Forsaken - A Novel of Art, Evil, and Insanity

by Andrew van Wey

  “Karina, yes,” Barton answered.

  “Last time I spoke to her...” Dan said clicking his tongue. “That would have to have been Friday, around ten in the morning.”

  Detective Barton didn’t write anything. Instead he flipped back to another page as if confirming something, his eyes never meeting Dan’s. Dean Robert shifted on the couch and Dan could see his forehead wrinkle as he tried to read the detective’s notepad.

  “What was the nature of the conversation?” Barton asked.

  Dan laughed: “Should I have my lawyer present?”

  Cold stares from the detectives. “Should you?” asked Cooper.

  “It was a joke,” Dan said. “Forget it.”

  “Your conversation on Friday,” Barton reminded him.

  “Right. We talked about the usual stuff, her project, what she was going to do for her thesis. I’m her advisor, and I had some ideas I wanted to go over. Before the fire she was restoring a Verduchi,” Dan said, realizing they probably had no idea what that was, so he addd: “That’s a painting--”

  “I know that,” Cooper said, thumbing through a book on contemporary Iranian art.

  “So you didn’t see her that day?” asked Barton.

  “See her? No. We had an appointment that afternoon but I had to cancel.”

  Barton jotted something down on the pad and, as if sensing Dean Robert’s wandering eyes, shifted his body so the pad sat in his lap, obscured. “Why is that?” he asked. “Why’d you cancel?”

  “Family emergency,” Dan answered. “Our dog went missing.”

  “Sorry to hear that,” said Barton.

  “Were you fucking her?” Cooper said without looking up from the book. Dean Robert and Dan exchanged a stunned glance but Barton continued to stare at Dan and click his pen as if nothing unusual had been asked.

  “Excuse me?” Dan asked.

  “Were you... fucking her?” Cooper asked again in that slow southern drawl, as if speaking to someone hard of hearing.

  “What kind of question is that?” Dan snapped back.

  Cooper returned the art book to the shelf as a look of contemplation passed over his face. “I suppose it’s a simple question really. Yes or no kind. Ain’t illegal, least not in this state.”

  “Bob,” Dan said, turning to his old friend. “I don’t have to listen to this.”

  “Gentlemen,” Dean Robert cut in. “Please.”

  Barton waved his hand, perhaps dismissing the other detective and his tactics for the time being. Cooper just shrugged as Barton continued. “Her neighbors called in a noise complaint, said the TV had been on for days. Officers investigated and found the apartment in a state of disarray. They found an overnight bag, clothes, reservation for a hotel in Napa.”

  “Well, there you go,” Dan said. The two detectives glanced at each other and Dan felt his hand shake. “I don’t understand,” he asked. “What’s the problem?”

  “She never checked in,” Barton said.

  “Well where’d she go?” Dan asked.

  Barton’s head lowered again as he flipped to another page in the notepad and continued. “Would it surprise you if I told you her car was found parked around the corner from your house?”

  “Absolutely. Of course it would,” Dan said, regretting how quick he had answered the question. “Well, was it?”

  Again, the notepad and no answer. He was starting to sense a pattern, some sort of verbal guerrilla warfare. Attack and retreat.

  “Her phone records indicate that she placed several calls to you last week. Seventeen texts on Thursday alone. Don’t you think that’s a little unusual?”

  For most people, sure, laughed Mr. Glass. But Karina, about par for the course.

  “You have to understand, some of our students spend upwards of two years working on their projects. Hell, we just had that fire. She was devastated, Bob, you remember her reaction?”

  Dean Robert gave a weak nod, not one of support but of resignation. He knew that old man’s trust in him had taken a heavy blow this afternoon.

  “We’re aware of the fire,” Barton said and folded the notepad over. “In fact, her prints were found at the scene of the fire.”

  “Of course they were. She’s one of my students.”

  “Her prints were also found at your house.”

  Dan put on his best look of disbelief. “What?”

  “Last Friday you reported a break in. Officers found two distinct sets of prints. Hers, and another we’ve yet to identify. They were small, a kid’s print, but they weren’t found at her apartment, so I have to ask: have you ever brought your children to work?”

  “No,” Dan answered. “No, never.”

  “I don’t understand,” Dean Robert cut in. “You gentlemen, you think Ms. Calloway might have set the fire? And broke into Dan’s house? Why?”

  “We were hoping he could fill that in for us,” Cooper said.

  “I...” Dan stuttered and laughed. “I have no idea. She hasn’t been to class all week.”

  Barton took that down in his notepad. “We ran her passport number to see if she might’ve gone abroad. She hasn’t, but it turns out the Italians have her flagged on Interpol. An assault charge from July. Claim is, she got into a scrap with another student, sent him to the hospital, if you can believe it.”

  He could believe it indeed, Dan thought.

  “Only reason she wasn’t detained is she pressed rape charges, which have since been thrown out.”

  “Jesus,” Dan said under his breath.

  “We also checked the hospitals. No sign of her presently, but we did come across something from March 21st. She was admitted on a 5150--a 72 hour psychiatric hold--with lacerations to her wrists. I don’t need to tell you who signed her in, do I?”

  “No, you don’t,” Dan mumbled. He remembered signing the form like it was yesterday, but it couldn’t have felt further away. As his pen had scrawled his name he had wondered if the whole thing wouldn’t come back to haunt him.

  The glass laughed. Your birds professor, seems they’re coming home.

  “So professor,” said Cooper. “You still maintain that your relationship with Ms. Calloway was, how should I say? Purely academic?”

  “Absolutely,” said Dan with a nod. “Absolutely.”

  “And in light of these, coincidences...” he paused as a smile crossed his face, “You’re certain you don’t know where she could be?”

  “No,” Dan said. “I mean, gentlemen, if I had any idea, I would have told you.”

  “Well,” said Barton, closing his notepad. “As they say, if you think of anything.” He handed Dan a business cards. His name and phone number sat beneath a gold badge and an embossed title: Investigator.

  “Anything at all, I should call, right?” Dan asked as he took the card.

  Barton’s eyes hung on the Hello Kitty bandages adorning Dan’s left hand. His eyes narrowed, if only for a second, then he nodded and hiked up his belt. “Yes, Please do,” he said.

  Cooper stood, staring at a framed painting next to Dan’s framed degrees. “That a real Heimdell?” he asked.

  “Sure is,” Dan answered, and Cooper nodded at the answer as if it had passed some internal sniff test. Dan felt his distaste for that man grow. He was testing Dan, both showing off his own keen eye for obscure art and belittling Dan’s exclusive knowledge, as if the job was something any hobbyist could do. When they left Dan could hear them talking and laughing in a low murmur from the hallway, like a pair of students that had stifled giggles for the last twenty minutes.

  “Dan,” said Dean Robert, “I think we should have a long talk about Miss Calloway.”

  Creative Types

  “UN-FUCKING-BELIEVABLE!” he said for the third time in as many minutes as he pounded his fist on the steering wheel. The horn gave a reflexive honk that made the woman in the hybrid in front of him glare into her rear view mirror.

  He had meant to avoid rush hour, and had instead wound up in the middle of it. Without
traffic it was an hour and a half at best to Monterey. But today, like most, the traffic stretched from the 101, past the houses and mansions of Alder Glen for miles, almost to the gates of the university itself. It had taken him the better part of an hour to drive fifteen miles to the San Jose airport exit where the stop and go traffic had finally stopped altogether.

  Dan rewound the days conversation in his head. The detectives knew about the affair, that much was obvious. If Karina really had disappeared, or worse, finally made good on her promise to ‘end it’ as she often said, he knew he would become what’s referred to on TV shows as a ‘person of interest.’ And on TV shows people of interest ended out having their whole lives dissected in front of their families. Business trips revealed to be trysts, secret bank accounts exposed, reputations ruined. And the paper, that local rag would love nothing more than to take another whack at the university. It could be Scandal of the Year for a fourth one straight. Buy three, get one free.

  The phone call with Nathaniel that had followed that grilling had been equally as lousy. At first he had sworn at Dan in Italian simply for waking him up. Then he had confirmed everything the detectives said and more. His complaints about Karina read like a bad reference letter. Her work was shoddy at best. She was unprepared and often late. She didn’t get along with the rest of the team and she made inappropriate passes at Nathaniel, a married man. By mid July she had deteriorated to the point of open instability. The other students grew worried and Nathaniel was swamped with complaints.

  He heard that she had become obsessed with a student from Salerno. They had some sort of violent altercation when the student’s girlfriend visited on a Friday. The police were called, reports were filed, and Nathaniel was forced to get involved. He gave her a week off, a grave mistake he said in hindsight. She never showed up the following Monday. Instead she disappeared, but not without a final, dramatic exit.

  “Nathaniel didn’t tell you?” he remembered her saying back in his office almost two weeks ago.

  “The piece was ruined. Four hundred and twenty-two years of history, gone. She even left the muriatic acid at the scene, can you believe that? Of course it’s still ‘speculation’ to the polizia, but to me Daniel, to me, there’s no other explanation. She destroyed it out of spite, pure and simple. Now go ahead and tell me this was your best student Daniel. I want to hear it. Tell me you didn’t know she was a liability.”

  He told Nathaniel he was sorry. That it was all a misunderstanding, and he had no reason to suspect his sponsored student would turn out to be such a grade A fustercluck. He did what the little piece of glass said he did best: he lied.

  And by the time Nathaniel hung up be believed it because, well, why wouldn’t he? Why would Dan have sent him a student primed for a nervous breakdown? Artists were, of course, always a bit strange, something Nathaniel agreed with. And this strangeness seeped over to the people who worked with art as well. It came with the trade. The poets and the musicians of course, they were truly in the deep end, but there was oddity among those who spent hours staring at paintings. A creative tax that made them less likely to be at the center of a conversation than on the edge of it, smiling and nodding and taking an extra long gulp of the champagne. But in regard to her professional ability he had, of course, no reason to suspect that Karina would have done anything less than a flawless job. That’s why he fought for her spot, he told Nathaniel. Because he believed in her, believed she held more talent than he ever would. And that was his job: spot the talent, nurture it, and let it go. Then, like any teacher, hope that she struck gold and made a name for herself. Maybe he had, somehow, missed the mark on this one. Bet on the wrong horse. The signs were all there but maybe there was something else, an unseen variable, hidden from sight that had festered and, triggered by stress, sprung out to everyone’s surprise.

  Yes, there was no way to predict such a thing and he was sorry that it happened but people were hard to read. Like the paintings they worked with, the whole story was often hidden.

  They were, after all, unpredictable people.

  Monterey

  THE CLOCK STORE was a relic of the past, a craftsman's shop that he guessed saw no more than a handful of customers a month. A single sign above the dusty counter proclaimed in gilded letters: Veritum Dies Asperit. And beneath it: Time Discovers the Truth.

  The counter was unmanned, probably had been for the majority of the day. Even the cash register was old fashioned; an engraved metal box carved with vines and flowers dancing up it in columns. He guessed it had seen at least two world wars and, like the clocks lining the walls, required tender care to keep in working order. A bell sat beside it. He tapped it twice and it gave a cheerful ding in response. Somewhere from a back office beyond the counter, he heard movement and the sound of metal scraping.

  “Gimme a moment,” a scratchy voice called out from the back office.

  “Take your time,” Dan replied.

  He paced around the store, taking in the merchandise. The clocks echoed throughout the old store, pendulums swinging like a dozen dead men from the gallows. Some towered almost to the ceiling itself. Others, shorter, hung on walls and sat on dusty mantels, all clicking away in perfect unison.

  All except one.

  He paused before a redwood mantle clock and squinted. At the top sat that familiar logo he’d seen in the photo: a dog leaping through the air after a bird in mid flight. Below that, the hands were stuck at 5:55. Odd, he thought, with all the clocks in perfect synch down to the very swing of the pendulum, that one would have fallen out of synch moments ago, perhaps around the time he stepped into the store.

  He reached out, hands drawn to the knob on the side, wanting to turn it and correct this oversight when the clock suddenly clattered. The hands spun, clicking up five minutes in five rapid movements that made him take a step back. For a brief second he thought he’d broken the clock.

  Then a stamp sized door sprung open and the metal logo, that bird and the dog, split in two equal pieces. A thimble sized bird popped out and bobbed its head up and down. The clock chimed off six cuckoos, joined by the sound of all the other clocks gonging, chiming, and clattering like a wooden choir. After six nods of the head the bird disappeared back into the door as silence fell over the room.

  “Never did like that one,” said an old man in a wheelchair, emerging from the back office and eyeing Dan through thick spectacles. His face was unshaven, not out of style but of age and laziness. His hair was little more than a few white cotton balls on the side of a liver spotted head. He struck Dan as appearing almost cartoonish, as if he should be in some hand drawn apothecary, drying herbs and distilling slimy parts of fungi.

  “Always thought they were silly,” he said, pointing at the clock. “Little doors with those odd birds bouncing out every hour like sugared up retards. But families love ‘em, so we made ‘em. Customer’s king after all. S’what can I do for you son?”

  “We spoke on the phone earlier, about a--”

  “Ah, I remember now,” he cut in with a smile that seemed to stretch every wrinkle in an opposite direction. “Fella with the photo and fax machines.”

  “Yes,” Dan said, withdrawing the very photo from his case.

  “Lemme take a look at her,” the clockmaker said, switching one pair of glasses for a thinner pair. Dan handed him the photo and noticed the old man was missing half of his right ring finger.

  The old clockmaker held the photo, scowling at it, perhaps locked in some personal battle with his own memory. His tongue clicked as his face kept that same frustrated expression for almost a minute. Then he smiled, placing the photo on the counter and slid it back towards Dan with a hooked finger.

  “This is a painting,” he said.

  “Is that a problem?”

  “Most folks bring a photo or a photocopy. Some even bring the whole dang clock. First time anyone’s ever brought me a painting of a clock. Or a photo of a painting of a clock, I suppose.”

  “It’s an unusual sit
uation.”

  “Ain’t it always? Still, I know this clock.”

  “You do?”

  “Sure enough. That’s why you’re here, ain’t it?”

  “What can you tell me about it?”

  “Well, see the sloped crown at the top? This curved ridge on the corners?” The clockmaker pointed to the top of the grandfather clock where it rose like a double mountain adorned with twin castles in the center. “My father made this. Forty-eight or forty-nine most likely.”

  “You can tell that from a picture?”

  The clockmaker raised an eyebrow as if Dan were asking him to perform basic arithmetic. “Sign on the door reads Cobald and Sons. Now my father was the son in that name, which makes me a third generation clockmaker. My memory’s fickle but my hands are steady. They remember every clock out that door, ‘cluding this one.”

  He slapped a hand on his useless legs.

  “I was standing when I helped him make that style of crown. Then I went to Korea. I didn’t stand so much after that, nor did I do these crowns.”

  “I didn’t mean to offend you,” Dan said.

  “Facts don’t offend, so none taken. Take a peek at the face, will you?”

  Dan studied the face of the clock. That dog leaping through the air after the bird, those hands stuck at 5:55.

  “Anything seem askew to you?” the old man asked.

  “It’s missing three numbers. Nine, ten, and eleven.”

  “Sure, but that ain’t all it’s missing. What else?”

  Dan shook his head. “I don’t know.”

  “Take a look behind you, ‘round the room.”

  Dan turned his attention from the picture to the clocks surrounding the small shop. All their pendulums and machinery clattering away in the last light of day. Relics, really. And then he saw it.

  “The numbers--”

  “Bingo,” said the old clockmaker with a pop of the mouth. “That painting of yours, they’re numbers on the face, most of ‘em at least. We only use roman numerals. Always have.”

  He was right. Those clacking and chiming relics around the room were all emblazoned with roman numerals across their faces. But the clock in the picture was marked with numbers, except one. The five o’clock mark was a simple V and Dan felt a spike of stupidity for not noticing this discrepancy. Clocks were not his speciality but art was, and there had sat such an obvious yet overlooked clue that he wondered if he wasn’t losing his touch.