The Empress of Tempera

by Alex Dolan

  Paire caught the effort in Melinda’s voice as she tried to sound patient. “Where is my father’s work?”

  “It was in storage for a while, but someone was going to find it eventually. There was so much bad blood from when we opened the museum. So many people that took your father’s side. I have to admit I was feeling a little vindictive.”

  Melinda raised her voice. “Where?”

  Abel finally spoke. “He burned it.”

  Gabriel glared at his son, perhaps loathing the fact that Abel had snatched the punchline away from him. Abel said to Melinda, “My father burned all of Qi’s works. Franconi helped him.” His tone stated the facts plainly, without a hint of apology to her, but without a trace of satisfaction either.

  Gabriel explained, “We had to erase the memory, to preserve our name. With a multigenerational legacy like the Kasson family, your name is your most powerful asset. We’d lost enough on our gamble to bring an unknown Chinese artist to America. We’d lost millions—and that’s when losing millions meant something. We couldn’t lose our name as well. So we destroyed your father’s legacy to preserve ours.”

  Abel said, “There’s nothing left, and that’s the truth of it.”

  “Nothing but this,” said Gabriel, gesturing to the painting with the poker, the black tip, assuredly still warm from the fire, inches from the surface. Melinda’s mouth gaped, and a tear rolled down her cheek.

  “The last remaining Qi,” said Abel. To his father, he said, “If you’d let me take care of this, it would have all been over by now.”

  “Don’t worry, it will all be over soon enough,” said his father.

  Paire scraped her nails on the sofa fabric and stared at the gathering clouds through the gigantic windows. They might be low enough to obscure tonight’s fireworks. She heard a faint combustion through the window, and she couldn’t tell if it was a crackle of fireworks or a distant gunshot, the way New York City seemed to clear its throat whenever it seemed too quiet. She asked, “Why are you telling us this?”

  Gabriel shifted his attention to Paire. “I see the way you look at her. It’s how I used to look at her. You should have seen Qi’s other work, and how it affected people. How it drew out their impish impulses. The power that man had over his craft.” He fingered the edge of the birch board. “There was a reason I brought the man overseas, and that was the power of his work. I’m too jaded now to look at it objectively, as is my son. Melinda here sees this work as a gateway to understanding her father. But you—you,” he pointed at Paire, “you see the work the way people should see it. You marvel at it. It’s glorifying for me to see. Because it tells me I was right all along. That he was a master. Such a master, in fact, that even one single work could earn him the recognition he richly deserved.” Gabriel glanced fondly at the Empress Xiao Zhe Yi, brushing her face lightly with his fingers. With some effort, he stood up from his chair. Abel stood to help his father, but Gabriel shooed him away, so he sank back down. Gabriel bent and scooped up the painting, holding it by the edges of the frame, just as Paire had carried it when she had stolen it from that flat one week ago.

  “Back then, so many people assumed that my passion for art was just another form of materialism, just more things to collect. But it was just the opposite. This was my escape from the regimented parts of my life. This painting ignites something in me, and I can see that it affects you the same way. The same way it changed people when they first saw Qi’s work back in 1974.”

  Paire thought he might chuck the portrait into the fire, and she slid onto the edge of the sofa cushions in case she needed to dive into the hearth to save it.

  Large as it was, and birch board at that, Gabriel held it like a kite. Pivoting away from the fireplace, he looked like he was waltzing with it. A gust from the French doors almost blew it out of his hands, but he held on tight. “It’s heavier than it looks,” he bubbled with his own audacity.

  Paire wormed around on the cushions.

  “Please be careful with that,” said Melinda. Her voice wavered a bit as she gave in to her own turbulent emotions.

  “Don’t worry,” Gabriel cooed, “It will be over in a minute. You don’t realize what you have until it’s gone. That goes for addictions, too.” He retreated backward toward the open balcony.

  Now Paire and Melinda rose from their seats. Abel rose as well, but circled around and stood between his father and the two women so they couldn’t intervene in whatever Gabriel had planned.

  “There’s a good boy,” Gabriel called to his son. The older Kasson walked out onto the balcony.

  Paire needed to act. She approached, and when Abel tried to stiff-arm her, she swatted at his arm with the baton. Only this time, he was prepared. He grabbed her wrist and pinched her arm until the pain made her drop her only weapon softly on the carpet.

  “This is senseless,” Melinda implored. She moved slowly, creeping toward Gabriel like a stalking lioness. “Think about what you’re doing. Think of what that work gives people.”

  Gabriel remarked, “It gives people cancer. This thing ruins people.” But he admired the portrait just the same. “This is wiping the slate clean, for both our families. Nothing clings to you like shame. You know how to get rid of shame? To find someone to blame it on. And I’ll have to be that person. I’m as good a choice as any.”

  Gabriel backed up with careful duelist’s steps until the marble balcony railing caught him just under the buttock. The wind swirled around him. “You’re all funny. I wish you could see yourselves. Here I am, perched on the edge of a window fifteen stories up, and you’re all more worried about this thing.” He made the birch board dance in the air. “Eventually, you’ll thank me.”

  Paire remained stiff, petrified by the inevitable. Later, she would remember all this seeming like a hallucination, happening silently, without punctuation.

  Gabriel folded his arms around the board, holding it to his chest in an embrace. Willing the strength in his legs, he sprang into the air, backward over the railing, like a track-and-field high jumper. As he spun in an axel, his face looked peaceful, as if caught waking from a blissful dream. Quietly, he slipped into the night.

  Melinda gasped.

  A staccato shriek tore out of Paire.

  Abel was the only one who moved, rushing to the balustrades, his hands holding the marble rail as if he were preparing to jump himself.

  It didn’t seem real until they heard Gabriel land. Over a hundred feet below, a jarring and meaty slap sounded as muscle and bones collided with the pavement.

  Abel let out a low, grieving groan, the first noise from him that had sounded like regret.

  Chapter 20

  Abel Kasson stepped off the balcony, his face red as a blister. Tears clouded his eyes, so when he stared at Paire and Melinda he looked blearily about the room instead of focusing on them. He unfolded a jackknife from his pocket. Behind him, clouds lit up with an electric flash, and the first thunder rumbled seconds later. Paire heard a faint crackle from the fireworks that were being launched into the storm.

  The spring baton lay across the room. The only thing within arm’s reach was a couch cushion. Paire grabbed one and held it like a shield.

  Incensed, Kasson came at her with the grace of a runaway boulder.

  He moved even faster than he had at Rosewood’s flat. Kasson plunged the knife into the cushion. The impact alone forced her back a few steps. The blade ripped out the white filler, and cotton billows fell to the floor. With his father had gone the last shreds of his composure, and Kasson was in a blackout rage. He stabbed and slashed at Paire in a frenzy, and she used all her strength to keep the cushion held in place.

  Kasson slashed and caught Paire across the forearm. Too stunned to scream, her mouth opened in an inaudible gasp. Blood dripped on the carpet. He raised the knife above his shoulders for a killing stroke, but Melinda threw the fireplace tongs at him, which whacked him on his shoulder. A momentary distraction, but enough time for her to tug Paire’s arm and
encourage her to run for the exit. They both sprinted down the main corridor.

  Rather than wait for the elevator, Paire took them through the kitchen to the service staircase. Kasson followed steps behind, hollering after them as he stumbled down the stairs. To stay ahead of him, they circled the turns so quickly that Paire felt dizzy. Or perhaps it was the blood loss from her arm. She drizzled on the steps.

  Her bleeding might have saved their lives. Kasson was catching up, but he slipped on some of Paire’s blood around the second floor, and tumbled on the landing.

  When they got outside, Melinda was momentarily transfixed by the sight of Gabriel Kasson’s broken body. He’d just missed crashing through the green awning. Blood pooled around the skull, and scraps of brain littered the sidewalk. He reminded Paire of Nicola Franconi, another man dead on the pavement.

  The empress should have smashed apart on the sidewalk as well. But on the way down, the wind must have caught the board like a sail, and wrenched it out of Gabriel’s arms. The gust carried it into the awning, where it tore through and lodged in the canvas. A corner of the birch board stuck through the fabric, just above their heads. While Melinda flagged down a taxi, Paire impulsively pulled down the painting, bleeding arm and all. She had to take it. She jumped up and caught the board, and her body weight dragged it through the canvas with a loud rip. The impact had scratched the tempera, scarring the empress’s cheek, but she was otherwise undamaged.

  A taxi stopped, and they climbed inside as Kasson barreled out the front door, holding the knife at his side. He might have chased after them as they drove off, but as they pulled away he froze at the sight of Gabriel Kasson, and fell to his knees beside the halo of blood around his father’s head.

  Chapter 21

  The next morning, the empress leaned against the brick wall at Melinda’s compound, next to the dining table. Melinda scrambled eggs with spinach. “You need to eat something,” she urged. “It will help to keep the medication down.”

  They’d spent several hours the night before at the hospital while a doctor sewed up Paire’s arm. She still felt woozy from the painkillers, the only reason she had been able to sleep at all. Paire lifted her bandage and examined the gash on her forearm. The stitches pulled every time she rotated her wrist. Doctors said it would scar. When it healed, it would stripe her arm lengthwise, and she wondered if some people would think that she tried to open a vein in the bathtub.

  Against the wall, the empress’s face had been marred with a few scars of her own down her cheeks, disfiguring the perfect oval.

  They sat together while Paire forked through her eggs. Both of them stared at Qi’s painting.

  “She follows you with her eyes,” Melinda said.

  “She does. But I used to think that about my Brandon Flowers poster.” She blew steam off her eggs. “What do you think it is about her?”

  “My father used to say if you knew how they did it, it wouldn’t be magic,” Melinda said.

  “You know Abel Kasson will come for this,” Paire said.

  “You’re the one who took it with us. We could have left it there.”

  “I thought you wanted it.”

  “I did. But that’s not why you took it.”

  “Touché,” Paire said, staring down at her eggs and resenting the other woman’s tone.

  Melinda let the steam rise off her own plate of eggs without touching them. “The compound has the external gate, plus two locked doors to get in here.”

  “You really think that’s going to stop him?”

  Melinda looked at the empress against the wall. “Maybe we should destroy it.”

  “You could lock it up. It’s easy enough to find a storage unit in New York,” Paire said.

  “None of that would stop him from finding us,” Mel said.

  “I doubt it.”

  Melinda stood and turned the birch board so it faced the wall. “Let’s pretend for a few moments that it isn’t here.”

  Not having any siblings or pets, Paire had never been charged with another’s welfare. Not so much as a gerbil had ever shared her bedroom. Having something to care for stirred nurturing instincts in her that had been dormant. “We could leave.”

  “Not a bad idea. Not for both of us, but for you. You ever think about going back to Maine?”

  This came as an affront to Paire, but she considered it for Melinda’s sake. She had no home anymore and had lost her few possessions. Without family to support her, without Rosewood loving her and housing her, she didn’t have anything left. The realization cast her into a deep gloom. Retreating to Maine would mean becoming Katie Novis again. A return to weakness. Suffering under the family taint. Even with the imminent threat of Kasson and the shame of Rosewood, the grief over Mayer and Lucia, New York still felt safer than Abenaki, if for no other reason than her doom was less assured here. So long as she could stay ahead of Kasson.

  “I can’t go back to Maine.”

  “You still have a father. That’s more than I’ve got.”

  “For all practical purposes, I don’t have a father.” She remembered Lake Novis in his ratty chair, his gloomy eyes adrift to the yellowed wallpaper. He had resigned himself to death. He’d ebb away in that dark room, pining after his dead wife, until gamey smells heralded his passing to his neighbors.

  There was a pause before Melinda asked, “How bad was it up there?”

  “Some kids have it worse, but it was plenty bad enough for me. Would you call your father right now?”

  “Of course I would.”

  “You loved your father,” Paire said.

  “I love him still, even if he’s not alive.”

  “But he left you.”

  Melinda shrugged. “He stayed in his own way.”

  Paire asked, “Would you call your mother?”

  “That’s a little different,” said Melinda. “You know I was disinherited by my mother.”

  “Some families do that,” Paire said, hoping to convey a shared experience.

  “My mom had old-country values. A gay child was a dead child. She died hoping I’d meet the right guy.” Melinda added, “But even with that, I would probably call my mother if it would help us out of this.”

  Paire understood that whatever the turbulence with her family, Melinda had, at some point, known what it was to have loving parents. “I’m not saying my family is better or worse than yours. Only that I can’t go back to them.”

  Paire saw Melinda’s frustration. Despite her reluctance, she spilled it, so she could make Melinda understand why she needed to stay here, and why she had nowhere else to go. Kasson might very well murder them, and the need to keep secrets didn’t feel important. For the first time in New York, Paire divulged the secret she’d hoped would never leave Abenaki.

  • • •

  After Lake Novis and Cissy married, they lived in seclusion in northern Maine, specifically, Caribou. There they had their baby in private. Gilda diligently kept reporters from printing news about their whereabouts, or the juicy scandal of how an institutional guard fertilized an inpatient.

  During the trial later on, it would all come out. Even though the press stayed away, court transcripts told the story. As a teen, Katie Novis pored through these to try to get a glimmer of who her parents were. Neighbors from Caribou had testified. Some said that Lake and Cissy Novis had been “in wedded bliss” and that they were “wonderful neighbors.” As one neighbor said, “I never heard a peep about them that indicated anything was wrong…you know, until it happened.” But a few witnesses hinted at some misgivings. One said, “There was something off about them,” and another, “They were gloomy. That’s what I remember most.”

  In his own testimony, Lake Novis had explained:

  Some people weren’t meant to have children, plain and simple. Some people find out about these things and they rise to the occasion. We didn’t feel that way. But we were stuck. Cissy was Catholic, I mean a faithful Catholic, so abortion was out. We figured we’d have to m
ake the best of it. We both thought that the maternal and paternal instincts would kick in. We waited for them. But they never did.

  By the trial, Cissy Novis had already hanged herself in the garage, so she wasn’t around to testify on her own behalf.

  Gilda, however, had said, “Cissy was a challenging child, no doubt about it. Postpartum depression was probably the final factor.”

  Katie sensed when reading this that Gilda was trying to leverage the trial to clear her own name, to convince the world that while Lake and Cissy Novis might have been monsters, they didn’t come from monsters.

  By the time Katie Novis was ten months old, Lake and Cissy were depressed and fatigued. Cissy had overdosed on aspirin but recovered. Lake hungered for the intimate contact the couple had had before they became parents. They both wanted things to go back to the way they were before. Lake testified that Cissy had nothing to do with the “solution” that was hatched, but without Cissy to confirm or deny her role in the events that followed, no one with the exception of Lake knew for sure. Even Gilda speculated, when asked, that her daughter might have been complicit in the deed. Of course, attorneys demanded this statement be struck, but there it remained in the transcripts.

  On the Maine coastline on any given night, buoys from lobster traps bobbed up and down on the water like tombstones in a flooded graveyard. Lake had set out on a foggy night with the child. The baby was wrapped in a blanket—less to keep her warm and more to keep her comfortable enough not to scream in the cold. Lobster boats occasionally patrolled the coastline at night to make sure poachers weren’t hauling their traps, or competitors weren’t cutting free the buoys. But Lake picked a night when the visibility was poor, and he could neither see nor hear any boats on the water.

  He rowed out as quietly as possible, so that not even the drips from the oars would give him away. When he was far enough out, he found a buoy and pulled it into the boat. He hoisted the soggy rope and waterlogged wood as if playing tug o’ war with the Atlantic.