“What are you looking at?” Ned said.
“Maybe she found something in your trunk.”
“Like what?” But he was already moving toward the car. Francie went with him. He opened the trunk: roof rack, rock salt, kayak paddle; and under the floor mat, tools and the spare. “What’s there to find?” said Ned, just as an old Bronco pulled into the driveway. Ned and Francie wheeled around, backs to the open trunk.
Savard got out of the Bronco, carrying a shiny metal box. He nodded to Francie, spoke to Ned. “I’d like to see your wife’s paintings, if you don’t mind.”
“Her paintings?”
“Mrs. Cullingwood hasn’t explained?”
“No,” said Francie. “I have not.”
“It’s kind of pressing,” Savard said to Ned, “or I wouldn’t be bothering you like this. We found something after you and I talked last night.” He told Ned what Anne had written on the floor of Brenda’s cottage.
He didn’t seem to understand, his eyes, those new eyes, going to Francie, back to Savard. “I haven’t even seen my daughter yet,” he said.
“I won’t come inside,” Savard said. “You could bring them out here, if there aren’t too many.”
“Her paintings?”
“I’ll help, if you want,” Francie said.
“I’ll do it myself.” Ned went into the house.
Savard gazed into the open trunk, then at Francie. “Did Anne ever ask you to buy one of her paintings for your foundation?”
“Why do you ask?”
“Just wondering whether you ever turned her down.”
“The answer is no to both.”
“You must do that a lot-turn people down.”
“It’s part of the job.”
“Do you tell them the truth?”
She met his gaze: surprising eyes, almost unguarded, almost as though interested in the answer for its own sake. “Enough of it, Mr. Savard,” Francie said.
Ned came into the garage from the house with some paintings, went back for more, leaving the door open. Francie heard Em crying in another room, heard him talking to her, his voice closer to normal, comforting, sweet; Francie knew the effort that must have taken. He came back with more paintings, arranged them all in a row of seven leaning against the wall.
Anne’s paintings: the still life with grapes, another still life with fish and wine, two seascapes, a desert landscape, an abstract with deep blue spirals, a self-portrait. Francie wanted them to be great, was already toying with a fantasy of Anne’s posthumous fame, and her its engineer. But they were not great; the still life with grapes was the best, and even it was not as good as she’d first thought, flawed in ways she hadn’t seen before; she argued with herself that the fault lay with the harsh strip lighting in the garage, and lost.
“That them all?” Savard said.
“Yes,” said Ned.
But Francie knew it wasn’t. Where was his own portrait, the one that hung over the bed in the master bedroom? Francie didn’t look at Ned, or at Savard, kept her eyes on a slightly fussy cactus in the desert landscape. How could he have missed his own portrait? She thought of Dorian Gray.
Savard examined the paintings one by one, spending ten or fifteen seconds on each. Francie had watched many people look at paintings, their levels of concentration ranging from superficial to profound. Savard’s was of the latter, but she had no idea what he was seeing. “Are there any works in progress?” he said.
“No.”
“Did she have a studio somewhere?”
“No.”
“So this is it?”
“Yes.”
Savard studied the self-portrait: a younger Anne in a black turtleneck, holding a paintbrush, a dull gold band almost invisible on her ring finger.
“Will you be needing me any longer?” Ned said.
Savard took his eyes off the self-portrait. “Just one more thing,” he said, and opened the little metal box, an evidence kit, Francie realized-she’d seen them on TV. At the bottom lay a road map of New Hampshire, folded open to a panel of the southern part of the state. She saw a small red X on the Merrimack River. “Have you seen this before?” Savard said.
Ned shrugged. “A road map. Is it important?”
“That remains to be seen.”
Ned reached for the map. Savard jerked the box out of his reach.“Haven’t dusted it yet.” He checked to see if they understood. “For fingerprints,” he explained. “We’ll also check for fibers-try to match car interiors, floor mats, that kind of thing. But does it look familiar, Mr. Demarco, at first blush?”
Ned gazed down into the box. Savard turned to Francie, seemed suddenly to notice her presence. “I’m sorry, Mrs. Cullingwood. Didn’t mean to keep you so long.”
A dismissal. Polite, almost deferential, but a dismissal. Why? And why now and not before? Francie had no choice. She tried to establish the proper distance in her tone. “If there’s anything I can do, Ned.”
“Thanks, Francie.” He did it better.
Francie got in her car and drove away. In her rearview mirror, she saw Ned and Savard talking in the driveway, or more accurately, Ned talking and Savard listening, very still.
Roger took his car to an auto glass shop and had a new window installed. On the way home, he stopped at the newsstand of the Ritz, found mention of Anne, but none of Mrs. Truax, none of Whitey. He parked in his garage, closed the door, carried the ax inside, and tucked it behind the woodpile in the storage room off his basement HQ, woodpile left over from the evenings when they’d had fires. Then he went upstairs and poured himself a Scotch, drank it looking down on the street from the living room window.
Whitey was (A) dead in the woods, perhaps not to be found until spring, or (B) alive and somewhere out there. A would be lovely, but he had to plan for B. Roger tried to quantify the threat represented by Whitey, in the event he fell into the hands of the police. Not, based on the evidence on his digital recorder, that the police were much to worry about: a dumb cop confused in predictable ways. Roger had already dealt quickly with the puzzle of lover boy’s reluctance to explain his whereabouts. The answer was obvious: he and Francie had met somewhere else. Perhaps determining where might be useful.
But not exigent. Exigent was identifying the points of vulnerability represented by Whitey. A leather jacket with no label. A small sum of money in untraceable bills. A story of alligators and a disputed painting. A name: Roger. Not much, but neither was it nothing, especially the name. Roger sensed a complex equation that could only be balanced by the death of Whitey. But the problem was deeper than that, much deeper, because the perfect solution, perfect in that it rendered him blameless, even sympathetic in some eyes, had involved tying two deaths together in an invulnerable little package, and how could he do that now? That meant-my God! — that in order to be rid of Whitey, to be rid of him and blameless of that ridding, he would have to design another, completely separate, perfect crime! Roger foresaw a horrifying string of perfectly unincriminating homicides stretching on and on into a never-ending future, horrifying in the vastness of its numerology, in the demonic intertwining of its permutations and combinations. What kind of a life was that? He had a dreadful premonition-no, not premonition, no such thing-that the truly perfect part of a perfect crime might be the inevitable, wired-in-from-the-inception, inclusion of its own punishment: the perpetrator being the true target from the start. But, no, that was sophistry of the most unscientific and moralistic kind, and in this case outrageous-he was not the one in the wrong. But what a thought, Whiteys row on row, all in need of being put down with all their fingers pointing elsewhere. Chaos. Chaos leading to madness, even in a being possessed of a thousand brains like his. Oh, A would be lovely.
“Please, A,” he said aloud, as Francie came walking up the street. In a well-ordered world, in a world that meant something, Whitey would be lying frozen solid under a dark tree, but since this was what Roger had been given for a world, he had to plan for B.
And there was Francie, so alive, alive at least in the sense a cow lives, unaware of the concept of slaughter-
