by Maria Hummel
“There are open gardens and hidden gardens,” says Dee. “It’s designed to make the viewer feel lost and found at the same time.”
“Where do I go?” Evie murmurs, though the road twists in one direction, toward a surprisingly small house with a solar-paneled roof, rising above the trees. After all the magnificence and spread of the sculptures, the actual Rocque home seems modest by comparison.
“Is that the servants’ quarters?” Yegina asks in a wondering voice.
“Janis tore the old mansion down to make more room for the outdoor installations,” says Dee. “It’s all about the art.”
The road ends in a white gravel parking lot big enough for a dozen cars, its perimeter also marked by trimmed shrubs. We slide to a halt beside a beat-up Toyota and two sporty sedans. Dust shimmers in the heat. Dee and Yegina leap out of the vehicle. I wait in my seat, paralyzed, the air going stale and sweltering as soon as the doors shut. I watch the back of Evie’s motionless blond head.
“Coming?” I say. “You’ll regret it if you don’t.”
“Will I?” she mutters, staring out the windshield. She doesn’t glance at me and I don’t look at her. I force myself to breathe the stuffy heat. She unclips her belt, opens her door. I wait until she’s almost out of the car before leaping out after her. We slam our doors in tandem.
Yegina is already staring hungrily around, her phone dropped into her purse without a second glance. She roams to the edge of the parking lot, peeking through cracks in the green walls to see a hulking ellipse beyond. It’s a curving metal wall, the height of a garage, the color of wet chocolate.
“Hello! We’re here,” says Dee, holding her phone to her ear. “Okay.” Her face falls. “Sure. You do that.”
She pockets her phone and gives a sharp shrug.
“So! Want to see the Richard Serra?” she says with determined glee. “We should stick together, at least at the start. We’re still installing works, and there are some holes and sharp edges.” Without waiting for an answer, she bounds off after Yegina, leaving Evie and me alone.
I still can’t bring myself to look at Evie’s face, but I take in her slim legs and her little blue pumps, the same shoes she was wearing the night of the Gala, when I talked to her in the bathroom stall. She must have been hiding then. She was hiding herself away to text Lynne with Kim Lord’s phone. Announcing the artist’s arrival at seven o’clock. While I was rattling on about parties, Evie was pretending to be the woman she murdered. Was murdering. Kim wasn’t dead yet. Kim was bleeding and suffocating in an art crate, her body dying around the child inside her.
“This might take too long,” Evie says.
I finally meet her eyes and they’re as bright as dimes.
“It’s right there,” I say.
She slides her sunglasses on, blanking her gaze. “You first,” she says.
“No, you first,” I say with fake enthusiasm. “You’re the one who has to rush.” And I wait until she struts ahead of me, feeling that I will survive today only if I keep playing the ingenue, and actually that I’m not playing at all.
When we catch up with Yegina and Dee, they’re in the middle of the Richard Serra ellipse, laughing and stepping in and out of the sharp quadrants of shadow and light. “Almost crushed a guy when they put this one in,” Dee chirps. “It weighs almost thirty tons.”
For me, Serra’s sculptures always invoke a feeling of sacred space, and standing inside one now is like being in a labyrinth with one path in, its center an open eye to the clouds. The metal wall is as warm as a burner on low. The steel curves are so smooth and massive that they contort the earth and sky. We’re each angled by the artwork, tipped and diminished, and for one tiny instant I forget what Evie has done and succumb to my awe.
But then Dee does a giant cartwheel and almost hits Evie when she lands. Evie jumps back with a shriek; the sculpture amplifies the sound to a long, harsh call.
“You all right, then?” Dee asks, brushing herself off. “Did I hit you?”
Evie shakes her head no, but her face is mottled; her self-control has slipped.
“You seem jumpy,” I say, grinning hard at her.
Evie smiles back at me, her lips closed, but one tooth shows over her bottom lip. Behind her, Yegina strokes the wall of the sculpture.
“Let’s keep going,” Dee says, and nudges me. “Your special surprise is coming up soon.”
As we wind our way out of the ellipse, ducking to see around the tilted sides, I tail Yegina.
“I think your phone is buzzing,” I say. “Might be Jayme for me.”
She hands her whole bag to me without turning around. “Just let me enjoy myself for five minutes, okay?”
I pretend to check the phone, hand it back. “Actually it’s for you.”
We emerge from the Serra onto the open lawn. Yegina snaps up the screen, reads my message, snaps it back again, but she only hurries after Dee, who is skipping her way down a slope to a giant scrap-metal figure. It’s a David Smith, humanoid and reptilian, tall but flat-headed, the twolegged body made of broken scales and loops and shapes. It reminds me of the newspaper game where the letters in a word are scrambled and you have to stare at it to put them in the right order. One of the sculpture’s limbs has a long, serrated edge.
I wait for Evie again, then follow her. I am squinting so hard in the sun that my forehead aches. Everything that can reflect light is shining: the last drops of dew in the grass, the buckles on our purses, the vast shapes of metal, the little gold loops in Yegina’s ears. Dee and Yegina erupt into wows about seeing the David Smith up close, standing in its broken shadow. I hang back, afraid of the glinting, jagged blade.
I wonder where Hendricks is, what he knows. Was he watching Evie all along?
Evie’s flipping open her phone every two minutes now, glancing over her shoulder back to the parking lot. She’s going to bolt. I want to bolt. I want to knock on the door of Janis Rocque’s solar home and hide in some clean, modernist parlor until Evie escapes and someone else chases her. My purse—stuffed with the recorder—is dragging on my shoulder like a stone. I could make an excuse and run to the gatehouse, tell the old guy to let no one out. Maybe there’s even a phone in there. I could call the LAPD right now.
Dee’s voice interrupts my thoughts. “And through this hedge is your special surprise, Maggie.” She bows to me and points to a path snaking into a bower of trees. “I stumbled on it yesterday,” she says. “Janis said she bought it years and years ago—but she didn’t trust anyone to install it properly until she met Brent Patrick. He did this and a couple of other tricky installations for her last year.” She takes a breath and shakes her head. “He’s kind of clueless, really. I don’t think he knew about your connection, or he would have told you it was here.”
At the mention of Brent, Evie stays expressionless, but I see her hand tighten on her phone.
I walk through first, keeping a cushion between me and Evie. As the green branches close around me, I hear Yegina call out, “Hey, I have to make a quick call.” And then, “There’s no reception. I’m going closer to the house.”
Her departure sends needles of fear into me. I wanted her to go for help, but I also need her here.
Dark limbs stretch overhead. Although the path is clear and level, the grove seems jumbled compared to the open fields. A pleasurable coolness seeps up from the earth. The ground here is deep grass, broken by a hole in the earth, long as a schooner and about six feet across. They must have dug it out with shovels. You couldn’t get an excavator in here, not with the thick ring of trees that surround the clearing, not with this lush, trackless grass. How far down did they go? The hole looks like a miniature version of the fault lines I have seen out in the desert, but its depth seems dark and forbidding.
Dee bumps into me and I fight back a squawk. She’s urging me to step closer, read the plaque.
Instead I look back at Evie, whose face glows with curiosity.
“Read it,” Dee says.
&n
bsp; I drift sideways, out of Evie’s reach, and bend down to see the bold brass lettering:
THERESA FERGUSON
CLEFT, 1970
“Must be a different artist,” I say. “Greg’s mother sculpted in glass.”
“Look closer,” Dee says. I keep an arm’s length from Evie as I tiptoe to the edge of the rift. The ground is firm up to the last step, and then I feel its looseness, a spongy, crumbly edge where the grass roots cannot hold it. The air smells of soil and dampness.
“The main trick was getting the sun and shade right,” says Dee as I crane my neck and see them fifteen feet below: dozens—no, hundreds—of glass apples piled on either side of a long, gleaming blade, sharp as a guillotine. “So you could discover them all at just the moment you might fall in.”
The blade runs the entire length of the hole, as high as my knee, its edge slightly beveled. Heaped around it, each glass apple is curvy, fleshy. And each is severed cleanly in half.
I step back, suddenly choked by an emotion I cannot name. When I look over, Evie is also stepping back, gingerly, like her footsteps might crush the grass.
A beeping fills the glade. Dee claws at her hip and pulls out her slim blue flip. “It’s Janis,” she says in a complicated tone. She waves at the far end of the clearing. “Just go that way. You won’t be disappointed.”
And she sprints off through the same gap in the trees, leaving me and Evie alone.
For a moment neither of us speaks. We just circle the hole, peering in, moving back. I slide a hand into my purse and turn my cassette tape on. How many minutes are left on it? Do I really expect a confession? No, but she will speak. I will get her to speak.
In the dappled shade, Evie’s gaze has softened, and she seems incapable of hurting anyone. I step closer to her anyway, because I have to, because I have put myself here. Out of the corner of my eye, I catch sight of the apples piled on either side of the blade. They look lush. And amputated. I remember Kevin’s notes: Symbol of female sexuality. Cleft apple = woman’s reproductive parts. Also, implied violence.
One of the last pieces in the puzzle comes to me.
“You thought I’d never figure it out.” My voice is low but sure. “I almost didn’t. I was looking for why, not how. And I couldn’t see the why for you. Jealousy wasn’t enough, though you were jealous of Kim. I know I was.” I step toward Evie.
She is backing up, cradling her phone.
“I hated her,” I say. “I hated the way she could just step in and absorb every last bit of Greg until there was nothing—and never would be anything—left for me.”
I move closer. Evie holds her ground. She stares at me with such intensity that it burns. My skin feels loose and hot on my face.
“But I couldn’t have killed her for that,” I say. “And neither could you. Until you heard Kim tell Brent about the baby. A baby meant it was all true.” I pause. Anger swells my voice; it’s my own anger. The bower is drawing closer with its black-gold-green light, and Evie’s rapid blinking tells me I’m right, but she’s as silent as a statue. “It meant he never really loved you.”
As I’m talking, the murder plays again like a movie in my mind, only I don’t see Evie doing it, I see myself: flicking the table saws on, and walking in on Kim alone, changing her clothes in Brent’s office. I bring the mallet down on the back of her head in one heavy, awkward blow. The body falls. The blood spurts and flows. I wrap the body in one of the painting tarps. Stab Kim’s belly with the Jason Rains syringes. Roll a crate in from the carpentry room, load it, and order a storage delivery. Clean the room and dump the clothes and gloves in the crate.
“You’re her size,” I tell Evie. “You could wear her disguise out of the museum. If you went fast enough, no one would know.”
A wind from somewhere shifts the trees, freckling the glade with fresh light. Inside the hole, the glass apples shine and darken.
“I should go,” Evie finally says in a remote voice.
“You took the elevator so people would see you,” I say, my mind racing ahead. I see myself departing the museum in Kim’s clothes, wig, and sunglasses, hurrying down to Pershing Square. “And then you changed somewhere, maybe your car, and came back through the loading dock, and escorted the crate to the storage facility. Then rerouted it again somewhere. Your loft.”
It was barely possible. Evie’s loft rose in a warehouse neighborhood of brick and rust and emptiness. No one would hear Kim dying there. And the burial in the Angeles National Forest? She might have dug the grave at night. Buried the body on the weekend. What terrible, exhausting, lonely tasks, in a city filled with them. I can’t reconcile the slight figure in front of me with the dread and struggle of what she’s done. Was it really Evie who struck the blow? Was it really Evie who closed her ears to Kim’s muffled screams? Was it really Evie in my apartment last night? It’s easier to still picture a strange man, a nameless perpetrator. Then I remember Evie in the mirror of the gym studio, the determination that can flush her strong and rigid. Stronger than anyone I know.
In the distance, the dull roar of a mower. Evie shakes her head, presses her lips together. I’m losing her. I’m losing the connection I made with her over hating Kim Lord.
“You did it for Brent’s sake. He didn’t want a baby,” I say.
Evie almost nods.
“It wasn’t his, though,” I say. “It was Greg’s. Greg’s baby is dead. And now Brent is leaving—with you or with Barbara?”
With Barbara. It has to be.
But I can tell from her face that Evie can’t hear me now, not after what I said about the baby. She’s written her reasons in blood, and she cannot erase them. She glances over her shoulder. When she turns back to me, the tightness is gone, and she looks troubled and sympathetic, as if I’ve just announced I’ve got the flu.
“Maggie,” she says in a cold, lucid voice. “Do you really believe all of this? Because no one else does. When Dee said you might show up today, I had to stop Yegina from calling Fritz and having you barred from reentering the museum. You’re making it hard for the rest of us to do our jobs. I spent a whole day on that provenance stuff because I took pity on you.” She pauses. “Shaw is free. And some twisted creep killed Kim Lord, but the police will catch him. Now I’ve got to get some sculptures to the airport, okay?”
Evie is lying, but I can’t find the falsehood in her face.
“Okay,” I say.
She turns away, still clutching her phone. I can’t let her go.
“Wait,” I say. “I’m sorry Brent hurt you.”
She hesitates, gazing at the dark rift in the ground.
“You’re sweet,” she says. “You know they call you Maple Muffin down in crew.”
At that moment, a loud click tells me my recorder has switched off. Before I can fully register this, a man’s voice calls from the far side of the clearing.
“Maggie!” He sounds alarmed. And more awake than ever. But how is he already here?
Something hurtles at me so hard I only see it in parts—smooth white arms, swinging blond hair, a fury-distorted mouth—before I stagger two steps and slip on the springy soft earth at the edge of the hole. I hear my raspy, surprised cry. Then Evie’s final push, full of senseless strength, flings my head so hard it snaps, and I fall.
27
Sounds: glass shifting and breaking against itself, like the crashing of surf onto small round rocks. The dull crack of my purse hitting the blade and my body after it, thudding to its side. I scramble up, cutting my knees and palms before I notice the wetness spreading over my belly, and a great wind rising through my skull, making it hard to see the sky above me. Evie’s gone. The man’s voice has stopped calling me. He must not know where I am. He must not know I’m here. I cry out, the effort blacking my eyes. I sink to my knees. The blood keeps spreading like silence. I call again, but the sound is too weak. My fingers fumble in the purse for the recorder. I press the rewind button on the cassette player and turn the volume dial high, blasting what I sai
d to Evie into the clearing.
I hated her.
Footsteps, fainter then louder. The crack of sticks. My name bursts over the stretch of sky, and then there is Hendricks’s face peering over, measuring the distance for less than an instant before he leaps.
THURSDAY
28
The room swims in and out, and I am inside it, lying on a bed, my arms taped with tubes, a rubbery taste in my throat. My belly enormous and strained, a beach ball of flesh. White walls blister with light. Women in blue masks lean over me. Then another room, another bed, same tubes, an IV machine blinking. Yegina is sitting with me. Then no one. Then a cluster of doctors who talk about my concussion, broken ribs, and damaged right kidney, the fluids that are filling my body because the organ isn’t working properly.
Then Yegina’s back, announcing, “They got her, and they found Brent, too. He was in New York. He said he didn’t have any idea about Evie, said he was just tired of L.A. But I think he knew. It’s so messed up.”
I blink away tears, unable to speak.
She looks at me, her lips trembling. “You’re going to recover. I won’t let you alone until you do.”
I struggle to say Yegina’s brother’s name, but my mouth still won’t make a sound.
Yegina’s eyes fill. “Don’s okay. It’s just going to take some time. For all of us.”
Later Hendricks comes, sits in a chair by my bed. He looks like he’s washed his whole person in darkness: the edges of him are gritty and indistinct. It must be twilight. I don’t know how long I have been here, in the hospital. Hendricks raises his closed hands to his mouth; they are lunar, bandaged, and he leans into them like a man in prayer.
When I make a noise, he glances over at me, eyes traveling over the hump of my midsection. His lips tighten.
It’s me. The sight of me bloated and bruised makes him flinch.
But instead of looking away, his gaze is steady; he puts his palm over my hand, covering it, his fingers warm, the cotton bandages rough and cool, until I fall asleep again.