As she turned back to Hawkin her eye caught on the painting above the wood stove. It was actually a triptych, three panels depicting a mossy stream bed in which a minimum of brush strokes and a nearly monochromatic palette of grays and greens managed to convey an air of mystery and anticipation. Kate drew it to Hawkin's attention with a dry comment.
"Unicorns and starry maidens it ain't. If that's her work, she's very good."
There were three other rooms on the lower floor. On the right-hand side of the hall as it went to the front door was Vaun's bedroom. A subtly colored patchwork quilt made of hundreds of tiny squares lay on the double bed, its corners knife-sharp. The top of the bedside table held an electric lamp and a clock; a small gray vase with a sprig of dried flowers and grasses sat atop the narrow, chest-high dresser. All else, even the walls, was bare, polished wood, with the exception of one small, very old-looking painting on the wall above the bed, a Virgin and Child. Kate forced herself to open drawers and closets, a thing she always disliked, but inside things were equally neat—not with the recent tidiness of the nervous housekeeper faced with an unwelcome and judgmental guest. Kate was familiar with the rapid neatening of strewn magazines and the quick dusting of obvious surfaces. This was a compulsive order, the obsessive tidiness of a woman who could not go to bed at night knowing there was disorder in the house, lest she be whipped away during the night and other eyes see the evidence of her debauched way of life. Looking at the straight line of shoes on the closet floor, Kate would have bet that Vaun Adams never wore a safety pin in her brassiere. Had she always been this way, or was it only recent? Since December? Kate closed the closet door and went across the hall to the bathroom.
After the austere bedroom, this room seemed positively flamboyant, tiled in warm oranges and browns with a brilliant batik shower curtain and mat in the same colors. The furnishings here were also minimaclass="underline" two towels and a face cloth, hairbrush, comb, toothbrush, toothpaste, soap, one bottle of shampoo, and nailbrush, all precisely aligned. No water spots or rust stains in the bath tub; no soap smears on the taps or porcelain. The only profligacy was a cupboard startlingly full of medications, both prescription and over-the-counter: vials at the top, three kinds of antibiotics; aspirin, Tylenol, Bufferin, and a codeine-and-Tylenol mix; cough syrups; half a dozen antihistamines with their fluorescent caution stickers (do not operate heavy machinery; do not take with alcohol), a handful of nasal sprays and drops; antacids, both liquid and chewable tablets, and a liquid laxative; nine bottles of assorted vitamins; a snakebite kit; wart removal drops; three small bottles of liquid charcoal and one of syrup of ipecac, for accidental poisoning; and on the lower shelf tubes of antiseptic cream and ointments for sore muscles, for burns, bites, stings, and sunburn, for yeast infections and athlete's foot; and an unspecified cortisone preparation. Nothing illegal; nothing more narcotic than the mild codeine prescription, six months old and less than half gone. No tranquilizers. Kate closed the cupboard door with a smile. That Vaun Adams was a hypochondriac was the most human side of the artist that she'd seen yet.
She opened the doors under the sink and rummaged through the pharmacopoeia there, mostly outdated, raising her eyebrows at a pair of disposable hypodermic syringes, still in their wrappers, each with a glass ampoule taped to it. Kate squinted thoughtfully at the printing on the glass and put them back.
She spent a few minutes writing the names of various doctors and pharmacies in her notebook, closed up the drawers and doors, and went back out into the hallway. A noise came from the room to her left, on the side away from the living room, so she followed that and came upon Hawkin, hands in his pockets jingling the coins, running his eyes over the walls of the combination office and library.
One corner of the room was chewed off by the overhead stairs, and below that was an oddly angled window. It probably gave a brief flood of light in the early morning, but now, the other window being a narrow, chest-high strip the length of the room but barely above the grasses that grew on the hillside cradling the back of the house, the room was inadequately lit for any serious reading. Nonetheless, the walls were solid bookshelves, broken only by the door, the windows, a small oak rolltop desk, and its matching filing cabinet.
Hawkin signaled Kate to close the door, and asked her what she had found.
"Very precise lady, not even any hairs in her comb," she commented. "One area of nerves, though. She's got a small pharmacy in her bathroom, everything from headache to ingrown toenails, with a concentration on sinus and lungs. Nothing hard, nothing illegal. Couple of needles, but they seem to be for allergic reaction to bee stings. How about you?"
"A very precise taste in music," he reflected. "Clearly divided, at any rate. Sing-along stuff, folk music from the sixties and the stuff they put on the radio and call mellow rock—muzak for yuppies—lots of fiddly instrumentals, Vivaldi, some Haydn, all the Mozart piano concertos, both of Glenn Gould's Goldberg recordings, that kind of thing." Kate nodded, catching the drift if not the specifics. "And then music to be overwhelmed by—huge, pounding stuff that doesn't leave you any room to breathe. Four different versions of Verdi's Requium, no less, and three of Mozart's. Great stuff to sublimate depression and keep the mind off of suicide. Three separate shelves, all in alphabetical order. What about the books?"
Wondering uneasily how much of Hawkin's last comments had been rooted in personal experience, Kate turned to the shelves. Here, too, order prevailed: general art history books here, volumes on specific artists (alphabetized) there; psychology there, novels here. The art world took up at least two-thirds of the shelves and represented a massive investment of money. Oversized books with many color plates ran the gamut from Egyptian and primitive to Frankenthaler and de Kooning, with a heavy emphasis on the European masters of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Slick, expensive, serious books, not something Kate would have expected to find on Tyler's Road. She leafed through a few of them and found two with writing on the flyleaf: Art in the Making: Rembrandt was signed, "With love from Gerry," and a very worn copy of The Art Spirit by Robert Henri was inscribed, "To my dear niece on her seventeenth birthday, with love from Uncle Red."
Second in number were works on psychology, ranging from college textbooks (two of them familiar to Kate from her own shelves) to popularized pseudopsychology to abstruse academic tomes with multisyllabic Latinate titles that seemed to deal with the more obscure varieties of madness. Running a poor third, and placed on shelves behind the door, was an eclectic gathering of fiction: Doris Lessing and Dorothy L. Sayers, Elie Wiesel and Isak Dinesen, a few Updikes, some Steinbeck, a couple of early Steven Kings. Some of them were old friends, some Kate had never heard of, and she could see no particular method in the selection.