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
