Still Lives(73)

Once at the lake near my childhood home, I cut my foot badly on a beach shell. I’ve forgotten the pain, but I remember the feeling of the shell slicing into my foot. That awful, eerie feeling of my skin being entered and opened—it’s stuck with me all these years. The truth—or what I think is the truth—feels like that now. A gash. Impossible to believe.

Memories whir through my mind. I see Evie in her first weeks at the museum, shrugging when I asked where she was from.

“All over California. My mom moved us around a lot, depending on the guy.” And then later, telling me about her stepfather Al, declaring his love to her. “He was sure I would run away with him.” But Evie didn’t. She ran away alone. Something about that story always seemed off to me: the way Evie cast herself as both the victim and the romantic lead.

I see Brent at the Jason Rains opening, and Evie plucking a champagne bottle from his hands. She drank a sip, then threw it away almost full. I remember the heavy clunk it made in the trash. I remember thinking she was protecting a colleague from embarrassing himself, but now the gesture seems so proprietary. Almost wifely.

I see the crew’s rooftop party on the night of the Gala. I see Evie watching Brent ranting to the sky about how Kim was the best artist he’d ever seen. The crew looked mostly surprised and alarmed to see Brent’s outburst. Only Evie looked betrayed.

“I wonder how long it took her to die,” Evie said when she handed me back the Still Lives photographs of Judy Ann Dull, bound and gagged in the Melrose apartment. That day I’d chalked Evie’s question up to a certain professional detachment—museum registrars are always interested in the effects of time—but when I said, “Not long, I hope,” she looked at me curiously, as if she didn’t understand what I meant.

Evie, who was strong. Evie at the gym, pedaling faster than anyone.

Evie, who lived alone and had no close friends.

Evie, who’d reminded me so much of Nikki Bolio when we’d first met, with her self-conscious air and the yearnings she so thinly hid to live a bigger, more interesting life.

Evie would have hated Brent’s closeness with Kim Lord: Kim photographing his wife, Kim changing clothes in his office. Their secrecy might have driven Evie mad with jealousy. And yet—mad enough to murder? I still don’t get the motive, quite. It’s the facts that point to Evie. She had access to all the means of the act: the saws to cover the noise, the hammer or mallet to strike the blow, the sodium thiopental, the crate. She had the same body size as Kim Lord, to wear her clothes and hurry away from the museum. She possessed the insider knowledge to text Greg and Lynne, to make them think the artist was still alive. She knew about Greg and me. It wouldn’t be hard to frame us, one at a time. Which means she’d have to hate me, too.

If this is the truth, I want to be wrong this time. And I am probably too late anyway. Just in case, I hitch my purse higher on my shoulder and slip a hand in to find my recorder, the first button on the right. Press it down.

I recite a line from Daisy in Gatsby, rewind the tape, and play it back. A voice emerges, tinny and not my own.

Beautiful little fool.


“You coming on the grand adventure after all?” Dee says. She’s leaning on a big crate with Yegina in the loading dock. She looks jittery, and she’s freshened her face with uncharacteristic lipstick and blush.

Lipstick and blush. Wait. Her girlfriend works for Janis Rocque?

I look to Yegina for some confirmation, but she folds her arms and stares at her feet. A frilly sleeveless shirt hugs her tight around the neck.

“How’s Don?” I say cautiously. Yegina is so private, I don’t know if she’s told Dee anything.

“He’s doing fine,” Yegina says with a meaningful emphasis. “I thought you were out sick.”

“Officially I am. But I wanted to see you.” I try to keep my voice steady. “Where’s Evie?”

“Getting her car,” says Dee. “She’s probably going to have to drop us off.”

“Why?” Fear slices through me. I feel Yegina’s eyes flick to my face.

Dee shrugs. “She has to fly to Amsterdam tonight.”

I’ll bet she does. And I bet she’s not coming back.

The sight of the crates sickens me. Blond plywood boxes, the small ones stacked on the wall twenty feet high, the big ones the size of doghouses and garden sheds, parked alone on dollies. All bear their stenciled arrows and warnings. The crates have always reminded me of giant birthday presents, each one full of mystery and splendor, carrying paintings from a Venice studio, or sculptures from a museum in Queens—or objects with a luxury provenance, shipped from a famous actress’s second home, or taken down from a wall in a castle in Italy, where they were owned by a real count. But now the boxes look like instruments of torture, and their wooden scent tastes false in my mouth, like air freshener covering the smell of rot.

Yegina is still staring at her feet. I need her. She’ll never believe me.

“I’m really sorry. I lost my phone,” I say again, hoping Yegina is in a forgiving mood.

She sniffs. In the half-light of the open loading-dock door, she appears aged, an older sister to the self that she’s always been. Her hair is darker and heavier, her mouth harder. Her arms are crossed so tightly, her fingers are pressing circles into her biceps. With a chill, I remember the straps tightening on my arms in the lethal injection chair in Executed, the capped syringes nearby loaded with the drugs that might have helped to kill Kim Lord.