Still Lives

by Maria Hummel

  In the morning, I waken to the swelling and the sensation of the catheter winding from my legs into a bag, and the heaviness of a blanket. I don’t feel pain so much as an overwhelming fullness, as if someone has poured liquid into every hollow of my body. When the nurse comes in, I ask her how long I’ve been here and she says “Two days,” but I have a hard time believing her because it feels like much longer and where is my family?

  “Your mom’s on the way,” she says, standing close to me. “There was bad weather in Chicago and a few flight delays. She’s dying to get here, though.” She touches my rank hair. “Want me to fix you up later? We could give you a shampoo.”

  As soon as she leaves, doctors and residents flood in, yanking the curtain around my bed and examining me with clinical eagerness. Their voices volley around me like gunfire. After they quiet, the oldest doctor, a wrinkled woman with eyes the color of dates, tells me gently that I may be able to recover without surgery, and this is good news. She says the swelling will go down with rest and diuretics. I fall asleep again after they leave. The nurse wakes me; she is carrying a blue plastic basin with a tiny bottle of shampoo and a small brick of soap.

  “There’s still a risk of infection, so we’ll do a sponge bath,” she says. Her movements are deft, and the warm water feels good on my face and scalp, but when I ask for a mirror, I see the warning in her eyes and I want to cry.

  “Let’s wait a couple of days,” she says. “The swelling should go down.”

  Then she gently combs my hair and gives me my pills and I gratefully fall asleep again. When I wake, it must be late afternoon: Detective Ruiz is shaking my shoulder, and Hendricks is leaning against the wall, arms folded, hands still in bandages, eyes on his black canvas shoes.

  Detective Ruiz reintroduces herself. She keeps her eyes on me, but they clench at the corners, as if she is forcing herself not to look away.

  I say I remember her visiting my office.

  “Good. I’m sorry to disturb your rest. We just need a brief statement from you about the events that occurred at Janis Rocque’s estate.”

  “Did Evie confess?” I whisper.

  “I’m afraid I can’t answer that,” says Detective Ruiz, but behind her, I see Hendricks shake his head no. How did he get to the sculpture garden so fast? I thought he was almost at my apartment in Hollywood. Gratitude floods me. I could have died if Yegina hadn’t found him, if he hadn’t found me.

  “Maggie, I’m going to ask you some questions and I want you to answer as honestly as possible. You arrived at the sculpture garden at what time?” Detective Ruiz has a little recorder in her hand, proper-sized and digital. The doctors said that the big clunky machine inside my purse actually broke my fall, so the blade only cut my belly after I rolled.

  I tell Ruiz everything I can remember about the morning, including calling the storage facility, including the heat and the drive through Hollywood, including the coolness of the bower where Theresa Ferguson’s art opened the ground. I keep talking until I get to the part where Evie pushed me and then the words abruptly stop. I can’t say it, can’t describe the look in her face when she shoved me: She wanted me dead. The force of that feeling: it’s like a steel wall slamming into my nose and skull. I don’t want to experience it again.

  “And then?” Detective Ruiz rubs her temple.

  I shake my head, still unable to speak. My hair is still damp from the bath. It drags on my cheeks like fingers.

  Ruiz glances up at Hendricks, as if soliciting his advice.

  Explain what happened, I think. You saw it. You saw me in the hole, bleeding. You know.

  Hendricks watches me for a moment and then he shrugs, slow and elaborate, as if we’re talking not about an attempted murder but about some sloppy habit of mine to which he has resigned himself.

  “My guess is that the victim fell,” he says finally. “Ground’s slippery. Nothing fencing the artwork.”

  I make a noise and Ruiz looks suddenly puzzled.

  “Did you fall?”

  Hendricks nods behind her. Say yes, he mouths.

  Ruiz spins on Hendricks. “Describe again what you found when you got the scene.”

  “She was lying in the glass at the bottom of the hole, turned on her side.” His voice is casual, almost resentful, as if he’s told the same version of the story many times. “The suspect was nowhere in sight. I jumped down, cut up my hands”—he holds up one bandaged fist—“stopped the victim’s bleeding, and called for help.”

  “Suppose you start a little earlier,” Ruiz says sharply. “You said you were on the estate already—why was that again?”

  Hendricks tells her that Janis Rocque had asked him to attend a meeting between herself, Nelson de Wilde, and Bas Terrant to help determine the future ownership of the twelve paintings in Still Lives and other, earlier works by Kim Lord. Hendricks had just arrived at the parking lot when a friend of Maggie’s spotted him and said that Maggie had an urgent message for him. “And then I heard her scream,” he says, his eyes hard on mine. “I ran toward the sound and found her there, as I’ve described.”

  “And you never saw the suspect emerge from the woods,” says Ruiz.

  “No.”

  “And you did not know the suspect was on the estate”—Ruiz extends every syllable to show her disbelief—“at the point you entered the sculpture garden.”

  “Again, I guessed as much. I confirmed it with Maggie, at which point I called the unit.”

  “Maggie, do you remember telling Detective Hendricks that you were pushed by Evie Long?” Ruiz asks me.

  I shake my head. “I didn’t—”

  “Did you fall or did someone push you?” she asks.

  I stare back at Hendricks, shocked that this is the same man who gripped my hand last night. I see the new shadows in his face, the studied slouch that cloaks a fierce desperation. He’s not in Los Angeles to be a private investigator for rich ladies. He’s looking for something else here, and I, with my bumbling attempts to find the truth and save Greg, have been distracting him.

  Now he wants me to lie. He knows Evie tried to kill me. Why does he want me to lie? So that he can get the credit for catching her? I did it. I stopped her. This is my story. Not his.

  But he’s not taking the credit either.

  My body feels bubbled, like I am a hot-water bottle filled to the brim, ready to pop.

  “Did you fall or did someone push you?” Ruiz says again.

  I did it. I stopped Evie. I want to shout this.

  As soon as they leave together, the room expands. The window and walls are miles away, and my throat is so dry that I can’t swallow. I’m dying for water, though I am drowning in water. The capacity inside me to rise and get a cup, or to press the nurse’s button for help, has entirely disappeared. I close my eyes.

  I don’t know why Hendricks asked me to lie.

  I don’t know why, when I finally said I fell, it felt true.

  Maybe I did fall. Maybe I goaded Evie to push me because I wanted to feel what her rage was like. To feel, face-to-face, a rage strong enough to kill so that I could finally understand it. I thought if I could slip inside the skin of a victim and emerge again, I might be able to explain why it happens. Wasn’t that the reason Kim Lord made Still Lives?

  I lie on the hospital bed, motionless, under the weight of my own swollen flesh. I fell. I lived. I am nothing like Kim.

  For the first time, a dark idea spreads in my mind: What if Kim didn’t choose this subject? What if it found her because she sensed, deep down, that she was about to die? She might have felt it somehow, when she caked her blond hair in fake blood, and painted her own slumped body, face down, the red gore pouring out of her. Nicole Brown Simpson was the first painting she made in the series. It took a year, according to Kim, until she “knew what to do with all the blood.” She shaped a tree with it, upside down, bearing its tiny fruit. A life-bringing image in the midst of a slaughter. Meaning in the darkest horror of human nature.

&nbs
p; Did she believe in that herself? We’ll never know.

  But I think it’s what she wanted us to see.

  SUNDAY

  29

  My mother, Lillian, perches in the vinyl chair by my bedside from eight in the morning until seven at night, leaving tactfully and resentfully when the nurses come to change my dressing. She brings her yarn and needles, a British mystery novel, and ham sandwiches that she made in my kitchen; she brings her practical clipped-back blond hair, the graceful way her neck arches when she knits, and the little hisses she makes when she drops a stitch.

  Against the backdrop of this busy urban hospital, my mother looks pale, lovely, and slightly stiff, as if she’s been washed on the delicate cycle and gently flattened to dry. She broadcasts a friendly voice at the nurses, but her eyes are glinty and watchful until all medical personnel leave the room. She doesn’t trust them. When she knows they’re gone, a rush of tenderness softens her features and she takes my hand and holds it tight.

  I’m grateful for the tenderness. It keeps me from thinking about Hendricks or Evie or the dreams of falling that wake me every night for the last four nights here. My mother refuses to discuss the case or what happened to me in the bower.

  “You need to move on so you can heal,” she says.

  So instead of being pushed into a pit by a murderer, it’s as if I’ve contracted some terrible disease that has swollen my midsection and made me too dizzy to walk. Once I get over this illness, I will go back to being the Maggie she knew, the good daughter, instead of the clumsy, wannabe reporter who helped get a girl killed, traveled the world, and then moved far away.

  “We could fix up the old homestead for you, if you want your own place,” she says. “Your father’s dying for a new project.”

  My mother has decided that I’m coming home with her. I’m going on disability leave from the Rocque, and bit by bit, she is packing up my bungalow. I want to ask her if she found any evidence, something Evie planted to frame me, but I can’t. It now sounds crazy, even to me.

  “Don’t throw away anything without asking me,” I tell her instead.

  “Your furniture’s not worth keeping,” my mother says.

  “I mean small things, Mom.”

  “Small things add up,” she says.

  “Just in case, ask me.”

  But she doesn’t ask. Instead, we talk about boxes, temporary storage until I decide what’s next.

  What we both don’t utter aloud: I might not come back to Los Angeles at all.

  There is, of course, one formidable opponent to this plan. My mother, recognizing a sophisticated adversary when she meets one, won’t budge from her chair whenever Yegina comes.

  “Oh I’ll just knit over here in the corner while you chat,” she says.

  So we can’t talk about real stuff—not about Don or Bas or the case—but Yegina, not to be outflanked, brings a plethora of temptations to stay: dark chocolate laced with raspberry; honeybush tea; wrapped and beribboned macaroons from an overpriced bakery. The more exotic the edible, the more convinced Yegina is that it will heal me. She thinks people in hospitals suffer from the lack of sensory stimulation, so she’s also made me CD mixes, pasted reproductions of Kahlo and Matta paintings up on my walls, and scattered lemongrass sachets in my drawers.

  “It’s so international in here,” my mother marvels, and pats my hand.

  Today the doctors have come by with news about my discharge—a few more tests and I can go.

  I ask my mother if she minds returning to the apartment to finish packing. “The sooner we’re done, the sooner we can get home,” I say.

  She brightens at the word home, but inside I feel the discernible prick of a lie. I picture Vermont in May, mud season giving way to crocuses and the delicate gold-green that explodes all over the woods. It’s still mine, but it’s also very far away.

  “I’ll go for a couple of hours,” my mother says. She stands and regards me. “You’re looking better now.” She puts both hands to both her cheeks, and, for a moment, her resolutely cheerful manner slips. “I didn’t even recognize you when I first came,” she admits in a quavering voice.

  “Oh, Mom.”

  I let her hug me too tight. She leaves her knitting lumped on the chair, needles poking up, as if to prevent anyone else from occupying it.

  As soon as she’s gone, I call Yegina.

  “Just bring yourself,” I say. “And hurry.”

  I’m so relieved to finally have time alone with Yegina that it surprises me when she walks in the room and I don’t know what to say. There she is, with her beautiful, alert face, laden with bags under her arms, my friend and rescuer. My memory flashes to the open door at her house, the anger in her eyes, Bas behind her on the couch—and then to Don, tumbling from his bike. I want to thank her with my whole heart, I want to beg her forgiveness, or to cry, or just to pretend nothing happened, but not knowing where to begin with her is terrible. It paralyzes me.

  “I brought magazines,” she says awkwardly. “You want to know about the case, right?”

  “Definitely,” I say. “It’s all I’ve been thinking about since I fell.” I emphasize the last word, and Yegina nods. She doesn’t say What happened with Evie? How’d you slip? Doesn’t wait for me to lie. She just nods.

  “And I brought mochi,” she says, and sets a Japantown box on my bedside table.

  Then she looks warily at my mother’s knitting needles and sits on my bed instead. The jostling sends a wave of discomfort through me.

  “Where should we start,” she murmurs, and spreads the magazines and newspapers out on my white blankets, cover stories with pictures of Evie in an orange jumpsuit, of the glass-and-steel front of the Rocque with photoshopped blood running down it.

  Nothing squalid. Nothing cop-show. This is supposed to be high art. Lynne must be shattered and impossible now, I say.

  “She got herself a third cat,” says Yegina. “It seems to be helping her cope.”

  “How about Jayme—did she quit?” I received a card from her, wishing me a speedy recovery, but I’m surprised she hasn’t visited. I’ve been here almost a week.

  “Jayme’s on vacation in Hawaii,” says Yegina. “She actually sat Bas and me down last week and told us that she was stalked as a teenager, and that Kim Lord’s disappearance and death have been extremely upsetting to her.” Her eyes rest on me. “She said she didn’t want this public, but she’d already told you, and it made her realize she needed to tell us, too.” She adds, “I always wondered.”

  “Yeah, me too,” I say, grateful that Jayme has finally stopped bearing her pain alone. “I’m glad she left all this behind for a while.”

  I finger the cool, smooth pages spread around me. The “museum murderess” is huge news, both the grisly homicide and the quick reprisal by the LAPD, which gets all the credit for solving the case. Hendricks is absent from the story. I am absent from it, too, and Evie’s flight through the sculpture garden is reduced to a simple arrest. Instead, reporters have sunk their teeth into every other aspect of the murder. Yegina shows me “Dimensions of Death” in one magazine, a timeline that chronicles Kim Lord’s alleged killing, hour by hour. A dotted line shows a figure in a wig and a trench coat entering the museum through the loading dock, passing the guard station, then proceeding into the carpentry room and into Brent’s office. It also shows a second blond figure in a blue pantsuit in the registrar’s room, and a dotted line leading to the same office. The police found traces of Kim Lord’s blood on Brent’s floor and on one of the mallets. They never found the syringes holding the sodium thiopental.

  “Any ordinary day, and this murder could never have occurred,” wrote one journalist. “But on Wednesday, the entire exhibition crew was upstairs in the galleries, installing the opening show, and Evie Long was alone for hours. She turned on the saws in the carpentry room, grabbed a mallet, and crept to the door of Brent Patrick’s office.”

  “How an Art Crate Became a Coffin” follows how Evie shipped
the unconscious and dying Kim Lord out of the museum to the Van Nuys storage facility, and then retrieved the crate two hours later and relocated it to her loft. The Diamond Storage shipment is key to the police case, because the second truck driver, the one who picked up the crate, remembers rolling it into Evie’s loft. The crate itself has vanished, but dirt on Evie’s sneakers matches dirt from the burial site. Enough puzzle pieces will finish the picture for the jury, even if key ones are missing. Yet Evie’s cruelty will never be completely explicable. Did she assume Kim Lord was dead? Did she ever hear her cry for help? No one knows. While Evie played business as usual at the Rocque, and stayed out late at the Gala in Kim Lord’s honor, the artist was clawing at her coffin, dying from suffocation and thirst.

  “The Gallerist, the Artist, the Murderer, and Her Lover” focuses on Brent Patrick, the “Leonardo of stagecraft” who relocated to L.A., watched his marriage collapse with his wife’s mental illness, and got involved with an obsessive young woman who later murdered her supposed rival. Tawdry stuff. I can’t believe I sat through dozens of thumb-twiddling meetings with these people. Brent claimed he had no relationship to Kim Lord beyond a professional one. He did know Kim was pregnant because she’d told him in his office earlier that week. He also admitted to a few months’ affair with Evie Long last year, which he ended when Evie began appearing at his apartment without his invitation. “I’m not proud of it, but I broke it off,” he told the reporter. “To be honest, I partly wanted to move back east to get away from her.”

  “Dee knew about him and Evie,” says Yegina, leaning over my shoulder. “She thought it ended last fall.”

  In my mind’s eye, I see Dee and her hurt but obstinate face. “She was being so secretive about Brent last week, though,” I say. “Do you think she suspected something anyway?”

  “Brent begged her not to tell about him being hired in New York. He was double-billing his two health insurances. For his wife’s care,” Yegina says, and taps a paragraph where Brent claims his “insanely busy” schedule kept him “utterly unaware” of Evie’s actions. “I believe Dee. She was all lovesick about Janis. She was absent the days it happened. But I don’t buy Brent. He must have known something. His office must have stunk of disinfectant. There was a crate missing. Tarps missing. Why wouldn’t he tell the police?”