Crazybone Read Free Page A

heritage oaks. The garage was detached, off on the right. On the far side stood a smaller outbuilding with a slanted glass roof, its near wall two-thirds glass. Sheila Hunter’s potting studio.
    I parked in a paved semicircle fronting the house. There were no other cars in sight, and when I rang the bell its chimes didn’t bring anybody. I wandered over to the outbuilding. The afternoon sun threw flamelight off the glass surfaces, lit up the interior in a glaring way. The effect, as I approached, was of a building on fire. The woman in white sitting in the glass-walled section, motionless with her head bowed, might have been a penitent in some weird religious ceremony — or a corpse prepared for cremation in a glass oven.
    The illusion vanished as I reached an open door in the wood-walled section. Unpleasant image, given the circumstances, and I was glad to be rid of it. I had a clearer look at the woman now: she was seated on a stool before a potter’s wheel, her hands clasped between her knees, her back sharply bent forward and her head so far down I couldn’t see her face behind a hanging screen of dark hair. The white outfit was a man’s shirt and a pair of tailored jeans. No widow’s weeds for Sheila Hunter, if that was who she was. Not that clothes make a grieving spouse: you can mourn just as deeply naked or in the raiments of royalty.
    I poked my head through the doorway. “Mrs. Hunter?”
    No answer. She didn’t move, didn’t seem to have heard me. I thought: Why not just go and leave her alone? But it was reflexive and without conviction. Like it or not, the nature of my job is to bother people, too often at the worst of times. If I started giving in to my overload of empathy, I might as well get out of the investigation business.
    I stepped inside. Storage shelves of pots, bowls, urns in odd, twisted shapes, some wearing bright green and blue glazes overlain with geometric black designs, others unglazed. Tubs of wet clay. Miscellaneous clutter. A doorway without a door gave access to the glass-walled section where the woman sat. In there I could see a kiln, squatty and much tinier than I’d imagined kilns to be, and the potter’s wheel and a long bench and not much else. I framed myself in the opening and said her name again. Still no response: she might’ve been in some kind of trance.
    “Mrs. Hunter?” Louder, and a rap on the inner wall to go with it.
    She came alive in a convulsive spasm, sitting bolt upright, the dark hair flying silkily as her head whipped around my way. For three or four seconds she gawped at me out of wide, bulging eyes — a look that made me recoil a little. It contained as much raw terror as I’ve ever seen in anyone’s face. Then she was on her feet, in a movement so sudden it toppled the stool: backing away, one hand up in front of her as if she were trying to ward off an attacker. The edge of the workbench stopped her. She reached down to grab it with both hands, steadying herself, still radiating fear at me. Her eyes had an unfocused sheen. She was breathing so rapidly I thought she might start to hyperventilate.
    “Crazybone,” she said.
    The word popped out in a thin, choked whisper. There was dread in it, and something else, a visceral emotion from deep within her. She seemed unaware of having spoken; it was a sleepwalker’s word, a nightmare word.
    I said, “I’m sorry, Mrs. Hunter, I didn’t mean to frighten you.”
    “Oh, God.” Eyeblinks, several of them. A palpable shudder. And then she was herself again, the eyes focusing, some of the terror retreating. “Who are you?” she said in a stronger voice. “What do you want?”
    “I called to you twice from outside, but you—”
    “Who are you?”
    I told her my name, that I represented Intercoastal Insurance. I had one of my cards in hand, but I was afraid of setting her off again by approaching her with it. Instead I reached over and laid it on the clay-stained bench.
    “Jesus,” she said, “that