“I don’t think so,” Tina said, coming up on it. “He really only did the clowns once he lived here. I’d guess it was the assistant’s or maybe some art student who was around. A few were still coming to work here occasionally.” She touched the base. “I don’t want to move anything that is unidentified, though, for the estate. Albert was big. Big enough that his last incomplete works are very valuable.”
She walked to a corner where a desk with a computer felt out of place, black and modern among all the easels and paints that could have come from almost any era.
I looked at the sculpture again. The woman wore a dress, and the bottom hem looked odd, like it wasn’t hanging down. Like maybe it was floating. I peered at her head. There was no hair yet, just an unformed block. “You think she’s underwater?” I asked Tina. I remembered my coat floating around me in the ocean from that terrible day I walked into the water.
Tina walked back over, holding an envelope. She bent to stare at the statue. “You might be right.” She kneeled down to get super close. “And the way this foot is kicked out. She could be swimming.”
She touched a bit of the statue, then jerked back as if she was burned. “I recognize the marks now from the one he did for me.” Her face was pink from excitement. She ran over to the desk and pulled out a magazine. She turned to an image inside, a picture of Albert when he was young, with a woman.
“Do you think this face looks like her?” Tina asked.
I held the page next to the unfinished sculpture. “Look at the nose,” I said. “I’d say it’s very likely.”
She pressed her hand against her throat. “This might have been what he was working on. What sent him over the edge.”
We stared at the woman a little longer. On the table next to it was another block of wrapped clay. “He was going to add to it,” I said. “There was more.”
Tina set down the magazine and laid her hand on the top of the block. “I bet he was going to try to do his daughter.” Her voice faded to a rasp. “He was trying to do something else. Break out of his rut. Face his demons.”
She took a step back and sat on a tall stool. “I knew when the Parkinson’s started getting to him, he felt this compulsion to finish the things he needed to do.” She reached out to touch the block of clay again. “But with the shaking he wasn’t able to do it the way he wanted. He didn’t think he ever would.”
Tina stood back up. “I’ll call the lawyer. Ask what to do with this. It’s significant.” She headed to the desk again, then stopped. She picked up an envelope from where it rested on an easel and handed it to me. “This is for you.”
I took it and watched her pick up a camera to snap pictures of the location of the sculpture. Then she carefully moved it to a cabinet on the wall where it was less likely to get bumped or damaged.
I turned the envelope over. On the outside was a printed label with the simple word “Corabelle.”
It was not sealed. I lifted the flap and pulled out a sheet of paper folded into thirds. Inside was a legal bit about the will. Then a small bit of paper that said, in shaky handwriting, “For the babies sure to come. Undo the hurt. Albert.”
I glanced up at Tina. She was watching me now, her face serious. She didn’t say anything but pointed at my hands to indicate, keep looking.
Behind the note was a check.
A check for twenty thousand dollars.
Chapter 13: Tina
I couldn’t stop looking at the unfinished sculpture.
I had moved it out of the studio to one of Albert’s private rooms a week ago, the day after Corabelle realized how important it was to the estate. It was now safely housed in a room I could hang out in without feeling squeamish. Albert’s study was steely and impersonal, from the stiff navy leather sofa to the frosty gray shelves filled with clear crystal.
But at least it didn’t look like a fun house or a murder scene.
The statue of the woman stood on an empty desk in front of a set of bay windows. The block of unopened clay still rested in its position at her feet. I circled it, trying to figure out where Albert began and, more importantly, where he stopped. What was the last thing he sculpted on his wife? What broke him?
I remembered with chagrin finding some sculpting tools on the floor of his studio during one of the visits before he died. I picked them up with no clue. So important. The location of them could have told me his state of mind when he stopped working. I had been foolish to put them away in their tray. No matter how much I racked my brain, I could not remember which ones they were.
The question pulsed inside me, night and day. What made Albert snap? What led such a talented man to attempt suicide in his studio in the middle of an important work?
I wanted to know the tiniest detail and hovered over the statue. Had it been the uplifted foot? Or the outstretched arm? Those were complete. Maybe her hair? It was still a block of clay, not yet formed into a swirling underwater mass.
Or perhaps as he prepared to finish the woman, his mind had turned to the wrapped block that would become his only daughter, just six years old. He would watch her die in his hands as he sculpted. He would create her image in a way he hadn’t seen, couldn’t have seen, in those last moments of her life.