them graceful.
'There must be more Nabis paintings in this room than anywhere else in the country,' I said. 'How did you find them all?'
'April was good at things like that,' Ransom said, suddenly looking very tired again. 'She went to a lot of the families, and most of them were willing to part with a couple of pieces. It's nice that you like the Vuillard—that was our favorite, too.'
It was the centerpiece of their collection: the most important painting they owned, and also the most profound, the most mysterious and radiant. It was an outright celebration of sunlight on leaves, of the interaction of people in families and of people with the natural world.
'Does it have a name?' I stood up to get a closer look.
'I think it's called
I looked at him over my shoulder, but he gave no indication of knowing that there was a famous Brothers Grimm story with that name, nor that the name might have meant anything to me. He nodded, confirming that I had heard him right. The coincidence of the painting's name affected me as I went toward the canvas. The people beneath the great tree seemed lonely and isolated, trapped in their private thoughts and passions; the occasion that had brought them together was a sham, no more than a formal exercise. They paid no attention to the radiant light and the vibrant leaves, nor to the shimmer of color which surrounded them, of which they themselves were a part.
'I can see April when I look at that,' Ransom said behind me.
'It's a wonderful painting,' I said. It was full of heartbreak and anger, and these feelings magically increased its radiance— because the painting itself was a consolation for them.
He stood up and came toward me, his eyes on the painting. 'There's so much happiness in that canvas.'
He was thinking of his wife. I nodded.
'You can help me, can't you?' Ransom asked. 'We might be able to help the police put a name to this man. By looking into the old murders, I mean.'
'That's why I'm here.'
Ransom clamped his fist around my arm. 'But I have to tell you, if I find out who attacked my wife, I'll try to kill him—if I get anywhere near him, I'll give him what he gave April.'
'I can understand how you'd feel that way,' I said.
'No, you can't.' He dropped his hand and stepped closer to the painting, gave it a quick, cursory glance, and began wandering back to his chair. He put his hand on the stack of Vietnam novels. 'Because you never had the chance to know April. I'll take you to the hospital with me tomorrow, but you won't really—you know, the person lying there in that bed isn't—'
Ransom raised a hand to cover his eyes. 'Excuse me. I'll get you some more coffee.'
He took my cup back to the table, and I took in the room again. The marble fireplace matched the pinks and grays in the paintings on the long walls, and one vivid slash of red was the same shade as the sky in the Maurice Denis painting of the descent from the Cross. A pale, enormous Paul Ranson painting of a kneeling woman holding up her hands in what looked like prayer or supplication hung above the fireplace. Then I noticed something else, the flat edge of a bronze plaque laid flat on the marble.
I walked around the furniture to take a look at it, and John Ransom came toward me with the mug as soon as I stood the plaque upright. 'Oh, you found that.'
I read the raised letters on the surface of the bronze. 'The Association Award of the Financial Professionals of the City of Millhaven is hereby given to April Ransom on the Occasion of the Annual Dinner, 1991.'
John Ransom sat down and held out his hand for the plaque. I exchanged it for the coffee, and he stared at it for a second before sliding it back onto the mantel. 'The plaque is just a sort of token—the real award is having your name engraved on a big cup in a glass case in the Founder's Club.'
Ransom raised his eyes to mine and blinked. 'Why don't I show you the picture that was taken the night she won that silly award? At least you can see what she looked like. You'll come to the hospital with me, too, of course, but in a way there's more of the real April in the picture.' He jumped up and went out into the hallway to go upstairs.
I walked over to the Vuillard painting again. I could hear John Ransom opening drawers in his bedroom upstairs.
A few minutes later, he came back into the living room with a folded section of the
The photograph took up the top right corner of the first page of the financial section. John Ransom was wearing a tuxedo, and his wife was in a white silk outfit with an oversized jacket over a low-cut top. She was gleaming into the camera with her arms around a big engraved cup like a tennis trophy, and he was nearly in profile, looking at her. April Ransom was nearly as tall as her husband, and her hair had been cropped to a fluffy blond helmet that made you notice the length of her neck. She had a wide mouth and a small, straight nose, and her eyes seemed very bright. She looked smart and tough and triumphant. She was a surprise. April Ransom looked much more like what she was, a shrewd and aggressive financial expert, than like the woman her husband had described to me during the ride to Ely Place from the airport. The woman in the photograph did not suffer from uselessly complicated moral sensitivities: she bought paintings because she knew they would look good on her walls while they quadrupled in value, she would never quit her job to have a child, she was hardworking and a little merciless and she would not be kind to fools.
'Isn't she beautiful?' Ransom asked. I looked at the date on the top of the page, Monday, the third of June. 'How long after this came out was she attacked?'
Ransom raised his eyebrows. 'The police found April something like ten days after the awards dinner—that was on Friday, the thirty-first of May. That unknown man was killed the next Wednesday. On Monday night April never came home from the office. I went crazy, waiting for her. Around two in the morning I finally called the police. They told me to wait another twenty-four hours, and that she would probably come home before that. I got a call the next afternoon, saying that they had found her, and that she was unconscious but still alive.'
'They found her in a parking lot, or something like that?' Ransom placed the folded section of the newspaper on the coffee table next to the stack of books. He sighed. 'I guess I thought I must have told you. A maid at the St. Alwyn found her when she went in to check on the condition of a room.' There was something like defiance in his eyes and his posture, in the way he straightened his back, when he told me this.
'April was in a room at the St. Alwyn Hotel?'
Ransom jerked down the front of his suit jacket and smoothed his tie. 'The room where the maid found her had been empty all day, and someone was due to take it on that night. April got up to that room, or was
'So how did she get there?' I asked. I felt sorry for John Ransom and asked my stupid question to buy time while I absorbed this information.
'She flew. I don't have any idea how she got into the hotel, Tim. All I know is that April would never have met any kind of boyfriend at the St. Alwyn, because even if she had a boyfriend, which she did not, the St. Alwyn is too seedy. She'd never go inside that place.'
I thought: not unless she wanted a little seediness. 'I know her—you never met her. I've been married to her for fourteen years, and you've only seen a picture of her. She would never have gone into that place.'
Of course, John was right. He did know her, and I had been merely drawing inferences from a newspaper photograph and what had seemed to me the striking degree of calculation that had created her art collection.
'Wait a second,' I said. 'What was the room number?'
'The maid found April in room 218. Room 218 of the St. Alwyn Hotel.' He smiled at me. 'I wondered when you were going to get around to asking that question.'
