Skyscape (42 page)

“Where is Curtis?”

“The doctor'll be back in a couple of minutes,” he said. “He's got so many people who'd do anything for him.”

She grabbed the man's shirt, tearing the pocket.

They were in the studio, at the end of the room. There was still an eye-smarting trace of Mace in the air. Bishop tried the door. “The keys are with Dr. Patterson,” said Bishop, as though that settled it.

“We'll break it down,” said Margaret.

Bishop made a calming gesture. “We don't want to rush into anything,” he said. His face was still a mask, but the look of pleasant competence had been replaced by one of doubt. “A door like this—we shouldn't do anything we might regret later on.”

“Open it.”

“We will,” he said. “We'll get the door open.” His eyes looked hurt, as though surprised that she would doubt his ability. “But Dr. Patterson is going to want to know why we didn't just wait for him.”

Margaret grabbed him again, the fabric of the shirt making another tearing sound.

“What are you going to tell him when he comes back?” Bishop was saying. There was no anger in his voice, only a need.

“Do what she tells you,” said Loretta Lee from across the room.

Loretta Lee stood still. The gun in her hand gave her a certain authority, although she gave no indication that she knew it was there.

Bishop's eyes narrowed. He considered Margaret. He considered Loretta Lee. “I'll tell him I had no choice,” he said.

“That's true,” said Loretta Lee.

Bishop and Loretta Lee left. They were not gone long, but Margaret was alone with the barrier, the door that would not open. She pressed against it, listening, telling Curtis that she was there.

There was no sound from inside. The room might be empty. The place could be filled with things long lost but, for the moment, useless, dusty furniture, blank canvas.

Bishop and Loretta Lee returned with a long crowbar, a crowbar longer than he was tall, a classic lever out of a physics lesson.

“Found this in the desert,” Bishop said, inserting the curved end of the iron into the crack in the door. “Maybe a year ago. Out near Trona, near the dry lake. Belonged to the railroad, I would imagine,” he said. “No telling how old.”

Margaret wanted to take the iron in her own hands, because there was something deliberate and at the same time thoughtless in the man's behavior, a person so baffled by events that he clung to empty fact.

Or perhaps it was Bishop's way of consoling himself that although he did the bidding of two women, he did it in his own way, at his own pace. The door did not splinter, but the lines between the boards that made up the door began to show white against the walnut-stained oak. Bishop grunted, and the door did not move or shiver, except to part where the door met the jamb.

The muscles in his arms were taut. He planted his feet, and pulled again, saying, as he worked, “Iron like this doesn't get old. You keep it from rusting—”

The door burst. Something metal, part of the lock, Margaret surmised, sang off the ceiling.

The smell of the room was vaguely medicinal. The place was like a hospital room, a room that had been thoughtfully decorated with Mexican wool rugs and palm leaves and art books stacked, with hopeful disorder, beside the hospital bed.

In the bed was an unshaven figure, a person she nearly could not recognize. The man was asleep, his lips moving like someone suffering a bad dream.

Margaret held Curtis, weeping, calling to him.

“I couldn't do it anymore,” said Curtis. His voice was an urgent whisper, sometimes breaking into a rasp. “I couldn't work.”

Margaret told him not to talk. She would take care of everything.

But he continued, “I saw the paints go transparent. All I could see was the empty canvas behind the colors.” The emptiness, he thought, that is always there. “So I had to quit, and there was nothing he could do to help me.”

He held her as though he was afraid that she was not real.

“You know what I have to do,” she said.

As though it were alive, he thought. As though the work of art had become a thing that could take life.

He met her eyes.

Loretta Lee watched Margaret gather in the torn, color-splashed sail of the painting.

“What's she doing?” asked Bishop.

“Don't move,” said Loretta Lee. “Stay where you are.”

Her voice was calm, and Margaret looked up, expecting to see the gun pointing at her. But it was pointing at Bishop, and Bishop turned like a man in pain, and felt his way toward a chair.

He sat. “I won't let you do this,” he said in a voice without strength.

Margaret made her way quickly down the stairs. Her fingers were glazed with a substance like dried cocoa, her own blood. She found old sheets of newspaper in a wicker basket, yellowed classified ads. The match heads were pastel colors, pink, mint green. She broke one match, and then another. At last one of the matches was alight.

The canvas beside her on the floor, she worked carefully, touching the white flame to a wad of newspaper. The paper began to burn. As it burned the wad of paper began to loosen, opening, an ugly blossom.

She let the fire grow, fed by kindling and lengths of sweet-smelling wood, wood so dense with sap that it glistened. When she tried to roll up the canvas, crumbs of paint fell onto the floor. The painting was bulky, heavy, and it shifted in her grasp.

Patterson might be here now, she knew—climbing from the aircraft, running through the heat.

It was an effort, the thing buckling, fighting back. The canvas threw itself open in the big fireplace, suffocating the flame. The fire was out.

You didn't want to let it burn, something in her said. Look at it, how seductive it is, wanting you to reach in and pull it free.
Go ahead
—
it's not too late
. The splashes of color were distorted by their position in the fireplace. This new painting was a semblance, a disguise, but even a disguise can flow, pleasing the eye. It wasn't going to burn. Flame couldn't harm a thing like this.

She thrust an iron poker into the middle of the canvas, and kept it there.

A single trellis of smoke rose in one corner of the blackened fireplace. Where Margaret had gashed the painting there was a curl of flame. A folded-over corner straightened, flaring. Fire ate a further hole. The painting made a sound, a whisper, a sputtering whistle. She stepped back, letting the poker fall.

The full conflagration was so sudden it shook the air in the room. There was a flash, and the painting was gone.

48

Before the sheriff's deputies arrived, when it was not clear what was going to happen next, Margaret heard the sound of a car from outside, beyond the trees. She thought it must be help, but when she looked up at the sound of a footstep it was only Loretta Lee with some knowledge quiet in her eyes.

“Bishop's gone,” said Loretta Lee.

Margaret was sitting beside Curtis, helping him eat. Tomato juice and crackers had seemed easiest in his condition, and she held the glass of juice so he could take another drink. The Saltines made crumbs and she brushed the flakes of flour and the salt from the pillow.

“Bishop loves Dr. Patterson so much,” said Loretta Lee.

Margaret was the authority now. There was power in the house, and it belonged to her. Loretta Lee waited for her response. “What harm can he do?” asked Margaret.

“A lot of harm,” said Loretta Lee, in a voice that sounded unafraid. “To all of us.”

All the way there Margaret was by his side. Deputy sheriffs in their pea-green uniforms and cowboy hats did not try to separate them. Medics did their work, apologizing to both of them for interrupting.

They flew together, under the thudding prop of a helicopter, the desert falling away from them. It was replaced by a different sort of desert, empty river beds and golf courses, with shaved patches for sand traps and white plumes where sprinklers plied water. There were streets of houses among green lawns.

Curtis wanted to have a view, and so they gave him one.

There was a strip of Palm Springs grass. There was a parking lot, a range of mountains, and sky.

But, having been given a view, Curtis ignored it. He followed Margaret with his eyes as she brought him water, a cloth to moisten his lips. There was talk of pneumonia, and blood clots in his legs from injuries that were slow to heal.

But more than one doctor commented that he was not doing so badly, considering what he had been through.

She stayed with him through a cavalcade of doctors and nurses, the white smocks of technicians and the green smocks of orderlies. Margaret did not want to leave his side, but she had to.

She had unfinished work.

The room was filled with men and women in a hurry, medical personnel, guards, administrators.

She was introduced to a short man in a blue suit. He did security, he said, for the network. He had worked briefly with Red Patterson, but it had not gone well; Patterson had found him irritating. Poole offered this revelation as though it did not interest him much.

“They kicked me upstairs,” said Poole. “The usual sort of consolation. Now I get to worry about a lot of things at once.”

She listened to Poole with a polite expression, but did not feel moved to respond to him beyond a few soft-spoken remarks. Her press conference was in three minutes. She kept her eye on the clock on the wall, a circle with numerals as black and joyless as the glyphs in an eye chart.

“So,” said Poole at last, “the question of the hour, aside from the health of Mr. Newns, is—”

“Where is Red Patterson?” she said.

“Exactly.”

“No, I'm asking you,” said Margaret. “Where is he?”

Poole's suit was the sort that does not go out of fashion. He buttoned one of the jacket's black buttons, then unbuttoned it again. He seemed unhappy to have to trouble her, and Margaret liked him for that. Margaret wore the only thing available in her overnight bag, an outfit her mother would have termed
plain but pretty:
silk blouse, stylishly wrinkled, cotton blend slacks, all the moderately dressy clothing she had taken to Owl Springs.

“He's missing,” said Poole.

“You'll find him.”

“I have to ask you if you know where he went.”

“The sheriffs were all very nice,” said Margaret. “I told them what I knew.” She had even confessed to a little bit of a stab with a knife, in self-defense. There had been many questions, but somehow there was little surprise. Perhaps it was the way Margaret told it, or the fact that Loretta Lee related the same story.

“We have a question or two more to ask,” said Poole.

“Curtis is expected to be all right. Thank you for asking.”

Poole gave a smile. He was a sweet-looking little man, she thought.

“What happened out there?” he asked.

She considered the question. “Did you like Dr. Patterson?”

Poole took a moment. “I liked him a lot. Even though we didn't get along. Why?”

She could imagine Patterson finding this man irritating. He was insistent, but quiet, and he wanted to do his job.

Poole waited for Margaret to respond, but she turned away from him.

“And this other man, Donald Morton Bishop,” he said. “What do you know about him?”

“Nothing.”

“Any idea where he was heading when he left?”

“No idea, Mr. Poole.”

“He might have gone to meet Patterson in the desert somewhere.”

“That's possible.”

“Why do I have the feeling you know a lot you don't want to share with me tonight?”

Margaret liked that little fillip,
tonight
. That was the way waitresses kept their questions from sounding too straightforward.
Anything more I can get you tonight?

Poole spoke as though to the wall. “You don't have to talk to the media. You don't have to do anything you don't want to do. The network's going to issue a further statement.”

“What sort of statement?” said Margaret, her tone so flat it came out not sounding like a question. She was looking in a mirror. She looked good, she thought. Not so plain after all.

“You're going to cooperate with investigative agencies, and we'll have further statements in a few days. We think the best thing is to say nothing. Nothing slanderous.”

“What are you afraid of?”

The man laughed, showing his teeth. “I personally am not afraid of anything. It's just that if you go out there with that particular story and expect people to change their minds about Red Patterson.…”

It was time. She took a peek through the swinging doors. There was an army out there, videocams and microphones, a hungry corps of people who were up at one o'clock in the morning. They had been at the hospital all day, and while Palm Springs was pleasant in January, this was the dead of summer. They couldn't all fit into the air-conditioned building. There was an international corps of irritated, articulate people growing increasingly frayed.

“You can just tell them all to take a walk. You don't owe them anything,” said Poole.

“You couldn't protect Red Patterson the man,” she said, “so now you guard his reputation.”

“It's entirely up to you, Mrs. Newns. But you have to realize that you can't really just go out there and say anything you feel like saying.…” His voice died.

Margaret said, “Watch me.”

Margaret stood in the hospital cafeteria. There was a tangle of microphones, some of them taped together, held to the podium with hastily applied duct tape so that the ends of the adhesive strips crept over the edge of the podium like a Halloween spider.

Margaret was bandaged, under her clothes, painted with antiseptic, coddled with painkillers. They like this, all these reporters, she thought. They act efficient and professional, but this is what they love to do.