“You find who, I’ll tell you why. Or vice versa. I agree it’s a crazy idea, but it does fit better than the theory of Vaun Adams as a psychopath wanting to be caught.”
They had come up to the Dodson cabin now, the helicopter just beyond. Eight or nine residents stood in an uncertain group near a pile of brush and wood.
“Good evening, Angie,” Hawkin greeted her, “and Miss Amy. Thank you for your help this evening.”
“Is Vaun going to be all right?”
“I don’t know. If anything comes through I’ll send word by Trujillo. I’m glad your husband made it back before the road went out. Is he here?”
“He and Tommy went up the Road to let people know what’s happening. Everyone will have heard the helicopters.”
“Right. Look, Angie, tell him to go down to the washout tomorrow and give someone his statement. If the wind stays down we’ll be around here, but he and old Peterson and a couple of others are missing from the records.”
“I’ll tell him.”
“Thanks. ’Night, everyone, you can let the fires go out. Maybe you should leave Matilda in her stall tonight, though. We’d hate to land on her head in the morning.”
The cold and the pain and the loss of blood had Kate trembling by the time they reached the copter, and Hawkin and one of the paramedics had to help her climb in. The man wrapped her in more blankets, strapped her in with Hawkin at her side, closed the door, took his own seat. She had seen his face before. Why was thinking becoming so laborious? His face, bent over Vaun’s still body with the mask. What was wrong there, what was so terribly stupid? The copter lifted off, Hawkin leaned into her, and she knew what it was.
“Al, these two paramedics? They know. Who she is, I mean. I said something to them—”
“It’s all right. They told me what happened, and I had a talk with them. They understand, and they won’t blab. You done good, kid. Have a rest now.”
Her body hurt all over, but in her mind the words brought relief, sweet relief. She leaned against Hawkin’s broad shoulder and surrendered to the darkness.
Two
The Past
The past is but the beginning of a beginning.
—H. G. Wells, The Discovery of the Future
It was all so long ago; so closely encompassed and complete; so cut off as by swords from the bitter years that lay between…. And afterwards, the stark shadow of the gallows had fallen between her and that sun-drenched quadrangle of grey and green. But now—?
—Dorothy L. Sayers, Gaudy Night
14
California spent the weekend at the task, familiar to her assorted generations, of digging herself out from under mounds of debris and rubble. The whine of chain saws filled the air; the scrape and slop of shovels moving mud, the taps and bangs of hammers replacing shingles and panes of glass were heard in every corner. There was a belated run on candles and purified water, “for next time.” The repair trucks from the gas and electric company and the telephone companies and the cable television companies pushed gradually farther out from the centers into the hills, and deep-freezes hummed back to life, telephones rang, televisions brought pictures of the other storm victims. Power at Tyler’s Barn was reestablished on Monday, and the first thing Tyler’s lady Anna did was to put Vivaldi’s Gloria on the stereo and blast the joyous chorus up into the hills, startling the pale horses. She found the house exceedingly dreary without lights and refrigeration, and had it not been for all the extra residents who needed feeding she would have escaped the close surveillance and the noise and tension with all the others who were now visiting friends and family.
The Sunday papers all ran full-page photographic spreads of the storm, freak incidents and bizarre incongruities next to close-ups of mud-smeared faces caught in attitudes of fear or exhaustion or agonized relief. The events on Tyler’s Road rated a small paragraph, and Kate wondered how long it would be before some enterprising reporter discovered that the unconscious woman being treated for a drug overdose was also an artist whose last show had brought well over a million dollars in sales.
Tyler’s Road reemerged in its entirety over the next few days, as Tyler, with Hawkin glaring over his shoulder, arranged for an unprecedented amount of huge machinery to invade the bucolic hills and lay two larger culvert pipes and scrape the mudslide from the Road’s upper end. Kate spent two days lying uncomfortably on her side, reading a ridiculously thick stack of files and trying to urge her back and leg to heal. Al Hawkin spent sixteen hours a day on the case—up at Vaun’s house, meeting with the representatives of three counties, the FBI, and the press, talking to three sets of parents, staring out of various windows—and began to show it.
And in her hospital bed, Vaun Adams slept on.
On the Monday following Thursday night’s storm, Kate’s little white car turned off the street and stopped in front of a garage door that was sternly marked No Parking. Kate got laboriously out of her car, left it blocking the driveway, and climbed the steps to Hawkin’s bell. The door opened an instant after she took her finger from the little lighted circle, and Hawkin stood there with his venerable briefcase, shaven, in a clean, open-necked shirt, with dark circles under his eyes.
“Morning, Casey, you look nice. I’d forgotten you had legs.”
“Come on, Al, it’s not even a week since you saw me in a skirt.”
“Ah, yes, shiny-clean Miss Martinelli wondering if Alonzo Hawkin would bite. God, only a week?”
“Seven days.”
“How’re you feeling?”
“Fine. A bit stiff, but that’s because I haven’t been able to run or swim since Friday.”
“Sure.”
“Really. The leg cut is healing cleanly, and one of the ones on my back has reached the itching stage already.”
“And the other one?”
“It’s deeper,” she admitted, “and the middle of it bleeds if I jump around much, but it’s coming along.”
“You okay for driving? What does the doctor say?”
“The doctor says I’m not to do racing sprints in the pool or lift weights. A nice quiet drive and some nice calm interviews are no problem.”
“All right, but if you want me to drive, just say the word.”
“I will.”
Hawkin removed his jacket, opened the back door of the car, tossed the objects already on the seat to one side, and threw the jacket in.
“That’s for you,” commented Kate, cautiously folding herself into the front.
“Thank you very much, but I don’t think your coat will fit me.”
“The pillow, the pillow. I get tired of hearing your head thump on the door every time the car moves.”
“All the comforts.”
To Kate’s surprise, though, he didn’t immediately curl up to sleep. As she dodged her way across town to the freeway he was reviewing the files from the case at his feet. He did not read the pages so much as glance at each one, as if to remind himself of the contents.
The worst of the morning commute was over, and the traffic moved smoothly across the Bay Bridge. On the east end, however, the inevitable snarl was compounded by a spill—a garbage bag filled with crushed aluminum cans that had fallen from the back of a pickup truck. Cars crawled past the trivial barrier of flattened metallic bits and then immediately accelerated to the speed limit once past it. Kate shook her head at the mysterious ways of automobile drivers and turned to Hawkin with a comment.
He was asleep, heavily unconscious of the freeway, the fluttering papers sprawled across his lap, the hard door’s jamb against his head, the glasses crooked on his nose. He looked like he could sleep for a week, thought Kate, exasperated. With one hand on the wheel and both eyes on the cars ahead she gritted her teeth and stretched gingerly back for the pillow, which she inserted between skull and metal. She then reached over and drew the file from under his limp hand and pushed it, closed, between the seats. Three or four pages had slipped down onto the floor, and she retrieved those too. She to
ok her eyes from the road for an instant to aim the loose sheets between the file’s covers, and as she did she recognized what he had been reviewing: the transcript of Vaun Adam’s testimony during her murder trial.
Kate knew those pages well. Some of it she could recite from memory. All day Sunday she had spent collating the myriad fragments into a coherent whole, working toward a portrait of the woman who lay unconscious in a hospital room a hundred miles to the south. The portrait, though voluminous, was oddly dissatisfying, incomplete. She could only hope that by the end of the day it would be less so.
Vaun Adams had been thirteen when she lost both her parents in an accident. She had, even by that early age, a history of considerable talent and considerable mental instability, and to be thrown into orphanhood at the inevitably tumultuous age of puberty was a shock she apparently never completely overcame. She was sent to live with her aunt and uncle. Her mother’s half brother was a stolid farmer with two children, a large mortgage, and now a problem niece. Eventually Vaun settled into a state of equilibrium there, although she never really fit in, never made any close friends. Until her last year of high school.
A few months before her eighteenth birthday Vaun began to go around with a young man who had come back to finish his degree after a two-year absence from school. Andy Lewis was something of an enigma at school, and rumors grew up around him. The most popular was that he had been in the Army, slaughtering small brown people, having lied about his age to enlist. Needless to say, the army had never heard of Andrew C. Lewis, though the records from the draft board showed that he had been issued a deferment on the grounds of chronic back pain, an injury that did not keep him from the high school football team.
This mysterious, slightly sinister figure came to school a grown man among children, a blooded killer (or so rumor had it) among the sheep, at a time when across the country students wore peace pins and burned their draft cards—or at least talked about it. While the other seniors experimented with hair down to their collars and the occasional marijuana cigarette to complement their illicit beer, Andy Lewis looked down on their thrills as childish, and, it was later discovered, patronizingly allowed these lesser mortals to accrue merit and sophistication by purchasing their recreational drugs through him.
He came to school in September. In October he discovered Vaun, a withdrawn, friendless, virginal outsider. By Christmas vacation they were, in the eyes of the school, “going together,” despite (or perhaps because of) strenuous opposition from her aunt and uncle. Some time in December Vaun first tried LSD. During that winter her schoolwork, which had been solid B’s with a few A’s and C’s, fell to near failure. She began acting even stranger than usual. In mid-March she dropped a second dose of LSD and launched herself straight into an eight-hour screaming frenzy which ended under hospital restraints and was followed, according to her own testimony during the trial, by weeks of gradually diminishing flashbacks and disorientation. Only her uncle’s standing in the community prevented her arrest for possession of an illegal substance. She refused to say who had given it to her.
Then suddenly in early May, just before her eighteenth birthday, things changed again. Homework assignments began to come back complete and correct, and absences dropped off. She started joining the family again at meal times, trimmed her hair, and stopped seeing Andy Lewis. For her birthday she asked her aunt for a trip to San Francisco, and the two of them spent the day in museums and galleries and stayed the night at the Saint Francis. Her aunt later testified that Vaun had seemed happy, somehow slightly shy, but relaxed for the first time in months.
Two weeks later Vaun Adams was arrested for the murder of a six-year-old girl whom she was baby-sitting. She was accused of strangling Jemima Louise Brand (known to all as Jemma), removing Jemma’s clothes, and then casually going into the next room to work on a painting of the child’s naked, dead body transposed onto a hillside. The jury saw the painting, heard the testimony, and after five hours’ deliberation found her guilty. She was sent to prison.
A little more than three years into her sentence Vaun was discovered by her psychiatrist. More than that: she was saved by him. Dr. Gerry Bruckner was called in when Vaun went into a catatonic state during a spell in solitary confinement, where she had been put during an outbreak of prison unrest. He succeeded in prying her out of it, gave her the art materials her soul craved, recognized the stunning power of her work, and sent several pieces to a friend in New York who owned a gallery. Under the name Eva Vaughn she was an overnight success.
After serving nine years and three months, she was released. She spent a year of parole near Gerry Bruckner, then a year traveling in Europe and the United States. She met Tyler two and a half years after she was released from prison, and six months later she was building her house on Tyler’s Road. That was five years ago, and she had lived there ever since, aside from occasional trips to New York, where she kept an apartment.
Such was the outline of the life of Vaun Adams, built up from the stack of papers, nearly a foot thick, that sat on Kate’s desk at home. From birth certificate to passport to Friday night’s hospital admission forms, the papers included prison reports, psychiatric evaluations, pale copies of copies of letters, signed statements, the trial transcript, photographs, pathologists’ reports, and hundreds of mind-numbing pages, each presenting in microscopic detail a segment of the life of Vaun Adams.
And yet, when Kate should have felt that she knew this woman better than her own sister, better than Hawkin, better than Lee even, she simply could not connect these segments into a whole; she simply could not match the avalanche of words with the woman in the brown corduroy trousers who had served her a ham sandwich, who had sketched in a few lines the threat in a pair of approaching police investigators, and who had lain blue and still under Kate’s hands and lips. Kate’s mind could not make the most tenuous of links between the woman and the girl she had been.
Even the trial itself seemed disjointed and incomplete and left some very perplexing questions unanswered. Why had Andy Lewis been allowed back into school, rather than pursuing the more normal course of enrolling in the local junior college for a high school certificate? Why was his role in the trial so perfunctory? Neither the prosecuting attorney nor Vaun’s court-appointed defender had pressed him, but had on the contrary treated him with wary respect. He had a solid alibi for the night, playing cards with no fewer than eight friends, but he had apparently graduated and was allowed to go free, without prosecution for the drugs he had almost certainly supplied to Vaun. Why? And where had he gone after the trial? He had disappeared with only the sparsest of a trail left behind: driver’s license renewal two years later, one job in California and one in Alaska on his Social Security records, then—nothing. Ten years ago Andrew Lewis had disappeared, completely.
Hawkin slept like a dead man for the next three hours, until Kate pulled into a gas station in the small town nearest the Jameson farm. She told the pimply young man who came out what she wanted and walked around the back of the station to the door marked Ladies. When she came out the car was empty. She paid the attendant and fished two cups and the thermos from the back seat. Hawkin reappeared in his jacket and a tie. The circles under his eyes had lightened several shades, she noticed, and his walk had a spring to it. She handed him a cup.
“Oh, good,” he said. “Chamomile tea with goat’s milk and honey.”
“Sorry, all out, you’ll have to settle for Ethiopian mocha. Sugar’s in the glove compartment.”
He raised an eyebrow at that but said nothing aside from an appreciative sigh after the first swallow. Three miles down the road he drained the cup and placed it in the back seat.
“A good sleep and a cup of fine coffee always takes ten years off of me. Your housemate make the coffee again?”
“This morning I made it. Lee buys it from this crazy little hundred-and-fifty-year-old Chinese woman who cooks it up in a two-hundred-and-fifty-year-old coffee roaster. It’s a great honor to be taken on
as one of her trusted customers. The turnoff is up here somewhere,” she added. “Could you check the map, Al? It’s in the glove compartment.”
Although he was fairly certain that she had been looking at the hand-drawn map back at the gas station, Hawkin obediently fished it out and read off the landmarks. If she didn’t want to talk about her home life—and her reticence was well known to her colleagues—it was her business. He suspected that few of the others had even been given the man’s name.
15
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.”
A Grave Talent Page 14