She took a deep breath, her nostrils flaring, her head rising, then released it slowly. In the gesture there was a trace of a spirit that had been subdued by the black clothes and it was possible to see what had attracted Elliot to her.
“My husband killed himself because he was afraid, Mr. Parker. Something he had done had come back to haunt him. He told Elliot, but Elliot wouldn’t believe him. He wouldn’t tell me what it was. Instead, he pretended that everything was normal, right up until the day he went into the garage with a length of yellow hose and killed himself. Elliot is also trying to pretend that things are normal, but I think he knows better.”
“What do you think your husband was afraid of?”
“Not what. I think he was afraid of someone.”
“Do you have any idea who that person might have been?”
Adele Foster rose and, with a movement of her hand, indicated that I should follow her. We ascended the staircase, past what, in the house’s former days, would have been used as a receiving room for visitors but was now a large and very luxurious bedroom. We paused in front of a closed door, in its keyhole a key, which she now turned to unlock the door. Then, keeping her back to the room, she pushed the door open and revealed its contents.
The room had once been a small bedroom or dressing room but James Foster had transformed it into an office. There was a computer desk and chair, a drafting board, and a set of shelves against one wall lined with books and files. A window looked out onto the front yard, the top of the flowering dogwood below the window visible above the bottom of the frame, the last of its white blooms now fading and dying. A blue jay stood on its topmost branch, but our movement behind the glass must have disturbed him because he disappeared suddenly with a flash of his blue rounded tail.
Yet, in truth, the bird was only a momentary distraction, because it was the walls that drew the eye. I couldn’t tell what color they had been painted because no paint showed through the blizzard of paper that seemed to have adhered to them, as if the room was in a constant state of motion and they had been propelled there and held in place by centrifugal force. The sheets were of varying sizes, some little more than Post-it notes, others larger than the surface of Foster’s drafting board. Some were yellow, others dark, some plain, a few lined. The detail varied from drawing to drawing, from hurried sketches executed with a flurry of pencil strokes to ornate, intricate depictions of their subject. James Foster had been quite an artist, but he seemed to have only one main theme.
Almost every drawing depicted a woman, her face concealed, her body swathed in a cloak of white from the top of her head to the soles of her feet. The cloak spread out behind her like water pooling from an ice sculpture. It was not a false impression, for Foster had drawn her as if the material that covered her was wet. It clung to the muscles in her legs and buttocks, to the sweep of her breasts and the thin blades of her fingers, the bones of the knuckles clearly visible where she gripped the cloak tightly from beneath.
But there was something wrong with her skin, something flawed and ugly. Her veins appeared to be above rather than beneath the epidermis, creating a tracery of raised pathways across her body like the levees over a flooded rice field. The result was that the woman under the veil seemed almost to be plated, her skin armored like that of an alligator. Unconsciously, instead of drawing closer I took a single step back from the wall and felt Adele Foster’s hand come to rest gently on my arm.
“Her,” she said. “He was afraid of her.”
We sat over coffee, some of the drawings spread on the coffee table before us.
“Did you show these to the police?”
She shook her head. “Elliot told me not to.”
“Did he tell you why?”
“No. He just said that it would be best not to show them the drawings.”
I rearranged the papers, setting the depictions of the woman aside and revealing a set of five landscapes. Each depicted the same scene: a huge pit in the ground, surrounded by skeletal trees. In one of the drawings a pillar of fire emerged from the pit, but it was still possible to pick out, even there, the shape of the hooded woman now clothed in flame.
“Is this a real place?”
She took the picture from me and studied it, then handed it back to me with a shrug.
“I don’t know. You’d have to ask Elliot. He might know.”
“I can’t do that until I find him.”
“I think something has happened to him, maybe the same thing that happened to Landron Mobley.”
This time, I heard the disgust in her voice when she said Mobley’s name.
“You didn’t like him?”
She scowled. “He was a pig. I don’t know why they let him stay with them. No-” she corrected herself-“I do know why. He could get things for them: drugs, booze when they were younger, maybe even women. He knew the places to go. He wasn’t like Elliot and the others. He didn’t have money, or looks, or a college education, but he was prepared to go places that they were afraid to go, at least at first.”
And Elliot Norton had still seen fit, after all those years, to represent Mobley in the impending case against him, despite the fact that it could bring no credit to Elliot. This was the same Elliot Norton who had grown up with Earl Larousse Jr. and was now representing the young man accused of killing his sister. None of this made me feel good.
“You said that they did something, when they were younger, something that had come back to haunt them. Do you have any idea what that might be?”
“No. James would never talk about it. We weren’t close before his death. His behavior had altered. He wasn’t the man I married. He began to hang out with Mobley again. They went hunting together up at Congaree. Then James started going to strip clubs. I think he might have been seeing prostitutes.”
I laid the drawings down carefully on the table.
“You know where he might have gone?”
“I followed him, two or three times. He always went to the same place, because it was where Mobley liked to go when he was in town. It’s called LapLand.”
And while I sat talking to Adele Foster, surrounded by images of spectral women, a disheveled man wearing a bright red shirt, blue jeans, and battered sneakers strolled up Norfolk Street on the Lower East Side of New York and stood in the shadow of the Orensanz Center, the oldest surviving synagogue in New York. It was a warm evening and he had taken a cab down here, electing not to endure the heat and discomfort of the subway. A daisy chain of children floated by, suspended between two women wearing T-shirts identifying them as members of a Jewish community group. One of the children, a little girl with dark curls, smiled up at him as she passed and he smiled back at her, watching her as she was carried around the corner and out of his sight.
He walked up the steps, opened the door, and moved into the neo-Gothic main hall. He heard footsteps approach from behind and turned to see an old man with a sweeping brush in his hand.
“Can I help you?” said the cleaner.
The visitor spoke.
“I’m looking for Ben Epstein,” he said.
“He is not here,” came the reply.
“But he does come here?”
“Sometimes,” the old man conceded.
“You expecting him this evening?”
“Maybe. He comes, he goes.”
The visitor found a chair in the shadows, turned it so that its back was facing the door, and sat down carefully upon it, wincing slightly as he lowered himself down. He rested his chin on his forearms and regarded the old man.
“I’ll wait. I’m very patient.”
The old man shrugged, and began sweeping.
Five minutes went by.
“Hey,” said the visitor. “I said I was patient, not made of fucking stone. Go call Epstein.”
The old man flinched but kept sweeping.
“I can’t help you.”