Last Night, page 15
“Think of Banksy. A great artist who hits and runs, mostly on outdoor sites. And Keith Haring—he started in the graffiti subculture.”
“They were original,” Hadley said. “Brave, defying convention. I am literally the definition of convention. Johnny and I work for municipalities.”
“I’ve seen what you do, in person,” Kate said. “And I’ve looked you up online. Lots of articles out there, Hadley. Your murals are pure art.” She smiled. “I see subterfuge in them.”
Was it possible she had detected the little clues Hadley left, buried in every mural she did? No one had ever mentioned them to her before. She always incorporated hidden objects, details, or phrases that reflected her beliefs. In one completely sexist and macho scene of a male crew harpooning a whale, she had painted the captain as a woman—not dress-wise but essence-wise—and the words “Watch me save the whales” were woven into the hem of her coat. Until Kate, not one person had ever mentioned those details to her—not even Johnny had noticed.
“Would you ever think of producing work for a gallery show?” Kate asked.
The question made Hadley feel both flattered and uncomfortable. “Yes, of course,” she said.
“We’ll have to explore that,” Kate said.
“Tell me more about Beth,” she said. “How you listen for her in every knock at the door. And how she reminds you of Maddie.”
“That’s easy,” Kate said. “Your love for Maddie reminds me of mine for Beth. Both our sisters were murdered.”
“Thoughts flood into my mind, and I push them away, over and over. My sister is dead,” Hadley said. “I’ve watched true-crime shows, read the news, know that murder happens to other families. I’ve thought of how terrible it is, and I’ve felt their pain—or so I thought.”
“But never, really, till now,” Kate said.
Hadley nodded. “I would watch the shows and wonder how someone could end another’s life. Who would do that? What could possibly drive them to do it? But I never imagined it could happen to Maddie.”
“And to you,” Kate said. “Because the killer took your life, too. You’re still living and breathing, but . . .”
“I’m not the same,” Hadley said.
“I know,” Kate said.
“I never will be,” Hadley said, a question in those words.
“You can’t go back to how it was before Maddie’s murder, but it will change,” Kate said. “It won’t always be like this.”
“Yet you say you still listen for her to call or knock.”
Kate didn’t reply to that, and her silence said it all.
“You have a niece, too?” Hadley said.
“Yes, Beth’s daughter.”
“Also an only child?”
“Yes,” Kate said. “Samantha—Sam. Very loved and doted on. But she was a teenager when Beth died. They were fighting a lot.”
“That’s normal for that age,” Hadley said. “Maddie and I were pretty much in a constant state of rebellion till we got to college. Our parents were strict. How is Sam doing now?”
“Well, it was terrible for a long time afterward. Sam felt so guilty for all the fighting, for how distant she’d been—and so critical of Beth. So there was a long spell where she tried to bury the feelings—drinking a lot, pot, other things. Then a crash into bad depression.”
“Navigating grief, too,” Hadley said.
“Definitely.”
“Did she get through it?” Hadley asked.
“She did. It was kind of a miracle. We were going to send her to rehab, or a hospital for depression, but she came out of it on her own.”
Hadley was happy for Kate and her niece, that after all Sam had been through, she was somehow okay. But she could only think about CeCe.
“What’s going to happen to CeCe?” Hadley asked. “If she’s even still alive, how will she live with what she must have seen?”
“She just will,” Kate said. “Because you’ll be there with her.”
25
CeCe sat very still in the house with Ronnie. Zane had told her the rules, and she had thought Ronnie was going to take her somewhere else, but they hadn’t left yet. She realized that something was happening outside the house, but she didn’t know what. She could tell Ronnie was nervous. He crouched by the window, peeking over the sill. He wasn’t paying any attention to the stove. It needed wood, so the fire was going out, and the house was getting cold again.
She heard voices outside, men talking. Were they good people or bad? Was it the commander and his brother? They were good. She had been able to tell by the things they said, but what if it wasn’t them out there? If she screamed, would they come to help her, or would they kill her father and Aunt Hadley? Ronnie kept turning to her, putting his finger to his lips: Be quiet!
Should she do what he wanted? What if she yelled and tried to run outside and the men were even worse than he was? She was thinking as hard as she could, glancing around for a way to escape so none of them would see her—not Ronnie, not any of the other men—but she didn’t see any doors, and the only window was covered by a thick curtain. Who knew what lay outside?
Her stomach was better, but her nose and cheeks hurt from where she had fallen, and she kept touching her broken front tooth with her tongue. The tooth edge was sharp. It kept scraping her tongue and making it bleed. She rubbed her tooth with her finger, and when she saw the blood on it, she wiped it on her knee. Then she did something naughty, and she didn’t really know why she did it, but when Ronnie wasn’t looking, she dabbed her finger in more blood and wrote on the wall.
CeCe liked to draw. Her mommy was an artist. Sometimes she and CeCe sat in her studio, painting and drawing pictures. CeCe had her own watercolors and charcoal pencils. She had a tall stool at her mother’s worktable, and the long-necked lamp cast cozy light on her paper. She would tell stories in what she drew and get lost in the picture. Sitting in the cold room while Ronnie stared out the window, she wished she could disappear into the marks she was making on the wall.
After a few minutes, Ronnie turned toward her. His eyes were wide, as if he were scared. He opened the drawer and took the gun out. He grabbed a tall flashlight from a shelf in the kitchen.
“We’ve got to get out of here,” he said, walking over to her.
She jumped up and kept her back to the wall so he wouldn’t see her name.
There was a dirty rug next to the rumpled sofa. He lifted a corner, and beneath it was a door in the floor. He pulled it open. She looked down and saw rough wooden stairs leading into a dark basement.
“Come on,” he said, pointing.
“I don’t want to go in there,” she said.
“You have to,” he said. He showed her the gun. Then he pointed it at her. It made her shiver so hard she felt she might topple over. But she had to stay standing because if she fell, he would see that she had written on the wall.
“I don’t want to shoot you,” he said. “But my dad and I have too much to lose, so I will if you make me. Get going—down the stairs.”
She moved away from the wall, toward the opening in the floor.
“There’s no light,” she said.
“I have this,” he said, waving the flashlight. He turned it on, swept the beam into the basement.
The stairs were steep. CeCe stepped slowly from one tread down to the next. The flashlight barely illuminated anything because Ronnie was holding it behind her, so all she could see was her own shadow. She felt silky strands on her face and knew she was walking through spiderwebs. She thought of Charlotte’s Web so she wouldn’t be even more scared.
The basement smelled like wet dirt, like the garden in Malibu after the sprinklers were on. She told herself she was walking on the stone path from her house to the deck, past white roses and purple flowers. She could picture the wall covered with dark-pink blossoms and the orchard trees full of lemons.
“Wait here,” Ronnie said, startling her out of her fantasy.
She saw another set of stairs leading up. He climbed them and slid back a bolt, inching open a door to the sky. It was metal, and the hinges creaked. She watched him look around, and then he beckoned her to follow him. They stepped out of a hatchway that must have been on the back side of the cold house.
It was on the opposite side of the dock. Ice-crusted snowdrifts were very high here, but a path had been trampled, so obviously someone had walked here after the storm. Ronnie pushed her ahead of him. The mounds of snow were over her head, and the path was so narrow that her shoulders scraped the sides, making little clouds of snow twinkle down onto the ground.
At the end of the path, they stepped out into a parking lot. It had been plowed, CeCe knew, because she could see the pavement. Slick with ice, it had been sanded, so she didn’t slip. She glanced at Ronnie. He was still holding the gun, but instead of watching her, he was looking over his shoulder, back toward his house. She thought of the voices that might have been help or might have been danger. By the look in his eyes, she knew he thought they were danger—to him.
That made her heart pound. Because if Ronnie was scared of those voices, she knew they were there to help her. She was sure they belonged to the commander and his brother. This was the moment she had been waiting for. She flexed and unflexed her fingers.
He had that gun. His father had told her to follow the rules or he would kill her father and Aunt Hadley. But CeCe trusted herself more than anything Ronnie and his father said. She knew what she had to do. They were walking toward a row of big trucks. Painted on the side of each truck door was the same lobster she’d seen on the sign and on Ronnie’s jacket.
Ronnie reached into the crevice above the front tire on one of the trucks, and he pulled out a small metal box that contained a key.
“My dad was right—here it is,” he said, flashing her a grin, as if finally something was going well for him. “Everything is going to be so good. We’re getting out of this shithole, gonna buy a big house where everything works, and a big garage. We’ll fix up the boats, and we’ll have the best in the fleet. We can afford it now.”
He unlocked the driver’s-side door, held it open for her.
“Get in,” he said.
She took a step back.
“I told you,” he said. “Get in. Now.”
“No,” she said, staring him in the eyes.
“You heard my dad. You want to get your father and aunt killed? And you? He told you the rules. Follow them and you’ll be fine.”
CeCe didn’t believe anything he said, so she blocked out his words. She thought of races on the beach, of how she and her friends tried to beat each other to the finish line, and she crouched so she’d get a good start, then took off like the fastest girl on earth.
She screamed as she ran, words screeching out of her chest, not even knowing what she was saying—they were gibberish, like sounds made by a wild animal. She ran onto the snow path, toward the horrible house, because that was where the voices had come from, the people who were there to help her.
She heard footsteps pounding behind her, so she screamed louder.
“CeCe!” Ronnie called. “Stop!”
Then she felt him bump her back. He pushed her into the snowbank. She made a snowball and threw it at him. It hit him right in the face, and he looked so surprised that it gave her a few seconds to stand up, make another, and throw it at him. She moved so fast she lost her balance and fell backward, hitting her head on something hard buried under the snow.
Ronnie reached out his hand, then bent down to help her up.
“Come on, CeCe,” he said. “You cut your head.”
She gulped back tears, but then they all came pouring out.
“CeCe, I don’t know what we’re doing,” Ronnie said. “But I’m not leaving you here with my dad. Let’s go, I’ll figure it out. My uncle can help us, okay?”
It wasn’t okay at all. CeCe wanted her mother. She wanted Star. Ronnie picked her right up out of the snow. He had his arms around her, carrying her. She sobbed into his shoulder.
“Mommy,” she wept. “Mommy.”
26
Hadley felt nervous, waiting for Genevieve to arrive at the hotel, so when the suite’s doorbell rang, she hesitated before answering. Kate, sitting on the sofa, noticed her reluctance and answered the door.
“Genevieve?” Hadley heard Kate ask.
“No,” a woman’s voice said. “I’m Jeanne Gladding, Maddie’s attorney. Hadley, I am so sorry about your sister . . .”
“Double mistaken identity,” Kate said, leading the lawyer into the living room. “I’m Kate Woodward. This is Hadley.”
Hadley stood to shake the woman’s hand. She looked about fifty, with shoulder-length brown hair and low-key makeup. She was dressed in black pants and a double-breasted black blazer over a starched white blouse. On her lapel was a pin, the enamel painted with Maddie’s whale-and-swan motif. Her battered brown leather briefcase looked as if she might have had it since law school, and she set it on the coffee table when Hadley gestured for her to sit down.
“Hadley, I can’t imagine what you must be feeling. Maddie adored you—we spoke about you often. I know how close you were,” Jeanne said.
“We were,” Hadley said.
“I wanted to come as soon as I heard. This might sound strange, but when someone dies, the family so often gathers together, and I feel like her family,” Jeanne said, her voice breaking. “She was so much more than a client. I waited as long as I could, wanting to give you time for yourself, but then . . . I had to come.”
“Thank you,” Hadley said.
“I hope you don’t mind.”
“No, I don’t.”
“I considered her a dear, dear friend,” Jeanne said. “And I think she felt the same about me.”
Hadley felt drawn in by Jeanne’s warmth and obvious grief, but also a little sorry for her. She knew Maddie had several lawyers that handled various issues in her life, but she had never heard her mention Jeanne’s name before. She figured Jeanne was no different from many of Maddie’s other fans. Her paintings drew people in, made them feel like she was speaking directly to them through the images. Essays had been written about Maddie’s ethereal work, studies done on ways it affected viewers.
One psychiatrist had published an article in the Hanover Journal of Neuroscience about how her images had entered the collective unconscious. Strangers often thought they knew Maddie better than her family did—and felt closer to her than she did to her actual friends. Several patients with Cluster B diagnoses grew angry when Maddie didn’t respond to their emails, phone calls, and letters. Some threatened suicide when she ignored them; others promised to hurt her or the ones she loved.
Several fans with disorders that manifested in auditory hallucinations believed that Maddie—or the subjects of her paintings, such as the whale—was speaking to them directly, giving them orders that ranged from self-harm to violence against others.
Hadley doubted that Jeanne’s wanting to feel close to Maddie approached those levels, but still, she felt that the lawyer was feeling something that Maddie wouldn’t have reciprocated.
The midday sun cast silver light on the beach and ocean. The temperature hovered around ten degrees, so Kate got up to turn on the gas fireplace. The flame burst on, instantly throwing heat. Kate stood in front of it, warming herself and gazing at Jeanne with a curious look on her face.
“Did you say your last name is Gladding?” Kate asked.
“Yes,” Jeanne said.
“I’m familiar with a law firm in Hartford,” Kate said, “with Gladding in the name. Is that yours?”
“It is. My father was a founding partner, and I’ve been there since I graduated from law school.” Jeanne smiled. “I thought I recognized your name, too. Kate Woodward, from the gallery in Black Hall?”
“Yes, Woodward-Lathrop,” Kate said.
Jeanne nodded. “Our firm has many clients who collect fine art, much of it acquired from your gallery. American Impressionists, in particular. Woodward-Lathrop is very well known, highly respected.”
“I’m glad to hear that,” Kate said.
“You’ve also, on occasion, done appraisals for us. For the estates of clients who have passed away. In one case, you discovered a forgery . . .”
“I remember,” Kate said. “A supposed Henry Ward Ranger, moonlight on a pond in Black Hall.”
“Valued close to a hundred thousand until you looked at it,” Jeanne said.
“Life lesson,” Kate said. “Don’t buy fine art on eBay.”
“Are you serious?” Hadley asked. “Someone bought a Ranger on eBay?”
“You’d be surprised,” Kate said. “There are eBay listings full of names you’ll find on museum walls. Ranger was one of the earliest American Impressionists. Foolish buyer. We look at eBay and several of the less ethical auction sites—they’re full of fakes.”
“Have you ever looked there for work by Maddie?” Hadley asked.
“I did last night,” Kate said. “There are plenty of paintings and drawings being offered as her originals. At prices you’d expect. It’s possible that some are genuine, but they would be the exceptions.”
“The forged Ranger was a blow to the family,” Jeanne said. “Not only to discover that a painting they had assumed was by him was a fake, but also to realize that their father wasn’t as astute an art collector as he—and they—had thought. They had intended to donate it to the Mystic Museum of Art.”
“That would hurt,” Kate said.
“One of the daughters said she was glad her father had died before knowing the truth,” Jeanne said. “That was quite heartbreaking to hear.”
Hadley felt the lawyer’s compassion for her clients. “What is your specialty at the firm?” she asked.
“Trusts and estates,” Jeanne said. “And it literally is trust. I feel honored that people entrust me with their goals—not just after death but during life.”
“In what way?” Hadley asked.
