“Maybe he was planning to,” Aida said. “Isn’t this a sketchbook?”
She picked up something sitting on the coffee table and handed it to me—an eight-and-a-half by eleven notebook bound in black faux leather. I opened it to the first page and found myself looking at a sketch of a nude woman. Recognizably Felicia, though a lot more voluptuous than I remembered her as being. Maybe Clay was trying to flatter her.
“Okay,” Aida said. “I see why Jerry Granger might be a bit put out if he caught sight of that.”
Just then we heard a heard a knock on the door.
“I’ll get it,” Aida said. “Just in case it’s not Randall.”
I flipped through a few more pages in the sketchbook. Several more flattering sketches of Felicia. A distinctly unflattering but highly recognizable one of Jerry Granger. Until I saw Clay’s sketch, I hadn’t quite realized how large Jerry’s jaw was, or how Neanderthal it made him look.
On the next page was a sketch of Ivy. Ivy in the show house, hunched over in a corner of the hallway with a paintbrush in her hand, peering at the wall she was painting. He’d exaggerated the height of the walls looming over her, so she looked more like a mouse than a human. But unlike the one of Jerry, this sketch didn’t feel unkind or mocking. More … bemused.
I kept turning the pages. Apparently this was a very recent sketchbook—all the denizens of the show house were there. I could tell he didn’t like Mother—he’d sketched her looking at Ivy’s Snow Queen mural, and made the Snow Queen look the warmer of the two. He didn’t like Eustace either, but about the only unflattering thing he did was exaggerate Eustace’s neat little paunch into a huge Santa-like belly.
He had a wicked take on Linda, showing her in her room, not only surrounded by chintz but even dressed in it, and when you looked at her feet you saw that she was gradually being sucked in, as if the chintz were quicksand and she its unwary prey. And of course he’d turned Vermillion into a stereotypical vampy figure reminiscent of Morticia Addams, which showed he hadn’t looked too closely at her.
I was surprised that the sketches he’d done of me were pretty accurate and made me look reasonably good. Violet and Sarah came off pretty well, too. And he had a sketch of Martha that was downright flattering. Flattering and noticeably younger than she was.
One sketch stopped me cold—a sketch of Clay himself. He’d been a handsome man. Not my type—too brooding and saturnine. But handsome. Probably a real heartbreaker when he was in his twenties, back in his New York art world days. Funny that I couldn’t remember noticing his good looks when I’d first met him, probably because he’d barged into the middle of a conversation I’d been having with Sarah, intent on bullying me into something or other, and after that it was all downhill. Looking at his sketch made me sad. It was accurate enough, but somehow not the least bit flattering. I hadn’t liked Clay, but I felt sorry for the man who’d drawn himself with such mockery, self-loathing, and pitiless honesty.
I couldn’t understand why anyone with Clay’s talent would give up his art. And I couldn’t decide who to be angrier with: Clay, for doing so, or the killer who’d removed any hope that he’d ever change his mind.
The sketch of Clay was the last one in the book. No, wait—I flipped past several blank pages and came across another one.
Martha. But not the flattering version that had appeared earlier in the sketchbook. This one was a nude that showed every blemish, bulge, and bit of sagging skin with cruel precision. And her face didn’t have the pleasant, almost dreamy look of the first sketch but a look of utter fury, as if he’d imagined how she’d react if he showed her the sketch. Imagined, or maybe seen?
And the pose—wasn’t it curiously similar to the one in the unfinished painting in the attic? I pulled out my phone to check. No, not just similar. Exactly the same pose. Only with fifteen or twenty years added—that, and a whole lot of anger.
“Meg?” Aida called. “You coming?”
“On my way.”
If this were my sketchbook, I’d have torn out that last drawing. No one deserved to see that kind of hateful picture of herself. But it wasn’t mine, so I tucked the sketchbook into my tote. If anyone challenged me on it, I could say that I was keeping my options open in case one of the paintings proved too big for its space. My permission form from the brother did say as much artwork as I needed, not just paintings. And in the meantime I could glance through it and learn more about Clay. And of course, I could always take it to the chief if I thought any of the sketches had any relevance to the murder case.