would someone hate her so much? Why not just bang her over the head on one of her walks and make it look like an accident?”
A Grave Talent Page 13