Layla clutched the sides of the beanbag chair, reminding herself that she was here, that Marla was sitting across from her, waiting for answers. She needed to follow the plan she’d made on the drive back from Phoenix: to come as clean about things as she could, knowing she’d never be able to tell Marla the whole truth—that she almost hadn’t survived the mission she’d accepted from Bette. The only reason she had is that she’d killed a man.
“Those briefcases, they’re why Bette was so set on going to Phoenix. When she couldn’t finish the trip, I promised her I would. Because she needed you to get what’s in ’em.”
Marla was looking at the briefcases as if she sensed all the ugliness connected to them. “It’s money, isn’t it?”
“Yes,” Layla said. “Two million dollars, to be precise.”
Marla flinched, or maybe Layla just imagined this. Now, she just sat there speechless, the same look of disgust on her face.
During Marla’s silence, Layla told her Bette’s hopes for the money: that it would help make sure that Jake was cared for, for the rest of his life.
“It’s from Victor, isn’t it?”
Had Marla always called him Victor? She spoke it like the name of some poisonous snake.
Hedging, Layla said, “I believe so.”
She waited for Marla to say something more: to ask questions, to make the reasons for her distaste clear. But if Marla had any questions, maybe she didn’t want the answers. Or maybe her sister, Vic’s ex, had told her everything she’d ever want to know about how Vic got his money.
Finally, Marla spoke. “Half of this should be yours, Layla. You’re Victor’s daughter as much as Bette was. And you’re family to Jake, and me.”
Now, Layla herself was speechless, and once again feeling the electric thrill that had rolled through her on that dark road in Texas. Why not accept Marla’s offer? The same one Bette had made herself? Then she thought of Jake. Would even one million be enough to see him through after she and Marla were gone?
“I don’t know, Marla.” It was the only thing she could think to say, and it was the truth.
Marla leaned forward. “Well, I do. Half the money’s yours. And if you don’t wanna take it now, it’ll be here for you, whenever you feel ready.”
“I appreciate that, but I— ”
“No buts. This is the way it’s gotta be. All right?”
Layla knew she had no other choice, at least not tonight. “All right.”
She gave Marla the code for the briefcases and cleared the boxes away from the safe Bette had told her about. Once the briefcases were inside it, she said goodnight to Marla and made her way to the guestroom.
There, the sleepiness that had rolled through her at the dinner table was long gone, and whatever she’d hoped to gain by delivering the money—a sense of satisfaction? relief? freedom?–seemed destined to escape her. She’d never be free of what she’d gone through to get the money, meaning she’d never be free of Wes. In her mind, he was on an endless loop of resurrection.
She thought again of Marla’s offer: Half of this should be yours.
Maybe. Layla still wasn’t sure. But she needed to figure out what to do with the money that had been meant for her all along, in Vic’s eyes. She took the velvet box from her suitcase and retrieved the card from him. The picture on the front of it—the girl staring into a mirror, as if she were a mystery to herself—had never felt truer to her. Maybe truer than anything Vic had written inside.
She reread his message, lingering on the final line:
Wishing you many more years from now, happy ones.
What kind of happiness could money buy?
She wasn’t sure. The very notion of happiness had always seemed fraudulent to her, an assumption that a steady state of unadulterated contentment was both possible and desirable. An assumption she’d never accept.
Still.
She thought of her workspace back home, the den—how its shelves and the cabinets beneath them were crowded with her paints, brushes, paper, and other supplies. How she always seemed to be bumping into the canvases stacked along one wall, and generally getting in her own way. For months, she’d thought of converting Alice and Roy’s old bedroom to a proper studio. Twice the size of the den, it had a northern exposure with just the right amount of natural light. The only thing that had gotten in her way was money. Not anymore.
If a proper studio could never bring happiness, at least not the greeting-card kind, it would be a new start, something she needed right now. Maybe something Jake needed, too. Although they’d never be able to “go huge” with Bette, they’d get closer to huge than was possible now. Tomorrow, that’s just what she’d tell him.
Slain Money Launderer Faced IRS Raid;
Related Killing Still Under Investigation
PHOENIX—It turns out that death was just the final stroke of bad luck for Xavier “Zav” Leos, the victim of an execution-style slaying in June.
Documents obtained from the Internal Revenue Service indicate that IRS agents were just days away from raiding the auto repair shop that was the site of the killing. Operating under the name M. Duprée’s (a.k.a., Mike D’s Automotive), it allegedly provided cover for what investigators say was a multi-state money-laundering operation overseen by Leos for years.
“He kept things under the radar for a good, long time,” an IRS source said. “So long, you could almost admire him. But in the end his good fortune ran out.”
As previously reported, a bullet recovered from Leos’s body was matched to a gun in the possession of Wes Stabler, of Reedstown, Ohio. The bodies of Stabler and another man, Gordon Cross of Leehaven, Pennsylvania, were discovered not far from Leos’s operations, and both men also died of gunshot wounds. At the site of those killings, investigators found $3 million in cash in the trunk of a car registered to Cross. Evidence suggests that Leos was the source of the money.
Evidence also indicates that Stabler fired the shot that killed Cross. As to who killed Stabler, the matter remains under investigation.
“Almost certainly, money was a motive for Stabler and Cross,” a source in the Maricopa County Sheriff’s Office said. “But the motive for Stabler’s killer? I’m not so sure it was money. I mean, they left three million bucks behind.”
As reported earlier, security cameras at the site of the shootings appeared to have been disabled, throwing one more wrench into the investigation of Stabler’s death.
—Phoenix Daily Eagle, September 14, 2019
Chapter 27
The Carlos-Fields Gallery, Pittsburgh
The juried exhibit, six months later
When they reached the entrance to Salon C, Jake scanned the room, then bolted straight to the far left corner.
If the place had been busier, Layla would have asked him to slow down. But it seemed that most everyone who’d wanted to see the show, now in its final week, had come and gone. Right now, she and Jake were the only people in the room.
Although he’d never seen Sara, Staying, he must have recognized Alice from the photographs Layla had shown him. Now he was standing right in front of her reclined form, and he seemed to be taking in every detail of the painting: not just Alice but also the storm-darkened background, the baby rattle glinting in the foreground, and the hand that held onto Alice’s.
“That’s your mom’s hand, right?”
“Yup.”
On the way here, when Jake asked for the gist of the painting, Layla said that it was kind of like a dream where someone you love comes back to life. In Sara, Staying, the dreamer was her Grandma Alice, and the person she loved was her daughter, Layla’s mother. “In the painting, my mom’s mostly a shadow,” Layla explained. “But to my grandma, she’s very, very real.”
Though Jake knew that her mom had died a long time ago, Layla hadn’t told him how and never would. He had come to know Sara best throu
gh the drawings of hers that Layla had framed and hung on the far wall of the new studio. During art-camp weekends, he’d studied them to learn how to draw birds, one of Sara’s favorite subjects, and now one of his.
To Layla, Sara’s drawings were a comfort. Except when she thought of the one that would never be there: the rendering of that twisted tree from Ross Woods. Stolen by Wes, along with anything else in that sketchpad. As soon as she’d come home from Reedstown, she’d rid herself of every physical reminder of him, burning everything he’d sent her. And as she’d promised Bette, she’d finally destroyed The Woods, knifing it to shreds and hauling the remains to the curb.
Jake pointed to the painting to the right of Sara, Staying, an abstract watercolor of blues and greens.
“That one’s not very good,” he said.
“Shhhh.” Layla glanced behind them, but not a soul was in sight, not even a security guard.
In a lower voice, Jake said, “Grandpap should go there instead.”
Layla had never intended to paint Vic, and that she’d taken him up as a subject seemed almost accidental. After returning from Reedstown, she tried to resume the painting she’d left on her easel, but she couldn’t remember where she’d been going with it, or why she’d started it in the first place. She was too distracted by her memories from Phoenix, and by the clattering, shouting, and banging from Alice and Roy’s old bedroom—from the workers she’d hired to transform the space into a studio.
To get going on something—anything—she took another crack at painting the aliens from her dreams. But just like before, these paintings looked like the worst kind of carnival prizes, and when she’d texted one of them to Jake, he’d texted back a single response: “Lizards don’t stand.” With that, she gave up on the aliens, not just because of Jake’s criticism. Since she’d returned from Phoenix, they seemed to have exited her thoughts, and her dreams.
But something new crept into her thoughts and wouldn’t leave: the picture of Vic and his brother, Gene. All she had was Bette’s description of the photo, and the sense that the picture had captured a side of Vic that had died with Gene, the side that had gotten the brothers razzing the photographer and “just having a good time.” The side that had been absent from the expressionless courtroom sketches of Vic, and from the man who had taken her and Bette on that ill-fated camping trip so many years ago. The man who’d seemed miles away.
She decided to try to capture Vic as his brother had known him, though all she had to work from were post-Gene photographs of him, and her best guesses about how to make something that she’d known only by absence present—in his eyes, in his smile, and in the tilt of his head.
From the start, she knew that painting Vic would never bring her closer to understanding him, or help her see in him the father she’d wanted him to be. But as she worked ahead, the Vic who emerged on the canvas started to feel like a companion—a companion in loss, of people they’d loved, and of people they’d once been.
So far, Jake had been the only person she’d shown the painting to, and he’d given it his highest praise, never granted easily: “It’s damn good.”
Now, he tugged her sleeve, and pointed at the wall to their left. “Our painting of Mom can go there.”
“Maybe someday,” Layla said.
As soon as the new studio was ready, the two of them got to work on a 60" x 30" painting of Bette’s antics: not a huge one, but as close to that as they could get, for now. The painting had started with three blown-up images from Jake’s “Bette series” of drawings, images he’d selected after much deliberation: Bette cruising ahead on her rider mower, Bette hand-springing across the yard, Bette doing flips on a neighbor’s trampoline. In the painting-in-progress, she flipped first on the trampoline and then off the right edge of the canvas. Into eternity.
As she and Jake worked ahead on the painting, determined to get Bette-as-they’d-known-her right, Layla’s connection to Jake was feeling more and more essential. She could only hope he felt this, too.
Another thing that was feeling essential: the new studio space, which at times seemed to cast a spell. Working there with Jake, or on her own, Layla sometimes forgot herself, in a way that felt different from her previous immersions in drawing or painting. It was almost as if she’d been dropped into another life, or into some altered version of this one. For a time, she existed apart from her darkest memories and fears.
For a time, she forgot the press of Wes’s body.
She forgot the sight of his blood, and Cross’s.
She forgot how she felt whenever she stepped out of the alarm-systemed house: never quite off high alert.
She forgot how, whenever she heard footsteps behind her, even during the day, she stepped aside to let the person pass, or crossed the street.
She forgot how she checked her rear-view mirror far more often than she used to, shuddering if she saw a white car. Or a cop car. If Wes’s murder investigation ever went cold, she’d never learn that from the news she Googled from time to time, against her better judgment. Only time would tell.
Jake stepped closer to Sara, Staying—almost too close, his nose inches away from Alice.
Then he looked to Layla. “Did you paint your mom’s shadow from reality? I mean, have you seen it?”
“Kind of. I mean, it’s more like I feel it.”
But this had happened only recently, and Layla wasn’t sure why, though she guessed the open, uncluttered nature of the studio had something to do with it. In that kind of space, who wouldn’t sometimes feel like someone was standing behind them, watching? In Layla’s case, she imagined Bette, Vic, or her mom, depending on what she was working on or thinking about. But with her mom, it was something different. More and more, Layla wondered what she would have said about the paintings of Vic and Bette, about everything that had happened on the road, and about this new turn in her life with Jake. And she wondered what it would have been like to work side by side with her mom, just as she was working with Jake. Most times, her imagination failed her, her mother remaining an ache of absence, nothing more. But now and then, that ache took on a new weight, becoming something close to real. If Layla were superstitious, she might have believed it was a ghost.
Jake took her hand, swung it back and forth, and held it up to Sara’s from the painting. “Hey! Your hand’s exactly like your mom’s.”
He was right. How could she not have noticed that before?
“And you know what that means?”
Layla hadn’t a clue.
“Good luck. For both of us.”
She had no idea where Jake had heard such a thing. Or maybe he’d just invented it on the spot. Either way, it didn’t matter. Right now, she was going to take all the good luck she could get.
Not letting go of her hand, Jake pulled her out of the exhibit room, out of the gallery, then back to the Forester Layla had gotten by trading in Bette’s truck. Within an hour, they were back in the studio, back to work.
Acknowledgments
I am beyond grateful to Mark Sedenquist and Megan Edwards of Imbrifex Books for taking on I Mean You No Harm and for providing such thoughtful and thorough guidance and support throughout the editorial, production, and marketing processes.
I never would have been able to complete this novel, and improve my early drafts, without the help of many others. First, I’d like to thank those who commented on those drafts or provided moral support throughout my writing and revising processes: Sally Bunch, Ellen Darion, Beth Gylys, Karen Henry, Chris Juzwiak, Audrey Schulman, Grace Talusan, Gilmore Tamny, Ellen Thibault, and Patricia Wise. Gilmore and Ellen provided especially thorough suggestions, helping me to further develop the plot and characters.
Editor Celia Johnson also turned a sharp eye to the novel, identifying ways to make it a more satisfying experience for readers. Her thorough critique and thoughtful edits resulted in a much stronger manuscript.
Finally, I will be forever grateful to my parents, Barbara and Nelson, who always kept plenty of books within reach and never let bedtime or a sunny, play-outdoors-worthy day interfere with a good read.
About the Author
Beth Castrodale worked as a newspaper reporter until her love of books led her to the publishing field. She was a senior editor at Bedford/St. Martin’s and is the founding editor of Small Press Picks. Her short fiction has appeared in numerous publications, including Marathon Literary Review, Printer’s Devil Review, and the Smoky Blue Literary and Arts Magazine. Her debut novel, MARION HATLEY, was a finalist for a Nilsen Prize for a First Novel from Southeast Missouri State University Press, and an excerpt from her second novel, IN THIS GROUND, was a shortlist finalist for a William Faulkner – William Wisdom Creative Writing Award. Castrodale lives in Boston in a shadowy Victorian that’s proving to be an inspiration for her next book.
Discussion Guide
If you would like Beth Castrodale to join a discussion of the book via phone or video chat, she would love to hear from you. She can be reached at [email protected].
Why does Layla travel to Reedstown, other than to attend her father’s wake and funeral? What misgivings does she have about making the trip?
From early on, Layla suspects that Bette’s trip to Phoenix is “about more than exchanging one set of possessions for another.” Despite this suspicion, Layla decides to join Bette for the trip. What motivations—altruistic and otherwise—are behind this decision?
When describing the aliens from her dreams, Layla says, “They actually seem like they’re trying to take care of me, or somebody.” What do you think might explain the alien dreams and the fact that they cease after Layla returns from Phoenix?
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