Still Lives(80)

Detective Ruiz reintroduces herself. She keeps her eyes on me, but they clench at the corners, as if she is forcing herself not to look away.

I say I remember her visiting my office.

“Good. I’m sorry to disturb your rest. We just need a brief statement from you about the events that occurred at Janis Rocque’s estate.”

“Did Evie confess?” I whisper.

“I’m afraid I can’t answer that,” says Detective Ruiz, but behind her, I see Hendricks shake his head no. How did he get to the sculpture garden so fast? I thought he was almost at my apartment in Hollywood. Gratitude floods me. I could have died if Yegina hadn’t found him, if he hadn’t found me.

“Maggie, I’m going to ask you some questions and I want you to answer as honestly as possible. You arrived at the sculpture garden at what time?” Detective Ruiz has a little recorder in her hand, proper-sized and digital. The doctors said that the big clunky machine inside my purse actually broke my fall, so the blade only cut my belly after I rolled.

I tell Ruiz everything I can remember about the morning, including calling the storage facility, including the heat and the drive through Hollywood, including the coolness of the bower where Theresa Ferguson’s art opened the ground. I keep talking until I get to the part where Evie pushed me and then the words abruptly stop. I can’t say it, can’t describe the look in her face when she shoved me: She wanted me dead. The force of that feeling: it’s like a steel wall slamming into my nose and skull. I don’t want to experience it again.

“And then?” Detective Ruiz rubs her temple.

I shake my head, still unable to speak. My hair is still damp from the bath. It drags on my cheeks like fingers.

Ruiz glances up at Hendricks, as if soliciting his advice.

Explain what happened, I think. You saw it. You saw me in the hole, bleeding. You know.

Hendricks watches me for a moment and then he shrugs, slow and elaborate, as if we’re talking not about an attempted murder but about some sloppy habit of mine to which he has resigned himself.

“My guess is that the victim fell,” he says finally. “Ground’s slippery. Nothing fencing the artwork.”

I make a noise and Ruiz looks suddenly puzzled.

“Did you fall?”

Hendricks nods behind her. Say yes, he mouths.

Ruiz spins on Hendricks. “Describe again what you found when you got the scene.”

“She was lying in the glass at the bottom of the hole, turned on her side.” His voice is casual, almost resentful, as if he’s told the same version of the story many times. “The suspect was nowhere in sight. I jumped down, cut up my hands”—he holds up one bandaged fist—“stopped the victim’s bleeding, and called for help.”

“Suppose you start a little earlier,” Ruiz says sharply. “You said you were on the estate already—why was that again?”

Hendricks tells her that Janis Rocque had asked him to attend a meeting between herself, Nelson de Wilde, and Bas Terrant to help determine the future ownership of the twelve paintings in Still Lives and other, earlier works by Kim Lord. Hendricks had just arrived at the parking lot when a friend of Maggie’s spotted him and said that Maggie had an urgent message for him. “And then I heard her scream,” he says, his eyes hard on mine. “I ran toward the sound and found her there, as I’ve described.”

“And you never saw the suspect emerge from the woods,” says Ruiz.

“No.”

“And you did not know the suspect was on the estate”—Ruiz extends every syllable to show her disbelief—“at the point you entered the sculpture garden.”

“Again, I guessed as much. I confirmed it with Maggie, at which point I called the unit.”

“Maggie, do you remember telling Detective Hendricks that you were pushed by Evie Long?” Ruiz asks me.

I shake my head. “I didn’t—”

“Did you fall or did someone push you?” she asks.

I stare back at Hendricks, shocked that this is the same man who gripped my hand last night. I see the new shadows in his face, the studied slouch that cloaks a fierce desperation. He’s not in Los Angeles to be a private investigator for rich ladies. He’s looking for something else here, and I, with my bumbling attempts to find the truth and save Greg, have been distracting him.

Now he wants me to lie. He knows Evie tried to kill me. Why does he want me to lie? So that he can get the credit for catching her? I did it. I stopped her. This is my story. Not his.

But he’s not taking the credit either.

My body feels bubbled, like I am a hot-water bottle filled to the brim, ready to pop.

“Did you fall or did someone push you?” Ruiz says again.

I did it. I stopped Evie. I want to shout this.


As soon as they leave together, the room expands. The window and walls are miles away, and my throat is so dry that I can’t swallow. I’m dying for water, though I am drowning in water. The capacity inside me to rise and get a cup, or to press the nurse’s button for help, has entirely disappeared. I close my eyes.

I don’t know why Hendricks asked me to lie.

I don’t know why, when I finally said I fell, it felt true.

Maybe I did fall. Maybe I goaded Evie to push me because I wanted to feel what her rage was like. To feel, face-to-face, a rage strong enough to kill so that I could finally understand it. I thought if I could slip inside the skin of a victim and emerge again, I might be able to explain why it happens. Wasn’t that the reason Kim Lord made Still Lives?