Several miles away Alonzo Hawkin lay on the sofa in his living room, a glass balanced on his stomach, his eyes on the large, delicate fish that performed their glides and pirouettes for his amusement, his mind on the events and the texture of the day. He was, for once, satisfied.
It was almost magical the way one day’s work could on occasion, on very rare occasion, transform a case entirely and bring its whole setting and landscape into focus. That morning—yesterday morning, now—he had walked down the stairs with a huge sheaf of unrelated papers and more questions than he could begin to even ask, and Andrew C. Lewis was just one name in a hundred others. Sixteen hours later he had trudged back up those stairs, bone weary, with two things: a name and a direction. His weariness he bore like a badge of accomplishment, and he felt himself a fortunate man. A break.
The police artist Susan Chin was not the only one he had disturbed that night. First was Chief Walker, from whom he had asked two things: the whereabouts of Andy Lewis’s aunt and her family, and further information concerning the reliability of Lewis’s alibi the night of the murder eighteen years ago. Hawkin would have preferred to do that himself, but as it was not strictly his case, it would be hard to justify another couple of days up there. Next week, maybe, but not now.
Then he reported in. The man listened, concealed three yawns, grunted approval, and went back to bed.
Then the hospital: no change. Hawkin heard the first prickle of worry in the back of the doctor’s voice, but as there was nothing he could do in that department, he pushed the thoughts away and called Trujillo.
That young man sounded older than he had a week before. He confirmed that a guard was now installed next to Vaun’s bed instead of in the corridor, with orders not to step outside the door, and not even to close the bathroom door when he needed to use the room’s toilet. She was not to be out of his sight.
Trujillo was disappointed that the photo was bad, though not surprised, and agreed to set Susan’s drawings up in the main room to guarantee the most contact.
He then told Hawkin that he was not sure how much longer he could keep control. The Road’s uneasiness was nearly to the breaking point. He’d had to let two families with children leave during the day (one of the men was black, the other in his late fifties) to take refuge with suburban friends, and the efficient bush telegraph had spread the news clear up to old Peterson’s place that Vaun’s near death was not being treated as a suicide. Trujillo had spent the day going up and down the Road—Tyler had been forced to suspend the anticar rule—reassuring people and reminding them to inquire first before they let fly with buckshot or bullet. The bedrooms at Tyler’s were full tonight with nervous residents (peasants come to the castle during a siege, thought Hawkin with amusement, right down Tyler’s alley), and he, Trujillo, would be staying there too. Sharp-nosed newsmen were back to camping outside, and it was only a matter of time….
There had been no immediate response that afternoon to the tattoo inquiry, although only a couple of dozen people had been asked. Hawkin told him in all honesty that he was doing a fine job. The younger man responded to the confidence in Hawkin’s voice, and after a few minutes Hawkin told him to go to bed.
After that he went and took a long, mindless shower, wrapped his stocky body in his favorite soft and threadbare kimono, and settled down with a glass.
The time with the Jamesons had proven a gold mine. He now had Vaun Adams; he could now see her walking the halls of that unremarkable high school, an extraordinary teenager with an aura of untouchability and genius to keep the world at bay. And her short liaison with clever, nasty, sophisticated Andy Lewis—even that was not as completely unlikely as it had first seemed.
But what to do about the maddening shadow figure of Andrew C. Lewis? Hawkin’s eyes were caught by the enthusiastic rooting of the eel-like loach in the gravel, and his mind wandered into a side track. What, he mused, does that C stand for? Charles? Clifford? Coleoptera? The father’s name on the transcript had been Edward, or Edmund…He caught himself angrily and dragged his wayward thoughts back to the problem at hand. Lewis was on Tyler’s Road; Hawkin knew it in his very bones. If he had not made a break for it by now, he wouldn’t, not until he knew for certain that Vaun was not about to die. Perhaps not even then, if he felt sure enough that he had covered his tracks. Andy Lewis was not a man to panic blindly. How best to find him? And, once found, how to tie him to the wispy bits of circumstance, how to weave his involvement into a fabric strong enough to hold up in court? How to spin a sliver of wood, a hypothetical tattoo, and a deliberate concealment of identity into a rope strong enough to hang a man? Best would be if Lewis could be forced into an incriminating bolt—that would help to solve both problems at once. Hawkin lay there considering and discarding options and ideas, building up a plan around the geography and the psychological makeup of his prey and the people he had to work with.
The level in his glass went down very slowly, but eventually it was dry, and he sat up.
Twenty-four hours, he thought. If nothing’s happened in twenty-four hours—no photograph has appeared, no description has clicked—I’ll bring down the retired sheriff and Coach Shapiro and anyone else I can find and drive them up and down Tyler’s Road in Trujillo’s shiny new wagon until one of them says, “Say, wait a minute….” Tomorrow night I’ll decide whether or not to turn Tyler’s Road inside out. The thought of that possibility gave him a moment of pleasurable anticipation, seventy-four long-haired adults and twenty minors dragged in and printed and grilled until something gave under the pressure.
(I wonder what that C stands for? he thought in irritation.)
Yes, something will happen. If not tomorrow (today!) then Wednesday for certain. As for Monday, he could end it content that he had done all he could.
He put his glass on the table, said good night to the fish, and went to bed.
He was not to know until the sun rose that succumbing to the day’s all-too-rare glow of satisfaction had been a mistake.
Two hours to the south a woman with black curls lay in a hospital bed, her hands tucked neatly beneath the crisp covers, her remarkable ice-blue eyes staring, unblinking, up into the dim room. The hour was very late, or very early, but a disturbance down the hall and the rapid departure of a much-attended gurney had brought her eyes open some minutes before. One could not say that she was awake, exactly; only that her eyes were currently open, where before they had been closed.
The room’s machinery had been edged back from the bed, save for the tall pole with the intravenous drip and the rolling cart with the monitor, whose wires were connected to little round sensors taped onto the woman’s chest. The tracery of the heartbeat was slow but regular, and the cart would be removed later that day.
The woman did not know that, though. There was considerable debate over what she did, or would, know. The bruised puffiness of her mouth had subsided, the marks of her resurrection were fading, but Vaun Adams had given no sign of anything other than a mere physical presence. The words “brain damage” and “oxygen deprivation” had slid into the room and been carried away again, but they waited just outside her door and would return.
The room was lit solely by the corner reading lamp that sent its beam across the guard’s paperback novel and laid a stretched circle of light along the wall and across a corner of Vaun’s bed. She gazed passively up at the reflection of her face in a bit of polished metal overhead, distorted but familiar. One tiny part of Vaun saw it and recognized it, but that part was disconnected from her now, in abeyance, hiding.
The brain of the woman who had been Vaun Adams and Eva Vaughn was not physically damaged, not badly at any rate. Her mind, however, and her spirit—those had been severely wounded. The spark of being that was Vaun Adams, the spark that had flamed into being as Eva Vaughn, lay smothered beneath a burden that had finally proven intolerable. Vaun was covered by a blanket of despair, a thick, gray blanket that was crushing her, stifling her will to move and create and live, a thick
gray blanket that said, “Enough.”
Enough.
Enough was the ruling principle that governed what there was left of this life. Enough. I can no more. Since I was two years old I have fought for the right to be what I am, and I can fight no longer. I yield. I give up. I can no more. Enough.
I choose to die.
The blue eyes were still open when a nurse came in ten minutes later to check the drip. Vaun’s ears registered sound waves, and some dim hidden part of her automatically deciphered them as words, but they did not connect, did not penetrate the thick gray blanket. The nurse leaned over her eyes, and behind the white shoulder appeared the face of a man above a dark uniform. More sounds came, a few squawks and a rumble, and the male face withdrew.
The nurse addressed Vaun with professional cheeriness, though even the guard could hear the uneasiness in her voice. Vaun was a problem, a VIP who was in an unclear state of either arrest or protection, or both. She was also, to all appearances, a vegetable. This mysterious black-haired woman with the unseeing, crystalline eyes gave a number of people the creeps, and the night nurse was one of them. She left after servicing the body in the bed, and eventually the eyes drifted shut again.
In the dark hills between Vaun Adams’s hospital bed and the city where two detectives slept, a shadow moved onto Tyler’s Road. The man who had been Andy Lewis closed the door on its oiled hinges and slipped silently away from the house he had thought of as home these last years. He felt no regret at leaving the woman who slept behind him in the bed he had built from a single oak tree, and only slight regret at leaving the child in the room his hands had made. There was no room for any feeling other than the white-hot, piercing-cold, all-consuming rage that trembled and bubbled throughout his body like dry ice furious in a bucket of water. In his mind’s eye the leaves scorched and blackened overhead, small animals dropped down dead with his passing, the road cringed from his boots—and Vaun Adams woke screaming from her hospital bed to feel the approach of his terrible hate.
None of these things happened, of course. The muted beep of Vaun’s monitor kept its hypnotic rhythm, small night animals rustled leaves, a dog barked once, the breeze from the ocean stirred the fragrant needles.
By dawn he had crossed the mud slide’s remnants, avoided the guards posted at the upper end of Tyler’s Road, and entered the adjoining state park. At eight a neatly dressed man with a mustache, carrying a thick briefcase, caught a ride with a computer programmer who worked over the hill. The driver’s daughter was with him in the front seat, going to spend the day with her grandmother. The child was six years old and had shiny brown hair and one loose front tooth, which she delighted in wiggling precariously with her tongue. The man who had been Andy Lewis smiled at her with his charming smile, chatted easily with her about kindergarten and with her father about computers and the problems of remote automobile breakdowns, and thanked them both when they got to San Jose. By noon he was in Berkeley, completely invisible.
Long before that—shortly after he left the park, in fact—Angie Dodson woke to find that her husband was gone.
21
Angie’s pounding echoed through the house and roused the sleepers, Trujillo among them. He wrapped himself in a borrowed bathrobe and walked yawning down to the kitchen. Angie’s face was tight with worry despite her deliberately casual words, and Trujillo was far from sleepy as he unobtrusively left the room and sprinted for the upstairs telephone.
Hawkin cursed viciously, Kate cursed with less imagination and opened her back again, and two hours later they burst into Tyler’s kitchen.
“Where’s Angie?”
The huddled group all busied themselves with their cups or studied their hangnails. Blond-braided Anna told them that she was upstairs with Trujillo. Hawkin took the stairs two at a time, Kate on his heels, and when they got to Tyler’s door he threw the door back without knocking.
Angie Dodson looked up from where she sat crouched in front of the fire. She had passed through tears and now looked old and beaten and utterly without hope. Hawkin walked over to her and put his arms around her, and she clung to him and began to moan in a breathless, high-pitched animal noise. Trujillo turned to look out the window. Tyler smiled sickly at Kate and lurched through the door, muttering something about coffee. Kate studied the watercolors and gradually she realized that Angie’s moans had resolved themselves into a monotonously repeating phrase.
“She was my friend. She was my friend. She was my friend.”
“You mean Vaun,” said Hawkin in a gentler voice than Kate would have thought possible.
“Yes. She was my friend. She was—”
“Where’s Amy?”
That got to her. She took a deep and shaky breath and sat up. Hawkin’s arms fell away, but he sat close to her and bent his head to her.
“She’s with the Newborns. I told Rob to watch her every minute, and not let her go off anywhere, not even with—Oh God…” She collapsed again. “She was my friend, and they say he killed her. Is it true? You must tell me.”
“She isn’t dead, Angie.”
“She might as well be. Did he do it?”
“Does the man you know as Tony have a tattoo on his arm?”
His non sequitur caught her full attention.
“What?”
“A tattoo,” he repeated. “Does Tony have a tattoo?”
“How did you know?” She straightened and blew her nose. “He never let anyone see it; he was embarrassed by it. He’d had it put on when he was real young. Not even Amy knew he had it. He always wore a T-shirt, even when he went swimming.”
“What was it?”
“A dragon.”
“A dragon? Not a snake?”
“No, it was one of those long, skinny dragons. I suppose it looked a bit like a snake, but it had little legs. It was on his left arm, up high. I only saw it clearly two or three times myself. He’d usually only take his shirt off in the dark. What does his tattoo have to do with it?”
So he told her. Tyler came in with a tray of coffee, and Hawkin broke off until he had gone; then he resumed and told her all, or nearly all.
“So you see, Angie, at this point the only positive identification we have is that tattoo.”
“He always was funny about having his picture taken, I know. Even at our wedding.” She giggled softly and sighed, dazed with the impossibility of what her life had become in a few short hours.
“Angie, I have to ask you some questions now.”
“I won’t testify against him,” she threw out at him. “I’ll talk to you, but I won’t testify against him.”
(Andy…he was a real charmer…she wouldn’t press charges….)
“Just talk to me, then. Tell me how you met.”
They had met at one of the Road’s yearly Medieval Faires, three years ago come June. He had come as a visitor, not in costume, and though he had bought his ticket from her early in the morning, it was not until afternoon that he had reappeared and made her teach him the steps to a pavane, and they’d danced and drunk and laughed on into the evening, and on the Sunday he’d been back first thing and spent the whole day with her and with Amy, and that night he’d gone up the Road with them and slept on her couch. Two weeks later he moved his few belongings into the small house, and in November they married. Not a church ceremony, but one they wrote, and Tyler conducted. It wasn’t a legal marriage, because Angie’s husband had neither divorced her nor been in touch since he deserted her, but it had not mattered.
“What is he like, Tony? With you and Amy?”
“Very good with Amy. I don’t think he’d ever been around kids much, before he moved in with us, but he was a good father to her. Quiet, polite. Private, but not like he was hiding anything. A gentleman, I guess.”
“Always?”
“With Amy, yes. And almost always with me. He…he has a temper. Had. He never hit me, I don’t mean that, but once he got really mad at me—for something small, too, I was just teasing him about a stupi
d mistake he’d made when he was building the addition onto the cabin. He didn’t like it.”
“What did he do, Angie?”
“He chopped up my loom.” Her face remembered frightened bewilderment as she studied her clasped hands. “He got really quiet, and his eyes…He went out to the woodshed and got the big ax and came back with it and chopped my loom up into little pieces, and then he hauled it off and burned it. Afterwards he was sorry, he kissed me, and the next day we went to Berkeley and he bought me another one, a better one, too, an eight harness I’d been wanting for a long time. We never talked about it again, but, well, I never teased him again.”
“And with the other people on the Road? How did he get along with them?”
“Really well, with most of them. As far as I know he never lost his temper with anyone else, not that I heard of. He’s never been tremendous buddies with anyone, he likes to keep to himself, but when he’s in the mood he can be a lot of fun. Anyway, he was approved for residency in the October meeting, so obviously everyone thought they could get along with him.” Her tone was defensive, as if wondering why her friends had not protected her against her choice. “They all like him. He seems to get along best with Tommy Chesler,” she added.
“What about Vaun? How did he act toward her? Did she vote for him?”
“I don’t remember anyone not voting for him—wait a minute, she wasn’t here, I think. It was the Harvest Meeting, and she wasn’t here, she had to go to New York, I think it was. How did he act toward her?” she repeated. She chewed on her lip and fixed her shiny eyes on a part of the carpet, and sobbed a small laugh.
“I thought he was jealous of her. She was my friend, before he came here. My old man took off about six months before she came, you see, and then she built her house, and we were neighbors, and she admired my needlework and weaving and helped me with the colors and the designs and—she was my friend, you know? And I thought he was jealous, though he never said anything. I thought it was funny, cute in a way, that he’d be jealous, but I didn’t want to bother him, so mostly I’d see her when he was away, or when I was up working in the garden. She let me use her sunny hillside for vegetables, you know, so we could use our open space for the ponies. Tony was never nasty about her, he’d just quietly go out the back if she came to the house, or look away if we met her on the Road. Nothing obvious or rude, you understand. I thought he was just being nice to me, not wanting to break up my friendship with her, but if what Paul says is true, if he is this Andy Lewis, then I suppose he wanted to avoid being recognized by her.” Her voice dragged to a halt, and her face looked drawn and haggard.