The House in the Pines(51)

“Hey, thanks for meeting me,” she said.

“No problem, happy to talk about Cristina’s work. I want more people to see it.” He set his phone on the table and pulled up a picture. “I brought another one to show you.” The painting was of a cold and severely shaded landscape that might have been the salt flats again, but flooded this time, pewter water mirroring an inhospitable sky. “This one’s my favorite,” Steven said. “You really have to see it in person, but even here you can see how striking it is.”

“Beautiful. She really was talented.”

“I’m trying to get ahold of all her work, but it’s been hard since I’m not family. Her paintings belong in a museum.”

“I agree,” Maya said carefully. “Especially her last one. Interesting how different that one is.”

“Isn’t it?”

Maya nodded thoughtfully and sipped her drink. “Did she ever tell you about Frank’s cabin?”

Steven deflated a little as he gathered what Maya was here to talk about, and she wondered why he’d come. Was it to talk about Cristina’s work—to keep it alive in the world—or might he have thought Maya was asking him on a date? She was, after all, his type, it seemed. “Sure,” he said, “she mentioned it.”

Maya waited.

He sipped his beer, a sour look on his face.

She felt for him and would have dropped the questions if it weren’t her life that was in danger. “Cristina must have really liked it there,” she said leadingly. “To have painted it that way . . .”

Steven sighed, resigned. “You could say that,” he said. “The cabin was one of the first things she told me about him. I remember it impressed her, and to be honest it impressed me too. I mean, who else our age owns a home? Not to mention builds their own? But then the more I heard about him, the less impressed I was. Honestly, the guy’s a loser.”

“Why?” she said, hiding her agreement.

Steven’s mouth puckered with distaste. He sipped his beer. “Well, for one thing, he didn’t have a job. Cristina didn’t know how he made his money, but apparently he had clients of some sort.”

“Clients?”

“Yeah, but don’t ask me what he did for them. My guess is he was actually living off an inheritance. His dad was some big professor at Williams who died several years ago.”

Maya wasn’t surprised to hear that his father had passed away—though it reminded her that she’d never learned what was wrong with him.

“Not to mention,” Steven added, “that Frank basically hangs out at a bar every night. The Whistling Pig. Cristina would go with him sometimes. I never knew her to hang out at bars before Frank.”

Maya filed this away for later. She looked down into her drink, where a shiny olive sat pickling in her last sip of martini. “Did she ever mention anything . . . strange that happened at the cabin?”

Steven looked annoyed. “Not that I can think of. Why?”

“Another round?” said the waitress.

“Yes, please,” Maya said, at the same time that Steven said, “No, thanks.” He wasn’t even halfway through his beer. She saw him watching her through the bottom of her martini glass as she tossed back the last briny sip.

“I ask because Frank brought me there too,” she said. “Only once, but he did something to me there. I blacked out.”

“What?”

“As I was arriving and as I was leaving,” Maya said. She’d never seen the bridge or the outside of the cabin. “I had dirt on my hands and knees afterward, and I still don’t know why.”

“Jesus, that’s . . . I don’t know what to say. I’m sorry to hear it.” He sounded like he meant it. “What do you think he did to you?”

“That’s what I’m trying to find out.”

The waitress returned with Maya’s martini, and she took a fortifying sip before continuing. “Frank was secretive about his cabin. I never knew why. He said I was the only person he’d ever brought there, and now he’s brought Cristina there too. And I can’t help but think that whatever he did to me . . . he probably did to her too.”

This clearly upset Steven. His whole hairless head flushed red.

Maya leaned in closer. “Whatever’s he’s hiding,” she said, “it’s there at his cabin. Which is why I need to go there—it’s the only way. But I’m scared. I don’t want to go alone.”

“You’re asking me to go with you.” He sounded both taken aback and not at all surprised that she’d ask this of him.

She nodded.

He was quiet for a long time. The bar had begun to fill, and someone had turned up the music. Finally, appearing to arrive at some conclusion, he pulled up Cristina’s painting of the cabin on his phone. “Look,” he said, “I don’t doubt that Frank hurt you. I had a bad feeling about him from the start. But I just don’t think Cristina would have painted this if he . . . did something to her. Like you said, she seemed to really like it there.”

Maya’s eyes filled with tears, but she managed to keep them from falling.

“I know she did,” Steven said, his tone growing soft, “because she gave me something else before she died. She gave me a few things, actually—like I told you, she said she was getting rid of some stuff. She’d remembered that my old coffee maker was broken, so she gave me hers.” Now he was the one verging on tears.