Silent victim s-2

by C. E. Lawrence

  "I'm very sorry to hear it," Charlotte said. She had much the same upper-class British inflection as her brother.

  "Did you know the young woman in question?" Lee asked, surprised at his own old-fashioned locution.

  "Her name was-" Butts began, but Charlotte Perkins interrupted him.

  "I never had any dealings with Martin's patients," she said. "I keep to my rooms when he is conducting his sessions."

  Her choice of words made it sound like Perkins conducted seances instead of psychiatric counseling.

  Charlotte turned to her brother, arms crossed in front of her thin chest.

  "Martin, did you not offer these gentlemen something to eat or drink?"

  "Oh, dear me, forgive me!" Perkins squeaked, bustling toward the door where his sister had just entered.

  "No, really, we're almost finished here, and we have to be getting back," Butts said.

  "It's no trouble, really," said Charlotte, but Lee and Butts were already backing out toward the door. For all its splendor and elegance, there was something about the house that made Lee want to leave it as soon as possible. He had a sticky sensation of being drawn into it, as though one could somehow get trapped there.

  All of this flashed through his head in a fraction of a second as he and Butts sidled toward the door. Perkins and his sister took a step toward them, and it was all Lee could do to not turn around and run. He glanced at Butts to see if he was feeling the same way, but he couldn't read the expression on the stocky detective's face.

  "Are you sure you wouldn't like to stay for tea?" Charlotte Perkins said pleasantly.

  "No, thanks-we're expected back in the city," Lee answered, letting her know that other people knew where he and Butts were. It was irrational, it was crazy, but the creeping dread he felt was real.

  "Give us a call if you think of anything else that might be useful," Butts said, placing a business card on the round rosewood table by the front door.

  "I certainly will," Perkins responded cheerily.

  "Nice meeting you," Lee said with another little bow. Perhaps following his lead, Butts did the same. Perkins bowed back, and his sister gave a tiny curtsy.

  And then, with a push, they were out the door and standing on the front porch. The sun was sinking lower in the sky, and the town's quiet little main street was bathed in its golden light. It was like stepping from a bad dream into a painting. There was still a sense of unreality in the bucolic beauty of the setting, but the foreboding that had enveloped Lee melted the moment they set foot outside the house.

  Lee looked at Butts, who was sweating-but then, Butts often sweated.

  "Did you-?" he began.

  "Yeah-what was that?" Butts said, loosening his tie. "I don't know," Lee replied. "Something about those two-" "And that house! No wonder Santiago thought Perkins was creepy."

  Lee turned to glance behind them as they clattered noisily across the wooden porch. The lace curtains on the door fluttered, as though someone had been peering through them. Next to the door, he noticed something he had failed to see before. It was a statue of a Green Man, an ancient Celtic symbol of fertility that Lee had always found rather sinister. The image took many forms, but certain elements were always present-it was always the face of a laughing man, with vines and plants growing out of his mouth.

  Green men had always struck him as grotesque and nightmarish, and this one was no exception. The eyes stared wildly over the lecherous grinning mouth, and the suppurating vines were reminiscent of the writhing snakes that sprouted from the head of the Medusa. It reminded Lee of a Green Man he had seen in Rosslyn Chapel, the famed church in the tiny village of Rosslyn, just outside Edinburgh.

  "Whatchya lookin' at?" Butts asked. "It's a Green Man."

  "Yeah? What's that?" As they walked to the car, Lee explained the significance of the Green Man as a Celtic fertility symbol.

  "You notice anything else weird about his place?" Butts said as they climbed into the Saturn.

  "What?"

  "There were no light switches on the walls."

  "Really?"

  "Yeah. I saw some-what do you call 'em?-sconces, but no switches. And that oil lamp I saw-I think they don't have any electricity there."

  "You think?"

  "Yep. I'm tellin' you, there's something weird about those two."

  But as they drove up the tiny main street, Lee was struck by how normal and familiar his boyhood town looked, and how little it had changed. There were the same rambling clapboard houses with their leafy lawns and porch swings and hanging baskets of pink begonias swinging gently from the white wicker trellises. In the gentle afternoon sun of late August, the town resembled a Norman Rockwell painting. He half-expected to see a rosy-cheeked family through white lace curtains, sitting down to a meal of turkey and gravy and mashed potatoes, their faithful little black-and-white terrier sitting patiently at their feet.

  He and Butts didn't speak as Lee drove the Saturn up the long hill leading out of the valley toward Route 202. They stayed silent as he passed the little churchyard and turned onto the long hilly road leading past Washington's Headquarters Road and Three Bridges. As he drove down roads he had driven a hundred times before, Lee forgot about the Perkins siblings and began to think about this river valley, steeped in Revolutionary War history. As a boy, he had thrilled to the stories of the patriots battling the British troops. It was hard to imagine this softly rolling countryside in the dead of winter. Even though he had seen it every year of his life, Lee always found it hard to remember these green and inviting hillsides in the stark, stony whiteness of late December. He thought of the cold, hard winter the soldiers endured before the heroic attack on Trenton, just a few miles up river.

  The Matthew Arnold painting of that triumphal moment never lost its power to move him. It was not so much the heroism of Washington he admired, but the sheer raw courage of the men, cold and hungry and half-starved, trekking wearily across the winter landscape and across the half-frozen river in rickety wooden boats, moving horses and cannons to the other side in the dead of night. Not for the first time, he wondered, if faced with that kind of hardship, whether he would have stood the test.

  Butts broke the silence.

  "Where we goin' now?"

  "To Flemington. It's on the way back."

  Their last stop would be the most difficult-a visit to Ana's house. The crime-scene technicians already been called out to process the place for forensic evidence, but now Lee and Butts would follow suit and sift through what remained to see if they could find something-anything-that might lead them to her murderer. Maybe, just maybe, the key to her death lay somewhere among the detritus of a young life ended tragically and far too soon.

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  Ana Watkins's house was situated on about ten acres of land on the outskirts of Flemington-a name familiar to nonlocals for the renowned shopping malls and outlet stores on Route 202. Flemington itself was a handsome, decent-sized town with sturdy historic buildings and upscale, locally owned shops, including a few really good restaurants frequented by its comfortably upper-middle-class residents.

  The village had a sleepy late-summer glow as they drove through it and turned east onto Duck Pond Lane, the country road leading to Ana's house. A few miles down the road, they saw it on their left. Perched on a slight rise, overlooking a few acres of pastureland, it looked like any other nineteenth-century farmhouse in the area-except for the bright yellow police tape stretching from the mailbox to the thick oak tree at the bottom of the broad, sloping front lawn.

  Lee parked at the bottom of the driveway. He and Butts got out and walked up the long drive, which looked freshly graveled, the shiny black stones crunching sharply underfoot. A single officer stood guard at the door-a Jersey state trooper, looking snappy in his gray and black uniform. His patrol car was parked in front of the house, and he came halfway down the drive to meet them, shielding his eyes against the sun.

  "Can I help you?" he said, striding rapidly toward
them, carrying his hat in his right hand. The Jersey state trooper hats, with their stiff broad brims and crisply indented tops, always reminded Lee of Smokey the Bear-and the man's shiny black knee-high boots and matching wide leather belt did nothing to dispel the image.

  "Detective Leonard Butts, NYPD," Butts said, flashing his badge. "This is my associate, Dr. Campbell."

  Lee smiled-Butts still insisted on calling him "Doc." He supposed that the detective was trying to impress the state trooper, but it was unnecessary. He was very young-hardly more than a boy, with cheeks so smooth they looked untouched by the blade of a razor. His pale skin, and red hair and eyebrows over cornflower blue eyes added to his aura of innocence. He reminded Lee of a youthful Max von Sydow-he had the same exaggerated Nordic complexion.

  The young trooper stumbled on the freshly laid gravel, blushing a deep scarlet as he hastily placed his hat upon his head.

  "Lars Anderson, Jersey State Police," he said, extending a hand. "They told me you were coming."

  Lee was relieved to see the friendly expression on the officer's face as they shook hands. These things could be tricky. Though there was a brotherhood between all cops, interstate rivalry was a fact, especially when jurisdictional issues were involved. He knew from experience that things could get prickly very fast. Law enforcement was not a profession that attracted Type B personalities. Typically, cops were quick to react, which was a good thing in the face of danger, but they were also equally quick to anger.

  But Officer Anderson seemed genuinely glad to see them. Lee imagined this was a pretty lonely and boring assignment.

  He led them up the drive, the soles of his high leather boots grinding into the gravel with a crisp crunching sound.

  "Your CSI team was here yesterday," he said as they mounted the three steps leading up to the porch. "I don't know if they found anything useful or not."

  "Yeah, it's too early to tell," Butts replied as they walked across the wooden floorboards, their heels clicking sharply on the whitewashed porch floor. He and Lee each pulled on a pair of thin rubber gloves from the box Anderson offered them. The crime-scene techs had already processed the house, but you could never be too careful. The front door was unlocked, and its metal hinges creaked as Officer Anderson swung it open.

  The front room was so bare that Lee's first impression was that no one lived there at all. Then personal little details began to emerge: the green pottery vase of dried flowers in the window, the child's wooden chair in the corner next to the fireplace. The room was clearly originally intended as the main living room of the house, but as Trooper Anderson led them through to the kitchen, it was clear that most of the living had gone on there. In contrast to the rather bleak spareness of the living room, the kitchen was a happy, untidy jumble. Bunches of dried herbs hung suspended from each of the three windows. Stained and spattered cookbooks lined one shelf of a battered built-in bookcase, and the shelves over the heavy, old-fashioned gas stove sagged with the weight of mismatched, obviously handmade ceramic plates and mugs.

  A brightly colored hooked rug covered most of the floor, which was made of the same wide white-pine floorboards as the rest of the house. A wooden table painted turquoise blue snuggled up against the far corner of the room. The walls were painted a cheerful bumblebee yellow, with a mural of wildflowers on the north wall. The sun streaming in through white lace curtains fell on the riotous blossoms, turning it into a lifelike three-dimensional trompe l'oeil. An old potbellied stove against the far wall served as the heat source for the room, Lee suspected-a wooden crate full of firewood was nestled in the corner, next to the kitchen table. The two chairs on either side of it looked as though they had been recently and hastily vacated, and the sight made Lee's heart give a sad little skip until he realized that the room's most recent occupant was no doubt Officer Anderson.

  "The crime-scene techs spent quite a lot of time in here," the trooper said. "Removed a few glasses and some silverware for fingerprinting." He looked around the room and shook his head. "Such a pity-someone was real happy here."

  Butts stared at him. "How can you tell?"

  Anderson waved a hand at a stack of unpainted ceramic mugs on the windowsill. "It's not hard to see-look here, see? She was in the middle of this project-and look here, too," he continued, indicating an open cookbook on the counter. Lee recognized it: The Moosewood Cookbook, an early pioneer of the natural food movement. The pages were stained and splattered-obviously the recipe was one she had loved, and made again and again.

  "Okay," Butts muttered, "so she was happy here. Fat lot of good it did her."

  The young trooper looked shocked at the detective's apparent callousness, but Lee knew Butts better-his disgust was an expression of his deep anger at the injustice of murder.

  "Well, I'll leave you to it," Anderson said, with a disapproving glance at Butts. "Call me if there's anything you need."

  "Thanks," Lee replied, and the young officer retreated quietly back to his post on the front porch. They heard the swing and slam of the screen door and the scraping of a chair across the floorboards, then silence.

  Lee turned to Butts. "You know," he said softly, "not everyone knows you as well as I do. I think our friend has the wrong impression-"

  "Yeah, whatever," Butts grunted, stomping over to the corner and sticking his face into a blue crockery bin. He immediately pulled it back and sneezed. "It's damn flour," he said with disgust, wiping the white powder from his nose.

  "What did you think it was-cocaine?"

  Butts ignored him and continued to poke around the kitchen, opening cupboards, lifting the lids off saucepans, rifling through drawers filled with silverware and kitchen utensils. Lee sat on one of the chairs and watched Butts for a while, then let his gaze fall idly upon the mural of wildflowers. It really was wonderfully painted-with the sun on it from this angle it was very lifelike. He wondered if Ana herself had taken up painting. As Anderson had observed, she had clearly taken up pottery, and was doing a pretty good job of it. The mugs drying on the windowsill were gracefully if imperfectly crafted, and the finished ones in the cupboard were creatively and gaily glazed. He wondered if she had a kiln somewhere on the property.

  "Okay," Butts said finally, "I think I'm done in here."

  "This doesn't look like the kitchen of someone who is suicidal," Lee remarked.

  "Naw," Butts agreed. "Sure doesn't."

  They wandered around the room for a few more minutes, and then, as they were about to leave, Lee noticed something hanging behind the potbellied stove. It was partially obscured by the black piping of the stove's chimney, so he stepped closer to have a better look.

  He saw with a shock of recognition that it was a Green Man-the same Celtic symbol he had seen on the Perkinses'

  porch. This one was larger, of a different design, and even more threatening. The face was wilder, more primal, with an expansive, evil grin. A primeval tangle of thorns and vines spilled from its mouth, wrapping and twisting around its hoary head. It also had obviously been hand painted, in bold greens and blues-probably by the same person who had painted the handmade pottery in the cupboards. Lee looked around the kitchen for evidence of painting equipment, but saw none.

  "Is that one 'a them Green Men?" Butts asked, coming up behind him.

  "Yeah."

  Butts leaned forward, studying it, his small eyes nearly disappearing under his heavy overhanging brows. "You think she made it?"

  "Could be-especially if she made the mugs," Lee said. "Let's see if we can find a kiln somewhere on the property."

  "Why? You think it's important?"

  "Well, it's interesting that both she and Dr. Perkins have the same Celtic symbol in their homes. It's not all that common."

  "Yeah," Butts said, trotting after him as they went back through the living room. "Maybe she made his and gave it to him as a present."

  "That's one possibility."

  They found the kiln in the basement, surrounded by pots and mugs and plates in vario
us states of completion. The entire room had been turned into a pottery studio-there was a wheel and raw clay and a shelf of textbooks and instruction manuals on the craft of pottery and ceramics. Clearly Ana had dived into this recent passion with an energy and commitment Lee found touching. He imagined the comfort and satisfaction it must have given her, and pictured her sitting at the wheel, her thin hands wrapped around the spinning clay, a wisp of blond hair dangling from her forehead, as she turned raw materials from the earth into the graceful and useful household items he had seen upstairs.

  He and Butts wandered slowly around the room for a while, but there was no sign of any more Green Men. There was, however, a mother and child figurine, the only one of its kind, on the table of white, as-yet-unfired pottery. Nestled among the mugs and plates, it was all curves, an impressionistic sculpture with a womblike roundness to the design. The mother's arms encased the child, as she cradled its head on her bosom, while staring down at its sleeping figure.

  The symbolic significance to Ana's life struck Lee at once: she was playing the role of both mother and child, seeking her own "rebirth" in therapy. Perhaps that accounted for her susceptibility to someone like Perkins, whose past-lives theories were probably very attractive to someone who was never very comfortable in this life.

  Butts picked up the figurine and examined it. "Looks like she was really into this stuff. Wonder if she sold any of it?"

  "That's exactly what I was thinking," Lee mused. "And if so, who did she sell it to?"

  "Here's somethin'," Butts said, plucking a piece of paper from the top bookshelf. Lee studied it over his shoulder. It looked like a ledger of some kind, with a list of about a dozen names and prices next to them, as well as a brief description of the item sold.

  "Looks like she did sell some of her work," Lee said. "Good job finding that."

  "Some interesting names on here," Butts remarked. "Here's a funny one-Caleb. Like one 'a those old-fashioned New England names out of Hawthorne or somethin'." Butts scratched his head. "But what are the chances that one of her customers killed her?"