A Grave Talent (12 page)

"Something from Saint Francis, no doubt."

"No, it's Shelley. 'How wonderful is Death, Death and his brother Sleep.'"

"A comforting thought," she said drily.

"Isn't it? Isn't it just?" He took a swallow of the coffee and made a disgusted noise. "Goddamn goat's milk again. What's that you're listening to?"

She reached over and switched off the mumble of voices.

"A discussion of how to prepare for a catastrophe."

"Appropriate. Drop me at the station, would you? Then go home and get some sleep. You've done well today."

She tried to find the words patronizing, but in the end succumbed to the little glow of warmth they started up in her.

"We aim to please."

"Wish I thought the same of Trujillo. Christ, what a miserable night."

The garage was empty, which gave Kate a moment's pause until she remembered that this was a third Thursday, Lee's night working at the med center. Hell. The automatic door rumbled shut behind her, and she gathered up an armload of debris from the car--sodden clothing, sandwich bags, thermos and two cups, handbag, shoulder holster, jacket. Plodding up the stairs she thought, I have been on duty or reading files for fifty hours out of the last seventy-six, since six o'clock Monday night. I am tired.

With that thought came another, something that had occurred to her as she drove home. She glanced down at the boxes of newspapers and magazines piled at the back of the garage awaiting recycling, and then shook her head firmly and went on. Nope. Not even for Al Hawkin. It would wait. She needed to sit still, think of nothing, eat something. One word of praise from the man was not going to turn her into a fanatic.

At the top of the stairs she unlocked the door, stepped into the house, dropped the armload in an untidy heap on the floor, turned, and walked back down the stairs.

The magazine she was looking for wasn't in the recycling bins, so she turned to the doors under the stairs and began a haphazard search: intuition, past experience had taught her, was the best tool to use in breaking Lee's idiosyncratic filing system.

It took another twenty minutes, about average. She shoved the rest of the journals, magazines, and photocopied abstracts back into place, wrestled the doors shut, and returned to the house.

She tossed the magazine onto the kitchen table and went to investigate the refrigerator, whose contents sat complacent in the knowledge that in her present state they were quite safe. She took out the cheese bin and broke off some knobs of a hard orange cheddar, dumped half a box of crackers into a big bowl with the cheese and a couple of pears, poured some dark, heady Pinot Noir into a stubby French glass, and took the lot back to the table, where she sat with her elbows on either side of the magazine, emptying bowl and glass and reading the article.

It was even longer than she remembered, a fair chunk of the glossy art journal's hundred and fifty pages, and actually comprised separate articles by three different people, two men and a woman. She looked at the three photographs, two of them older and aristocratic faces, one aggressively blue-collar, and glanced through their biographical sketches, filled with vaguely familiar names of galleries, museums, and art schools, before turning to the articles themselves.

The woman, an editor of the journal, had written a very helpful if noncommittal review of the known history of Eva Vaughn, from the first, almost unheard-of one-woman show twelve years before, which had set the art world to talking and had sold out within a week, to the recent New York show that Kate had seen with Lee. Noncommittal was not the word, Kate decided. Frustrated, perhaps. Baffled, even. The woman was certainly torn and had retreated into the safety of facts. That Eva Vaughn was a difficult person to contact, and quite impossible for a mere journalist to meet face-to-face. That her oeuvre of paintings and sketches represented the first real threat to the supremacy of Abstract Expressionism since it had conquered the art world beginning in the forties. That her approach to art, painstaking and painfully traditional, had already begun to make people think about the role of art and about "painterly" paintings (a derogatory description, Kate was surprised and amused to find). That, most amazing of all, it was a woman who had swept in like a Vandal through Rome, a barbarian with power on her side against the civilized art establishment; a woman, an outsider, a source of absolutely maddening frustration.

The introductory article came to an abrupt end, through poor editing or a fear on the part of the author that her objectivity was about to fail her. The other two essays, by the men, were a pro and con, which began side by side before setting off to leapfrog through the advertisements for galleries, liquors, and jewelers. After trying to keep both going at once, Kate gave it up and read the anti-Eva Vaughn first, written by the man who looked like a bricklayer, beginning it at the kitchen table and ending up in the bath.

It was like reading a technical piece in a foreign language: the words looked familiar, but she found it almost impossible to hang on to the train of thought. Individual phrases stood out, though, and the cumulative effect was one of scathing, vituperative condescension. Eva Vaughn's vision was compared with flea-market seascapes, "Wyeth with a social conscience," "Grandma Moses naivete combined with Rembrandtesque chiaroscuro," whatever that meant. As the writer became more insistent his obscurant terminology fell away like an acquired accent, until he seemed to be holding off Anglo-Saxon monosyllables with an effort.

Miss Vaughn [he wrote] has proven highly popular with the masses, those who grumble that they know what they like, that their five-year-old can do as well, those who like their bodies three-dimensional and their emotions simple. Eva Vaughn has legitimized classical forms for the twentieth-century proletariat. That the forms are empty of anything but nostalgia matters not.

Ouch. The writer went back to another bout of technical language, which Kate skimmed in self-defense, although some passages stood out:

In
The Creek
Vaughn achieves a level of sensual sentimentality that would render a male painter suspect of pedophilia.
Quiet
belongs in the pages of a specialist journal of female erotica. The derivative
Troll Bridge
looks as though Bouguereau had set out to finish Munch's
Scream
: horror prettied up.

Finally, he concluded:

Miss Vaughn's refusal to see and be seen makes her highly suspect in the world of art, where dialogue and criticism are the only things that save an artist from drowning in her own vision. Instead of learning from her century, she seems determined to turn her back on it, to the extent of an eremitical existence somewhere, apparently, in California, judging from the recurrence of redwood trees, Hispanic farm workers, and unrecon structed flower children gone somewhat to seed. Her motto seems to be 'Eva Vaughn, mystery lady of the brush,' as carefully nurtured an idiosyncrasy as we have seen for a long time, on a par with Dali's moustache and Warhol's collections. The public is beginning to know her by her characteristic absence. Perhaps the walls of certain galleries should follow suit, and recognize Miss Vaughn for the absent, imitative would-be that she is.

Scalpel and bludgeon. Kate wondered if Vaun had seen it, and if so whether she had difficulties picking up her brushes the next day. She took herself and her reading to bed, and tackled the third writer.

The aristocratic gentleman's style was more accessible than the anti's, but his enthusiasm was cautious. It would have been easy, Kate realized, for the editor to have chosen for this section an author whose effusiveness undermined his case but, despite her own reservations, the editor had not done so. His praise was unstinting, but he was sternly prepared to demonstrate the flaws and inadequacies of Miss Vaughn's work.

The names that come to mind [he wrote] are not those of the moderns, not Rauschenberg or Picasso or even Monet, but the noble and formal names of centuries past and styles no longer taught, or taught only as a dead language, for the purpose of translation. For Eva Vaughn has taken an outmoded, classical, dead style, imbued it with the idiom of the twentieth century, and restored it scintillating to life.

Her images are classically simple: a man, a woman, some children, a kitchen. Landscape is background, allegorical in its overtones but secondary to the humans who dominate all her work. The figures are generally unposed, or informally so, and so intimately known as to embarrass the viewer.

Aside from that, it is difficult to reduce the Eva Vaughn style to mere description, even to say that she belongs to one school or another. The lesbian lovers of
Quiet
are caught in a shaft of light from a window, two fresh bodies pinned into the still, silent moment of a Vermeer, a suspension of movement before life sweeps in again to animate and discomfit. Her farm laborers--
Strawberry Fields, Three P.M
., and
Green Beans
--rival Van Gogh for lumpen grittiness. The surface beauty (how seldom does a critic use that word in a review!) of
Cos, Asleep
could have come from Bouguereau's brush, and the voluptuous pleasure of the woman's sprawl could be an early Renoir, but whence comes the vague sense of unease? Is there menace in the shadow that falls across the bed, or is it merely the drapes? Is that a man's shoe in the corner, or the arm of a chair? Is the scarlet stain a part of the multicolored bed cover, or something more sinister? Is Cas actually asleep? Or does she lie there, murdered in her bed?

This is not an isolated fling of imagination in viewing Eva Vaughn's work, for emotions are her forte, particularly the dark and disconcerting ones. It is no accident that the structure of
Troll Bridge
echoes Edvard Munch's
The Scream
, but in this case the androgynous figure is caught in an innocuous, sunny stretch of bridge, with a normal couple approaching along an everyday bit of roadway. The woman/man has obviously been seized by a fit of insanity. Or is there something dark lurking under the bridge, something the couple has yet to see? Or, worse yet, that they are a part of?

Is there any style this painter has not mastered, any field she will not enter? Well, yes. She will have nothing to do with Abstract Expressionism; and she is not a Romantic. Romanticism is emotion for its own sake, and leads nowhere outside the frame that surrounds the canvas. Eva Vaughn fascinates, disconcerts, lays a hand on the hearts and minds of her viewers. That, after all, is what art is meant to do. She employs the light of Vermeer, the vigor of Caravaggio, the massive, sculptural drama of Michelangelo, and the eyes--no one since Rembrandt has painted eyes like this, eyes the depth and breadth and fullness of the human soul, of devastating honesty.

Objections to her art abound, and valid objections they are. She
is
naive, and she
does
largely ignore everything art has said over the past century. She is a painter of immense power, yet she is curiously passive. The agony and passion she paints, the menace she evokes, the madness and the sheer impossibility of life belong to others. She sees agony; she paints passion; whether she lives them or not cannot even be guessed.

It is this sense of distance, of noninvolvement, that may keep Eva Vaughn from joining the ranks of the truly great. She is young, true, but inhibitions and formalities have a way of becoming more ingrained with age, not less. A great artist leaves one with no doubt--he (and the pronoun is used advisedly) has borne the sufferings and ecstasies of his subject, himself, alone and without relief. When Eva Vaughn finally decides to paint herself with her pigments, then we shall see if we have here the greatest artist of the post-Picasso age. Even--say it quietly--of the century.

Tired as she was, this man's personal and authoritative analysis of the woman she had met as Vaun Adams kept Kate from sleep, kept her from noticing the storm building outside her window until she closed the magazine, when she suddenly noticed the rattling windows and gushing downspouts. She fell asleep as soon as she heard Lee come in, and her dreams were of strawberries.

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Across town Hawkin worked late in his office and eventually had himself driven home. He poured himself a drink and sat in the darkened living room of his rented house, watching the rain slant down in buckets like some B film of a storm at sea. At eleven o'clock the streetlights flickered, dimmed, and strengthened again, and the low hum of the aquarium pumps behind him hesitated, then clicked back on. In San Jose a huge area of the grid went abruptly black, and a thousand newcomers to Silicon Valley cursed and cracked their shins on the furniture as they searched blindly for flashlights and the stubs of Christmas candles. Old-timers just went to bed and told each other that it would be all over in the morning.

The storm center massed from Eureka to Santa Barbara, and the force of it was immense, incomprehensible. At one o'clock a homeless woman in an alleyway off Market Street died of exposure. At one-thirty another seven thousand homes across the Bay were suddenly without power; electric blankets went cold, and seldom-used fireplaces were stuffed with paper and lit. At two o'clock fire crews fought to save a burning house for its shivering owners, winds gusted to nearly a hundred miles per hour, and the bridges across the Bay were shut down. The gale ripped up trees by their roots, threw satellite dishes about like Frisbees, blew out the windows of office buildings. Before the night was out the storm would kill five people in the Bay counties: the woman in the alley; an old man whose heart stopped when a garbage can lid sailed through his bedroom window; a young mother who was standing in the wrong place when the wind plucked the neighbor's badly mounted solar panels from the roof; and two young men who were returning early from a liquid party, swerved to miss a falling branch, and went off the road into a madly swollen river.

At two-thirty a redwood tree died. One of hundreds that went down that night, this was a youngster, barely two centuries old, and its characteristic lack of a taproot made it vulnerable to the combination of near-liquid soil and hard gusts from the Pacific. Six of its cousins already lay across Tyler's Road, but this one fell directly upstream of one of the junctions of road and creek, washed top-first downstream, and inserted itself like a cork into one culvert with its roots blocking the mouth of the second. Watery fingers pried at the road bed.

At three o'clock the pent-up waters lifted the two four-foot-deep, fifteen-foot-long iron drainage pipes like a couple of straws and hurled them downhill, madly gobbling up huge pieces of the road and hillside as it passed. At three-thirty the winds faltered, very slightly. At four-ten the sodden hillside above the spot where Tina Merrill had been found abruptly let go and dumped several hundred thousand tons of mud and rock onto the upper end of Tyler's Road. At four-thirty the storm suddenly gave up and moved on to see what it could do with real mountains. By five o'clock silence descended, broken only by the pervasive sound of running water.

Light seemed to come earlier than usual that morning, as if the sun were anxious to see what its clever child had accomplished during the night. All over Northern California life slowly dug itself out and ventured into the changed world. For hundreds of miles the ground was carpeted with branches and trees, broken glass, tangled wires, drowned birds, billboards, mudslides, roof shingles. Anything and everything that could be lifted and moved by wind or water had been. The world took a shaky breath, grateful birds began to sing, and the sun rose in clear blue skies to give its blessing to this humbling of creation.

At six-thirty Kate jerked awake and wondered why the telephone had not yet rung. Then she came fully awake and laughed to realize that she had come to assume, after only three days, that the day began with a call from Hawkin. She stretched hard like a cat and turned over to kiss the sleep-soft mouth next to her. The phone rang.

"Martinelli," she answered through clenched jaws.

"Look, Trujillo just called to say the Road's out, and it'll be some time before anyone can even walk up it, so I thought we'd spend the morning here, trying to put a few things together."

"Good morning, Inspector Hawkin."

"What? Oh, good morning. Is this too early to call?"

"What time do you get up, anyway?"

"I don't. Get here when you can."

"Seven-thirty." She dropped the receiver down hard onto the base and hoped it hurt his ear.

At seven-fifteen she found him in his office, and at first glance she thought the wind had gotten in during the night. She pushed aside the drift of scraps, set a white paper bag on the corner of the desk, and drew out a whole-wheat croissant. Hawkin looked up from the pages he was pinning on the wall.

"What's that?"

"Breakfast. There's one for you, if you want it."

"Did you bring me a coffee?" He eyed the foamy top of her double cappuccino.

"You have a machine."

"I'm out."

She sighed, and poured some off for him into a chipped white mug with a thick brown glaze in the bottom.

"Al, I should tell you that these are the days when even the lowly secretary takes her boss to court when he expects her to make him coffee."

"Aren't you glad you're not a secretary? No sugar?"

"Aren't you glad it's not goat's milk? No sugar."

She took her roll over to the wall and studied his handiwork. Her original map had been replaced by a contiguous series of large-scale topographical maps, taped together and tacked to the wall. Houses and buildings were drawn in with small blue squares (even the octagonal, circular, and rhom-boidal ones), some of which had red check marks in them. Scraps of paper, mostly pieces of computer printout, but also handwritten notes, a few Xeroxed newspaper clippings, and several photographs, were taped and pinned in clusters, with a line leading from each collection to a blue square. On a number of the papers Kate saw green frames around words or paragraphs.

"Why?"

"Why what?" Hawkin grunted, trimming a length of paper and pinning it up to the wall.

"Why all this fuss? I've got all of it in the computer, if you want to retrieve it."

"I hate computers," he said absently. "Glorified filing cabinets that are always locking themselves up just when you need them. Computers don't think, they just suck up information and tyrannize the people using them into thinking the way they do: yes, no; A, B. It's limiting, and it's no way to catch a murderer."

"Is that--" Kate bit her tongue.

"Speak, Martinelli."

"Well, you have to admit it's unusual for someone to make lieutenant and then willingly take another job that means a reduction in rank. I was just wondering if being allergic to computers had something to do with it."

"It had nothing to do with it, Martinelli, and don't be so damned superior. My mistrust of computers isn't a phobia, it's common sense. I am in the vanguard of a new age, the post-computer age, when our race turns from the worship of silicon idols and recognizes anew the superiority of the human brain. As for the other," he said, stabbing up a note in green ink, "I dumped the job because I was too damned good at it. There was no challenge. Now, if you're not going to help me with this you can go buy some coffee."

"What are the red check marks?" she asked, peering at his wall collage.

"When I'm satisfied that we have relatively complete information on each person in the house, no large gaps, I put a check."

"And the green looks like it marks evidence." She was looking here at the first name attached to the farthest-left blue square, which was Tyler's. His pieces of paper included a note of two years' residence in the same town as Amanda Bloom's mother and the fact that Anna grew up less than ten miles from Samantha Donaldson's neighborhood. Both of those facts were marked in green ink, along with the word
keys
, circled in green, and the note
Jag
--
hairs
, similarly colored.

As the morning wore on, the leaves of paper on the wall multiplied and fluttered like aspen leaves whenever the door opened. The red checks gradually progressed in from both ends, a few green marks were added, and Kate's back began to ache. The telephone rang steadily throughout the morning with names to add, alibis checked, information received. Shortly after noon Kate picked it up to hear Trujillo's indistinct voice.

"That you, Casey? Sorry this line is so bad. It's actually down across the road, but it still works, if I can keep the press from driving over it too much. I wanted to tell you that I've been up the Road to the washout, and we probably won't be able to bridge it until tomorrow at the earliest. They're working on it from both sides, but the water in the creek is still pretty hairy. What's that? I couldn't hear you."

"I said," she shouted, "what about from the upper side, through the reserve?"

"Even worse, apparently. There's a lot of big trees gone down, and a major slide across the Road. Sounds like an ungodly mess. Look, this line is getting pretty bad. If you want to reach me you'll need to use the radio. I'll call you in a couple of hours. Ciao."

Ciao? she thought, looking at the phone. The man's up to his nicely tailored behind in mud and reporters, and he still manages to be trendy?

"That Trujillo?" Hawkin had been running his hands through his hair while he stood staring at his map, and he looked very rumpled.

"None other. The Road's out until at least tomorrow."

"Thought it would be. Christ, what a mess. At least there aren't any brown-haired six-year-old girls living on the Road, or I'd have to have somebody go in and haul
her
out." By the way he said
her
, Kate knew he meant Vaun Adams. "Let's take a break, I'm seeing contour lines in front of my eyes. Time for lunch."

Lunch was two beers and a hamburger for Hawkin, one beer and a chicken salad for Kate. After that it was back to the computer screen and the wall, and standing and thinking and half waiting for
the
telephone call, which finally came at two-forty. Kate took it, listened for a minute, and then interrupted.

"Hang on just a sec. Al? I think you should hear this." She waited until he picked up the other extension. "Go ahead, start again."

The words tumbled out over the telephone in a rush, as if the speaker did not want to stop and consider too closely what he was saying.

"Jim Marsh. Trujillo sent me to try and track down the owner of that ring we found in the Jaguar yesterday, and I think I've got it. I'm sorry it took me so long, but the roads are pretty bad all over. I started with the Donaldsons, but nobody there or at her school recognized it, and the same story with the Blooms. I went to the Merrill house, then to the child's school, and her teacher, who was just leaving, said she thought it might belong to the girl who was Tina's best friend. She gave me the address, and the child's mother said it looked like one her daughter had been given for her birthday last November, but she thought the kid had lost it. So we talked to the girl--she was scared, thought I was going to arrest her I guess--and she finally told me that she'd given it to Tina on her last day in school. Tina told her that it was a magic ring and that she was going to use it to fly to Never-Never-land--their teacher had been reading them Peter Pan, you see--and this kid was convinced that's where Tina was, in Neverland. She wanted--" His voice broke, and Kate realized how young he sounded. "She wanted to know when Tina was coming back. If you talk to Trujillo tell him I'm home getting drunk." The line went dead, and Kate slowly hung up, watching Hawkin do an imitation of a stone.

"That's it, then." He hung up his receiver.

"Are you going to have Trujillo pick her up?"

"No, damn it, I'm not. If she hasn't made a run for it by now, she's not going to, and I want to see her face when she hears about the ring."

"If you go like that, you'll ruin a nice suit," Kate noted mildly.

"Hell, you're right. We'll have to go by my place on the way. What about you?"

"Al, the last few days have turned me back into a Girl Scout, always prepared. I have a bag in the car."