“I see white paint,” I said. “This is Juli—”
“White?” Oakleigh interrupted, and now 10 percent of her rage was aimed at me. “It’s Polar Vanilla, which is a very warm cream. But can’t you see the square?” She jabbed at the wall again. Julian and I leaned in like a pair of paint-shade critics, and then I saw the faint shift in the color. A small rectangular patch shone a little brighter than the rest, and there was a tiny nail hole at the top. “What you don’t see is my Picasso sketch. And you don’t see it because Clark took it down and stuffed it in the liquor cabinet to make me think that it had been stolen. What are you going to do about it?”
Oakleigh was treating me like the help and Julian like furniture. Time to get my girl in hand. I made my face look blank and bored and held out my contract in two fingers. “Nothing, until you sign this. And I need that check.”
She rolled her eyes, but she came down and snatched the papers, then held out a peremptory hand toward Julian. He passed her his pen. She turned on her heel and stomped through the archway, leading us into the great room.
There a huge sectional sofa, ash colored and covered with an excessive number of black and white throw pillows, faced a fireplace big enough to roast whole pigs. Oakleigh walked around it to a Cheveret desk. She opened the drawer and pulled out a checkbook.
Julian was looking around the room with his arms tucked close to his sides.
“Relax,” I told him, sotto voce.
He shook his head and whispered, “If I break a vase, I’ll have to sell my car to replace it.”
Funny to see him so intimidated by this show of money. He’d been this way to a lesser extent at my office and my loft, but when I was growing up, the Bouchards’ suburban house would have looked downright ritzy to me.
“Oakleigh doesn’t seem to mind ruined things,” I said quietly, pointing to the picture hung above the fireplace. It was Clark and Oakleigh’s wedding portrait.
They stood together on a sweeping antebellum staircase, Oakleigh in a huge dress that made her look like a poufy haute couture meringue and Clark in a bespoke tuxedo. It was my first look at Oakleigh’s husband. Or bits of him, anyway. He was elegant and slim, with artfully tousled blond hair and a chiseled jawline—pretty much what I’d expected. What surprised me were his devil horns, his Hitler mustache, and the blood-red slanting demon eyes with slashed black pupils that obscured the top half of his face. Oakleigh herself had no face at all, just a jagged black scribble of ballpoint-pen ink. Her whole head had been annihilated with such pressure that the canvas had rips and scours.
“There,” Oakleigh said, tearing a check out of the book. She came across the room to join us, looking at the portrait. “Yes, you see? I shouldn’t have drawn on him like that, but at least I’d pulled it down and stuffed it in the closet. He wrecked my face and hung it right back up. I left it to show the cops.”
She handed me the check and the contract, both signed. The O in Oakleigh was huge, and the rest of the letters were as curly and fat as anime bunnies.
“Don’t sign things you haven’t read,” I told her, putting them inside my bag.
She flirted up a dismissive shoulder and said, “I thought reading my contracts was your job.”
“Fine. Next time I’ll put in a clause that gives me your immortal soul,” I said, and finally got a small smile out of her. I was giving her the benefit of the doubt by assuming that she had one.
Julian’s gaze caught on the sofa and his face lit up.
“Kittens!” he said, and went right to them. There were two, one black, one white, nestled up asleep in a fuzzy yin-yang that I’d taken for yet another throw pillow.
It wasn’t at all professional, and Oakleigh’s eyebrows shot to dizzying heights as Julian plopped onto her sofa and pulled them both into his lap. He looked up at me, grinning and oblivious, scratching at the black one’s ears. It burst into enthusiastic purring, and the white one yawned. Its eyes were bright blue. If Julian were my real intern or assistant, I’d be excusing us both and taking him outside to fire him right quick. But the sight of Julian snuggling fluffy baby things pulled me off my game. My heart rate jacked into that pulsing urge: Find her.
I heard myself saying, “I would have thought you were a dog person,” and Oakleigh’s disbelieving gaze widened to include me.
“Oh, yeah, for sure,” he said. “But who doesn’t like kittens?” He turned to Oakleigh. “What are their names?”
She snorted. “I don’t know. Blackie and Whitey? I got them yesterday, after Clark broke in yet again.”
Julian ran his fingernail across his pants seam. The black one heard the noise and pounced. Whitey had to see Blackie jump before he noticed the wiggling finger. He was probably deaf, like Henry.