I noticed how his receding hairline exposed a slab of forehead.
“John’s told me the story of your daughter. If it helps, I don’t think she’s involved in this ring. They concentrate on teens. Your child was too young for them when she disappeared. Anyway, they’re into something more lucrative. It’s all about money. Your case seems isolated.”
But Vinni’s older now, I thought.
His words pierced me in the same wound I’d been nursing for almost five years.
“Do you think Hannah and George are involved in the prostitution ring?” I asked Dobson as he studied the photos.
“No. We can’t find any connection other than they live two buildings down from the alleyway on the same street. Wait a minute.” Al lifted his eyes and turned. “This picture. The one of this girl.” He pointed to one I had photographed where I had a clear view of a face. The girl in the photo held her hair behind her ear. She couldn’t have been more than fifteen. Her eyes looked sleepy, with heavy lids shutting down a third of the world.
“I know this face. We found her dead last month in an abandoned apartment building. She was soaked through her clothes. Strangulation. When we found her, she was nothing but skin and bones.”
At least now the girl on my couch has a chance, doesn’t she?
Neighbor Man stepped into the kitchen, a few feet away. I knew he was speaking into his phone, but his face was turned away from me. He hung up right before there were three taps on the door, a pause, two more taps, and a ring on his cell phone. Al put his phone in his pocket and opened the door. The girl stirred in her sleep as two men entered the room. With deliberate care, one of them picked up the girl in his arms. The other adjusted a blanket around her small frame.
“What will happen to her?” I asked anyone who might answer me.
Al Dobson spoke in a gentle voice. “You did something pretty brave tonight. We’ll take care of her from here.”
The girl opened her eyes before they carried her away.
Al picked up his hat to follow them. “I’ll need all these pictures. I’ll send one of my guys down.”
The door closed, and I reached for my phone.
“John?” To say his name in the middle of the night made my mouth go dry.
“I’m already on my way. Dobson just called.”
AN HOUR LATER, I jumped at a light knocking on my door. My fingers felt sticky from the girl’s dried blood—a few droplets I had missed washing on the third and fourth fingers of my right hand.
“It’s John,” he said. I guess detectives know how to enter a locked building.
I opened the door, and he quickly stepped inside. He pressed me into his cold woolen coat. He took both his hands and cupped my face.
“You’re okay?” he whispered.
I nodded and gently brushed off a nest of snowflakes resting on his head.
“You took a big chance tonight. Nobody expected you to be in that alleyway. Nobody knew how it would go down. Agents were watching.”
Shocked. I pulled away.
“You mean they watched me walk down the alleyway and go to the front of St. Stefan’s?”
“You could have been hurt or even killed. What got into you?”
John D’Orfini wanted an answer.
I thought about it for a moment, but it was all very clear.
“The child needed saving,” I said. The horror of the night struck me as I slipped to the floor. I broke apart from the inside and wept.
If thoughts make us who we are, then I worried about what kind of woman I was. I thought of last month, when John D’Orfini told me his former wife had gotten in the car in the middle of the night and driven away, leaving a note on the kitchen table. “It’s not working. So sorry. Just forget me.”
“As if she was a bad novel I had been forced to read in high school and could put down after I got through the final page,” he said as we lay naked, stomachs full of pasta whipped with butter and cream. “We were only married seven months. Not much of an investment.”
I was not someone who left a note in the middle of the night and snuck away. I was a mother who longed to hold her daughter. I painted so I could find a way to breathe. So I could stay alive and breathe in my child when she returned.
John D’Orfini drew back from the photos on the wall. “What the hell?”
“I had to do something,” I said.
“What aren’t you telling me?” He stared straight through to the place where I hid things.
Was now the time to speak? To say, “Vinni’s coming home but I don’t know when”? Instead I said, “I can’t.”
“Can’t what? Talk to me?”
I shook my head and walked over to the window, where the curtain hung puddled and dusty on the floor. I drew it back and peeked out the window from the side, the way I always did. Dawn was breaking. The outside glistened with snow crystals. The streets lay quiet. My lips remained closed.
Remember, I am not someone who leaves a note in the middle of the night.
John D’Orfini walked up behind me and slipped his arms around my waist. I leaned back into his neck—a perfect resting place.
“Sometimes it doesn’t seem real that I’m living this life. Children missing. My own daughter gone for so long. Kosinski.” I stepped away and moved around the room, avoiding the bloodstains from the girl. “I know you’re shocked by the wall of photos, but I had to be sure that Vinni wasn’t one of these girls.”
I told John D’Orfini only part of it—the part about being sure.
“I’m shocked.” He gestured wide with his arm. He pointed to the wall with his hand turned open. “If you’d been caught . . . If the guys running this ring . . .”
“But I wasn’t caught.” I concealed Kosinski’s warning.
“You’ve stepped into something you know nothing about,” he said.
I began, “Hannah and George—”
He interrupted. “The FBI’s been watching them because of the alleyway, but Dobson doesn’t think they have anything to do with it. They’re simple bakers, Maddy. That’s it.”
I stopped moving. “That can’t be it! George knows I’m at the window. He’s been watching me!”
“You’ve gone too far,” John D’Orfini said.
“I’ve got no more to say.” I left him standing in the middle of the room while I went to the bathroom. When I came out, he was sipping water from a tall glass. He had poured one for me and set it on the counter by the sink. My room was small, but I felt as if we were miles away from each other. He reached for the glass and offered it to me. Seconds passed before he spoke. I took a long sip. He waited.
“Why do you think George has been watching you?” he finally said.
“I was locked out one night. He found me outside the apartment.”
It was part of the answer. Just not the whole thing.
YEAR FIVE
THIRTY-FIVE
TUBA HAD MADE RESERVATIONS AT THE EXCELSIOR HOTEL Ernst in Cologne, directly across the street from the cathedral. The girl at the reception desk told us we could walk to the Käthe Kollwitz Museum. In the breakfast room, I sipped tea in an elegant china cup etched with a gold-leaf scroll. I could barely eat, from nerves and excitement.
Since that first year when Evelyn had taken me to see Stanley and he had served me strawberries in a bowl, I never failed to remember how he had urged me to nourish myself in the midst of my despair. I chose six large, ripe strawberries from the buffet table and spooned them into my bowl. A young woman in a black skirt and black long-sleeved blouse, who had been standing nearby to assist the diners, took my plate and cut the berries into perfect slices. She brought the bowl to my table and offered me sweet cream as a topping. Thick, rich, pure, it coated my tongue as the juices from the strawberries burst inside my mouth.
TUBA LOOKED AT her watch.
“Are you worried about our meeting with the curators?” I asked.
“Oh, no, my dear. That’s not it.” She hesitated and inhaled a breath
so deep, I could see her chest shiver inside her demure white blouse. Sleeves hanging like falling leaves.
“I received a message this morning to wait in the lobby for . . . visitors,” Tuba said.
“People you know?” I asked.
She nodded slowly and proceeded to put on her gloves.
“My children.” Her eyes opened as if a window had been raised.
“You’ve never mentioned children,” I said.
“Two. Only two now. Of course, they’re grown. Living their own lives. I haven’t seen them in a very long time. I’m a bit nervous.”
Suddenly, her tight chignon looked wrong for the soft face across from me that looked about to crumble. Her eyebrows moved inward as the wrinkled skin in between traveled downward. As her skin fell, I wondered if I should reach across the table to catch it. Tuba lowered her face as she drew her shawl around her shoulders. The longer end fell with a series of painted red roses perfectly placed below her left collarbone. When she looked up across the table, she smiled. The shadow shifted slightly.
“Would you mind going on without me this morning? I feel a need to rest.” Tuba said.
THE COLD STUNG my face as I walked outside. I looped my scarf twice around my neck and tucked the ends inside my coat. My flat-heeled boots made barely a sound as I walked in between the morning crowd. The museum opened at 10:00 a.m. My instructions were to arrive at eleven o’clock. I looked forward to meeting the six other artists. From the distance, I saw two large banners flying lengthwise on either side of the building. One banner had the words SCHÖNHEIT, SCHMERZ, UND VERLUST. Opposite, on the other side of the door, in English: BEAUTY, PAIN, AND LOSS.
The museum was smaller than I imagined. Two of the curators I had met months earlier greeted us warmly inside the front door. A private breakfast meeting awaited us downstairs, off a corridor from the lower gallery. One artist was from Spain, two from England, one from Nigeria, and two from Germany. I was the only American. At first, I was intimidated. What place did I have in an international art show? Self-doubt plummeted me into silence.
One of the German curators I had met in September at Tuba’s estate by the ocean approached me. He must have sensed my discomfort as I stood alone.
“Your Number Eleven has caused some excitement,” he said in perfect English.
The paintings had arrived earlier and were in the process of being hung upstairs and downstairs. My work was hung in the “Pain” section of the exhibit.
“Really?” I asked.
“It’s already hung downstairs. Would you like to see it?” The curator gestured for me to follow him. Walking behind him as we went downstairs, I noticed how his torso leaned slightly toward the side. A crooked spine, I thought.
The two German artists stood in front of Number Eleven.
“Dies ist der künstler, Madeline Stewart.” The curator introduced me, even though we had met upstairs. Both nodded. The female, blond, in her fifties, looked back at the painting. The male appeared to be much younger. Early thirties.
“Das Gut. Gut,” he said.
I mumbled, “Thank you.” I was not used to this. To any of it. How had it all started? Without Tuba with me, I felt so alone. The way I had felt in the middle of my marriage to Steve. The way I felt when I sat at the bar at the Bryant Grill Café and ordered a glass of champagne. The way older women in New York did who wore thick gold bangles on their wrists and waited for someone to notice.
After the male artist had complimented me on Number Eleven, I excused myself and raced up the stairs to where the “Beauty” section of the exhibit was being hung in the upper gallery. The Nigerian artist, a woman whose age I couldn’t tell and whose face had the most luminous skin I had ever seen, smiled in my direction. I looked at her work. Spare, uncomplicated profiles of African children covered the winding hallway upstairs. Each oversize painting told a story of one child at a time.
As we watched the paintings settle onto their places on the wall, the Nigerian woman and I walked together. She spoke of being away from her daughters and son for the first time. How surprised she was to miss them, even amid the excitement of the art exhibit. Her turban, washed in creams and charcoal grays, wound round and round her head into a huge bouquet of braided fabric. Her teeth glistened white against her blue-black skin. Her smile matched the broad ones painted onto the faces of some of the children. At the evening reception, Tuba immediately picked the Nigerian woman above the other artists for her sensitivity and technique.
“She knows beauty,” she said.
What do I know? I wondered. A bitter taste coated the inside of my mouth.
I was most interested in the panel scheduled for the following afternoon. Tuba and her son and daughter took seats in the third row. She sat between them and held hands with each of them. A string of tables faced the raised, stadium-like seating wound into a wide semicircle. Each artist had a microphone set in front of her seat. The moderator of the discussion was the curator who had showed me Number Eleven when it was first hung. He had sought me out twice at the previous evening’s reception to introduce me to other artists from Germany. One was a couple who had traveled in from Munich, and the other a single, elderly man with paint still clinging to his whiskered chin. He seemed oblivious to the purples and blues hanging like drips of shampoo from a long-ago head wash.
Members of the media attended and asked questions. Some spoke only German, but a translator interpreted. “Does it depress you to paint such angst on the canvas?” “How long have you been painting?” “Did your parents support your decision to paint?” And finally, the question I prayed no one would dare: “Do you think you’ve become a successful painter because of dealing with your daughter’s disappearance . . . maybe even death?”
There it was—the question Hilda had asked me almost five years before. Twisting and turning.
Does my work keep me from my daughter? Have I failed so miserably? If so, did Hilda have the right to take her from me?
“Tell us, Ms. Stewart, what propelled you all these years to paint?”
What to say? What to say? How much truth dare I say aloud?
“I have always loved to paint.” I cleared my throat to continue.
“Painting allows possibilities. The possibility of my daughter coming home. The possibility of a new life, better than the old one. The possibility of finding myself after being lost.”
The person who had asked the question nodded as she scribbled into a small pad. I closed my lower lip over the top. Shame shut me down. Words banged up against one another. The possibility of a new life . . . I should have explained.
The Nigerian artist addressed each question eagerly. Again, her smile broadened, as if coaxing me along to enjoy the discussion. As the afternoon light dimmed outside, I noticed a woman stand up and make her way to the aisle. The museum had hired a videographer and his crew to tape the panel. The bright lights made it almost impossible to see the faces in the audience. Just as the woman stood, the lights went off. I saw her turn at the top of the steps when she was leaving. In my head, a noise that only I could hear exploded. The blood in my veins froze. My heart expanded into a racing mess of blood and muscle inside my chest.
The woman was Hilda.
Her hair was the same. Loosely tied into a bun in the middle of her head. Her body was thinner than I remembered, but it still had that round shape that Vinni used to say was like an apple.
I stood up, and the Nigerian artist next to me whispered, “We are not finished.” I ignored her and left my seat, running and shouting, “Wait, wait! In the back. Someone stop her. Please!”
I tripped over the chair where the Spanish artist sat and landed on my right arm. Pain shot up my elbow, but I scrambled to my feet and yelled, “Wait, wait! Please. Stop her!”
The camera lights blinded me as they started up again. Fighting the brightness, I tried to run up the aisle steps. I thought I saw Hilda turn once more in my direction before she was out the door. I raced after her, but she ha
d faded into the bitter winter afternoon.
Holiday shoppers crowded the streets. A soft snowfall rested on the shoulders of winter coats.
Someone called my name, but I ignored the voice until he was at my side. I recognized him as one of the ushers who had greeted the gallery guests when they arrived.
I was out of breath and my side hurt from racing down the street, looking everywhere for a gray-haired woman wearing a tan coat.
“Here,” he said, as he removed his coat and placed it over my shoulders. “You’re shaking.”
I threw my arms inside the long sleeves of the coat and wrapped myself up in a desperate embrace. I had no idea where to go. I walked up one street and down another.
Two hours later, I was frozen and lost. Had I imagined that I saw Hilda? How could I prove this to anyone, least of all the local police? If this were Hilda, then she had slipped through my fingers, but why would she have taken the chance and come to the museum? True, there had been articles in the newspapers leading up to the exhibit that mentioned my name as a featured artist. Hilda must have read about me. She must have wanted to see me—but from a distance. What if I had been able to stop her? What might she have said, other than “I wanted your daughter, so I took her”?
Would she have pleaded for my forgiveness?
I shuddered. Vinni had to be close. I leaned against a stone building and rocked my head into the cement. I could barely feel my lips, numb from the bitter wind that strengthened as the afternoon faded. The snowfall picked up and cast a sheet of white across all of Cologne. I continued to walk, not knowing where I was going.
Up ahead, I saw a sign: POLIZEI. I pushed open the door to the station. I ignored the oversize coat bearing down on my weakened limbs. I walked up to a glass enclosure where a policeman stood with his head bowed over papers. The man looked up. “Kann ich Ihnen helfen?”
I ignored his German.
“I saw the woman who stole my daughter. She’s here in Cologne.” I did not flail my arms or scratch at my head.
A Matter of Chance Page 24