Breakaway (A Gail McCarthy Mystery) (2 page)

I smiled back and wondered how to put it. "Ms. Devereaux, I'd call the police if I were you. Anyone who'd sneak out here in the middle of the night to do this is not someone I would want prowling around my house. Do you live alone?"

"Yes. I understand what you are saying. But I do not want the police. I just wanted to know if my thoughts were," she paused, "legitimate. I will be careful. Thank you. What do I owe you?"

I gave her the standard charge for an exam and a ranch call. Since it was a weekend, technically I should have added an emergency charge, but it just didn't seem reasonable, given the little I'd had to do.

"I will write you a check," she said.

I followed her as she walked toward the house, my eternal curiosity about people's dwellings and ways of living poking its head above the blanket of indifference I'd been under for months. Still a faint spark of the old Gail there, I thought wearily.

The adobe house was small and old and entirely charming. The whitewash flaked off the mud-brown bricks, leaving irregular dark patches on the mostly white walls, and the low, cedar-shingled roof was mossy. A five-foot-high adobe wall that matched the house surrounded what looked like a kitchen garden. Nicole Devereaux pushed open a wooden gate and walked up an uneven path toward a Dutch door, which stood with the top half open. An apricot-colored rose draped a long arm like an archway over the path.

"A little. I've been making a garden for the last two years and I've gotten interested in old roses. I grow this one at home; she's one of my favorites."

The woman smiled, an expression of pure and simple delight, such as you see on the face of a child. When it disappeared from her mouth it still remained in her eyes. "The rose is my favorite flower. I planted this bush, it is five years ago now." She smiled again, but more to herself. "Five years I have been in this house."

Opening the door, she stepped inside. I glanced around the enclosed garden before I followed her. Other climbing roses, some of which I thought I recognized, festooned the gracefully deteriorating walls. Mostly in shades of cream and gold and apricot-the colors I favored myself. Tea roses and Noisettes, I thought. Classic border perennials-delphiniums, pinks, Shasta daisies-blended haphazardly with weedy herbs and wildflowers in an untidy band around the base of the wall. The center was all roughly cropped grass, which looked as if the horse, rather than a mower, kept it trimmed.

Uneven slabs of slate had been laid to form a path from the gate to the door where Nicole Devereaux had disappeared. I followed her into the house.

Into the kitchen, it turned out. This truly was a kitchen garden. The kitchen itself was small and unfancy, with cracked tile on the floor and an old-fashioned refrigerator and sink. A table sat in a windowed nook that extended out into the garden, and light filled the little room, even on such a foggy morning.

An open archway on one side of the kitchen seemed to lead to the rest of the house. I couldn't see Nicole Devereaux anywhere, so I stepped through the archway and stopped abruptly.

"My God," I said softly.

TWO

The room beyond the archway was amazing. At least to me, who had never seen anything like it. Originally it must have been several rooms, given the age and style of the house. At a guess, dining room, front hall, and living room. Whatever walls had divided it had been removed, leaving one big open space.

The walls were whitewashed, with windows set deep in them; the floor was planked oak. A fireplace with a simple oak mantel filled one end of the room. Nothing else. No furniture, not so much as a camp stool. Only paintings.

Paintings everywhere-hanging on the white walls, on easels in the middle of the floor, leaning against each other here and there. One, which appeared to be a work in progress, was sitting on a particularly large easel by a window that looked out at the kitchen garden. On the wide window ledge were paints and brushes.

I stared at the paintings as if mesmerized. Brilliant, vivid colors-lapis blue, coral red, indigo violet-in great sweeps and strange shapes, somehow evoking landscapes, and yet like no landscapes I had ever seen.

I stared and stared, forgetting my purpose for being here, lost to everything but buoyant, yet demanding creations in front of me. The nearest one, dominated by a swirling topography of amber, revealed delicate black inking over what looked like watercolor. The closer I peered, the more intricate the detail appeared, revealing further nuances and possible meanings.

Stepping even closer, I felt as if I were entering the world of the painting, a tawny landscape as foreign as it was familiar. And yet, was it a landscape? I stepped back. Were these paintings abstract, impressionistic, surrealistic? I couldn't say. A unifying force seemed to bind them all, but neither it, nor they, could be easily defined.

Footsteps. I turned abruptly to see Nicole Devereaux enter the room from the other end. I felt shy, almost embarrassed. Had she meant me to see her work? Was I trespassing on her private space?

"You're an artist," I said, trying to fill the gap.

"That is true." Her expression was not unfriendly; she stood quietly in the middle of her room and watched me look around.

"Oh." I took that in and was impressed. I knew people who painted, of course. But I had never known anyone who made a living as an artist.

Nicole Devereaux continued to regard me pleasantly enough, saying nothing, seeming content with the silence and my obvious appreciation of her art.

As for me, I could hardly tear my eyes away from the paintings. For the first time in what seemed like years, and was certainly months, something was speaking to me again. With their deep and brilliant colors, these disembodied semi-landscapes were saying something I could hear. Not that I understood it. But it was a voice I recognized.

Tantalized, I stared around the room, wanting to explore, to look at each painting carefully and slowly. I brought my eyes back to Nicole Devereaux's face. "I might like to buy one," I said.

"I would like," I said slowly, "to look at your work, and if I could afford it, to purchase a piece for my home."

"Of course," she said. "Would you like to set up a time?"

Belatedly it occurred to me that she had called me out here to look at her horse, not her paintings, and that she was, perhaps, busy with other things at the moment. She came toward me, then past me, into her kitchen. Reluctantly, I turned my back on the paintings and followed her.

Sitting at the kitchen table, she wrote me a check and consulted a calendar. "I have time in the evening next week," she said. "Most evenings."

A tortoiseshell cat jumped onto the chair beside Nicole and she stroked its head with a hand that was as finely boned as her face. "Yes, Ruth," she said to the cat. "What is it?"

The cat mewed, in that questioning, plaintive tone cats so easily assume.

"Yes, you can be fed," Nicole responded.

I stared at the woman, fascinated by the shape of her face and the cadence of her voice. This was the creator of those strangely symbolic paintings, those paintings that had seemed to reflect my own inner landscape. Vivid colors and the play of light and shadow on empty hills-something, something that was me.

And so, I wondered, gazing at Nicole, who was this?

Her angular face gave no clues. Dark brown hair pulled back in a knot, dark eyes, jeans and a faded shirt, sandals on her feet. A slender hand stroking a cat. Plenty of lines around the eyes. That was it.

I put my hand on the door latch. "Thank you," I said again. "And be careful."

"I will be. Thank you, also." A smile with a note of finality.

And then I was out the door and walking across the small garden to the wooden gate, in something of a daze. I found my way to my truck, wondering the whole time what had come over me. I'd never been particularly moved by a piece of art before. I'd admired, been repulsed, been intrigued. But never swept away, never inclined to spend major money. My little house was decorated with the few bits and pieces I'd either inherited or acquired, somewhat by chance. I was in no sense an art connoisseur.

Still, I was aware that I truly longed for the paintings in Nicole Devereaux's studio. Desire is a trap, I told myself. But what registered more was that I had felt desire at all. It had been so long, or so it seemed, since I had felt much of anything but weariness.

Pulling out of Nicole's driveway, I took a last glance over my shoulder. The adobe house was mostly hidden from the road by a big and untidy hedge of what looked like the rambling rose called Mermaid. I could see the black mare, munching hay in her corral under the apple tree.

The sight of the horse recalled the reason for my visit. Damn. Now that was a strange thing. In my half dozen years as a practicing veterinarian, I had never come across anything like that. I tried to imagine someone who would sneak into a barn in the middle of the night in order to have sex with a horse. Creepy. Nothing came to mind but adolescent boys, playing a prank. I hoped that was all it was.

I was on Harkins Valley Road now, driving through a particularly wet, dense fog. Despite the lack of visibility, I knew exactly where I was and what was around me. I had a lot of clients who lived in Harkins Valley; it was familiar turf.

In many ways, it was an odd area. A fertile little valley in the hills south of Santa Cruz, it had been settled by dairymen and farmers, and the terrain was still dotted with their fairly humble dwellings. At a guess, Nicole's house had been one of these.

However, in the last thirty years the inviting arable land had been bought up bit-by-bit by the increasingly wealthy folks who had begun to populate Santa Cruz County. Some had come when the university moved in, others had arrived when the once quiet, rural Santa Clara Valley, only a half hour away, had evolved into the heavily industrialized Silicon Valley. And a lot of these people wanted "a place in the country."

Harkins Valley was ideal for small horse properties, and it was now crowded with them. Ranging from remodeled farmhouses like Nicole's with an acre or so, to forty-acre white-board-fenced estates with five-thousand-square-foot pseudo-mansions plunked down on them-not to mention everything in between. And everybody had a horse.

Not surprisingly, the place was full of odd contrasts between new and old, shacks and spec houses. Even the landscape seemed to lend itself to this. The valley couldn't make up its mind whether to be open and sunny, or steep and shady. It wavered in and out along its length, billowing into wide, level meadows with oaks dotted decoratively here and there, and narrowing in places to shadowy canyons thick with redwoods.

It was in one of these redwood filled passages that I braked and pulled my truck into a driveway. My friend Kris Griffith lived here, in a house that she had purchased about the time I bought my own property.

Like Nicole, Kris was in the low-rent district of Harkins Valley. These sections of shady canyon were not nearly as popular, or as valuable, as the meadow ground. Although Kris had three acres here, barely an acre was usable; the rest was almost vertical hillside. And though the sun could slant invitingly through the trees on warm summer afternoons, on cold, foggy mornings like this, or long, wet winter days, life in a redwood grove was pretty dark and dank.

Still, I smiled as I always did when I saw Kris's house. A narrow little box of a place, sided only in weathered plywood and stripping, it still managed to look inviting. Maybe it was the smoke rising gently from the chimney pipe, or the old-fashioned French doors leading out to a deck overhung with jasmine. Or the border of foxgloves and ferns around a tiny lawn, with the redwoods towering up all around it. Who knew what alchemy caused some houses to work and others not? One thing was apparent: money couldn't buy it.

I knocked on Kris's door, thinking how pleasant it was to have at least one friend I could drop in on without notice. Kris and I had known each other for many years; since her divorce our relationship had evolved into what I, an only child, could imagine was a sisterly one.

It took awhile for Kris to open her door. Well, after all, it was Saturday morning. She had no doubt been out last night. Although it had taken her a year or so to recover from her divorce, at this point Kris was relishing her status as a divorcee and frequently regaled me with sagas of nights spent out at the bars and clubs.