“HONEY, I’M HOME!” MITCH called out as he came charging in the door.
And bright-eyed little Clemmie was right there, slipping and sliding her way across the wooden floor to greet him. She seemed kind of clumsy for a cat, in his opinion. In fact, she was so adept at tripping over her own feet that Mitch was starting to think she might have a future as a starting wide receiver for the New York Giants. He picked her up. Petted her. Told her how much he’d missed her, managing to discover yet again just how sharp her young teeth were.
He could not believe how happy he was to be back. To smell the sea air. To be in his little house on Big Sister Island. He could not believe it.
The lieutenant had been there some time earlier that morning. Mitch knew this because Clemmie’s litter box was clean. Also because the lieutenant had left a highly prized possession of her own behind on his desk.
Her portfolio.
She had set it there without fanfare. No note. No fuss. Just wham, here it is. This, Mitch concluded, was the woman’s style.
Inside, he found two dozen charcoal drawings that had been torn out of a sketch pad and loosely gathered. Mitch was not sure what to expect. The only time he’d observed her at work she’d been parked out on the bridge sketching what he’d assumed to be a landscape. He didn’t know what her art would be about. Had no idea what it would show him.
What it showed him was pure horror.
Faces that were smashed and contorted and frozen. Innocent lives that had been destroyed by violence and hate and the evil that men and women do to each other. What it showed him, one drawing after another, was the soul of an artist. Lieutenant Mitry was trying to cleanse herself of the destruction she saw in her daily life. To capture it. To understand it. And she had-her drawings jumped right off the page. They were breathtaking in their visceral impact. They were positively haunting. Leafing through them, Mitch was reminded of the tabloid crime photographs of Weegie. But there was more to the lieutenant’s drawings than that. Within them, Mitch found both the noirish foreboding of Edward Hopper and the violent spiritual anguish of Edvard Munch, the great Norwegian impressionist who gave the world The Scream. Within them, he found a vision that was uniquely her own.
Dead people. She drew nothing but dead people. All except for the last one Mitch came to. This one was a portrait of a living man whose face was a wretched mask of pain, his eyes hollow and etched with sorrow. As Mitch stared at it, he realized with a shudder that it was a portrait of himself.
He immediately gathered her drawings back up, jumped in his pickup and headed for Dorset’s graceful, tree-lined historic district. Several cruisers, marked and unmarked, were parked out in front of the white, wood-framed town hall. Also a television news crew van. Mitch left the portfolio on the seat of his truck and went inside, where he was nearly bowled over by the smell of musty old carpeting. The office of the first selectman, the village’s equivalent of a mayor, was just inside the front door. His desk was positioned out in the middle of the room and his door was open. A quaint old Yankee custom-anyone who wanted to speak his or her mind just had to walk in, sit down and start talking. Right now, that anyone was a freshly minted J-school grad who looked remarkably like an eleven-year-old child wearing Lesley Stahl’s clothing and hair. A cameraman was stationed in the doorway, capturing their conversation on video, the lights from his camera bathing the office in artificial brightness. The first selectman, a wheezy white-haired man with an extremely red nose, looked very unhappy.
Lieutenant Mitry’s temporary command center was located down the hall in the conference room. Here Mitch found a hive of activity. Four uniformed troopers talking on telephones, two more pecking away at computers. Files and evidence reports were stacked everywhere. Lieutenant Mitry was locked in grim conversation with her short, muscular sergeant. It was he who noticed Mitch first.
“Help you?” he grunted, eyeballing Mitch’s fat lip with chilly suspicion.
“I’ll take this,” she broke in quickly, crossing the room toward Mitch. “What have you got for me?”
“Something out in my truck that you left behind.”
Her gaze narrowed, her almond-shaped eyes studying his anxiously. “I’ll be back in a sec, Rico,” she said.
They went out the door together.
“Quite some number Mandy did on your lip,” she observed, as they strolled out into the sunshine, the midday sun glinting off her freshly oiled dreadlocks. “You look like you were in a head-on collision.”
“Don’t kid yourself, Lieutenant-I was.”
“Funny, she didn’t have a scratch on her.”
“That’s because I’m a gentleman.”
“That’s not what she said.”
Mitch frowned. “Why, what did she say?”
“Bud Havenhurst was in the city yesterday, too,” the lieutenant mentioned, sidestepping him.
“I thought he hated the city.”
“He may hate it, but he was there.”
“Interesting. Find out anything else?”
“The forensic entomologist discovered no insect life on Niles Seymour’s remains that’s inconsistent with the life found on Big Sister.”
“Meaning he was killed on the island?”
“Meaning there’s nothing to indicate he wasn’t,” she replied. “Toxicology turned up a little something on Tuck Weems-the man was flying high when he died.”
“Marijuana?”
“And booze. Blood alcohol level of point two-six percent-more than twice the legal limit. I’m doubting he could have driven his truck down to the beach in that condition.”
“What does that suggest to you?”
“That he split a fifth of Jack D on the beach with his killer before he got himself done.”
“In the pouring rain?”
“Okay, in the front seat.”
“Did you find a bottle anywhere?”
“Nope.”
Now Mitch opened the door of his truck and removed her portfolio and handed it to her. “I’m sorry, but it is my duty to inform you that you’re a fraud.”
“Just exactly what do you mean by that?” she demanded.
“I mean you’re an artist, not a cop.”
She leaned her long frame against the truck and sighed, hugging the folio to her chest. “Please don’t be doing a number on my head right now, okay?”
“I’m totally serious. You should be doing this full time. You have to. Your technique needs refining, and you need to start thinking about color, although there’s a lot to be said for how the black and white captures the immediacy of a news photo. But just think of what’s in store for you. Look at Munch’s career. He got into nature painting, etching, printmaking, lithography… He also had a nervous breakdown in 1908 but, hey, that was him. Besides, he was Norwegian. The point is, you have a gift.”
“How do you know?” she asked, squinting at him uncertainly.
“I just do. But if you don’t believe me, let’s march on down the street to the Art Academy. They’ve got world-renowned artists teaching classes there. Classes you should be taking. We’ll show your portfolio to them. Come on,” he said, grabbing her by the wrist.
“Let go of me, Mitch.”
“They’ll tell you the same thing. I’m positive.”
“And I said let go!” she cried, wrenching her hand free of his. “I really don’t like people tugging at me.”
“Well, you’d better get used to it, because I come from a long line of great American tuggers. And I would kill to have one tenth of your talent. Christ, don’t you realize just how gifted you are?”
She stood there in wary silence, her eyes probing his. At that moment, she reminded Mitch of a big cat that suddenly found itself on unfamiliar turf-feet wide apart, hackles raised, ready to run Or to strike. Depending on what happened next.
“Tell me something,” Mitch said to her in a low, calm voice. “Exactly why did you decide to show it to me?”
“I’m beginning to ask myself that same question.”
“Okay, I think I know why you did.”
She let out a brief laugh. “Somehow I had a feeling you would.”
“You were hoping I’d tell you that you were no good-so you could forget about the whole thing. Not a chance. I won’t do it. You are good. And you know it. And you’re scared to death. I don’t blame you, believe me. Talent is a very frightening thing.”
“Now why do you say that?”
“Because if you have it, you have to do something with it. You owe it to yourself. Wasting talent is one of the deadly sins. Maybe it didn’t make the Bible’s top seven, but it’s right there at the top of mine. You must study and work and grow. And that’s where it gets scary. Because the people closest to you will think you’ve gone a little nuts. They will not understand why you’ve quit your job-”
“Wait, who’s quitting her job?”
“And they for sure will not approve, because it’s impulsive, impractical, selfish and all of those other things we’re taught not to be when we grow up. There’s big-time risk. Most of us never take that kind of a risk our whole lives. But most of us don’t have your kind of talent. Am I getting through to you, Lieutenant? You are not a cop. You are leading somebody else’s life.” He broke off, watching her closely. She looked shaken. In fact, she looked like she was about to be sick. “I’m not telling you anything you haven’t already thought of, am I?”
She considered this for a long moment before she said, “Nice words. Every single one of them.”
“But…?”
“What makes you think there’s a but?”
“I hear a but.”
She glowered at him. “But art doesn’t pay the bills.”
“You’ll get by.”
“You’re dreaming. This is real life-not some Robin Williams movie where everybody hugs everybody at the end.”
Mitch shook his head at her. “If you don’t watch out you are going to make me really angry at you.”
“Why, are you a big Robin Williams fan?”
“Don’t play games with me, Lieutenant!”
Her eyes widened at him in surprise. “You’re totally serious about this, aren’t you?”
“Totally,” Mitch confirmed. “And unless you’re prepared to be as serious about it as I am I don’t ever want to discuss it with you again.”
“I don’t take well to bullying,” she warned him.
“I’m trying to encourage you.”
“Well, try a different way before that lip of yours suddenly starts bleeding again.” Four helmeted school girls on rollerblades went teetering past them on the sidewalk, giggling. She watched them. She seemed bothered and distracted. “Look, I don’t mean to be ungrateful. I appreciate you saying what you said. I’ve just got a lot on my mind right now, okay? Something I have to do. And I’m not looking forward to it.”
“Do you want to talk about it?”
She hesitated before she gave him a shake of her head.
“May I ask you something personal?”
“What is it?”
“Why did you draw me?”
She immediately tensed, clutching her folio tightly. “It was… an attempt to try to understand a certain situation.”
“What situation?”
She ducked her head, didn’t answer him. She seemed very uncomfortable.
“Are you saying that you think I’m dead inside?”
“No, no,” she said hastily. “Not at all. It was more about me than about you. I-I probably shouldn’t have shown that one to you.” She raised her eyes to his. “I’m sorry.”
“No need to apologize. None at all. You don’t ever have to…” Mitch swallowed, his Adam’s apple suddenly feeling as if it were the size of a musk melon. He gazed at her. She gazed back right at him, her eyes large and lustrous behind her horn-rimmed glasses. “I’m genuinely honored that you chose me to show your work to, Lieutenant,” he said. “It’s an experience that I’ll never forget.” Then Mitch got in his truck, started it up and eased away from the curb, glancing back at her in his rearview mirror.
She remained there on the curb, watching him pull away. She was still standing there, watching him, when he went around the bend by the public library and was gone.