Lesson In Red

by Maria Hummel

  “See-ing,” he said again, softer this time.

  “Seeing what? What am I supposed to see?” I tried to keep the panic from my voice.

  After another shudder, he opened his eyes. He looked at me, his pupils so dilated that the black centers were huge and the blue was almost gone, and then he looked beyond me, above me.

  “Ceiling. Only way.” He barely uttered the words. “Out.”

  “The ceiling?” I said, catching on. “But how?”

  “Climb. Save light,” he said.

  Then his lids fluttered shut.

  Before I clicked the tiny flashlight off, I looked around the room. In the startled dimness of the single beam, I saw a shelf that rose all the way to the ceiling, stacked with engraved and sculpted stones. I didn’t know enough about antiquities to recognize what they were. But it was clear they had originated from centuries ago, made and touched by people whose bones had long since turned to dust. There was a crate by the wall, a shipping label in plastic. I knelt to read the return address: 41 Genevieve Street in London.

  25

  SHIVERING, I GRABBED THE SHELF and pulled myself to standing, slowly, stumbling, the drug sludging my muscles. My hands probed the edges of the structure, reaching just higher than my head before my fingers touched open air. About six feet high. I jiggled the metal. Sturdy but loose. If I climbed it, I could send the whole thing toppling down. Exhaustion spread through me again, and I fought it off by blinking hard and flexing my hands.

  First, I would need some kind of hammer. When I ascended the shelf, it might only be once, given my strength, and I needed a tool up there to smash the ceiling. I felt among the objects. Gravestones, tablets. I couldn’t tell what any one was. The darkness, the drug, and the freezing air had muted shape and recognition. I needed something heavy. But not so heavy that I couldn’t swing it. Not so light that it wouldn’t break drywall.

  My fingers closed on a smooth oblong with some kind of pointy tip. Whatever it was, I hoped it was solid. I tapped it experimentally on the wooden floor.

  The pinging made Ray stir, but when I crawled over and checked him, he was motionless, his flesh clammy. “I’m going to try now,” I said.

  He didn’t answer.

  I shoved myself upright, my head spinning, and carried my hammer to the shelf, setting it down on the top. My huffing breaths filled the silence of the room as I strained up my makeshift ladder. One shelf. Two shelves. The structure swayed. I clung halfway, trying not to imagine where the shelf and its contents would fall, if they fell.

  A noise came from outside the room. A whooshing sound, like water through pipes.

  Was someone else inside the Westing?

  Pearson? Hal? Could they have come back to check on the installation?

  Alicia?

  I shouted for help. I almost lost my perch and clambered higher, buoyed by the thought of rescue. By the time I reached the top of the shelf, my voice was hoarse and there were no answering footsteps. Nothing from Ray, either.

  The dizziness hit. Not like a spinning feeling, but like a tide, black and full. My stomach heaved, and I nearly lost my balance. My scalp brushed the ceiling. I clung, crouched, waiting for the sensation to pass.

  The pipes were quiet. No one was there to rescue us.

  I felt around for the oblong and slammed the ceiling with it. The impact made my frozen fist ache. It was like wielding a baseball bat at cinder block. All the energy of my swing lashed backward into my body. I swung again, back aching from my crouch. Wham, wham. My shoulder recoiled in pain. I felt the ceiling. Nothing. Wham! A tiny dent.

  I sagged over, exhausted, the hammer clunking on top of the shelf. How long would this take? Was it already too late? I looked down at the blackness. I spoke to Ray, but there was no answer, and my voice sounded echoed and strange, like I was speaking into a culvert.

  I lifted the hammer. Wham. Sand kissed my hands. Wham. A bigger chunk tumbled, landing on the shelf. In the dark I felt for it. A crumbly, jagged piece. It was all I had. All we had. I closed my fist around it.

  AFTER I MADE A HOLE in the ceiling the size of my fist, I started pulling down the drywall by hand, cringing when it tumbled to the floor, but unable to stop. The energy I had left could have filled a teaspoon, and the nausea was worsening. If I ceased moving, I would throw up or faint.

  The hole widened to the diameter of a dinner plate. I pulled Ray’s tiny flashlight from my pocket and clicked it on again. It shone into foam insulation. I punched at the insulation and felt it give. My knuckles stung. I punched again.

  The insulation broke free, and through the hole I saw a gap beyond.

  Holding my breath and closing my eyes, I pulled at the hole until it grew, and then stuck my head and shoulders through, pushing the foam apart with my skull. It tumbled off me, gusting dust all over my face. When I opened my eyes and breathed again, the cloud made me cough and retch, and I almost dropped the flashlight. Then, warm air settled in its place, and my caked, freezing face ached from its own thawing.

  There was a gap between the ceiling and roof that extended all the way toward the gallery. Boards interrupted the sheetrock in a network of lines. The light didn’t reach the far end, but I could crawl to Nelson’s office and punch through the ceiling there and get us out. For the first time since he tossed me into the room, I felt a splinter of hope.

  I shone the light down on Ray, who looked pale and sunken, his eyes closed. His arm angled wrong, as if he had fallen from a far height. The blood from his busted face was jellied on the floor by cold. I’d seen blood like this beneath animals that’d died in the winter woods, so thickened it looked solid. The dizziness swept over me again, and my legs trembled. I put the flashlight in my mouth. It made me gag, but I clenched my teeth and rose and pushed myself through the hole, grabbing for a two-by-four board crisscrossing the drywall.

  Huge chunks of ceiling fell as I tried to hoist myself on the board. My body plunged, I slumped, almost lost my grip. In movies, this was the moment when action heroines would slide, smooth as spandex, into their own stunt rescue, but even sober and clear-headed, I would have struggled with the effort. It was like trying to clamber onto the highest rung of a monkey bar with all the other rungs removed. My arms would not do the job. I had to use my legs. I had to jump.

  If I jumped, the shelf might tip and fall on Ray.

  I looked down at him again. He opened his good eye. I didn’t know if he could see me or the hole in the ceiling. He looked both like a ghost and like a beaten child, remote and uncomprehending.

  I scanned the shelf below me, laden with stone tablets and pieces of statues. It was heavy. It would crush a man. But it also might not budge easily. Staying here would not save us.

  Creeping as close to the hole as I could get, I bunched my legs and leaped. The shelf swayed and rattled behind me, loud in my ears as I lurched, gasping, onto the beam, scrambling for balance. Something long and sharp scraped my elbow. I held on, righting myself. But I couldn’t stop from crying out, and the flashlight fell from my mouth, tumbling end over end, to the concrete beside Ray, glowing toward his empty, outstretched hand. I couldn’t go back for it. I couldn’t see the ceiling or the crawlspace anymore, or tell if my elbow was bleeding. I would have to feel my way, board by board, until I broke through.

  I’D LIKE TO SAY THAT I spent the next minutes in brave motion, certain that I could rescue Ray and myself, that Calvin’s death would be solved and his killer held for questioning, but the whole time I crawled, trying not to vomit, I wanted to give up. So I forced my mind to lemons. California lemons. Big, yellow, thick-rinded, and tart with juice. Sawing into them with a serrated knife. Making wedges for gin and tonics. Sucking on the sour, bright taste and swallowing. I thought about lemon trees. Lemon trees on my old block in Hollywood, draped in so many fruits no one would ever eat them all. The green of their leaves, their branches hung with gold ornaments.

  Lemons were California to me. Condensed sunlight. Sharp, stinging hope.


  I crawled in the dark toward where I thought Nelson’s office would be, slipping several times, my knee cracking the drywall. By then, my eyes had adjusted to the dimness and I could make out shapes: where the eaves crossed, the soft peaks of foam.

  I kept looking back at the hole to the secret room, to measure distance. The thought of Ray lying there, waiting or dying, paralyzed me each time, and I had to shake myself free. Finally, I estimated I might be above the office, but what if the office was locked, too? I had to get to the gallery.

  The change in temperature was turning my muscles to jelly. The nausea was cresting again.

  Lemons, I thought again, but it wasn’t working now.

  I was close. I knew it. The dust in my mouth and lungs made it hard to breathe. Sweat prickled my forehead, my once-cold face trickling with warm salt. My belly heaved. I was so tired.

  Lemons. Lemon trees. Ray. Calvin. Brenae. Kim. Nikki.

  None could lift me.

  I shut my eyes and felt a new presence like a rush of wind. She was there—here—for me, as she had been one long-ago day in Vermont when she’d stormed into my apartment in her mud-season boots and stood over my body curled with fear and grief on my futon and told me that she was taking me home. My mother. Only it wasn’t my mother alone. It was also Janis, summoning me back to Los Angeles, gripping my arm in the LAAC parking lot. It was Yegina, urging me to write Brenae’s story anyway. It was Brenae, standing at the blue pool edge, her face wet, tape ripped away from her mouth, gasping for breath. Brenae was also inside me, mothering me. Picking me up, setting me forward. Insisting I go on. Saying Just up there, it’s right up there, just twenty, then nineteen, then eighteen, seventeen, sixteen breaths. Go on. You’ll make it. I fumbled over the foam, no longer caring about my cut hands, my aching lungs, my streaming eyes. I halted a dozen feet later and began ripping at the insulation below me, then kicking my foot through, frantic, pummeling. The sheetrock dented, dented, broke, and I fell into an arch, into a nave of shoes, tearing the arch down with me, sneakers, sandals, loafers, and pumps, flying apart as they tumbled, as if their hundreds of invisible owners were bursting away in all directions. I hit the floor. The cathedral above sagged and broke. Clattering, the shoes fell after me, around me; they rained.

  26

  TWO DAYS LATER, I SAT with Alicia Ruiz in the garden courtyard of the hospital. Sprays of palmetto and thick succulents surrounded us. The garden was tucked on the fifth floor between two towering wards. It didn’t feel like a garden. It felt more like a secret, airlifted jungle with a concrete floor. There was nothing to do out here but sit in the shallow shade and slightly fresh air, trying to pretend that waiting through Ray’s surgery was restful instead of nerve-racking. A smog-white sky spread above us.

  Ray had a broken clavicle, a fractured scapula, cracked ribs, and lacerations to his right lung. For forty-eight hours, the doctors had stabilized him with IV fluids, a sling for his shoulder, and a tube to help him breathe. He looked like a car-crash victim being slowly strangled by translucent vines. Ray’s “high injury severity” score made two surgeons recommend surgery for his scapula, to put pins in, helping the damage heal faster and easier. A third countered the idea, citing potential long-term nerve damage to Ray’s arm. Ray chose the majority view, and now he was under anesthesia and we were waiting.

  I still didn’t understand how Nelson had gotten the best of him in a fight, even in an ambush at night in Ray’s apartment. Nelson had had no gun, only a billy club. A strike from behind crippled Ray’s shoulder. Then he fought back, nearly ripping an ear off Nelson’s head, but he lost. Where was Ray’s gun, where was his training at disarming opponents? It was almost as if he had intended to surrender. He couldn’t have known that I would come looking for him, that Layla, an hour after leaving us, would call her father, Steve Goetz, and use the safe word he had once given her as a teenager, and her father would alert the police to stop Nelson’s car. Ray must have expected to die. Yet here he was, alive.

  As for me, I was fine. Hollowed but fine. I had already recovered from the drugging, my right hand was badly bruised but not broken, and the other cuts were superficial. A boring, easily resolved case for the ER, but not for the LAPD. Even with Alicia and a lawyer’s intercession, I had answered the same questions dozens of times. What happened at the bar? What happened when you exited the bar? What happened when you exited the vehicle? What were Layla’s words exactly? Who lifted you into the room? Who shut the door? Did Ray Hendricks tell you anything about how he received his injuries? Nelson and Layla had been arrested outside San Diego, and the police needed an airtight case against Nelson. The case was ours: attempted murder of me and Ray. Proving anything about Calvin’s death would be hard. No evidence linking Nelson to his murder had been found.

  The warehouse on Genevieve Street in London had been searched, and the police uncovered illegal Iraqi antiquities hidden in the packaging of contemporary artwork, headed for the United States. The pieces were all small and lightweight, and they fit into cleverly concealed hollows in the plastic foam that kept the contemporary art in place. According to a British employee, who offered information in exchange for police protection, the business had been running for seven years, ever since Nelson had bought the property. The same witness had also known James Compton, and knew that Compton had used the back room of the bar where Nelson worked to purchase looted items from college students who traveled to Turkey for spring break. It was “a popular racket for a while,” the witness said. Free vacations, great pay, and the “added ethical bonus of supporting the funding of contemporary artists” while rescuing Iraqi treasures. He was sure that Nelson de Wilde had gotten his start watching Compton. The witness promised he would name international players in exchange for a plea.

  All in all, illegal art smuggling and attempted murder were enough to put Nelson in jail, but not to convict him of a life-threatening assault on Calvin. An ongoing search of Nelson’s properties had not yet turned up any other proof. Why would it? Who would keep evidence of beating someone nearly to death?

  “Do you think there’s any possibility at all that Nelson killed Brenae?” I asked Alicia. “What if she had connected him to Calvin’s death?”

  “Not his usual method.” Her voice deepened. “Her body was unmarked. The location was too public. And he wasn’t that skilled. If he had killed her, he would have slipped up somewhere and the police would have found it. They spent weeks. Ray didn’t see any holes in her case, either.”

  She wore an uncharacteristic T-shirt and jeans, her feet in strappy gold sandals. This was off-work Alicia, and I could imagine her lounging back, a magazine on her lap, but she sat stiffly upright beside me. She was worried about Ray, but she was also still wary of me. I wished I knew how to signal my gratitude to her without insinuating that I expected to be pals. Alicia sipped coffee from a paper cup and checked her watch, until her phone buzzed. She looked at the number, frowned, then held it to her ear.

  “Yes,” she said. “Yes.” She listened for a while. “That’s great.” She rose and walked to the corner of the garden, standing under an angel’s trumpet tree, looking up at the dangling yellow flowers as she spoke. After an intense conversation, she hung up and strode back, sitting down again. “That was Layla’s lawyer,” she said. “She will cooperate with us fully as part of a plea bargain. And Erik’s been released,” she said. “Hal Giroux went to the station and spoke on his behalf. He said that he personally had requested that Erik talk Brenae out of sharing her video. He claimed he was worried Erik’s visa status might get threatened if the school took action against him.”

  So Hal had finally publicly admitted it: He’d always taken Erik’s side and not Brenae’s. Even after he’d watched Lesson in Red, after he’d witnessed Erik’s body pin her body and her stricken face stare back at him, demanding to be seen, even after hearing her agonized words, Hal had decided that Erik’s acts were not real and that Brenae’s outrage was a performance. He had seen all the evidence
before him, and still had not believed.

  “Erik says now that he did enter her studio on Tuesday,” said Alicia. “He asked to see the video. Brenae refused to show it to him. She told Erik that he had to confess to Hal first that he’d coerced her into sex last fall, in exchange for him helping her get on Hal’s crew. Erik said he denied coercing her. He claimed the sex was always consensual.”

  Alicia paused on this and rolled her eyes.

  “Brenae also begged Erik to take her gun away,” she said, “saying she didn’t know what she would do if she kept it. He refused.”

  “He didn’t take her seriously,” I said.

  “He didn’t have to. He had his idol’s support,” said Alicia.

  When Erik heard that Hal had come to the police station to defend him, the student broke down and retracted his confession of aiding in a murder. Of course he did. It was an empty drama. And Hal had rescued him again.

  I tried to imagine that first, long-ago conversation between Hal and Erik about the video, two men sorting through the accusations of a woman they’d both held power over. I could see them sitting across from each other in Hal’s office, the posters and accolades all over the wall, celebrating the success of the school. LAAC didn’t need a scandal. It didn’t need a young woman claiming she’d said yes but meant no, and showing her shocking footage. Maybe Hal had told Erik to apologize, to settle things privately. Maybe he’d even reprimanded Erik. But whatever he said, he defended him as innocent. He gave Erik permission to ignore Brenae’s pain as oversized, hysterical.

  Hal’s lack of self-protectiveness surprised me. He should have seen how this could blow up. All he had to do was contact his student services office about Brenae’s video, and they would have descended on her immediately with the appropriate counsel and resources. He could have let Erik burn, washing his hands of the whole matter with a single phone call.