Before She Knew Him(26)
“Honestly, I have no idea, but too much. I’ve decided I have to like this studio because I am never moving again.”
“You’ll like it here. It’s not too cultish. Artists are encouraged to be involved, but if you aren’t, no one judges you . . . Oh, wow, is that new?”
Derek was looking at her recent sketch, the one she was calling “The boy was back again the very next night.” He looked at it for a long time, and Hen realized that the boy on the branch looked more like a small man. Like a dwarf, really, and Hen worried a little that he might find it offensive.
“It’s like looking at someone’s dream,” Derek said. “It actually sent a shiver down my spine.”
“Me, too,” Hen said, then added, “That’s the type of art I like, when it freaks you out.”
Before Derek left, Hen promised him she’d take a break during Open Studios and come look at his stuff. She still didn’t know what his stuff was, exactly. When she was alone again, she finished etching on her plate, the CD player now playing the Lost Highway sound track. She slid the plate into the acid bath, then quickly began one of the sketches for Lore Warriors. It was a scene toward the beginning of the book, when the evil Santa Claus is emerging from the fireplace. She sketched an idea quickly, one in which just his foot was emerging, then did a version in which a clawlike hand was visible as well, plus just a sliver of the creature’s face. It wasn’t half bad. She’d gotten so engrossed in the drawing that she worried she’d left the plate in too long. But after removing the wax, adding ink, and doing a first run through the press, it turned out perfect, one of the best things she’d done in a while. She ran several more prints, then quickly sketched an idea for the second illustration she owed the publisher. Before she knew it, Ani DiFranco was singing again, the player having cycled through all five discs, and Hen realized she was starving. It had been a good day of work. She locked her studio door, shut down the lights after yelling out to see if anyone else was in a basement studio, and emerged back into the bright sunshine of the day.
Chapter 14
After the detective left, Matthew went back inside the house. He had planned on making mulligatawny soup, one of Mira’s favorites, so that she would have something to eat if she was hungry when she got home. Instead, he rooted through the freezer for a frozen dinner and settled on some French bread pizza.
While he ate, he began the process of finding out everything he could about his neighbor. She, or maybe the husband, had obviously called the police. It was the fencing trophy, of course. Hen (who didn’t really look like a hen; she was a fox, the exact opposite) was the one who’d spotted it, who somehow knew about its connection with Dustin Miller. And now she’d brought the police to him, something that had never happened to him in his entire life. It had gone okay, he thought, or as well as it possibly could have. He did wonder why the detective hadn’t asked to look around or asked anything about the trophy. He assumed that was because it would have made it far too obvious that he’d been turned in by his neighbor. And, of course, Matthew could have refused, could have asked that a search warrant be provided. No, it was clear that it was nothing more than a fishing expedition. And with the trophy gone, the police would have nothing to connect him with Dustin Miller.
Matthew did a search using “Henrietta,” “Lloyd,” and “wedding” and instantly got a wedding page. Henrietta Mazur and Lloyd Harding were their full names. He almost did a search for “Henrietta Harding” but realized there was a much better chance that she hadn’t changed her name and searched for “Henrietta Mazur” instead. Because of her illustrations, she was all over the internet. She had her own website, plus she was on Twitter and Facebook and Instagram. There were surprisingly few pictures of her, but there were multiple images of her work: dark, intricate etchings that Matthew found intriguing. Many were from children’s books, but he found a Boston gallery that had thumbnail pictures of some of her original artwork, and Matthew studied them. He didn’t know too much about art, but thought that they might be brilliant. Genius, almost. His favorite was an etching of a family eating dinner—mom and dad and three pretty girls. There was a large roast on the table, and all the family members were eating pieces of it greedily, some with juice dripping down their chins. Underneath the table, although it wasn’t obvious at first look, one of the girls was missing a leg, severed just under the knee. It looked freshly bandaged. The title of the etching was “Christmas that year came and went most pleasantly.”
Henrietta Mazur’s art was so interesting that Matthew, for a time, forgot why he was researching her in the first place. He found himself studying several of her pieces and beginning to wonder how much a signed print would cost. He could already imagine one hanging in his office.
Before shutting down his computer, he did one more search, using “Henrietta Mazur” and looking to see if there were any news stories about her. There was one gallery announcement, from eight years ago, and then there was a story about a Henrietta Mazur who had been involved in an incident at Camden College about fifteen years earlier. Matthew almost skipped it, thinking it was another Henrietta Mazur, but the phrase “Ms. Mazur, an art major who had won several awards in high school for her dark and arresting sketches and paintings” made it clear that it was his neighbor. She had been charged with criminal assault for attacking a fellow student. Matthew read all the stories he could find. It wasn’t entirely clear what had transpired, but the basics were that Henrietta had had some sort of breakdown and had become convinced that a fellow student was trying to kill her. She’d raised these concerns with both her college adviser and the local police, but then she’d attacked the other student herself, winding up in a psychiatric hospital and then court. Reading the articles, Matthew got the strange feeling that, even though it was clear the young Henrietta had had a break with reality, maybe she’d been right. One of the articles had a picture of the other girl in the case—Daphne Myers—and Matthew recognized something in Daphne’s dead eyes, even through the pixelated image on the screen.