“You’ve given up on your Aimee Semple McPherson theory,” I say.
“Entirely.” He looks grim. “I think the head box in ‘Disappearances’ is Colleen Stan’s,” he says. “Homemade torture instrument made by the guy who abducted her.”
The head box? Homemade torture instrument? Just two days ago, Kevin was deep into his theory of Kim Lord cunningly staging her own vanishing. Now he’s decided on a different story in the same painting—the giant still life I have yet to view. It makes me skeptical that there’s anything to find.
I ask what changed his mind.
“You’ll see when you look at that painting,” he says. “The more you study it, the more it looks like a prediction of something very, very bad.”
He fishes inside his coat and holds out a packet of papers. “I’ve got to catch my flight. I’m giving you my notes on ‘Disappearances,’ though,” he says. “I wish I could have made something from them myself, but”—he scratches his beard—“I can’t.”
I take the papers. “This is what you wanted to give me?” I try not to sound disappointed.
“You seem like you have a head for this,” he says. “Don’t you?”
Kevin’s notes are a few loose sheets wrapped in rubber bands that make them heavier than they are. Inside I can see the shape of his handwriting: a jaunty, hasty print. I shrug.
“You know you do,” Kevin says.
“Why are you going home so soon?” I say. “I thought this was a big assignment for you.”
Kevin runs a hand down his tweed lapel and looks off to the freeway. “I can still focus on the Gala,” he says. “That first evening.”
“Doesn’t sound like a cover story,” I say.
His gaze remains on the distance. “I’ve encountered unforeseen complications,” he mutters. “My sister doesn’t want me writing about her client.” He pauses. “She doesn’t like what I’m seeing.”
Kevin must mean that Greg looks guilty. He has to mean this, or why would it bother Cherie, Greg’s defender? My stomach drops, but I don’t say anything, studying Kevin’s bearded face, his broad, honest brow. The edges of his notes prick my palms. Faded red lanterns sway behind us, tossed in a gritty breeze from the east.
When the silence gets too long, Kevin tells me that he’s also soon to be “embedded” with something that sounds like “secret rows” and he needs to prepare.
I recover my voice. “You’re going to Iraq?”
He chuckles and repeats the name. “Icelandic band on a big American tour. They’re blowing up and I’m going to be riding the bus with them.” He nods at the notes. “But this story is huge. And you know you’re in the perfect position to tell it.”
Now it’s my turn to look away, to the wishing well, now collecting late-afternoon shadows.
Kevin aims for WEALTH, and the penny pings the rim. “Never going to get in that one,” he mutters.
I offer him a penny. “Try WISDOM,” I say.
“Never going to get that one, either,” Kevin says. “Anyway, I’ve got to go.” He gives me a long glance, one that feels heavy on my face. “I wish you well, Maggie Richter.”
To my surprise, he grabs my hand and kisses it.
“Please be safe,” he says, and walks away.
When I get home, I toss Kevin’s papers in my work bag with the flash drive, call my parents, and tell them about Greg’s arrest. Then I call my two brothers, John and Mark, and have the conversation all over again. As I repeat the same horrifying facts, my disbelief and worry pile up with their disbelief and worry, and the news begins to fall more heavily through me. By the end of Mark’s call, it’s a hard rain, soaking everything.
Then Yegina beeps in.
“Want to go on a double date with me and Hiro to a Jon Byron show at Bootleg? It’s Tuesday night.” There’s something cagey in her voice.
“Who’s the fourth person?”
“Well, he’s not really a prospect for you. He’s more of a fan of Jon Byron.” She sighs. “Actually I just invited us both along on a man-date—”
“With who?”
“—in which we now both have to pretend we both like Jon Byron even though I think he’s meh and you’re clueless. With Brent.”
“I know who Jon Byron is. He does all the soundtracks for the movies I fall asleep to,” I say. “What am I going to talk about with a surly married man?”
“It’s usually too loud to talk, remember?”
The last time we went to Bootleg, the loudspeakers were turned up so high that they caused a minor earthquake in Altadena, and the pasta dinner looked like it had been poured straight from a can, spat on, and gently stirred. I remember suggesting that we stuff it in our ears instead of eating it.
That night, Yegina and Chad were still together, and Greg was still with me, and Kim Lord was a famous stranger who blessed us now and then with her sharp conversation. I held Greg’s hand all the way to the car afterward, and it felt ordinary, the night in the bar, our laughter and happiness, but now it seems unbearably precious.
“My brother got his last med school rejection yesterday,” says Yegina. “I found out an hour ago. My mom is in pieces.”
“Oh no. I’m so sorry.” Much as Yegina makes light of her parents’ pressure on their children to succeed, her half-white mother grew up hungry and outcast in Vietnam, then ignored by her American father’s relatives. She wants to show them all. “What’s Don going to do?”
“Maybe a nursing degree,” Yegina says skeptically. “Maybe osteopathy. But he’s stopped leaving the house. Just sits at his computer in his room.”
“Count me in for any Don support you need,” I say. “And for Bootleg. But can I ask something? Do you think we should look into what happened to Kim ourselves? I mean, we know the Rocque. We might find something the police missed.”
“Absolutely not,” she says. “We’re not qualified, and besides, if she has been murdered, and if Greg is the killer, your judgment is too clouded to see it—”
“If Greg is the killer!”
“And if the killer is someone else, he’s still out there and you’re putting yourself in danger by snooping around. So no. Don’t get involved.”
“You’d rather let an innocent man get framed?”
She makes a frustrated noise.
“You don’t care what the truth is?” I ask.
“Maggie, you don’t come from a haunted people.” Yegina’s voice deepens. “I do. You can’t just step into this pit and step out again.”
She’s right. I’m already in it. I’ve been in it since Nikki Bolio was murdered, and I thought I’d left for a while, but Still Lives brought it all back: the fear that any path is a bad one, that any surface beneath my feet can break and plunge me into a bottomless dark.
Yegina is still talking. Her tone has smoothed to a warm hum. It says, I know you’re hurt and confused, but time will heal you.
“We’re just laypeople. Rubes,” she finishes.
“Fine. I have to go,” I say.
She doesn’t protest, and we hang up.
Maybe I am a rube. Maybe I always will be. I regard my living room and its possessions: Bare walls except for one print of fishing boats that I brought home from the Mekong Delta. The faded gold couch, the cheap glass coffee table, bookshelves in maple veneer. The only items of value are my books. Their titles gently pull my eye: In Cold Blood. Slouching Towards Bethlehem. Kaputt. The Love of the Last Tycoon. Only the books are arranged, cherished. Without them, the room would have no personality but neglect. Without them, a visitor might guess the occupant had just moved in, or was moving soon, or didn’t believe in having taste. Or maybe that she didn’t even notice what was missing.
Three days before the press preview of Executed, the Jason Rains exhibition about capital punishment, Lynne Feldman invited the staff to test it out. Twenty of us showed up, a little crowd, chatty and nervous. Although Lynne welcomed us, it was Brent Patrick, the exhibition designer, who told us what to do. As Brent stood in the darkened doorway to the show, the possessive pride in his face startled me. This show had Jason Rains’s name on it. But it was Brent’s vision, Brent’s staging that would alter us.