Still Lives(77)

For me, Serra’s sculptures always invoke a feeling of sacred space, and standing inside one now is like being in a labyrinth with one path in, its center an open eye to the clouds. The metal wall is as warm as a burner on low. The steel curves are so smooth and massive that they contort the earth and sky. We’re each angled by the artwork, tipped and diminished, and for one tiny instant I forget what Evie has done and succumb to my awe.

But then Dee does a giant cartwheel and almost hits Evie when she lands. Evie jumps back with a shriek; the sculpture amplifies the sound to a long, harsh call.

“You all right, then?” Dee asks, brushing herself off. “Did I hit you?”

Evie shakes her head no, but her face is mottled; her self-control has slipped.

“You seem jumpy,” I say, grinning hard at her.

Evie smiles back at me, her lips closed, but one tooth shows over her bottom lip. Behind her, Yegina strokes the wall of the sculpture.

“Let’s keep going,” Dee says, and nudges me. “Your special surprise is coming up soon.”

As we wind our way out of the ellipse, ducking to see around the tilted sides, I tail Yegina.

“I think your phone is buzzing,” I say. “Might be Jayme for me.”

She hands her whole bag to me without turning around. “Just let me enjoy myself for five minutes, okay?”

I pretend to check the phone, hand it back. “Actually it’s for you.”

We emerge from the Serra onto the open lawn. Yegina snaps up the screen, reads my message, snaps it back again, but she only hurries after Dee, who is skipping her way down a slope to a giant scrap-metal figure. It’s a David Smith, humanoid and reptilian, tall but flat-headed, the twolegged body made of broken scales and loops and shapes. It reminds me of the newspaper game where the letters in a word are scrambled and you have to stare at it to put them in the right order. One of the sculpture’s limbs has a long, serrated edge.

I wait for Evie again, then follow her. I am squinting so hard in the sun that my forehead aches. Everything that can reflect light is shining: the last drops of dew in the grass, the buckles on our purses, the vast shapes of metal, the little gold loops in Yegina’s ears. Dee and Yegina erupt into wows about seeing the David Smith up close, standing in its broken shadow. I hang back, afraid of the glinting, jagged blade.

I wonder where Hendricks is, what he knows. Was he watching Evie all along?

Evie’s flipping open her phone every two minutes now, glancing over her shoulder back to the parking lot. She’s going to bolt. I want to bolt. I want to knock on the door of Janis Rocque’s solar home and hide in some clean, modernist parlor until Evie escapes and someone else chases her. My purse—stuffed with the recorder—is dragging on my shoulder like a stone. I could make an excuse and run to the gatehouse, tell the old guy to let no one out. Maybe there’s even a phone in there. I could call the LAPD right now.

Dee’s voice interrupts my thoughts. “And through this hedge is your special surprise, Maggie.” She bows to me and points to a path snaking into a bower of trees. “I stumbled on it yesterday,” she says. “Janis said she bought it years and years ago—but she didn’t trust anyone to install it properly until she met Brent Patrick. He did this and a couple of other tricky installations for her last year.” She takes a breath and shakes her head. “He’s kind of clueless, really. I don’t think he knew about your connection, or he would have told you it was here.”

At the mention of Brent, Evie stays expressionless, but I see her hand tighten on her phone.

I walk through first, keeping a cushion between me and Evie. As the green branches close around me, I hear Yegina call out, “Hey, I have to make a quick call.” And then, “There’s no reception. I’m going closer to the house.”

Her departure sends needles of fear into me. I wanted her to go for help, but I also need her here.

Dark limbs stretch overhead. Although the path is clear and level, the grove seems jumbled compared to the open fields. A pleasurable coolness seeps up from the earth. The ground here is deep grass, broken by a hole in the earth, long as a schooner and about six feet across. They must have dug it out with shovels. You couldn’t get an excavator in here, not with the thick ring of trees that surround the clearing, not with this lush, trackless grass. How far down did they go? The hole looks like a miniature version of the fault lines I have seen out in the desert, but its depth seems dark and forbidding.

Dee bumps into me and I fight back a squawk. She’s urging me to step closer, read the plaque.

Instead I look back at Evie, whose face glows with curiosity.

“Read it,” Dee says.

I drift sideways, out of Evie’s reach, and bend down to see the bold brass lettering:

THERESA FERGUSON

CLEFT, 1970

“Must be a different artist,” I say. “Greg’s mother sculpted in glass.”

“Look closer,” Dee says. I keep an arm’s length from Evie as I tiptoe to the edge of the rift. The ground is firm up to the last step, and then I feel its looseness, a spongy, crumbly edge where the grass roots cannot hold it. The air smells of soil and dampness.

“The main trick was getting the sun and shade right,” says Dee as I crane my neck and see them fifteen feet below: dozens—no, hundreds—of glass apples piled on either side of a long, gleaming blade, sharp as a guillotine. “So you could discover them all at just the moment you might fall in.”