This is not an isolated fling of imagination in viewing Eva Vaughn’s work, for emotions are her forte, particularly the dark and disconcerting ones. It is no accident that the structure of Troll Bridge echoes Edvard Munch’s The Scream, but in this case the androgynous figure is caught in an innocuous, sunny stretch of bridge, with a normal couple approaching along an everyday bit of roadway. The woman/man has obviously been seized by a fit of insanity. Or is there something dark lurking under the bridge, something the couple has yet to see? Or, worse yet, that they are a part of?
Is there any style this painter has not mastered, any field she will not enter? Well, yes. She will have nothing to do with Abstract Expressionism; and she is not a Romantic. Romanticism is emotion for its own sake, and leads nowhere outside the frame that surrounds the canvas. Eva Vaughn fascinates, disconcerts, lays a hand on the hearts and minds of her viewers. That, after all, is what art is meant to do. She employs the light of Vermeer, the vigor of Caravaggio, the massive, sculptural drama of Michelangelo, and the eyes—no one since Rembrandt has painted eyes like this, eyes the depth and breadth and fullness of the human soul, of devastating honesty.
Objections to her art abound, and valid objections they are. She is naive, and she does largely ignore everything art has said over the past century. She is a painter of immense power, yet she is curiously passive. The agony and passion she paints, the menace she evokes, the madness and the sheer impossibility of life belong to others. She sees agony; she paints passion; whether she lives them or not cannot even be guessed.
It is this sense of distance, of noninvolvement, that may keep Eva Vaughn from joining the ranks of the truly great. She is young, true, but inhibitions and formalities have a way of becoming more ingrained with age, not less. A great artist leaves one with no doubt—he (and the pronoun is used advisedly) has borne the sufferings and ecstasies of his subject, himself, alone and without relief. When Eva Vaughn finally decides to paint herself with her pigments, then we shall see if we have here the greatest artist of the post-Picasso age. Even—say it quietly—of the century.
Tired as she was, this man’s personal and authoritative analysis of the woman she had met as Vaun Adams kept Kate from sleep, kept her from noticing the storm building outside her window until she closed the magazine, when she suddenly noticed the rattling windows and gushing downspouts. She fell asleep as soon as she heard Lee come in, and her dreams were of strawberries.
11
Across town Hawkin worked late in his office and eventually had himself driven home. He poured himself a drink and sat in the darkened living room of his rented house, watching the rain slant down in buckets like some B film of a storm at sea. At eleven o’clock the streetlights flickered, dimmed, and strengthened again, and the low hum of the aquarium pumps behind him hesitated, then clicked back on. In San Jose a huge area of the grid went abruptly black, and a thousand newcomers to Silicon Valley cursed and cracked their shins on the furniture as they searched blindly for flashlights and the stubs of Christmas candles. Old-timers just went to bed and told each other that it would be all over in the morning.
The storm center massed from Eureka to Santa Barbara, and the force of it was immense, incomprehensible. At one o’clock a homeless woman in an alleyway off Market Street died of exposure. At one-thirty another seven thousand homes across the Bay were suddenly without power; electric blankets went cold, and seldom-used fireplaces were stuffed with paper and lit. At two o’clock fire crews fought to save a burning house for its shivering owners, winds gusted to nearly a hundred miles per hour, and the bridges across the Bay were shut down. The gale ripped up trees by their roots, threw satellite dishes about like Frisbees, blew out the windows of office buildings. Before the night was out the storm would kill five people in the Bay counties: the woman in the alley; an old man whose heart stopped when a garbage can lid sailed through his bedroom window; a young mother who was standing in the wrong place when the wind plucked the neighbor’s badly mounted solar panels from the roof; and two young men who were returning early from a liquid party, swerved to miss a falling branch, and went off the road into a madly swollen river.
At two-thirty a redwood tree died. One of hundreds that went down that night, this was a youngster, barely two centuries old, and its characteristic lack of a taproot made it vulnerable to the combination of near-liquid soil and hard gusts from the Pacific. Six of its cousins already lay across Tyler’s Road, but this one fell directly upstream of one of the junctions of road and creek, washed top-first downstream, and inserted itself like a cork into one culvert with its roots blocking the mouth of the second. Watery fingers pried at the road bed.
At three o’clock the pent-up waters lifted the two four-foot-deep, fifteen-foot-long iron drainage pipes like a couple of straws and hurled them downhill, madly gobbling up huge pieces of the road and hillside as it passed. At three-thirty the winds faltered, very slightly. At four-ten the sodden hillside above the spot where Tina Merrill had been found abruptly let go and dumped several hundred thousand tons of mud and rock onto the upper end of Tyler’s Road. At four-thirty the storm suddenly gave up and moved on to see what it could do with real mountains. By five o’clock silence descended, broken only by the pervasive sound of running water.
Light seemed to come earlier than usual that morning, as if the sun were anxious to see what its clever child had accomplished during the night. All over Northern California life slowly dug itself out and ventured into the changed world. For hundreds of miles the ground was carpeted with branches and trees, broken glass, tangled wires, drowned birds, billboards, mudslides, roof shingles. Anything and everything that could be lifted and moved by wind or water had been. The world took a shaky breath, grateful birds began to sing, and the sun rose in clear blue skies to give its blessing to this humbling of creation.
At six-thirty Kate jerked awake and wondered why the telephone had not yet rung. Then she came fully awake and laughed to realize that she had come to assume, after only three days, that the day began with a call from Hawkin. She stretched hard like a cat and turned over to kiss the sleep-soft mouth next to her. The phone rang.
“Martinelli,” she answered through clenched jaws.
“Look, Trujillo just called to say the Road’s out, and it’ll be some time before anyone can even walk up it, so I thought we’d spend the morning here, trying to put a few things together.”
“Good morning, Inspector Hawkin.”
“What? Oh, good morning. Is this too early to call?”
“What time do you get up, anyway?”
“I don’t. Get here when you can.”
“Seven-thirty.” She dropped the receiver down hard onto the base and hoped it hurt his ear.
At seven-fifteen she found him in his office, and at first glance she thought the wind had gotten in during the night. She pushed aside the drift of scraps, set a white paper bag on the corner of the desk, and drew out a whole-wheat croissant. Hawkin looked up from the pages he was pinning on the wall.
“What’s that?”
“Breakfast. There’s one for you, if you want it.”
“Did you bring me a coffee?” He eyed the foamy top of her double cappuccino.
“You have a machine.”
“I’m out.”
She sighed, and poured some off for him into a chipped white mug with a thick brown glaze in the bottom.
“Al, I should tell you that these are the days when even the lowly secretary takes her boss to court when he expects her to make him coffee.”
“Aren’t you glad you’re not a secretary? No sugar?”
“Aren’t you glad it’s not goat’s milk? No sugar.”
She took her roll over to the wall and studied his handiwork. Her original map had been replaced by a contiguous series of large-scale topographical maps, taped together and tacked to the wall. Houses and buildings were drawn in with small blue squares (even the octagonal, circular, and rhomboidal ones), some of which had red check marks in t
hem. Scraps of paper, mostly pieces of computer printout, but also handwritten notes, a few Xeroxed newspaper clippings, and several photographs, were taped and pinned in clusters, with a line leading from each collection to a blue square. On a number of the papers Kate saw green frames around words or paragraphs.
“Why?”
“Why what?” Hawkin grunted, trimming a length of paper and pinning it up to the wall.
“Why all this fuss? I’ve got all of it in the computer, if you want to retrieve it.”
“I hate computers,” he said absently. “Glorified filing cabinets that are always locking themselves up just when you need them. Computers don’t think, they just suck up information and tyrannize the people using them into thinking the way they do: yes, no; A, B. It’s limiting, and it’s no way to catch a murderer.”
“Is that—” Kate bit her tongue.
“Speak, Martinelli.”
“Well, you have to admit it’s unusual for someone to make lieutenant and then willingly take another job that means a reduction in rank. I was just wondering if being allergic to computers had something to do with it.”
“It had nothing to do with it, Martinelli, and don’t be so damned superior. My mistrust of computers isn’t a phobia, it’s common sense. I am in the vanguard of a new age, the post-computer age, when our race turns from the worship of silicon idols and recognizes anew the superiority of the human brain. As for the other,” he said, stabbing up a note in green ink, “I dumped the job because I was too damned good at it. There was no challenge. Now, if you’re not going to help me with this you can go buy some coffee.”
“What are the red check marks?” she asked, peering at his wall collage.
“When I’m satisfied that we have relatively complete information on each person in the house, no large gaps, I put a check.”
“And the green looks like it marks evidence.” She was looking here at the first name attached to the farthest-left blue square, which was Tyler’s. His pieces of paper included a note of two years’ residence in the same town as Amanda Bloom’s mother and the fact that Anna grew up less than ten miles from Samantha Donaldson’s neighborhood. Both of those facts were marked in green ink, along with the word keys, circled in green, and the note Jag—hairs, similarly colored.
As the morning wore on, the leaves of paper on the wall multiplied and fluttered like aspen leaves whenever the door opened. The red checks gradually progressed in from both ends, a few green marks were added, and Kate’s back began to ache. The telephone rang steadily throughout the morning with names to add, alibis checked, information received. Shortly after noon Kate picked it up to hear Trujillo’s indistinct voice.
“That you, Casey? Sorry this line is so bad. It’s actually down across the road, but it still works, if I can keep the press from driving over it too much. I wanted to tell you that I’ve been up the Road to the washout, and we probably won’t be able to bridge it until tomorrow at the earliest. They’re working on it from both sides, but the water in the creek is still pretty hairy. What’s that? I couldn’t hear you.”
“I said,” she shouted, “what about from the upper side, through the reserve?”
“Even worse, apparently. There’s a lot of big trees gone down, and a major slide across the Road. Sounds like an ungodly mess. Look, this line is getting pretty bad. If you want to reach me you’ll need to use the radio. I’ll call you in a couple of hours. Ciao.”
Ciao? she thought, looking at the phone. The man’s up to his nicely tailored behind in mud and reporters, and he still manages to be trendy?
“That Trujillo?” Hawkin had been running his hands through his hair while he stood staring at his map, and he looked very rumpled.
“None other. The Road’s out until at least tomorrow.”
“Thought it would be. Christ, what a mess. At least there aren’t any brown-haired six-year-old girls living on the Road, or I’d have to have somebody go in and haul her out.” By the way he said her, Kate knew he meant Vaun Adams. “Let’s take a break, I’m seeing contour lines in front of my eyes. Time for lunch.”
Lunch was two beers and a hamburger for Hawkin, one beer and a chicken salad for Kate. After that it was back to the computer screen and the wall, and standing and thinking and half waiting for the telephone call, which finally came at two-forty. Kate took it, listened for a minute, and then interrupted.
“Hang on just a sec. Al? I think you should hear this.” She waited until he picked up the other extension. “Go ahead, start again.”
The words tumbled out over the telephone in a rush, as if the speaker did not want to stop and consider too closely what he was saying.
“Jim Marsh. Trujillo sent me to try and track down the owner of that ring we found in the Jaguar yesterday, and I think I’ve got it. I’m sorry it took me so long, but the roads are pretty bad all over. I started with the Donaldsons, but nobody there or at her school recognized it, and the same story with the Blooms. I went to the Merrill house, then to the child’s school, and her teacher, who was just leaving, said she thought it might belong to the girl who was Tina’s best friend. She gave me the address, and the child’s mother said it looked like one her daughter had been given for her birthday last November, but she thought the kid had lost it. So we talked to the girl—she was scared, thought I was going to arrest her I guess—and she finally told me that she’d given it to Tina on her last day in school. Tina told her that it was a magic ring and that she was going to use it to fly to Never-Never-land—their teacher had been reading them Peter Pan, you see—and this kid was convinced that’s where Tina was, in Neverland. She wanted—” His voice broke, and Kate realized how young he sounded. “She wanted to know when Tina was coming back. If you talk to Trujillo tell him I’m home getting drunk.” The line went dead, and Kate slowly hung up, watching Hawkin do an imitation of a stone.
“That’s it, then.” He hung up his receiver.
“Are you going to have Trujillo pick her up?”
“No, damn it, I’m not. If she hasn’t made a run for it by now, she’s not going to, and I want to see her face when she hears about the ring.”
“If you go like that, you’ll ruin a nice suit,” Kate noted mildly.
“Hell, you’re right. We’ll have to go by my place on the way. What about you?”
“Al, the last few days have turned me back into a Girl Scout, always prepared. I have a bag in the car.”
12
Tyler’s Creek runs year-round. Ten months out of the year it is a tidy, attractive, well-behaved little stream where salamanders creep and damselflies skip. On a lazy August afternoon, when the kids laugh and haul rocks for a dam and the deepest pools are barely waist-high to an adult, it is very difficult to visualize the process by which that snarl of tree roots ten feet up the bank came to be wedged there or to imagine the force that caused the convenient sunning spot of a flat granite boulder to come to rest half a mile downstream from the nearest granite outcropping. Moss turns sere and brown, tadpoles become frogs, water bugs dimple the surface on a hot August afternoon.
Kate stood well back from the gaping edge of Tyler’s Creek and realized that living in San Francisco, with the occasional power outage and blocked storm drain, did not fully prepare one for this. The image that had come to mind with the phrase “the road is out” combined a deeper degree of rutting, a lot of mud, and a bit of a gap across which some boards could be put; certainly nothing like this.
Tyler’s Creek was a ravening, greasy gray monstrosity, thirty feet of grasping, hungry, primal power. It thundered like Niagara, pulling bits of the hillside, roadway, and vegetation into itself with its strong greedy fingers and eying its human audience hungrily. Kate swallowed, mute, as a piece of the opposite bank the size of a small car suddenly broke away and slithered down into the muddy torrent. A good-sized tree came washing around the turn, its naked roots twelve feet across. The waters rammed the roots into the soil. They stuck for a long moment before the bank gave and tossed
the tree back into the center of the flood, where it whirled around crosswise in a fast, ponderous spin before being caught on a cluster of boulders, snapping instantly with a crack that momentarily silenced the constant roar, and folded itself in a streamlined fashion for the flume to run it to sea. All in barely thirty seconds.
She turned to Hawkin and raised her voice.
“We’ll never get across that, not for days.”
He shook his head, thin-lipped, his eyes on the boiling, white-capped demon that was Tyler’s Creek.
“Any chance of a chopper?” she asked.
“Not until these gusts die down.”
“Which won’t be until after dark, if then. Al, I want to go around, find a place to cross.”
“No, Casey, we’ll just have to wait until they can rig a sling across.”
“Tomorrow? Look, we’ve got an hour and a half of light, maybe more, and I can cover a lot of ground in that time. The creek isn’t that long, according to the map. Let me try it. Please?”
He looked at her, at the waters, at the small group of people who stood well back from the opposite bank. His eyes traveled back to her, to Mark Detweiler and Tyler where they stood talking, and on to Tommy Chesler, who sat on a rock and watched the waves go past like a kid at a space movie.