This mysterious, slightly sinister figure came to school a grown man among children, a blooded killer (or so rumor had it) among the sheep, at a time when across the country students wore peace pins and burned their draft cards—or at least talked about it. While the other seniors experimented with hair down to their collars and the occasional marijuana cigarette to complement their illicit beer, Andy Lewis looked down on their thrills as childish, and, it was later discovered, patronizingly allowed these lesser mortals to accrue merit and sophistication by purchasing their recreational drugs through him.
He came to school in September. In October he discovered Vaun, a withdrawn, friendless, virginal outsider. By Christmas vacation they were, in the eyes of the school, "going together," despite (or perhaps because of) strenuous opposition from her aunt and uncle. Some time in December Vaun first tried LSD. During that winter her schoolwork, which had been solid B's with a few A's and C's, fell to near failure. She began acting even stranger than usual. In mid-March she dropped a second dose of LSD and launched herself straight into an eight-hour screaming frenzy which ended under hospital restraints and was followed, according to her own testimony during the trial, by weeks of gradually diminishing flashbacks and disorientation. Only her uncle's standing in the community prevented her arrest for possession of an illegal substance. She refused to say who had given it to her.
Then suddenly in early May, just before her eighteenth birthday, things changed again. Homework assignments began to come back complete and correct, and absences dropped off. She started joining the family again at meal times, trimmed her hair, and stopped seeing Andy Lewis. For her birthday she asked her aunt for a trip to San Francisco, and the two of them spent the day in museums and galleries and stayed the night at the Saint Francis. Her aunt later testified that Vaun had seemed happy, somehow slightly shy, but relaxed for the first time in months.
Two weeks later Vaun Adams was arrested for the murder of a six-year-old girl whom she was baby-sitting. She was accused of strangling Jemima Louise Brand (known to all as Jemma), removing Jemma's clothes, and then casually going into the next room to work on a painting of the child's naked, dead body transposed onto a hillside. The jury saw the painting, heard the testimony, and after five hours' deliberation found her guilty. She was sent to prison.
A little more than three years into her sentence Vaun was discovered by her psychiatrist. More than that: she was saved by him. Dr. Gerry Bruckner was called in when Vaun went into a catatonic state during a spell in solitary confinement, where she had been put during an outbreak of prison unrest. He succeeded in prying her out of it, gave her the art materials her soul craved, recognized the stunning power of her work, and sent several pieces to a friend in New York who owned a gallery. Under the name Eva Vaughn she was an overnight success.
After serving nine years and three months, she was released. She spent a year of parole near Gerry Bruckner, then a year traveling in Europe and the United States. She met Tyler two and a half years after she was released from prison, and six months later she was building her house on Tyler's Road. That was five years ago, and she had lived there ever since, aside from occasional trips to New York, where she kept an apartment.
Such was the outline of the life of Vaun Adams, built up from the stack of papers, nearly a foot thick, that sat on Kate's desk at home. From birth certificate to passport to Friday night's hospital admission forms, the papers included prison reports, psychiatric evaluations, pale copies of copies of letters, signed statements, the trial transcript, photographs, pathologists' reports, and hundreds of mind-numbing pages, each presenting in microscopic detail a segment of the life of Vaun Adams.
And yet, when Kate should have felt that she knew this woman better than her own sister, better than Hawkin, better than Lee even, she simply could not connect these segments into a whole; she simply could not match the avalanche of words with the woman in the brown corduroy trousers who had served her a ham sandwich, who had sketched in a few lines the threat in a pair of approaching police investigators, and who had lain blue and still under Kate's hands and lips. Kate's mind could not make the most tenuous of links between the woman and the girl she had been.
Even the trial itself seemed disjointed and incomplete and left some very perplexing questions unanswered. Why had Andy Lewis been allowed back into school, rather than pursuing the more normal course of enrolling in the local junior college for a high school certificate? Why was his role in the trial so perfunctory? Neither the prosecuting attorney nor Vaun's court-appointed defender had pressed him, but had on the contrary treated him with wary respect. He had a solid alibi for the night, playing cards with no fewer than eight friends, but he had apparently graduated and was allowed to go free, without prosecution for the drugs he had almost certainly supplied to Vaun. Why? And where had he gone after the trial? He had disappeared with only the sparsest of a trail left behind: driver's license renewal two years later, one job in California and one in Alaska on his Social Security records, then—nothing. Ten years ago Andrew Lewis had disappeared, completely.
Hawkin slept like a dead man for the next three hours, until Kate pulled into a gas station in the small town nearest the Jameson farm. She told the pimply young man who came out what she wanted and walked around the back of the station to the door marked Ladies. When she came out the car was empty. She paid the attendant and fished two cups and the thermos from the back seat. Hawkin reappeared in his jacket and a tie. The circles under his eyes had lightened several shades, she noticed, and his walk had a spring to it. She handed him a cup.
"Oh, good," he said. "Chamomile tea with goat's milk and honey."
"Sorry, all out, you'll have to settle for Ethiopian mocha. Sugar's in the glove compartment."
He raised an eyebrow at that but said nothing aside from an appreciative sigh after the first swallow. Three miles down the road he drained the cup and placed it in the back seat.
"A good sleep and a cup of fine coffee always takes ten years off of me. Your housemate make the coffee again?"
"This morning I made it. Lee buys it from this crazy little hundred-and-fifty-year-old Chinese woman who cooks it up in a two-hundred-and-fifty-year-old coffee roaster. It's a great honor to be taken on as one of her trusted customers. The turnoff is up here somewhere," she added. "Could you check the map, Al? It's in the glove compartment."
Although he was fairly certain that she had been looking at the hand-drawn map back at the gas station, Hawkin obediently fished it out and read off the landmarks. If she didn't want to talk about her home life—and her reticence was well known to her colleagues—it was her business. He suspected that few of the others had even been given the man's name.
15
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The house was slightly more ornate than Kate had anticipated, a bit larger, its landscaping somewhat more elaborate than what she imagined commonplace for a farmhouse. From meeting Vaun's aunt at the hospital and having seen the amount of money that was transferred monthly from Vaun's account, she had expected it to be well maintained, and indeed it was: bright white rail fencing that stretched out into the distance, three nicely blending colors of paint that brought out the house's gingerbread details, a flawless acre or so of lawn encircled by wide flower beds and at the moment edged by several hundred tentative daffodils, slightly flattened by the recent rains. A small pond sparkled through the bare branches of a curve of trees. Kate switched off the engine, and she and Hawkin got out to sounds of rural life: quacks and honks from the pond, the rumble of distant machinery, the sharp snarl of a far-off chain saw, then the evocative, nostalgic screak of a screen door, followed by a familiar voice.