“Probably. And from what I’ve read so far, it’s a good thing. She had no sense of what a poem really is.”
“I didn’t know you were a literary critic.”
“And I suppose you are?”
“No. I don’t know the slightest thing about poetry. But I do know emotion when I see it. If it’s part of the poetic process, Jude should at least get an A for attempt.”
She looked down at the page she’d been reading, ashamed of her hasty judgment. She’d allowed the barely readable scrawl and awkward phrasing to obscure what he’d seen.
Guy added, “It’s the emotion that makes me wonder why she stopped writing. People who’re passionate about a pursuit don’t usually abandon it, even if they’re not very good.”
“Unless something happened to take away the passion. Like Virge Scurlock when she gave up on all her interests.”
“Could have.” He looked down at the portion of the pages she’d given him. “Since each poem’s dated, I think we can construct a psychological history of Jude during the time she was writing. Perhaps a factual history as well. That might tell us why her daughter went to the canyon a few days after they had two long private chats.”
Rho nodded. She’d been wise to bring Guy along, wise to involve him in the investigation. Since he was relatively new to the subject of the murders, his viewpoint was fresher and he discerned things that she had allowed the passage of time to obscure.
“Listen to this poem,” she said. “It’s dated five months before the murders. ‘I walk beside the pond where the deer lay still... Going to the place that is my spiritual home... Going to the people who are my spiritual family... Who love my child as much as their own.’”
Guy shuffled pages. “It’s similar to the very last poem. ‘I walk through the canyon under the pines... The sea breeze stirs their boughs... There are no screams or shots, not now... I nod to the ghosts of well remembered family as they pass, at peace.’”
“So maybe the reason she quit writing is that she came to terms with what happened. Maybe she was using the poetry to work out her feelings about the killings. Some of the ones she wrote shortly after the murders are quite violent.” She selected a page and handed it to him.
He skimmed it, frowning. “Six months after. ‘Blood streams down the face of betrayal and blinds its lying eyes... The knife strips away the flesh to expose the false heart... Screams rise to the trees where the hawks live... The hawks who wait for fresh prey... The hawks will feast on the torn bodies of the people I love.’ I think she confused hawks with vultures. And what’s this about a knife? Nobody was knifed.”
“Have you ever heard of poetic license?”
“Of course I’ve heard of it! And some of them shouldn’t be licensed.”
Rho smiled. Guy obviously disliked having his creative powers challenged, and her catching him being literal-minded had stung.
“Go ahead,” he said, “make fun of me. I suppose now you’re going to tell me you studied poetry writing in college.”
“English lit, with a dual major in early childhood education. And I did write poetry. Even won a couple of prizes. Sometimes when I get bored on patrol I make up poems in my head, but I forget them before I can write them down.”
“What kind of poems?”
Rho looked away, sorry she’d mentioned them.
“Rhoda?”
“...Actually, some of them were pretty violent. Others were sad. I guess I’ve been working something out, like Jude Ackerman.”
“And have you? Worked it out?”
“Close to.”
“Then you ought to be able to reconstruct what was going on with Jude.” He exchanged the pages he held for hers. “Read on, and then let’s see what we can come up with.”
Guy tried to concentrate on the scrawled poetry, but he found himself repeatedly stealing glances at Rhoda. She read with intensity, her lower lip caught between her teeth. Occasionally she’d make a note on a folded piece of paper.
The day before, she’d taken him to the canyon out of what he sensed was a need to make him understand the murders and what she’d been through. He didn’t flatter himself that her doing so or asking him along on this trip was for personal reasons; she’d been attempting to influence his treatment of the crime in his book, and today he was here to act as a sensor when her powers of observation failed. But moments ago she’d opened up to him and for the first time allowed him into her emotional space. He wasn’t at all sure how he felt about that.
Since Diana died there had been women — not many and all on a short-term basis — but none had touched him where he lived. Rhoda Swift was different, however. From the night he’d met her he’d sensed pain, and now he knew it was as great in its way as any he’d experienced. They’d both seen their lives changed by violence, and such commonality often drew unlikely people together. But Guy had learned not to trust the viability of such entanglements, and now he warned himself against becoming closer to this woman. She was as different from him as possible.
East Coast, West Coast. Big city, small town.
Both truth-seekers by profession, though.
No. He: interpreter of hard facts. She: poet, even though she only wrote in her mind.
He: sophisticate, world traveler. She: impressionable, had seldom left her native state.
A loner, not family oriented. A woman with strong community ties and a love of children.
A man who shunned pets. A dog lover.
No way. Absolutely not.
He turned his attention back to Jude Ackerman’s poetry. Its initial charm now eluded him. Rhoda’s criticism was right on the nose, he decided. Jude hadn’t known a poem from a posthole digger.
“So what do you think?” Rhoda asked.
“I think I can’t take much more of this stuff.”
“Well, I’ve read it all, and here’s my conclusion: In the beginning Jude was in love with the canyon. She’d found a beautiful place and people who accepted and cared for her and her family. I don’t think many people had cared for Jude till then. But three-quarters through the year something changed. The poems start to talk about betrayal and lies. After the murders they grow violent, then depressed. It took almost three years for those feelings to turn into peace and acceptance.”
He nodded. “There’s one upbeat note throughout the time the Ackermans spent in the canyon, though. She apparently formed a close friendship with Susan Wynne.” He shuffled through the pages he’d read and selected one. “‘My friend Susan offers coffee and her most precious secret... She shares, but I’ve got nothing to give in return... She says it doesn’t matter, friendship is everything... She wants me to know where her treasure is in case I need it.’”
Rhoda snatched the page from his hand and examined it, her lips moving, face suddenly animated.
“What is it?” he asked.
“The reason Chrystal went to the canyon. It’s right here, and I nearly missed it.”
Guy’s expression was almost comical, Rho thought. She could practically see his overlarge ego deflating like a pinpricked balloon. “You couldn’t have known this,” she reassured him. “I’m basing it on something we never revealed to the public.”
“And that is?”
“Five weeks before the murders Susan Wynne made a substantial cash withdrawal from her trust fund — a quarter of a million dollars. The trust officer at the bank in San Francisco thought it was unusual at first, until Susan explained that they were planning to make some major improvements on the property, and that most people up there like to deal in cash if at all possible.”
“Hide their income from the IRS, you mean.”
Rho shrugged. “Most of them are barely getting by as is, without turning a chunk of it over to a government that does very little to provide relief to poor people. Anyway, no improvements were ever made in Cascada Canyon, and the money was never recovered. We were afraid that if the information was made public we’d have an invasion of treasure-hunters on the property.”