Still Lives

by Maria Hummel

  “Whose sister?” Yegina and I say in unison.

  As we cluster closer, bumping elbows, Dee tells us that Kim Lord spent a whole afternoon at the crew office a couple of weeks ago because she was concerned about the lighting in one of the galleries. And then she got to talking to Dee about light sources—because, apparently, this is what artists talk about—and Kim said she’d grown up with long, dark winters in Toronto and so was acutely sensitive to L.A.’s brightness. Also, that she associated white light with fear, because her older sister used to wake her up every night by shining a flashlight in her eyes.

  “She literally said to me, ‘Voices were telling her I was dead,’” Dee says. Kim also told Dee that her sister had vanished from her rehab facility in Toronto a month ago.

  “Do the police know?” says Evie.

  “They must,” says Dee.

  Kim Lord has a troubled sister. Was she the older woman in the flash drive photo? Is she dangerous? Dee’s news is like a minor chord, altering the tone of the scene around us: the flow of the marble fountains deepens to a harsh rush; the stark sun and shadows of midday seem locked in battle. It’s odd information to come from Dee now. She could have mentioned it during Craft Club, but instead she brought up Greg then, too. She’s always so interested in Greg. Or so eager to cast blame on him? We’re almost to the gym now. We halt together at a busy intersection near the crest of Bunker Hill and the steps down to the public library, and wait for the light.

  “How come you never told us this before?” demands Yegina. “Here Maggie’s been on a quest to prove her stalker theory.”

  “I love stalker theories,” Dee says. “But come on.” She spins on me. “Don’t you suspect Shaw just a teeny-weeny bit?”

  “No,” I say flatly. “He was out walking on the night she disappeared.”

  “Walking,” Dee repeats. “In Los Angeles. All night long?”

  I hate the conclusions in Dee’s pale eyes, in this whole sensationalizing city.

  “Why didn’t you mention her sister before?” I say.

  Dee watches a flurry of pigeons ascending from some scattered bread. “Kim didn’t sound afraid of her sister,” she says slowly. “But I did hear her complain about Shaw.”

  “When did she complain?”

  “Down in the crew office. Her phone kept dinging. She said he wouldn’t leave her alone.”

  “But when?” I ask again.

  “I don’t know. Tuesday?” Now she gives me a pitying gaze. “I’m sorry, mate. This must be wretched to hear.”

  “Look. Greg told me he was innocent. He … he only talks about her in the present tense,” I say. “I know him. He’s heartbroken.” My voice catches on the last word.

  My friends’ heads all swivel.

  “Oh, sweetie,” Yegina says. She’s wearing black today. It heightens the contrast in her complexion, her darkness and her paleness, and turns her into a woodcut of disapproval. She doesn’t believe me either.

  None of them do.

  I really need to get off this subject.

  I nudge Dee. “Hey, I heard you’re taking Evie on a tour of Janis Rocque’s famous sculpture garden. Can we all go?”

  Thankfully Yegina practically explodes into rainbows at the idea, and this topic takes us all the way into the gym, through the locker room, and up the stairs to the spin studio.

  Our spin instructor is a Frenchman with a lavishly hunky sense of himself; he stares at his own gyrating body with infectious longing as he rides up nonexistent hills. Denis has a huge following and people mob every class. My friends and I each have to hurry inside for a bike and slam down onto it. The lights dim. Denis’s techno track layers beats over our buzzing wheels. We sit on our hard seats, trying to keep pace. A wall of mirrors reflects us, pumping and frowning, but Denis is faster. His legs blur at measureless speeds. His sweat pours like a libation to the floor.

  “Find a friend and catch up! Make a team!” shouts Denis as we log our thirtieth minute. This is one of his tricks: first we compete, then we compete again and pretend it’s collaboration.

  I look back toward Evie, who always spins so fast her wheels are humming clouds. Her face is a slick of sweat. Her thighs and upper arms bulge with flexed muscle. No one works harder in this class, or at any other workout. I never catch her, but that’s why she’s good for me.

  “Someone very scahhhh-ry is chasing you both! He’s gaining. He’s gaining. Go faster!”

  I look for Yegina’s glowing face in the reflection. We don’t like when Denis does his boogeyman tactic in class, but we put up with it because the workout is so tough. And because Denis is so delighted with his dumb idea and his sexy accent that it comes across as a joke.

  “He’s gaining! Go faster!”

  Today the threat feels different to me, and I wish Yegina would meet my eyes in the mirror and silently agree. We don’t need this. We need fake mountains to climb, and fake wind in our faces, and fake victories over fake finish lines, but we don’t need fake perpetrators. Look here, I will Yegina, staring her down in her reflection. Let’s stop pedaling. Let’s stop together. But she’s staring off into space, her lips parted, unreachable.

  “He’s gaining! Faster!” Denis shrieks.

  He’s gaining. I picture Kim Lord’s stalker: a balding man with shiny skin. No. A guy who’s almost handsome except for the weak chin that he tries to hide with a scraggly beard. No. A businessman, gray suit, coppery hue, chilly and elegant. His image doesn’t stay fixed in my mind except for the stare, its calculation, its possessiveness. For years, he’s been patient. For years, he’s bought up everything she’s ever made, but he can’t wait any longer. He wants to own all of her work; he wants to own her. She will be the ultimate treasure in his collection.

  “Don’t stop now!” Denis shouts, pointing to my wheels. I look down at my slowing feet and pump them until they’re blurs again. Another face slips into my mind: the woman from the flash drive, with her pretty, haggard eyes, her downturned mouth, a blue collar. Who is she? Then another face: Kim Lord as Roseann Quinn, casting her vague, doomed smile over Grand Avenue, Fairfax Avenue, Western, and Sunset, this entire enormous city. Where is she?

  I ride so hard I am gasping.

  On my desk when I return: a green folder, a sticky note that says Per your request in Juanita’s nunnish cursive. Inside, yellowed and new clippings, Bas’s name highlighted in each article. Most are from 2001, when the Rocque hired him, and they recap the same biography: Yates graduate, a long stint at Catesby’s auction house, then a slew of development and administrative jobs at East Coast museums.

  The oldest clipping, from the Yates alumni magazine, transcribes an interview with Bas when he still worked at Catesby’s as an auction specialist. In the accompanying photo, Bas smirks with smug boyishness. He stands between two Yates friends, clearly the handsome one, the budding star, arms looped over their shoulders.

  I skim the text, about to turn it over, when something Bas says catches my eye:

  Auction houses are changing the playing field for contemporary artists. Some artists—like Chris Branson and Kim Lord—have proved that they don’t need intermediaries to determine their value. They’re skipping the gallerists and selling straight to collectors. Big collectors. I know this will sound sacrilegious to some, but houses like Catesby’s could become as important as museums in determining the Old Masters for future generations.

  The article is dated 1996. Kim Lord had just had her first show, The Flesh. Bas must have watched the paintings sell at Catesby’s for high prices, riding the artist’s wave of talent and daring. How strange he must feel now to watch his career come full circle, to work at a museum and be offered a priceless but monetarily useless gift from the same artist. And then to have her vanish. My eyes snap on another statement:

  It’s all evolving because of international money. First the Japanese got in on it, and now the Russians. And they can be different about provenance. Some view ownership as a private investment, not a public st
atement like most American collectors. I have a friend who makes a great living buying contemporary art for collectors in Asia who don’t want their names and ownership public. Everything is under an alias. And he’s having to buy twentieth-century work because the Rembrandts and Monets—they’re just gone. Snapped up. It’s making the contemporary art market even crazier. Just wait ten, fifteen years and see how the prices have skyrocketed.

  I flip through the rest of the folder. Nothing there exactly, except an unsettling feeling that Bas hasn’t changed since that interview. Not underneath. He’s always been dazzled by money, especially by how money shapes the art world. That might have blinded him, or tied his hands, when it came to an obsessive collector who wanted to buy everything an artist had ever made.

  I dial Cherie.

  “The arraignment is scheduled for late this afternoon.” Her voice has lost none of its clip, but deep down I hear a note of defeat. “There’s enough evidence.”

  I tell her Dee’s story about Kim’s sister leaving rehab.

  “Rachel Lord, missing since March,” says Cherie. “I’ve been following that lead, but—” She stops herself. “Is that why you called me, or did you want to get a message to Shaw?”

  “How’s he doing?”

  “He’s surprisingly stoic,” she says. “Nights there can be hard.”

  And grief is hard. Greg in a jail cell is an image that refuses to materialize in my mind. Instead, I see him in the weeks after his mother died, his face hawkish, badly shaven, his clothes hanging like wilted leaves. Truth be told, I didn’t know what to feel about Greg then: he was so far gone into himself that he was a stranger to me. He sat at the kitchen table and stared into space, or went on walks alone. Sometimes he held books but didn’t read them. I roamed his periphery, making useless soups and toast, wondering if I should turn on the radio or let the silences cloak us. That was the beginning of the ending: I couldn’t be Theresa for Greg, and I couldn’t be myself either, because I reminded him too much of how he’d resisted her influence all his life. How he’d settled on an ordinary, pretty girl from the country, when he was the son of a queen.

  “Do you have a message for Shaw?” Cherie repeats.

  I can’t ask her to ask him about the flash drive. “Not really,” I say. “Tell him I’m thinking of him.”

  “Can I ask you something?” says Cherie. “Shaw said he tried to talk with you at the Gala, but you avoided him. Why?”

  For a stunned moment I wonder: Is Greg trying to implicate me?

  “I was embarrassed,” I say. “Humiliated might be a better term. We hadn’t seen each other much since our breakup.”

  “You were humiliated by Shaw Ferguson,” she repeats.

  I know where she’s going. Where Detective Ruiz was going. Angry ex. Prime motive, right?

  “Yes, humiliated. In an ordinary, dumped kind of way,” I say coldly.

  “I see.” She waits. “Why did you call Shaw on the night of the Gala?”

  I remember my phone in Yegina’s hands that night. “My coworker asked me to call him, to find out where Kim was.”

  “But you hung up before he answered. Were you upset with him?”

  And so we go on for several minutes of useless prying, until I’ve had enough, and tell her I have to go.

  I click end on my phone, but I waste the next thirty minutes googling Cherie Rhys to see how many cases she’s actually won (turns out, quite a few). I scroll through page after page of her pretty, intelligent face, a thinner and sharper version of Kevin’s. It bothers me to think of them discussing me. Did he give her the idea that I might be a suspect? Then I remember Kevin’s article, the call from ArtNoise, the faxed copy of it I was supposed to review.

  Downstairs, the fluorescent mailroom is neatly stuffed to the brim with boxes of museum letterhead, shipping materials, and one sluggish photocopy machine. A wall label beside the copy machine says:

  Copier, 1998

  5 × 3 × 4 feet

  Metal, lights, toner, infuriating paper jams

  I check my mailbox. Empty. I check the boxes around it. Also empty. I check the fax machine. Nothing. I can’t believe Cherie Rhys—anyone—would think I could hurt Kim Lord. But who did? I wonder if Evie has had any luck with the provenance question. Although I only asked her this morning, it feels like years ago.

  When I return upstairs, Yegina is marching out from Jayme’s office with a big binder, her cheeks still pink from our exercise class.

  “Art of the Race Car is almost off the schedule,” she says. “I just have to win over Development. They’re going to hit the roof, though.”

  “The Art of Yegina.”

  She rolls her eyes. “Art of J. Ro, more like it,” she says, but the flush deepens. “You want to go out for happy hour tonight?” She follows me into my office. “Sliders and fries half off at Luster’s.”

  Luster’s is our default after-work place, a dark steakhouse right across the street and dirt cheap if you hit it before seven.

  “I’m saving my energy for tomorrow and Bootleg,” I say, sitting down and grabbing my folder from Juanita. After she leaves tonight, I intend to sneak over to her cube again and check her calendar.

  “Yeah, Bootleg. But that’s with them,” Yegina says, sounding as if she’s slightly dreading our plans with Hiro and Brent. “Come on. We should catch up, just us.”

  “We’ve talked sixteen times a day since 2002,” I joke, opening the folder.

  Yegina stands there, the binder perched against her waist, tucking her black hair behind one ear.

  She never begs like this. I want to say yes. But if I say yes, it ruins my plan to search Juanita’s cube.

  “Early drinks tomorrow night. Just you and me. I promise,” I say, rooting through the clippings. I hold up the Yates picture. “Check this out.”

  Yegina stares at the twentysomething Bas in the photo.

  “Before the facelift,” I joke, and put the clipping down.

  Yegina winces. “I’m worried about my brother,” she says. “He’s not answering my calls.”

  “Maybe you should invite him out for drinks tomorrow, too.” I turn to my keyboard. “It’s high time Don started anesthetizing himself to failure like the rest of us.”

  “Yeah, right,” Yegina mutters. The light in my office brightens as my friend walks away and I rise to shut the door after her, knowing she’ll hear it click.

  I’ve met Yegina’s brother a few times. A more categorical opposite to Yegina could not be invented: Don is tall and skinny, and he blinks a lot. His music tastes halted somewhere after Barney; obscure pop culture references sail over his head; and he favors khakis, Hondas, sincerity, and holidays at Disneyland. In college, Yegina backpacked alone through Europe and rode the Moscow-Beijing train all the way to China. Don has never left California. Yegina learned to spray-paint graffiti; Don dutifully colored the entire illustrated Grey’s Anatomy, page by page, never going over the lines. They spent their childhood caged together, Yegina always disappointing her parents, Don always winning their approval, and sometimes I think their resistance to each other was the only thing they had in common.

  But when Yegina’s parents were flipping out about her divorce, Don supported her. He told her without a trace of sarcasm that she was the best person he knew in the world, and she shouldn’t settle for someone who didn’t believe that, too. She was profoundly touched, and it has ushered in a new era of perplexing closeness between them. “I actually like Don now,” she told me once after they went bowling together. “What a funny feeling.”

  I think of my brother John, who has offered to fly out. Siblings need to rescue each other. I go to my inbox, open a message, and write to Yegina:

  Sorry for sounding glib earlier. Just keep telling Don you care about him. And if he doesn’t respond, say you’re going to come kidnap him tomorrow. I’ll make sure he has fun.

  I hit send. A few minutes later:

  You don’t know my brother, but okay, I’ll try.


  The parking garage is dim as usual, but somehow tonight all the vehicles I pass are sheer and shining, lined up like bottles in a vending machine. There’s Phil’s little coupe, Spike’s Vespa, Evie’s spotless beige sedan. The rows of glimmering chrome hoods and bumpers stretch half a football field, looking as new and untouched as if they just drove off the lot. I could go blind from all the reflections. My skirt swishes on my bare knees. My sandals skim the concrete. Even the walls’ dirt streaks look premeditated, gestural. I am tingling with my sleuthing success.

  I found Juanita’s calendar and read it without getting caught. Bas did indeed meet someone on Monday. I have a name for him.

  “You look happier,” says a voice. I turn to see Jayme, standing by her white car. She has sorrowful lines around her mouth. The hairs above her ears have started to kink into tiny scribbles. Although I know Jayme is older than I am, I don’t know by how much. Too old to want to marry anyone? Too old to have children? I don’t usually worry about her vitality—she’s so lovely, so competent at life—but something has unmasked her age tonight.

  “Just glad to go home,” I say. “I heard the press conference went well.” Another lie, but what does it matter? I found a piece of evidence. I can feel it. Even my clothes fit differently, looser, like I just dropped five pounds—my dress barely touches the skin of my waist.

  “It went. That’s about all I can say for it,” says Jayme. “You ready for tomorrow?”

  I try not to look blank.

  “The big meeting about the annual report,” she says, studying my face. “We talked about it this morning? You said you were putting together some stories.”

  “I am,” I say brightly. “I just found some good info for Bas.”

  “All right, then.” She puts her hand in her big red purse and beeps off her car alarm.

  It was all so easy, I can’t believe it happened. I waited for Juanita to leave and then I slipped over to her cube. I found her blue calendar, right there on her desk. It practically opened on its own to last week. I read the entries. No meetings on Monday for Bas except one, with a Steve Curtain. Funny name. Distinct name. How many Steve Curtains can there be? I’ll figure it out tonight, safe from prying eyes, in my own apartment.