What Janie Saw(54)
If she drew an individual, she wanted to make them physically flawed, like she was. Not much of an audience for scarred beauty. And she never drew a family because she didn’t believe in them.
Family let you down, fathers gave you away, aunts ignored or punished you. Drawing a happy family would only make Janie mourn something she could never change.
And Janie wondered if maybe that’s why Derek hadn’t been able to draw the crime scene.
Picking up a black pencil, she sketched a side of the road. She knew it was rural because Derek had spoken about hating nature. So she added trees, thinking about the few rural areas she’d explored just outside Scorpion Ridge.
Using her pointer finger, she smudged the background and then added a bit of gray. It was night; he’d mentioned the darkness. And it was December. What would rural December in Arizona look like? No leaves.
She drew the car far enough off the road so that anyone driving by wouldn’t notice it. She put Derek near the car, hovering, staring down. She put Chris a few feet from Derek, looking away from the road and toward the trees. Chad she placed in the thick of the trees. He held a gun, pointed at the ground.
In front of him, Brittney lay sprawled on her stomach, shot in the back.
Derek had mentioned blood. There must have been a full moon, maybe. That would have allowed Derek to see all the details. She’d have to check.
Finished, she examined her work. Suddenly, every light in the house wasn’t enough. “Oh, my,” she whispered. She should never have undertaken this endeavor alone. What she had in front of her was the most frightening thing she’d ever created. Yet she knew her work was good. So good that she needed to do more.
From the moment she’d accepted that Derek’s sketches had been fact and not fiction, she’d realized she was involved in something she couldn’t control—something that would make her put all her other endeavors, like painting, on hold.
After studying Brittney’s picture, meeting Derek’s parents and hearing about the two toddlers at the meth lab, she didn’t just want to draw bears swimming in a lake. She wanted to understand Brittney, get into Derek’s mind, walk where he walked, see what he’d seen so she could end this nightmare.
Painting animals no longer worked as a means of escape. She’d have to find another refuge.
Rafe could yank her anywhere he pleased if it would help solve the case.
She went and got her laptop, setting it up at the kitchen table. She taped her drawing to the wall so she could stare at it while she wrote.
She started re-creating the words in Derek’s art book, her fingers erratically dancing across the keys. With the computer, she could cut and paste, play with words, and even choose a font that resembled Derek’s original handwriting.
Away from Detective Williamson’s pain, Justin Robbins’s grief and Rafe’s eagerness, she could take her time. After a while, she started to write with her eyes closed, trying to picture Derek’s dark handwriting, imagine how tightly he’d held the pencil, attempting to feel the texture of the art book—a book that had just one week ago belonged to a living, breathing boy.
She could almost taste his fear.
Derek had done a good job of creating tension in just a few pages. That he’d died making poor choices and in poor company only made Janie even more angry.
He could have made a difference!