Yegina hands it over reluctantly. I switch off the ringer and type a message to her instead:
Get away from us and get J. Ro to call Hendricks. Tell him I’m here with Evie. Tell him that Evie had the drug from the Jason Rains show and put Kim’s body in an art crate. Tell him to call Diamond Storage about a recalled delivery last Weds. Say exactly that. You have to believe me.
Then I hand it back. She slides it in her pocket without glancing at it as we turn past some hedges, down a private drive into the hills.
26
Janis Rocque’s gatehouse is barely larger than a toll booth, but when a gray-haired attendant slides open the window, I feel the cool gust of its air-conditioning and hear the murmur of a TV.
“Dee here,” Dee says, and leans over to wave.
The attendant gives her a knowing smile, and the two green-painted gates to Janis Rocque’s estate open inward.
Slowly a narrow road appears before us, flanked by blue-headed bird-of-paradise flowers. Tall hedges make second and third perimeters, but, between them, lawns extend like primeval savannas for dozing dinosaurs of iron, stone, and steel. I see Yegina mouthing the names of the artists she recognizes, her hand drifting to her high white collar like a Victorian in an opera-induced swoon. Here and there, a winglike edifice soars over the hedges that conceal it.
“There are open gardens and hidden gardens,” says Dee. “It’s designed to make the viewer feel lost and found at the same time.”
“Where do I go?” Evie murmurs, though the road twists in one direction, toward a surprisingly small house with a solar-paneled roof, rising above the trees. After all the magnificence and spread of the sculptures, the actual Rocque home seems modest by comparison.
“Is that the servants’ quarters?” Yegina asks in a wondering voice.
“Janis tore the old mansion down to make more room for the outdoor installations,” says Dee. “It’s all about the art.”
The road ends in a white gravel parking lot big enough for a dozen cars, its perimeter also marked by trimmed shrubs. We slide to a halt beside a beat-up Toyota and two sporty sedans. Dust shimmers in the heat. Dee and Yegina leap out of the vehicle. I wait in my seat, paralyzed, the air going stale and sweltering as soon as the doors shut. I watch the back of Evie’s motionless blond head.
“Coming?” I say. “You’ll regret it if you don’t.”
“Will I?” she mutters, staring out the windshield. She doesn’t glance at me and I don’t look at her. I force myself to breathe the stuffy heat. She unclips her belt, opens her door. I wait until she’s almost out of the car before leaping out after her. We slam our doors in tandem.
Yegina is already staring hungrily around, her phone dropped into her purse without a second glance. She roams to the edge of the parking lot, peeking through cracks in the green walls to see a hulking ellipse beyond. It’s a curving metal wall, the height of a garage, the color of wet chocolate.
“Hello! We’re here,” says Dee, holding her phone to her ear. “Okay.” Her face falls. “Sure. You do that.”
She pockets her phone and gives a sharp shrug.
“So! Want to see the Richard Serra?” she says with determined glee. “We should stick together, at least at the start. We’re still installing works, and there are some holes and sharp edges.” Without waiting for an answer, she bounds off after Yegina, leaving Evie and me alone.
I still can’t bring myself to look at Evie’s face, but I take in her slim legs and her little blue pumps, the same shoes she was wearing the night of the Gala, when I talked to her in the bathroom stall. She must have been hiding then. She was hiding herself away to text Lynne with Kim Lord’s phone. Announcing the artist’s arrival at seven o’clock. While I was rattling on about parties, Evie was pretending to be the woman she murdered. Was murdering. Kim wasn’t dead yet. Kim was bleeding and suffocating in an art crate, her body dying around the child inside her.
“This might take too long,” Evie says.
I finally meet her eyes and they’re as bright as dimes.
“It’s right there,” I say.
She slides her sunglasses on, blanking her gaze. “You first,” she says.
“No, you first,” I say with fake enthusiasm. “You’re the one who has to rush.” And I wait until she struts ahead of me, feeling that I will survive today only if I keep playing the ingenue, and actually that I’m not playing at all.
When we catch up with Yegina and Dee, they’re in the middle of the Richard Serra ellipse, laughing and stepping in and out of the sharp quadrants of shadow and light. “Almost crushed a guy when they put this one in,” Dee chirps. “It weighs almost thirty tons.”
For me, Serra’s sculptures always invoke a feeling of sacred space, and standing inside one now is like being in a labyrinth with one path in, its center an open eye to the clouds. The metal wall is as warm as a burner on low. The steel curves are so smooth and massive that they contort the earth and sky. We’re each angled by the artwork, tipped and diminished, and for one tiny instant I forget what Evie has done and succumb to my awe.
But then Dee does a giant cartwheel and almost hits Evie when she lands. Evie jumps back with a shriek; the sculpture amplifies the sound to a long, harsh call.
“You all right, then?” Dee asks, brushing herself off. “Did I hit you?”
Evie shakes her head no, but her face is mottled; her self-control has slipped.
“You seem jumpy,” I say, grinning hard at her.
Evie smiles back at me, her lips closed, but one tooth shows over her bottom lip. Behind her, Yegina strokes the wall of the sculpture.
“Let’s keep going,” Dee says, and nudges me. “Your special surprise is coming up soon.”
As we wind our way out of the ellipse, ducking to see around the tilted sides, I tail Yegina.
“I think your phone is buzzing,” I say. “Might be Jayme for me.”
She hands her whole bag to me without turning around. “Just let me enjoy myself for five minutes, okay?”
I pretend to check the phone, hand it back. “Actually it’s for you.”
We emerge from the Serra onto the open lawn. Yegina snaps up the screen, reads my message, snaps it back again, but she only hurries after Dee, who is skipping her way down a slope to a giant scrap-metal figure. It’s a David Smith, humanoid and reptilian, tall but flat-headed, the twolegged body made of broken scales and loops and shapes. It reminds me of the newspaper game where the letters in a word are scrambled and you have to stare at it to put them in the right order. One of the sculpture’s limbs has a long, serrated edge.
I wait for Evie again, then follow her. I am squinting so hard in the sun that my forehead aches. Everything that can reflect light is shining: the last drops of dew in the grass, the buckles on our purses, the vast shapes of metal, the little gold loops in Yegina’s ears. Dee and Yegina erupt into wows about seeing the David Smith up close, standing in its broken shadow. I hang back, afraid of the glinting, jagged blade.
I wonder where Hendricks is, what he knows. Was he watching Evie all along?