Fever Dream

'How did Pendergast take the news?'

'Hard to tell--like everything with Pendergast. On the surface, it barely seemed to affect him.'

There was a brief silence. Hayward wondered if she should try to pressure him to come home, but she realized she didn't want to add to his burdens.

'There's something else,' D'Agosta said.

'What's that?'

'Remember the guy I told you about--Blackletter? Helen Pendergast's old boss at Doctors With Wings?'

'What about him?'

'He was murdered in his house the night before last. Two 12-gauge shells, point blank, blew his guts right through him.'

'Good Lord.'

'And that's not all. John Blast, the slimy guy we talked to in Sarasota? The other one interested in the Black Frame? I'd assumed he was the one tailing us. But I just heard it on the news--he was shot, too, just yesterday, not long after we snagged the painting. And guess what: once again, two 12-gauge rounds.'

'Any idea what's going on?'

'When I heard about Blackletter being shot, I figured Blast was behind it. But now Blast's dead, too.'

'You can thank Pendergast for that. Where he goes, trouble follows.'

'Hold on a sec.' There was a silence of perhaps twenty seconds before D'Agosta's voice returned. 'That's Pendergast. He just knocked on my door. He says the painting is clean, and he wants my opinion. I love you, Laura. I'll call tonight.'

And he was gone.

40

Penumbra Plantation

WHEN D'AGOSTA OPENED THE DOOR, PENDERGAST was standing outside in the plushly carpeted corridor, hands behind his back. He was still dressed in the plaid work shirt and denim trousers of their foray to Port Allen.

'I'm very sorry, Vincent,' he said. 'Please forgive what must seem to you like the very height of rudeness and inconsideration on my part.'

D'Agosta did not reply.

'Perhaps things will become clearer when you see the painting. If you don't mind--?' And he gestured toward the stairway.

D'Agosta stepped out and followed the agent down the hall toward the stairs. 'Blast is dead,' he said. 'Shot with the same sort of weapon that killed Blackletter.'

Pendergast paused in midstep. 'Shot, you say?' Then he resumed walking--a little more slowly.

The library door stood open, yellow light from within spilling out into the front hall. Silently, Pendergast led the way down the stairs and through the arched doorway. The painting stood in the center of the room, on an easel. It was covered with a heavy velvet shroud.

'Stand over there, in front of the painting,' said Pendergast. 'I need your candid reaction.'

D'Agosta stood directly before it.

Pendergast stepped to one side, took hold of the shroud, and lifted it from the painting.

D'Agosta stared, flabbergasted. The painting was not of a Carolina Parakeet, or even of a bird or nature subject. Instead, it depicted a middle-aged woman, nude, gaunt, lying on a hospital bed. A shaft of cool light slanted in from a tiny window high up in the wall behind her. Her legs were crossed at the ankles, and her hands were folded over her breasts, almost in the attitude of a corpse. The outlines of her ribs protruded through skin the color of parchment, and she was clearly ill and, perhaps, not entirely sane. And yet there was something repugnantly inviting about her. A small deal table holding a water pitcher and some dressings sat beside the bed. Her black hair spread across a pillow of coarse linen. The painted plaster walls; the slack, dry flesh; the weave of the bed linens; even the motes in the dusty air were meticulously observed, rendered with pitiless clarity and confidence--spare, stark, and elegiac. Although D'Agosta was no expert, the painting struck him with an enormous visceral impact.

'Vincent?' Pendergast asked him quietly.

D'Agosta reached out, let the fingertips of one hand slide along the painting's black frame. 'I don't know what to think,' he said.

'Indeed.' Pendergast hesitated. 'When I began to clean the painting, that is the first thing that came to light.' And he pointed at the woman's eyes, staring out of the plane of the painting toward the viewer. 'After seeing that, I realized all our assumptions were wrong. I needed time, alone, to clean the rest of it. I didn't want you to see it exposed bit by bit: I wanted you to see the entire painting, all at once. I needed a fresh, immediate opinion. That is why I excluded you so abruptly. Once again, my apologies.'

'It's amazing. But... are you sure it's even by Audubon?'

Pendergast pointed to one corner, where D'Agosta could just see a dim signature. Then he pointed silently to another, dark corner of the painted room--where a mouse was crouching, as if waiting. 'The signature is genuine, but more to the point, nobody but Audubon could have painted that mouse. And I'm certain it was painted from life--at the sanatorium. It's too beautifully observed to be anything but real.'

D'Agosta nodded slowly. 'I thought for sure it was going to be a Carolina Parrot. What does a naked woman have to do with anything?'

Pendergast merely opened his white hands in a gesture of mystery, and D'Agosta could see the frustration in