“Mannered?”
“Yes,” Karen said. “Like when a painting is mannered. There’s nothing real about it. It’s as if the artist decided to copy a feeling he didn’t have himself.”
Frank closed the diary. “I’ll need to keep this.”
“Of course.”
He put it in his coat pocket. “How did Angelica take it when your parents were killed?”
“She was too young to understand it.”
“Did she play with other children?”
“A little,” Karen said, “but I don’t think she ever had a real friend.” She glanced about the room. “You know, this room isn’t strange only because of what’s in it, but because of things that are missing.”
“What things?”
“Letters. There’s not one note to Angelica in this room. There are no books, no records. It’s as if nothing has been added to it from the time she was eleven.”
Frank turned slowly, eyeing the room carefully. At a murder scene, the area was often divided into quadrants and then searched meticulously. His eyes had gotten used to the same method. They turned the room into a grid, then examined each small square of space.
“It’s as if Angelica was some sort of teenage version of Miss Havisham,” Karen said, after a moment. “It’s like time stopped when she was eleven, and after that it was all a fantasy.”
“Unless it was all in secret,” Frank said.
“Another life, you mean?”
“Yes.”
Karen smiled delicately. “You know, I hope she did. And in a way, it doesn’t matter what kind of life it was.” Her eyes darted furiously about the room. “As long as it wasn’t this.”
“We can find out what kind of life it was,” Frank said.
“How?”
“We can start with this book.”
“And do what?”
“Well, for one thing, all those nights she claimed to be at proms and parties, things like that.”
“What about them?”
“If she wasn’t at those places, where was she?”
Karen thought about it. “Most of the time, she was here, I think.”
“Up in her room?”
“Yes.”
“But you’re not sure?”
“No, I’m not sure,” Karen said. “I tried to stay out of her life. I knew that that was what she wanted.”
Frank closed the diary. “Maybe.”
“What do you mean?”
“Sometimes they want to be watched over,” Frank told her. “They want to be told ‘no.’”
“I don’t think that was the case with Angelica,” Karen said firmly.
“All right,” Frank said. He lifted the book slightly. “Did you notice any names in here?”
“Names?”
“Friends, fellow students, teachers, anything.”
“She used initials,” Karen told him. “She would write something like ‘Had a great time at L’s,’ or ‘Met with Prom staff: B.T.H.’”
“Telephone numbers?”
“I didn’t see any.”
Frank walked over to the small white telephone that rested on a table next to Angelica’s bed. He took out his notebook and wrote down the number.
“Why do you want that?”
“To find out who she’s been calling,” Frank said.
She looked at him with an odd sympathy. “It must feel odd, to do what you do. I mean, it’s something like a Peeping Tom, isn’t it?”
“Yes,” Frank admitted.
He closed the notebook, put it in his pocket and looked up at her. She was standing in the doorway, her body framed by a soft, purplish light. Her beauty swept over him like a thirsty wind. There was a kind of isolation in her eyes, a separateness from ordinary experience, and he wondered if her sister had felt the same aloneness, had walked down lost, desolate streets and listened to the catcalls of the men she passed until there was nothing to do but return to the innocence of a little girl’s room. It was the sort of loneliness he’d known in others, known in himself, and he knew how easily it could turn to rage.
“The play she was in,” he said. “Did you see it?”
“Yes,” Karen said. “It was the only time she ever invited me to anything.” She shook her head slowly. “We’re burying her tomorrow. Will you come to the funeral?”
“Yes,” Frank said.
“It’s part of the routine, I guess,” Karen said.
Frank shrugged. “That’s part of it,” he said, “but it’s not the whole thing.”
15
It was almost noon the next day when Angelica Devereaux was buried in one of Atlanta’s most exclusive cemeteries. It was the sort of exquisitely kept ground that up until recent years had never received the body of a black or a Jew. It held to a certain rigid dignity, the sort that looked as if money couldn’t buy it, even though everyone knew that it was the only thing that could.
“They’ll probably bury the mayor here,” Caleb said, his lips fluttering around the stem of his pipe. “That’ll make integration complete.”
To Frank, it had only mattered that Angelica was being buried. He could still remember the feel of her clothing. He’d gone through it the day before, fingering the pockets of her ordered blouses and neatly folded jeans for some note with a name or number on it. The closets had revealed nothing, and so, as Karen stood in the doorway, he had gone through the drawers of the vanity, then the bureau, had peered under the canopy bed and beneath the primly stuffed pillows. The underside of things revealed no more than their appearances, and a little girl’s room remained a little girl’s room forever.
“Who’s the guy with the white hair and black suit?” Caleb asked.
“Arthur Cummings,” Frank said.
Caleb leaned against the large elm and sucked his teeth. “Oh yeah, the guardian.”
Even from the distance, Frank could hear the low moan of the Episcopalian minister as he began his prayer for Angelica’s salvation.
“I recognize that guy on Cummings’ right,” Caleb said, “the headmaster.” He squinted against the bright light. “But who’s the blonde guy with the hairdo?”
“James Theodore. Friend of Karen’s.”
The sound of prayer died away, and Karen stepped forward. For a moment she remained, staring into the open grave. Then she took a spadeful of reddish earth and scattered it over Angelica’s coffin.
“From the look of it, Frank,” Caleb said, “Angelica didn’t have many friends.”
“No teachers from the school. No students.”
“You think the little papa might be here?”
Frank glanced at one face, then another: Cummings, Morrison, Theodore, and at last, a small, squat man in a gray suit and hornrimmed glasses.
“The guy in the gray suit,” he said. “He looks familiar.”
Caleb shook his head. “I think Angelica could have done better than that.”
“I’ve seen him somewhere,” Frank said thoughtfully. He was not sure exactly what he remembered, the flabby round face, the short, stocky body, the enormous glasses, but it was something unpleasant. He replayed his past cases, searching for some detail that would sweep the man back into his memory.
Then, suddenly, the man reached in his jacket pocket and fingered the antenna of a small remote receiver.
“He’s a doctor,” Frank whispered. He looked over to Caleb. “There was a woman, a society woman. They found her dead in her house on the Prado.”
Caleb watched him. “This one’s new to me, Frank.”
“She’d OD’d on something,” Frank continued. “Alvin brought the doctor in for questioning.”
Caleb’s eyes slowly shifted back to the little man in the gray suit.
“It turns out he was one of those Dr. Feelgood types,” Frank said. “He was pretty much giving a few rich people anything they wanted. Loading them up on prescription drugs.”