Little Deadly Things Read Online Free PDF Page A

looked at the framed art and asked, “Worms?”
    He laughed. Once again, the sound was unforced. “I take it you’re not familiar with the work of Jackson Pollock.”
    “You’ve got bugs for brooches and worms for paintings.” She paused, considering, “I’ve never seen worms like that. The colors are wrong. It’s not realistic.”
    “No, not realistic at all for worms. But Pollock didn’t so much try to paint worms as he tried to make art without a brush coming between him and his creations. So he dripped paint on his canvases rather than brushing it on.”
    “You like these?”
    “I do. Eva, look at them. If you wanted to make a painting of the energy in a chemical reaction, how would you do that?”
    “I don’t know. Not like that, I don’t think.”
    “What about, say, Brownian motion?”
    “These paintings are supposed to be the random movement of molecules?”
    “Good. Now think bigger. Pollock was trying to show the energy and movement of life. That’s my opinion, anyway.”
    “It looks like a baby’s scribbling.”
    “Maybe yes, maybe no. Look deeper, Eva. What he did was to use things he could control—the thickness of the paint, the movement of his body, how absorbent his canvas was—to portray things he couldn’t control. It looks chaotic, but isn’t life chaotic? Don’t we all try to control the chaos around us? That’s what I see in his work. Think of chaos theory and then imagine it as art. You just might end up with Jackson Pollock.”
    “So what? Why would anybody want to paint science?”
    “Art can inspire science.”
    Eva gave a snort.
    Coombs continued, “A sculpture that looked like a tower of needles inspired a major breakthrough in understanding cell structure. Four hundred years ago, the divisions on a horsetail plant inspired John Napier to discover logarithms.”
    “I don’t need art to do science.”
    “Okay.” Then, “How’s your tea?”
    They sat without speaking for several minutes. Eva stood and explored Coombs’s work area and looked at his book titles. “May I offer a suggestion, young lady?”
    “Eva.”
    “Yes, indeed. Well, Eva, I have a suggestion. Your work cleaning the sidewalk was better than I expected. I should be taking advantage of you by offering only the brooch as full payment for this good a job. I’d like to give you a book, real paper, an old edition with some value.”
    “What book?”
    “It’s called
To Kill a Mockingbird.”
    “How hard can that be?”
    “Eva, it’s not a textbook.”
    “Then what is it?”
    “It’s the story of a young woman like you. A good girl named Scout must face terrible things and terrible people. She has to struggle to be herself despite awful events that happen around her. I rather think you might enjoy reading about how she managed.”
    “How old is Scout?”
    “When the book starts, she’s five.”
    “I’m thirteen.”
    “You were five once, yes? And now you’re older?” Eva nodded. “Well Scout grows older, too.” Coombs went to his book collection and muttered, “I know it’s here.”
    Eva continued to wander about the work area. She stopped at the Pollock triptych for several minutes. She said, “It’s funny. I don’t like stories because they try to tell you something is true when it’s not. This—” she nodded to the grouping, “—doesn’t try to lie. It doesn’t try to pretend to be a picture of something. It might be nonsense, but at least it’s honest nonsense.”
    “How does it make you feel?” Coombs asked.
    There was a long pause and Eva turned away. She turned back to Coombs and said, “I have to go. Thanks for the tea.”
    “What about the book?” He reached back to the shelf for the slim volume.
    But when he turned back, Eva was gone.
    She did not miss her duty once, not even Sundays. Thirty-one days after first meeting Coombs, she skipped home, bobbing under her mantle, the brooch in her pocket. What a splendid gift she would present to Gergana. Eva