Stone Quarry (3 page)

But I knew.

Because although the fresh prettiness of her face, the round cheeks and soft brown eyes and the wave in her hair, had all been her mother's, that sharp, slanted smile was mine.

And because, in all her nine years, I had never seen Annie afraid.

I turned away from the picture. I poured myself some Maker's Mark, left the bottle out. I drank, then flexed my

hands, palms up, palms down; they seemed all right, so I carried the bourbon to the piano bench and raised the cover off the keyboard of the old, battered Baldwin.

I ran through a series of scales, the keys cold and smooth and hard under my fingers; then, after a still minute and a few deep breaths, I started on the Mozart B minor Adagio, trying out the phrasing that had been running around my head since morning. It didn't really work, but I played through the piece anyway, twice, and then went on to more Mozart, the Sonata in A minor, which I'd been playing a lot longer and played better.

As I moved into it, the power and the tension in me grew until my whole body rang with them, with the exhilaration of balancing on a very narrow beam, barely controlling the lines of the music as they wove toward and away from each other, building, fading, stopping and not stopping, only my hands preventing chaos, creating just enough order for just enough time that the immense beauty of the music could exist here, now, in this dark, small place halfway down a wooded winter hillside, under a million stars.

Chapter 2

Morning came, cold, clear, and much too early.

Groggy, I rolled across the bed out of the sunlight, tried to remember why I ached, why my cheek was stiff and sore and my jaw was tender. There must have been a fight, but I didn't remember it, and a sick, familiar feeling began in the pit of my stomach. The fights I couldn't remember were usually ones I'd started, usually over nothing, usually with men I didn't know and had no quarrel with except the quarrel that comes in a bottle of bourbon like the prize in a box of Cracker Jacks. Time had been when I would often wake sick and aching, finding nothing in my memory but shadows and regret. It had been a long time since the last time, though, and it had never happened up here. That was one of the reasons I came here, and so I worked at remembering, pushing my way through the bourbon haze and the dull thudding in my skull.

Nothing came. I groped on the table by the bed for a cigarette. I lit one, missed the ashtray with the match, rolled onto my back. I looked slowly around, to the window, the charcoal drawing on the wall, the bureau, the straight-backed chair with yesterday's clothes slung over it. Nothing. A cloud covered the sun, left the room gray and cold.

Early-morning smoke caught in my throat and I coughed, felt a pain I wasn't expecting. I touched my neck, feeling the sore, bruised places, and then memory and relief flooded in together like tide in a sand castle. It was all there: Tony, Frank Grice, the bony hands around my neck. The muddy puddle. The gun.

I finished the cigarette, threw off the quilt. Standing at the window I watched the high thin clouds drifting east. Birds searched my yard for breakfast. They moved with the jerky speed of a silent movie, flashing from branches to the ground.

I shrugged into a robe, went out to the front room. As always, it was warmer there than in the rooms in the back, the one I slept in and the other, rarely used now.

I flicked on the hot water heater in the corner of the kitchen. I built a fire in the wood stove and put some water on to boil. When the coffee was ground and waiting I took a quick shower, in water I wouldn't have called hot anywhere but here.

I dressed quickly in clothes as cold as the air. I thought about shaving, but I looked in the mirror at my cheek, streaked and raw, and decided to skip it. Eve Colgate would just have to live with it.

Wearing my jacket and gloves, I took my coffee outside to the porch. Up on the ridge 30 ran, invisible, around the rim of my land. The damp smell of decaying leaves mixed with the dryness of woodsmoke. In the crisp and clear air the black skeletons of trees were sharp against the sky. The oaks up by
the road I'd planted myself, the
first summer I was here. They were still small; oaks are slow growers.

By the time I'd finished the thick, bitter coffee the Bounding in my head was gone. I smoked a cigarette while the pale- sun stabbed through the branches as though it were searching for something. I grabbed a handful of bird- seed from the can by the door, scattered it in the yard. Then I went back inside, rinsed out my coffee cup, slipped on my holster and my .38. I wiped the frost from the car and headed up the road to meet Eve Colgate.

Eve Colgate's house sat on the crest of a hill along Route 10 in the north of the county. Below, the state highway gleamed two wide flat ribbons laid over the fields. Cars raced along it with a faint whoosh. From Eve Colgate's place you could see that, but there were better things to look at. The sky was a brilliant blue and the wind raised miniature waves on puddles by the roadside. The sun was almost warm. Eve Colgate had apple, peach, and cherry orchards, pasture for a small dairy herd, and a long, straight drive arched over by chestnut trees planted close. A stand of forsythia already showed tiny spots of green.

The house was small but solid, yellow clapboard with white shutters and a big front porch. To the right of the drive a lawn slanted up to the house. On the drive's other side, ten feet of lawn separated the chestnuts from a tangle of undergrowth and scrub trees sloping down to the forest. A hundred years ago someone had cleared the forest from that slope, probably intending to plant and harvest and

Prosper. But the ground was rocky and winters were hard. Some of the scrub trees were as tall as the house.

A muscular black dog came charging off the porch as I drove up. I parked behind a blue Ford pickup. In front of the house was another truck, a work-scarred red one. Eve Colgate, in a black sweater, hatless and gloveless, stood beside it talking with a thickly built man.

I got out of the car. The dog barked, planted his feet, growled deep in his throat like a dog who means business. I took a step forward. So did he. I stopped, waited.

"Leo!" Eve Colgate called. The dog looked to her, then quickly back at me, giving one wag of his tail. He didn't stop growling. "Leo!" she called again, more sharply, and he hesitated, then went to her reluctantly, glaring at me over his shoulder.

Eve Colgate stood scratching the dog's ears. I walked up the drive toward her and the heavy man. The dog bristled as I got close but he didn't move.

Eve Colgate's eyebrows rose slightly when she saw my face, bruised and unshaven. She looked from me to the man next to her; then she explained us to each other. "Bill Smith, Harvey Warner. The Warners have the next farm to mine. Mr. Smith is up from New York. He has a cabin near North Blenheim." We shook hands.

"Well, I'll call you," Warner said to her. "Is day after tomorrow's good?"

"It's fine," she said. "I'll be sure to have read this by then." She gestured with a folder of papers she was
holding.

"Damn thing better be all
it's cracked up to be." Warner
spat in the dirt. "Else I swear I'm gonna sell them damn cows, go sharecroppin' for Sanderson like everybody else
.
"

"You swore that last year," she smiled.

"Yeah well, this year I'm gonna do it. Damn pipeline's gonna ruin my best pastureland anyway. Or maybe I'll just stick Sanderson with the whole damn place, retire to Florida before he figures out he's out of his mind. To hell with it. I'll call you." He swung into the red pickup, drove
nil
down the muddy drive. The dog chased after him, yapping.

Eve Colgate watched the truck go, then looked at me, her eyes probing my face as you might test an ice field before you walked out on it.

"What did he mean, sharecropping?" I asked, to be saying something under those eyes.

She turned back to the drive, watched the dog trotting up it. "That's what they all call it. The small dairy farmers are all giving up. They're selling their herds to whomever will buy them, and their land to Appleseed. Then they contract to Appleseed, putting the pastureland into vegetables. They grow what Mark Sanderson tells them to and he pays them whatever he wants." She ran a hand through her blunt gray hair. "A lot of people are bitter about it. But they do it, because they're farmers and this is what they know, even on land that's no longer theirs." She gestured with the folder in her hand. "Harvey's grandfather settled that farm. But fifty cows aren't enough anymore. I have even fewer. We're talking about consolidating our herds and investing in new equipment."

"Will that pay?"

"I hope so. I don't know what Harvey will do if he has to sell his cows, or his land."

"He says he'll go to Florida."

She said, "He's never been farther than Albany."

"What will you do?"

"I—" She paused. Her crystal eyes moved over the hills and pasture, ocher and charcoal and chocolate under the bright sun. "I have options Harvey doesn't have. Don't misunderstand me: this farm supports itself, it's not a hobby. But neither am I totally dependent on it. I have no mortgage, no bank loans. I can weather bad times." She turned away from the drive. "Shall we walk?"

I lit a cigarette, turning to shelter the match from the wind, and we headed down the slope behind the house. The dog sniffed at me. I showed him my hand and when he stuck his cold nose in it I carefully scratched his ears the way Eve Colgate had. He wagged his tail grudgingly and bounded away.

Eve Colgate watched the dog, then looked at me appraisingly. "He usually won't let a stranger touch him."

"Professional courtesy," I said.

She continued to look at me for a short time, absorbing me with her colorless eyes. Then she laughed.

"They say I'm eccentric, Mr. Smith," Eve Colgate said as we paced over yielding earth criss-crossed by papery yellow grasses.

"Is it true, or just convenient?" I asked her.

"It's true enough."

"Where are we going?"

"I need to show you something."

We didn't speak again, striding side by side through last year's field. As we walked I could feel Eve Colgate's mood change. She grew distant, tense.

Finally we came to a small outbuilding, weathered siding and corrugated steel roof in a clearing where a dirt road curved up from the valley. We stopped at the padlocked door. Eve Colgate looked at me, looked down at the mud at her feet; then, her lips drawn into a thin line, she pulled a single key from her back pocket and thrust it into the lock, jerked it open. She pushed the wide sliding door just enough to make an opening a person could fit through and she went inside.

I followed her into a single square room, flooded with unexpected brightness from a skylight. Unexpected, too, was the fact that the interior was finished: sheetrock walls and ceiling, white; gray deck paint on the broad-plank floor; double-glazed frosted windows, allowing light but no view out or in; and heat, electric heat from baseboards running all around the place.

The warmth and closeness of the air, after the sharp cold of the morning, was unpleasant, and it intensified the strong, heady smell of turpentine that rolled toward me as I came through the door. But that wasn't what stopped me dead two steps inside. What did that was the canvas leaning on the wall before me.

Six feet high, eight feet wide, unfinished, but already with the power of a nightmare, barely contained. Brutal, slashing lines; sullen, swollen forms whose weight seemed to threaten the canvas th
at held them; a darkness, a lack
of clarity that made you want to shake your head, clear the film from your eyes. When you did that, when you stared long and deep enough, the thick grays and decaying browns, even the black, began to unfold, revealing the taut wires of color within them—blood red, cobalt, the green of a Kentucky sky in the minutes before a twister hits, other colors I couldn't begin to name.

I had seen paintings like this before. They were in the Museum of Modern Art, at the Whitney, at the Tate. There had been at least one in every large twentieth- century show at every major museum for the last thirty years. Landscapes, I'd heard them called, but that was only by people who needed distance, needed to name and so deflect the pain and anger that lashed out from these paintings to rip open the places inside you where you hid things you had let yourself believe were gone forever.

"Jesus Christ," I said finally, and then again, "Jesus Christ." I looked at Eve Colgate, who was standing in front of me, a little to one side. Her, back was rigid, as though she were expecting a blow, bracing herself. "You're Eva Nouvel."

She turned to face me. Two hot spots of red shone on her cheeks, but her eyes were completely calm. "Yes," she said, in a voice that matched her eyes. "And now you know something that not a half dozen other people in this world know." She pushed past me and out through the narrow opening. I turned back to the unfinished canvas for a long look, then stepped over the threshold, joining her in the crisp, bright day.
In silence we
skirted a pasture where black-and-white cows nosed at a carpet of hay. Beyond the pasture was an apple orchard, where new, mature, and ancient trees ran in parallel rows up and over the hillside. We walked beneath them under branches studded with buds. The dog threaded in and out as though stitching the orchard together.
Eve
Colgate, without looking at me, spoke. "You recognized my work. I didn't expect that. It may make this easier”.

At
the edge of the orchard a low stone wall curved sinuously along a ridge. Eve Colgate leaned on the wall, her arms hugging her chest, her back to the sun. I leaned next to her, watching the shadows of the high, cottony clouds move across the hills.

"If you know my work," she said quietly, "perhaps you know my reputation."

"Eva Nouvel is a recluse. A hermit."

"That's right." She put her hands on the wall behind her and slid onto it, cross-legged. The black dog settled into a round pile in the sun.

"I was just thirty when I left New York, Mr. Smith. I came here and bought this farm and I have lived here since, alone. I stopped painting when I came here and did not paint for some years after." She picked up a twig lying on the wall, dug it into the joint between two stones. "That's not quite true. Within weeks of establishing myself here I did a series of six canvases. I—" She drew a deep breath. "Before I came here I had been in the hospital for—for a long time. I had been seriously injured in an automobile
accident in which my husband was killed. The accident was entirely our fault, my fault, I was driving. We had been drinking heavily." She paused again, stared into the distance, past the valley, past the hills.

To my mind, sudden, unwanted, and unavoidable, came the screech of brakes, the shattering of glass, sirens and shouts. Not Eve Colgate's accident, but another one, seven years ago: the crash when Annie died. An accident I hadn't seen, hadn't even known about until days later. I'd been away then, out of town on a case, and hadn't called anyone to say I was leaving, to say where I'd be.

The sun was high by now, shining through a silence broken only by the drone of a distant plane. Eve Colgate spoke again. "The paintings I made when I first came here . . ." She stopped, restarted. "It doesn't matter. They were not successful. They couldn't have been. I stopped painting then, and did not paint again for almost five years." The twig in her hand lodged between two stones and snapped. "When I came here I brought almost nothing from my days in New York. Most of my husband's things, and mine, I disposed of. The few things I couldn't part with I brought here, packed in the steamer trunk we had taken on our honeymoon. The trunk went into a storeroom and I never looked at it again. When I realized the paintings I had made were not good, I intended to destroy them, as I do all my unsuccessful work, but I couldn't. I crated them and put them in the same storeroom." She threw the broken twig away.

"Four days ago—two days before I called you in New York—I had a burglary. I'm a prosperous woman in a
poor county, Mr. Smith; it's happened before. I expect it

and I survive it. But this time the storeroom was broken Into The trunk and the crate were taken, as well as some other things: tools, equipment. I don't care about any of II, mil even Henri's things, which were in the trunk. I don't need to have them anymore."

She fell silent, empty clear eyes staring out over the far hills. Then she turned to me, and I saw that her eyes weren't empty. Something gleamed deep within them like grins locked in ice. "But I want those paintings back. Do you know why?"

I looked into her eyes, saw amethysts, rubies, sapphires, sparkling, infinitely distant. "I think I do."

She waited, still and silent.

I said, "Because they're not good."

She nodded, let her breath out slowly. "I want you to mind those paintings, Mr. Smith. Can you do that?"

"I don't know. Have you told the police?"

She shook her head. Then she gestured over the orchard, the pasture, the hills. "Do you know what this is?"

I answered a different question. "It's beautiful."

She was quiet for a very long time. Then she spoke. "It's mud," she said. "Manure. Hay. Snow. Eight-hundred- pound cows that have to be helped to calve. Eggs that have to be collected every morning in a henhouse that stinks. Apple trees that lose their blooms in a frost, or their fruit in a hailstorm. Or produce so much fruit you can't hire help enough to pick it, at any price." She unfolded her legs, slipped off the wall to stand again on the rocky
ground. The black dog leapt to his feet, tail wagging. Eve Colgate looked at me. "It's why I can paint."

We started walking again, back through the orchard, toward the house. "Eva Nouvel is famous," she said. The dog dropped a stick at her feet. She picked it up, threw it in a high, curving arc. The dog charged after it. "But Eve Colgate is a farmer. She splits wood and wrings chickens' necks. And she's the one who paints." The dog trotted back, dropped the stick. I bent down for it. He lunged but I was faster. I lifted it into the air, let him jump at it; then I sent it flying end over end through the sunlight. He raced away.

"Thirty years ago," Eve Colgate went on, "I made an arrangement with myself. It was based on my opinion of the world as I knew it. I've had no reason to change that opinion." She didn't speak again until we came up the hill behind the house, trim and solid against the blue of the sky. "Fame is a disease, Mr. Smith. I don't want it; I won't have it. Nor will I have those paintings dissected, discussed, exposed—!"

The spots of red appeared in her cheeks again, but her voice stayed low, controlled. "I want you to find those paintings, and do whatever you have to do to get them back. Pay the market price, if you have to. I can do that." She smiled a small, bitter smile; then it faded. "But who I am is my business."

We rounded the house, stopped at the porch steps. I looked at her. Her boots were caked with mud. Her eyes were like crystal creatures caught in the net of lines around them.