The Bright Silver Star (6 page)

“What do you think?” Des asked her.

“I think Dr. Bill will put them down as soon as he lays eyes on them.”

“No, I mean about
her.”

“Who, the great Esme Crockett?” Bella let out a hoot of derision. “I think she has the worst BO I ever smelled in my entire life.”

Why did Martine tell her about Dodge’s affair?

Des couldn’t imagine. Being human, she also couldn’t help wondering who the other woman was. She didn’t say anything about it to Bella on the way home—she’d promised Martine she’d keep quiet, and she did. But it was certainly on her mind as they dropped off Spike and Mike with Dr. Bill, knowing full well they’d never see those two helpless kittens again. It was still on her mind when they pulled into her driveway in gloomy silence. She and Bella always felt lousy when a rescue mission turned out sour.

Bella marched straight inside to scrub the kitchen floor and listen to one of her Danny Kaye records, which was what she did when she was blue. Des hung out in the garage for a while with the Pointer Sisters, Mary J. Blige, Bootsy Collins, Master P, Jay-Z and the others that they
had
rescued. She cooed at each of them, stroking the ones
who’d let her. Some, like Method Man, just hissed. No problem. He’d come around. Des was patient. She made sure they all had food and water, then went upstairs.

Des had bought and renovated a snug little cottage tucked into a hillside high above Uncas Lake. Mostly, she’d bought it for the sunlight. The living room, which she’d turned into her studio, had floor-to-ceiling windows overlooking the shimmering lake. Her kitchen and dining area were very airy and open, with French doors leading out onto the back deck, which had a teak dining table and chairs, and a dynamite view. The deck practically doubled her living space during warm months. There were three bedrooms, all of them small. The spare room was where Des worked out with twenty-pound dumbbells five mornings a week. Her weight room door was closed currently and there was a steady chorus of meows going on in there. Their five in-house cats were unable to resist the allure of a wet kitchen floor—whenever Bella was in scrub mode she herded them in there.

Des kept a portrait that she’d drawn of Mitch hanging over her bed. She’d drawn it when she was still trying to figure out how she felt about him. He looked very lost and sad in the portrait. He didn’t look nearly so sad now. It was the only sample of her art that was visible anywhere in the house. She did not display her haunting portraits of murder victims that were her life’s work and her way of coping with the horrors of her job. These she kept tucked away in a portfolio.

She did not like to look at them after she’d finished them.

Right now, Des snatched a graphite stick and Strathmore eighteen-by-twenty-four-inch sketch pad from her easel and started across the house with them as Mr. Danny Kaye was busy singing “Madam, I Love Your Crepes Suzette.” Or make that shrieking. Des did not understand that man’s appeal. Apparently, you had to be Jewish, old, and from Brooklyn in order to dig him. Also, possibly, deaf.

“I put your breakfast out on the deck,” Bella called to her from the kitchen floor, where she was on her hands and knees, scrubbing away like an old-time washerwoman.

“You didn’t have to make me breakfast, Bella.”

“I did so,” Bella shot back, scrubbing, scrubbing. There was a sponge mop, but she wouldn’t go near it. “Otherwise you’ll tromp all over my wet floor with your big feet.”

“They are not big. They’re
long.”
Twelve and a half double A, to be exact. “Besides, Mitch likes them—especially my toes.”

Bella made a face.
“Genug shen!”
Which was Yiddish for
No mas.
“I don’t want to hear these things about you two.”

“Don’t blame me, girl. You’re the one said I should snag me a Jewish gentleman.”

“And did I steer you wrong?”

“Nope. Just don’t tell him that—I don’t want his ego swelling.” Des tilted her head at Bella curiously. “Real, if I stick around long enough will I
ever
dig Danny Kaye?”

Bella puffed out her cheeks in disgust. “No one appreciates true talent anymore.”

“Oh, is that what you call it?” she said sweetly.

“If you want to put on your Jill Scott, go ahead. It’s your house.”

“It’s
our
house. And I’m just woofing on you.” Des started out of the kitchen, then stopped. “We can’t save them all, Bella.”

“I know that,” Bella said tightly.

Des went out onto the deck, closing the French doors behind her, and sat down at the table in front of her Grape Nuts, skim milk, and blueberries from Mitch’s garden. It was a drowsy, humid morning. A young couple was paddling a canoe out on the lake, their giddy laughter carrying off the water as if they were right there next to Des. Otherwise, it was quiet enough that she could hear the cicadas whirring.

As she ate, she flipped through her drawing pad, looking at her latest work. Her figure drawing professor at the Dorset Academy of Fine Arts, a brilliant and maddening guru named Peter Weiss, had urged Des to take a complete break from her crime scene portraits this summer and draw nothing but trees, an exercise that he claimed would prove highly beneficial to her. He wouldn’t explain why this was so, merely said, “You’ll find out what I mean.” Leaving Des to
solve the mystery on her own. She’d tried to do what he said. Spent the past six weeks working on trees and trees only.

And, so far, the results had been a total disaster.

Page after page of her drawing pad was filled with one crude arboreal rendering after another. Her lush, midsummer oaks and maples looked like stick figures topped with meatballs. Her evergreens resembled television aerials. It all looked like something an eight-year-old kid would do. She’d tried graphite stick, vine charcoal, conte crayon, pen, pencil. The results were all the same:
dreck.

Bella had been the soul of tact when Des showed them to her. “I like everything you do,” she said.

Mitch, who was always brutally honest, had said, “Jellystone National Park—they look exactly like the background drawings from the old
Yogi the Bear
cartoons. Remember Yogi and Boo Boo?”

To which Des replied, “Back slowly out of the room while you are still able to.”

Knowing full well that he was right. For some reason she kept drawing her way
around
the trees as opposed to getting inside of them. She wasn’t
grasping
them. She’d tried to learn her way out of her personal abyss. Pored over book upon book by arborists and nature photographers. Studied the Connecticut shoreline’s grand masters such as Childe Hassam, George Bruestle, and Henry Ward Ranger, landscape painters whose works she admired tremendously. But it was no use. Not any of it. She could not translate what her eyes saw into lines and contours and shapes. Her trees were two-dimensional, lifeless, and crude, her drawing hand stubbornly blind.

She slammed her sketch pad shut, boiling with confusion and frustration. Because there was no instruction manual for this, no road map that could direct her to her inner soul. There was only her. The wisdom was within her.

The enemy was within her.

All she could do about it now was punish herself physically. She stormed back down to her weight room. Out went the cats, in came the crazed artist. First, she stretched for twenty good minutes on her mat, freeing her mind, feeling the blood flow through her as she worked the
kinks out of her lithe, loose-limbed body. Then she did one hundred pushups and two hundred sit-ups. Then she hit the irons—two full circuits on her pressing bench with the twenty-pounders, two sets of twenty-four reps each time around. Pushing herself. Working it, working it, working it. Pump, breathe . . . Pump, breathe . . . Muscles straining, veins bulging, the sweat pouring off of her. Pump, breathe ... Pump, breathe . . . Pump, breathe . . .

Why did Martine tell her about Dodge?

Des could not imagine. These blue-blooded locals genuinely perplexed her. They did not believe that the shortest way between two points was a straight line. They did not believe in lines—only negative space. And she did not know what to do about this. Mitch raved about Dodge Crockett day and night. Should she break it to him his new walking buddy was a snake? Or should she keep it to herself?

She made it through her last set of reps on adrenaline and fumes, and collapsed on the bench in a heap, gasping. She gulped down a bottle of water, then showered off.

Des spent very little time in front of the bathroom mirror these days. She wore no war paint. She needed none. She had almondshaped pale green eyes, smooth glowing skin and a wraparound smile that could melt titanium from a thousand yards. She kept her hair so short and nubby that it was practically dry by the time she’d put on her summer-weight uniform and polished black brogans. She strapped on her crime-girl belt, complete with top-of-the-line SIG-Sauer semiautomatic handgun, and called out good-bye to Bella. Then she jumped into her cruiser and headed out.

Des lived in was what was considered a mixed neighborhood by Dorset standards, which meant it enjoyed a highly diverse white population. There were tidy starter houses owned by young professional couples. There were rambling bungalows bursting with multiple generations of blue-collar swamp Yankees. There were moldering summer cottages rented by old-timers from New Britain who played bocce out on their lawns. Right now her mail carrier, Frank, was out walking his golden retriever, and a pair of young mothers were on their way to the lake with a brood of kids, complete with pails, shovels,
and water wings. They all waved to Des as she drove past. She raised a hand in response.

Summer was her busy season. Dorset’s seaside renters nearly doubled the town’s year-round population of less than seven thousand, plus the inns, motels, and campgrounds were filled to capacity. More people meant more traffic and more trouble. So did the warm weather. During the cold months, people did their drinking and their fighting behind closed doors. Now it all spilled out onto the front lawn. Dogs barked, tempers flared, neighbors started throwing punches at one another. It could get a little ugly.

And then, dear God, there were the tourists.

First, she headed for the historic district. The lawn in front of the old library on Dorset Street was being set up with chairs for a noon summer concert by Dorset’s town band, which was quite accomplished if you happened to be into oompah music. Des rated their sound one solid notch below Danny Kaye on her own personal hit parade. The concert was part of a full day of quaint small-town activities. Crafts stalls were being erected next door on the lawn in front of Center School, where local artisans would be offering their handcrafted candles and soaps, their driftwood sculptures and wind chimes made of seashells and bits of broken glass. Des pulled in at town hall to see if there was anything of interest in her mail slot—there wasn’t—and to work on Mary Ann, First Selectman Paffin’s new secretary, a lonely widow who desperately needed to adopt two healthy, neutered kittens and just didn’t know it yet. Then she resumed her patrol of the historic district, with its lovely two hundred-year-old homes, steepled white churches and graceful old oaks and sycamores. Trees again. Trees, trees, and more trees . . .

I should just give up and move to the damned desert.

The art academy was located in the historic district, in the old Gill House. So were the better galleries and antique dealers, the cemetery, firehouse, John’s barbershop with its old Wildroot sign and barber pole.

It was only when she got to Big Brook Road and made a left that
she returned to the twenty-first century. Here was Dorset’s shopping center, which had an A &
P, pharmacy, bank, hardware store, and so on. Across the two-lane road from it were the storefront businesses like the insurance and travel agencies, realtors and doctors. It was all exceedingly underwhelming. There was no ostentatious display of signage allowed in Dorset. No Golden Arches, no big box stores, no multiplexes. Most businesses were locally owned.

As a rule, the business district was quite laid back, too. Not much traffic, plenty of parking. It was possible to get around even during the summer. But not this summer. Not with Tito and Esme in town. News vans were crowded into parking spaces wherever they could find them. Des could spot crews from at least a dozen Connecticut and New York television stations, not to mention CNN, Fox News,
Entertainment Tonight,
and
Inside Edition.
News choppers hovered overhead. And the sidewalks were positively bursting with sunburned tourists cruising back and forth in the bright sun, back and forth, hoping to catch just one glimpse
of them.

Madness. It was just plain madness.

As she nosed her way around, making her presence felt, Des came upon a genuine traffic jam at Clancy’s ice cream parlor. Cars were at a total standstill. Drivers were even honking their horns, which was unheard-of in Dorset. She flicked on her lights and veered over the yellow line so she could get around to it. When she reached Clancy’s she discovered a whale-sized white Cadillac Escalade double-parked out front with its doors locked. Its owner had simply left it there and walked away, blocking the entire lane of traffic. No one else in town could get by.

Des hopped out, straightening her big Smokey hat, and took a closer look. The big SUV had New Jersey plates. No special handicapped tag, no media or law enforcement markings. Just a selfish, thoughtless owner. Shaking her head, she got busy filling out a ticket. She was just finishing it when a middle-age guy with an expensive comb-over came sauntering toward her licking a double-scoop chocolate ice cream cone that he really, truly did not need. His gut
was already straining hard against his tank top. It didn’t help that he was wearing shorts. His skinny, pale legs just made his stomach look even bigger. Summer clothing was very unforgiving.

But not as unforgiving as the resident trooper of Dorset, Connecticut.

“Hey, I just went inside for a second,” he protested when he caught sight of her. “One second.”