Sacrificial Ground

“She’s upstairs,” the man answered quietly.

“Who are you?”

“My name is James Theodore. I’m Karen’s partner.”

“Partner?” Frank asked, as if he suspected that this was the sort of word that could easily mean something a great deal more.

“Yes, in the Nouveau Gallery,” Theodore explained. “It’s an art gallery downtown.” He stepped out of the door. “Please, come in.”

“I told Miss Devereaux that I would be back some time today,” Frank said as he walked into the house. He was annoyed with himself: How had he missed finding out about the art gallery? He took off his hat and twirled it in his fingers. “She should be expecting me.”

“I’m sure she is,” Theodore said. He closed the door and pressed his back up against it. He looked as if he were guarding a bank vault. “She mentioned you to me,” he said.

“Mentioned?”

“That you’d be coming by today,” Theodore added quickly. “I’m sure she’ll be right down.”

“Did you know Angelica very well?” Frank asked.

“Slightly.”

Frank pulled out his notebook. He could sense that Theodore was not just some upper-class playboy. He had an air of quiet authority, as if he knew he would be the same person even if the Mercedes suddenly evaporated, along with the velvet coat.

“So you’re sort of a friend of the family?” Frank asked tentatively.

“Well, there isn’t much of a family,” Theodore said mournfully. “I suppose you know what happened to Karen’s parents?”

“Yes.”

“So it was only the two of them,” Theodore added, “just Karen and Angelica.” He drew in a deep breath. “Now there’s just Karen.” He smiled sadly. “But that really doesn’t answer your last question, does it?”

“No.”

“Sorry.”

“How well did you know the family?”

“Not at all, as a family,” Theodore said. “And as for Angelica, not at all, really. My only relationship is with Karen.” He shrugged. “And to be entirely candid, I’m not really sure that I know her very well, either.”

“That sounds more like her sister,” Frank said.

“What does?”

“That no one seems to have known her very well.”

“Is that what you’re discovering?”

“Yes.”

Theodore looked at Frank curiously. “So you have to live their lives a bit, is that it? The lives of the victims, I mean?”

“In a way,” Frank said.

“Fascinating.”

“Not really,” Frank said. “It’s just that most people know the people who kill them. So, you have to find out about the people they knew.”

“Do you think Angelica was murdered?”

“Yes, I do.”

“And that she knew her murderer?”

“That I don’t know.”

“You know,” Theodore said, “I sometimes think that there is such a thing as a family that simply carries its doom around with it. Like a virus, you might say. It’s as if they’ve been infected, and there’s nothing that can be done to them.”

Frank nodded.

“The Devereaux family strikes me as very much like that,” Theodore went on. “It just doesn’t seem possible that mere accident could have generated so much tragedy. It’s more like a plague, don’t you think?”

“When was the last time you saw Angelica?”

Theodore thought about it for a moment. “That would have been last Friday.”

“Two days before she died,” Frank said. He pulled out his notebook. “Did she seem different in any way?”

“No, not then.”

The “not then” struck Frank as unusual. “But there were other times when she did seem different?”

“Oh, no, not really,” Theodore answered quickly. “It’s just that I saw so little of her. I hardly knew her.”

“Did she seem happy that last Friday?”

“I suppose,” Theodore said. “I really saw her for just a few seconds. She sort of passed me in the foyer here. She seemed very busy, but that was nothing odd for Angelica.”

“She always seemed busy?”

“Bustling, rushing about, that sort of thing,” Theodore explained. “There were times when I suspected that she might be quite a creative person.”

“Why?”

“Her energy,” Theodore said. “That’s the one thing I’ve noticed about creative people. They may not be brighter than others, and they certainly have no better morals or any more ordered personal lives than the rest of us. But they do have this energy. It’s like—forgive the standard image—it’s like they’re on fire.”

Frank wrote it down. “Did Angelica seem that way?”

“Sometimes,” Theodore said. He thought a moment, as if trying to recapture some part of her in his mind. “But, at the end of all that energy, there was nothing. I mean, she never really did anything.”

“She was eighteen,” Frank reminded him.

“Of course, you’re right,” Theodore said. “What can you expect from a young girl?” He walked a few paces away, then turned back toward Frank. His face was very grave, as if some disturbing thought had occurred to him. His lips parted slightly, as if he were about to speak, then closed suddenly, sealing off the words.

“Hello, Mr. Clemons.”

Frank glanced toward the stairs that swept down to the foyer and saw Karen as she slowly made her way down them. She was dressed in a long, lavender skirt and white blouse, and as he looked at her, Frank could feel something go soft and pliant within him.

“I told you that I’d be coming by today,” he said.

“Yes, I know,” Karen said. “James was just leaving.”

She stopped on the last step, lingering there, as if to hold herself back from something. Then she moved forward quickly and touched Frank’s hand. “I’m glad you came,” she said. “The funeral is tomorrow, and I wanted to get as many things done as possible before then. Things having to do with the investigation, I mean.”

“Yes,” Frank said. His hand tingled where she had touched it.

“I’d better be on my way, Karen,” Theodore said quickly. “Nice to have met you, Mr. Clemons.”

“Thank you,” Frank said. “And if you think of anything that might …”

“Yes, yes, I’ll let you know,” Theodore said as he walked briskly out of the house.

Frank looked at Karen. “Your partner?” he said.

“Yes.”

“In a gallery?”

“That’s right.”

“I didn’t know you owned a gallery.”

“Of course you didn’t,” Karen said crisply. “How could you?”

And yet it seemed to Frank that he already knew a lot about her. He had seen her in the garden, with that rose. He glanced down at his notebook, and the facts gathered there suddenly struck him as the least real things in life, little more than an inventory of its debris.

Karen stepped away from him. “Do you want to see Angelica’s room now?”