Kate casually appraised their fellow passengers while Lee nattered on to Vaun about a boat trip she’d taken as a child. Kate had always envied Lee her ability to enjoy life even when the future held something unpleasant, whether the threat was the oral defense of her dissertation or the approaching death of one of her clients. Today Lee’s pleasure in the day and the outing and the company was if anything sharpened by her awareness of the incongruity of the reason for the trip, and her pleasure was contagious. At least, Vaun seemed to be finding it so, and Kate made an effort to relax physically so as not to disturb the two of them. Nobody had recognized Vaun yet, and if someone hadn’t done so by the time the group broke up on the island, it would be up to Bob Fischer to plant the suggestion in the mind of some passenger bound for shore. Meanwhile, she would do all she could to encourage Vaun to enjoy her moment of fresh air and freedom. God knew she’d had few enough of them lately, and would have no more for some time.
Lee was now telling Vaun about the Native American occupation of the island, a year and a half at the end of the sixties. Kate listened with half an ear. The boat was cast off and began to reverse out of the pier, and as it cleared and started its turn, a small movement near the ticket booth caught her eye. Half a dozen permed and rinsed tourist types were staring up at them, one woman’s outflung arm pointing at Vaun, whose tipped head and intently listening face were full in the sun. The boat pulled away from the mooring, and Kate glanced to see if Bob had noticed. He nodded at her over a blond head. She sat back and sighed. Poor Vaun. Her public would soon alert the media. The day had begun.
They would have perhaps an hour on Alcatraz before anyone caught up with them, and Kate decided not to tell Vaun. She dug an extra pair of sunglasses out of her purse and gave them to Vaun, who put them on absently.
They disembarked, heard the ranger’s lecture, bought postcards, and set off up the hill, the two couples at their heels. Through the tunnel, past the rusting, glass-enclosed guard tower, they zigzagged along beside the long-empty homes of the guards and their families, the anonymous chapel, the burnt shell of the warden’s house. A handful of spring flowers waved among sparse weeds, the few hardy survivers of some gardener’s suburban dream. Dirt had been transported from the mainland in the last century, back when Alcatraz was a cannon-ringed garrison defending the entrance to the goldfields. The soil was laboriously brought in with an eye to absorbing the explosive power of incoming cannonballs; what remains now grows spindly weeds.
At the island’s peak they entered the prison itself, and the cold dampness of it shut off the sun behind them, although it occasionally worked its way in through dirty, high windows. They wandered along the rows of cells, into the barbershop and out to the exercise yard. It was like being inside an immense concrete and steel machine that had been turned off but not yet completely dismantled. Only a few of the more extraneous decorations had been stripped away, with the essential prison unaffected. If this were a volcano, Kate thought, looking up into the tiers of cells and walkways, it would be classified as dormant rather than extinct. It felt distant, but watchful. She wondered how it was affecting Vaun, and whether the ex-inmate might hesitate at coming too close to the cells, but she did not. She even walked into one and ran her fingertips over the walls, where for thirty years the cell’s occupants had leaned against the concrete and worn it smooth with their rough shirts. She would not, however, go near the dark, solid holes of the solitary confinement cells.
Finally they stood in the mess hall, where the last day’s breakfast menu was still mounted on the wall for the tourists to photograph. Long windows on either side let in the light, and from one side stretched out the view of San Francisco that tantalized and taunted. Lee and Vaun stood there, heads together, Lee talking still, Vaun absorbing and reflecting Lee’s vivacity.
“—fed them a bit too much, kept them a bit too warm, gave them very little exercise, and of course no visitors, no privacy, either physical or mental, no goal, no change in the routine. It turned men who were accustomed to action and power into soggy cabbages. They thrived at other prisons, but this place broke them. Look at Al Capone, for ex—”
Lee’s voice was cut off by a sharp, nasal exclamation from the doorway.
“There she is, I told you, it’s Eva Vaughn!”
Kate had seen her coming and moved in front of the two women, who whirled around at the voice. Bob Fischer and his partner stood apart on the other side of the room, looking mildly interested at the disturbance. Kate took Vaun’s arm and propelled her firmly out past the group of chattering gawkers. The central figure, the woman Kate had seen at the pier, raised her voice and turned to follow but was pulled to a sudden and unexpected halt by her elbow, upon which a very large and utterly immovable hand was laid. Her face looked up, and up, into the smiling teeth and invisible eyes of Bob Fischer.
“Pardon me, ma’am, I couldn’t help overhearing, but could you tell me please who you thought that was?”
His words were faultlessly polite; his stance and dress were definitely, well, big; and the thumb and forefinger grasping her arm were like a clamp. She looked into her own face staring down from his glasses, and quailed.
“I, well, Eva Vaughn, the painter, you know, down on that Road, the little girls….” Her voice drifted off as she realized that her quarry was rapidly getting away from her. She plucked at his fingers with nervous little jabs and looked desperately over her shoulder. Her husband hugged his big video camera bag to his chest and began to protest weakly. The other three ladies and two men in the group faded back a step or two and eyed each other as their leader explained valiantly about artists and pictures and maybe an autograph, for her granddaughter, who was such a clever little artist herself, you know?
After several minutes of this Bob bared his teeth hugely and loosed his clamp.
“Oh, yeah, I see, the artist, she was in the paper, I remember. You remember, Lily, down on that Road where they kept finding them little girls?”
The pale woman nodded and dropped her purse, and by the time the last errant lipstick had been rounded up by the gallant gentleman from Schenectady, Kate had called ahead on her walkie-talkie to have the boat held for them and had taken two precipitous shortcuts across the Road. The pursuers never had a chance.
Kate hustled her two charges aboard, followed closely by the other “couple” who had dawdled behind Bob and the pale “Lily” during the morning, and by a solitary older Japanese man who had been sitting on a bench at the landing with a booklet on the history of San Francisco until Kate had spoken into her radio. Kate shoved Vaun into a corner seat as the door swung shut behind them. Ropes were cast off, the engines began to work, and they were well away by the time the cluster of art lovers burst from the tunnel and slowed to a disappointed walk. She smiled grimly and turned to the man with the history booklet.
“Hello, Inspector Kitagawa. Is Tom Grimes waiting for us, then?”
“Oh, indeed, with about five hundred others.”
“What!”
“Word got out,” he said laconically.
“We won’t be able to land, then.”
“It’s all right, half the department is there, too. Hawkin has a car there; he wants you to take your ladies right into it. If we let her stop to talk there’ll be a riot, so he’s arranged to meet Grimes later. Somebody’ll take care of your car, if you’ll give me the keys.”
She unhooked Lee’s ignition key from her ring, gave it to him, and stood up.
“I’d better go talk to the captain or the pilot or whatever he is and let him know what’s going on.”
“He knows.”
Half of San Francisco knew, it appeared. Every tourist from Ghirardelli Square to Pier 39 must have heard, and added their numbers to the professional voyeurs. An alarmingly narrow line had been cleared by the uniformed police, a gauntlet of lenses and microphones to be run. Kate looked at Vaun to see how she was taking it and saw the same face she had met all those days ago: achingly beautiful, pal
e as death, and without the slightest expression or hint of life within. Vaun’s hand reached up and removed the sunglasses, folded them, handed them to Kate. Even without them there was no sign of her thoughts about the chaos before them.
“Are you going to be okay?” Kate asked her.
“Probably never again,” she replied calmly.
The boat bumped into the berth. Ropes were made fast, the door opened, and the gangway stretched out towards the crowd, and Vaun stepped out to meet her fate.
She walked slowly through the mayhem of shouted questions and outthrust microphones and the swell of clicking and whirring cameras, looking only at the equipment-laden belt of the chunky policeman who led their small procession through the crowd. She seemed completely oblivious to the uproar, looked only like a woman preoccupied with a minor personal problem, and allowed herself to be guided to the waiting police car and pushed in. Hawkin was there, and while Lee and Kate got in on either side of Vaun in the back seat he raised a bored and authoritative voice to inform the assembled media of their opportunity Tuesday to ask all the questions they might want, but not until then, sorry, no more comments, and with that he climbed into the front next to the driver and off they drove.
The driver spent the next few minutes shaking off several pursuing cars and vans while Kate gave Hawkin an account of the trip onto Alcatraz, Vaun stared unseeing through the front window, and Lee touched Vaun’s hand lightly and watched her. The driver was good, and in ten minutes they were on the freeway going south, free of followers.
They drove for twenty minutes to a huge, anonymous motel three hundred yards from the freeway, went directly to room 1046, and ordered a room service lunch. Vaun asked for tea. The food arrived, and on its heels came Tom Grimes and his photographer.
“You weren’t followed?” Hawkin asked him at the door.
“I wasn’t followed, Al, don’t bust a gusset. Is she here?”
“You can have fifteen minutes,” Hawkin growled, and let him in.
Hawkin and Kate stood and munched; Lee picked at a sandwich and watched over Vaun like a mother dog with a litter of one; the cameraman squinted over his cigarette and filled the anonymous room with equipment and harsh white light. Grimes set a small tape recorder on the table in front of Vaun, who sat at the center of it all in a plastic chair, feet together, hands in her lap, as calm as a royal personage on her way to the block. She answered his questions as if she were reading them from a page; she was impersonal, noncommittal, but honest.
She told him that yes, she was Eva Vaughn, and also Siobhan Adams, that yes, she was the Siobhan Adams who had been convicted of murder, and no, she had not committed these recent murders, had in fact nearly been murdered herself. Who did them, then, and why was she involved? She could not comment on that question, not until the police investigation had been completed. Grimes had not expected an answer, and he went on. How long had she been living on Tyler’s Road? Almost five years. No, her neighbors had not known who she was, either as artist or as murderess. Yes, she painted there. Yes, some of them appeared in her paintings.
On and on, human interest questions for the most part, as Grimes could fill in the rest for himself. Through it all Vaun maintained an air of polite disinterest, until nearly the end. Hawkin had just stuck his head out the door to signal the driver that they were nearly ready, and the photographer was packing up his lenses and paraphernalia.
“A last question, Miss Vaughn,” said Grimes, casting about in desperation for a quote with some zing to it. “I’m curious about your name change. Did you have any reason for choosing the name Eva Vaughn?”
This unexpected question caught Vaun’s attention, and for the first time she seemed to look at him.
“Adam and Eve were the same person, weren’t they? Two halves of a whole. It wasn’t really a name change at all.”
“Are you a religious person, then?” Grimes tried not to sound surprised, as if Vaun was about to declare herself a born-again believer, and at that she fixed the full gaze of her remarkable eyes upon him and smiled gently.
“Not church-religious, no. But a person who has been through what I have is not apt to find such thoughts…without interest.”
The camera flashed a final time, and in three minutes they were back on the freeway, going north. The driver went off on the second exit, drove east for a few miles, and joined the other northbound freeway. Hawkin nodded and eased his neck. No followers.
Kate leaned forward in her seat, and Hawkin half twisted to talk with her.
“There were television people in that lot at the pier,” she noted. “How much do you suppose they’ll put on tonight?”
“They’re sure to have something. Saturdays are always slow.”
“Anyway, Lee and I will stay inside from now on, as there’s sure to be people wandering up and down the street. Hopefully it’ll be a couple of days before one of the neighbors squeals on us. Lee has to go out tomorrow afternoon to see one of her clients at the hospice, and she has two people coming to the house, one tonight and one Monday night, that she really doesn’t want to put off. The rest she’s cancelled. Is that okay?”
“Let the guys across the street know exactly who they are and when they’re coming, so they don’t get nervous. There’s no point in locking yourselves off entirely, so long as—” He stopped with a look of astonishment, and Kate jerked around to look at Vaun.
She had broken, at last. Her eyes were shut and her mouth open in a little mewling o, and she was trembling. Her hands came up to cover her face, and she twisted toward Lee, who held out her arms, and Vaun went blindly into them and curled up as best she could, with her head in Lee’s lap, and with Lee’s arms and upper body bent fiercely around her. She huddled there all the way home, and Lee rocked her and murmured to her. The others sat silent with their thoughts.
Vaun spent the rest of the afternoon upstairs. Lee cooked, making croissants from scratch and an elaborate salade niçoise with fourteen separate marinated ingredients that took her several hours and filled the kitchen with pans, and might have been iceberg lettuce with bottled dressing for all any of them tasted it. Kate prowled the house until her nerves were jangling, and finally disappeared into the basement to pedal the exercise bicycle for an hour. She came up dripping and had a glass of wine, showered and had another glass, and watched the local news, including the amateur videotape of the backs of three blurred women, after which she felt like having several more glasses but did not.
When the news was over Lee went upstairs with a glass of whiskey, which she made Vaun drink, and then came back and set out the dinner, which they all picked at. Finally she took the food away and went to make coffee. Kate and Vaun cleared the table, but to Kate’s surprise Vaun, instead of retreating upstairs, went to sit on the sofa. Kate obligingly laid and lit a fire and wondered if Vaun just wanted company. She fetched the coffee tray and poured them each a cup.
“Do you feel like a game of chess, or checkers? Backgammon?” she offered.
“No, thanks. I’d like to tell you something, you and Lee. Something about myself.”
The hum and swish of the dishwasher started up in the kitchen, and Lee came in for her coffee. Vaun rattled her cup onto the table and got up to make a silent circuit of the room, touching things. When she got back to the sofa she folded herself up into it and simply started talking. For the next two and a half hours she talked and talked, as if she had prepared it all in advance, as if she never intended to stop.
31
“I cannot remember a time when my hands were not making a drawing,” Vaun started. “My very earliest memory is of a birthday party, when I was two—I have a photograph that my aunt sent me four or five years ago, and it has the date on it. One of my presents was a box of those thick children’s crayons and a big pad of paper. I remember vividly the sensation of pulling open the top of the box, and there was this beguiling row of eight perfect, smooth, brightly colored truncated cones, lying snugly in the cardboard. They had the m
ost exciting smell I’d ever known. I took one out of the box—the orange one—and I made this slow, curving line on the pad. There were all these other presents sitting piled around me, but I wouldn’t even look at them, I was so fascinated with the way the crayon tip made this sharp line and the flat bottom made a cobwebby wide rough line, and how I could make a heavy line of brighter orange when I pushed hard, and the way it looked when I scribbled it over and over in one place. I can still see it, my fat little hand clenched around that magical orange stick, and the thrill of it, the incredible excitement of watching those lines appear on that clean, white paper.
“My poor mother, she must have looked back on that day with loathing. Everything she hated, everything she feared, there it was, welling up in her sweet, curly-haired, two-year-old daughter.”
Vaun smiled crookedly and leaned forward to refill her cup. She put down the pot and poured a dollop of cream into the black liquid, where it billowed up thickly to the surface. She watched intently the color change, her mind far away.
“My mother was born in Paris, just after the First World War. Her father considered himself an artist, but he had absolutely no talent, other than for latching on to real artists and drinking their wine. He and my grandmother weren’t married, but she put up with him until the winter of 1925, when my mother, who was about six, nearly died of pneumonia from living in an unheated attic. Grandmother decided to emigrate to California, so when he was out at a weekend party in the country she gathered up all the presents he’d been given, or helped himself to, including several respectable canvases, sold them, and bought passage for herself and my mother to New York. It took five years to work her way to San Francisco, but they made it eventually. She married when my mother was twelve, and had two more children, Red and another daughter who died young, but she never let up on her first child and drilled into her the unrelenting image of an artist as someone who steals, drinks, and is willing to allow his own daughter to die of neglect in his self-absorption.