“And that she knew her murderer?”
“That I don’t know.”
“You know,” Theodore said, “I sometimes think that there is such a thing as a family that simply carries its doom around with it. Like a virus, you might say. It’s as if they’ve been infected, and there’s nothing that can be done to them.”
Frank nodded.
“The Devereaux family strikes me as very much like that,” Theodore went on. “It just doesn’t seem possible that mere accident could have generated so much tragedy. It’s more like a plague, don’t you think?”
“When was the last time you saw Angelica?”
Theodore thought about it for a moment. “That would have been last Friday.”
“Two days before she died,” Frank said. He pulled out his notebook. “Did she seem different in any way?”
“No, not then.”
The “not then” struck Frank as unusual. “But there were other times when she did seem different?”
“Oh, no, not really,” Theodore answered quickly. “It’s just that I saw so little of her. I hardly knew her.”
“Did she seem happy that last Friday?”
“I suppose,” Theodore said. “I really saw her for just a few seconds. She sort of passed me in the foyer here. She seemed very busy, but that was nothing odd for Angelica.”
“She always seemed busy?”
“Bustling, rushing about, that sort of thing,” Theodore explained. “There were times when I suspected that she might be quite a creative person.”
“Why?”
“Her energy,” Theodore said. “That’s the one thing I’ve noticed about creative people. They may not be brighter than others, and they certainly have no better morals or any more ordered personal lives than the rest of us. But they do have this energy. It’s like—forgive the standard image—it’s like they’re on fire.”
Frank wrote it down. “Did Angelica seem that way?”
“Sometimes,” Theodore said. He thought a moment, as if trying to recapture some part of her in his mind. “But, at the end of all that energy, there was nothing. I mean, she never really did anything.”
“She was eighteen,” Frank reminded him.
“Of course, you’re right,” Theodore said. “What can you expect from a young girl?” He walked a few paces away, then turned back toward Frank. His face was very grave, as if some disturbing thought had occurred to him. His lips parted slightly, as if he were about to speak, then closed suddenly, sealing off the words.
“Hello, Mr. Clemons.”
Frank glanced toward the stairs that swept down to the foyer and saw Karen as she slowly made her way down them. She was dressed in a long, lavender skirt and white blouse, and as he looked at her, Frank could feel something go soft and pliant within him.
“I told you that I’d be coming by today,” he said.
“Yes, I know,” Karen said. “James was just leaving.”
She stopped on the last step, lingering there, as if to hold herself back from something. Then she moved forward quickly and touched Frank’s hand. “I’m glad you came,” she said. “The funeral is tomorrow, and I wanted to get as many things done as possible before then. Things having to do with the investigation, I mean.”
“Yes,” Frank said. His hand tingled where she had touched it.
“I’d better be on my way, Karen,” Theodore said quickly. “Nice to have met you, Mr. Clemons.”
“Thank you,” Frank said. “And if you think of anything that might …”
“Yes, yes, I’ll let you know,” Theodore said as he walked briskly out of the house.
Frank looked at Karen. “Your partner?” he said.
“Yes.”
“In a gallery?”
“That’s right.”
“I didn’t know you owned a gallery.”
“Of course you didn’t,” Karen said crisply. “How could you?”
And yet it seemed to Frank that he already knew a lot about her. He had seen her in the garden, with that rose. He glanced down at his notebook, and the facts gathered there suddenly struck him as the least real things in life, little more than an inventory of its debris.
Karen stepped away from him. “Do you want to see Angelica’s room now?”
“Yes.”
“Follow me,” Karen said.
Frank walked directly behind her as she made her way slowly up the stairs. There was an odd weariness in her movement, it seemed to him, a reluctance which all but stopped her at each step.
Angelica’s room was at the far end of a long, wide corridor, and when Frank walked into it, he was amazed at what he saw. It looked like the room of a little girl, rather than a young adult’s. Frilly curtains hung from the two large windows. The walls were papered with designs that looked as if they’d come from Fantasia. There was an enormous canopy bed, all white and lavender, and at the opposite end of the room, a large cabinet filled with exotic dolls. A white wicker vanity sat near the adjoining bath, but it looked as if it had never been used. The tall mirror was polished to a bright sheen, and the ornate embroidered stool showed no signs of wear.
“I came into this room for the first time only a few hours ago,” Karen said. “For the first time in many years. I was very surprised by the way it looked. Nothing had changed in all that time. It looked as it had when Angelica was eleven.”
“You haven’t been in this room since then?” Frank asked.
“Absolutely not,” Karen assured him. “It became a real issue for Angelica when she was around eleven. Privacy became an obsession with her. She refused to let anyone in.”
“Even you?”
“I think, especially me.”
“Why?”
“I thought it was just something she was going through,” Karen said, “some sort of prepuberty thing. So I went along with her. But it never changed. Time went by. I didn’t make an issue of it.”
“But why especially you?”
“Big sister, I suppose.”
Frank walked slowly to the center of the room. He remembered the look of Sarah’s room, cluttered, strewn with books and records, perpetually disordered. It was as if she had despised the order Angelica had worked so hard to maintain.
“It sure doesn’t look like a teenager’s room, does it?” Karen asked.
“Not like my daughter’s,” Frank said, before he could stop himself.
“Oh, you have a daughter?” Karen asked.
Frank turned away slightly. “She died.”
“I’m sorry.”
Frank glanced at the bed. “Did Angelica ever have people up here?”
“Not that I know of,” Karen said. She stepped over to the vanity and opened the top drawer. “I found this,” she said, as she handed it to Frank. “It’s a diary.”
Frank took it from her and opened it. “Where did you find it?”
“It was on her bed,” Karen said. “And it was open.”
“Have you read it?”
“Yes.”
“Is there anything in it?”
“Odd things,” Karen said. “But only odd because they’re so normal.”
Frank began to flip through the pages. “What do you mean?”
“Well, from the diary, you’d get the impression that Angelica was a very average sort of teenager. She writes about going to parties and sleep-overs. She writes about being the treasurer of the senior class. She writes about being on the prom committee, that sort of thing.” She shook her head. “But she never did any of those things. It was all a lie.” She glanced at the diary. “That’s what I mean about it being odd. It’s about a normal life that never existed.”
Frank continued to flip through the book. The handwriting was extraordinarily neat and precise, the letters carefully formed, the lines utterly straight. It was as if Angelica had drawn the words, rather than written them.
“She lived behind a mask,” Karen said. “That’s all I can figure out.” Her eyes latched on to the diary. “It’s as if she lived an entirely mannered life.”