Texts continue to come from Kim Lord’s phone (could be someone else, pretending to be her). She goes missing on her opening night.
The police are so busy trying to nail the angry boyfriend, maybe they’ve overlooked Monday’s meeting and Kim’s gift. Maybe they can’t see the possibility of a cold, calculating intelligence who covers his tracks. A collector who has become obsessed with her. Who panics when she threatens to expose him.
I plug in the flash drive and click through the files again, slowing down at the last five photographs.
The dog is standing on grass and sidewalk. He could be anywhere.
The woman in the last photo sits against a white wall. Her shirt is blue, collared, nondescript. Her gray-threaded hair is brushed, and lipstick darkens her mouth, but there’s something violating about these improvements; they only serve to highlight the woman’s pallor and exhaustion. The photo is dated a week before the opening-night Gala.
A friend? A new subject? The images are not labeled. The woman is looking not at the camera, but at something or someone beyond the photographer.
Should I call Cherie? If I call Cherie, she will requisition the flash drive. If Greg wanted his lawyer to requisition the flash drive, he would have told her to ask me for it. I am supposed to hold on to these images as art, not evidence.
For now.
I remove the flash drive and chuck it deep in my drawer.
When I reach the entrance of Still Lives, I don’t look at the walls. The museum has not yet opened for the day; the galleries are as dim as crypts, and the paintings hard to see. I hurry toward the third room, but I can feel the gazes of the dead following me.
Unlike Kevin, I don’t believe Kim was painting secret messages, but her monumental still life, “Disappearances,” is one of the last things she touched before vanishing. She delivered it on Tuesday with the paint still drying, hours after Brent went over to her studio himself and demanded it on behalf of the nerve-racked exhibitions crew.
According to crew gossip, when Lynne saw “Disappearances” go up on the wall, she stared at it for ten minutes—in disgust? in awe?—and then stomped out of the room.
Still Lives has never been Lynne’s pet show. Its origins on the Rocque exhibition schedule are unclear; Yegina thinks Janis Rocque was behind it, because it was not something our curators proposed. Most of our exhibitions originate from the scholarly agendas of their department—they like to be the ones who decide which artists matter.
Regarding Still Lives, Lynne made her own position clear. In her catalog essay, she professed a faint admiration for Kim Lord’s much-heralded career and her initial concerns about the show’s content and the artist’s self-declared turn away from portraiture. “Still lifes have long been considered a lesser form of art, a decorative or feminine form,” Lynne wrote. “Instead of looking outward to epic characters and scenes, the still life looks inward, to the possessions of a family.” Tables of peaches and flowers. Tables of dead birds. A glass of half-drunk wine. “In Still Lives, Kim Lord has inverted the form, to examine today’s commodification and consumption of the images of female homicide victims.” Lynne steadfastly refused to praise the move, however; I think she felt that no matter what artistic process Kim used, the blood and gore were beyond the realm of good taste.
The text was finished months before the images; Lynne asked Yegina to approve all the copyedits, which, for a control freak like Lynne, was the equivalent of washing her hands of the whole thing.
Now the faces of dead women follow my progress through the gallery. When I reach the threshold of the third room, I realize I am holding my breath. I don’t see these pictures as treasure maps, but, reluctantly, I find them haunting. And like Lynne, I don’t yet know why.
Why here? Why subject us to these scenes in an art museum, when we’ve seen them practically everywhere else? For decades, the spectacle of female homicide has spattered the news. A couple of weeks ago a former actress was found dead in a record executive’s house. Her beautiful face glowed from every crevice of the media. Another blond smiler. Another bloody mess on someone’s floor. We’ve seen her and seen her and seen her. We’ve witnessed victims in every feminine shape, young to old. The child pageant winner with her sexy lipstick, duct-taped and garroted. The teenager abducted from her suburban bedroom. The elderly woman raped and strangled by a stranger she allowed in the door. What we haven’t seen, we’ve read or overheard. How could Kim Lord’s depictions move us beyond disgust and visceral fear, into an emotion that is deeper and richer, freighted with pain for humanity? It’s just paint around me now. Shape, texture. It’s also more.
Until now, I’ve avoided Kim’s portrait of Judy Ann Dull, victim of the Glamour Girl Slayer. It’s the main feature of the third room: Kim-as-Judy is wearing only underpants, gloves, and thigh-high stockings and is bound to an X of wood, her blond head slumped, bare breasts exposed. The life-size painting hangs low on the wall, so you can stare right into the victim’s shuttered and drained face, her eyes closed, her skin glowing against a black background. “I can’t tell if she’s dead or still alive,” Evie said to me about this image when she handed the catalog pages back, and I wondered the same thing, then and now, looking into Kim’s depiction. It’s impossible to tell if Kim-as-Judy has perished already or simply lost the will to respond to another torture. She just sags there, strung by her wrists.
I hate this artwork. I hate the abject powerlessness it projects. I hate it because it reminds me there is an end for women worse than death. I will not look at it again.
I exhale and turn my gaze to the monumental canvas hanging on the back wall.
In the weak sun from the skylights, the painting looks like someone’s overloaded buffet table, strewn and heaped with objects and fruits. The colors glow with a lushness absent from the rest of the exhibition, but here, too, red appears more than any other hue. I am halfway across the room when I finally discern a woman’s shape underneath the chaos. As with the photo on the flash drive, she is lying facedown, as if someone has flung her to the table. She is all contour, her body covered in a rough gray robe, her head thrust in a dark wooden box. The only spot of bare skin is her white, exposed neck. The neck pulls my eyes back, again and again, even as I try to catalog the rest of the things Kim Lord is showing me:
A gold blanket.
A book marked 5￠.
A bloodstained screwdriver.
An empty bottle of absinthe tipped on its side.
A cloth hanging behind the figure, a cream-colored curtain, alternately patterned with jugs and fruit.
A heap of apples, one of them split and lying open, showing its pale meat and seeds.
The old-timey radio microphone with a cross on it.
A toy bicycle with an oddly numbered license plate leaning in one corner.
That white neck.
A clock.
That neck.
I open Kevin’s notes and read about the five-cent notebook that eleven-year-old Florence Sally Horner stole from a store in Camden, New Jersey, prompting a pervert who witnessed the theft to tell her he was an FBI agent. If she didn’t follow him, he’d have her arrested. He then proceeded to make Horner his sex slave as he traveled across states, masquerading as her father. May have inspired Nabokov’s Lolita, wrote Kevin.
The bottle of absinthe and the robe: Favorite libation of Elizabeth Smart’s captor, who dressed her in a burka when he took her in public.
The clock: The passing of time. Significance of no hands? You’re out of time when you’re dead?
The apple: Symbol of female sexuality. Cleft apple = woman’s reproductive parts. Also, implied violence.
The screwdriver: Could be the weapon used to kill Carol Jenkins, a young black woman stabbed in the chest while selling encyclopedias in a white Indiana neighborhood (1968).