He blinked, gave the paintings a final glance, and yanked hard at his wheels, disappearing down the ramp at a heart-stopping speed. He was halfway to the house before Kate and Hawkin caught up with him.
17
The house smelled of onions and hot cheese and nutmeg. Kate excused herself and ducked into the small bathroom just inside the back door. She was relieved to find that the blood had only reached as far as the lining of her jacket. She took off her blouse, pulled off the soaked bandages, and replaced them with two sterile pads and a plastic-backed six-inch square, held down with lengths of tape. It was awkward, but she got it on. She sponged off her blouse, one chosen that morning for the dark colors and all-over pattern, dried it with toilet paper, and got dressed again. Wrapping the gory evidence in more toilet paper, she thrust it into the waste basket, used the toilet, washed her hands, opened the door, and nearly collided with a tall man with red hair whom she had last seen as a boy on canvas, splitting wood.
His arrogant blue eyes probed lazily over her body from hair to ankles before rising slowly to her own eyes. She felt herself stiffen and blocked it immediately, but she could never do much about the impersonal smile that came to her lips when this happened, the civilized version of the raised-hackle snarl.
“Well, well,” he said. “I must say that when Mom told me a police lady was coming today, I didn’t expect someone like you. I’m Ned Jameson, and I’ll shake your hand when I’m a bit cleaner.”
“Casey Martinelli. Isn’t the ground a bit wet for turning today?” she asked innocently, and she was unprofessionally gratified to see a flush of anger start up, before he decided that it was the simple question of a female nonfarmer.
“A bit. Not too bad.” He turned to put the black rubber boots he carried onto a sheet of newspaper near the door, and she glanced at his clothes. Mud from knee to hips and fingertip to shoulders was probably not normal. She turned away to conceal her smile.
The cat had disappeared from the window seat, Kate noticed, replaced by Hawkin, who was seriously discussing a multicolored, much-jutting Lego construction with a small brown-haired boy in patched jeans, while a toddler with a head of the most stunning red curls Kate had ever seen sat glued to Hawkin’s other side, her little round body twisted forward to watch their faces as she followed the conversation with serious concentration.
Kate exchanged an amused look with Red Jameson and moved to one side to let pass a slim woman with darker red curls and a heavy casserole in her hands. She plunked the pot on the table, wiped her hands unnecessarily on her apron, and held out her hand to Kate.
“Joanna Olsen. The two monsters are mine, Teddy and Marta. My neighbor was going to watch them for me but one of hers is coming down with something, so we’ll just have to shout over them.”
“They’ll be fine, Joanna,” said her mother’s voice from behind Kate. “Let’s sit down now, Miss Martinelli there, and Alonzo, you can sit there.”
“It’s Casey, Mrs. Jameson.”
“Then I’m Becky. What’s wrong, Teddy? Oh, all right, you can move your chair next to him. Where’s Ned?”
“Upstairs changing. He was kind of muddy.”
“I told him…” began his father.
“Now, Red, we know you told him not to, but he was anxious to do something and he’s gone next week, so he had to try. You’d have done the same thing when you were thirty. We won’t wait for him, though. Some salad, Casey?” Her voice was almost sharp and she thrust the bowl to her guest in an emphatic change of topic. “I hope you like tomatoes. Ned grows them year-round in his greenhouse.”
Lunch was a full farmhouse meal, a hot dish of chicken and herbed rice, hot mixed vegetables and a salad, two kinds of bread rolls, three jams, and bottled spiced peaches for dessert. Kate ate more than she usually ate in an entire day, and when after the meal Joanna carried a heavy-lidded Marta off upstairs, she wished she could join the child, thumb in mouth and all.
Ned Jameson had come in halfway through the meal and dug into the food with great concentration, answering direct questions without looking up from his plate. The conversation eddied around him, his sister juggling admonitions to her offspring with tales of her cousin Vaun, of whom she was obviously very fond and very proud. Red and Becky Jameson contributed, and even Teddy piped up.
“Auntie Vaun is teaching me to paint. She said that if I like it I can have my own paints maybe for Christmas. She painted a picture of me. I had to sit very still, and she gave me a Lego space cruiser to put together so I’d sit still enough, but Matty’s too little to do that, so she just makes drawings of her.”
“I’ve seen that painting,” said Hawkin. “It looks just like you.”
“Was that in her studio?” asked Kate.
“When I was there yesterday,” he said, nodding.
“Did you see Auntie Vaun?” Teddy asked quickly. “She’s sick, isn’t she? Is she going to be all right?”
Spoons around the table stopped in midair. Ned Jameson’s jaws went still as he awaited Hawkin’s pronouncement, oddly intent.
“You like your Auntie Vaun, don’t you?” Hawkin asked the child.
“I love her,” he said simply. “And she loves me.”
“I could see that in the painting. I hope she’ll be okay. I’m not a doctor, but some good doctors are taking care of her.”
“She’s in the hospital.”
“I know. I’ve seen her.”
“I can’t visit her, I’m too young,” he said, disgusted.
“Maybe you could make her a drawing, so she knows you were thinking about her.” It was the suggestion of an experienced father, Kate realized, and wondered why she always forgot that side of him.
The child tipped his head, thinking.
“She likes my drawings. May I be excused, Mommy, so I can make a picture for her?”
“You don’t want the rest of your peaches? Okay, you come up with me and we’ll find your crayons.”
Becky Jameson brought in coffee and began to clear the dishes, refusing any help. Kate and Hawkin were left alone with Red and his son, who had not yet spoken to each other. Hawkin stirred sugar into his cup and opened a polite topic of conversation.
“You grow hothouse tomatoes, Ned?”
“Not commercially, it’s too expensive, but it’s nice to have a few of the summer vegetables in winter.”
“What do you do, then?”
“Farm this place, some experimental stuff I’m doing with the local organic farmers’ organization. Fruit mostly, but the last year or so I’ve been growing those tiny vegetables that fancy restaurants like. Inch-long carrots, beets the size of marbles, that kind of thing. I don’t think they have much flavor, myself, but people buy ’em, so I grow ’em.”
“Can you make a living out of that? You hear a lot about farms closing down these days.”
Kate wondered where Hawkin’s sudden interest in agriculture came from, or was going to. Ned seemed reluctant to answer.
“Oh, yes. Well, not a great living. Farmers don’t drive Rolls Royces, but the bills get paid. Course, a lot of us have other jobs, too, just to help out, during the slack times.”
“What do you do? Your other job?”
“I make deliveries.” Red was looking oddly at his son.
“Truck driving, then? Long distance?”
“Sometimes.”
“Yes, I think your mother mentioned that you were going away next week. Must be hard on your wife.”
“Oh, she doesn’t mind; it doesn’t happen that often.” Here Red interrupted with a snort, and when his son shot him a look of barely controlled rage, Kate realized what Hawkin was after, though she was not at all sure how he had known it was there.
“It doesn’t,” he insisted. “And the money’s damn good.”
Teddy came back into the room, crayons and paper in hand, and climbed into the chair next to Hawkin, who helped him clear a place for the pad, automatically placing a half-full glass of milk to one side without taking
his interested gaze from the young man across the table.
“The money’s not the reason—” began Red, but Hawkin seemed not to hear him and talked over his words.
“I’ve always been fascinated by those big rigs—an eighteen wheeler, is it? A refrigerator truck?”
“Usually. It’s owned by the local co-op of organic farmers. Three of us have licenses, so we take turns with deliveries. Usually the truck’s only half full, so we fill up with stuff for the other growers.” The young man spoke easily, but he seemed to be warmer than the room’s temperature would account for.
“Mostly California?”
“Yeah, some Oregon.”
“And Nevada, and Utah, and Texas,” broke in his father. “It’s a crazy thing to mix with trying to grow crops.”
Several things happened at once. Ned shoved his chair back with a crash just as his mother entered, and the oblivious Teddy reached for a crayon just as Hawkin put his own arm out to place his napkin on the table. The anger from one end of the table and the maternal consternation from the doorway were both drowned by a child’s horrified shriek as the contents of the glass shot across the drawing, over the edge of the table and all over the front of the young artist. Only Kate, seated directly across from them, saw that it was Hawkin’s hand rather than Teddy’s arm that had propelled the glass, and by the time it had been cleared and wiped and the child taken upstairs for dry clothes, the air had cleared.
Hawkin accepted another cup of coffee and sat back, meeting Ned’s wary glances with the same benign, almost drowsy look Kate had seen him wear in Tyler’s upstairs room, just before the coup de grâce.
“Tell me, Ned,” he said in the same conversational tone he had started with. “Do you think your cousin killed those little girls?”
Ned froze, but with what emotion Kate could not tell. When he spoke he looked slightly ill, nothing more.
“It looks like it, doesn’t it? She killed one already, and she’s always been a little crazy.”
“Ned!” his mother said, horrified.
“Well, it’s true, you know it’s true, even if you won’t say so. Sure she could have killed those girls. Who else would be doing it? Why ask me, anyway?”
“I’ve already asked your parents about her. I wondered what you had to say. After all, you must have been fairly close as children.”
“Vaun was never close to anyone besides herself.”
“Not even Andy Lewis?”
“She used Andy and dumped him.” He stood up again, this time more gently but with greater finality, and deposited his napkin in his place. “Look, I have work to do this afternoon. If you’re through questioning me maybe you’ll let me get back to work.”
Hawkin smiled up at him, and the smile held the younger man like shackles.
“I wasn’t ‘questioning’ you, Ned,” he said gently. “Just talking. If I wanted to question you, you would know you were being questioned. It’s been nice talking with you, Ned. Hope to see you again.”
He stood up and held his hand out in front of the man, and waited. Ned reached out with reluctance, clasped it briefly, and without another word crashed out through the back door.
Becky Jameson shook her head.
“He’s so funny about Vaun. They used to be such good friends, when they were kids, but they had a falling out about something, and before they could patch it up she got involved with Andy Lewis, and then, well, there was never a chance. Sad, really.”
“What did you say their age difference was?” asked Hawkin.
“He’s three and a half years younger than Vaun, and Joanna’s three and a half years younger than he is.”
“Kids are funny,” he said, as if to himself. “I have two, both in college now, and they’re just starting to talk to each other civilly again. Maybe if Vaun comes out of this okay, they’ll start to work it out again.”
“Maybe,” she agreed, “though if anything it’s been getting worse lately. They had some kind of a fight about a year ago, but neither of them would say what it was about. The last time she was here, he wouldn’t come over until she’d left.”
Hawkin shook his head in sympathy.
“Kids are funny,” he repeated. He finished his coffee and stood up again. “We must go. I told the principal we’d be there at two-thirty.”
“You know how to get there?”
“Yes, no problem. Thank you for lunch, Becky. Good to meet you, Red. I’ll be in touch, and feel free to call if I can help with anything.”
Mrs. Jameson followed them to the studio and helped them load the canvases into the back of the car. She gave Hawkin an old curtain to cover them and stood watching as they drove off. She looked small, and tired.
18
“That’s one angry young man,” commented Kate a few minutes later.
“Isn’t he though? Look, pull up at that wide spot. I need to think for a minute.”
He got out and went to lean against a neat white fence. A single black cow lay ruminating, and watched him watch her. Kate joined them.
“What did Jameson tell you before I came in?” he asked.
She told him about the installation of the windows, Red Jameson’s feelings about Andrew Lewis, what he had told her about the changes in his niece from December to April, the uncertainty he felt concerning her guilt.
“Yes, I heard from then on. Interesting about the missing picture, isn’t it?”
“It wasn’t in her studio, then?”
“It was not. Even more interesting is the fact that last November the Jamesons had a break-in. A few valuables missing, some money, and assorted odds and ends—including one of the photograph albums. Not the family one, but one in Vaun’s room.”
“You’re saying that someone has made sure we have no pictures of Andrew Lewis?”
“Odd coincidence, isn’t it?”
“Could be,” she said doubtfully. “What made you go after Ned like you did?”
“I wanted to confirm a suspicion I got from talking with his mother. Ned was fourteen when Vaun took up with Lewis, remember, a boy proud of his new muscles, with a not unattractive young woman living close enough to be always there, but far enough away—both emotionally, and physically often away in her studio—to take away the taint of incest. She was never a sister, after all.”
“Becky Jameson told you this?”
“Of course not. If she even thought of such a thing she’d clam up immediately. Just my cynical mind, putting two and two together and getting eight.”
“And they had another confrontation, of some kind, last year.”
“I wish someone had overheard it.” He flipped his cigarette over the fence. “When we get to the school I want you to find yourself a nice quiet office and track down that farmers’ co-op. We need to know if any of his trips coincided with the three dates or with the other night’s attempt on Vaun.”
“You sound decided, then, that it was not a suicide attempt.”
“Oh, no. No proof, of course, but nobody who can fill a studio with what I saw yesterday could lie down in front of a fire with a bad novel and a Mickey Finn to commit suicide. It’s wishy-washy and uncertain, which she is not. Besides, she’d never endanger her life’s work by leaving a pot of beans on the fire. No, it wasn’t suicide.”
“Does Ned Jameson strike you as being clever enough to do all this elaborate business? And I just can’t see a farmer with another job on the side having the time to plan it out and kidnap and murder three children and put their bodies so they’d point to her, and then find her when she’s most vulnerable, just when she’s cut off by the storm, and somehow get to her and stage a suicide—I’m sorry, Al, but the whole thing seems ridiculous. It would have to be the work of a totally fixated person who has all the time in the world and is within reach of her even when the road’s out.”
“One of her neighbors, in fact.”
“But who?”
“That’s why I want a picture of Andy Lewis.”
“So you’
re not looking at Ned Jameson?” She tried not to sound petulant, but her back was hurting.
“Of course we’re looking at him. We can’t very well leave a loose end like that dangling, not with his attitude and motive.”
“The fact that she turned him down nearly twenty years ago? That’s a motive?”
“That, plus the fact that his father obviously worships her, and the fact that he got trapped into marriage two months after he graduated from high school by a woman who pretended to be pregnant but who has since proven to be infertile.”
“Becky Jameson said that?”
“She said, and I quote, ‘Yes, it’s such a pity they’ve never had any children, though she had a miscarriage two months after they were married.’”
“Two plus two….”
“Sounds like eight to me. But I think the thing that galls Ned the most is the money. They live off Eva Vaughn. She keeps the roofs over their heads and the bank paid, and to know that and yet to accept each month’s subsidy, from a woman who probably laughed at his overtures—well, it wouldn’t be too surprising if he were to wish her dead and have her estate come to them.”
“Assuming her will is written that way.”
“It is. There was a copy of it in her desk.”
“But you still see him as a loose end rather than a prime suspect.”
A Grave Talent Page 17
