"But why?"
It was a cry of pain, and Hawkin responded by allowing his own frustration and exhaustion to show through.
"I don't know, Mrs. Jameson. Not yet. I do intend to find out. With your help."
The room rippled with the effect of his last phrase. Red Jameson sat slowly up in his chair, shoulders straightening, chin up. His wife grabbed at the idea as if it were a life ring in a stormy sea, and Hawkin her rescuer, about to tell her what to do. Five minutes earlier they had both been closed, wary, and would have parted with information grudgingly, if at all. Now they saw Hawkin and Kate as their champions in the cause and would withhold nothing.
Kate reached for her coffee and swallowed deeply to hide her face. Pray God these two would never know how thin was the evidence supporting Hawkin's declaration: a sliver of wood, the lack of pills, a pot of stew. Pray God they would not have to be faced with a future Hawkin who had withdrawn from the confident opinion that had just won their support, an opinion that she knew he only half held, but which was very, very useful in opening up this vital source of information. Manipulating people without an outright lie was never easy, but Hawkin was a clever man. The coffee tasted suddenly sour, but she drank it all.
"How can we help?" the hostess asked eagerly.
"Just tell us about her," Hawkin said simply. "What was she like as a child, how did she change as an adolescent, her friends, her painting. Anything that comes to mind."
"You should see her studio, then—the shed where she painted," she offered. "And I have photograph albums, if you like? Is that what you want?"
"Exactly right. However, I'm also hoping to see one or two of her teachers at the high school this afternoon, which leaves us short of time. Casey, why don't you go have a look at the studio with Mr. Jameson while Mrs. Jameson and I go through the albums."
Kate was mildly surprised at his division of labor, and Mrs. Jameson began to protest that the ground was too muddy, but her husband growled at her and she subsided. Kate held the kitchen door for him as he pulled on a billed cap with "Samuels Feed n' Seed" stitched on the front. He rolled down the ramp onto the concrete path that wound around the house and spidered off in various directions, pointing his chair towards the older, wooden barn. Kate walked beside him in the clear spring sun.
16
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The small shed had three steps leading up to it, and Kate had to push the chair up the rough boards that had been nailed down as a ramp. She felt a sharp pain in her back as the stitches pulled, and she cursed silently, hoping that the double gauze pads she'd had Lee tape on that morning would absorb the blood.
It was an unlikely place to have nurtured such a talent, she thought as she followed Jameson through the narrow door: white paint on coarse plank walls and ceiling, a bare bulb on a wire, ancient linoleum with odd tacked-down seams, salvaged from somewhere else; a narrow metal-framed bed in one corner, once painted dark green but chipped now, still laid with a lumpy mattress with blue ticking and loose buttons, three blankets folded neatly at the foot.
Three things made it the home of an artist. One was the massive storage cabinet that almost hid the south wall, a cruder version of the storeroom in Vaun's house on Tyler's Road. This one was built of various thicknesses and qualities of plywood, painted white, and its two tiers of slotted racks still held a number of paintings. Then on the opposite wall the rough planks had been cut away for three large, metal-framed sliding windows that opened up the shed and made it a place of clear, even light. They were almost identical with the window from which Kate had taken a sliver of redwood three days before. Below the expanse of windows lay the third and unmistakable sign of this structure's most recent life: a midden of drops, dribbles, and smears that obscured the faded linoleum entirely near the windows and trailed off to a thinner layer of footsteps and drops as it reached the middle of the room. Jameson saw her looking at the motley surface.
"Becky wanted to clean it up, but I told her not to bother. We've left it like it was. We don't need the space, not really, and I think Vaun likes to see it when she comes. She sleeps here sometimes, though we kept her old room for her in the house. Becky comes in every month or so to make sure the mice aren't moving in, and she does a quick dust and a mop once or twice a year. Silly, I suppose, not to use the space, but somehow we couldn't bring ourselves to clear it out after—when Vaun left, and after a while it just got to be habit. Silly, I guess," he repeated, but he didn't sound embarrassed by this tangible evidence of sentimentality, and his face was relaxed in the silent air that smelled faintly of ancient paint (or was that imagination?) and of the sun-soaked farmyard breeze that moved through the open door behind them. Kate realized that a comment was not necessary.
"Did you put these windows in for her?" she asked.
"I helped her. She paid for them herself—her first sale, it was. She was sixteen. She used to paint some of the kids in school, and one time she did a really nice one of the daughter of the fellow who owns the lumberyard in town. A few weeks later she started asking me if she could have some of the money from her parents' insurance settlement to make this shed more usable for painting in—Becky wasn't too happy about Vaun's getting all that on the floor of her bedroom, as you can imagine." He gestured at the floor and chuckled. "I hated to see her eat into the money, even for that, so I said why didn't she take the painting over to Ed—Ed Parker, his name is—and see if he'd trade it for some glass. She liked that picture, but she liked the idea of windows even more, so she thought about it for a couple of days and then wrapped the picture up in one of Becky's old tablecloths and went down to see him. She came back two hours later, riding proud in his delivery truck with those three windows. She helped me put them in, and when we finished, she looked at them for the longest time and went over and slid them open and shut a few times, and then she just stood there with her back to me and said 'thank you,' real quiet. My own daughter would have hugged me or jumped up and down, but Vaunie was always different. It was okay, though. It was enough, that 'thank you.' She really meant it. Not just putting in the glass for her, but everything attached to those windows." A lost past echoed in his voice, gone.
"She hasn't changed much, has she?" mused Kate, thinking of her own experience of the woman's understated intensity.
"She hasn't changed at all. A little bit quieter, but everything she's been through has only made her more of herself. The only time she's been at all different was when she was hanging around with that Andy Lewis."
"What happened to him, do you know?" Kate asked it in as offhanded a manner as possible and was not prepared for the violence of his response.
"Don't know, don't care. He was a slimy little bastard, pardon my French, and I told him that if I caught him on my land I'd empty a load of buckshot into him."
"When was that?"
"The week Vaun was sent to prison. I saw him in town, standing around with some of the kids who used to kiss his—who used to look up to him. His father died when Andy was small, I think, and his mother was a weak little woman who never said no to him, so I guess it's not surprising he turned out the way he did. He went away not too long after that, I remember. Took all the money he could find in the house and disappeared. Broke his mother's heart, wouldn't you know? She died the next year."
"He gave Vaun drugs, didn't he? Marijuana, LSD? Why was he never prosecuted for that?"
Jameson sat staring out the window. The red tractor had come into sight, still far off, the black-brown trail unfurling in its wake. He muttered something under his breath.