Angel Fire - Lisa Unger [9]
chapter four
Groggy from a fitful night’s sleep, Lydia walked unsteadily to her kitchen and brewed a pot of Hawaiian Kona coffee. Wrapped in a white terry-cloth cotton robe, she sat down in the window seat and stared out at the Technicolor Santa Fe morning sky, trying not to think about her nightmare and what it meant. When the rich scent of the coffee reached her, she turned her head and surveyed the kitchen. It was a large white room, immaculately clean. The appliances were brand-new, state-of-the-art machines that had barely been used. She was satisfied with how the room looked, everything in order, nothing out of place except for the unruly stack of papers on the kitchen table.
The creative mind by its nature, Lydia had long ago concluded, is restless and cluttered—constantly shifting in thought and action until it settles on something that can engage it for more than a few moments. She read newspapers that way, skipping from article to article, looking for something interesting, something different. She clipped items if she felt there might be something to look at more closely. They collected in piles around her house that she would sort through later to pick out things that struck a chord with her and then read more thoroughly.
She had done little but read since she arrived in Santa Fe over four weeks earlier. Mostly local papers, though. Her subscriptions to national newspapers piled up in her office, her e-mail went unchecked. She didn’t feel ready for another story yet. Not yet. Her last article, for New York magazine, had been about a socialite with Munchausen’s syndrome by proxy who was on trial for poisoning three of her four children. It was a long time before anyone suspected her because she had killed one child in Paris, one in Switzerland, and one in New York City. Esmerelda von Buren, known to her friends as “Esmy,” was a most narcissistic and terrifying sociopath. And after dealing with her, her heinous crimes, and the shallow, snobbish world in which she lived, Lydia figured she needed a good two months of doing nothing in Santa Fe before she even thought about writing something new. But some subconscious memory of the articles she had clipped was giving her the buzz, that little edge of excitement she got when she knew something wasn’t quite right, that there was a puzzle in need of solving. And ready or not, she couldn’t resist.
Gathering the articles in her arms, she carried them into her living room. The room, filled with plants and small, potted trees, was flooded with sunlight. The southern wall was completely glass, below which was a precipitous drop into the valley of the mountains. She had an unobstructed view of the landscape, a sight she considered one of the most beautiful in all the world. She had told Jeffrey once that to wake up and see it in the morning gave her faith in the nature of the universe. No matter how wrong so many things were, no matter what tragedy, what chaos existed, this landscape still remained. He had laughed a little, telling her to stick to journalism and leave the poetry to someone else. But he knew what she meant. There was something peaceful about incorruptible beauty. But right now she barely noticed it. She was inside her head.
She placed the articles on her stone coffee table, then walked over the bleached wood floor back to the kitchen for a cup of coffee—very light, very sweet. She walked back into the living room, absentmindedly touching the white adobe wall, blemishing the pristine surface with a three-inch smudge of newsprint. She placed the cup on the table beside the clippings but not before spilling a few drops on the elaborately patterned dhurrie rug. She hunted for a cigarette, then a lighter. Finally, she settled on the plush cream chintz sofa and began sorting.
Like a sculptor searching for form hidden in a lump of clay she flipped through the pieces of newsprint. They must have whispered to her, otherwise she wouldn’t have clipped them. She had found many stories this way, scanning papers and looking for connections other people