Rainbow's End (29 page)

Feeling himself to be a voyeur, he opened drawers, went through notebooks and papers. Yes, Angela was a messy person. All manner of things had been shoved in together—letters, bills, accounting books. And in the general mess were the indications of someone trying to stop smoking: a packet of plastic filters, one used, the others forgotten; nicotine chewing gum; another filter, tar-stained. So he'd been right. Soul mate. He smiled a little. Again, he wished he'd known her.

Jury drew out one of the accounting books, recently dated, and opened it, hoping that perhaps Angela was one of those shopkeepers who entered names and addresses of customers who had bought from her once, hoping they would buy from her twice if the name was added to a mailing list. Angela wasn't that sort of shopkeeper. For tax purposes, she had kept records. But for all Jury could see, she didn't have a mailing list, and certainly hadn't collected personal information about her customers. Her salesmanship probably stopped at handing out her little cards, the name of the shop silver-embossed across its surface. Phone number, fax number, doing double duty, the same one that had turned up in Fanny Hamilton's address book.

He left the desk to study the silver work displayed in the glass case and on the shelves on the left wall. Her work seemed very fine and elegant, smooth and unemblazoned with the geometry of Indian designs he'd been looking at in the shop windows around the plaza. There were a number of crosses. Oddly, the crosses were the most elaborately worked of all the silver pieces. Both sides had been executed with circles, vines, curls—minute intaglio designs barely discernible, since the crosses were so small—an inch long at most, some little more than half. He picked up a bracelet inset with an oval turquoise and was surprised by its lightness and the airiness of the silver band.

On the middle shelf sat three turquoise sculptures similar to Lady Cray's, but of different sizes, slightly different in design. They were roughly the size one might want for a paperweight and he supposed that might be the purpose a customer who insisted on something utilitarian would put the block of stone to. Lady Cray's use of it was purely aesthetic. He wished Angela Hope were alive to appreciate that.

He wished Angela were alive, period. Holding the smallest of the turquoise and silver squares, he sat down in one of the armchairs. This one was banded round the center with silver, accented by a small bronze lizard. It looked a little like a belt with a bronze buckle. Neither of the other two turquoise blocks had bronze accents; perhaps she wanted to experiment with something different. What Jury was fairly certain of, having searched a dozen jewelers' windows near the square, was that this particular adaptation of turquoise to silver was unique with Angela Hope. He had seen nothing at all like this.

Jury was reaching the same conclusion as Macalvie. Only Macalvie had leapt to his immediately. Jury was not enthusiastic about such leaps—they were a little like leaps of faith, he thought, with
nothing but the tenacity of instinct. Yet, his instinct was uncanny. Macalvie, however, would not call it “instinct” at all: he would call it something like meteoric calculation, such a swift taking in of facts that the conclusion would only appear to have been reached through “instinct.” His facts were not precisely other people's facts.

Too many coincidences had piled up to ignore Macalvie's theory. This turquoise block, Frances Hamilton's visit to Santa Fe at the same time Nell Hawes had come here. Both had stayed at the La Fonda. Both in November. He set the turquoise block on the wide arm of the chair and drew out the same photocopied pages he had sent to Melrose Plant. This errant telephone number belonging to a person who had never heard of either Nell Hawes or Frances Hamilton. Jury studied it. Something odd about that number, he thought. It didn't resemble the others, nor had it been entered like the others that had been written carefully into the small lined squares.

Jury got up, checked the stereo, saw there was a CD in place, and punched the Play button. Flute music, notes as clear as crystal, filled the air. It was soothing stuff, he thought. It fit the country. Well, no wonder, it was Native American music. To the right of the stereo was a long row of books. An eclectic mix. Sharing the shelf with a number of works about Indian culture and some of archaeology were an assortment of Nancy Drews. He pulled out
The Secret of the Spiral Staircase
and leafed through it, loving the illustrations. Nancy with her flashlight, Nancy in her white socks and saddle shoes. Halfway through the book, he noticed marginalia, comments such as “obviously!” or “use your brain!!” or “I saw this coming a mile!!!” That last appeared near the end where the villain was (apparently) unveiled. Someone—the younger sister, Mary, perhaps?—had fancied herself a much better detective than Nancy Drew.

He replaced the revisionist Nancy Drew and read the spines of the others.
Sarum
, the fictional work about Old Salisbury and Stonehenge, which had also been given several thorough readings. Several volumes by writers who had popularized types of mysticism, such as Alan Watts.
Persuasion
by Jane Austen, a Raymond Chandler mystery, a couple of books by local writers.

One of the unfamiliar titles interested Jury. It had been written by Nils Anders with the odd title
Shattered Light.
Odd for a scientist, that is. Jury took it over to the armchair and sat down. The small picture on the inside of the dust jacket was of a man who clearly didn't enjoy having
his picture taken. His head was tilted, his eyes cast down, as if finding down there something infinitely more interesting than the camera. Early middle age, perhaps not even that—late thirties, maybe. What Jury could see of his face appeared to be handsome, but given the angle, hard to say. Hair lightish and somewhat curly. The eyes were impossible to read, of course, being cast down. His mouth was slightly open, as if he'd been caught in the act of speaking. And in the bit of bio here there was a string of letters after his name that suggested even more degrees than Jack Oñate had mentioned. A couple of awards, too. Funds for his work happily supplied by several organizations.

Jury opened the book at random and was immediately lost in a labyrinthine description of light and its effects that he could no more understand than fly to the source of it. Jury tried again: he started on the first page, far more accessible since it was constructed as a sort of conversation between Dr. Anders and someone who had interviewed him a while back. They were having a little chat, this interchange apparently made use of by Anders to draw the lay reader into the book. It was effective, too, since Dr. Anders was no mean writer himself, with a certain flair for description—surroundings, people (especially the obviously vapid woman doing the interviewing)—a writer that Mary Hope might not even edit. It also had the advantage of delivering a message to the reader: Look, you're not as smart as I am, true; but then you're not as stupid as
she
is, right? Jury almost laughed. A clever ploy, and a necessary one, for the reader was about to be plunged into a universe that seemed to be made up of anything but solids: particles, lasers, equations, theorems, pis.

Given that he was such a “pure” scientist (“whatever that means,” added Anders), did he believe in anything? His reaction to this question was given in such sardonic words that Jury thought surely the interviewer would have jumped and run. But his answer was quite simple. “Light.” Simple, but strange enough that Jury could fairly hear the indrawn breath of the woman, the breathy little laugh, the disbelief. “Yes, but what
else
?” she asked.

“There is nothing else,” he answered, tossing some papers on the table and immediately beginning to bury her in a morass of numbers.

Jury looked up, frowning. There
is
nothing else?

His mind seemed to tumble, something in the manner of the tumblers in a safe when one turns the combination. Things both clicked into place and blew away, helter-skelter. Unfortunately, the
clicks were dependent on what had literally blown away and would have to be gathered back, raked in like tumbleweed across a dusty plain, before it would make any sense. He knew of no other way to describe his state of mind.

Thus, he closed the book, shook his head to try to clear it. The dust jacket was quite beautiful, showing a vision of the cosmos, silver bursts of nebulae against a blue-purple background, and all overlaid on something that looked like a broken mirror. Well,
Shattered Light
, he expected.

He started to return the book to its place on the shelf, paused, slipped it into a big pocket on the inside of his coat.

There were a few volumes of poetry, a thick Robert Frost, a thinner T. S. Eliot.
Four Quartets.
Here was a series of mystical flashes Jury had read more than once and, on the one hand, been moved to a point of fear; on the other, found impossible to comprehend. Jury approached most poetry with apprehension, timidity even, and with insulated gloves on. Poetry could catch you unawares. He opened
Four Quartets
and saw that here too sections had been heavily underscored and the occasional cross-reference written in the margin.

Who then devised the torment? Love.

Abruptly, Jury snapped it shut, eliding the next words in that act. He did not want to read about lost innocence. Or roses turned to dust. Or dry fountains.

What Jury wanted to do was avoid the deep for the shallow water, which Eliot would no doubt consider as self-consignment to Purgatory. Well, at least it wasn't Hell. Love. Love was rather terrifying. Something so hard to find should not be so easily lost. He closed the book and thought, again, of Jenny; he ran through his memories in that ominous state of mind that prophesies disaster. His memories of Jenny were, actually, few: on the other side of a grave; alone in that great empty house she'd been forced to sell; and in that pawnshop off Saint Martin's Lane, where she'd tried on a ring Jury was buying for someone else; and, lately, in Ryland Street. Years had separated these meetings, making them that much more emblematic, rich with unstated, perhaps unconscious meanings.

Jury much preferred to skate on the thin ice of consciousness. And he was beginning to think that thin ice might be all the ice there was.

Opening the book again, he looked at the title page. Nils Anders had given this book of poetry to Angela Hope. Angela Hope was taking it all very seriously.

 • • • 

THE WOMAN
who came into the shop and demanded to know his business finally introduced herself as Sukie Bartholomew. Her favorite posture appeared to be the one she now adopted: one arm across her midsection, one hand cupping the elbow of the other arm, the other hand holding a small black cigar. The two arms formed an L that might have served as a frame for the viewer to look at Sukie Bartholomew. She was fighting hard to project an image; she wasn't winning. She was not attractive—raw-boned, thin, possibly in her late fifties, but still wearing blue barrettes to clasp and hold back her shoulder-length hair. It was mouse-brown and blunt-cut. But the color had been highlighted so that wispy little strands gave the impression of silver dust. Too many visits to the local hairdresser had resulted in hair the texture of straw.

Sukie Bartholomew was waging a war with herself over her looks. No lipstick, but there was that glimmery brown eye shadow; an uncompromising haircut, but carefully highlighted; an outfit that fairly screamed “I won't bow to fashion,” but one that belonged on a girl of fifteen, not a woman of fifty-plus. Jury noted these contradictions because he inferred they spelled trouble. A difficult woman, uneasy with herself, dissatisfied, and therefore dissatisfied with the rest of the world. It was as if she eschewed the trap of femininity, the little embellishments that made women attractive to men. Jury had not really thought of it before, but the women he admired were not ones to do pitched battle with themselves over a bit of nail varnish or a dab of lipstick. He thought of Fiona, whose fountain of youth was gathered in her sponge bag rather than in her medicine cabinet, and that reminded him, again, of Wiggins. He
must
remember to send flowers. He smiled at the morning sunlight streaking the shop's polished floor as all of this passed before his mind's eye in a few swift seconds. He must have raised the smile to Sukie, for she asked,

“Something funny?” The tone was surely more hostile than such a smile had called for.

“No. Not at all. You remind me of . . . someone, that's all.”

“Someone pleasant, I trust?”

Her expression was gratingly coy. The smile that accompanied this primping tone was more unpleasant than the frown had been.

“Yes. Very pleasant.”

With a much-beringed hand, she flattened the already flat hairdo against her cheek. “You're here about Angela, I suppose. Terribly sad.”

Jury doubted she felt sad at all. “When did you last see her?”

“Just before she left. We saw one another often. We had coffee, you know, that sort of thing.”

“You knew her well.”

Slowly, she drew in on her cigar and exhaled thin streams of smoke through her nostrils. Jury's eyes tracked the upward spiral of smoke.

“She didn't really talk a great deal about herself, about her feelings. People don't, you know. That's one of the problems.”

He was not about to ask which one, or what the others were. It was clear she'd have gone straight off the topic of Angela Hope and onto herself in an eyeblink. He made his smile as ingratiating as possible. “I'm told she lived outside of town, some miles away, with her younger sister.”

“Mary. Difficult girl. Angela herself was much more malleable.”

His eyebrows rose fractionally. Strange sort of thing to want a friend—or anybody—to be. Malleable.

“Tell me about this U.K. trip of hers. Had she any particular reason for going to England?”