Still Lives(83)

It’s a logical question, and the logical answer would be: He’s telling the truth. He simply didn’t know.

But I don’t believe that’s it exactly. Brent let himself go blind. I think of the momentary fire in his eyes after the Jason Rains preview, how even my small burst of admiration affected him. What if such adulation were magnified a thousand times by the big theater company orchestrating his Broadway comeback? Why would he care about anything else? I relay my thoughts to Yegina.

“But Kim told him she was pregnant,” she says. “It seems like they were really close.”

“Maybe.” I muse aloud that Kim was panicking about the responsibility of a child, and how it might ruin her art career. She might have thought Brent would understand. Because of Barbara.

“So Evie overheard the pregnant part and she went nuts,” says Yegina. “But she was so calculated, too. I feel like I never knew her.”

“I agree.” I grab an article and read aloud about Evie’s childhood in small towns in the Imperial Valley and Northern California. She moved often with her single mother, who had a drug habit, and for several years was placed in foster care by the state for neglect. Evie’s biological mother declined to be interviewed, but the foster mother characterized Evie as the “prettiest little psychopath” she’d ever met.

“One thing we do know: it was dangerous to be close to her,” I say. It was dangerous to know her at all, I add internally, wanting to confess to my stolen phone, my hunch that Evie sent the warning note to Greg, that she was scoping out my house to figure out how to frame me next and ran out of time. I wait again for Yegina to say something about my fall in the sculpture garden, but again, she doesn’t. She is looking down, pressing a finger into her forearm until the skin whitens.

I ask about her brother. She tells me Don is living at home, but the whole family is seeing a great therapist, and Don’s saving money to bike up the coast to San Francisco. Yegina says she might go with him.

“Work is so busy, though,” she adds. “With you and Jayme gone. And Bas is fund-raising like crazy in Kim’s name, which I know you’ll think is crass, but people want to do something, they feel so sad …” She trails off.

“How is Bas?” I say. “I mean, how are Bas and you?”

Yegina heaves a giant sigh. “The day Don tried to … Bas was with me in my office,” she says. “And yes, we’d been flirting, in this silly, sinkingship sort of way, because his career was going down and his marriage was breaking up and Kim Lord was missing and my best friend was lying to me and we might all lose our jobs if the Rocque couldn’t balance its budget.” She absently stacks the magazines as she talks, periodically pausing to tuck her black hair behind her ear. “And then I get a call from my mom saying she’s bringing Don back from the hospital because he tried to hang himself. I can’t drive, I’m too upset. And you’re totally unreachable. So Bas just dumped everything and drove me.” Bas told her that his older sister had committed suicide when he was a teenager, and that he’d never recovered from it. “We both realized we came from these pressure-cooker families, where you have to stay on track or you’ve failed forever.”

That day, Bas stayed in the car for two hours while Yegina went inside with her family, and then he escorted her home.

“And if you must know, we decided not to sleep together,” she adds. “He’s only an okay kisser, anyway.” Her tone is light, but her eyes, locked on mine, are hurt. “So you didn’t really interrupt anything, and you didn’t have to take off like that.”

“I was in shock,” I say. “And there you were with him. I felt like an intruder … What was I supposed to do?”

“You could have trusted me,” Yegina says.

I did trust her. I might have died if Yegina hadn’t believed my text in J. Ro’s garden. It hurts how much I trust her, and she rescued me. But I don’t want to start bawling now because I don’t know when I’d stop.

The bustle of the ward fills the silence: the custodian rattles her mop bucket, rolling it down the hall. There’s a burst of conversation at the nurse’s station.

“Ray Hendricks was in the office today,” Yegina says. “He said he left something for you.”

“Strange,” I say, my stomach dropping. Hendricks hasn’t been back to the hospital since we lied to Detective Ruiz. “Why was he there?”

Yegina says that Hendricks came for the legal sorting out of the Still Lives paintings. J. Ro insisted he take part in the dialogue because he was the one who identified Kim Lord’s alleged stalker. “It was this big collector who was trying to own everything Kim Lord ever made. Really creepy.”

“Sounds it,” I say.

“Anyway, J. Ro is buying them, on the condition that Nelson give Kim’s percentage of the proceeds to Kim’s family, and Nelson’s percentage to nonprofits for women artists. And then Janis is loaning the paintings to the Rocque indefinitely.”

I try to show enthusiasm, though I am having a hard time processing the news. Still Lives will belong to the Rocque, as Kim wanted, but what will happen with the rest of her paintings—all her early work in The Flesh and Noir? Now that Steve Goetz and his supercollector scheme are known, will he continue with it?

“How did you figure out that Evie did it?” says Yegina, watching my face.