This did not deter Des, who was partial to the ungrateful badasses. She regarded them as a challenge. She loved a challenge.
The average life span of a feral stray was less than two years. They battled starvation, disease, predators and one another. But in spite of this they managed to reproduce at such an appallingly high rate that the animal shelters were unable to keep up. It was a crisis. Crises called for action. And so Des and Bella were taking action. To date, they had rescued over forty feral strays. They took them straight to the local vet, Dr. John, who promptly checked them over for worms and ear mites and vaccinated them against distemper, rabies and feline leukemia. He also neutered them—all this free of charge. Dr. John applauded Des and Bella’s concern. He was also partial to Des’s form, especially when she was in her spandex running tights.
Right now, Des could hear Bella’s garage door opening. It was time to move out. They’d gotten a tip: Donna in produce at the A & P on Amity Road had overheard her manager—a real dick—say that he was going to call the animal shelter people about the half-dozen adult strays that were hanging around the Dumpsters out back. The animal shelter was a kill facility. Consequently, such a pronouncement was akin to genocide.
Consequently, Des and Bella were on Dawn Patrol.
Des grabbed her coffee and headed on out into the predawn darkness with it. Bella was waiting for her behind the wheel of her Jeep Wrangler in her driveway, engine idling, the back crowded with cages, have-a-heart traps and food. The personalized license plate on Bella’s Jeep read CATS22.
“Hey, girl,” Des said as she hopped in.
“Hey back at you,” Bella exclaimed brightly, her chubby fists gripping the wheel. “Desiree, how is it that you manage to look so gorgeous at five o’clock in the morning?”
“Um, okay, you forgot to put your contact lenses in again, Bella. I’d better drive.”
“I mean it, Desiree,” she insisted, handing her a shopping bag from her lap. “Stuffed cabbage. I made it last night. Just heat it and eat it.”
“Bella, why do you keep feeding me?” Des objected, smiling at her.
“Because you’re a healthy young girl and you need to eat. I don’t want to see you turn into some little wasted thing like that Ally McBeal person.”
“That I would pay to see,” laughed Des, who was six-foot-one in her stockinged feet, broad-shouldered, high-rumped and cut with muscle.
Bella Tillis, on the other hand, was an inch under five feet tall and totally round, a feisty, silver-haired little bowling ball of a Brooklyn Jewish widow in her early seventies. Her late husband, Morris, had been on the Yale Medical School faculty. Bella had three kids scattered around the Northeast, eight grandchildren and nine million causes. Around Woodbridge she was known as the Queen of Petition drives. Lately, she had been harnessing her considerable energies toward raising money for a No Kill shelter.
“What’s up with you today?” Des asked her as they went rocketing down the sleepy lane in the Jeep. Bella drove like a demon.
“Clothing drive over at the shul later this morning,” Bella replied, chin thrust up into the air over the steering wheel. Her legs were so short that she had to shove her seat up right against it, practically squashing her breasts. “Have you got any old clothes?”
“Girl, I’m wearing them.”
“What about Brandon—did he leave anything behind?”
Des let out a laugh. “Just ill will.”
When Des was twenty-three, she and Brandon had been featured on the cover of Connecticut magazine under the headline: “Our State’s Shining Future.” She was a West Point graduate with almond-shaped pale green eyes, a wraparound smile and dimples that could melt titanium at a distance of a thousand feet. Brandon, just two years out of Yale Law School, was the state’s top young district prosecutor. Only it turned out their future was in Washington, not Connecticut. Or at least his was. He went to work for the Justice Department looking into campaign fraud by several high-ranking senators. It was just a temporary assignment, he insisted. But one investigation led to another. And then he was signing a two-year lease on an apartment there without talking to her about it.
It was right around then that Des started rescuing cats with Bella. There is an old saying in pet connection circles: People who are trying to save stray animals are really trying to save themselves.
Des knew it was over when Aretha peed in Brandon’s $395 Ferragamo loafers. Cats know about such things. That same night he told her there was another woman. For the record, she was not white. But she was the daughter of a wealthy Philadelphia congressman. Their affair had started when they were in law school together. And it had picked up heat again in D.C. In fact, it had never actually ended, not even after he married Des. Which had taught Des a most valuable lesson in life:
Don’t ever trust lawyers.
“What you need,” Bella counseled her as they drove along, “is a Jewish man.”
“Is that right?” asked Des, raising an eyebrow at her.
“Absolutely,” Bella replied with total conviction. “They don’t drink to excess, they always come home at night and, oy-yoy, do they have low self-esteem.”
“Why is that such a good thing?”
“It means they work harder to please you—morning, noon and night.”
“Um, wait a second, are you saying Jewish men make better lovers?”
“I’m saying it.”
Des let out a hoot. “Bella, you are baad.”
“Now don’t misunderstand me,” Bella cautioned. “Stallions they are not.”
“Been there, done one. Maybe two.”
“But a good Jewish man won’t sleep a wink until he is absolutely positive you are satisfied. And I mean fully. Even if it means he has to go to work in the morning with bags under his eyes and full-blown case of lockjaw.”
“Yum, sounds totally off the hook.”
“They also make excellent fathers.”
“Whoa, let’s not get ahead of ourselves.” Des drained her coffee and put her empty cup in the bag at her feet. “But, listen up, I thought they only went out with their own kind.”
“Not a problem. You’re one of us.”
“I am?”
“You forget, I’ve personally laid eyes on you climbing in and out of your hot tub,” Bella replied, her eyes twinkling at her with mischief. “And there’s no getting around it, Desiree—you are one of the chosen people.”
Des grinned at her. “Girl, are you alluding to my booty?”
“If bootay is another word for tuchos then the answer is yes. And you’ve got one to die for. Although what you do for a living might scare them.”
“Hey, it scares me.”
It was not yet dawn when they pulled up behind the darkened supermarket and unloaded their traps. Dog cages worked the best, they had found. They would tie a length of string to the cage door. Lure the cats inside with opened jars of Gerber’s strained turkey. Then pull the cage door shut behind them.
They waited, strings in hand, huddled together by the Jeep in hopeful silence. As dawn came, the first to show was that black male with the white patch on his face and paws. Big Willie, Des had dubbed him. He was her kind of guy. Skinny. One ear bloodied. One eye, the left, half shut. She thought they might get him today. He actually crept to within two feet of the cage, the closest he’d come since they’d started staking out his Dumpster. And then he was just one foot from the cage. He was very hungry. Also very skittish and suspicious. His head was actually in the cage … Des tensed, poised to slam it shut behind him … But at the last minute he went skittering away into the brush and was gone. They waited an hour more but none of the others showed.
By 6:00 A.M. Des was back home in the spare bedroom that she had turned into her studio, seated before her easel with her 18-by-24-inch Strathmore 400 drawing pad and her sticks of soft vine charcoal. A pair of high-intensity desk lamps cast light on her subject, which was affixed to the easel at eye level with a bulldog clip. Not exactly ideal
studio conditions. Natural light would have been vastly preferable. But Des had no choice. It was vital that she draw for at least an hour every morning before she left for work. The studio was Des’s sanctuary. Here, she found wholeness and meaning. Here she found peace. These things she found nowhere else.
Always, she drew still lifes. Always, her subjects were taken from photographs.
Always, Desiree Mitry drew dead bodies.
They were crime scene photos. Gruesome photos. Horrifying photos. They were photos of what she had seen on the job. Des had seen things that most people never do and never should have to. Des had seen too much.
And so she drew.
On this particular morning, her subject was one Torry Mordarski, a young single mother who had been found in the woods near Wadsworth Falls shot twice in the face. One shot had glanced off her forehead. The other had caught her over her left eye, which was submerged under a coating of congealed blood and brain matter. Her right eye was staring straight at the camera. Her lips were drawn back from her teeth in the frozen death rictus.
Draw what you see, not what you know.
Des drew, stroking boldly as she had been taught to. Although she did not handle the soft charcoal in the preferred manner. She gripped it tightly, not loosely, and she held it between her thumb and middle finger, digging the tip of her index finger into the side of the stick. But it worked for her. Her strokes were sure and precise, her passion boundless. Always, she kept in mind the rule that a drawing teacher had drummed into her years ago. For Des, it had become a mantra.
Draw what you see, not what you know.
Des drew what she saw. What she saw were lines and contours, shadows and highlights. Nothing more. She started Torry Mordarski’s face very dark, then began to pull the light away from the shadows with swipes of her kneaded eraser. Finding Torry’s features. Giving contour and value to the shadows, texture to the highlights. Line by line, shadow by shadow, highlight by highlight, Des deconstructed the image of Torry Mordarski from her memory. Expunging the visceral impact. Neutralizing the horror. Abstracting the painful reality—stretching it, contorting it, injecting it with fearsome emotional power. Until the image was no longer a photographic memory but a haunting, mesmerizing work of art.
Her drawings gave Des chills up and down her spine. They gave her comfort as well. When she drew, Des was alive and free. She was the person who she wanted to be. In a perfect world she would have quit her job and drawn full-time. But it wasn’t a perfect world. So she brought copies of crime scene photos home. No one knew she did this. No one had ever seen her drawings. She did not display them. She did not talk about them. Once a drawing was completed, she would store it away in a folio book and never look at it again.
No one knew. Not even Bella.
When she was done she ate her breakfast of grapenuts, banana and skim milk. It was the same breakfast she ate every morning. She showered and dressed in a crisp white blouse and pressed gray gabardine slacks, blue blazer, polished cordovan loafers. She cleaned the charcoal smudges from her horn-rimmed glasses and put them back on. She applied a bit of purple lipstick. She wore no other makeup. Her hair burst forth in dreadlocks that tumbled wild and free halfway down her shoulders and back. A woman in East Hartford did them for her every three months. All Des had to do was keep them washed and oiled. Des’s immediate higher-ups on the job, all of them white men, regarded her hair as some kind of a militant black feminist statement. They hated it. Des didn’t care.
In fact, that was kind of the whole point.
Gazing at herself in the mirror, Des felt that she looked remarkably like a stylish, promising young minority quota executive at one of the insurance giants in Hartford.
Just as long as you didn’t notice the top-of-the-line SIG-Sauer that she wore on her hip.
CHAPTER 3
THE STORM WAS GONE in the morning. The sky was blue, the birds were chirping and the air wafting through Mitch’s window was scented with cherry blossoms and the tangy freshness of the sea. It was a cheerful, life-affirming sort of day. It was just the sort of day that made Mitch yearn for a darkened movie house, a Tod Browning double bill and an economy-sized tub of buttered popcorn.
But not today. Today he had a story to write.
After he had shaved and dressed he partook of the Frederick House’s homemade scones with honey and coffee on the porch. Then, armed with his notepad and a local map, he headed out to tour the village on foot, blinking in the blinding sunlight and trying very hard not to bump into any sharp objects.
Quickly, Mitch found himself in the Dorset Street Historic District, which was lovingly restored, immaculate and straight out of Norman Rockwell. There was a marvelous white steepled Congregational church, a town hall, library, schoolhouse, general store. There were stately colonial mansions with picket fences and window boxes and flower gardens. There was a firehouse and a barber shop with an old Wildroot hair tonic sign hanging out front. The Dorset Academy that Lacy had referred to, which attracted painters and sculptors from all over the world, was located in the Gill House, circa 1817. There were huge, leafy maples and oaks everywhere. There was no graffiti, no trash, no traffic and no stress. An elderly woman who he passed on the sidewalk smiled and said, “Good morning.” A boy rode by on a bike with a fishing pole, a sheepdog tailing after him, arfing happily.
“Day One—Have found it,” Mitch scribbled in his notepad. “Have at long last discovered the land that time forgot. All is quiet—too quiet. Have queer feeling that someone, or something, is following me.”
He stopped in at the barber shop. Had himself the seven-dollar haircut and listened to some crusty locals make fun of each other’s fishing prowess. All of it was good-natured—clearly they had known each other since they were boys. Mitch asked them how the fishing was this year and got three sharply different responses, all of them vigorously voiced. Freshly tonsored, he strolled over to the village’s cemetery, where he discovered an exceptional slice of New England history. Sea captains who had lived in the 1600s. Family plots that dated from the present all the way back to before the Revolution. In one such plot he found a beloved Pembroke Corgi resting for eternity by its master’s side. Mitch was so taken by the tiny headstone that he tore a sheet from his notebook and made a rubbing of it.
His appetite whetted by the fresh air and exercise, Mitch trudged back to the inn for a lunch of cold poached salmon, potato salad and baby greens. Then he climbed into his rental car and headed back out.
He found the village’s business district on Big Brook Road. There was a market, a package store, hardware store, bank. Nothing noteworthy. Not until Mitch stopped at the gas station to fill up and discovered that a living, breathing attendant was on duty there to fill the tank for him and wash his windshield. He even offered to check Mitch’s oil. It was a positively eerie experience. From there Mitch turned north onto Route 156 and headed up around a bend into Dorset’s soft, rolling green hills. He was in moneyed farm country now. There were huge old colonial estates edged by stone fences, with lush meadows and forests and rushing streams. They had names, these estates. He passed a riding academy called Buttermilk Farms. He passed Gray Rocks, which bred champion Burmese Mountain dogs. He passed no place called Affordable Handyman Special or Dump Falling Down. He made notes … Estimated median property value—north of 2 mil. Estimated number of For Sale signs observed—zero … There was a working dairy farm, Winston Farms, that had three silos and hundreds of acres of pasturage. Numerous spotted black and white cows with name tags around their necks were feeding at the troughs by the split-rail fence. Mitch got out and introduced himself to Lizzy and conducted a brief but trenchant interview on local political conditions.
From there he headed down Route 156 to the shore. There were bait and tackle shacks here. Boatyards where yachts and fishing boats were being readied for the summer. Beach colonies where the rental cottages were being spruced up. He turned off onto Old Shore Road, a narrow snaking country lane where the cottag
es got conspicuously more Laurenesque. Many had views of Long Island Sound. And vineyards. They had vineyards, these people.
Old Shore Road ended at the Peck’s Point Nature Preserve, which was open from sunup till sundown, according to the handcarved wooden sign. He followed the dirt road inside. The point was a windswept peninsula that jutted right out into the Sound at the mouth of the Connecticut River. There were footpaths along the bluffs, an observation deck, a meadow that tumbled down to the shifting tidal marshes, where, according to the signs, osprey, least terns and the highly endangered piping plover nested. Beyond the marshes was the Sound, where sailboats scudded through the sparkling blue water. On a clear day, it was possible to see all the way across to the north shore of Long Island. This was a clear day.
As Mitch sat there, gazing out his windshield, he felt a powerful tug. This would be the first summer in a long time that he wouldn’t be renting a beach cottage. He couldn’t go back to Fire Island. Too many ghosts. And he detested the Hamptons, which were strictly for show. Even the way people gardened there was relentlessly competitive and joyless. Peony envy, Maisie used to call it. So he had decided to stay in town this summer. Work on his book in air-conditioned solitude.
But sitting here now, he felt a pang of regret.
Near the southernmost tip of the Point, the dirt road ended at a barricaded bridge. It was a long, narrow wooden bridge that led a quarter-mile or so out over the swirling surf to a small island. He could make out a cluster of houses out there. Towering over them was a lovely old whitewashed lighthouse. A sign that was posted at the barricade said PRIVATE PROPERTY. ACCESS BY PERMISSION ONLY. VIOLATORS WILL BE PROSECUTED. The barricade was raised and lowered by inserting a coded card in an electronic sensor device, like in a private parking garage. Deliverymen and guests could gain access only by buzzing the residents, who were obviously very rich and very lucky.
The Cold Blue Blood: A Berger and Mitry Mystery Page 3
