was a tramp.”
Out of the corner of her eye, Diane could see that Harte was shivering. She pulled her sweater tighter around her and nervously fingered her pearls. Vanessa and Lillian were quiet and still, their faces blank masks.
“I sold a great many pottery vessels, each one with its own unique face—young, old, beautiful, harsh. Did you see the pitcher in Miss Wanamaker’s office? That one wasn’t special and is made with ordinary clay, but you can get the idea of what the others must have been like. Isn’t it beautiful? All the pottery vessels I made after that had a special look about them. People in Atlanta told me they looked as if they could come alive. They were right. But they didn’t know it.”
She took another long drink and stared off into the distance. Diane thought they might be losing her. She got up and opened the box. In it lay the partial mask that Marcella had put together.
“We have one of your pieces,” said Diane, handing it to her.
“Oh, it’s the most beautiful one of all.And Father crushed it. You know, I like it like this. I like the lines formed where the pieces are fitted together. I hadn’t thought of breaking it and putting it back together. That adds another symbolic dimension.”
“Please go on,” said Diane. “We want to hear about your art.”
Maybelle Gauthier didn’t take her eyes off the mask in the box as she spoke.
“I bought a cauldron and put it in the shed, and I boiled the bones down after Everett cut up the pieces that I needed. When the bones were perfectly white, I dried them and crushed them. They made the perfect temper for my clay. I used the face of each person as the form to sculpt the piece. When I finished and it was fired, it was the most beautiful work of art you have ever seen. There was nothing like it in the galleries. It had the rough look of Indian pottery but the delicate sculpting of modern work. Each piece had a spirit in it. People saw it, even if they couldn’t put a name to it. I made a fountain for a man in Atlanta who loved the idea of water coming out of the eyes.
“Then Father found out. I don’t know how. I suspect that he came to visit when I wasn’t there and saw something he shouldn’t. Everett told me they were coming after me. That’s when I wrote the note. I was afraid. Everett helped me throw everything we could down the well. I hid all my work I had there. But when Father came, he found my pottery and crushed the beautiful pieces in front of my eyes and threw them in the fire pit. I hated him for that. He didn’t find the portraits I did of them. I hid them in the wall, along with a portrait of my mother.”
“What about the young victims?” said Lillian. “Didn’t you feel bad for them?”
Diane thought Lillian probably couldn’t hold it in any longer.
“Oh, they were far better off. The people Everett brought home had terrible lives. At least they could now live forever in art,” she said. “And their suffering was over.”
“So your father took you to a clinic,” prompted Diane.
“Yes. What was the name? Something about a river. It was a huge Gothic building. Mother would come to visit me and she would cry. She told me if I got out, Father would see that I went to jail. This way, no one would ever know what I did, and one day I’d get out and could start over. Everett begged me not to tell on him and I didn’t. I didn’t even tell Mother about his part in it.
“The clinic was a terrible place. At night you could hear people screaming. I never knew what was happening to them. I was smart enough to stay quiet and be easy to get along with. That way they wouldn’t increase my medication or do whatever it was they were doing to the other poor patients.”
Diane shivered. She and Vanessa exchanged horrified glances. Diane didn’t know very much about the clinic that once had been housed in the museum building. The docents made up ghost stories about the old clinic, but she never considered that strange and terrifying things really may have gone on there.
“They closed the place down in just a year,” continued Gauthier. “Good riddance. I was taken to another place.