The Ripper books and pictures were the last thing Mark wanted to consider now. He wasn’t sure he could even read any more. Spelling his name would be an amazing feat. “Would you go get them?” he asked Preston.
“Sure.” Preston and Leslie went out the door.
From the bedroom ran Graymalkin, fur on end, eyes yellow globes of terror. Behind her Jenny said, “You’re too late.”
A voice answered. Mark had heard that voice before, in the now-vanished stairwell, not uttering words but scratching his mind. “I know. I lost the others a long time ago. But I never had you to lose. All my life I ran. I thought I was running to but I was running away. From this house, from this family, from myself. Guinevere, I regret so much.”
“I’m an adult. The house is gone. Nothing can be changed.”
“Guinevere, my daughter, forgive me, please, and set me free.”
Hilary’s arm was as taut as a rubber band. Mark’s spine crawled. Either the violence of his family or the violence of the storm had given Arthur’s uneasy shade the energy to materialize. It had given Jenny her chance to tell him off at last. But the emotion reverberating in her voice wasn’t hatred but pity. “I forgive you. Rest in peace.”
Raindrops frolicked down the wind. Another ray of sun found its way through a chink in the clouds. Static sizzled from the patrol car. Zapata and Yeager leaped inside. It skidded around and took off, narrowly missing a car turning into the driveway.
Together Mark and Hilary tiptoed to the bedroom. Jenny stood over her open suitcase, tears sliding down her face. No one else was there, not the least hint of a shape or a sound. She had forgiven him, but she had never called him “Father”.
Hilary drew Mark out of the room. “She’ll be all right. She’s tough.”
“Just like you,” Mark returned.
That long ago night, he thought, Jenny had come back to bed with her skin so cold he felt goose flesh just remembering. Later he’d felt someone watching them as they slept. Perhaps Arthur had fled in horror from his son who had just committed murder and had gone searching for his unknown quantity of a daughter. Perhaps Jenny had sensed his presence and had gone to search for him. But it was all over now.
Lucia climbed out of her car, looked after the departing police car, and greeted Leslie and Preston. “Are you all right?” she shouted through the amputated end of the kitchen.
“More or less,” replied Mark.
“I like to have had a conniption fit when the radio said the tornado hit over here. High time the cussed place came down, but I’m sure glad you didn’t go with it.”
Hilary sighed. “A shame about all the carved paneling and stuff.”
Jenny emerged, suitcase in hand, her face looking as though she’d been through a flood, but otherwise composed. Although, Mark reflected, none of them was exactly suitable for framing.
“Come over to my house,” Lucia called. “You must be hungry.”
“Ravenous,” said Jenny. “Would you collect the moggie?”
Graymalkin’s aggrieved face was peering out of the cabinet. She allowed Hilary to pick her up and cuddle her. Mark and Preston gathered up the computer and the archaeological records and artifacts. Without a backward look, Jenny started her Blazer and Mark his slightly dented but otherwise undamaged van. They followed Lucia, and Preston and Leslie followed them, through the leaf-and-branch littered streets.
His apartment, Mark saw, hadn’t suffered so much as a cracked window. Lucia’s yard was littered with multicolored petals, and the wind was scented with damp and roses. They paused on the front porch to admire a spectacular sunset, billow upon billow of cloud edged with gold like an illuminated manuscript. The sky was apologizing for its temper tantrum.
Inside the house Gilbert was lighting candles. “Electricity’s off,” he explained. Lucia served soft drinks and sandwiches. Mark, Hilary, and Jenny gulped down the pastrami and cheese and explained the happenings of the last hours. Graymalkin finished off a can of tuna and then played vacuum cleaner beneath the table.
“I’m sorry,” Mark concluded, “to have gotten y’all mixed up in this.”
“I’ve been mixed up in it all along,” Lucia told him.
Gilbert shrugged as well as he could with his arm in a sling. “All’s well that ends well.”
“Not necessarily,” said Jenny. “The Coburgs got away.”
Hilary peered into her glass of Coke as though into a crystal ball. The doorbell rang, supplemented by a fusillade of knocks. Zapata’s voice called, “Anybody home?”
Lucia ushered the detective and her partner into the kitchen and offered them food. They refused. Zapata’s hair had come loose from its braid and straggled wildly around her face, shading her grim expression. “I have news. I don’t know whether it’s bad or good. Dolores and Kenneth are dead.”
The faces around the table exchanged quick, sharp looks of horror and pity. Mark gulped. “The tornado?”
“No. The car hit a support wall in the mixmaster downtown. Witnesses said Dolores was going at least ninety. She drove straight into the wall. Not one skid mark.” Zapata took Hilary’s empty can of Coke, threw it onto the floor, and crushed it beneath her shoe. “Like that, God help me. The Cadillac looked just like that.”
“She killed herself and Kenneth, too,” Jenny whispered. “That’s what she intended to do when she left Osborne.”
Yeager stared at the family pictures on Lucia’s sideboard. “The bowie knife was in the back seat, but I guess that’s all academic now. In the trunk were some wooden boxes holding what looks like the Regensfeld things. We’ll need you, Hilary, to identify them for us.”
Hilary shrank, her breath expelled in a low moan.
“They’re not smashed up,” Yeager added. “I mean, the car hit head on; it was compressed from the front, and the fire department got there before everything….” His voice caught in his throat, and he looked at his dirty hands. “Rosalind, I’m going to go home and take a bath.”
“Sounds good to me.” Zapata drew herself up. “Hilary, Leslie, would you meet me at the Lloyd about eleven o’clock tomorrow morning?”
“Sure,” said Leslie and Hilary simultaneously.
Gilbert went to let the detectives out. Lucia started collecting dishes. Jenny’s eyes didn’t quite focus. “Mark, if I might intrude upon your hospitality once again….”
“Of course.”
She tucked the cat beneath her arm, accepted a candle, and paused at the back door. “Thank you,” she said, ostensibly to Lucia. But Mark knew she was speaking to everyone in her temporary family.
“Good night,” they all chorused.
Preston and Leslie disappeared into the dusk. Mark took Hilary’s hand. It was cold but warmed in his grasp. “Let’s go…” he began, and stopped before he could say “home”. Soon his apartment would be home for them both, he assured himself. It would always hold a subtle hint of English forest below the scent of roses.
Hilary smiled. “Home is where we’re together.”
She was right. She usually was.
With the power outage, the night was so dark the headlights of the van seemed like welding arcs. The Caprice was safe under a cover of wet leaves. Once inside, Hilary and Mark stood on no ceremony whatsoever but plunged together into the shower.
Mark stood comatose beneath the hot water. The rush of adrenalin that had goosed his courage and his strength was only a fever dream. His mind strobed with images—the glittering knife, the unearthly light, the cloying scent of perfume, voices shouting…. Hilary, he realized, was soaping him down, her touch so delicate his skin tingled. Well, he could always summon a little more adrenalin, for her.
They made love with a tenderness that through some emotional alchemy gave purpose to everything. Even after Hilary dozed off, Mark continued stroking her sweet satin skin. It would take a while before she could make love without qualms ranging from embarrassment to repugnance. But every time she withdrew she returned, eager to discover the subtleties of
rhythm and response. He anticipated the nights to come, when he could help her learn what she liked and how to ask for it. Smiling, he fell asleep with his hand tucked securely into the curve of Hilary’s waist, and did not dream of mad eyes and crushed Cadillacs.
Neither had Hilary had nightmares, she divulged with relief when they awoke to a clear, bright morning. Only the most fragile lamblike puffs of cloud dotted an azure sky. If it hadn’t been for the streets still cluttered with vegetation, and the newspaper headlines shouting murder and forgery, Mark would have had trouble believing he’d at last defeated his evil dreams.
Hilary maneuvered her car around another tree limb. “How many ministers are going to base this Sunday’s sermon on the text, It is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter the kingdom of God?”
“The wages of sin?” Mark pointed out the window.
The hill that had once been crowned by Osborne House now resembled one of Shakespeare’s blasted heaths. “No need to sow salt in the ruins,” Hilary said soberly. Human figures rather than crows picked through the debris—insurance adjustors, Mark assumed, distressed preservationists, reporters, and souvenir-hunters. In time Victoria Square would bloom over Osborne’s grave, but for now Mark and Hilary averted their eyes and passed by.
Reporters milled outside the Lloyd. Mark and Leslie had to buoy Hilary through their ranks while they shouted questions about the artifacts. From the atrium the photograph of Arthur was mercifully indistinct.
“Whew,” Hilary sighed once they’d reached the lab. “I never knew a curator’s job could be so hazardous.”
“I’m glad you’re all right,” said June, looking up from her painting. “My kids used to think my job was too dull for words. Now they want me to tell their classmates about my hairsbreadth escapes. Like the time I spilled a bottle of varnish on a Delacroix, I guess.”
“I hope my future adventures are no worse than that,” Hilary replied.
Into the cool, slightly antiseptic lab came Bradshaw and Zapata wheeling a cart. On it were three wooden boxes that looked like they’d been kicked from Texas to Germany and back. Hilary didn’t wait to be formally reinstated in her job; she reached for a screwdriver. Just as the first screw popped out, Jenny arrived with Preston. “We couldn’t stand it,” he announced. “We had to see, too.”
“There’s sod-all we can do at the dig,” Jenny said. “It’s time for the bulldozers to have a go at it. Fortunately the people from the Historical Society say we did a good job and deserve good references.” Her face, Mark noted, looked ten years younger, as though she’d excavated several strata of resolve and pain during the night. She’d found in the dig just what she’d wanted to find. And he had, too, for that matter. He winked at her, earning a quick, wry grin, and gave Preston a surreptitious highfive.
Hilary drew on her gloves. Taking a deep breath, she dug down through crumbled polyurethane and lifted out the boxwood misericord. To Mark it looked the same as the one he’d already seen, a congregation gathered before a church door just as this congregation gathered before the artifacts. But Hilary saw more. Lips parted, tasting some indefinable essence, she bent over the piece. After a long two minutes she announced, “This woman and child here on the end are fractured but not completely broken. I could inject some resin, but I think it’d be better to pack it and let the Regensfelders decide.”
No one, least of all Bradshaw, argued with her. She rooted around in the box and produced the brooch. “Enamel’s fractured in this one branch. I could dig it out and put in a plastic restoration, but the cure might be worse than the disease.” Hilary’s gloved fingertips traced the swirls of the pattern just as her naked fingertips had drawn similar patterns on Mark’s body. The brooch was for the sacrament of marriage, after all, and what was a good marriage but a state of grace—the whole greater than the sum of its parts…. As if hearing Mark’s thought, Hilary glanced up, met his eye, and smiled.
“Are they the real artifacts?” Zapata asked.
“Oh my, yes! They certainly are. They’re beautiful.” Hilary held out the brooch, grinning broadly.
Jenny murmured, “Just like Dolores to pack them well, even though she knew she’d never see them again. Almost as though she were asking….”
Forgiveness? Mark asked silently, when Jenny didn’t finish.
“I can’t help but remember that discussion about just why these things are valuable.” Hilary opened another box. She drew out the reliquary, frowned, and chose a dental pick with which to probe a slightly crushed area of silver-gilt filigree.
Zapata shifted restlessly. Perhaps she’d expected the boxes to produce a sound-and-light display like the Lost Ark. Bradshaw fluttered back and forth behind the ranks of shoulders, trying to get a better view. Anyone else, Mark reflected, would’ve simply pushed forward. Envisioning Nathan’s ghost hovering like a patron saint over the artifacts—although he didn’t think Judaism had saints—Mark gave up his place to Bradshaw and asked Zapata, “Have you closed the books on Nathan’s murder?”
“Almost. I’ll need for you, Hilary, and Jenny to come downtown and give us interviews about the confrontation yesterday—you can’t hear much on my tape, there was too much background noise. But the interview we had with Sharon Ward early this morning was very helpful.”
“Sharon finally came clean?”
“She and Travis were clinging to each other and chattering like kids, more glad to be out of it than upset about Dolores and Kenneth.”
“Did they know Kenneth had killed Nathan?”
“They suspected everyone, including each other, which is what led Travis to his clumsy attempt to intimidate Hilary. The bowie knife was his. He knew someone had stolen it, but he wasn’t sure who.” Zapata shook her head. “Sharon has very vivid memories of Felicia’s murder. She was only eleven then, and it terrified her.”
Mark had never thought he’d identify with Sharon.
Hilary glanced up. “I hope Sharon and Travis keep on clinging to each other. She’s really just an innocent ingénue beneath the clothes, you know, and he has a certain Neanderthal charm. You can drop those assault charges, by the way.”
“If you say so,” said Zapata. “But I’m not running a lonelyhearts club. Where they go from here is their problem.”
Jenny asked, “Who killed Felicia?”
Bradshaw reached forward as though to help, and Hilary shoved his hand away. Leslie and Preston exchanged a dubious glance. June swabbed a patch of painting. Mark studied the angle of Hilary’s head, the light of her extension lamp making her hair a halo.
“The way I see it,” Zapata said, “it all started with the art scam. I don’t know whether it was going on when Felicia was still married to Arthur or not, but she almost certainly had grown suspicious by 1975. I bet that’s why Dolores let the rose bushes die, to keep Felicia away.”
“Arthur,” said Jenny, “was always searching for his place in the world, trying everything, touching nothing.”
“I doubt Felicia saw him that way, although she did knit that ambiguous message into her sweater. Which she wore to Osborne the night she died. I think she went there when Dolores was gone, not to get cuttings from the last rosebushes or even to snoop around, but to talk to Arthur.”
“And she saw Arthur kill Juan Esparza,” said Leslie.
“That seems to be it,” Zapata returned. “Judging from Felicia’s autopsy record, she was hit on the head in exactly the same way. But the medical examiner estimated she lived for two more hours and died from a cut throat. Ironically enough, that bit of evidence was what kept Arthur from being convicted—he had an alibi for those two hours.”
“He called Dolores,” Mark said, grasping the truth at last. “She came rushing back from Dallas and took it upon herself to kill Felicia.”
“Not to mention ornamenting her body,” said Jenny dryly. “The rose in Felicia’s hand was quite the macabre touch.”
“Then Dolores burned the garage,” Preston pu
t in, “to make it appear a thief had done it all.”
Zapata nodded. “Arthur must have taken Felicia’s sweater before Dolores got there. It was probably up in that attic room.”
“Arthur stood trial for Felicia’s murder,” said Mark, “knowing he was really guilty of Esparza’s. Knowing that Dolores had done it—without consulting with him first, I bet. She wanted to protect his reputation, her social position, their children…. I don’t know what her motives were.”
“In the end,” Jenny stated, “no one escaped judgment.”
June flicked a brush around a jar of cleaner, the jangling noise shockingly loud. Hilary held up the Giotto panel painting and inspected it. Judas sat among the apostles, the shadow of his suicidal noose on the wall behind him. “Travis attacked me to protect Sharon,” she said. “Nathan broke up with Sharon to protect her. No wonder she was frightened.”
“Kenneth wanted to protect Dolores and Arthur both,” Zapata went on, “from any new evidence about Felicia’s murder, and from anyone finding out about the artifact scam. Dolores killed Kenneth to protect him from the consequences of his actions…. What a brangle.”
Hilary wiped off the painting, laid it face down on a cloth, and chose a bottle from the rack above her. Wetting a brush, she dabbed at the fissure on the back of the panel. The pungent odor of adhesive rose into the air and was swept away by the air conditioning system.
“It didn’t bother Dolores that Kenneth killed Nathan and tried to kill us. It bothered her that we almost—sort of—caught him.” Mark saw Kenneth’s crazed eyes and felt the hideous strength in his arm. The blade had radiated chill. He’d been possessed, he told himself, to jump a madman.
Zapata shot Mark a jaundiced glance—someone always wants to play hero. “Nathan got a hint of the workshop scam from Arthur’s notebook. It must’ve given him quite a turn when Vasarian warned him the scam was still going on.”
“He was very upset the morning I left,” Hilary said. “It’d be just like him to go searching for the missing artifacts two days later, feeling they were his responsibility.”
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