The Eye of the Beholder Page 21

  I did a search first for symbols and codes in art, then for articles in Canadian Anthropology Studies, and wrote down a few titles. I then headed to the reference desk, because if there is one thing I have learned about libraries, it is to take advantage of their secret weapons—research librarians.

  The fact that it was a slow Monday was probably to my advantage. Spring and summer session students didn’t hound librarians, for the most part, mostly because they were having too much trouble making it through the reading requirements for their courses without adding to their loads. I sidled up to the desk and put on my sunniest smile.

  “May I help you?” asked the woman behind the desk, who looked as if she never had to consciously put on a smile because she was just naturally beaming. Her nameplate said “Carol Wright,” and somehow I knew I was in good hands.

  “I hope so. I am looking for some books on hidden messages in works of fine art, and symbols and signs in Middle American art.”

  “Oh my goodness. Did Janet send you over here as a joke?”

  “Uh, no. I’m totally serious. Why?”

  “Because my own thesis was on reading the messages in the visual arts.”

  “You’re kidding. So, in that case, does the library have a copy of your thesis?”

  “I’m afraid not. I did my masters degree at York. But I can point you to some good source material and give you an overview of my argument, if that would be of use to you. You’re absolutely positive this isn’t a joke?” She scanned the vicinity, looking for some prankster friend, I suppose, or James Cordon.

  “Absolutely positive. I don’t know, I guess sometimes coincidences work in our favour. And anything you can tell me would be spectacular, Ms. Wright.”

  “Call me Carol.”

  “Thank you, Carol. I’m Randy. Randy Craig.”

  I pulled up a chair to the side of her desk, and for the next hour, Carol Wright listed a variety of books on the subject of symbol and message in the arts, both secular and religious, including one which had an essay that sounded an awful lot like the talk Nancy had pointed me towards. She also walked me through the meaning of the various milagros with which South and Central American religious icons were bedazzled.

  “Are you working on a paper, or is this for your teaching in some way?” she asked, having ascertained that I was indeed an academic of sorts, working across the river.

  I admitted that my interest was partly personal and partly as research for the police as a civilian specialist.

  “And the crime is one of art theft? Or some sort of art puzzle?”

  “Not really. It’s more that a murder scene had some art elements to it.” I figured it was okay to say this much, though I was trying to be as circumspect as possible, knowing that Steve would wince and Keller would kill me if they even knew I was discussing things this much.

  “Well, you should probably add De Quincey to your reading list, in that case,” Carol nodded to herself.

  “Thomas De Quincey, the opium eater?”

  “One and the same.”

  She pulled up the call numbers on her computer and scribbled them down for me on a note pad.

  “His essay, On Murder Considered as one of the Fine Arts, is all about the argument that one can appreciate the aesthetics of a murder, given the attention to details a murderer presents.”

  “Wow. Yes, that sounds like something I should read.”

  Carol passed me the paper, and smile. “I hope I’ve given you something to start on. It’s been fun talking shop again, as it were.”

  “Do you paint, Carol?”

  “No,” she shook her head, “I dabble occasionally with watercolour pencils when I’m on vacation, but I certainly don’t transcend the level of applied doodling.”

  I thanked her again and went off through the stacks to see which of her suggestions I could find. After about half an hour of searching, I had a sizable number of books to haul home with me. I looked for Carol when I was back on the second floor, checking out my books, but she must have gone on a break or have completed her shift for the day, because a rather sullen-looking younger woman was now manning the reference desk.

  I thanked my lucky stars I had been in the right place at the right time to meet up with Carol Wright, popped my books into my backpack, and headed for the bus bays to grab a bus that would take me down Whyte Avenue. Walking in five short blocks from Whyte Avenue with a heavy backpack sounded a lot more appealing than trudging twelve long blocks along the river valley, no matter how nice the view was.

  I was soon home, and once I had peeled out of my teaching togs, and back into some capri leggings and a T-shirt, I set out a roast to thaw before popping it into the oven with root vegetables. Only then did I unload my backpack onto the coffee table.

  I had two books on the Symbolists, most particularly Redon and Gaugain, with Munch, Klimt, and Beardsley bringing up the rear. Symbolism apparently was a push against the literal representation of works, or what we’d call photorealism, and aimed for a purpose beyond capturing the vision itself. They moved back to the mythic, and looked into death and lurid sexuality as topics for their work, as well.

  I also had a book on hidden messages in famous paintings, which I’d pulled for curiosity more than research. Another book Carol had suggested, The Metaphoric Interpretation of Paintings, might or might not be of use. And then, topping it off, a small red book with a gold embossed title, On Murder Considered as one of the Fine Arts and other essays by Thomas De Quincey.

  I suspect it was his opium-eating essay that had turned me off De Quincey as an undergrad, where I had been introduced to him in a half-term course on Regency and Victorian Essayists. There was an archness to his writing about addiction, and I could feel it here, as well, in his overblown gentlemen’s club discussion of murder.

  I just about dropped my pen when I got to the third page of the essay, though. The main character at his murderers’ appreciation club was known as Toad-in-the-Hole, supposedly for his gloomy attitude about modern life.

  Toad in the hole. Could it be a total coincidence that the egg and toast picture which had been included in the beach bag at the murder scene? Was her white and yellow beach hat supposed to lead a viewer back to De Quincey and an aesthetic argument for murder?

  Steve had once said that police officers understood that coincidences did happen, but that they hated them. So, he wasn’t going to think it was a coincidence.

  I sent Steve a text to call me as soon as he had a chance, but I had been so wrapped up in my reading that I hadn’t realized the time. He texted me back saying he was in the elevator, and he walked in the door just as the oven buzzer signaled that dinner was ready.

  It was all a bit garbled in my mind, and I didn’t want to lose the thread, so I turned off the oven and made him sit down and listen to my findings.

  His eyes got wider for a bit, and I wasn’t sure whether that was amazement or disbelief, so I suggested he look through the books and computer histories of his suspects for a copy of the De Quincey essay.

  “That’s amazing, Randy. And exactly what I was hoping you’d uncover with your research. I’ll get on this first thing tomorrow. I might even see if the university library system will give up who may have checked it out in the last year or so.”

  “You’ll end up with me on that list, then. I’ve got a copy sitting here on our coffee table.”

  “I think we can eliminate people who took it out after February of this year.”

  “I think eliminating people is what it is all about.”

  “Figure of speech.”

  “That’s the thing. What we take as shorthand, symbols, figures of speech, someone out there is seeing as literal concepts. It’s as if someone brand new to the codes of a culture, like an alien or a baby or a tourist, is coming in and reading them as utterly literal. Or someone very immersed in symbolism is
playing with its potency.”

  “Can we narrow it down to not being a baby or an alien?”

  “Okay, if we must. But I think you really need to look at the artists in this case: the teacher Diego, and the married sculptor guy. Both of them are visual artists. Hell, add in the ex-boyfriend, too. Maybe he got to Mexico somehow without our knowing it. All of them had an axe to grind with the victim, all of them play with symbols.”

  “And you still think this art installation was meant for a particular audience?”

  “That I’m not sure about. Unless it was you and me.”

  “You think the killer knew we’d be there?”

  “Not us personally. But Edmontonians on Reading Week break, yes. I think it may have been meant to ruin our vacation, to present us with a vision of foreign tourist, set out as attempting to approximate fitting in—hence the Frida allusions—but showing how little we do, how anachronistic we are when set apart from the rest, how invisible we become. Hell, I’m not sure what the message was meant to be, but I am certain it was supposed to convey something to us Canadians escaping our winters by invading sunny shores.”

  “You could be right. Listen, I’ll take this to Iain and Keller, and see if we can get warrants to search for the De Quincey circulation history, and we’ll see what we pull up, okay?

  “Terrific.”

  “So can we eat dinner now?”

  “You bet.”

  30

  The next morning, Steve left me drinking coffee at the island, promising he’d let me know what the thought was on the symbolic angle. He kissed me on the forehead and was gone. And with him went my sense of being of value on the case. All in all, it seemed pretty small potatoes, especially given that it was I who had first seen the body.

  I tidied up the rest of the books, suddenly tired of looking at anything that reminded me of Kristin laid out on the sand, and spent an hour organizing the shelves under the bathroom sinks, which was obviously an area that Steve had no use for, and which I liked tidy. Our tacit agreement seemed to be that if something bothered you enough, you should be the one to deal with it. So Steve washed up dishes sitting in the sink and vacuumed every morning of a day off, I dusted and organized shelves, and whoever got out of bed last made it.

  We were getting the hang of this combining of our lives just fine. I only panicked every other month, and only for a minute or two, about the finality of it all. Then I zipped my mind through a catalogue of my life without Steve, and bucked up again. With our schedules, we managed to get enough private moments for me to feed the introverted aspect of my personality. I hoped Steve felt that way, too. Did he ever feel as if I had just invaded his space, leaving him no down time without me draped over the arm of the chesterfield like some patchwork quilt? Most of the time I could quell these thoughts, but sometimes it haunted me. Would Steve ever get tired of having me around, and once I was so entwined into his life, what would that do to me?

  Was this how murderers felt about people? Did they get tired of them? Not that I could ever imagine Steve as a murderer, but one of De Quincey’s lines came to mind: “For, if once a man indulges himself in murder, very soon he comes to think little of robbing, and from robbing he comes next to drinking and Sabbath-breaking, and from that to incivility and procrastination. Once begin upon this downward path, you never know where you are to stop.”

  Could that have been the sort of impetus that led to Kristin’s death? Did someone feel she was in the way, or intruding? Were they just tired of her and turned her into material for their next project, like the pile of odd parts in the corner of the studio?

  Odd parts in the corner of the studio. That thought reminded me of the offhand offer Briar Nettles had made me to look around the fine arts studios. I knew that Steve and Iain had been all over there, questioning everyone who had known Kristin, but maybe I could find something that pointed to a more symbolic sensibility after all the reading I’d been doing.

  Before the impulse died down, I had grabbed my backpack, phone and keys, scribbled a quick note for Steve to say I was heading to the university to check on things, and I was out the door.

  I was immediately glad I had decided to get out. The air was warm and redolent of honeysuckle and early roses from the gardens I passed. I strode along purposefully, taking deep breaths and wondering why anyone ever considered going somewhere else than Edmonton in the summertime. In the winter, sure. The combination of cold, short days and icy roads and sidewalks, not to mention the fifteen extra minutes you needed to bundle up or disrobe any time you wanted to go somewhere, made it easy to see why so many retirees became “snowbirds” and headed south each November. But summer in Edmonton hinted at its approach with a hot week or two in May, made you deliriously happy in June, serene in July and somewhat guardedly nostalgic in August, as you saw the days begin to shorten.

  I reached the Fine Arts Building with a short detour into Remedy to get an iced Kashmiri Chai to go, and was soon happily sipping the final dregs of it and looking for a waste receptacle in the foyer of a building I hadn’t really set foot in since the summer I’d worked at the Centre for Ethnomusicology on the second floor. I was aiming for studios on the main and second floor, I figured, but I wasn’t certain which. The Drama Department was on half of the third floor, with the Music Department housed in the other half. There was also a theatre on the main floor and some recording studios, so it wasn’t tremendously clear where one aspect of the arts left off and another began.

  The thought of that made me happy, but it didn’t do much for my sense of direction at present. I decided to go with basic arithmetic and start with the first floor. I popped my empty cup into a waste bin and went through the double doors leading toward the south wing of the building.

  I was immediately treated to the sound of whining machinery, and a sign pointing to Sculpture Studio A let me know I was on the right track. Huge twelve-foot-high doors toward the end of the hall were propped open; the sound was coming from beyond them. I crooked my head around the doorway to get the lay of the land before venturing in.

  Large sculptures took up space in five or six areas of the vast room. Along the walls were work benches covered variously with power tools, buckets of paint, what looked like the entire grill of an old Chevy, and a collection of pop cans and used coffee cups. There was a boom box covered in paint plugged in and blaring something electronic, which seemed fitting.

  Canvas sheeting covered one area, making a little Everest in the middle of the room. I still hadn’t spotted a human in the area. I ventured in cautiously, feeling a bit timid since the invitation had been so offhand and long ago.

  The machine noises I had heard from the hall weren’t audible anymore. The only sound was from the boom box.

  I passed a metal sculpture that undulated wavelike in one direction and formed jagged edges along the other. Another area was filled with welded pieces of bicycles and mixing machines.

  I had thought the area extended along the south face of the building, but hadn’t realized that it was an L-shaped room, turning along the east edge, as well. From the windows, I could see the small courtyard amphitheatre between the Law Building and the Fine Arts Building. There was no one outside the windows on this lazy summer day.

  In the far corner of that shorter wing of the room, I saw something familiar. A family of white figures, partially wrapped like mummies with gauze, partially hollowed out so you could see the chicken wire form underneath. They were grouped in that triangle that I had learned in my overview Art History class so long ago, was classical balance: one sitting, one leaning toward the seated figure, and the third on the ground looking up to the seated figure.

  The bench near the figures was tidier than some I had passed. There were boxes of gauze, the sort you’d find in the first aid shelves of the drug store; huge bottles of white glue, a couple of old department store catalogues, an anatomy colouring book like the on
es med students bought to learn all the body bits and bobs; and tons of photos and pictures taped to the wall behind the bench. There were several of a pretty young woman with a baby; a bunch of hand studies, gripping different objects; and two or three art cards—American Gothic, Alex Colville’s Binoculars staring ahead, and Munch’s The Scream.

  I pulled out my camera to take a photo of the pictures on the wall. Munch’s Scream had been in Kristin’s beach bag. Of course, it was quite possible that it was just here coincidentally. A lot of people probably had a copy of The Scream up on their walls. I’d even had one on my bulletin board for ages, sent to me by my cousin, the symphony cellist. Of course, in that version, the fellow behind the screamer was obviously playing the banjo—a comment from him to me on my choice of musical instrument.

  Anything and everything might be of interest to Steve, though, especially because I was pretty sure this corner belonged to Austin Stauffer, who had been featured in the same art show as Kristin Perry in the student gallery on 124th Street.

  “Can I help you?”

  I jumped. While I had been focusing on the pictures on the wall, the noisy music had run its course, and the silence was profound, except for the echo of the question just asked.

  The fellow not quite four feet away from me didn’t look exactly belligerent, but he didn’t look all that friendly, either. He was about the same height as me, but his arms were ropy and muscular, and I had a feeling that if it came to physical combat, I wouldn’t have a chance. I also had a feeling I had seen him before.

  “Is this your space?” I asked, rather inanely.