A Grave Talent (5 page)

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The stairway was lined with odd bits of old weaponry, a small tapestry, a cloak pinned out fully to show off its thick embroidery, several framed photographs of castles and people in colorful medieval costume, and similar elements of Tyler's passion. At the top landing a full set of armor, with both arms and its helm in place, stood guard over a locked glass case that held numerous small objects, bottles and combs and such, which Kate did not pause to examine. Voices came from the third door on the left, so she knocked lightly and opened it.

"... decided on a maximum of a hundred and fifty. Ah, come in, Inspector Martinelli. We were just getting started. What will you have to drink?" Tyler stood up and moved to a tall, glossy cabinet made of several kinds of wood, and Kate allowed herself to be talked into a glass of soda water. Tyler presented it with a flourish and went to stand by the open fire, his back to the stones and the heavy mantelpiece.

His air of jovial goodwill seemed somewhat strained, and Kate soon diagnosed that the source of his nervousness was Hawkin, who was sitting comfortably back into a leather chair with a somnolent expression on his face and a glass of amber liquid on his knee. Tyler's eyes kept glancing off the relaxed figure, as if by avoiding eye contact he might escape a blow. It was a reaction Kate had seen many times before, but she was a bit surprised to see it in Tyler.

Hawkin picked up the conversation again, continuing where it had been left, and with half an ear Kate listened to Tyler's plans for his land, proposals for a grant and tax-free status, the balance between convenience and freedom from gadgets. She listened, but she also studied the man's surroundings, the room at the top of the house.

The room was magnificent, wrapped in glass on three sides, with the tiers of hills soaring up at one end and the fields across the Road flowing down to the sea at the other; from the middle the owner could survey the graveled triangle and the comings and goings of his tenants. From the fourth wall jutted an open-sided granite fireplace, dividing the space in half visually. This was a lordly tower, and even if Flower Underwood had not said as much, Kate would have known immediately that this was where Tyler lived, not in the casual funk of the ground floor or in the relatively impersonal hallways Kate had glimpsed from the middle landing. Here Tyler had no need to bolt a broadsword down for fear of accident or theft, no need to limit the furnishings to sturdy dark chairs that would neither intimidate the residents nor show the effects of their children's heels. Here John Tyler could be what he was: the sole heir to three generations of money. In California, three generations is a long time.

The room was not flagrant in its opulence. The walls were smooth redwood, the floor polished oak with an inlaid pattern of some darker wood running around the edges. The intricate carpet underfoot was wool, not silk; the buttery leather of the chairs and sofa showed signs of long use; the beams and mantelpiece were of the same unadorned redwood as the walls. The solid wall to Kate's left held a cluster of watercolors on this side of the fireplace. The other wall was hidden from where Kate sat, but she could see another group of chairs at the other end of the room around a low table with a chess set. Her attention was caught by a change in Tyler's voice.

"... wine, Inspector Martinelli? No? Very abstemious of you. Inspector Hawkin? You don't mind if I do?" He limped over to the cabinet again and poured more of the amber liquid into his squat glass, then put the bottle with the unpronounceable name back on the shelf. A smoky fume rose from the glass, and he returned to put his back to the fireplace before he sipped from it. At bay, thought Kate, though Hawkin looked less like a pursuer than he did an old, well-fed hound drowsing in front of the fire. It was an odd way to question someone, she thought, and waited impatiently for him to get on with it. Soft voices drifted up the stairs, distant pans rattled, a child cried, and raised voices from the road outside reminded her of the gathered media. Finally she couldn't stand it.

"When you say 'we decided,' Mr. Tyler, just who do you mean?"

Tyler looked relieved at the question, and Hawkin shot her a quick glance.

"You're looking at him. I get in the habit of saying 'we' because I do consult the people who live here, and my various money men, but ultimately I decide. I still find it faintly ludicrous to think of one person 'owning' a stretch of forest, but it's mine in the eyes of the law. I prefer to think of myself as the landlord, keeping out undesirables and maintaining the road. If anything it owns me, not I it."

"The land lord," said Hawkin, making it two words. "A nice feudal concept."

The oblique accusation seemed only to relax Tyler, as if he were settling into an old, familiar argument.

"There's nothing wrong with a feudal system," he began, "not if it retains the key element of responsibility. It's popular to think of the lord of the manor as a parasite who drained the peasants of their hard-earned products and spent all his time drinking and hunting deer--"

"And screwing wenches," contributed Kate unexpectedly. Tyler looked at her cautiously until he decided that she didn't mean anything by it. Hawkin raised an eyebrow.

"Yes, that too, but it was his responsibility to protect the people from invaders, to make judgment in a dispute, to provide for the old and widows and orphans, so they wouldn't go hungry. The deer hunting and the riding to hounds were not just sport--deer ate crops, and foxes killed farm animals if they weren't kept down. The whole idea of hierarchy and authority is bound up, in the feudal system, with responsibility. The peasant had few rights and privileges, but then he was only responsible for producing a certain amount more than his family needed. The greater the rank, the greater the accountability. Why, do you know," he said, warming to his argument and the whiskey, "in ancient days the king was seen as being responsible for the life of the land itself? He was cheered and begrudged nothing when food was plentiful and the people healthy, but if the crops failed or there was a drought or a plague, he was seen to be the cause of it, and the people would slit his throat to restore the land to fresh life. That's the real origin of 'The king is dead; long live the king.' "

He was totally caught up in the thought of this anachronistic threat to himself, and his eyes gleamed with the relish of it.

Without raising his eyes from the contemplation of his glass, Hawkin placed a gentle question into the room.

"What do you think of human sacrifice, Mr. Tyler?"

Kate felt the hairs on her arms rise and her head snapped around, but Tyler had not yet realized that the old hound was no longer drowsing.

"Human sacrifice--any sacrifice, for that matter--is a means of feeling in control of one's fate by giving the gods what they want before they can take it. By offering them the best, the purest, the newest--" The words strangled in his throat as he saw what he had been led to say. His eyes flew to Hawkin, who looked back at him with the patient air of an old hunter waiting for his prey to panic, watching neither in triumph nor in glee, but certain of the outcome. Tyler's face drained bloodless above the dark fringe of his beard, his knuckles showed white around the glass he held. The room's only movement was the slow dip and rise of the whiskey in Hawkin's glass as he swirled it around and around and around, waiting.

"I... You don't... You can't think..." Kate thought the man would not look much worse if one of his jeweled daggers had been pushed into his belly.

"Yes?" coaxed Hawkin.

"You can't think I had anything to do with it?" He spoke in a hoarse whisper.

"Can't I?"

"You can't be serious."

"No?"

"Why would I do something like that?"

"Why would anyone, Mr. Tyler? You've just given me what could be construed as a motive, have you not? You would be physically capable of it, would you not? This is your land, and you know the comings and goings of the people here better than anyone, do you not? So can you tell me, Mr. Tyler, why I should not consider the possibility that you, as you say, had 'something to do with it'?"

Tyler stared at Hawkin, searching his face for anything other than the polite curiosity with its hint of steel that it now presented. He looked to Kate, found no help there, and lurched about to face his fire. A minute passed, then two, while the two of them sat and watched his back and the movement of muscles along his jaw.

Suddenly his arm shot out and the glass exploded into the fire with a billow of blue flames. His voice began low and the words bitten off in rage.

"Why did he have to come here with his filth? This is my land. My land! Bringing his sickness here and defiling us like this. I'll never be able to go up the Road without seeing this last child, never go up to the top without thinking of the first one, the smell--" He broke off, one hand gripping the mantelpiece. They waited.

Steps came in the hall, a tap at the door. A flash of anger crossed Hawkin's face, and after a moment Tyler turned, his color high but his anger gone, looking both annoyed and relieved at the interruption.

"Yes?"

"John?" The door opened and the tall, gentle-faced woman with corn-silk braids wrapped about her head who had brought Kate lunch looked in. "I'm sorry to break in like this, but Jenny Cadena's going into labor. Her water broke, so she'll go too fast to get her home. What room do you want her in?"

"But she isn't due yet, is she?"

"Only two weeks early."

"How about the green room?"

"That bed's too soft. I thought either the quilt room or Alice's room."

"The quilt room is better; there's nobody downstairs at that end. Strip the bed first, though, would you? Did you call the midwife?"

"She'll be here in an hour, and Terry's with her now. Sorry to bother you."

"S'okay, hon, I'll poke my head in when we're finished here and see how you're doing. It'll be nice to have another baby born in the house--it's been a long time."

She smiled affectionately at him and nodded vaguely to Hawkin and Kate, and the door closed.

"Shouldn't you get her to the hospital?" asked Hawkin.

"Oh no, she'll be fine. This is her fourth, and she's never had any problems. Quite a few of the women come down here to give birth. The midwives don't have to go up the Road, and there's the insurance of the phone and the highway if something goes wrong. Never has so far, touch wood," and he flicked a fingernail lightly against the mantel, "but it goes easier when they know help is available." He was calm now, and met Hawkin's eyes steadily. The interruption had firmly restored him to his position of mastery, and Hawkin reluctantly accepted that nothing would be gained by pressing on that day. Still, his main goal had been achieved; he'd have to settle for that. He started again on a different tack.

"Can you tell me who is not down here today?"

"Offhand I can name a half a dozen. Old Peterson, of course. He comes out of the hills once a year at Christmas, to visit his mother in Santa Barbara, and stays until the end of January. Never other than that."

"His full name?" asked Kate, pen poised.

"Something like Bernie. I'd have to look it up, to tell you the truth."

"That would be helpful. Who else?"

"Vaun Adams. Tommy would've told her, but she's probably busy painting. Ben Riddle is in San Francisco for a few days. I think Tony Dodson is off on a job somewhere, probably be back tonight or tomorrow. Susanna Canani is in Florida with her kids. Hari Bensen I haven't seen, or his lady Ursula." He thought for a moment, then shrugged. "There might be one or two others. If I think of them I'll let you know."

"Do you keep close records of the residents?" Kate asked. He laughed.

"Are you kidding? Half of the kids here don't have birth certificates, and a few of the adults. A lot of them make a point of having no bank account, social security number, driver's license, voter's registration card--not all of them, by any means, but there's a handful of residents who are greater purists--fanatics, if you prefer--than I can afford to be."

"Strikes me you've laid yourself right open for some not very nice people to come in."

"I don't know that keeping track of people's past is any insurance against that. We don't let just anyone in, you see. It's the one place where everyone over the age of twelve has an equal say, whether or not to allow a specific individual in after a four-month trial period. Three-fourths of them have to approve a residency application, or the person goes. I can veto someone, but I can't override their negative. So far it's worked fine. In fact, one time we voted out a couple, and a few weeks later I found out that they'd been arrested for some knifing that had happened the year before in Arizona. There was something wrong with them, and after four months we knew it."

"Don't you have problems with the county and the tax man and all?" asked Kate.

"I pay two full-time lawyers to keep my affairs sorted out. I tell them what I want to do, they tell me how to do it."

"Their names, please," asked Kate, and added them to the growing list.

Hawkin scowled at his glass for a moment.

"It remains to be seen if your method of weeding out the twisted ones has been one hundred percent effective, Mr. Tyler. Tell me, why do you think the bodies were brought here to your Road? Who do you think it is, this person who has 'brought his filth here'?"

"I wish to God I knew. It feels... I feel like someone is doing this to me personally. I know that's ridiculous, and I would certainly never say such a thing to the parents of those little girls, but it is how I feel. Like someone's got it in for me, laying dead children on my doorstep, and yes I'm aware of how absurd and egocentric it is, but I can't help it. And no, I can't think of anyone who would want to do that to me. God knows I've thought about it."

"Mr. Tyler, there's something else that's been puzzling me. Maybe you can shed some light on it. If the murderer didn't want the bodies found, he could have chosen a thousand better places between here and the Bay Area. If he did want them found, his method seems a bit chancy. Any ideas?"