“Why? What have I— you can’t mean that, John!”
He glanced at her with an intake hiss of breath that scared her. His eyes looked feverish. “Exactly that.
Leave. For your safety.”
“My—? What has Taja done? Why were you fighting with her last night? Why are you afraid of her?”
“Done? Why, she’s spent the past few years hunting seven beautiful women after I had finished painting them.”
“Hunting—?”
“Then she slashed, burned, maimed— killed, for all I know! And always she returned to me after the hunt, silently gloating. Now she’s out there again, searching for Silkie MacKenzie.”
“Dear God. Why?”
“Don’t you understand? To make them pay, for all they’ve meant to me.”
Echo had the odd feeling that she wasn’t fully awake after all, that she just wanted to sink to the floor, curl up and go back to sleep. She couldn’t look at his face another moment. She went hesitantly to a curved window, opened the shutters there and rested her cheek on insulated safety glass that could withstand hurricane winds. She stared at the brute pounding of the sea below, feeling the force of the waves in the shiver of glass, repeating the surge of her own heartbeats.
“How long have you known?”
“More than two years ago I became suspicious of what she might be doing during prolonged absences. I hired the Blackwelder Organization to investigate. What they came up with was horrifying, but still circumstantial.”
“Did you really want proof?” Echo cried.
“Of course I did! And last night I finally received it, an e-mail from Australia. Where one of my former models—”
“Another victim?”
“Yes,” Ransome said, his head down. “Her name is Aurora Leigh. She’d been in seclusion. But she was in adequate shape emotionally to identify Taja as her attacker from sketches I provided.”
“Adequate shape emotionally,” Echo repeated numbly. “Why did Taja hit you last night?”
“I confronted her with what I knew.”
“Was she trying to kill you?”
“No. I don’t think so. Just letting me know her business isn’t finished yet.”
“Oh Jesus and Mary! The police—did you call—”
“I called my lawyers this morning. They’ll handle it. Taja will be stopped.”
“But what if Taja’s still here? You’ll need—”
“Her boat’s gone. She’s not on the island.”
“There are dozens of islands where she could be hiding!”
“I can take care of myself.”
“Oh, sure,” Echo said, bouncing the heel of her hand off her forehead as she began to pace.
“Don’t be frightened. Just go back to New York. If there’s even a remote possibility Taja will be free long enough to return to Kincairn—well then, Taja is, she’s always been, my responsibility.”
Echo paused, stared, caught her breath, alarmed by something ominous hanging around behind his words. “Why do you say that? You didn’t make her what she is. That must have happened long before you met her, where—?”
“In Budapest.”
“Doing what, mugging tourists?”
“When I first saw Taja,” he said, his voice laboring, “she was drawing with chalk on the paving stones near the Karoly Kit gate. For what little money passersby were willing to throw her way.” He raised his head slowly. “I don’t know how old she was then; I don’t know her age now. As I told you once, terrible things had been done to her. She was barefoot, her hair wild, her dress shabby.” He smiled faintly at Echo.
His lips were nearly bloodless. ‘Yes, I should have walked on by. But I was astounded by her talent. She drew wonderful, suffering, religious faces. They burned with fevers, the hungers of martyrdom. All of the faces washing away each time it rained, or scuffed underfoot by the heedless. But every day she would draw them again. Her knees, her elbows were scabbed. For hours she barely paused to look up from her work. Yet she knew I was there. And after a while it was my face she sought, my approval. Then, late one afternoon when it didn’t rain, I—I followed her. Sensing that she was dangerous. But I’ve never wanted a tame affair. It’s immolation I always seem to be after.”
His smile showed a slightly crooked eye tooth Echo was more or less enamored with, a sly imperfection.
“Just how dangerous she was at that time became a matter of no great importance. You see, we may all be dangerous, Mary Catherine, depending on what is done to us.”
“Oh, was the sex that good?” Echo said harshly, her face flaming.
“Sometimes sex isn’t the necessary thing, depending on the nature of one’s obsession.”
Echo began, furiously, to sob. She turned again to the horizon, the darkening sea.
After a couple of minutes he said, “Mary Catherine—”
“You know I’m not going! I won’t let you give up painting because of what Taja did! You’re not going to send me away, John, you need me!”
“It’s not in your power to get me to paint again.”
“Oh, isn’t it?” She wiped her leaky nose on the sleeve of her fisherman’s sweater; hadn’t done that in quite a few years. Then she pulled off the sweater, gave her head a shake, swirling her abundant hair.
Ransome smiled cautiously when she looked at him again, began to stare him down. A look as old, as eter-nal as the sea below.
“We have to complete what we’ve started,” Echo said reasonably. She moved closer to him, the better for him to see the fierceness of eye, the high flame of her own obsession. She swept a hand in the direction of her portrait on his easel. “Look, John. And look again! I’m not just a face on a sidewalk. I matter!”
She seized and kissed him, knowing that the pain in his sore head made it not particularly enjoyable; but that wasn’t her reason just then for doing it.
“Okay?” she said mildly and took a step back, clasping hands at her waist. The pupil. The teacher. Who was who awaited clarification, perhaps the tumult and desperation of an affair now investing the air they breathed with the power of a blood oath.
“Oh, Mary Catherine—” he said despairingly.
“I asked you, is it okay? Do we go on from here? Where? When? What do we do now, John?”
He sighed, nodded slightly. That hurt too. He put a hand lightly to the bump on his head.
“You’re a tough, wonderful kid. Your heart… is just so different than mine. That’s what makes you valuable to me, Mary Catherine.” He gravely touched her shoulder, tapping it twice, dropped his hand.
“And now you’ve been warned.”
She liked the touch, ignored his warning. “Shall I pick up the rest of those brushes that were spilled?”
After a long silence Ransome said, “I’ve always found salvation in my work. As you must know. I wonder, could that be why your god sent you to me?”
“We’ll find out,” Echo said.
Peter heard one of the detectives ask, “How close did she come to his liver?”
A woman, probably the ER doc who had been stitching him up, replied, “Too close to measure.”
The other detective on the team, who had the flattened Southie nasal tone, said, “Irish luck. Okay if we talk to him now?”
“He’s awake. The Demerol has him groggy.”
They came into Peter’s cubicle. The older detective, probably nudging retirement, had a paunch and an archaic crook of a nose like an old Roman in marble. The young one, but not that young—close to forty, Peter guessed—had red hair in cheerful disarray and hard-ass good looks the women probably went for like a guilty pleasure. Cynicism was a fixture in his face, like the indentations from long-ago acne.
He grinned at Peter. “How you doin’, you lucky baastud?”
“Okay, I guess.”
“Frank Tillery, Cambridge PD. This here is my Fathah Superior, Sal Tranca.”
“Hiya.”
“Hiya.”
Peter wasn’t taken in by their show of camaraderie. They didn’t like what they had seen in the architect’s apartment and they didn’t like what they’d heard so far from Silkie. They didn’t like him, either.
“Find the perp yet?” he said, taking the initiative.
Sal said, “Hasn’t turned up. Found her blade in a can of paint. Seven inches, thin, what they call a stiletto in the old country.”
Tillery leaned against a wall with folded arms and a lemon twist of a grin and said, “Pete, you mind tellin’ us why you was trackin’ a homicidal maniac in our town without so much as a courtesy call to us?”
“I’m not on the job. I was—looking for Silkie MacKenzie. Walked right into the play.”
“What did you want with MacKenzie? I mean, if I’m not bein’ too subtle here.”
“Met her—in New York.” His ribs were taped, and it was hard for him to breathe. “Like I told you at the scene, had some time off so I thought I’d look her up.”
“Apparently she was already shacked up with one guy, owns the apartment,” Sal said. “Airline ticket in your coat pocket tells us you flew in from Houston yesterday morning.”