Dance Away with Me(4)

What the hell, Trav? How many thirty-five-year-olds die from pneumococcal pneumonia these days?

She tugged her long, tangled hair from the neck of the sweatshirt. “I bought the place sight unseen. The price was right, but the photos were misleading.”

Bianca waddled toward the kitchen table. “It could be really cute with some paint and new furniture.”

Once Tess would have risen to the challenge, but not now. Not only couldn’t she afford new furniture, but she also didn’t care enough to buy any. “Someday.”

As Tess made coffee, Bianca chatted about a biography of one of Picasso’s mistresses she’d just read and about how much she already missed Thai food. Tess learned that Bianca and her husband lived in Manhattan, where she worked as a visual merchandiser in the fashion industry. “I design windows and pop-up stores,” she explained. “It’s a lot more fun than modeling used to be, although not as lucrative.”

“Modeling?” Tess turned from the stove to stare at her as she finally put it all together. “That’s why you seem so familiar. Bianca Jensen! We all wanted to be you.” She hadn’t made the connection between Bianca’s name and Tess’s own college days, when that face had been on the cover of every fashion magazine.

“I had a good career,” Bianca said modestly.

“More than good. You were everywhere.” As Tess poured two mugs of coffee and carried them to the table, she remembered how dissatisfied those magazine covers had made her feel with her own big breasts, disobedient hair, and olive complexion.

Bianca took a sip from her mug and released a long, delicious sigh. “So good. You’d think it was heroin the way Ian acts.”

As a midwife, this was hardly the first time Tess had sat across the kitchen table from an almost nude woman, but unlike Bianca, those women had been in labor. Bianca curled her free hand around her belly in the protective, self-satisfied way of pregnant women. “How long have you lived in Tempest?”

“Exactly twenty-four days.” Being too evasive made people inquisitive, and it was better to volunteer a little information so it didn’t look as though she had anything to hide, because once people knew she was a widow, everything would change. She braced her heels on the chair rung. “I got tired of Milwaukee.”

“But why here?”

Because she’d seen the name Runaway Mountain on a map. “I got restless.”

Not true. Trav was the restless one. In the eleven years they’d been married, they’d lived in California, Colorado, and Arizona before moving back to Milwaukee, where they’d grown up. He’d been ready to move again when he’d died. She traced the handle of the mug with her thumb. “What about you? How did you end up in these mountains?”

“Not my choice. There can’t be more than eight hundred people living in this godforsaken place.”

Nine hundred sixty-eight, according to the sign on the highway.

“It’s all Ian’s fault,” she said. “Too many people were bothering him in the city—dealers, the press, wannabe artists—so he decided to move us here.”

“Dealers? The press?”

“That man who was yelling at you is Ian Hamilton North the Fourth. The artist.”

Even if Tess hadn’t loved art museums, she would have recognized his name. Ian Hamilton North IV was one of the world’s most famous street artists, second only to the mysterious Banksy. He was also, she seemed to remember, the black sheep of the blue-blooded North family financial dynasty. Although she didn’t know a lot about street artists—or graffiti crapologists, as Trav had called them—she’d been fascinated by North’s work.

“Give me a can of spray paint, and I can do the same thing,” Trav had said. But the critics didn’t share Trav’s opinion.

She remembered what she’d read about North. His reputation had grown from urban street corner tags as a kid to the stenciled posters he’d plastered on bus stops and utility boxes. From there, he’d started producing larger pieces, which had begun showing up on the sides of buildings all over the world—outlaw works at first and finally commissioned murals. Now sold-out gallery shows and museum exhibitions, like the one she’d seen, displayed his posters and paintings, all of which bore the tag he’d adopted as a kid—IHN4, Ian Hamilton North IV.

Street artists, by nature, had little regard for law and order, so it shouldn’t surprise her that this particular artist, however brilliant, lacked the unselfishness gene. Witness the fact that he’d dragged his heavily pregnant wife away from her home to the middle of nowhere two months before her due date.

“I saw the MoMA exhibition.” She and Trav had gone to Manhattan not long before he’d gotten sick. At the time, she’d loved the explosive images she’d seen on the museum’s walls, but now that she’d met the artist, not so much.

“I’m his muse.” Bianca touched her collarbone. “I drive him crazy, but he needs me. Two years ago we broke up. He was paralyzed for almost three months. Couldn’t paint a thing.” She smiled, not bothering to hide her satisfaction.

Tess wasn’t sure how an ethereal creature like Bianca could inspire such a mythic body of work. In the exhibit she’d seen, the video game–like creatures of North’s early work had transitioned into grotesque, mythological creatures he placed in everyday surroundings—the family breakfast table, a backyard barbecue, an office cubicle. The calligraphy in his paintings had grown more intricate, too, until finally his letters lost themselves in abstract design.