by Mary Bowers
Hank brushed around Joy and went straight to Carmen.
“What happened?” he said.
She gestured to a chair at a dinette set adjacent to the kitchen, and they sat down and began to talk quietly, leaving us in the kitchen with Joy.
Noticing an odd look on Joy’s face, I realized she was staring at the painting I was holding.
“She gave you that?” she asked.
“I bought it.” Immediately, I regretted telling her. I didn’t know what kind of rivalry there was between the two artists, but I hadn’t exactly shown respect for Joy’s sculpture, and not five minutes later I’d bought something by her housemate.
Joy was staring at me, and I expected her to have a little fit, since I’d already accepted that she was a wealthy brat. Instead, her eyes became sad. Her eyes were the only thing that made her very different from Maida – they were a soft, vulnerable brown, instead of a unique and arresting violet. Her eyes had put Maida over the top, in the sex wars, especially when she’d been Joy’s age. Joy was pretty enough, and she had a good figure, but she didn’t have that extra magic. I suspected that to a man like Grant Rosewood, though, who liked them young, she’d have been pretty enough. Carmen had sarcastically referred to her as Grant’s prize pupil, but judging from the crime scene she was responsible for behind the studio, she wasn’t that great. And judging from the look in her eyes, she knew it.
“Do you paint at all?” I asked, just to break the tension. Moving slowly, I set the painting aside on the kitchen counter.
She shrugged. “Everybody paints. It’s how you get started.” After rallying for a moment, she seemed to lose confidence again. “Grant believed in me. But now that I’ve lost him, I can’t seem to find my direction anymore. When he was alive, I knew exactly what I was doing with The Armor Plating of Our Peace. His death hit me hard, of course, but I’m trying to force myself to get back into that place within myself, and it’s just not happening. I’m up against a deadline. And I’m not sure . . . .” Her voice became almost strangled. “Without him, I can’t find myself anymore.”
“He was that important to you?” Lily said.
“I’m lost without him. More than anybody else is. Everybody has a husband. Everybody has a father. But not many people find their true mentor, their Zen master. The one who can see inside your brain and make the right synapses start snapping. I’ve lost my mentor. I may never find another, and I’m not fully formed yet.”
I took a furtive glance behind me into the dining room, and Carmen and Hank were talking quietly and intensely. They didn’t even seem to know we were there anymore.
“Were you surprised when Grant Rosewood committed suicide?” I asked Joy.
“Of course I was. Well, at least on one level of myself. On another level, I had known it was coming, but I didn’t let myself believe it. The things he said.”
“He talked about suicide to you?”
“Not in so many words. He was a man who could only express himself visually, and sometimes in metaphors. I could read his work, and it told me that his interior landscape was growing dark. His sun was setting. And he knew it.”
“How did you read the most recent metaphors?” I asked, trying to hang in there. “What kind of darkness?”
“Sexual. Oh, not the physical kind. I didn’t care about that. Physical sex is just a bodily function, like scratching your ear, or eating spinach.”
Spinach. I nodded, and beside me I could see Lily doing a bobblehead move along with me. It wasn’t the time to argue, and besides, where would we have begun?
“I mean emotional sex,” she went on. “It makes you heavy, you know? It puts chains on your wrists and your ankles and around your neck. You can’t breathe. It makes you blind, it makes you deaf.”
“And who was he having emotional sex problems with?” I asked.
“Maida, of course,” she said. “Can’t you see from what I’m telling you? Maida killed him. With sex.”
Lily and I glanced at one another. Looking back at Joy, Lily said, “Sex. He was too old, and she kept sort of, you know – ”
Joy shrugged. “She would, but who knows? You’re missing the point.”
I was beginning to realize that whatever point she was trying to make, she was the only one in the world who could understand it. I decided it wasn’t worth asking her any more questions, but she went on explaining anyway.
“It’s why I’ve lost my way with The Armor Plating of Our Peace. I’m consumed by a soul in agony, and another structure keeps intruding itself upon my vision. A metaphor of Grant Rosewood, in the quicksand that was rising around him for months before he finally gave up and let himself sink into it. It keeps superimposing itself on Peace so that I can’t see what I’m doing anymore. All I see is Agony.” She blinked, as if a revelation had smacked her between the eyes. “A Soul in Agony,” she said in wonderment. “That’s it! My next piece. I have to get that out of the way, and then I can finish Peace. I’ll just have to tell them at the mall . . . .”
She was still talking to herself when she turned around and wandered out of the house, looking possessed.
Lily and I stood near one another in the kitchen for a moment, and when we’d had a moment to blink away the fog, I said, “That woman is loopy.”
“All the way around the bend and looking at her own backside.” Lily looked directly into my eyes. “What do you think? Is she crazy enough to kill?”
I pursed my lips. “If her mentor suddenly had enough of her and tried to cut himself loose . . . from what Carmen implied and what I’ve seen, I’m having a pretty easy time believing that the talents Grant saw in Joy had nothing to do with mentoring and everything to do with anatomy class. If he was dropping hints that it was time for her to move on, she might have felt betrayed – as a woman, not an artist.”
Without our realizing it, Carmen had finished talking to her uncle and was walking toward us in the kitchen. We turned to her, wondering if she was going to pretend she hadn’t heard my last comment.
“I kept hoping he’d drop her,” Carmen said, leaning back against the counter next to me. “She lasted way longer than any of his other ‘students.’ I was beginning to worry that he was about to do something stupid. With his way of looking at the world, he might have expected Maida to accept Joy as part of their marriage.”
“Or . . . ?” I started to say it, but just couldn’t.
Carmen, however, had no qualms about it. “Oh, he wouldn’t have left Maida for Joy. They meant different things to him. If it had gone that far, he would have simply tried to have them both. And he would have been surprised if either one of them objected. I asked him about Joy, that last time I saw him, and he said something about her work taking a new direction. He tried to make it sound positive – said she’d grown as an artist, and all that insider babble – and at the time I took it to mean he was getting tired of her. But he could also have meant exactly what he was saying: that he didn’t think he had anything else to teach her. At the time, I interpreted it the way I wanted to, and I was relieved. And if I was right, if he was getting ready to drop her . . . his little conquests could get sticky when he was ready to move on.”
“Watch yourself, girl,” her uncle said. “That’s my brother you’re talking about.”
“You admit yourself you didn’t really understand him, Hank. Maybe it was purely art; maybe it was something else. It doesn’t matter anymore. Let’s not fight about it.”
“So,” Lily said, “the thing about rent, baby. This was more a case of keeping your enemies close?”
“She’s not my enemy. I can’t believe she’s the reason he killed himself. Maybe it’s just my fascination with my own father that made me want to be closer to Joy, to see what he saw in her. I loved my father, but I never really got to know him. I wanted to know what she had that could inspire love in the object of my own love.” Then suddenly she began to laugh at herself. “And yeah, there’s the rent, baby. And if I have to walk out that door and face T
he Armor Plating of Our Peace for much longer, I’m jacking up her share of it.”
I took a deep breath and asked, “Do you know if Joy followed you into town last night, when you went to see your mother?”
I could see that she hadn’t considered that yet, and she dropped her wry manner and began to think. Then she shook her head. “She didn’t follow me, but she could have known where I was going. While I was talking to Maida, I walked out of my bedroom into the kitchen. She’s called me in the middle of the night before, wanting emotional support. When she was living in St. Augustine, I used to just try to talk to her until she got too tired to go on. It takes forty-five minutes to drive to St. Augustine from here, even in the middle of the night. But now that she’s living . . . was living in Tropical Breeze, I could get there in ten minutes. As soon as she called, I knew I’d go over there, so I got up to make myself a cup of coffee to take along. Joy could have overheard. But she didn’t follow me, I’m sure of that. At that time of night, I would have seen her headlights in my rearview mirror. But why would Joy want to kill Maida?”
“Joy’s mind,” I said, “works in mysterious ways. It sure sounds to me like she blames your mother for your father’s death, and if that’s the case, she would have had a motive.”
“Finally, somebody’s talking sense,” Hank said. “And for whatever my own two cents are worth, Maida was the reason Grant gave up on life. Don’t you know that yet? Or don’t you want to know.”
“They were both unfaithful, if that’s what you’re talking about,” Carmen said. “And if that had been a reason for suicide, either one of them would have killed themselves, or even one another, years ago. Decades. They hung together all this time because they needed one another. A little sex on the side didn’t upset either one of them.”
He stared at her like an outraged preacher-man. “Well, you may be right about that, but you’re wrong in the face of the Lord. I never understood my brother, and I sure as hell never figured out what he saw in that woman. Beauty is only skin deep, as far as I’m concerned, and look inside that woman and all you saw was ugliness. A monster. A devil who walked among us upon the face of the earth.”
Things were getting Biblical, and I’d had enough trouble hanging on when Joy had been roving the artsy plains. It was time to go.
Addressing myself to Carmen, since Hank obviously wasn’t going to mourn his sister-in-law, I expressed condolences for Maida, and waited while Lily did the same.
It was in the back of my mind that Lily would try to recruit Carmen for her TV show, now that Maida was gone. With everything that had happened, most people would have forgotten about the show, but not Lily. I waited a few beats to give her the chance, but apparently she felt it was not the right time. So I picked up my painting and told Carmen again how much I loved it, then said, “I have an appointment in Bunnell, and I have to drop Lily off at Cadbury House first, so we’d better get going.”
Leaving uncle and niece together, we got out of there.
Chapter 11 – Dr. Trance and the Performing Flea
“So, you’re a full-trance medium?” Dr. Williams asked me. He was writing as he asked it, and seemed completely neutral about it.
When I took my time answering, he looked up at me over his reading glasses.
“It’s complicated.”
“But you have entered a trance state in the past?”
“Apparently so. I don’t always remember it.”
“Does this happen often?”
“No, not often, and never in my life before a few years ago. It’s sort of a new thing.”
“And you haven’t yet come to terms with it,” he commented. “Have you been examined by a doctor, to see if there’s a medical cause for these trances?”
“Yes. As far as he could see from the imaging, my brain is normal and cranking away like anybody else’s.”
“Good.”
I watched the end of his pen (he was writing again) to see if I could follow the lines of, “Conflicted,” or “This one’s nuts,” but I couldn’t make it out.
“Have you ever talked to people like me before?” I asked. “I mean, as a part of your job?”
He set his pen down on the desk, giving me his full attention. “Are you going to ask me if I think you’re crazy?” He smiled, and suddenly I liked him. Trusted him, even. “No, Ms. Verone, I see no signs of that. In fact, other than a little uneasiness about your newfound ability to enter a trance state, you seem perfectly well-adjusted and normal to me.”
“I do? If I look at your notepad and see the word, ‘Conflicted,’ can I take that as a slippery slope to the loony bin sometime in the future?”
He seemed startled, and quickly looked to see if his notepad was in a position where I could read it. It wasn’t. He redirected himself, gently taking control of the interview.
“And in these trances,” he said, “you . . . predict things? See things? Solve problems?”
“Sometimes I’m able to solve problems, but maybe what others call a trance is just a natural state where your mind is working and your body is asleep. Like hypnotism. You just relax, and then you can figure things out.”
He gazed at me intently. “Is that how you interpret your trances?”
Classic psychologist tactic: throw the question back at you. Still, I thought about it, because I was intrigued. I heard my own voice grow softer. “Sometimes I come up with things I shouldn’t have known, but are they revelations, or just reasonable conclusions?”
He waited for me to answer my own question.
“There have been a few times when I’ve made really good guesses that were a little too good,” I said at last. “Not the result of simple reasoning. Definite things, like what objects were going to be in a room before I went into it, or what might have pushed someone I never knew to commit suicide, a long time ago.”
“And what was the reason for the suicide?”
“A wedding invitation. In 1936.”
“Tell me about the wedding,” he said. “Can you see it?”
I began to hear drifts of music and laughter, to see shimmering ballgowns swirling and swishing, and in the midst of it all, a porcelain doll of a bride who looked much happier than her groom did.
* * *
“You can open your eyes now.”
I blinked. The last thing I remembered was the long-ago wedding reception. I stared at him. “You’re good,” I said. “I don’t remember a thing.”
“You don’t remember me hypnotizing you?”
“No.”
“That’s because I didn’t. You slipped into a hypnotic state all by yourself.”
I thanked him for not calling it a trance, and he gave me a faint smile.
“Was I any help to the murder investigation?”
“That will be for the detective to decide, but you remembered every word of that phone conversation, apparently word-for-word. I recorded it, as I said I would before we started. I want to thank you for your cooperation, Ms. Verone. This has been very interesting for me.”
“I wish I could say the same, but I’d need to be able to remember it first, wouldn’t I?”
I stood up, shook hands with him, and left the station.
Chapter 12 - Bibimbap
When I finally got home, it sounded like there was a party going on. I went towards the kitchen holding Carmen’s painting and saw that we had company: Lily was staying with us, of course, and Jesse was sitting next to her at the breakfast bar. They were watching what was going on in the kitchen.
I said, “Hi, everybody,” and showed off Carmen’s painting. Lily had seen it already, of course, Jesse was only mildly interested, and Michael and Myrtle were very busy in the kitchen, so they only gave it cursory glances, nodded approval, then went back to work. Poor forlorn little thing, I thought, looking at the painting. I set it aside on the sofa table. I loved it, and I was going to hang it in my office where I could see it from my desk.
Michael was working expertly over a wok and My
rtle was acting as prep chef at the cooking island. They were preparing a complicated dish involving a lot of fresh vegetables, a couple of blood oranges from our own trees on the other side of the kennel, and a jar of cashews. The sugar cannister and a carton of eggs were also sitting out. I didn’t know what it all added up to, but I was intrigued, and suddenly very hungry. Michael can really cook when he wants to, which is a good thing, because I tend to burn my eyebrows off if I get anywhere near the range-top.
He was just beginning, apparently, frying onions and green peppers, and the house smelled wonderful.
“So what’s for dinner, guys?” I said.
“Michael’s making Bibimbap,” Lily told me. “Whatever that is.”
“It’s a Korean dish. It means whatever you got,” Michael said. He was madly whisking a sauce in a little green bowl. “You fry it all up in a sauce and put it over rice, then finish it off with an egg on top.”
He let me kiss his cheek and then I got back out of the way, taking a chair beside Lily.
“Nice place you got here,” Jesse said.
I leaned forward to see him around Lily. “Enjoying the water view at The Breakers?”
He made a face. “You should have warned me. You may have actual kennels here, but that place is really for the dogs.”
“Ready to move over here?”
“Oh, no, thanks, Taylor. I would, but now there’s no reason to stick around. We don’t do downers on Orlando Sizzles!, and our primary guest just got herself killed. We’re out of here, right Lily?”
“What do you mean?” she said. “We’ve got a show to do, and I’ve got the videographer coming on Monday. We still have tomorrow to line up material, and we’re going to start right here at Orphans of the Storm. And I haven’t given up on the art angle.”
“Are you thinking of including a segment on Carmen?” I asked. “It’s kind of soon, isn’t it?”
“Not Carmen. After you dropped me off here today, I went back into town and interviewed Adam Cody, to see if he was interested in doing an interview about Grant Rosewood and his work. After all, Adam represented Rosewood for years, and it’d be good publicity for his new gallery, appearing on Orlando Sizzles! You’re right, it’s going to be touchy approaching Carmen, but I’m going to make her aware of the opportunity and just leave it up to her.”