“I see what you mean,” she said drily. “You’d say, then, that these two are representative of her state of mind at those two times?” She sounded like a prosecuting attorney, she thought, annoyed. Still, it was risky to place too much emphasis on two paintings, and after all, didn’t every teenager go through that period of scornful rebellion? True, few had the ability to express the state so eloquently, but the talent and the temperament that had produced the March painting did not necessarily depend on chemicals to see the vision. Her own eyes were not sufficiently trained in either art or psychology for her to feel confident in judging the potential imbalance in that later painting, but the madness in it seemed more anger than psychosis. She wished Lee were here to advise her.
“Representative?” Jameson was saying thoughtfully. “You mean was all of her stuff like that,” he pointed at the larger one, “during those months? I guess so. She didn’t do all that much then—started a lot and then scraped them off the canvas, mostly. There’s only that and a couple others.”
“Any unfinished ones?”
“Vaun never left anything unfinished. If she didn’t like it she’d scrape it off or throw the canvas into the incinerator, but once she was satisfied she’d put her name on it and never touch it again.” He paused, thinking, and Kate held still, though she ached to sit on the bed.
“It was like her eyes changed during that time. Not how they looked, though that too, but it was like there was someone else behind them. She was always kind of strange, the way she’d look at you. Put a lot of people off, especially when she was small. You ever had your portrait painted, or drawn?”
“Once, yes.”
“Well, you know how it feels to have someone staring at you, while you’re sitting there frozen, and then they get up and look at your nose for a while, like it’s some troublesome piece of machinery they’re trying to figure out, and then they go back to the easel, and a few minutes later they’re standing over you staring at your eye, but they’re only seeing the shape and the color of it, and you’re not there at all, not looking out of that eye, you’re just buried underneath the cornea and the iris or whatever, wondering where to look and feeling like a damned fool?”
Kate burst out laughing, and went to sit on the edge of the bed. It was surprisingly firm.
“Vaunie was a bit like that all the time. You always had the feeling that at least part of her was studying your face and the wrinkles in your skin and the hair that came out of the end of your nose and the way your mouth moved when you made words, and it was very off-putting sometimes. I’m sure it was one of the reasons she had so few friends. But at times it was even more than that, and it would seem like she was still studying your face and your hands and the way you walked, and you’d feel self-conscious, and then you’d begin to get the feeling that she was also looking through your eyes right into your brain, that she was studying the way you looked on the inside too. Not physically, though she could do that too. I remember one night she sat with her sketchbook and drew the bones of my hand, and then she attached the muscles to the bones, and then the skin, and ended up with my hand, perfect—it was eerie. But I mean that she seemed to be memorizing the inner things that make a person work as well as the outer way he looks, and how the two come together, like the bones and the muscles and the skin. There were times, even when she was little, when you’d catch her studying you so seriously and you’d wonder if she knew about how a barn full of hay made you feel, or how it felt to be in bed with your wife, or how deep-down angry the thought of your wife’s old beau made you. Not even if she knew, but how she could know those things. Like you were being taken apart, a little impersonally but with respect, and affection. Does that make any sense at all?” he asked somewhat desperately.
“Oh, yes,” she said emphatically. He seemed encouraged, and went on.
“Well, that was how Vaun was. Odd, but I never worried too much about her. I mean, anyone who could see people like that,” he gestured at the small painting, “she might get hurt herself, but she’d never deliberately hurt another person. I didn’t think it so clearly at the time, but I’ve spent a lot of time mulling it over since then, and I can put it into words now, but it was how I thought then.
“And then around Christmas she began to change. Christmas is a big thing with us, and we always have a lot of relatives and noise and fun. Vaun was always quiet, but she seemed to enjoy it, the excitement of the little kids and all. She did a couple of nice paintings about Christmas, in earlier years. But that year—I remember it like it was yesterday—it was such a shock. We were sitting around in the morning with the presents and the wrapping strewn around, Ned helping a cousin set up his train, the girls with a new tea set, and I looked over at Vaun and she was just sitting like a statue, looking at everyone, so cold, it made my guts turn to ice. Not scornful, like teenagers do—it was different. I’ve had two teenagers of my own, and I taught wood shop in the junior high for years, so I know all about scornful looks. This was something else altogether. Cold, and far away, like she was taking notes on the habits of human beings for a bunch of Martians. It scared the hell out of me, and it put the whole day off balance, for everyone.
“I saw that look a lot over the next few months, and I didn’t know what to do about it. I’d get angry with her, and she’d just look at me. I told her she couldn’t have Lewis over any more, and she just said, ‘Okay,’ and looked at me like I was an interesting kind of insect. I couldn’t take her out of school—it was her last semester—and I couldn’t force Lewis to stay away from her just because I didn’t like the way she looked at me, could I? I should have done something, but I was very busy, we didn’t have enough money, and I thought she’d go away to college in the fall, and I couldn’t imagine that he would follow her. I should have done something, but I couldn’t think what to do, couldn’t threaten or bribe her. She had no close friends I could turn to, and I couldn’t—God forgive me, I just couldn’t reach her.”
His voice broke, and he suddenly whirled the chair around and sat staring out the window, his jaws working tightly. In the silence Kate heard a faint sound from outside the door, but no one appeared. In a minute he resumed, his voice calm to the point of dullness.
“I don’t believe now that there was anything I could have done. She had to work it out herself, whatever she was doing with him, but I tell you it was like sunshine breaking through when Vaunie began to reappear in April. I’m not a religious man, but Becky went down to church and prayed her thanks, and I knew how she felt. I wanted to sing the first time I saw funny little Vaunie looking out at me again, curious and half smiling and not cold any more. We had three or four weeks of her, before she was arrested.”
“Do you think she killed Jemima Brand?” The bald question made him wince, but he turned the chair’s wheels to meet her eyes and did not hesitate.
“I did then. I was sure she had. Nothing would have surprised me out of that other Vaun, not even, I had to admit, murder. She just wasn’t anyone I knew, and when they said she’d had a flashback of the LSD and done that, I could believe it. I’d seen her in the hospital, when she was going crazy and attacking the nurses and trying to hurt herself. Vaun said she couldn’t remember anything but painting that night the child was killed, but she agreed that she must have done it. I was convinced she had.”
“And now?”
“Now, I don’t know. I’ve had a lot of time to read and think in the last ten years, since my accident, and I have to admit, I’m no longer so sure of it. If I’d felt then the way I do now, I’d have fought for her a lot harder than I did. It would have meant losing the farm—we nearly did, anyway—but I would have done it, no matter what evidence they had. But that was eighteen years ago, and I was a different man. I have regrets, but I can’t change what happened.”
“Do you blame her state of mind during those months on the drugs she was taking?”
“No, I blame Andy Lewis. I’m no expert on how the human mind works, or the brain itself
, for that matter, but smoking marijuana, and even taking that other poison, doesn’t turn a person like Vaun into what she was. It was Lewis. He had control of her, somehow, like some filthy virus that infected everything she did. He was such a big man, claimed to have killed men in Vietnam, you know? He probably spent the time mugging old ladies in Los Angeles. God knows why, but Vaun was susceptible to him. I know he was good-looking and he chose her out of the whole school and she was no longer a leftover but the big man’s girl, but it was more than that. Something in him latched onto her and wouldn’t let go. Hypnotized her, if that doesn’t sound too melodramatic. I think she was breaking free, but whether or not she killed Jemma, and if she did whether it was the chemical in her brain or his hold over her that made her do it, I do not know. I wish to God I did.”
Jameson had come to an end, and he stopped and let the silence settle over them. Kate felt drained, and the thought of rousing herself for the next set of questions raised by this extraordinary interview made her residual aches, which were considerably greater than she’d let on to Hawkin, take possession of her will. There were more questions to be asked, but she needed a pause, and Jameson seemed content.
There was a sound of stirring outside, followed by the hollow thump of feet on the wooden steps next to the ramp, and the shed darkened. Kate looked up to see Hawkin outlined dramatically in the light that came streaming in the door, and Vaun’s charcoal sketch flashed vividly into her mind.
“Mrs. Jameson asked me to check and see if everything was all right, and to say that lunch would be in half an hour.” His eyes took in the room, paused to consider Kate’s face, smiled at the metal windows, and went to the pair of paintings resting on the floor. He stepped forward to look at them, and the room brightened.
“Interesting,” he said after a few minutes. “I take it that the larger one was done during the time she was with Andrew Lewis?”
“In March,” Kate confirmed. “The other one is from the previous October.”
“Yes, very interesting,” he repeated, his eyes flicking from one to the other. “Do you mind if I take a look at these other ones, Mr. Jameson?”
“Of course not, help yourself. Just so they go back into the same slots. Vaun has them in order.”
“Right, we’ll keep track of them. I’ll put these two out of the way,” and he laid them on the bed next to Kate. “No, don’t get up, Casey. I just want to have a peep. I spent part of the day yesterday looking at the ones in her studio.” And the rest of the day recovering, he added to himself. He walked over to the far end and slid the first of the canvases from its berth. He checked the back before he set it up against the wall, and stepped back.
“Done four months after her parents died. She was thirteen.”
The order was chronological, the cumulative effect shattering, an intense, intimate portrait of the artist as a very young woman. There were a few paintings of animals and two landscapes, but most of the forty-odd canvases were Vaun’s vision of her neighbors and her family. Three images of a younger, whole Red Jameson jumped out at them, and two of his wife. Jameson kept up a commentary, identifying each figure and most of the locations. Finally there were two canvases left. Hawkin pulled them out together and stood them next to each other.
They formed a pair like the two on the bed behind Kate, though not so striking. The earlier one here, dated early November, was of a young, ginger-haired boy-man of about fourteen, identified by Jameson as his son Ned, Vaun’s cousin. He was splitting logs with his shirt off, and she had caught an expression half embarrassed, half proud, on his young face. The second of the pair, dated February, was of a slightly older boy. He was dressed in jeans and an army jacket, and was sprawled back on a bench with an utterly expressionless face. It was a disturbing painting, with that utter blankness, and Kate found herself trying to put some emotion into it—insolence, contempt, disgust—anything human to fill it in.
“That’s Timothy Bauer, lived down the road. He was one of Lewis’s followers. He died a couple years later, higher’n a kite on something and ran his car off the levee into the canal.”
“No paintings of Lewis, then?” asked Hawkin.
“Isn’t there one?” Jameson sounded very surprised, and wheeled himself forward to look. “There isn’t, is there? Used to be one. Vaun must have taken it,” he said doubtfully. Hawkin shot a glance at Kate, who felt her tiredness abruptly leave her.
“Was it in here, Mr. Jameson?” asked Hawkin, sounding only slightly curious.
“Yes, between the one you took out and the one over there. I know, because I used to look at these sometimes, and I used to avoid that slot—I didn’t like to see his sleazy face. Maybe Vaun didn’t either and finally burned it.” He sounded as if he found that a more likely possibility than his niece wanting it. Hawkin knelt down to replace the two he had removed and looked closely at the adjoining two slots. The odd bits of carpet that lined the bottom of the case were indented wherever a painting had rested over the years. The pile was notched clearly in the slot from which he had taken the young man and in the one where the young woman putting on her makeup had rested. Between them was a gap, one of several in the storage wall, and an indentation showed that a canvas had indeed rested here, although a thin layer of dust had had time to drift across the matted pile.
“Pity it’s not here, said Hawkin easily. “I’d have liked to see his face, and how she saw it.”
“You didn’t see it in her studio, then?” asked Jameson.
“Do you remember what it looked like?”
“I sure do. He was sitting in a turned-around chair, his arms along the back of it, his chin on his forearms. Shirtless. He had a tattoo, I remember, on his upper arm, a snake or something. He looked sweaty, and when I first saw it all I could think was, Thank God he put his pants back on before she painted it.”
“It had sexual overtones, then?”
“Yes. I don’t know why, something in his face, I guess. It was awful. But it wasn’t there, then? In her house?”
“I may have missed it; there’s a lot of paintings. When did you see it last?”
“Years. It’s years since I actually looked at it—like I told you, I didn’t like to see him. I think it was here last summer, but I couldn’t swear to it.”
“No problem—just curiosity. Mr. Jameson, I’d like to borrow a few of these paintings, if I may.”
“Which ones?”
“The two final ones, and two or three of the earlier ones. I’d be interested in having someone more knowledgeable than myself look at them and tell me about her state of mind when they were done. It could be very helpful,” he added.
“Oh, well, sure, if it’d help you. You’ll have to be careful of them.”
“We will. I’ll get them back to you as soon as I can,” he said. He retrieved the last pair, rested them next to the first pair that Jameson had shown Kate, and then went back and unerringly pulled out the second one of Jameson, squinting into the sun from the seat of a tractor. He put it next to the other four, and Jameson turned away, looking slightly embarrassed.
“Write him out a receipt of some kind, would you, Casey?” he asked, but she already had her notebook in her hand. As she finished, a thought occurred to her.
“Mr. Jameson, that painting of the lumberman’s daughter? And any others people around here might have—does anyone know what it is they have? An early Eva Vaughn would be a pretty valuable thing, I would have thought.”
“Nobody but the family knows. We don’t talk about her. She wanted it that way.”
Kate could well imagine that. This family’s ability to keep their mouths closed was probably the only thing that had stood between Eva Vaughn and a massive influx of vultures, disguised as reporters, onto the dirt of Tyler’s Road.
Hawkin moved towards the paintings, but Jameson stopped him.
“Leave them here,” he ordered. “You can bring your car over for them later. If we make Becky hold lunch for us, she won’t be happy.” He turn
ed to the door and then drifted the wheels to a halt against his callused palms. Something else was on his mind. “It’s not good,” he said finally. “I don’t like not knowing just how she is. I want you to have them tell us the truth. You can do that.”
Hawkin took out a small notebook and pen, wrote a few words, and then handed the sheet to Jameson.
“This doctor can tell you whatever you want. I’ll let him know you’ll be calling.”
“Thank you.” He folded the sheet carefully and buttoned it into a shirt pocket. He took a last look at the studio and shook his head. “I often wonder what Vaun would have been like if she didn’t have this…‘gift.’ Curse is more like it. It’s made her life hell; it tortured her mother. God forgive me, I can’t help but think it was also at the back of Jemma’s death and now these three—” He stopped, took a long and shaky breath, exhaled carefully, took off his cap and ran a hand across his hair, and put control back on along with the hat. “I remember an essay she wrote once in high school, an English assignment. Becky still has it somewhere. They were supposed to write on a word, any word, to research it and say what it meant to them, that kind of thing. Vaun chose the word talent. She started out talking about a talent as a kind of Roman coin and then went on to say that money was a form of energy, neither good nor bad in itself, just energy. ‘It’s how the talent is spent that makes the difference,’ that’s how the paper ended. Clever, it was, better than most of her schoolwork. But sad. At that time, she thought she was in charge. She never has been. Her talent has eaten her up, from the time she was a bitty little girl. She can never be normal, never be free and happy, not while this ‘gift’ has her. I think she knows it, too, now. I’m sure she does. It’s a terrible thing to say, but I wasn’t all that surprised when I heard she’d tried to kill herself. She’s a sad girl, is my Vaunie. Not just sad, I don’t mean to say that, but she has very few dreams left. All she has is her ‘gift’ and the world she paints. All she has is her eyes and her hands, and if one of them fails, that will be the end of her.” He turned his head and looked straight up at Kate, and she was shocked to see tears brimming into his tough eyes. “I love Vaun like a daughter, and this talent of hers is not a happy thing. I wouldn’t wish it on an enemy.”