by Jamie Mason
“But after everything, this thing seems . . . cursed. Not that I believe in that sort of stuff. But if that doesn’t bother them, or you, I’d prefer to be rid of it. I don’t know, maybe the history of it is a deal breaker. That’s fine, too. In light of everything, I just thought I’d extend the first gesture. Maybe to try to set things right. If you want to talk about it, call me back at this number. I look forward to hearing from you.”
Owen closed the voice mail app, his fingers firm on the edge of the case so as not to accidentally hit a delete command out of habit. He’d be listening to that message again. He was sure of it.
What the fuck was this guy playing at?
Jonathan, the Jonathan, put his head up like a prairie dog in the middle of all of this shit and acted as if Marcelline had died at the scene. He seemed completely unaware that Owen knew, firsthand, that she hadn’t. Which, if he wasn’t lying, would only mean that he hadn’t spoken to her since that night. And that meant she’d been telling Owen the truth. She and Jonathan weren’t partners.
The air felt thick in Owen’s throat.
The other possibility was that perhaps she’d not made it far after her little joyride in the Mercedes. Maybe she’d tried, but never made it back to Jonathan and their plan. Maybe she died of a blood clot or sepsis as a fevered Jane Doe in some undiscovered place, and Owen had for years been looking for someone who didn’t exist anymore. It would explain some things.
He caught himself gripping the seat’s edge in his fist. He flexed the painful lock out of his knuckles and blew out a big deep breath. Now what?
There was no coincidence that Jonathan had surfaced after all this time, ho-humming aloud—today—if Owen knew that the painting was still available. You’re a ham-handed little asshole sometimes, aren’t you, Jonathan?
The delivery of the message had been smooth enough, but the real question still blared out around the polished edges. This wasn’t simply about what Jonathan wanted Owen to think of him. This was about what Jonathan wanted to know. Had Owen seen the video? Jonathan wanted to know what kind of trouble he was in, and then how to get out of it.
And what kind of trouble was he in from Owen?
The Anningers had cooled toward Owen considerably after what had gone wrong that night. Blue blood had stripped cunning from them as surely as it had dialed up the sensitivity in their asses for a pea under a stack of mattresses. Their punishments were blunt and unsophisticated. Petty. They rolled their eyes at him and had relegated him to a series of dull special projects that made him want to break jaws just to keep himself awake.
He had an ear and an eye for the structure of it all, why they were the way they were. But he never had a reason to talk about it outside the few conversations he’d had with Marcelline. He’d lost himself in that connection, in those exchanges that brushed the line of what was not okay to say about the people they both worked for.
The image of her, of Marcelline looking up from her paperwork, eyes smiling at him from under her long lashes, it pulled him awake on the pillow so many mornings, still after all this time.
A tingle climbed the rungs of his ribs. Everything else could burn. He cared a lot about this one.
This Jonathan character had said way more than he meant to in his message, perhaps mistaking Owen for a simple gamecock that could be useful to him, if only Owen could be convinced to believe the right things.
The leather on the steering wheel of Owen’s C63 had an irregular dark patch at about two o’clock, right where the smooth-grain leather wrap gave over to the grippy padding. A similar smudge was at the edge of the center console, rubbed nearly invisible by the people who had detailed the car after he got it back. A few of the white stitches in the cover on the gear selector weren’t cream colored anymore. The dealership had wanted to reupholster the stained trim, but Owen had declined.
Marcelline had bled a little in her flight. He never knew how to feel about that.
So Jonathan wanted something from Owen that was probably as simple as a lot of money and to be rid of an item that could land him in quite a bit of trouble. It would be nothing for Owen to make that happen. It was his job to do just that.
If Marcelline was in fact dead, all that was in it for Owen was the chance to know what had really happened, to maybe finally be sure whether she’d set him up. And if she wasn’t dead, it was the same thing, but with even more potential.
He scanned the dashboard, a beautiful thing, really. He admired the mellow sheen of his trouser leg. The fine, carefully crafted things in life. He thought of Marcelline, who never got closer than his guest bed.
He keyed back into his voice mail and listened to the message again.
She was there in Jonathan’s script. The bit about the curse of the painting and all the Br’er Rabbit dissembling over how the bad history of the piece might be a problem for the Anningers. Please don’t throw me in that briar patch. Owen could practically feel her smirking.
Jonathan had known her better than he let on. Or he’d been paying better attention than he wanted to admit, as any straight man would in her presence. Either way, she’d left enough of an impression to write lines for him to speak when he wanted to wield her influence, even all this time later.
But the I’ve had a hard time moving past it, myself was pure, pointed fabrication. Owen knew what it meant to have a hard time moving past Marcelline. He knew exactly how it felt to not make much progress toward not thinking about her, in wondering if she was a conniving bitch who had found him disposable. And for nothing more than money. He knew what that feeling would sound like in someone’s voice. But it wasn’t there in Jonathan’s message. They were not brothers in disillusion, no matter that the man thought it was a coin for him to spend.
Owen had only a few images of Jonathan in his mind: the blandly handsome, stoic mask at the handshake; the hooded interest in the formalities of the exchange, trying not to look on high alert, as if he weren’t counting the number of steps to the exits.
But the image of him prying Marcelline’s hand off her neck, her mouth in a shocked little O and the quick lurch of blood as he pinned her arms down, that was vivid. Had Jonathan been helping her or hurting her? He’d looked over at Owen, unreadable.
There were things yet to know.
Goddamn, the Anningers’ silly wants were so boring.
Owen watched across a lane of parking spaces. Beyond the chain-link was a line of boys daring one another into the deep end, nudging, close to shoving, heads swiveling to take the measure of the others. Everything they knew about the world was obvious in the curve of their spines and the tension in their shoulders. But in that half-naked lineup you couldn’t tell what they would become. The short, skinny little twerp might be due for a growth spurt. The fat one might discover offensive tackle or physics. The one who stood a half step away, straight as a soldier, might find luck and opportunity that took him to places he’d never imagined but cost him his soul.
Owen took up his phone and tapped into the service’s message details for Jonathan’s number. He wouldn’t pick up. Of course he wouldn’t. He’d want to hear Owen’s tone on his own turf. He’d want to analyze Owen’s words and inflections to know whether to destroy his disposable phone or to roll the dice and take his next turn elsewhere.
Owen put his hand over the stain on the steering wheel’s leather and squeezed. Marcelline.
“Jonathan. Good to hear from you. Of course, I remember you. Who forgets something like that? You’re right in that there’s still interest and much to talk about. But I think it’s better, for everyone, if we talk in person. If you give me twenty-four hours, I can be wherever you’d like. You say where, you say when, I’ll make it happen. Text me the particulars, if that’s easier.”
Owen paused, then gave Jonathan the least of his own sentences back.
“I look forward to hearing from you.”
Owen closed the call and cranked the Mercedes’s engine back to life. He didn’t want to love the car. It
had an axle in both worlds—too showy in one and too humble in the other. He felt weak in that, at his heart, the car was in the same category as his rain-shower fixture in his bathroom and his underwear and his bedsheets and the occasional woman who touched his naked skin. The car was something intimate, a beautiful chain to the world that other, lesser people seemed to enjoy.
He thought of wacky, economy-class Charlie and the day he’d first seen the painting in the video. Something somersaulted inside him—then and again now.
He dropped the Mercedes into gear and pulled out into the mild suburban traffic.
He’d told Jonathan to give him twenty-four hours notice to meet up. But Owen didn’t need twenty-four hours. He probably didn’t need twenty-four minutes. He’d been in town for a day and a half, not knowing whether the girl, whom he’d watched walking home from school with her friends, deep in conversation punctuated in the occasional wild, uncontrolled gestures of youth, was heading to the plain little house that linked back to Marcelline, Jonathan, or some unknown and unlucky soul who would eventually tell Owen, with a last breath if need be, what he wanted to know.
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
* * *
Marcelline was growing convinced that the sense of knowing yourself was a delusion. The smackdowns you delivered in the bathroom mirror rarely happened to a foe who wasn’t your own reflection. The scripts you wrote in your head were almost never performed. You knew what was important to you, but you didn’t insist. You knew what was right and still steered around it. You took self-defense classes and could, in theory, stay frosty and flip an attacker over your hip. But in the end you still stood there and got shot in the neck.
The thing that bothered her, though, was wondering which was the real Marcelline. Was it the one who planned, or the one who abandoned plans and principles in the face of life rushing over her?
She wanted to see Jonathan, wanted to lay eyes on him. A plan about what to do would start with getting a second first impression of him. She’d only known him for a few days a long time ago.
There weren’t any photographs, not even of the painting. He wouldn’t send it to her. He wouldn’t give her his number. He never even told her his last name and made a big joke of it, promising it for later when all was said and done. And deposited.
She couldn’t even be sure if what he looked like in her mind would match up to reality. Every time they’d been together, she’d been buzzing with distraction. They’d had sex in the dark after a lot of wine. And in the last moments there was the moon, for all the help it was to see clearly by, and patches of streetlight along the weedy lot. But the darkness had swallowed most of the detail of that night. The last she’d seen of him, she was sure she was dying.
She knew sharply what she’d felt toward him in that moment, but the specific features of his face wavered uncertainly in the memory. Marcelline had this recurring horrible fantasy that she might have walked right past him on the street between then and now and not even noticed. In her ugly daydream, he turned as she went by and smiled at her blindness.
She needed to see him because she needed to know how she’d handle it. She was afraid of what it would do to her to know, to recognize—not just remember and guess—what he looked like. She was desperate to put a face, the right one, on this thing.
Or so she said. So she thought. But instead, here she was in the library with Carly and Ada for the fourth day in a row.
“It seems like cheating,” Carly said. “I’m just copying what these great famous artists did. That’s not very right, is it?”
The table was covered with art books opened to iconic paintings: Starry Night, Girl with a Pearl Earring, Guernica, A Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte, Water Lilies. In front of her was Michelangelo’s The Creation of Adam. Carly peered up from her paper every few strokes, checking it against the zoomed-in detail of the famous fresco.
Her sketch pads and pens, two full rainbows of colored pencils, and a set each of oil pastels and charcoals took up the rest of the tabletop. Ada had brought along a mandala coloring book and a big box of crayons that Carly had frequently borrowed from during the lesson. But Ada had left off the coloring and was flipping though an art book that covered most of her lap.
Marcelline looked up from her own book that she’d been hiding behind to think. “I’m not suggesting you sign your name to it and try to pass it off as your own idea. It’s just an exercise. Brain training. You look at it and try to decide what medium and technique you’d use to get something like that effect. You guess at how to duplicate the strokes you see, or think you see. You make the leap and find out how close you were to right. All it costs is paper and time.
“However it goes, it doesn’t matter. You’ll know more about what your hand can do, and your eye, and your materials. And I think, really, trying to understand how they did it makes you feel a little closer to these guys. It’s a time machine.” Marcelline swept her hand over the open books. “Besides, what do you think you’re doing when you’re drawing Peter Pan and Pokémon?”
“Those are just cartoons.”
Marcelline went wide-eyed at Carly. “I am going to pretend you didn’t even say that. Cartoonists aren’t artists?”
Carly blushed. “No. They are. I know that. I mean, it’s just not serious. . . .”
Marcelline smiled to reassure her. “Yeah, it is. And so are you. So don’t forget it. And be careful with your thoughts. They matter.”
Ada held up her open book and showed them Munch’s The Scream. She wrinkled her nose. “I’ve seen this before. I don’t like it.”
“No?” Marcelline said.
“It’s kinda cool, though.” Carly nodded at it.
“It’s creepy,” Ada said.
Marcelline could only agree. “It is. But why do you think it’s famous?”
Ada scoffed. “Because people like creepy stuff. Some people do. Creepy people do.”
They all laughed, but Carly stopped first. Marcelline watched her study the picture. “What are you thinking?”
“About maybe why it’s famous,” Carly said without looking away from it.
Marcelline dropped her gaze to the tabletop to keep the weight of her own stare off Carly. She kept still so as not to cause a ripple of distraction. These things were fragile, and self-consciousness could crush it in a second. She gave it its elbow room, letting the possibilities click together in Carly’s head.
Carly leaned back in her chair. “It’s famous because it’s really good.”
Ada was indignant. “What? No, it’s not. It’s weird. And it’s ugly. Sorry. Just being honest. I don’t know why it’s even a thing. I mean, who even let him? It’s creepy.”
Carly kept staring at the picture on the page. “Yeah, but it’s good because that’s not what creepy looks like.” She wiggled her fingers at the image. “Nothing really looks like that.” She leaned back again and pointed to punctuate her conclusion. “But that’s exactly what creepy feels like.”
Ada was shaking her head.
“No, no,” Carly said. “No. See? If it actually looked real, like something real-life creepy, it would be less creepy, because creepy is a feeling, not a look.” She turned to Marcelline. “Right?”
Marcelline sucked in her cheeks to keep from beaming. “I’m not sure it’s ever been explained better.”
Carly beamed for the both of them.
Ada shrugged and went back to her book. Carly took up her pencil.
Marcelline tapped the photo of the Michelangelo. “Try just the hands. Clean sheet. Use . . .” She hummed over the tray of charcoals and drew out a slim vine stick. “Try this one.”
Carly went straight back to being lost in her work, and Marcelline into her thoughts. The room faded to vague around her, Carly’s scratching charcoal and the library murmur receding to nothing. Marcelline ran her tongue over her teeth and drew her fingers along the track of her scar.
She knew so little about Jonathan. She was acting as if everything h
inged on the moment she saw him, as if as soon as that was confirmed, she’d know what to do. But that was a bit of wishful thinking. Sure, she’d probably rattle the bejesus out of him. As fun as that sounded, she hadn’t survived and come all this way to raise his blood pressure for a few minutes.
She took inventory of what she actually knew. With as much power as she’d given him to launch her into an entirely different life, it was embarrassing how little she could say for sure about Jonathan. She didn’t even know how he’d come by the Flinck. He’d been as cagey about that as he’d been about everything else.
The painting they’d been dealing with was only one small part of the haul from the Gardner Museum theft.
He couldn’t have all of it. What-if tugged for attention.
Marcelline’s heartbeat skipped wild in her chest. She pulled over one of the largest collection volumes and checked the index and found her page. She stuck in a pencil as a bookmark and went back to the index. She held the second place with her finger.
“Hey, Carly.”
Carly looked up. She’d managed to rub charcoal under one eye. She looked like a boxer two days after a bad round.
Marcelline wet a napkin from her water bottle. “Here, you’ve got . . .” She motioned for Carly to wipe her face.
“Oh, thanks.”
“Hey, so I liked what you saw in the Munch, in The Scream, and the way you figured out your reaction to it. I want to see what you think of this one.”
Carly lit up with an eagerness to collect more pride, to win the gold star of Marcelline’s approval. That it was just a ploy for information made the smiling back at her hurt a little. Marcelline winced, but stretched it into, hopefully, a more convincing expression.
She opened the book to Rembrandt’s The Storm on the Sea of Galilee, one of the missing treasures from the Gardner Museum. She watched Carly’s face for a jolt of recognition.