the idea of what the others must have been like. Isn’t it beautiful? All the pottery vessels I made after that had a special look about them. People in Atlanta told me they looked as if they could come alive. They were right. But they didn’t know it.”
She took another long drink and stared off into the distance. Diane thought they might be losing her. She got up and opened the box. In it lay the partial mask that Marcella had put together.
“We have one of your pieces,” said Diane, handing it to her.
“Oh, it’s the most beautiful one of all.And Father crushed it. You know, I like it like this. I like the lines formed where the pieces are fitted together. I hadn’t thought of breaking it and putting it back together. That adds another symbolic dimension.”
“Please go on,” said Diane. “We want to hear about your art.”
Maybelle Gauthier didn’t take her eyes off the mask in the box as she spoke.
“I bought a cauldron and put it in the shed, and I boiled the bones down after Everett cut up the pieces that I needed. When the bones were perfectly white, I dried them and crushed them. They made the perfect temper for my clay. I used the face of each person as the form to sculpt the piece. When I finished and it was fired, it was the most beautiful work of art you have ever seen. There was nothing like it in the galleries. It had the rough look of Indian pottery but the delicate sculpting of modern work. Each piece had a spirit in it. People saw it, even if they couldn’t put a name to it. I made a fountain for a man in Atlanta who loved the idea of water coming out of the eyes.
“Then Father found out. I don’t know how. I suspect that he came to visit when I wasn’t there and saw something he shouldn’t. Everett told me they were coming after me. That’s when I wrote the note. I was afraid. Everett helped me throw everything we could down the well. I hid all my work I had there. But when Father came, he found my pottery and crushed the beautiful pieces in front of my eyes and threw them in the fire pit. I hated him for that. He didn’t find the portraits I did of them. I hid them in the wall, along with a portrait of my mother.”
“What about the young victims?” said Lillian. “Didn’t you feel bad for them?”
Diane thought Lillian probably couldn’t hold it in any longer.
“Oh, they were far better off. The people Everett brought home had terrible lives. At least they could now live forever in art,” she said. “And their suffering was over.”
“So your father took you to a clinic,” prompted Diane.
“Yes. What was the name? Something about a river. It was a huge Gothic building. Mother would come to visit me and she would cry. She told me if I got out, Father would see that I went to jail. This way, no one would ever know what I did, and one day I’d get out and could start over. Everett begged me not to tell on him and I didn’t. I didn’t even tell Mother about his part in it.
“The clinic was a terrible place. At night you could hear people screaming. I never knew what was happening to them. I was smart enough to stay quiet and be easy to get along with. That way they wouldn’t increase my medication or do whatever it was they were doing to the other poor patients.”
Diane shivered. She and Vanessa exchanged horrified glances. Diane didn’t know very much about the clinic that once had been housed in the museum building. The docents made up ghost stories about the old clinic, but she never considered that strange and terrifying things really may have gone on there.
“They closed the place down in just a year,” continued Gauthier. “Good riddance. I was taken to another place. I forget the name. I was there for, I don’t know, but it seemed like several years. Mother would come see me, but then she died. She was my last hope. The doctors had to sedate me when I heard. I was still smart enough to be very good and they let me work in the office sometimes. It was there that I saw the surgery orders that my father had signed. He told them to give me a lobotomy. Do you know what that is?”
Diane nodded. “Yes,” she said.
“They wanted to cut part of my brain out. I had been around patients who had lobotomies. I would lose everything. I would lose my art. My father would win. I had to do something. He came to visit one evening before they were to do the surgery. I’d planned it all. It was so easy, much easier than making my beautiful pottery. I got some chemicals from the janitor’s closet ahead of time and stole an extra key they kept in the desk drawer of the receptionist’s office. As I said, I had been on good behavior and they gave me pretty much free run of the place. It was as if I were invisible. My father and the doctor were in the doctor’s office with the door shut. Before they knew anything was going on, I set fire to the outside office and locked the door. I left the key in the lock so the doctor couldn’t unlock it from the inside. The office was away from the dormitories in a separate building. There was no one to know or to hear. I stayed there looking at my father and the doctor as they tried to escape. They couldn’t get out the windows because they were barred. There was a glass window in the door, but it was double paned and had wire in between. And I watched them. I watched my father screaming at me. And I did this.”
She pointed her middle and index fingers at her eyes, then pointed them at Diane. She did it over and over in a sharp, jerking motion, her brows knitted together, her eyes dark.
“He did that to me as a child when he wanted me to pay attention to him, to look him in the eyes, to let me know he saw me. I called it his devil look, and I did that to him. That was his last vision-me giving him the devil look. And I’m not sorry I did that to him.”
Chapter 55
It was quiet in the room. The light from the windows was almost gone and only the harsh halogen light from the overhead fixtures was left. Diane didn’t know what she thought she was going to hear from Maybelle Agnes Gauthier, but she was oddly stunned and affirmed by what she heard.
She picked up the folder again and took out the like-nesses that Neva had created of the two skeletons from the well and handed them to Gauthier.
“Who are they?” Diane asked.
She ran her wrinkled hands over the drawings. “Lovely,” she whispered. “Who did these?” She looked up at Diane.
“A woman who works for me,” Diane said.
“I didn’t name them. A name would have only diminished what I was trying to say,” she said.
Diane took a breath. “What were their names before you met them?”
“Dust to dust,” Gauthier whispered. “I was taking them back from whence they came. I crushed them to dust and re-created them into something more beautiful. Something their fathers couldn’t hurt. See”-she looked at the mask still in the box in her lap-“even though my father crushed her, she’s still beautiful.”
“Who were they?” said Hanks. “We need to know who they were.”
“It was a long time ago. I don’t remember.”
“Of course you do,” said Lillian, her voice harsher than Diane had ever heard it. “You painted her; you talked with her as you were doing her portrait. What did you call her? She told you about herself. You knew her father hurt her. What was her name?”
Gauthier didn’t say anything. She stared at Lillian, but without anger. She gazed at the mask again, brushing it with her fingers, and finally spoke.
“Patsy. It seems as though I called her Patsy. The boy-I called him Steven because he reminded me of my Steven. He was quiet and sensitive. He sat so still as I painted him. He seemed to take joy in just sitting still. He liked Steven better than his name. I don’t remember what it was,” she said.
“Do you remember their last names?” asked Diane.
“No. I didn’t care what their last names were. Those were their fathers’ names,” she said.
“Why didn’t you change your name to Farragut?” asked Diane. “Why did you keep your father’s name?”
Diane had caught Gauthier by surprise. She looked wide-eyed for a moment, as if trying to understand the question.
“I don’t know,” she said finally. “I don’t know.”
“Why did you use a drawing of a bird for your signature?” asked Hanks.
She smiled. “Mother used to call me her little magpie,” she said, “and I lived in Pigeon Ridge. I liked the idea of being something that could fly away whenever I wanted.”
Hanks looked at Diane and his lips twitched into a whisper of a smile.
