"It's all right. They told me what happened, and I had a talk with them. They understand, and they won't blab. You done good, kid. Have a rest now."
Her body hurt all over, but in her mind the words brought relief, sweet relief. She leaned against Hawkin's broad shoulder and surrendered to the darkness.
TWO
THE PAST
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The past is but the beginning of a beginning.
—H. G. Wells, The Discovery of the Future
It was all so long ago, so closely encompassed and complete;
so cut off as by swords from the bitter years that lay between…
And afterwards, the stark shadow of the gallows
had fallen between her and that sun-drenched quadrangle of grey and green.
But now—?
—Dorothy L. Sayers, Gaudy Night
14
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California spent the weekend at the task, familiar to her assorted generations, of digging herself out from under mounds of debris and rubble. The whine of chain saws filled the air; the scrape and slop of shovels moving mud, the taps and bangs of hammers replacing shingles and panes of glass were heard in every corner. There was a belated run on candles and purified water, "for next time." The repair trucks from the gas and electric company and the telephone companies and the cable television companies pushed gradually farther out from the centers into the hills, and deep-freezes hummed back to life, telephones rang, televisions brought pictures of the other storm victims. Power at Tyler's Barn was reestablished on Monday, and the first thing Tyler's lady Anna did was to put Vivaldi's Gloria on the stereo and blast the joyous chorus up into the hills, startling the pale horses. She found the house exceedingly dreary without lights and refrigeration, and had it not been for all the extra residents who needed feeding she would have escaped the close surveillance and the noise and tension with all the others who were now visiting friends and family.
The Sunday papers all ran full-page photographic spreads of the storm, freak incidents and bizarre incongruities next to close-ups of mud-smeared faces caught in attitudes of fear or exhaustion or agonized relief. The events on Tyler's Road rated a small paragraph, and Kate wondered how long it would be before some enterprising reporter discovered that the unconscious woman being treated for a drug overdose was also an artist whose last show had brought well over a million dollars in sales.
Tyler's Road reemerged in its entirety over the next few days, as Tyler, with Hawkin glaring over his shoulder, arranged for an unprecedented amount of huge machinery to invade the bucolic hills and lay two larger culvert pipes and scrape the mudslide from the Road's upper end. Kate spent two days lying uncomfortably on her side, reading a ridiculously thick stack of files and trying to urge her back and leg to heal. Al Hawkin spent sixteen hours a day on the case—up at Vaun's house, meeting with the representatives of three counties, the FBI, and the press, talking to three sets of parents, staring out of various windows—and began to show it.
And in her hospital bed, Vaun Adams slept on.
On the Monday following Thursday night's storm, Kate's little white car turned off the street and stopped in front of a garage door that was sternly marked No Parking. Kate got laboriously out of her car, left it blocking the driveway, and climbed the steps to Hawkin's bell. The door opened an instant after she took her finger from the little lighted circle, and Hawkin stood there with his venerable briefcase, shaven, in a clean, open-necked shirt, with dark circles under his eyes.
"Morning, Casey, you look nice. I'd forgotten you had legs."
"Come on, Al, it's not even a week since you saw me in a skirt."
"Ah, yes, shiny-clean Miss Martinelli wondering if Alonzo Hawkin would bite. God, only a week?"
"Seven days."
"How're you feeling?"
"Fine. A bit stiff, but that's because I haven't been able to run or swim since Friday."
"Sure."
"Really. The leg cut is healing cleanly, and one of the ones on my back has reached the itching stage already."
"And the other one?"
"It's deeper," she admitted, "and the middle of it bleeds if I jump around much, but it's coming along."
"You okay for driving? What does the doctor say?"
"The doctor says I'm not to do racing sprints in the pool or lift weights. A nice quiet drive and some nice calm interviews are no problem."
"All right, but if you want me to drive, just say the word."
"I will."
Hawkin removed his jacket, opened the back door of the car, tossed the objects already on the seat to one side, and threw the jacket in.
"That's for you," commented Kate, cautiously folding herself into the front.
"Thank you very much, but I don't think your coat will fit me."
"The pillow, the pillow. I get tired of hearing your head thump on the door every time the car moves."
"All the comforts."
To Kate's surprise, though, he didn't immediately curl up to sleep. As she dodged her way across town to the freeway he was reviewing the files from the case at his feet. He did not read the pages so much as glance at each one, as if to remind himself of the contents.
The worst of the morning commute was over, and the traffic moved smoothly across the Bay Bridge. On the east end, however, the inevitable snarl was compounded by a spill—a garbage bag filled with crushed aluminum cans that had fallen from the back of a pickup truck. Cars crawled past the trivial barrier of flattened metallic bits and then immediately accelerated to the speed limit once past it. Kate shook her head at the mysterious ways of automobile drivers and turned to Hawkin with a comment.
He was asleep, heavily unconscious of the freeway, the fluttering papers sprawled across his lap, the hard door's jamb against his head, the glasses crooked on his nose. He looked like he could sleep for a week, thought Kate, exasperated. With one hand on the wheel and both eyes on the cars ahead she gritted her teeth and stretched gingerly back for the pillow, which she inserted between skull and metal. She then reached over and drew the file from under his limp hand and pushed it, closed, between the seats. Three or four pages had slipped down onto the floor, and she retrieved those too. She took her eyes from the road for an instant to aim the loose sheets between the file's covers, and as she did she recognized what he had been reviewing: the transcript of Vaun Adam's testimony during her murder trial.
Kate knew those pages well. Some of it she could recite from memory. All day Sunday she had spent collating the myriad fragments into a coherent whole, working toward a portrait of the woman who lay unconscious in a hospital room a hundred miles to the south. The portrait, though voluminous, was oddly dissatisfying, incomplete. She could only hope that by the end of the day it would be less so.
Vaun Adams had been thirteen when she lost both her parents in an accident. She had, even by that early age, a history of considerable talent and considerable mental instability, and to be thrown into orphanhood at the inevitably tumultuous age of puberty was a shock she apparently never completely overcame. She was sent to live with her aunt and uncle. Her mother's half brother was a stolid farmer with two children, a large mortgage, and now a problem niece. Eventually Vaun settled into a state of equilibrium there, although she never really fit in, never made any close friends. Until her last year of high school.
A few months before her eighteenth birthday Vaun began to go around with a young man who had come back to finish his degree after a two-year absence from school. Andy Lewis was something of an enigma at school, and rumors grew up around him. The most popular was that he had been in the Army, slaughtering small brown people, having lied about his age to enlist. Needless to say, the army had never heard of Andrew C. Lewis, though the records from the draft board showed that he had been issued a deferment on the grounds of chronic back pain, an injury that did not keep him from the high school football team.