A Grave Talent

32

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Kate's first frozen thought was that he was smaller than she remembered, shorter perhaps than Vaun, certainly more compact and concentrated than the hairy mountain man she had seen at Vaun's door.

His eyes and the gun stayed rock steady on Vaun where she stood behind Kate's right shoulder, not moving a millimeter as his left hand pushed the door shut, found the bolt, slid it home. For the space of five heartbeats nobody moved, or breathed, until finally his lips curled.

"Hello, Vaunie."

The quiet, sure menace in his voice washed like ice through Kate's veins and sent her mind yammering like a mad monkey against the bars of its cage, screaming at her to run, fly, dive for cover, leap for the drawer three feet away and get her hands on the gun there because that is the voice of a goddamned poisonous snake of a crazy man, Kate! But other than one all-over jerk of her muscles she stayed quite still and watched the hand on the gun.

At his words Lee, staring horrified from where she had fetched up against the wall, shifted her gaze from the gun to his face, but Vaun seemed not to see the gun or hear the menace. Neither of them made a move to touch the forgotten alarm buttons they wore. At his greeting she seemed to relax, and Kate heard her exhale in what sounded like a happy little sigh.

"Hello, Andy." Her voice was calm, even warm, a simple greeting at the mildly surprising appearance of an old friend. His smile deepened and Kate saw the face that Vaun had described when he walked out of her studio three weeks before Jemma Brand had died—amused, cruel, and utterly sure of himself.

"Good of you all to wait up for me like this. Damn stupid time for an appointment with a shrink, but I couldn't very well change it, could I?"

"What—" Lee shrank back under the stab of his eyes, but the gun did not waver, and she pushed the words out. "What happened to Jon?"

To Kate's surprise he laughed, a hearty sound, full of amusement, incongruous from a tidy man with murder in his eyes.

"I used some of his own toys on him. He'll be all right, unless he struggles too much. In fact, he's probably having a fine time, all trussed up like a pig. And speaking of which," he said, and looked at Kate, all his humor instantly gone, "you'll have a gun. Where is it?"

"Upstairs," she lied automatically. There was a chance that in moving them around he would leave himself vulnerable for an instant. He studied her, eyes narrowed, and seemed to hear her thoughts, for he smiled again, as if at the feeble efforts of a child.

"No, it isn't. Well it doesn't matter, so long as it's not on you." He ran his eyes over her T-shirt and jeans, which could hardly conceal a penknife, much less a police revolver. "Still, I'd better have a check. Vaun, you come on out into the hall. That's right, by that table. And you, next to her." He nodded curtly to Lee, who obeyed. "Now you, come here, hands against the wall. Get your feet further back. That's better." Kate felt a sudden sharp pressure against her spine, and he spoke past her. "Now, if you two don't want your cop friend to have a big hole in her, you'll stay very still."

Kate braced herself, but the search was impersonal, if thorough. In a minute he stood back, satisfied, and looked down the hallway toward the opening and the expanse of drapery.

"That's the living room?" he asked Vaun, and she nodded. "Right. You first, Vaunie, then you. Now you, cop."

Vaun turned smoothly to the door, the glass of ice water still tinkling gently in her hand. Lee followed with a curiously old-maidish stance, her hands clasped together between her breasts, hunched over in feeble defense or fear or cold. Kate moved down the hall, feeling the tingle in her back where the cold metal of the gun had pressed, and took great care not to stumble. She did not glance at what Lewis had referred to as a table, a decorative Indian apothecary's chest with a telephone and address book on top and her own familiar gun yearning from the top right-hand drawer, as useless to her as if it were on the bottom of the Bay. With a wrench she pulled her mind off the gun and off regrets and demanded that it get to work.

In the living room she moved directly to the first sofa and sat with her back to the dining area. Lewis hesitated, his instincts against allowing her any choice or independent move, but he studied the room and realized that there was no place she could have hidden a gun and that her position would put him with his back in the corner, away from the room's only internal entrance, the long windows, tightly draped, and two small, high windows that obviously looked into nothing but the neighbor's trees. He subsided, told Lee to take the other sofa and sat Vaun in the chair between them, facing the fireplace. Good, thought Kate. Now to get him talking.

"How did you find her?" she asked, and was pleased to hear just the right shade of querulous amazement in her voice.

Lewis preened. "It wasn't that difficult. I had a friend pretend to be a newsman willing to pay a lot, even for rumors. He found an orderly who said Vaun was being released to a therapist who specialized in artists. I figured it would be either here or in Berkeley, and since the police here were in on the case, I started here. I went into the kinds of bars and coffeehouses that artists go to, in the Haight and Polk and south of Market to begin with, and everywhere I went I talked about crazy artists and that woman down on Tyler's Road." Here he paused and reached out to run the tip of his left forefinger along Vaun's ear. She did not react. "Took me about eighty gallons of coffee and a hundred and fifty beers, but I finally got lucky—a tight-ass little jerk in a silk shirt practically drooling to tell me all about how he knew the policewoman who'd been on the TV down on Tyler's Road, oh yeah, knew her personally, well, no, not well, you know, but he'd once seen her, with a lady shrink who'd come to the hospital to see an artist friend of his who was dying a year or so back, lady shrink name of Cooper. That was noon on Wednesday. Took me until midnight to track down one of Dr. Cooper's regulars, and when I found out when his next scheduled appointment was, I just arranged that he'd be too, uh, tied up to keep it. And here I am."

"Can I ask you something that puzzled us? Inspector Hawkin and me, that is?" Kate continued, not giving him a chance to find his own topic of conversation. He looked irritated, then nodded magnanimously.

"The names. You are Andrew Lewis?" She made it a question, hinting uncertainty. "Without the beard… Where did you get the name Dodson?" She held her breath, playing for time, skirting the revelation of how much they knew about Lewis and Dodson, hoping he might relax into scorn at their ignorance but not wanting to give him the impression of incompetence—that could only arouse his suspicions. Keep him talking, keep him relaxed. However, she was startled at his response.

"You know my middle name?"

"Uh, no. There was an initial…"

"It's Carroll."

"Carol?"

"Two r's, two l's, like in Lewis Carroll. You know his real name?"

"I don't think—"

"Dodgson. The Reverend Charles L. Dodgson. With a g. So when I came across someone who looked like me, with a name so close, well, I just had to be him, didn't I?" He was grinning, daring Kate to ask what had happened to the real Dodson, but that was not the direction she wanted to go in, not yet. She desperately cast around for another topic.

"Where did you go during that two years you took off from high school? Inspector Hawkin thought it was Mexico, but I—"

"All right, enough crap. I don't have all night."

"What do you want, Andy?" Vaun's even voice distracted Lewis, almost, but not quite—enough for Kate to tense up in preparation, for what she did not know. He stood looking down at Vaun speculatively. She met his eyes, waiting.

"What do I want?" he said to himself. "What did I ever want? I loved you, and you treated me like shit."

"You never loved me," she chided him gently.

"No? Maybe you're right. I did nearly kill you, you know, when you told me you'd rather paint than be with me."

"Yes, I know that. But what you did was worse, wasn't it?"

She gave him her knowledge and the pain of those years in her voice and face, and he went very still. After a moment he looked at Kate, but she had ready a slightly puzzled expression to hide her fear and fury. Damn the woman, what was she playing at? Surely she could see that the very worst thing for all of them would be to push Lewis into a corner, to let him know how trapped he was. He looked back at Vaun, warily, reassessing her.

"What I did."

"What are you going to do now, Andy?" she asked him, and Kate felt like screaming at her not to push him into any action, stretch it out, give Hawkin a chance, but Vaun would not look at her, and Lee sat frozen.

"I'll tell you what I thought of doing," he said absently, and Kate knew then that all was lost. "I thought of knocking off these two and making it look like you did it. You'd never get out in just nine years after that. I could still do it."

"No, Andy. They know everything."

" 'Everything'? Oh, right."

"They do. Tommy's Time magazine. Drugs in your apartment in San Jose. That garage. Your fingerprints and some hairs from one of the children in the postal van. They'd never think I had anything to do with killing anyone."

Madness, thought Kate, this is madness speaking, she probably thinks he'll shoot her first and give us a chance, but it's impossible, I've got to stop her. But Kate couldn't think of a way that wouldn't set him off, so she prayed for Hawkin and readied herself for an unavoidable, futile lunge from the depths of the sofa.

The cruel smile crept back onto his lips, and Lee made a faint sound of protest as his left hand went down onto Vaun's head, gently playing with her curls, caressing the back of her head and cupping the nape of her neck, dipping his forefinger under the collar of her shirt. And then he froze.

Slowly his hand came back up, the cord between his first two fingers, and Vaun's alarm button emerged from the front of her shirt. He looked at it, and at Vaun, who sat through his touch and his discovery with unmoving aloofness, looking up at him. He twisted his hand around the cord and brought it up, and up, until the black line was biting into Vaun's pale throat. She watched him as her hands came up and plucked without passion at the cord. For the first time the gun moved away from Kate, but abruptly the clasp broke. Vaun jerked back into her seat, and Lewis took a sharp recovery step back and stood with the thing dangling from his hand.

And this is the Andy Lewis that that preacher's daughter saw just before being beaten to a pulp, thought Kate. His skin was dark with fury, his hand trembling with this evidence that he, Andy Lewis, might have been tricked, trapped, thwarted, outsmarted. He brought his eyes up to Kate, looked at her shirt, dismissed her, turned to Lee.

"You. Let me see."

She looked to Kate for direction, but Kate could only nod. Slowly, slowly Lee's hands went up to the back of her neck, and slowly she pulled her own black cord over her blonde curls, and then she held the button out to him.

He stared at the small device swinging from Lee's fingers, his eyes narrowing in disbelief.

"You pushed it, didn't you? When we were coming down the hallway, you were all bent over. You had your hands on it, didn't you? Oh, Christ, you stupid bitch, you're going to be very sorry you did that."

"Mr. Lewis," Kate began in the calm and reasonable voice demanded both by training and by good sense, "I'm afraid you'll find there are police all around the house. However, I should point out that as of this moment we have nothing on you, in spite of what Vaun just said. With a good lawyer—"

"Shut up!" he snarled, and jammed his gun into Lee's hair. Kate froze.

"I don't care what evidence you have," he said. "I've got hostages. I'll get away, you won't risk losing 'Eva Vaughn,' now will you? I'll get away. But I don't need you. Three hostages is too many, and a cop doesn't count anyway."

"Andy," Vaun said quietly, "don't hurt her. Tie her up if you like, but let her go. If you do, I'll go with you. If you kill either of them, you'll have to kill me too."

His head turned to her, his face screwed up as if he were about to spit, or to cry, and indeed the answer he spat out climbed rapidly into a shriek.

"You? You think I care what I do to you? I should have killed you years ago. All of this happened because of you, you goddamned bitch. I should have wrung your neck that night. I should have poked your cold little eyes out."

His rage poured out onto Vaun, and still Kate sat, knowing he was about to explode, knowing he would see her move, knowing that in a matter of seconds time would have run out and she would have to make her hopeless bid for their lives. Lee might reach him—she was out of his sight— but Lee sat, still clutching the button, stunned by his sheer animal fury.

Vaun, though. Vaun the passive, Vaun the mirror, Vaun the observer and chronicler of the world's torments, Vaun was meeting him, shaking herself free almost visibly from the restraints of a lifetime, caught up in a rising bubble of exhilarating, intoxicating, liberating rage. Her face was alive, furious, unrecognizable, her pale cheeks flushed with passion, her pale eyes glittering like a pair of blue diamonds, every bit as hard and as cutting. She threw back her head and called her death to her in the vast relief of one final clash, all bars off, no quarter given, all her confusion and torment coming to a single focus on this, her lover, her enemy, her death. She rose up to meet him, took one step back, and stood braced to hurl her words at him.

"Yes, Andy, you should have. But you didn't, did you? And everything I've done in the last fifteen years, everything I've painted, has been thanks to you. Thanks to you, Andy. These hands," she held them up and shook them in his face, "these hands have changed the way people see the world, thanks to you—"

"You'll never paint again!" he shrieked at her, and the heavy gun jerked slightly toward her, and then all three of them could see his mind reassert itself and take control of the hand's movement. He looked at her in astonishment and began to laugh, the madness and hysteria all the way up to the surface now.

"You think I'm going to kill you, you stupid bitch? That's what you want, isn't it? But I'm not going to make it that easy for you. You're going to wish you were dead—it'll make being locked up for ten years seem like a fairy tale because you're going to live knowing what your precious painting did, you're going to have to live knowing that because of your precious fucking painting people died, that those hands you're so proud of might as well have been around those skinny soft little throats and on this gun, and you're going to have to live knowing that precious little Jemma and Tina and Amanda who tried to bite me, the little bitch, and what's the other one's name? Samantha and now your good friends Lee and Casey, all of them died because of your precious fucking painting hands, and even if your hands can hold a brush when I'm finished with you, all you'll be able to paint is blood and death, and you did it all, you did it, Vaunie, it was you."

And he turned then and many things happened simultaneously, as his gun lowered onto Lee and Vaun cried out and Kate finally made her move, diving low for his knees, and the high upper window blossomed in glittering fragments into the room and two guns went off. Then there was blood like paint spattered across the room and there was death and there was the sound of two women groaning in deep and eternal agony, and then came the sound of more smashing glass and the absurdly unnecessary flat buzz of the breached house alarm, and then running feet and shouts and the wail of distant sirens, and Hawkin pulling Kate off Lee and muffling his partner's choking groans in the hollow of his shoulder, and the sirens louder now and the sudden silent chasm as both house alarm and siren shut off, and the calm rush of the ambulance men, and Hawkin holding Kate back—and then Lee was gone, and it was over, over, it was over.

EPILOGUE THE ROAD

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Works of art are always products of having been in danger,

of having gone to the very end

—Rainer Maria Rilke, letter

There was also a nun, a Prioress

and thereon hung a brooch of gold full sheen, On which there was first writ a crowned 'A,'

And after Amor vmcit omnia

—Geoffrey Chaucer, Canterbury Tales, Prologue 33

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Tyler's Road was a very different place in the June sunshine. Even the redwoods through which Kate had run that disgustingly wet night seemed more benevolent. The roses along the fence were a glory of color, the rusty shed roof had disappeared beneath an expanse of green, and brilliant flags flew from every fence post, each printed with a helm, a lute, or a quill and proclaiming the boundaries of the Medieval Midsummer's Night Faire.

There were still a few press vans, Kate was amused to see, although they were vastly outnumbered by the buses, bugs, pickups, vans, station wagons, and just plain cars of the participants, which even at this early hour lined both sides of the narrow road for nearly a mile on either side of the Barn. She parked her own car at the suggestion of a longhaired boy in jester's motley and began to walk toward the sounds and, soon, the smells of Tyler's Barn. There was a steady flow of long-haired, bearded, long-skirted types whose costumes ranged from monastic robes to gowns that would have seemed modern in Marie Antoinette's France, with a scattering of self-conscious families in shorts and cameras. She herself was dressed in proper period style, thanks to the bullying of one of Lee's clients—but as a young man, in tunic and lightweight leggings. No ruffs or farthingales for her, thank you.

As she neared the entrance gate she fished out from the leather pouch at her belt the pass that had come in the mail and handed it to the gatekeeper, a vaguely familiar woman in rustic brown who stamped her hand with something that was either an octopus or a musical instrument. Behind the woman stood a mountainous figure in green tunic and leggings, leaning on a rough staff the size of a young tree, a walkie-talkie grumbling from his hip. She looked at him more carefully, and at last knew him by the earring.

"Mark Detweiler?"

He looked at her with uncertainty.

"Kate Martinelli. Casey?" she suggested.

"Casey Martinelli!" he boomed, and crushed her hand in his. "Good to see you. I wouldn't have recognized you in a million years. How've you been?" And then his face changed as he remembered, and still booming he continued, "I was so sorry to hear about your friend, we all were. Is there—"

She interrupted quickly, not wanting to hear it.

"Thanks, no, I'm fine, have you any idea where Tyler is, or Vaun Adams?"

He looked furtively to either side and bent down to whisper in her ear.

"Vaun was around. She's helping Amy with the cart rides, or maybe doing faces, I'm not sure which. Tyler's around." He waved vaguely into the multicolored swirl of humanity. Kate thanked him and began to turn away, but was stopped by his booming voice. "Tell you who I did see, though," and he waited.

"Who?" she obliged.

"Your partner." Seeing her confused look, he repeated it. "Your partner. Al Hawkin."

"Al's here?" She was surprised. This didn't seem his sort of show, but then, maybe he was here for reasons similar to hers.

"Got here about half an hour ago, with the most gorgeous wench—oh, sorry, we're not supposed to call them wenches this year. What was it now?" He scratched his grizzled head in thought, pushing the feathered cap awry. "Oh, right. Buxom ladies, we're supposed to say. Anyway, she's a looker. They went towards the food tents—see the white ones?"

She thanked him again and set off, aiming well downhill from the blazing white canvas from which all the smells were drifting. She wasn't sure she wanted to see him, not quite yet. Later in the day perhaps, after she had talked with Vaun.

Inevitably, perverse fate decreed that the first familiar face she saw was that of Al Hawkin, dressed in twentieth-century open-necked shirt and tan cotton trousers, standing by himself across a clearing and listening to a quartet of three recorders and a viola da gamba. She had not seen him for nearly two months, since the night he had come to the house with the intention, she had realized only recently, of apologizing for his failure to send the marksman up the neighbor's tree in time to save Lee's spine. Kate had been in no state to receive him or his guilt, being on the edge of exhaustion and frantic with worry over yet another infection that was trying to carry off what was left of Lee, and had thrown him out with scathing, bitter words.

Those words hung in front of her now and she hesitated, tempted to duck back behind the tent, but was stopped by the absurdity of it. He saw her then, half raised a hand in greeting, and waited until he saw her start toward him before moving from his post. They met halfway.

"Hello, Al," she said with originality.

"Kate," he answered. "How are you?"

"I am well," she said, and was vaguely surprised to find that she meant it.

"And Lee?"

"You saw her a couple of weeks ago, I think?"

"Ten days ago. She was due to be discharged the following day. How is it going?"

"She's much happier at home, sleeping well. And she seems to be doing better just generally."

"Changes?" He was as sharply perceptive as ever and picked up the nuance of hope in her voice.

"The doctors say they aren't sure, but you know doctors. She says there's some feeling in her right foot, and the other day she moved it in reflex."

"Oh, Kate. That is good news. I'm very glad to hear it."

The sincerity behind the hackneyed phrases stung her eyes, and she looked away at the musicians. Some people were beginning a dance.

"Al, I'm sorry about how I acted when you came to see me. I didn't mean it, I hope you know that."

"I do. I chose a poor time to come. Forget it. I'll come to see her sometime, shall I?"

"She'd like that."

"Tell her I said hello, and that I'm glad to hear she's doing better."

"She's sure she'll be jogging by Christmas. Of course, she never jogged before—I don't know what her hurry is."

He smiled at her, hearing what lay behind her feeble joke.

"Buy you a beer?"

"A bit early for me."

"You have to get into the medieval spirit. They drank it all day—no coffee, can you imagine? and no tea other than herbs that they drank as medicine—and got a large part of their vitamin and caloric intake from beer. Why, do you know, court records show that the lady's servants—the women, mind you—were each issued something like three gallons a day?"

"Must have been a jolly castle." She wondered at this arcane expertise.

"With busy toilets. Speaking of which, I wonder where Jani could be? Oh well, she'll find us."

And so saying he casually draped an arm across Kate's shoulders, and she was so astonished she could only lean into him as they meandered downhill and joined the line for paper cups (printed with a wood-grain design) of surprisingly decent dark beer.

They found a quiet corner atop a pile of large wooden crates and sat looking at the pulsating, growing crowd of medieval merrymakers. The beer went down well as they sat in the shade on an already hot morning with the taste of dust on their tongues. Kate swallowed and gave herself over to relaxation, feeling small pockets of unrealized tension give way. It was the first alcohol she'd had since what she thought of in capitals as The Night. To drink would have been an act of cowardice, until now.

She didn't realize she had sighed until Hawkin turned to her.

"I almost didn't come," she said, as if in explanation.

"I was a little surprised to see you," he agreed.

"Some of Lee's clients are with her today. Jon Samson, as a matter of fact—one of her most devoted. Silly to call them clients, I suppose. If anything, they're the therapists, both physio- and psycho-."

"Friends, maybe."

"Friends. Yes. I don't know what I would have done without them."

"Are you coming back, Kate?" he asked abruptly.

"You know, until ten minutes ago I wasn't sure."

"And?"

"Yes. Yes, I do believe I'm coming back."

"Good." He nodded and drained his cup. "Good. How soon?"

"I'll have to arrange care for Lee." He waited. "Jon offered to move in for a while, to take over the front rooms. I'd have to get in a bed, arrange a relief schedule for him." Hawkin waited. "A few days. Four. Maybe three. Why?"

"I could use you now," he said. His fingers fiddled with the waxy rim of the cup, uncurling it, and his eyes scanned the crowd, and his face gave away nothing.

"Isn't this where you start lighting a cigarette?" she said suspiciously.

"Gave them up."

"Why do you need me now?"

"I've been given the Raven Morningstar case."

"Oh, Christ, Al, give me a break!" Ms. Morningstar had been found, very much murdered, in her hotel room in the city the week before. Ms. Morningstar had a list of enemies that would fill a small telephone book. Ms. Morningstar was one of the country's most outspoken, most eloquent, most militant, most worshipped, and most vilified radical feminist lesbians.

"You might be of considerable help."

"Oh, I can imagine. You could nail me up on the doors of the Hall of Justice and let them throw things at me while you slip out the back."

"None of them would throw things at you," he said matter-of-factly. "There is, after all, a certain amount of renown attached to a female police officer who forces her superiors to give her an extended leave in order to nurse her wounded lover, lesbian variety, and who furthermore makes noises that the departmental insurance policy should be made to include what might be termed unofficial spouses." He did look at her finally, with one eyebrow raised, to gauge her response. She stared at him, open-mouthed, for a long minute, until she felt a sensation she'd never thought to feel again. A great, round, growing balloon of laughter welled up inside her and finally burst gloriously, and she began to giggle, and laugh, more and more convulsively, until in the end she lay back on the crates and roared, tears rolling down into her hair. His growing look of alarm only made it worse, and it was some time before she could get out a coherent explanation.

"When I… that first day, in your office… you so obviously didn't want to be burdened with me—no, I understood, I was being set up in a prominent place on the case because there were kiddies involved—" She realized where they were and lowered her voice. "And any case with kiddies has to have a little lady in it, and little old Casey Martinelli was that lady, there to look cute and pat the kiddies on the head. And now"—she started to laugh again—"now I'm the department's representative to the chains-and-leather dyke brigade." She wiped her eyes and blew her nose, and suddenly the laughter disintegrated and she heaved a sigh. "Ah, well, as they say: only in San Francisco."

"So when can you be there?"

"Jesus Christ, Al, you don't give up, do you? Today's Saturday. I'll be in Tuesday."

"Make it Monday."

"Nope. There's people I can't reach on the weekend— have to do it Monday morning."

"Monday afternoon, then."

"All right, damn it! Late Monday afternoon."

"I'll set a press conference for three o'clock."

"A press—you utter bastard," she swore angrily, and an instant later realized that she was cursing at the man who was still her superior officer.

He swung his face around, looked directly at her, his gray-blue eyes inches from her brown ones, and grinned roguishly.

"That's what all the girls say, my dear."

A voice came from behind them, a voice low but penetrating, the voice of a woman accustomed to public speaking.

"I go away. I stand in line for one half hour with anachronistic music in my ears for the dubious privilege of using a porta-potty disguised as an eleventh-century privy. I come back to find my escort has disappeared, and when I manage to track him down, I find him guzzling beer and staring into the eyes of another woman."

Despite the words, the voice did not sound troubled, and the face, when Kate hitched around to face it, was only amused.

Kate nodded seriously.

"You just can't get good escorts these days," she told the woman.

"My dear," shouted Hawkin happily, "this is Casey Martinelli. Kate, this is Jani Cameron."

"Kate," said Kate firmly, and held out her hand. Another, smaller hand waved up from behind the crates, thrust vaguely in Kate's direction. Kate stretched and shook that one too.

"And that's Jules," added Hawkin. He slithered down from their impromptu seat, swore at the splinters, and helped Kate get down undamaged.

"Jani is the world's foremost authority on medieval German literature, and Jules is going to be San Francisco's youngest D.A. You needn't worry about Kate, Jani," he added offhandedly. "She's a lesbian."

Kate buried her face in her cup, which was already empty, and so missed the woman's reaction, but when she looked back the child was examining her with considerable interest. Finally, with the academic air of someone discussing the historical development of the iota subscript, she spoke.

"Are you, in fact, a lesbian, or more properly speaking bisexual?" she began. "I was reading an article the other day that stated—"

There was a rapid dispersion of the party toward the food tents, with Jules and her mother in the rear in intent conversation (consisting of a firm low voice punctuated with several But Mothers) and Hawkin and Kate in front, he grinning hugely, she decidedly pink, from the beer and the sun, no doubt, but smiling gamely.

At the food tents Kate allowed herself to be steered past the Cornish pasties (beef, vegetarian, or tofu) and tempura prawns (medieval Japanese, she assumed) to the sign that advertised the dubious claims of something called "toad in the hole," It turned out to be a spicy sausage in a gummy bread surround, but when she had washed it down with another beer and followed it with strawberries in cream (poured, not whipped, and with honey, not sugar—authenticity reigned in the strawberry booth), she was content.

The three adults sat on a bench in the shade of a colorful tarpaulin while Jules stalked off to try her hand at a game suspiciously like the ancient three-cup sleight-of-hand con game. Hawkin smiled almost paternally as the child stood gazing in intense concentration at the current players, a metal-mouthed page girl amid the lords and ladies who swept up and down the avenues among the stalls of crafts, foods, and games. The three of them chatted comfortably about Tyler, festivals, minor gossip concerning the department, the development of music, and the production of beer. At the end of half an hour Kate realized that Jani was someone she could easily come to like, and furthermore she saw that Hawkin was very much in love with her. She was quiet, even aloof, in manner, but listened carefully to words and currents, and when she spoke it was precise, to the point, and, like her daughter, not always politic. She and Hawkin argued, laughed, and touched, as if old companions, and other than a twinge of pain at the thought of Lee in the mechanical bed at home, she was glad. Eventually Jani stood up, gathered her brocade skirts, and went off after her daughter, with an agreement to meet Hawkin beneath the golden banner in half an hour to watch a demonstration of sword-play.

They watched her go.

"I like her," Kate told him.

"I'm glad. She's a remarkable woman."

"And as for her daughter…"

He laughed. "She's something, isn't she? Poor Trujillo, he's terrified of her."

"Have you seen Vaun?"

"A number of times. I brought Jani and Jules here to meet her, on Monday, in fact. We drove up."

"Ah, yes, Monday being one of the days cars are allowed. I take it Tyler's prohibitions are back in force."

"Slightly modified. They've strung a telephone line through the trees, to Angie's place and the Riddles'."

"Sacrilege. How is she? Vaun?"

"Recovering. Fragile. Determined. She sent you the pass."

"1 thought so." She watched the mob, unseeing, until the question leaped out of her. "Did he win?" Was it all in vain? Were lives shattered, was Lee crippled, were three children dead, four, so that Andrew Lewis could win his creative revenge? Did we catch him and kill him and still lose the one faint spark that might have justified it? Did he have the last word in the whole disastrous, ugly, horrifying mess? Did he win?

"No." His answer was sure. "No, he did not. She's painting again. Vaun Adams is an even greater human being than she is an artist, if that's possible. She is not going to allow him to win."

"Thank God," she said, and heard the tremble in her voice. "Lee—Lee will be glad," she added, inadequately, but his eyes said he understood.

"You'll want to see her," he said, and stood up.

"Have you any idea where she is? I saw Mark Detweiler at the entrance and he said she was here, though I'd have thought she'd be hiding out."

"She is, like the purloined letter."

In a few minutes Kate saw the sense of this cryptic statement, as Hawkin pointed her to a seated figure, clapped her on the back, said he'd call her Sunday night, and went off to find his Jani. Eva Vaughn had disguised herself as a painter— of faces. She was dressed in characteristically understated fashion—as a nun—but her face was transformed by greasepaint into the visage of a cat. Not that she had fur, ears, and black whiskers drawn on, but the arched eyebrows, self-contained mouth and neat chin were decidedly feline.

She was finishing the delicate webbing that outlined huge butterfly wings covering a young woman's face, the eyes two matching dots high up on the upper wings, the nose blackened as the body. It was a most disconcerting image, like a double exposure in a piece of surrealistic cinema, for the wings trembled with the movements of the face. The woman paid and went happily off with an astounded boyfriend, and a child settled in anticipation on the stool in front of her. Vaun spoke to him for a moment, smiled a feline smile, and turned to rummage through the tubes at her side. Kate stood and watched, but suddenly Vaun glanced up. The catty smile became tentative, and she got up and went to stand before Kate. She reached out a hand to touch Kate's arm, and drew it back.

"You came, then. I so wanted to see you, but I didn't think you'd come, until I thought, maybe, this would bring you."

"I would have come."

"Would you?"

"Maybe not at first," she admitted, "but I'm here now."

"Look, just let me finish this one and then I'll shut down for the day."

The child's requested face, that of an alien monster, grew up from the chin, with eyes that bulged when he puffed out his cheeks. He tried this out in the mirror, delighted; his parents paid, and Vaun firmly shut her box and stuck it under the drapery of the nearby weaver's stall (not Angie's, Kate saw). Again she made the tentative gesture toward Kate's sleeve, and again she drew back and with her other hand waved up the hill.

"There's a tent up there for us, the residents. Let me go and take this stuff off my face."

The house-sized canvas tent, a green one this time, was set off by a low fence and signs that informed the public that this was For Residents Only. It was high up in the meadow, brushed by the low branches of the first redwoods, and the opening was on the uphill side. Kate followed Vaun into the cool, spacious interior, which was scattered with chairs, tables, mirrors, portable clothes racks, sleeping children, and perhaps a dozen adults. A young man in shepherd's dress stood up at their entrance, took up his crook, and stalked toward them with an aggressive set to his shoulders. Vaun held up a pacifying hand, appropriately nunlike.

"It's okay, Larry, she's a friend."

He stopped, his petulance fading into embarrassment.

"Oh. Right. Sorry, it's just that we've had about ten people in here already snooping around, and Tyler said…"

"That they'd be looking for me? What did you tell them?"

"Like Tyler said, you're in New York. One of them didn't believe me, but she was pretty stoned."

"I'm sorry to give everyone the problem, but it'd be the same even if I were in New York. If you see Tyler or Anna, would you tell them I've gone up the hill and that I don't know if I'll be here for the dinner or not, but not to save me a plate. Thanks."

With a shrug and a swirl the habit came off. Vaun hung it and the veil on one of a series of chrome racks that held an odd assortment of garments, from dull homespun jerkins to a brilliant brocade cape, and dozens of empty wire hangers. The ex-nun, dressed now in shorts, sandals, and a damp T-shirt, went to a table and mirror and began rubbing cream from a large tub into her face. The feline cast to her eyes and the catty mouth disappeared beneath a scrap of cloth, and then Vaun was there, in the mirror, as Kate had seen her (was it only four months before?)—black curls, ice-blue eyes, a waiting expression.

But different. Somehow very different.

And then Vaun turned from the mirror and met her gaze evenly, and Kate knew what it was: the eyes.

Before, Vaun's eyes had been so withdrawn as to appear dead and gave away no hint of the person behind them. They were no longer uninhabited; no longer did they appear to mirror the world without influence of the person. These eyes were clear, immediate, and revealing windows leading directly into a vivid person. Whatever else Andrew Lewis had done, he had stripped from Vaun her apartness, her defense. There was no hiding now, for this woman. She stood naked.

All this in an instant, and Kate turned away, shaken. Vaun put the top on the removal cream and stood up. This time her hand made contact with Kate's arm and stayed there for a moment.

"Do you have time to come up with me, to the house?"

"I have all day."

"Let's go then."

The two women left the tent and plunged into the trees like a pair of truant schoolgirls, lifting strands of barbed wire for each other, crunching softly through the dry duff beneath the heavy branches, speaking little in the thick stillness that gradually overcame the distant fair and was then broken only by the harsh calls of jays and the occasional chained dog. It was not a long walk, those four miles, but an immensely satisfying one to Kate; and slowly, in the heat and the silence and the easy companionship, and in the awareness of her decision, she felt the last of the grinding unhappiness lift from her and felt herself not far from wholeness.

In the house Vaun waved her upstairs to the studio and went off to the kitchen for cold drinks. The house seemed like something from a distant childhood, Kate thought, dimly remembered but immensely evocative, and she climbed the stairs in mild anticipation of the tidy airiness of Vaun's work space. When she cleared the stairs she had a considerable shock.

The large room was a swirl of color, a frozen moment of intense, urgent activity. The long tables were piled precariously with pads, torn-out sheets of paper scribbled with half-finished sketches, tubes and tubs, brushes, congealed coffee cups, the stubs of ancient sandwiches, brown and mushy apple cores, two bowls with spoons and unrecognizable scum in the bottom. A length of dried orange peel trailed from one work top and disappeared into a closed drawer. Balled-up sheets of thick white paper spilled in a drift from an overflowing waste basket, and there seemed to be at least three palettes currently in use, and four easels.

And the paintings.

All around the walls, two and three deep, the paintings leaned, pulsated, reached out and grabbed the viewer and shouted. Huge paintings, in size as well as temperament— essential, stripped down, powerful faces and bodies, and more than half of them were Andy Lewis. Andy Lewis as Tony Dodson, with Angie. Andy Lewis naked in front of a mirror, meeting the viewer's eyes in the reflection and looking proud and scornful and as sinuous as the tattooed dragon writhing on his arm. Andy Lewis with a beard, looking down with aloof speculation at a child with blond braids. Andy Lewis in a cold rage, a dangerous killing animal that made the flesh creep and the eyes wince away. And finally, on an easel, Andy Lewis with a gun, mocked as a cowboy and acknowledged as a murderer.

Somehow there was a cold glass in her hand, and she realized that Vaun was standing next to her.

"You've… been busy," she said weakly. Vaun seemed not to hear her but stood with critical eyes on the naked Andy Lewis.

"He did love me, you know," Vaun mused. "In that he was speaking the plain truth. And he was right too in saying that I never loved him. The only man I've ever loved is doubly safe—both married and my therapist. Perhaps I am saved by my inability to love," she said in consideration, as if Kate were not in the room. "I've never understood how men, and women too, can carry on tumultuous love affairs and still paint. Affection, yes, and lust certainly. Those I understand. But not love."

"You paint it," protested Kate. Vaun glanced at her, then back at the painting.

"Not often, no. When I have, it's usually been one part of something else; loss, or threat. Although recently, I have been trying." They stood for a long minute.

"I wanted him to kill me," she said abruptly. "That night. It was crazy, but it just swept over me, a lust, like sex but stronger. When he came through your door, it seemed right. Not good, but just the only possible way for it all to end. I knew that after all those years he'd come to finish it, and I so wanted it to end, to be taken out of my hands. I wanted him to kill me," she repeated.

"I'm very glad he did not," said Kate quietly.

Vaun sighed and looked at her glass.

"Yes. I have days now when I begin to feel the same." She smiled. "Tell me about Lee."

So Kate told her about Lee, about the surgeries and the slow recovery, about Lee's mind and spirit, about their friends, about her own decision to return to the work that had nearly cost her lover's life. They sat in the hot stillness of Vaun's deck until the afternoon brought a movement of cool air from off the sea, and eventually they went back inside. Kate stopped in front of one of the canvases that was not of Andy Lewis but rather of a young girl with short brown hair and a missing front tooth.

"Jemma Brand?" she asked.

Vaun nodded, paused, and seemed to come to a decision. She tipped the picture forward and reached for the painting in back of it, and when she slid it out, Lee was in the room, Lee standing on legs that were whole and strong at the railing of the Alcatraz ferry, Lee half-turned to look over her shoulder with the laughter spilling out of her, her mouth poised for speech, her tawny hair tumbling about her face in the wind, the whole brilliant light of her blazing out of her eyes. To a stranger it would be a dazzling portrait; to Kate it sent a jolt through every nerve in her body and left her stunned and speechless.

She turned to Vaun, eyes wide and filling, mouth moving helplessly, and then she was crying against Vaun's bony shoulder, feeling the painter's strong arms around her and hearing the age-old litany of comfort.

"It's all right, Kate, it's all right now."

And though she knew that it was not all right, would never be completely all right, she felt, for the first time, that perhaps it might be.