Still Lives

by Maria Hummel

  “Although, you know, Bas might get the ax,” Jayme says without turning around. “The board votes on Wednesday.”

  I wonder if I should act surprised, and don’t respond for a moment.

  “He gets fired, and the reporters will be all over this place, looking to connect it to Kim’s disappearance,” Jayme says, fury in her voice. “TV, too. Tabloids. I’ll quit before I have to deal with that.”

  She opens her door: the car’s interior is as dark as a safe.

  “If they don’t think I’ll quit, they’re nuts,” she mutters.

  I’ve never heard Jayme angry like this.

  “Don’t quit,” I say. “The Rocque couldn’t run without you.”

  “Yeah.” She doesn’t turn. Down the row, a minivan squeals as it wheels up the spiral ramp to the street.

  My throat constricts as I say, “I hate Kim’s show, too.”

  Instead of answering, Jayme slowly sinks into her car seat and stares over her steeling wheel, through her windshield, to the concrete wall beyond. But she doesn’t shut the door.

  I hover over her, trying to articulate what I felt when I looked at the Judy Ann Dull portrait earlier. It comes out clumsy and broken, but I say it anyway. “I mean, I don’t hate what it is. I hate what it says.”

  Jayme continues to gaze at the wall, her face in profile, frozen in an expression of sadness and exhaustion. Then she looks down at her hands on the wheel, her graceful, tan fingers, and they tighten until the knuckles flex.

  “It wouldn’t bother me so much, but he’s out,” she says finally, in a calm voice, as if we’re discussing some tedious office matter. “He served twenty-two years for abducting another thirteen-year-old. But he got out in November.”

  I don’t know what man she’s talking about. I’m afraid to interrupt, though.

  “I always thought I was one of the lucky ones,” she says, still gripping the motionless wheel. “The police did nothing about him following me, but my mother moved us here and let me change my name. She knew she had to save me, and she did.”

  Jayme abruptly twists away and rummages in her purse and I think she’s searching for something to show me. She searches and searches, her hand grabbing in the bag, coming up empty, grabbing again. All this time she doesn’t meet my eyes. Finally she pulls out her key and slides it into the ignition.

  “He’s out now?” I say softly. “Here? In California?”

  She makes a noise of derision. “Who knows. Maybe. Guess I think I’m safe now, though, old lady like me.”

  “Jayme, I’m so sorry …”

  Her hazel eyes finally meet mine. They are full of an ancient bitterness, her loveliness like a halo around it. “Be careful,” she says. “Don’t take any chances for Shaw. It’s not your job.”

  Then she slams the door and turns the car on. The air between us fills first with the roar, then the taste of oil and fumes.

  17

  Steve Curtain does not exist in Los Angeles. There are dozens of Stephen Curtins—a spelling variation—in the United States, but mostly in Massachusetts. A doctor named Stephen Curtin in Pleasanton, California, and a doctor named Stephen Curtin in Arizona appear to be the same person. A Stephen Curtin is a district judge in Idaho. Another is an online consumer watchdog with an expression of such fake, shiny pleasure that he reminds me of the plastic sushi in the windows of Little Tokyo.

  Juanita could have heard the name and written it down like the noun is spelled. Or she could have written the notation as shorthand for a name and a place, but I can’t find anything for Curtain—no restaurants, no cafés, no galleries. Nothing except a factory outlet for drapes in El Monte.

  My screen glows with cold light. The Internet streams beneath the glass, shifting with the clicks of my mouse.

  Greg Shaw Ferguson was arraigned late yesterday in connection with the disappearance of Kim Lord. He had no comment for the press. Photos taken outside the courthouse show him gaunt, with lank hair that hangs in his eyes. Most articles detail the same four things about him: he was Kim Lord’s boyfriend; he is a “young entrepreneur” whose gallery and studios were “hot” or “edgy” or “up-and-coming”; a cloth with blood matching Kim Lord’s AB blood type was found in the basement of his gallery; and he allegedly made more than seventy phone calls or texts to Lord on the day before she disappeared, demanding to see her.

  Seventy. Every time I see the number, I get a fresh shock.

  A statement by Detective Ruiz crops up frequently: “Greg Shaw Ferguson is currently our only suspect.” Kim Lord’s phone was found in the bushes in Echo Park, less than a mile from Greg’s gallery. Her texts beg him to leave her alone.

  A few articles probe deeper: Greg Shaw Ferguson graduated from Williams College and worked as an office assistant for a New York art festival before moving to Thailand to teach English. The years skip ahead to Los Angeles, to Greg’s job for the Beans, the famous movie star and his art collector wife. The Beans said, “We can’t imagine that this is the same Greg Ferguson who worked for us. He was exemplary in every way. A real gentleman.” A photo shows seventy-year-old, whitehaired Sandahlia Bean with Greg at an art fair, her frail, crepe-sleeved arm around him, smiling. These articles also mention Greg’s fondness for papaya salad; his warm, scratchy voice; the death of his mother; the make of his car; his admiration for Jack White’s guitar; the philosopher he’s never read (Nietzsche); and his recent sunset horseback ride over the Hollywood hills.

  No one in the media should have access to the texts Greg sent Kim Lord, but nonetheless two texts are often quoted: You have to see me. If you don’t meet me, I will come find you. And You have no right to do this.

  I think about what Jayme told me in the parking garage, and what she didn’t tell. It sounded like someone stalked her, maybe some man she knew. She escaped, but also she didn’t. Jayme’s alive, she’s even highly successful by all external indicators, and yet I can’t imagine her without her rigid self-control, her isolating sense of privacy. I don’t know who she would be.

  I look up statistics on stalking: One in six women have been stalked, and more than half of those before the age of twenty-five. The average duration of stalking is almost two years. Stalkers of domestic or intimate partners are more likely to use violence than are stalkers of strangers. Homicide occurs in only two percent of stalking cases, but when it does, the stalker is usually an intimate partner: a husband, a boyfriend.

  As I read this, my head grows dizzy and dizzier, as if the oxygen in the room is draining away.

  I scan the e-mails from my parents and brothers, asking me to return their calls. My mother writes three times: first casually, about wrapping chicken wire around the apple tree that she and I once planted so that the deer won’t eat the buds; then worried that I am letting the news overburden me; then forcefully reminding me that she is my mother and she has a right to know if I’m safe.

  In my mind’s eye, I can see her furrowed brow, her blond hair wound up in rollers, her trimmed but unmanicured fingers clattering the keys. I picture her on the day I learned of Nikki Bolio’s death. I am hiding in my bed in my cramped Burlington apartment when my mother storms in, her mud-season boots thudding the floor. “Are you in danger, too?” she demands. “Because if you are, I’m picking you up in my arms and taking you home.” And then she did, without waiting for a reply.

  I’m safe, I type now. I’m doing okay. Really.

  John also sends me a sample itinerary. I can fly out on Friday if you need me. I tell him no. I love John, but I can’t translate my life for my family right now. I just need to press deeper into it.

  I read about why med school applicants get rejected: no clinical experience, lackluster academics, badly written documents. I’ll offer to edit Don’s application if he tries again next year.

  I look up Rachel Lord, Toronto. There’s a record of a Rachel Lord arrested for being a public nuisance. Nothing else.

  I look up Bas Jan Ader, and there’s a photo of a young man holding his h
ead and weeping. I’m too sad to tell you is written across the frame in a delicate hand.

  I get an e-mail from Ray Hendricks, who wants to interview me at nine tomorrow morning. A Ray Hendricks was an almost-famous musician in 1930s and ’40s Los Angeles. He played with the Benny Goodman Orchestra. A Ray Hendricks once pitched a no-hitter for a minor league baseball team. A Ray Hendricks is mentioned in an obituary in an Asheville, North Carolina, newspaper as the surviving half brother of a Calvin Teicher, a young art history lecturer, who was found dead in a Los Angeles hotel; it appears he fell in his bathroom and struck his head. Teicher also left behind his mother, Willow Teicher, sixty-two; his son, Nathaniel, four; and an ex-wife who lives in Florida. I search “Ray Hendricks North Carolina” and find another mention, in an article about state police busting up meth labs in the Smoky Mountains. Special Agent Ray Hendricks, a Boone native now working for the North Carolina Bureau of Investigation, calls meth “a scourge in our rural counties.” No picture accompanies either article, but I can’t help feeling it’s the same Ray Hendricks who is working as Janis Rocque’s private investigator.

  Special Agent sounds impressive. A big career for a guy from a small mountain town like Boone. Is he out here for his job or for his half brother? Either way, I don’t buy his sleepy, laconic mask; underneath it, there’s something else playing on a loop, some huge grief or desperation. I’m too sad to tell you.

  It’s getting colder and I want to go to bed, but my mind is not tired and I won’t sleep. I sit in the dark, staring into a box of illuminated fog, and hope for the miracle of Kim Lord’s life—hiding out or locked away, waiting to be found—instead of the commonplace fact of her death.

  One last peek at my inbox.

  A note from Yegina: Don said he’ll come. (!)

  A note from Evie, who says she has unearthed a perplexing pattern in the provenance of Kim’s work: I’ve never seen anything like this. I’ll show you the list tomorrow.

  TUESDAY

  18

  Mind if I shut this?” Ray Hendricks says, and waits for me to nod before closing my office door. I have a small office. Shutting the door makes it shrink to a pay-phone booth, tight and muffled. In this space, Hendricks is bigger than I thought he would be—he barely fits on the other side of my desk, but he doesn’t look uncomfortable as he sits. He has an easy looseness in his limbs. His eyes scan my shelves, roving over the spines of catalogs and copyediting books, then flickering to my window, my wilting ficus. They touch anything and everything but me.

  Hendricks’s watchfulness is something that has perturbed me since the first night I saw him, at the Gala, wearing that horrendous mustardcolored jacket. Most people look at the world, but they don’t watch it. They don’t try to see what’s coming at them. Hendricks couldn’t have known the fallen earring was mine unless it was somehow loose in my ear that night. He wouldn’t have brought it the next day if he hadn’t guessed I was an employee at the Rocque. He was curious about me. And knowing that he might be from the same eastern mountain chain as I am, that he’s a detective, that his half brother died here in L.A., makes me curious about him. And unnerved. For all the time I spent with Jay Eastman learning how to interview sources, for all that Hendricks and I must be close in age, I feel amateurish in his presence, almost precarious. It’s as if inside me there’s a plate teetering on the edge of a table, and one false move could make it fall.

  “Nice place,” he says in an unreadable tone.

  “I’m lucky to have an office.” I fumble for things to say. “They almost put me in a cube.”

  Hendricks’s roving eyes finally stop on a little Zen garden that’s gathering dust on my sill. The square wood frame holds sand and pebbles; a black rake perches on the corner.

  “Yours?” he says.

  I nod. My brother John gave the Zen garden to me as a joke when I told him I was moving to California. “If you rake the sand, it’s supposed to make you feel peaceful,” I say. “I keep it because the rocks are the only things in L.A. that remind me of my childhood creek.” I hesitate, then add, “I grew up in the mountains.” Too, I add mentally. I grew up in the mountains, too.

  Hendricks listens to all this with his head angled, as if he can’t quite understand my English, and then nods.

  “Try it if you want,” I say.

  To my surprise, he lifts the Zen garden down to my desk and starts combing.

  “I told everything I knew to Detective Ruiz,” I say.

  The rake makes gentle scratching sounds. “I don’t work for the police. I work for Janis Rocque,” he says. He piles all the rocks but one in a corner. Then he combs the sand so that it radiates out from the pile, like ripples in a pond. Finally, he puts the lone stone across the garden and presses it deeply down; the flowing sand almost drowns it. “She’s an inquisitive woman,” he adds.

  I peer at his work, surprised at how he made the crude materials so expressive. “I like the splash.”

  Hendricks sets the rake down on the frame’s corner.

  “What does Janis Rocque want to know about me?” I ask.

  “She doesn’t want to know anything about you.” Hendricks raises his head, and for the first time his sleepy guardedness is gone and I see a different man, blinking at me, the way people look when they emerge from water. It’s so shocking to see his direct gaze that it momentarily steals my breath.

  “Cases like this …” He pauses as if steeling himself for what he has to utter next. “There’s often collateral damage. Sometimes, people get hurt who shouldn’t. People like you.” His blue eyes lock on mine. “I just want you to understand that you can call me anytime, day or night. If you need help.”

  “Okay,” I say with a little unintentional laugh. “I have your card.”

  He almost looks bashful. “Good,” he says.

  A shadow passes my door: Yegina. She’s carrying that Art of the Race Car binder around again. She waves and gives me a grin just as Hendricks turns to look. I wave halfheartedly back.

  Hendricks sets my Zen garden on the sill. “I’ll see you around,” he says.

  “That’s it?” I say. “That’s all you wanted to say?”

  He pauses with his hand on the door handle.

  “There is one question I had,” he says. “Did you know that Kim Lord was pregnant?”

  19

  The loading dock door inches up. Morning light floods the cave where the crates are stacked. Fritz, our security guard, stands in the glare, his head craned toward the underpass. A large truck is backing up outside, beeping its way, and the noise ricochets against the walls and floor. Red lights flare above the truck’s giant bumper. Their glow looks garish, menacing, but my senses are hardly reliable now. Everything shimmers as if someone has punched me between the eyes.

  Evie emerges from the registrar’s office, a clipboard in her hands. The light from the underpass throws her features into sharp relief. She told me once that she came to L.A. to become an actress, but I can see why she didn’t succeed. She’s undeniably pretty, but in an impenetrable way. Even as she waves at me, her face looks as carved and immobile as a mask.

  “Just let me handle this first,” she says. “Can you wait a minute?”

  I could wait all day. It’s not like I can work with my mind like this, playing the end of my conversation with Hendricks over and over. How did he know Kim was pregnant? “Shaw told me,” said Hendricks, and then his voice changed, interrogating me.

  I hadn’t known? No.

  Had anyone known? No one here. Not Rocque gossip. Not common knowledge at all. I was so stuck on refusing the idea—of Kim Lord’s ripening belly, of a mother-to-be painting herself locked in some pervert’s torturing head box—that I couldn’t ask Hendricks why it mattered if I knew. All I could think about was Kim in a few months’ time, strolling slowly, full of Greg’s child, running her hands absently over her curving stomach while he hovered protectively, watching her step. I put my head in my hands, and probably—no, definitely—moaned, whereupo
n Hendricks fled my office like there was a dog inside threatening to bite him.

  I try to focus on the moment at hand. “What’s coming in?” I ask Evie.

  “Going out.” Evie points at two large crates. “Two Rothkos.”

  The truck stops, and the driver hops down and opens the back door. Empty truck. Pickup. He spreads the base with packing quilts.

  “Major loan,” I say.

  “Abstract expressionist show at the Hirshhorn. I should be going with them instead of using a shipper,” Evie says. “They’re fragile.”

  The way she says fragile, it sounds so protective, almost maternal. I wish I loved objects the way Evie does, investing them with a precious presence, because I want to feel more about things. Or feel less about myself.

  “Why can’t you go?” I ask Evie.

  A shadow crosses her face. “A conflict,” she mutters. “I’m supposed to accompany four Judd sculptures to Amsterdam on Saturday. Can’t do both.” She leaves me to meet the driver.

  Small talk concluded, my haze returns. I clench and unclench my fists, feeling like I want to get in my car and drive north, until the gas runs out, and then keep going.

  Brent Patrick bolts from the carpentry room, frowning. He doesn’t look mad. He just looks, once again, like his mind is boiling something down to a concentrate. I wave.

  “I hear we’re going to Bootleg tonight,” I call out. Brent glances toward the open door before giving me a puzzled nod. “The Jon Byron show?” He doesn’t move any closer, so I walk over to him, blinking as I enter his steaming, hypermasculine presence, and prattle on about the venue’s horrendous food, outrageous volume. I’ve never had a nonwork conversation with Brent, and it’s hard to launch one. “I heard the owner turns up the speakers if you complain,” I add with a little laugh.