Still Lives(20)

It was I, Maggie, however, who decided to flee overseas afterward, and then never to go back to the career I once dreamed of having, of recording people’s stories, writing their difficult truths. I don’t know what my grandmother would have decided in my shoes. She came from a different generation, with narrower ideas of what a woman could do.

A figure appears in my doorway. A woman with thick eyebrows, a high waist, hair that seems deliberately plain. One of the LAPD detectives.

“Got a minute?” she says, and introduces herself as Alicia Ruiz. She’s carrying a notebook, but she doesn’t uncap her pen as she sits down. “I hear you know Greg Shaw Ferguson?”

“We lived together.” I hate the squeak in my voice.

“When was the last time you saw him?”

“At the Gala.”

Her brows knit. “Before that?”

“Sometime in late February.” Greg came then to pick up a few boxes he’d left in our garage. Summer clothes, books. I tell Ruiz this. She doesn’t write it down. She glances over her shoulder, leans in. Her brown eyes are warm. She wants me to trust her.

“You ever feel threatened by him?” she asks.

“God, no.”

“Did you ever threaten him?”

“Of course not.”

She opens her notebook, uncaps the pen, and scribbles something. Even with her gaze averted, there’s that deep absorbency about her, soaking me in. Me, the angry ex. The angry ex? I was the doormat ex.

“Where do you think Kim Lord is?”

I don’t like this. It’s a speculative question. Jay Eastman taught me to ask speculative questions if I thought my source was lying. Listen to the story, then ask something to try to get an opinion out of the witness. Opinions need justifications. Justifications lead back to facts.

“I have no idea. Am I supposed to guess? I last saw her leaving the museum on Wednesday.”

She notes this. “What time?”

“Late morning? I saw her from the stairway when I was going down to the mailroom.” I point toward the view, but Detective Ruiz is focused hard on me. I fumble to describe that little jump Kim had done, as if something had bitten her. “She looked like she was in a hurry,” I say.

The detective nods, waiting. What else does she want me to say?

“She was going fast.” I’m starting to sweat.

There’s a clattering noise in the kitchenette near my office.

Detective Ruiz’s attention suddenly breaks. She taps her pen against her notebook and rises. “Thank you for your time, miss,” she says.

“I really hope you find her,” I say. Only when she leaves do I realize that my face is sore from holding the same fake, worried expression.


My phone rings, Yegina’s extension. “That guy you thought was a stalker? He’s a private investigator, working for J. Ro,” she says.

“What? How’d you find out so fast?”

“He wants to interview me.” She sounds reluctantly intrigued.

“You?” Why am I surprised? “I just got interviewed by the LAPD.”

“About what?”

My phone blinks with a second call.

“Nothing, really. I’ll phone you back,” I say, and click over to the other line.

“How much time can you get off for lunch?” says a deep voice. Kevin, the reporter from the Gala last night. It surprises me when my stomach flutters.

“Can’t,” I say. Development needs me to copyedit some fund-raising manual.

“Thirty minutes?” says Kevin. “I want to show you something.”

“You can’t get anywhere in L.A. in thirty minutes.”

He asks if I know the order in which Kim Lord’s paintings were made. Which one was last.

“The big still life. Why?”

“It could make a difference in finding her.”

“You should tell the police, then.”

“They don’t have time to hear speculation. It’s just a theory for a story, but I need your help. Please. I’ll bring burritos.”


I am not so different from you, I tell the departed Detective Ruiz and her curiosity, which coats my office like fingerprint dust, making even my stacked catalogs, my scuffed gym bag, the little Zen garden on my windowsill gleam with possible evidence. If Detective Ruiz suspects Greg, then she suspects me, at least as an outside player in whatever drama has ripped Kim Lord from her presently successful life. Detective Ruiz suspects, so she watches and waits.

I can watch, too, I think as I turn the pages of the Rocque’s new membership brochure, letting the errors appear, as they always do, as tiny breaks in the patterns of punctuation, sentence, style. Copyediting bores most people to tears. This is why—before I got hired—the Rocque printed ten thousand copies of a gallery guide for a show before anyone caught the missing l in its title, Public Offerings. This is also why the Rocque hired me, even with no museum experience. I was the only candidate who aced their copyediting test.

Detective Ruiz watches me, Maggie Richter, known ex-girlfriend, but part of her dismisses me because I am female. Most violent perpetrators are male. Most killers of women are family members or intimate partners. The police went after Nikki Bolio’s ex-boyfriend first, but he had a solid alibi, and evidence to arrest anyone else was insufficient. Local witnesses clammed up. Jay Eastman and I might have helped the case, except that Jay destroyed Nikki’s tapes. He said he was doing it out of principle. He did not approve of the way that Vermont law coerced journalists into testifying in criminal cases. When he did speak to the cops, he left my name out of his statements. You’re my assistant, he said. That’s the only responsibility you have in this. All right? It wasn’t all right. I couldn’t sleep for fear of a break-in, so I moved in with my parents and then across the world.