Last Night, page 21
But he wasn’t there.
His truck was in the parking lot, which meant he had borrowed someone else’s vehicle. Club members were closemouthed. No one admitted to loaning him their car or truck. No one even said he’d been there, except for one fisherman who told the police that he had gotten a text and taken off right away. Conor wasn’t really surprised. He wondered whether Elise had changed her mind and called to warn him, or whether Jack had figured it out.
Either way, Grub was in the wind, and there was still no trace of Ronnie and CeCe.
“What did Elise say?” Joe asked.
“That Grub will hurt CeCe. She alluded to him working with—or at least talking to—that guy Coach. She didn’t like the friendship, said that Zane wanted to make a man out of Ronnie. He got his son to kill Maddie.”
“Nice, setting his son up to take the heat,” Joe said. “With absolutely no evidence that any of them even knew her.”
“We’re all thinking the same thing, aren’t we?” Conor asked. “That it was murder for hire?”
“Yes,” Joe said. “That’s the theory.”
“Who hired them?” Tom asked.
“That’s the question,” Joe said.
“What about CeCe?” Conor asked. “Where does she come in?”
“Grub might have seen her as a bonus,” Joe said. “Unexpected but to be exploited. An asset, a way to make more money.”
“Where is she now?” Tom asked.
Neither Conor nor Joe could answer that. None of them knew. And they had no idea where to start looking.
36
“Where are we?” CeCe asked, looking around. She had slept for a little while, but now she was awake again and saw tall buildings, so she knew it was a city. She had been to lots of cities with her parents: Paris, Los Angeles, and New York. These buildings weren’t as tall as the ones in New York, or as beautiful as the ones in Paris, or surrounded by palm trees and flowers like the ones in Los Angeles. But the streets were crowded, the buildings were close together, and there were lots of cars.
“Providence,” Ronnie said.
“I don’t know where that is,” she said.
“That doesn’t matter,” he said. “I have to figure things out. They won’t look for us here.”
He drove them around, up and down streets. Her stomach was growling so loudly, and she felt sick again.
“I know you’re hungry,” he said. “So am I. And we’re going to run out of gas soon. I don’t have any money, though. They were supposed to pay me, but I can’t go home now. And it’s not because of the police, CeCe.”
“Then why?”
“I have my reasons,” he said.
She looked at him while he drove. He had changed in the last day. He seemed different, as if the awful, mean, tough part of him was slipping away. It reminded her of her papa in one of his movies. She wasn’t supposed to see it, because her mother said it was scary, but her parents had a screening—that’s what they called it when they showed films in the little theater they had in their house—and CeCe snuck in because she wanted popcorn. The room had big, comfortable seats facing a big screen, and there was a popcorn machine in the back, where the control panel was.
In the movie, her father was a bad man. He robbed a bank, and he was awful, like Ronnie was, with a gun, and swear words, and a car that drove too fast because he had to get away. He went to his daughter’s school to pick her up and take her to Canada, but she didn’t want to go. She wanted to stay with her mommy. She cried.
And it was his daughter’s sadness that made him change. He was still a robber, and he still had the gun, but the look on his face was different, just like Ronnie’s was now. He took her home and dropped her off in the front yard, where she had a swing set and a pink bicycle. And her mother, who was looking out the window, ran out the door to pick her up and carry her inside, and the father was watching from the road. And then he drove away.
CeCe hadn’t even felt like eating popcorn after she saw that. Her papa acted, which meant he pretended to be other people in movies, but even so, he always looked like himself, and CeCe knew that part of him in the movie was real, that it came from part of his heart. And she didn’t always like that.
“You like going to the zoo?” Ronnie asked.
She nodded. Her parents had taken her to a big zoo in California with a section called the Petting Kraal, where she had gotten to pet baby goats.
“Roger Williams Zoo is near here,” Ronnie said. “It used to be my favorite place, after Drake Aquarium. But that’s in Connecticut—it’s too far, we’d run out of gas. So I’ll take you to the zoo instead.”
She gave him a quizzical look. What was going on?
“Why are you being so nice?” she asked.
“I am going to save you,” he said, not exactly answering her question.
“Save me?” She frowned.
“If it was night, we could really see the Holiday Lights Spectacular,” he said. “They do it every Christmas, and you wouldn’t believe how many lights there are. A snowy day is pretty dark, though, so maybe we’ll still be able to see them.”
CeCe thought of the Ocean House and Isabel, how Isabel had said there were as many Christmas lights inside as there were stars in the sky. Was it possible there were that many at the zoo?
He smiled at her, then drove faster, as if he were excited to get to the zoo. She felt a little excited, too. She would like to see animals and maybe be able to pet goats. The thought of seeing a million lights made her sit up straighter, watch out the window. Stars, she thought. Stars, Star, Star in my pocket.
But when they got to the zoo, all happiness left the truck.
Ronnie stopped in front of a sign and read it. “I forgot—we have to pay admission to get in,” he said, looking at CeCe.
“Oh,” she said, her heart falling.
“I’m sorry,” he said. “I don’t have the money.”
“That’s okay,” she said, but tears popped into her eyes. It seemed weird that this would be the thing to make her cry, after everything else, but she had really wanted to pet a goat and see those stars. She tried to hold her sobs in, but her shoulders began to shake.
They sat in his truck, engine running, outside the zoo entrance.
“Don’t cry, CeCe,” Ronnie said. “Please.”
She couldn’t help herself.
“There might be a way,” he said. “It’s kind of a long shot. But when I worked at the Binnacle, the Almeidas catered an event here. They did a lobster boil for a bunch of board members, and I helped in the kitchen. We got to drive the truck right through the guard gate and park in a back lot.”
CeCe knew about catering. Her parents had lots of parties. Chefs and servers came to their house in Malibu with pizza trucks, or taco trucks, or New England–style clambakes with chowder, or steaks for the grill, or fancy dinners with French dishes that reminded her father of home in Bordeaux. And on film sets, they had craft services, where the caterers would set up snacks and drinks under a tent, including bowls of candy, and the young actors her father worked with called it “crafty.”
Ronnie rolled down his window and spoke to a guard. The guard looked as if he didn’t believe him, but then Ronnie pointed at the lobster embroidered on the patch on his grimy jacket.
“Ever been to the Binnacle?” Ronnie asked.
“Who in Rhode Island hasn’t?” the guard asked.
“Well, we supply them with lobsters, and I’m meeting them here for a party.”
“I don’t have anything on my list about a party,” the guard said.
“Christmas party,” Ronnie said. “Probably too many to keep track of. Let us in so I can talk to the manager, okay?”
“Dude, you’re driving a pickup truck, and I can see you got no lobsters back there.”
“I’m helping with the setup,” Ronnie said.
The guard gave Ronnie a look, as if he knew he was being lied to, but he wrote down the truck’s license plate number and waved them through the gate.
Ronnie laughed like crazy, pounding the steering wheel with his hands.
“Yeah!” he said. “Score! He didn’t even ask me for ID.”
He seemed to know where he was going and drove around the outside of the zoo buildings. He found the kitchen area, where there were a few parked vans, including one with a lion painted on the side.
He was right about the snowy day. It was dark enough that Christmas lights on the trees and on the rooftops of the buildings were glowing. They didn’t really look like stars to CeCe, not as much as she had wanted them to. But she had stopped crying, except for some lingering hiccups, and she still had hopes of petting a goat.
She watched Ronnie open the glove compartment and put the gun inside. Then he locked it.
He looked at her, long and hard.
“Come on,” he said to her after a minute. “Let’s go see some animals.”
She nodded and together they walked into the zoo.
37
After the locksmith arrived and changed the locks and codes, Hadley dialed the number she had for Genevieve. It went straight to voice mail. She felt as if her sister had become a mystery to her in death, and she wanted to talk to Genevieve—as calmly as possible, even though she felt like screaming—and find out what that receipt stapled into Maddie’s Moleskine notebook meant:
$1,000,000 to Genevieve Dickinson, plus past royalties
Public apology
Renunciation of credit—the idea was Genevieve’s
“Did Maddie even write this?” Kate asked as they drove back to the Ocean House from the storage property.
“It was stapled right onto the page. She kept those notebooks private,” Hadley said.
“The receipt was typed. Nothing in her own handwriting. Doesn’t that seem suspicious?” Kate asked.
“Yes, totally,” Hadley said. “But if she didn’t write it, how did it wind up there?”
“Maybe there’s something about the agreement in her journals,” Kate said.
“I don’t want to read them,” Hadley said. “They’re Maddie’s—they’re private—but you’re right. I need to know about this claim. I just can’t believe it, though . . .”
“I feel the same,” Kate said. “The whale and swan are so indelibly hers. If the work really is Genevieve’s, the news will shake the world.”
“Kate, I’ve believed Maddie all along and still do. I was there when she saw the actual whale, the swan, the moonlight. There’s no question that she did the painting—Genevieve had nothing to do with that. So what does this receipt mean?”
“Maddie’s talent isn’t in question,” Kate said. “I can’t stop thinking about that painting. Last Night. I’ve never seen anything like it. It reminds me a little of Rousseau’s famous work, The Sleeping Gypsy. A sense of repose, and magic, and moonlight and danger. It’s extraordinary.”
“It is,” Hadley said. “It has the same power as the original of The Whale and the Swan—a myth, done in oil on linen.”
“Predictive, though,” Kate said. “Insanely so. She foresaw what was going to happen to her, the way her life ended. The rose is her blood. I just can’t get over that.”
“The two paintings seem cursed,” Hadley said. “The whale painting caused years of lawsuits, and now this cryptic receipt. And Last Night—you’re right, it predicted her death, whether she had a premonition or whether someone saw it and set her up.”
“What if it’s Genevieve?” Kate asked.
“Behind Maddie’s murder?”
“She had a lot to gain,” Kate said. “What if she typed that receipt herself? If she went to the storage unit with Maddie, she could have stuck it into the notebook when Maddie’s back was turned.”
“Why would Maddie have invited her there? It was obviously a sanctuary for her—she never even took me.”
“Not that we should believe Genevieve, but that message she left you made it sound as if she and Maddie had had some sort of rapprochement. Maybe Maddie wanted to make peace with her, show her works in progress.”
“How would murdering my sister help Genevieve in any way?” Hadley asked.
“The receipt,” Kate said.
“But Maddie didn’t sign it. It’s not an agreement, a legal document,” Hadley said.
“If Genevieve planted it, she might have planted other things as well. You’ll have to go through everything to see what’s there. She might be setting herself up to make a claim for the million dollars and the credit on the whale painting.”
“She will never get credit for that,” Hadley said, fury rising inside her.
Kate nodded. “I know, Hadley. That work came from Maddie’s soul. Her heart. There are head paintings and soul paintings. An external idea is one thing, but when the subject matter comes from deep inside, it’s the artist’s experience. It’s as if they’ve swallowed it whole; it inhabits them. And it comes out of their fingertips, through the brush, onto the canvas. That is Maddie’s way. Without ever having met her, I know from studying her work.”
Hadley felt the same way. She could barely breathe. What if Kate was right and Genevieve had come to Rhode Island not to make peace with Maddie but to kill her? Hadley redialed Genevieve, and again the call went straight to her voice mail.
When Hadley and Kate arrived at the Ocean House, Hadley thanked Kate, then left her in the lobby because she just wanted to be alone.
No, that wasn’t true: she wanted her sister. She wanted to talk to Maddie, ask her about being pregnant, share her excitement. She wanted to trash Genevieve, badmouth her for trying to con Maddie out of her reputation and a million dollars. And she wanted to sit by the fire, read a book to CeCe, feel the everyday coziness of snuggling up with her sister and niece.
Rounding the corner on her way to the elevator, she spotted a man and a woman conversing at the end of the corridor. It was Bernard talking to Isabel. Isabel held a navy-blue folder and was showing him the contents. Bernard was frowning, shaking his head, and raising his voice in French.
“Bernard!” Hadley called, heading toward them. “Where have you been?”
“Hadley, they are claiming I’ve not paid my bill! Merde, it is a lie.”
“Mr. Lafond, I don’t want to embarrass you,” Isabel said.
“Worse than embarrassing me,” he said, “is calling me a liar. I told you—I paid by company check, in advance, the day I arrived. I want to speak to your manager!”
“We can discuss this in private,” Isabel said, backing away. “I’ll leave you to talk to your sister-in-law.”
“There’s nothing to discuss!” Bernard snapped. “Rude allegations!”
Hadley stared at him. He looked as if he hadn’t slept or taken a shower in days. His eyes were wild, his skin sagged, and his white hair was dark with grease. His shirt and trousers were rumpled, looking very unlike his usual fastidious wardrobe.
“I haven’t even been staying here,” Bernard said, raking a hand through his long hair.
“It shows, Bernard. You look as if you’ve been sleeping in your car,” Hadley said.
“How can I stand to be in this hotel, where my love spent her last night?” he asked.
The words were jarring. Last Night.
“Do you know about Maddie’s last painting?” Hadley asked.
“Her what? I am not thinking about paintings, Hadley. I am thinking about Maddie leaving this hotel to walk through the snow to her death. And to lose our daughter to a monster—I can’t bear it. I’ll never get either one of them back,” Bernard said.
“CeCe’s coming back,” Hadley said. “We have to believe that.”
“The news is all about her. I can’t escape. The highway, the little roads—they all have billboards with my baby’s face on them,” Bernard said.
“That’s part of how the FBI plans to get her back. Someone will see her picture, and then they’ll see her. Someone knows something, Bernard.”
“I want to leave this state and never return,” he said. “But I can’t—I need to be in Rhode Island until we know for sure about Cecelia. Until they find her. Have you learned anything at all?”
“Something strange has come up,” Hadley said. “I don’t know what it means, but it seems related. It has to do with a recent painting Maddie did—the one I was asking you about—and with Genevieve Dickinson.”
“That bloodsucker?”
“Yes,” Hadley said, unable to disagree with his description.
“What about her?”
“Has she tried to contact you?” Hadley asked.
He frowned. “Of course not. Why would she?”
“Did Maddie ever say anything to you about giving Genevieve credit for The Whale and the Swan?”
He snorted. “I hope you’re kidding. Putain. An art whore trying to get what was never hers.”
Hadley nodded. She agreed with what he was saying, but he looked crazy, his expression wild. A couple was coming down the hall toward them. They clearly recognized Bernard but averted their eyes to give him privacy. This was the kind of hotel where guests didn’t bother, much less fawn over, famous people.
“Hadley,” he said after the strangers disappeared around the corner, “I hate to ask you this, but can I borrow some money?”
“Sure,” she said, assuming he meant a little cash till he could get to the ATM.
“That receptionist, she may have been correct. It is possible my check had a small problem.”
“You mean you don’t have the funds in your bank?”
“You make it sound so ugly,” he said. “I paid the first part of my stay, no problem. It’s this week and going forward that will be difficult. A simple cash-flow glitch, my agent is working on it. Another issue: I am unhappy with the cops. I tried to hire Conor Reid, but he wouldn’t help me.”
“He’s a cop, too, Bernard,” Hadley said.
“Well, nobody is doing anything. I told him I wanted to find a private investigator, the best there is, to locate my daughter!” he said and took a step toward her. “Don’t you care?”
“Of course I care! How can you ask me that?”
“Then prove it! What else is money for? If you have it, you should help me hire a detective! I am family; your sister was my wife. She would want us to work together, to do everything we can to find CeCe!” Bernard said. His face, inches from hers, was bright red, the cords on his neck standing out.
