by Paula McLain
“Lydia?”
“I wouldn’t hold out any hope that she’d betray him, if she even knows. We just have to keep moving forward with what we have.”
“We’re getting a few more bodies tomorrow and a herd of ATVs to do another sweep of the area around Montgomery Woods.”
“That will help, but here we are in the middle of October, Will.”
The firelight has drawn shadows around his mouth and eyes. He looks years older than he did only weeks ago. “We can still get to her on time, though, can’t we? It’s not impossible.”
“Not impossible, no.” But so unlikely.
* * *
—
It’s almost midnight when Will leaves. From her place by the fire, Cricket stretches with a groan and stands up. Let’s go to bed, she’s clearly saying, but how can I even try to sleep when everything feels so nebulous and grim? Even though the fire is mostly spent and the light is patchy, I stare at the two photos, Cameron in the krummholz grove and Shannan in the rabbit-fur jacket, trying to step back and see them objectively, one of Hap’s old tricks, avoiding the blind spot, the place where being too close hides what matters most.
I know Cameron was modeling for Gray that day in the grove, but still don’t know why for sure. What she’d planned to do with the photos from that shoot, or whom she was trying to impress with those clothes and that hairstyle, the look in her eyes. As for Shannan, I haven’t seen any other images of her except the ones Karen showed me in Gualala, from when she was young. Her expression in this one is shrewd and cynical, her brown eyes narrowed in some sort of challenge, her mouth set, lips closed. No smile. No invitation or openness. If Cameron was trying to feel seen for the first time, Shannan had been seen far too much, had been used for her looks and also traded on them herself for a long time, way too long to feel anything good could still come of it. It’s almost ironic to look at the girls side by side this way. Factoring in face shape and hair and body type, they’re more alike than not—and yet their relationship to hope, to possibility, is stark in contrast. Black and white, as Will has been saying from the beginning, two sides of a tossed coin that won’t quite land.
* * *
—
At some point, I give up, the fire burned down to a low red smear. The dog curls next to me, warm and steady, doing her work, which is just to be here, by my side. I still don’t understand how I deserve her, or how she’s come to me, but I’m grateful anyway, for her body, her even heartbeat. Especially now as the night moves in, pressing heavily.
A dream tugs me under, strange images rising thick and moist, like the breath of an animal. I’m in a roundhouse, partially underground, a structure like the Pomo once built for rituals and ceremonies. Some sort of purification rite is taking place around me, elders in deerskin capes and robes, their chests bare, chanting with everything they’re made of. As if they’re singing through the pores of their skin.
I can smell burning sage. Gray smoke climbs the earthen walls and widens upward like a spell.
“Where does it hurt?” I hear a familiar voice ask me.
Everywhere, my mind answers.
It’s Hap. I can’t see him through the smoke but recognize the solid, spreading warmth of his skin and his smell, which has always been exactly like this, the scent of trees becoming wise.
I can’t do this, I tell him with my mind, meaning solve the case, unpuzzle the clues, find Cameron. But suddenly I mean everything. My whole life—heavy with loss. Jason and Amy. My mother in that awful parking lot, dead on Christmas Day. Jenny’s murder and Eden’s cancer. Hap’s disappearance. My daughter’s accident. The dark abyss of my work and how it connects in an awful and yawning way to everything else.
“It’s okay.” Hap speaks into my ear. “It was all a long time ago.”
No. I feel small and powerless beside him, as if I’m ten again. Twelve. Eight. Sixteen. All the ages I’ve ever been. There’s a sound like a ringing phone coming through the wet smoke around us, but it’s too far away, and I can’t reach it. Where did you go, Hap? I wish you could have said goodbye.
“Life is change, Anna. We don’t get to keep each other.”
I let you down. I’m not who you think I am.
“Hush.”
I have to tell you what happened. What I’ve done.
“Be still, honey. It doesn’t matter now.”
But it does. Help me, Hap. I can’t live like this, I plead as the dream spins on.
The elders are turned away from us, drumming over hot stones. The roundhouse seems to be breathing like a lung, taking in grief and letting it go.
Hap says, “I’m so sorry, honey. I know it hurts, but we never have to do anything alone. I’ve never left your side. Come look at what I brought you.”
I gaze up and the roof has disappeared. The sky is dazzling and boundless, sparks flickering on and off and on again.
“We can’t always see them,” Hap says, meaning the stars, “but they’re always with us, sweetie. Don’t give up.”
Help me move on, Hap. I need to find Cameron.
“You’ve already found her, Anna. See? She’s been here the whole time.”
(sixty)
When I wake, my eyelashes are sticky and damp. I’ve been crying in my sleep. Remembering, reliving. Replaying the trauma in my body, where it’s been all this time.
I dress numbly, forgoing a shower while Cricket paces, reading my mood. I’m out of coffee, out of food, too. Shoving my feet into boots, I drive into town, barely feeling the steering wheel under my hands, the air on my skin. Little flashes of the roundhouse dream wriggle through the emotional fog, Hap trying to reassure me that I’m not alone. But I sure feel like I am.
This case is getting away from me, and from Will, too. What he was saying in his office the other morning after we got the call from the medical examiner, that he might not be strong enough, or good enough. I wonder if he might be right—about both of us. Maybe we’re not ever going to solve this. Maybe Cameron will stay lost, and her abductor will go unnamed, and history will repeat itself.
* * *
—
Leaving Cricket in the car, I walk into the GoodLife and feel bombarded by the cheerful chaos, bright light and noisy conversation, and the smell of milk becoming sweet foam. I order coffee and a breakfast burrito and then head over to the message board by habit, to wait for the food. Cameron’s missing photo is still here, plus the new one with the words FOUL PLAY SUSPECTED screaming from dead center. The rest is innocuous, including a posting for Sam Fox’s free community yoga class, but something has struck me suddenly. A high bell has begun to ring steadily in my inner ear, a warning sound, because this is how Cameron’s abductor could have reached her. Exactly this innocuously—hidden in plain sight.
My eyes flick over the board, across the top and down the side, a feeling of dread and inevitability rising. And then I see the posting I’m looking for, in the lower-right corner, simple and spare, printed on Kelly-green copy paper:
ARTIST’S MODEL WANTED
No Experience Necessary
Will train if other requirements met
It was here three weeks ago, when I found the listing for the cabin, but I didn’t register it. Haven’t even remembered it until now. The phone number at the bottom is local and repeated in a fringe of tear-off tabs, no name. All but two of the tabs are gone. Artist’s Model Wanted…Will Train. Twelve words, three lines, all without heat or persuasion or intensity—which is why the posting is so potent. It’s like the kill site I saw in the woods that day, simple and incredibly effective.
I take Shannan’s photo out of my jacket pocket feeling sick to my stomach, all the hairs on the back of my neck vibrating. It’s not the coat I’m looking at anymore. The coat doesn’t matter, only the heavy-souled girl who’s wearing it. Her cynicism, her world-weary look. Her bat signal fla
shing out past her wounds.
Everything Shannan has lived through is here in her eyes—the day her father skipped town and her mother stopped trying, all the fights she heard from her bedroom at night, the sound of a fist against the wall, against her mother’s face. The way she tried to mute it all in the school bathroom, her knees on the tile, some boy’s hand on the back of her neck, pushing too hard. The times she ran and found nothing. Came back and found nothing. Left again. Of course I’m stretching, filling in the blanks. But in another way, it’s no stretch at all, but incredibly familiar.
Shannan isn’t me, or Jenny. She’s not Cameron either, but I can also see how we all line up behind one another, making a version of the same shape in the world. Trying to believe in people or in promises. Trying to be enough. Trying—always trying—to be free somehow. To unfold.
* * *
—
I pull the tack from the corkboard, feel the needle prick as it finds the fleshy pad of my thumb, a tightrope feeling coming over me. The number at the bottom of the posting in my hand is his number. A thin piece of paper, trembling in my fingers, everything zeroing to a single pinpoint, a freckle of my own bright blood.
Careful to touch only the bottom portion of the posting so I don’t disturb any valuable fingerprints or sweat residue, I ask one of the cashiers working the register for a large ziplock bag and tuck the posting safely inside before crossing to the pay phone at the back of the café to call the sheriff’s office. Cherilynn Leavitt picks up.
Through her voice, warm and cheerful, the bell keeps ringing. “Hey, Cherilynn,” I manage to say. “It’s Anna Hart. Is Will around?”
“He’s in the field. Want me to get him on the radio for you?”
“No, that’s okay.” My voice sounds glassy. I take a breath. “Listen, can you get me a reverse phone lookup on the fly? I’ll hold.”
“Sure thing,” she says.
As I wait, I’m barely in my body. My thinking is jumbled, nonsensical. Finally Leon Jentz comes on the line.
“Hey, Anna. I have the information you wanted. What’s up?”
“Hard to say yet.” Again, the disembodied feeling, and yet somehow I keep talking. “Just following up on a lead. What did you find?”
“That number is registered to the Mendocino Art Center.”
He’s right here, blocks away. Of course he is. “Do you have a name for me?”
“No name. The artists’ studios have phones and this is one. The residents shift around a lot, I guess.”
“Do we know which studio?”
“Number four. What do you think you’re onto here?”
“A new witness, maybe.” I pull the lie from thin air effortlessly. “I’ll let you know if anything turns up. In the meantime, can you get a message to Will to meet me at the Art Center as soon as he can get away?”
“You got it.”
(sixty-one)
Minutes later, I park, leaving Cricket in the back seat, and approach the cluster of outbuildings that has been here since the late fifties. In the largest of the outbuildings, there are twelve numbered apartments that function as living quarters as well as work space for instructors and artists in residence, six above and six below, with a bowed industrial-looking staircase between.
Number 4 is blank and quiet. In the dusty window to the left of the entrance, a piece of stained glass throws blurred color onto the concrete walkway, red and blue and yellow spheres.
I knock and get no answer, then test the knob to see if the door is locked, and it is. I try to peer in the windows, but they’re filmed over with dust and spiderwebs, flyspecks.
The studio gallery where tourists come to buy hand-painted windsocks and blown-glass ashtrays isn’t open yet. No one’s around except a gardener on his knees dividing a hosta plant with a sharp spade—an older man I don’t recognize. He’s wearing overalls and a ball cap, with tufts of his silver hair poking from underneath.
I head over, pointing back behind me. “Do you know who this studio belongs to? Number four.”
“Been empty for a bit, but a new intern’s coming from Portland at the end of the month.” He rests his soil-stained gloves on his knees. “Who are you looking for?”
“The artist who left.”
His glasses are cloudy, but his eyes are sharp. His shoulders square. “His lease is expired, but all the paperwork is in the office. Why? What is it you need to know?”
I can tell I’ve awakened his suspicion. I probably look more than suspicious, actually, my hair wild, and my clothes rumpled, careless. I’m out of breath, too. But as much as I know I need to slow down and reassure him that I’m not a threat, I can’t stop thinking about getting through that door. The man who killed Shannan and then took Cameron might be just inside. His prints might be on the phone, or his name on a receipt or a business card, or a piece of art.
“Who’s your supervisor?” I ask the man, and then crouch to meet him at his level. “I need to get into that studio. Who has a key?”
“I’m the supervisor. Stan Wilkes. What’s going on here, anyway?”
It takes me several long minutes to explain myself and convince Stan to let me take a look inside. Finally he nods, moving with a tortoise’s slow swing, and stands up, brushing off his knees. After eons, he reaches into his hip pocket and produces a skeleton key, small and rounded on top, hanging from a piece of red string.
We go over together, and he opens the door, his big shadow thrown onto the lintel and jamb.
“Go right ahead,” he says.
I step inside just as it strikes me for the first time that even at his age, Stan might be who I’m looking for. He’s a large man, still capable of doing harm. Without breathing, I whirl on him.
He stumbles back, startled. In his widened eyes, I see his age become obvious. It’s in his hands, too, and the shine of his forehead. He’s just an old man, and I’ve scared him.
* * *
—
After Stan leaves, I close the door behind me for privacy. The room is a chilly rectangle, maybe twenty by twenty-five feet. Cracks and dark stains mar the concrete floor. Splotches of oil paint. Along one wall, a wooden workbench appears similarly scarred, battered from long use.
The switch for the overhead fixture doesn’t work, but above there are three bubbled Plexiglas skylights. They throw light down in milky cones, where dust motes swim, seeming magnified. Granular. Though the room is bare, there is the sense of residue everywhere. The almost medicinal tang of linseed oil and gouache emanating from the walls. The blackened mouth of the empty kiln. The easel leaning in the corner, one of the support legs dangling as if it’s a broken limb.
I can’t help but wish the space could talk to me, tell me its story. Has Cameron been here, modeling or preening? Begging for love, or for her life? Did her abductor use this yellow slimline phone against the doorjamb to call her? The one with the snaking twisted cord? Is this where she first reached him? Where he first began to draw her into his tormented fantasy?
I’m still fixated on the phone when I hear a fluttering behind me. No one’s there when I turn, but the sound continues, like a small soft hammer on the wall or the pipes, coming from a closet at the back.
Cameron, I think and cross to the door. It’s not a closet at all, but a dim cinder-block storage space. The walls are gray and porous and smell of damp. The air feels thick and moist enough to drink. To swallow in pieces. In one corner, above a small rusted utility sink, a small bird drops down from the rafters, startling me as it thrashes against the wall violently. The gray-white wings are a frantic blur. It’s come through a broken transom window and can’t get out.
I feel its struggle as if it’s hammering at my chest instead of cinder block. All of its panicked energy and hopelessness pointed at me. My pulse jumps as it flails against the concrete and then the rafters, looking futilely for the sk
y. Finally it stops on one of the cobwebby joists, its heartbeat thumping visibly. And then I notice several canvases have been stacked nearby, resting between the joists like rungs on a ladder. Almost instantly, I forget the bird and find a chair, careful not to disturb anything that might have fingerprints on it. It takes some effort to hoist the canvases down without falling, but when I do, I’m stunned; they have Jack Ford’s telltale swooping signature in the bottom right-hand corner. They must be worth hundreds of thousands of dollars.
My first thought is that Jack must have had some connection to this studio, which has been here for more than thirty years. He could have painted here, or simply used this room for storage. Then it occurs to me that dozens of artists must have used this space over the last few decades, and that any one of them might have been a collector of Jack’s work, and inadvertently left the canvases here. The level of dust on the paintings and the fact that they’ve been left here when the rest of the studio is swept bare leads me to suspect that they likely don’t have anything to do with the present, with Cameron or her abductor. But he was here, and she may have been as well. Obviously we’ll have to get a team in immediately to sweep for prints as well as fiber and hair samples, particularly in the storage area, which with the thickness of the walls and high inaccessible transom could easily have been used as a captivity cell. If Cameron had managed to discover a loose stone or some other object, she might have broken the window as an attempt to get someone’s attention. Maybe that’s why her abductor had moved her from this place, so no one could hear her scream if he took off her gag.
My thoughts are still spinning on possible scenarios when I hear Will call my name from the main room. He looks flushed, as if he’s scrambled to get here, and it feels surprisingly good to see him. To know I can get through to him when I need to, and that he’ll find a way to come.