There are portraits, too: I recognize a young Misha in one, a shadow splitting her face. The next painting, distorted through plastic, looks at first like a collage of random shapes. Then I find a pair of eyes buried deep in the thickness of the paint, and another, and another. It’s like one of those visual deceptions where a vase is buried in a woman’s hair—in a millisecond the jigsaw of random shapes becomes instead a series of faces staring out at me from the paint.
Some glower, others appear to weep. All of them are Kaycee. It’s a self-portrait, an explosion of her—or versions of her—again and again on canvas. One has hair the color of blood. In all of them, her features are obscured, cut up, or erased, some imagined in negative space.
Even when we were little, she had that gift: she could study something I’d seen every day, take it apart and make it new. I labored over line drawings while she made flowers ripple on the page. She spent hours one day in the sun drawing the same enormous mushroom, over and over, until she was satisfied she’d got it right. When she asked if I liked it, I asked her to show me the actual mushroom she’d been staring at all day, but there wasn’t one. Just a scattering of shattered beer bottles in the middle of the field.
It amazed and scared me, the way her unseen world could seem more vibrant and alive than the real one. There was a time when I loved her imagination, would follow her anywhere. And yet even then, I hated the way she could make me question things that were obvious facts, things that were right there before my eyes.
I suddenly feel bad. I shouldn’t be here. Whatever Mr. Mitchell says about Kaycee now, he loved her and he still does. Why else would he be so careful to preserve her art? Kaycee’s paintings feel like live things, bits of skin and bone strapped down beneath their protective covering: but still bleeding, invisibly, all over. Even after I’m back in the car, I imagine the smell of paint, and keep checking my fingers and clothes for residue. Kaycee transmuted into oil paint looks different from the Kaycee I remember: lonelier, deeper, even desperate. I remember what Kaycee said to me that day, the day she turned beer bottles into a mushroom that seemed to be growing right out of the page. You know the problem, Abby, isn’t that you can’t draw, she said, out of nowhere. It’s that you can’t see.
I’m beginning to think she was right.
Chapter Eighteen
On Tuesday morning, my ass has barely touched the chair before my phone rings: an upbeat clerk announces that Dev Agerwal, the county prosecutor, is on the line for me.
I unroll the same song and dance I gave when I spoke to his junior prosecutor Dani Briggs just a few days before, and he listens patiently and without interruption before politely telling me that Ms. Briggs had already filled him in. I like him for that; he’s the type who likes to get the same story from different angles, more journalist than lawyer.
“But I don’t know how much help I can be,” he says carefully, and though it’s exactly what I expected him to say, my chest deflates. “My predecessor never announced a formal investigation into Optimal’s business practices.”
“But he spoke about it in interviews,” I counter.
“Off the cuff, sure.” He sighs. “Look, Ms. Williams, I’ve built my career on trying to take big business and big money out of local politics. But unfortunately, it’s mostly a gray area. Optimal has done a neat job of blurring the line. And corruption has to be provable.”
“Only if you plan to prosecute,” I say. “We just need a reason to open up the books. A subpoena would be a slam dunk, but right now, you’re the one with the best shot at a case.”
Agerwal is quiet for a while. Then, abruptly: “Have you thought of speaking to Lilian McMann?”
I scribble the name on the back of a coffee receipt. “Never heard of her.”
“She might have some things to tell you about Optimal, and about their relationship to the…political climate. She used to work at the Indiana Department of Environmental Management. She was at the Office of Water Quality.”
That, I have definitely heard of: IDEM works directly with both local monitors and the feds. Just my kind of girl.
Dev Agerwal hangs up after taking down my e-mail address, with a promise to send me Lilian McMann’s contact information. And a few minutes later he makes good.
Actually, he makes great. The e-mail, sent from a personal e-mail address—not the state government server—also includes several attachments and a short note.
Hope this is helpful.
When I open the attachments, I nearly fall out of my chair. He’s included a copy of the check stub written from Associated Polymer, Optimal’s parent company, to the Campaign for Pulaski, as well as several e-mail exchanges between an Optimal employee and a campaign aide. The e-mails are carefully crafted, but the subtext is clear.
The most damning of them, sent from someone in Gifts, expresses hope “that our support will spark a new era of cooperation and mutual support between the nominee and one of Indiana’s most successful homegrown businesses.”
On Wednesday, Joe, the snake charmer, works his magic on the local superior court. Unbelievably, our petition passes, and after we nudge Optimal’s legal counsel by dangling the threat of a much bigger problem down the line, we float an unofficial list of document requests. Now that we’ve gone ahead and filed, a deposition will be coming soon enough. After some hemming and hawing, Optimal agrees via their ancient-sounding lawyer to provide five years of financial records related to any third-party payments before the week is out.
Not totally ideal. I was hoping to go back further, ten years, to the complaint the Mitchells, Allens, Baums, and Dales dropped, and for bigger scope—investments, subsidiaries, the whole deal. But I know better than to say so to Joe. Still, he reads it on my face.
“You should be kissing my feet right now,” he says.
“I’ll let Raj do that for you,” I say, and he smirks in a way that doesn’t quite hide a genuine look of happiness. I feel a sharp stab of jealousy, and then another of disgust. When did other people’s happiness start feeling like assault?
But the answer comes quickly, and brings a bad taste to my mouth. Always. I didn’t ever stop feeling excluded. I just started to wear it and pretend it was my choice. Maybe that’s why I was drawn to the law of poisoned things, and hurt people, and scabby chemical earth. Maybe toxic is the only thing I really understand.
—
More good luck: that very afternoon, less than twenty-four hours after Agerwal directed me to her, Lilian McMann returns my call. I get out a hello and half of an introduction before she interrupts to suggest we meet in person.
Her office is about forty-five minutes out of town. Locals call this “uptown,” even though there’s nothing “up” about it. This is Anytown, strip malls and chain stores, and as a kid this is where we would come to hit the big grocery store when we wanted to buy in bulk. The storefronts have turned over but the structure is the same.
I get lost, circling several times around the address she provided before giving up and phoning again.
“There’s nothing here but a sports equipment store and a Chinese restaurant,” I say. “I must have written the address wrong…”