face, trying to see it afresh. He was comfortable with the accuracy of the proportions. What the hell had she seen here that had been so disturbing? After a few minutes, he gave up and set to work on the skull.
At noon, he stopped, and they drove to the Far Point Grill in the old Triumph, Alice looking like a carefree kid in her sunglasses and with her Cote d’Azur smile. They did this every couple of weeks when Dana volunteered at the battered-women’s shelter at Seton Hospital, as she was doing today. Alice liked watching the sailboats come and leave the marina, and the fact that she had almost been killed in a boating accident never seemed to bother her.
Katie had known Alice before the accident, too, and out of sheer compassion had quickly learned the give- and-take of Alice’s nonsensical conversation. It was easier for some people than for others. There were those who still found it disturbing to have this attractive girl speaking to them in an Alice in Wonderland syntax. It required a little creativity and willingness to laugh at yourself.
They were back at the studio in a little over an hour. Alice deliberately avoided the workbench where he had been reconstructing the face on Haber’s skull, returning to the sofa instead. Bern put on a Bach CD because Alice seemed in a Yo-Yo Ma mood, and within twenty minutes, he saw her put her sketch pad on the mesquite-slab table and curl up at one end of the sofa. She was soon asleep.
He had trouble with the sculpture almost as soon as the contours of the face began to emerge from the clay applications. From the very beginning, he found himself making a mistake that was common to beginning forensic sculptors-that is, projecting his own features onto the clay model. He went back to his measurements again and again to double-check tissue measurements, bone projections, and spacing, figures that he had determined only hours before or already knew by heart.
It was particularly frustrating because he was rebuilding and reshaping on a skull that was in perfect condition. The guesswork was as minimal as it was ever going to get. Which left his judgment to consider. He wasn’t arrogant, but he did have a lot of confidence in his ability to read a skull, and in his artistic skills.
But something was wrong. This thing didn’t feel right at all. Each adjustment he made simply resulted in a variation on a theme. Nothing substantive actually changed in the reconstructed face, because the substantive indicators remained the same no matter how many times he measured the skull or checked the tissue charts. He was just shoving around clay.
When Alice woke an hour later, she wanted to go swimming. She went to the lower bedroom, which opened onto the terrace, and changed into her swimsuit. When she came upstairs again, Bern quit working and sat on the deck outside the studio with a glass of iced tea and watched her swim back and forth in the cove below. Once in a while, he’d glance into the room and look at the head he had sculpted sitting on the workbench. The thing was beginning to get on his nerves. He had the vague feeling that there was something about it that was familiar somehow.
Alice messed around in the water, swimming, floating on a rubber raft, letting the breeze move her around in the sunny water. When she finally climbed out of the lake about an hour later, she sat on the deck with him and ate an ice-cream bar. She was just finishing it when Dana called to say that she was leaving the shelter early and would be there in half an hour.
After Alice had dressed and dried her hair, Bern thought he would try to get her to look at the reconstructed face again, now that it was finished. He tried to coax her over to the workbench, but she wouldn’t go, wouldn’t even look that way. He even tried humoring her, playfully putting his hands on her shoulders and guiding her toward the bench. But she wouldn’t be humored, either, and she pulled away from him, throwing him a painful look, mumbling something he couldn’t hear. She returned to the sofa, where she remained absorbed in a kind of distant sadness until her mother arrived.
After they had gone, Bern poured a gin and tonic, added a big chunk of lime, and went back to the reconstructed face. He sat down at the workbench and studied what he had done. Should he photograph the head now, and then go back and put a smile on the face? Since the teeth are the only part of a person’s skull that is seen by others while the person is living, sometimes showing them can be crucial to identification.
He decided against it, but he couldn’t resist doing a little more detailing, articulating the individual hairs in the eyebrows, and using the tips of the bristles of a toothbrush to lightly texture the area of the face where a beard would grow. By the time the gin was gone, he felt like he had taken it about as far as he should.
It was a little after 8:00 P.M. when he finally ate dinner on the terrace outside the dining room, a light meal of warmed-up quiche and a fresh green salad. The summer days were long and it was still more than an hour before dark, though the shadows from the house and studio now stretched far out into the water and the light on the hills across the lake was taking on the amber tones of the dying sun.
He had had a couple more gin and tonics since the first one, and now he made another as he finished putting the dishes in the dishwasher. He was feeling the drinks as he crossed from the terrace to the deck outside the studio. On the lake, the last of the sailboats were heading for the marina, which was just out of sight around the bluffs to the south, and the lake was growing still and glassy in the cove where Alice had been swimming.
As he pushed on the panel in the glass wall and stepped into the studio, the light of the reflected sunset was flooding everything inside in a honey haze. He was no more than a few steps into the room when he stopped and saw his own reflection in two of the three mirrors around the workbench.
It was odd that his image was perfectly framed in that one brief moment. Odder still was that he had caught his own reflection in a frozen moment, as in a snapshot. Profile. Frontal. His features softened in the muted honey light. It was a weird moment: The world stopped; his reflection gave no sense of movement or of life. It was as if he were looking at a wax image of himself.
Then with a sudden dizziness that he did not attribute to the gin, he realized that he was looking at the reconstructed sculpture that he had finished only hours before.
In an instant, he understood what Alice had seen in the drawing that disturbed her, why she had furiously refused to look at the sculpted head. With very careful calculation and with all of his experience and talent brought to bear on the task, he had meticulously reconstructed the skull that Becca Haber had brought him, only to discover that when the skull belonged to a living person, that person had lived with his face.
The glass slipped out of his hand.
Chapter 10
The glass hit the concrete floor with a sharp smack-and-shatter. Bern didn’t even notice. Shards of glass crunched under his shoes as he moved past the coffee table toward the reconstructed skull as if mesmerized, his eyes fixed on the face he had made but hadn’t seen. At least he hadn’t seen the face within the face. He had been intimate with its technical construction but not with its spirit. It was Alice who had seen the spirit of the thing.
Focused on the sculpture, to the exclusion of all other sensory awareness, Bern went to the workbench and turned on the lights. He sat down on a stool in front of the face and looked at it, his eyes moving over the details of its features as if they were the fingers of a sightless man. Good God. It was as if he had had some kind of myopia when he was building the face, some kind of break in visual-cognitive synapse, much like Alice’s disconnect from words that she had heard all of her life but could no longer comprehend.
But now, suddenly, he had been startled from a daze. He remembered that from the very beginning he had fought the tendency to reproduce his own features on the skull. What the hell was this? What was going on here?
He moved the stool over beside the face. After readjusting two of the mirrors, he sat down beside the reconstruction and put his own face inches away from it, side by side. He looked in the mirrors.
A warm flush spread over him. It wasn’t exact, but the accuracy of the proportional relationships was unmistakable. It was easy to see why he had tended to put his own exact features on this skull. Everything indicated that he should have. It was all there. He had indeed understood what he was looking at when he had been sketching the naked skull and then reclothing it with clay flesh. The bony architecture had told him that his own face had every right to be there.
He could hardly pull himself away from the mirrors, where the reverse angle emphasized the similarities between his own face and the reconstructed face even more. Jesus Holy Christ. What was he supposed to think?
