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“She only likes the first four songs,” Mrs. Mitchell offered as explanation.
Emily returned to the carpet by the sofa and went back to work like a high-speed robot programmed to color.
It took her another nine minutes of coloring in the loosely co
Mrs. Mitchell looked over at Jake and shrugged. “I guess that’s it.”
Jake looked at the ball, laid out like a dissection in a biology class.
Mrs. Mitchell shrugged. “Looks kind of like some of the pieces on your video.”
Jake stared into the swirling rubber puzzle, trying to pick out details that made some sort of sense.
It was Frank who said, “It’s upside down.”
Jake stood up and walked around to the other side of Emily’s artwork. In the middle of the spider’s body, sprawled out like a gerrymander map, four irregularly shaped pieces of rubber came together and formed the image of a human eye.
“You sonofabitch,” Jake said through his teeth.
“What?” Frank came over and stood beside him.
“It’s a sphere. Jacob meant for this to be assembled into a sphere.”
“What would be the point?”
Jake squatted down and lifted one of the legs of the rubber skin; it was cold in his hand. “So you could only see the painting from the inside.” He looked up into Frank’s eyes.
Frank looked at the model that Emily Mitchell had constructed from her vantage point, way out beyond comprehension. “He really has lost his mind.”
Jake shook his head and tried not to sound too reverent. “This is brilliant.” He thought of the stainless polyhedron model on the console by the door, the one his father had welded thirty-plus years ago. It was about the same size as the beach ball. In fact, if he thought about it, it was worth betting that it was exactly the same size as the beach ball. Somehow the old man had broadcast on a frequency that Emily Mitchell had received. The idea that the panels back in the studio were actually the mock-up for the real piece of art, which was right here in his fucking hands, was too far-reaching to consider. How could he know that we’d be able to do this? Jake wondered.
And the answer was, he hadn’t. This was a fluke, a one-in-a-trillion-squared shot that had pa
The thought of anything else was simply ridiculous.
The cold, almost epidermal rubber felt perverse, wrong in his hands. But he had his mug shot.
Ski
Jake turned to Mrs. Mitchell. “Thank you for your help.”
62
Jake and Frank headed for the hospital, fighting into the wind this time, their progress handicapped by the lousy aerodynamics of the big metal beast. With the new lead, Jake had come out of his angry grief enough to be amazed at the force Mother Nature was throwing around. He wondered if the house back at the point was still standing or if it had been snatched from the shoreline in one violent grab of the ocean.
“You think that’s a portrait of the killer?” Frank jerked his thumb at the mutilated beach-ball skin that lay in Jake’s lap, wrapped in two garbage bags.
Jake caressed the plastic beneath his fingers, wondering what was in there. “I don’t know.” He thought about the mind it had taken to put this together—a three-dimensional painting that was supposed to be viewed from the inside. How many men were capable of something like that? A handful on the planet at most. Maybe less.
And he thought about the other part, the part that was a little too freaky-deaky to really examine, because there was no way to put it into any sort of context.
“Jacob wanted this to be seen from the inside? I don’t understand, Jakey.”
Jake wasn’t sure he did, either. “All those little canvases at the house—all those little irregular shapes piled all over the place, are parts of a whole—of a bigger piece. Alone, they are nothing. It’s like a digital photograph. Up close—too close—all you see are little squares of color, like tiles in a mosaic. I knew they meant something, I just couldn’t figure out what.”
“How’d he design it? Did you look at the way that kid chopped up that beach ball? Something like that takes a shitload of smarts.” Frank shook his head and fired up a cigarette.
“You can fault Jacob Coleridge on a lot of things but you can’t accuse him of being dumb. And I think that this thing was designed to be stretched over that sculpture in the—”
Frank slapped the steering wheel. “—hallway! Sonofabitch, that’s smart, I mean—” And he stopped, realizing that meant that this had been Jacob’s plan for three-plus decades. “Oh, boy.”
Up ahead there was a dip in the road that had filled in with water. Jake shifted in his seat. “That looks deep, Frank.”
“Don’t worry. Got a snorkel,” he said, and tapped the windshield, pointing to a pipe that stuck out of the hood in front of Jake. “Besides, this thing won’t float—it’s designed to fill up with water so we don’t lose traction. Might get your pants wet but do you really give a shit?”
Jake’s fingers wrapped tighter around the support bar mounted on the dashboard in front of his seat, keeping one hand on Emily Mitchell’s artwork in his lap. He looked to the east, to the waves detonating against the newly gouged shoreline, and tried to ignore that if the storm wanted them to drown, a snorkel wasn’t going to do shit.
63
His father stared at the ceiling, making scared little sounds that belonged in a children’s ghost story. “Who is this, Jacob?”
Jake laid the skin of the beach ball out on a bulletin board he had rolled in from the doctor’s lounge. It was held up with pins, like a prized specimen on a dissection table.
Jake had other things in the back of his mind. He wanted to ask his father about where he had come from, where he had been found. About who he really was. But he had no time. The storm was raging against the world around him and the Bloodman was raging against the world within. And his entire focus had been reduced to finding his wife and child. “Who, Jacob?”
Jacob Coleridge stared at the piece, fascinated, something like pride shining in his eyes. Then he shifted his gaze to his son’s eyes, and for a second they were the eyes of a rational, sane man. Maybe even a man who loved him. His mouth twitched in one weak little smile, the kind Jacob had never given his son; I love you, it said.
Then someone threw the big breaker in his head, his mind shorted out for good, and he fell back onto the pillow, mumbling beneath his breath.
Jake spent another ten minutes—ten minutes he didn’t have and couldn’t spare—trying to coax his father’s mind out of wherever it had retreated to and all he had to show for it were a few mumbled pleas and some crying. Jake finally gave up and steered Frank out into the hallway by the elbow.