She took another long drink and stared off into the distance. Diane thought they might be losing her. She got up and opened the box. In it lay the partial mask that Marcella had put together.
“We have one of your pieces,” said Diane, handing it to her.
“Oh, it’s the most beautiful one of all.And Father crushed it. You know, I like it like this. I like the lines formed where the pieces are fitted together. I hadn’t thought of breaking it and putting it back together. That adds another symbolic dimension.”
“Please go on,” said Diane. “We want to hear about your art.”
Maybelle Gauthier didn’t take her eyes off the mask in the box as she spoke.
“I bought a cauldron and put it in the shed, and I boiled the bones down after Everett cut up the pieces that I needed. When the bones were perfectly white, I dried them and crushed them. They made the perfect temper for my clay. I used the face of each person as the form to sculpt the piece. When I finished and it was fired, it was the most beautiful work of art you have ever seen. There was nothing like it in the galleries. It had the rough look of Indian pottery but the delicate sculpting of modern work. Each piece had a spirit in it. People saw it, even if they couldn’t put a name to it. I made a fountain for a man in Atlanta who loved the idea of water coming out of the eyes.
“Then Father found out. I don’t know how. I suspect that he came to visit when I wasn’t there and saw something he shouldn’t. Everett told me they were coming after me. That’s when I wrote the note. I was afraid. Everett helped me throw everything we could down the well. I hid all my work I had there. But when Father came, he found my pottery and crushed the beautiful pieces in front of my eyes and threw them in the fire pit. I hated him for that. He didn’t find the portraits I did of them. I hid them in the wall, along with a portrait of my mother.”
“What about the young victims?” said Lillian. “Didn’t you feel bad for them?”
Diane thought Lillian probably couldn’t hold it in any longer.
“Oh, they were far better off. The people Everett brought home had terrible lives. At least they could now live forever in art,” she said. “And their suffering was over.”
“So your father took you to a clinic,” prompted Diane.
“Yes. What was the name? Something about a river. It was a huge Gothic building. Mother would come to visit me and she would cry. She told me if I got out, Father would see that I went to jail. This way, no one would ever know what I did, and one day I’d get out and could start over. Everett begged me not to tell on him and I didn’t. I didn’t even tell Mother about his part in it.
“The clinic was a terrible place. At night you could hear people screaming. I never knew what was happening to them. I was smart enough to stay quiet and be easy to get along with. That way they wouldn’t increase my medication or do whatever it was they were doing to the other poor patients.”
Diane shivered. She and Vanessa exchanged horrified glances. Diane didn’t know very much about the clinic that once had been housed in the museum building. The docents made up ghost stories about the old clinic, but she never considered that strange and terrifying things really may have gone on there.
“They closed the place down in just a year,” continued Gauthier. “Good riddance. I was taken to another place. I forget the name. I was there for, I don’t know, but it seemed like several years. Mother would come see me, but then she died. She was my last hope. The doctors had to sedate me when I heard. I was still smart enough to be very good and they let me work in the office sometimes. It was there that I saw the surgery orders that my father had signed. He told them to give me a lobotomy. Do you know what that is?”
Diane nodded. “Yes,” she said.
“They wanted to cut part of my brain out. I had been around patients who had lobotomies. I would lose everything. I would lose my art. My father would win. I had to do something. He came to visit one evening before they were to do the surgery. I’d planned it all. It was so easy, much easier than making my beautiful pottery. I got some chemicals from the janitor’s closet ahead of time and stole an extra key they kept in the desk drawer of the receptionist’s office. As I said, I had been on good behavior and they gave me pretty much free run of the place. It was as if I were invisible. My father and the doctor were in the doctor’s office with the door shut. Before they knew anything was going on, I set fire to the outside office and locked the door. I left the key in the lock so the doctor couldn’t unlock it from the inside. The office was away from the dormitories in a separate building. There was no one to know or to hear. I stayed there looking at my father and the doctor as they tried to escape. They couldn’t get out the windows because they were barred. There was a glass window in the door, but it was double paned and had wire in between. And I watched them. I watched my father screaming at me. And I did this.”
She pointed her middle and index fingers at her eyes, then pointed them at Diane. She did it over and over in a sharp, jerking motion, her brows knitted together, her eyes dark.
“He did that to me as a child when he wanted me to pay attention to him, to look him in the eyes, to let me know he saw me. I called it his devil look, and I did that to him. That was his last vision—me giving him the devil look. And I’m not sorry I did that to him.”
Chapter 55
It was quiet in the room. The light from the windows was almost gone and only the harsh halogen light from the overhead fixtures was left. Diane didn’t know what she thought she was going to hear from Maybelle Agnes Gauthier, but she was oddly stunned and affirmed by what she heard.
She picked up the folder again and took out the like-nesses that Neva had created of the two skeletons from the well and handed them to Gauthier.
“Who are they?” Diane asked.
She ran her wrinkled hands over the drawings. “Lovely,” she whispered. “Who did these?” She looked up at Diane.
“A woman who works for me,” Diane said.
“I didn’t name them. A name would have only diminished what I was trying to say,” she said.
Diane took a breath. “What were their names before you met them?”
“Dust to dust,” Gauthier whispered. “I was taking them back from whence they came. I crushed them to dust and re-created them into something more beautiful. Something their fathers couldn’t hurt. See”—she looked at the mask still in the box in her lap—“even though my father crushed her, she’s still beautiful.”
“Who were they?” said Hanks. “We need to know who they were.”
“It was a long time ago. I don’t remember.”
“Of course you do,” said Lillian, her voice harsher than Diane had ever heard it. “You painted her; you talked with her as you were doing her portrait. What did you call her? She told you about herself. You knew her father hurt her. What was her name?”
Gauthier didn’t say anything. She stared at Lillian, but without anger. She gazed at the mask again, brushing it with her fingers, and finally spoke.
“Patsy. It seems as though I called her Patsy. The boy—I called him Steven because he reminded me of my Steven. He was quiet and sensitive. He sat so still as I painted him. He seemed to take joy in just sitting still. He liked Steven better than his name. I don’t remember what it was,” she said.
“Do you remember their last names?” asked Diane.
“No. I didn’t care what their last names were. Those were their fathers’ names,” she said.
“Why didn’t you change your name to Farragut?” asked Diane. “Why did you keep your father’s name?”
Diane had caught Gauthier by surprise. She looked wide-eyed for a moment, as if trying to understand the question.
“I don’t know,” she said finally. “I don’t know.”
“Why did you use a drawing of a bird for your signature?” asked Hanks.
She smiled. “Mother used to call me her little magpie,” she said, “and I lived in Pigeon Ridge. I liked the idea of being something that coul
d fly away whenever I wanted.”
Hanks looked at Diane and his lips twitched into a whisper of a smile.
“How many were there?” said Diane. “How many did you turn into art?”
“Not many. Not many. Ten, maybe. Perhaps fewer,” she said.
“Where are they buried?” asked Diane.
“I don’t know exactly. Everett handled that. Somewhere nearby.”
Hanks rose to his feet. “Thank you for speaking with us.”
He said it as if it were all he could do to say the words. Diane understood.
Hanks reached to take the box containing the mask from Gauthier. She snatched it away.
“Can’t I keep it? It’s mine.”
“It’s evidence, ma’am,” he said, and took the box and put the lid back on it.
They left her there, sitting in the empty sunroom with the harsh light shining on her. No one spoke until they were almost to Rosewood. Lillian broke the silence.
“All that going on in Rosewood, and no one knew? Weren’t those poor people reported missing?”
“They must have been,” said Diane.
“The little boy she said liked to sit still. Poor little thing,” said Harte.
“He was worked hard,” said Diane. “The muscle attachments on his little bones were too developed. He’d led a hard life. He was undersized for his age. He wouldn’t have looked like the teenager he was.”
They were silent again until they were pulling up to the crime lab parking lot where Vanessa had picked up Diane and Detective Hanks.
“Is that what you have to deal with every day?” asked Vanessa before they got out.
“It’s usually not this crazy,” said Hanks. “No, I take that back. When someone gets stabbed for his shoes, or his lunch money, that’s pretty crazy. But I don’t usually deal with insanity on quite this scale.”
He put his sling back on his arm. Diane saw that he was still in pain.
“I want to thank you for the ride,” he told Vanessa. “I’ve never ridden in a limousine before.”
“Everyone should have a limousine ride at least once,” Vanessa said, smiling at him. “Thank you for putting up with us.”
“You were very helpful,” he said. “Mrs. Chapman, you made the woman connect with her past. I’m not sure I could have done that.”
“I’m glad we could be of service,” Lillian said. “It certainly gives one something to think about, doesn’t it?”
Diane and Hanks got out and watched the limousine leave the parking lot.
“I’m sure there’s fresh coffee in the crime lab if you’d like some,” said Diane.
“Fresh coffee sounds good. Will your personnel be up there this late?” he asked.
“Are you kidding? They’re waiting on pins and needles to hear the story,” she said.
“That’s the first time I’ve met Vanessa Van Ross,” said Hanks. “You say she’s the real power behind the museum?”
“Yes, she is,” Diane said.
“An interesting family. I have a ninety-year-old great-grandfather and he has to have twenty-four-hour care. Mrs. Chapman is heading to a hundred, you say? I could invite her out for racquetball.”
Hanks shook his head as he entered the lobby for the crime lab and nodded at Diane’s bodyguards, who were playing cards with the crime lab guard.
“Interesting family,” Hanks said again.
“The Gauthiers were an interesting family,” said Diane.
They got on the elevator and rode to the crime lab.
“Interesting isn’t how I would describe them,” said Hanks.
Diane was right; her team were all there, including Jin—plus Frank. Diane grinned and introduced Frank to Detective Hanks.
“I thought you would be here soon, so I thought I’d take you to dinner in the restaurant,” Frank said.
“Why don’t we all order dinner?” Diane said. “We can eat it in my office and Detective Hanks and I can debrief with you.”
“Let’s,” said Neva. “We are dying to hear about Gauthier. Could you get any sense from her?”
“That depends on your definition of sense,” said Hanks.
“How was the bar fight crime scene?” Diane asked.
“Uneventful,” said Neva.
“Yeah, the guy lying on the floor with a knife stuck in his gut kind of sobered them up,” said Izzy. “We didn’t have any trouble.”
They ordered dinner. While waiting for it to arrive, Frank, Izzy, and David moved the round table from the crime lab to Diane’s office. She, Neva, and Jin carried the chairs. Neva batted Hanks away when he tried to take one of the chairs.
“You have to be really sore,” she said.
“It’s not so bad.”
“I don’t believe that,” Neva said. “We’ve all been hurt and it, well, it hurts.”
“That’s one of the things I miss around here,” said Jin, “your way with words.”
Neva hit him in the shoulder of his Hawaiian shirt. Even with the weather cooling down, Jin still wore Hawaiian shirts and Bermuda shorts when he was off duty. Diane thought it was funny that he was critical of what Scott and Hector wore.
They put the chairs around the table and Neva sat down. “Okay,” she said. “Tell us all about it.”
Alternately, Diane and Hanks told Maybelle Agnes Gauthier’s story to an astonished audience.
“And I thought she was probably the victim,” said Jin, “living with some guy she couldn’t get away from who made crazy pots.”
“Wait a minute,” said Neva. “You mean she was here, when this was a clinic? She was an inmate?” Neva sat with one foot resting on the chair seat, hugging her knee to her.
“Yes,” said Diane. “How’s that for a really disturbing coincidence?”
“I don’t think they called them inmates,” said David.
“I’d say it’s a good word,” said Izzy. “I’ve lived in Rosewood all my life and I’ve never heard of these people.”
“This whole thing goes way off the dial on my freak meter,” said Neva.
“You should have been there with her,” said Hanks. “She’s got the strangest color eyes. Didn’t you think so?”
Diane agreed.
“She had praise for your drawings,” Diane told Neva.
“Oh, well, I’ll just quit my job and take her letter of reference with me to New York,” said Neva.
The buzzer rang on the museum side of the crime lab.
“Food’s here,” said Izzy.
He and Frank went to get it. They came back pushing the cart with their food. Frank handed it out and they settled in to dinner.
“David,” said Diane, “you were quiet during the narration. What have you got up your sleeve that you haven’t told us yet?”
“What makes you think I have something up my sleeve?”
“I know you,” said Diane. “What is it?”
“Two things,” said David. He turned silent as he slowly savored a bite of his salad with his favorite dressing.
“David,” said Jin, “you don’t have to make an entrance. What is it?”
He put his fork down. “UGA issued a parking sticker to Tyler Walters for a black Cadillac Escalade.”
“Okay,” said Hanks. “That’s what I want to hear. You said two things?”
“I got a hit on the fingerprints from the potting clay we found in the well. First, let me say that the thumbprint in the dried blood on the sculpting tool matches the thumbprint in the clay. Second, when I ran the database for people who are bonded, the print came up a match for Everett Walters. Detective Hanks, I think you can get a warrant now to search the cars and residences of both of them.”
Diane and her crew, Frank, and Detective Hanks discussed every permutation of possible solutions to the crimes, and she was sure one of them was probably correct. But sorting out which individual actually attacked Marcella, which one killed the Lassiter woman, and who killed Stacy Dance was impossible—or at least, beyond them for the moment.
“We’ll probably wake up with a brilliant idea in the morning,” said Neva.
“I’m sure,” said Jin as the two of them helped Diane put the dishes back on the cart.
Frank and Izzy put the table and chairs back in their places and Diane told them all to go home. She knew David would probably go down to the basement where he had his own private office and work into the night on some project that involved some algorithm or database or other.
Diane followed Frank’s car home and pulled up behind him in the drive. There was already a car parked over to the side of the driveway. Diane recognized it as Lynn Webber’s black Mercedes SUV. Lynn was sitting on their doorstep looking up at the stars through the tall trees.
Chapter 56
“Lynn?” said Diane, as she and Frank approached the steps. “Have you been waiting long?”
Lynn stood up with a Coke in one hand and an envelope in the other. She was dressed for colder weather than the current temperature warranted—jeans, suede jacket, and boots. She looked stylish, as always, but she also looked to Diane like a kid about to run away to a colder clime.
“No, not long. I would have called, but sometimes it’s better to just show up,” she said.
“Hello, Dr. Webber. How are you this evening?” Frank took out his keys, opened the door, and stepped aside to let Lynn and Diane enter.
“I’m fine, and please call me Lynn, because I’m going to call you Frank,” she said.
“Okay, Lynn,” he said. “Would you like some coffee?”
She held up her plastic bottle of soda. “No thanks. Got caffeine here.” She looked around at the decor. “This is a beautiful house,” she said as she shrugged out of her coat.
“Thanks,” said Frank. He led the way into the living room and offered Lynn a seat. Diane and Frank sat opposite her.
Dust to Dust Page 32
