Lesson In Red

by Maria Hummel

  “Only. Had. One,” I said. In truth, I had tasted two sips of her martini because she was watching me, and then sloshed the rest into a napkin holder when she turned to the stage to clap for Dee. Two sips. She must have put enough sedative in the drink to knock me out.

  “I valeted at the French restaurant down the street because they’re always faster,” she says. “It’s just one more block.”

  “Cab,” I said.

  “I forgot. I drove.”

  My phone started buzzing in my jeans pocket.

  “Friend,” I said.

  Layla muscled a hand into my pocket and I felt the buzzing stop. “You can call her when we’re in the car,” she said, hauling me faster.

  “My friend,” I said again. If I could somehow alarm Yegina. If I could somehow warn her.

  “I can’t take you back there,” Layla said. “You can’t even stand up. You can call her from the car, and she can come get you.”

  I balked and we almost tumbled to the ground. The cars passing seemed to brighten their headlights, blinding me.

  Layla tightened her hold. “Mary. People are staring,” she hissed in my ear. “Let me get you somewhere safe.”

  When we reached the restaurant, she snapped open her purse and handed the man a tag and a twenty. The attendant grabbed a set of keys and motioned for another valet. “Lucky you have a good pal,” he said to me.

  “She’s just a total lightweight,” said Layla.

  I am not a lightweight, I thought through the fog. I’d drunk a couple sips to convince her I was a fool. Then we’d started talking about Erik, and how Brenae had worshipped him, and how that worship had fueled him, and he hadn’t wanted to give it up, no matter the cost to him or her, no matter if they both wanted their relationship to be over. How Layla had tried to understand this, even though it drove her mad. At that point, I started to lose feeling in my legs and told her so. And she told me we should go.

  Now she was holding me so tight my wrist hurt.

  “Cab,” I slurred to the attendant, my eyes blurring to black. But I leaned on Layla because I couldn’t help it, and then I passed out.

  WHEN I WOKE, MY WHOLE body felt numb, but my head was slightly clearer. A seat belt had been pulled across my T-shirt and clicked. The edge of it bit into my neck, but I couldn’t lift a hand to adjust it. My wig and cloak were on the seat.

  Layla was alone in the front, driving, her white hands on the wheel.

  “Where. We going?”

  “Told you,” she said softly. “Nelson’s place. The Westing.”

  The Westing. Why the Westing? In my voicemail to Alicia, I’d told her all about Nelson’s wine cellar, the second locked door.

  “You. Drug me?” I said.

  “You had too many drinks,” she said.

  There was a pattering sound, and tiny silver stars burst on the windshield. It was raining. The first rain in months. Layla cursed and fumbled for the wiper switch. Black rods creaked over the stars, smearing and erasing them.

  “There’s a plastic bag in your lap if you need to throw up.”

  The roof of the car began to drum, then pound.

  AND THEN WE WERE ON the 10 freeway, in a flow of headlights. Wet signs flashed above me, the white letters of exits. La Cienega. Swamp. The rain had stopped, but everything had a misty halo. I had feeling back in my feet and hands, and I was stretching them, clenching them quietly, but my torso still felt like a sack of mud. I was not sure I would be able to stand.

  Layla must have sensed me waking because she cranked her neck and looked back at me.

  “Why me?” My tongue was still thick, and the words slurred.

  There was a buzzing sound in the front seat, and Layla picked up my phone, reading the tiny screen. “Oh,” she says. “Two people are looking for you. I’ll just tell them you called a cab home.”

  She tried texting with her thumb, still driving, swerving.

  I fought to keep my eyes open.

  “I still don’t know why—”

  “Sure you do,” said Layla. “You didn’t snoop around Nelson’s house for no reason.”

  My phone buzzed again, but she ignored it.

  “You don’t have to do this,” I said.

  “Just shut up, gallerina. I tried to warn you. You should have quit on your first day.”

  I worked my muscles, clenching, bending. My thighs, hips, and belly still felt leaden. I wouldn’t be able to fight her when the car stopped. I wasn’t even sure I could stand. But the effects couldn’t last forever—I’d only ingested a fraction of what she’d intended for me.

  Layla drove faster, slamming the gas, then the brakes, as she wove through the busy lanes. The ocean was ahead of us, the open water. Even if I couldn’t see it, I could always sense the end of the land, the big blackness where the lights stopped and the long emptiness took over. Once we got off the 10, we would be at the Westing in minutes.

  “How did you find me tonight?” I said.

  “Nelson knew you worked at the Rocque. I took a chance and waited outside the museum until you left. You’re not hard to follow. You never look behind you.”

  “Where’s Ray?” I asked.

  “I can’t help him,” she said. “Shut up so I can drive, okay?”

  23

  “SO WE’RE GOING TO PLAY a game,” Layla said in my ear as she helped me from the car. We were parked in the back of the gallery, where the truck of shoes had pulled up days ago. “If you shout for help, I’ll stick this knife in your side. Right under the ribs. And then I’ll twist.” I felt the cool edge of a blade against my belly.

  I complied by standing up and stumbling forward over the wet pavement. The sudden change in position made my head faint. Layla pulled me along, the knife tip jabbing. My legs still felt like they had been pounded into rubber and reattached to my hips.

  When we reached the back door, she lowered the knife and dredged a key from her purse. I lurched away from her and tried to run, but fell after two steps. My shoulder, then my cheek, slammed the soaked asphalt. The pavement scraped my skin. The door swung open. It was dim inside. I felt Layla’s hands dig under me and pull me into the hallway, then slam the steel to shut us in.

  Afterward, she sat there for a moment, breathing hard, her dress darkened with rain. I couldn’t hear anyone else in the gallery, and down the long hall, the spectral arches of Shoe Cathedral rose, looking from a distance like a giant spider crouched and waiting for us. I rubbed the wet grit from my cheek. It stung.

  Layla stood up and walked down the hall to my old gallerina desk, dialing a number. “She’s here,” she said, then listened for a moment. “About two milligrams. I guess.”

  There was another silence.

  “How do I know he’s—” She sounded worried. “I don’t want to do this by myself.”

  Another silence. Layla looked at the ceiling, her knuckles whitening where they clutched the receiver.

  “I’m not doing this,” she said in a smaller voice.

  She waited.

  “Okay, but you’re coming, right?”

  WHEN LAYLA CAME BACK TO me, she wore a different face. I had seen many Layla faces by now—her tender, insecure awe toward Erik, her protectiveness toward Zania, her cool scorn toward me—but this face was different. Her eyes did not seem to be looking outward at all, but focused on some inner landscape that was cold and barren, and she saw far into it, into that vast, bleak plateau. It was a terrifying face, and the hands that lifted me, yanked me toward Nelson’s office, felt as merciless as claws. I tried to speak, but she told me to be quiet, and in such a voice that I feared what she would do if I disobeyed.

  I let Layla pull me down the hall, into the orange-carpeted room. Layla’s bare legs, the tiniest stubble on them, shone in the fluorescent light. Her sandaled foot accidentally kicked my ear. The whiff of the rotting coconut takeout still drifted from the trash can. Nelson’s bookcase slid aside, revealing a panel in the wall, a keypad.

  An intuition, faint but
certain now. All along I had sensed that the dimensions of this room were wrong. The hallway too long. The office too short. A hidden room here. Not in Nelson’s wine cellar. Alicia would be arriving at his house soon. Maybe even finding the gallerist there alone, looking puzzled at the intrusion.

  When Layla had slung me all the way to the wall panel, she stopped, breathing heavily.

  “Well, this is what you both were looking for, isn’t it?” she said to me.

  Layla sat down at Nelson’s desk, propping her chin in her hands. My head felt clearer, but my muscles were still weak. I found if I lay very still, I could think better, but I wanted to run. I must have made a noise because she looked over at me.

  “It will be easier if you sleep through this,” she said in a tone that bordered on pity.

  “Please,” I said, keeping my skull pinned to the ground. “You don’t have to do anything. It’s all his fault. Not yours.”

  “I know,” she said. She smoothed her hair back in swift, automatic gestures. “I could leave this whole disgusting mess.”

  I fought against the fog in my head. I had to press her. “You tried to leave once,” I said. “You got scared by what happened to Calvin. You left for grad school. You found Erik. You were free.”

  A tremor crossed Layla’s face, and then it went blank again. I needed to push for that tremor to return.

  “Any person would take your side,” I said sleepily. “Nelson manipulated you. The age gap. Your father’s friend. No one guessed, so no one helped you.”

  Layla’s face was still glassy and blank. I thought through the timeline: how she’d started dating Erik at LAAC, how the London trip had exposed him cheating on her, how she must have run back to Nelson. Then Brenae’s death came, then Kim Lord’s murder and Nelson’s financial crash.

  “You knew getting back together was a bad idea,” I said. “But Still Lives went down and Nelson lost everything. You couldn’t abandon him. Not even if you had started to believe he might have killed someone. Maybe two people.”

  Layla blinked. “He did not touch Brenae,” she said. “Never.”

  “I meant James Compton.”

  “James Compton choked on his own vomit,” Layla said. “Nelson adored him. He was devastated that James died.”

  “If Nelson didn’t do anything wrong,” I said, “how could Calvin blackmail him?”

  She shrugged.

  “Nelson stole something from James,” I guessed.

  “No, he kept some of James’s money after James died, so he could carry on his work. That’s all. But that guy, Calvin, claimed he wanted to tell the true story of Shoreditch. He wanted a stipend for a couple of years, he said. To make sure he got ‘the facts’ right. Ha.”

  “So what happened?”

  “I don’t know. I thought Nelson sent him away. I didn’t know the guy would turn up dead.”

  “You didn’t know any of it,” I said. “Just leave me here and I’ll call the police. I’ll back you up. Quit now. You warned me, remember?”

  Layla gave the smallest nod and sat up straighter. For a moment, I thought I had her.

  “Go,” I said. “Erik needs you.”

  Layla’s face sagged into something that should have been a smile, but it was ghoulish and melancholy. “He doesn’t need me. He never needed me. He needs Brenae.”

  The office phone rang and Layla answered. She listened, nodding, shrinking into herself. Then she hung up and strode to the door with her old full-hipped sway, the soaked dress clinging to her. At the threshold, she snapped off the light, casting herself in silhouette.

  “You don’t seem like a bad person,” she said. “But you let yourself get used.”

  WHEN I WOKE AGAIN, THE light was still out in the office, but not in the hall. A wedge of glow hit the floor by the threshold, faintly illuminating the rest of the room. I felt someone else’s presence, someone sitting where Layla had sat, before I turned and saw him, slumped, heavy shouldered. Without his deep tan and cap of silver hair, his form looked thug-like and heavy. There was something misshapen about his head. He did not move as I pushed myself up, but I felt him watching.

  “Where’s Layla?” Despite everything, I was alarmed for her. “What did you do to her?”

  He remained silent, regarding me. Then his hand reached up to gently touch the side of his head, and I saw now that his ear was dangling, as if ripped from the side of his skull. His fingers dropped, covered in dark smears.

  I scrambled toward the door, my weak limbs flailing. He rose and strode past me, the bloody, mutilated ear catching the light, trickles of red down the side of his neck. With a flick, he slammed the door, casting us in darkness. The only source of light was a thermostat on the wall beside the hidden door, which read thirty-eight degrees. My head slurred at this information. I couldn’t imagine what it meant.

  “I wanted you to be awake, that’s all.” Nelson’s voice fumbled, as if he couldn’t remember what he wished to say. He stood over me. “To see what was done to me. Do you see it?”

  I crawled for the door again, my hands slapping the floor. I hadn’t heard him lock it. There was still a chance. But my limbs refused to coordinate and then his hands were on me, shoving though my armpits, so that he was holding me up from behind, dangling like a doll. I could feel his chest against my spine, his thighs shoving mine across the room. “Do you see it?”

  Crying out, I tried to kick at him and he cursed, but he kept his grip, pushing me toward the hidden door, punching at buttons.

  “Do you see it?” he demanded again, lower this time, because now he’d pulled me in tight from behind, our heads were close, and then I could feel it, the warm slickness of his ruined ear against my hair, the back of my neck, and for a single instant, as he groaned, its deep, gouging pain.

  “Yes, I see it.” I wanted to be free of his grip. I didn’t care what came next.

  The cold blasted over us, then the lightlessness inside.

  “Good,” he said, and threw me forward, hard, into the freezing room, so that I staggered and fell facedown on the concrete floor.

  Behind me, the wall closed. Then came a second, heavy sliding sound: the bookcase sealing me in.

  24

  THE COLD MIXED WITH THE dark, and the air chafed. The floor grated my cheek and the palms of my hands. As my adrenaline faded, I could feel the sleep pulling at me again, keeping me from breaking the surface. I wanted to sleep instead of remembering Nelson’s ruined ear touching me, its pulpy caress.

  I forced myself up. Faintness flooded my skull. I reached for a wall and found a shelf instead, covered in objects. Stone. Small shapes and large shapes, smooth and old.

  Bones, my mind told me.

  A cemetery, my mind told me.

  Then: Art. Sculptures.

  “Ray?” I said.

  The air was still. I was alone in the room. It was frigid. Winter cold. Winter cold with no coat or hat. The thermostat on the wall said thirty-five now. The climate control settings would be for the artwork. Nelson had turned them down to their lowest temp. Near freezing. I would not survive two days at thirty-five degrees. I might not survive a day, not if I kept falling asleep.

  I needed to get out. First, I needed to see. First, I needed to move.

  I counted to twenty, and for every count I contracted my muscles, pushed myself to feel the objects around me (cool, hard, dust whispering on my hands), to crawl toward the door. At twenty, I collapsed, exhausted. Another twenty. I felt the whole door, every smooth edge of it, and around the edges for a light switch, but nothing. A lone blue glow from the thermostat on the wall. Thirty-four degrees now. I felt everywhere on the instrument for a button or switch, but it had none.

  I sank to the ground and folded into a ball, blinking to stay awake, trying to keep the warmth in.

  The rustle was so soft at first, I thought my ears were playing tricks on me. Then I heard it again: the smallest scraping sound off to my right.

  “Hello?” I said.

  T
here was a faint moan, but I recognized the voice, even broken to pieces like this. I scrambled in its direction, saying Ray’s name, and smashed into his cold, limp body before I could stop myself. The groan lengthened, and I pattered my hands over his shoulders and chest, finding his face. Recoiled. It felt so much like Nelson’s ear. Cold and soft-slick. Like the inside of a pumpkin before you dig it out. I smelled blood on my fingers.

  “I didn’t know you were here,” I croaked. “What happened to you? I can’t see anything.”

  Ray said a word a few times before I realized it was pockets. My hands fumbled their way down his damp chest until I found the rim of denim on either side of his hips, and I blushed in the dark, plunging my hand against his thigh. Nothing but lint in the first pocket. In the other, sharp hard teeth. A key ring. I pulled it loose, jingling.

  “Keys?” I said, but then my hand felt the tiny metal tube. I groped at it until it clicked and light spilled into the room, over Ray. His face was a mask of pain, one eye blackened and swollen shut, lips huge and bloodied. The left side of his head aimed toward his shoulder, and his shoulder bent at an unnatural angle, his arm extending, fingers blue.

  His open eye met mine.

  “You should see his ear,” I said.

  “Maggie,” Ray said from far away. “Did he . . .” A long pause. “Hurt you?”

  “No.” It sounded like I was lying, and I was. “Just tell me how we’re getting out of here.”

  “Get . . . something hard,” he whispered.

  The words were costing him, and he closed his eyes, his breath rattling.

  “Break. See-ing,” he slurred.

  “I don’t understand.”

  He nodded as if to say, Just do it.

  I crawled to the shelf and pulled something down. It was shrink-wrapped and so heavy that it clunked on the floor, bruising my fingers. The plastic refused to tear, and I bit it, savage with fear, until I got a piece to peel free. Underneath: old, smooth beige stone, carved with ancient, faded symbols.