This consulting gig was turning out to be harder than I thought. With Devor work piling up and the pressure on to bless the Margoletti gift quickly, I felt pulled in different directions. It didn’t help my mood when I heard a sharp tapping on my closed office door Monday morning. I hadn’t even finished my cappuccino, I grumbled to myself as I yelled for whomever it was to come in.
“Got a minute?” It was Geoff.
I recalled with a twinge of guilt that I hadn’t returned his phone call while I was at Lynthorpe, and apologized now. “I am so sorry the vice president at your alma mater died before we could meet. Did you know him well?”
“No, not really, but he met with the board regularly, and I always thought he was good. They were lucky to have him. A heart attack, Rory said in his email.”
“Yes, a real shock. He’ll obviously be missed. But I have access to his materials about the gift, so I think the due diligence will continue.” He only nodded, seeming distracted.
“Are you okay, Geoff?”
“I know you were busy. I wanted to share something. Remember my mentioning the man I knew who was killed by a train?”
I nodded.
“Bart Corliss,” Geoff said. “A decent man, developed some tracking software for medical records that became viable at the right moment in the market. Got ready to take his company public while investor money was still flowing. I didn’t make the connection then, but I’ve since been reminded that he had a business tie to Vince.”
My antennae jumped to attention. “Wait. You don’t think Margoletti had something to do with this man’s suicide? I know you said you don’t trust Vince.”
“Good Lord, no, nothing that dramatic. I don’t like Vince’s proximity to Corliss in light of his way of doing business.”
“Sorry, I’m not tracking, Geoff. What proximity?”
“Vince was the company’s attorney.”
“Is Vince on the board?”
“No, but word is he was paid in shares at a very favorable option price before the public offering. Meaning,” Geoff said when he saw the puzzled look on my face, “he’ll be able to sell his shares for a whopping profit now that the company’s listed on the stock exchange.”
Geoff’s face had taken on a little color as he told me the story, and he was rubbing the fingers of one hand with the other. For him, that’s major emotion.
“But Corliss got rich too?”
“That’s what’s bothering me. The police have confirmed Bart committed suicide, and that doesn’t make sense. He was at the top of his game.”
“Family troubles, maybe?”
“Well, we’ll never know, I guess. But I’m sensitive to anything Vince is attached to these days. How’s the vetting going?”
Seeing Margoletti as somehow involved in the deaths of two company founders wasn’t computing for me. Why would he? If it was true he had a ton of stock in Corliss’s hot company, he could make good on his cash pledge to Lynthorpe and still have enough to keep his playboy son in riding boots and horse trailers. I was beginning to think that Larry Saylor was intimidated by the size of the gift and afraid to sign off for fear of overlooking some detail, and that Geoff was letting his dislike of the man color his thinking. I had to tread lightly.
“Well enough. I’m plowing through paper this week and hope to have a draft of the report done very soon for Rory Brennan.”
Geoff was watching me, nodding, and then he said, “Have you run into any resistance from the administration?”
“You mean Rory, Coe, or the development director? Nothing serious. They all seem worried that something will slow the process down. Vince’s demands for a quick resolution have made them nervous. Why? Have you heard something?”
“Well, the dean did send me an email. Nothing to worry about. I think they may not have realized the complexities involved in accepting a large art collection. It makes me doubly glad you’re there. Don’t let anyone push you to sign off on an agreement with holes in it.”
I told him I would move as fast as possible and Geoff seemed satisfied. Looking at his watch, he said he had to get to Peter’s conference room for an executive committee meeting and waved goodbye.
****
Peter and I had had a drink after work Monday. I wanted my boss’s perspective before I flew back to Lynthorpe.
“It’s tricky, I admit,” he said over martinis in a trendy place that served astonishingly good sushi and every kind of martini yet invented. We were in a dark room with concrete walls, and floors livened with a forest of bamboo plants. “I might push you to present hard proof of illegal or deeply immoral activity if I were Brennan, something big likely to come out in the future. All you have now is the vice president’s private concerns and the donor’s reputation as a shark, balanced against major cash and an art collection I wish we’d had a crack at getting for the Devor. Any news about Teeni’s job search?” he said, switching gears.
“She’s excited about the college back East. Have you gotten a call for a recommendation?”
“I’m guessing it will come soon. She’s a strong candidate for damn near any position at her level but, cynically, even if she wasn’t a board’s first choice, they would include her in the finalist pool because it would make them feel good to be able to say they had an African American candidate.”
“I thought of that,” I said, sipping the last of my green appletini and wondering if I should order a second, “and so has she. Teeni has a nose for this kind of thing and hasn’t let the gamesters keep her in their candidate lists for show. She bows out as soon as she gets the hint.”
“Maybe she’ll sniff out tokenism in all of these offers and we can keep her,” he said, “even though we don’t have the right position for her.”
“The museum world is getting more diverse. She’ll land something good and we’ll throw her the party to end all parties when she packs it in here.”
Peter pushed me a bit about how much longer I’d be at the consulting assignment since we had a busy few months coming up at the Devor. Teeni’s exhibition was the highlight of a season that included VIP tours of two local art preserves in Sonoma County, an artist-themed film festival, and an audience participation art installation that was already attracting cultural reporters wanting to do feature stories. We do all of these events because it builds support for the arts and attracts new donors, but it’s always a stretch for our small staffs, and the boss was making it clear he wanted me back after next week. Brennan’s assistant had called me earlier in the day to say the president hoped I’d return tomorrow or the next day to present the report so they could proceed with their announcement.
“Give me a couple more days and I’ll be finished, promise. In the meantime, why don’t you see if Dickie has a contact number for J.P.? We can invite him to something special and you can grill him about the owner of the Matisse.”
****
Luckily for me, Lynthorpe had insisted on business class. I spent the five-hour flight going through every piece of paper related to the donation of art that the development director and Gabby had been able to give me. The list of paintings was straightforward, a number of lesser known artists whose work might or might not stand up to scrutiny in twenty years, some reliable standbys from the middle of the twentieth century, plus a few marquee names. Larry Saylor had the same list but I hadn’t asked Gabby to copy it since I had skimmed McEvoy’s packet earlier. Margoletti, or more likely his art consultants, must have bid hefty amounts at Sotheby’s or Christie’s auction sales to get a few of them. He had a real trophy, a moody painting of an empty street by Edward Hopper that had sold at auction only a year ago for thirty million dollars before it came into his collection.
Most of the paperwork was fine, although there were a few, like the Hopper and a Lichtenstein, for which the documents were incomplete or missing, at least from my stack of material. Maybe he wasn’t giving them to Lynthorpe, and who could blame him? Most of the rest was routine, the provenances confirmed by the sales documents, and the pieces listed as being in storage, at his home or office, or in a few cases on loan for museum exhibitions. A few were also consigned for sale, and those needed to be cleared up as part or not part of the gift as of the date of the transfer. I would focus on making sure the full list was cleaned up before Lynthorpe signed the gift papers. Simple stuff really.
By the end of the flight, as I scooped up the piles of paper I had sorted through, I figured I had a handle on the art. If I could get a slightly better idea from Larry Saylor’s notes about what had worried him, I would be close to a place where I could make recommendations and hand the project over to the college.
****
It was late Tuesday when I handed the rental car keys to the young guy at the hotel’s concierge desk. From my room, I sent Gabby an email to ask if we could meet in the morning, and thought how nice it would have been to have someone back home who wanted to know I had arrived safely. Being unattached is a mixed experience.
Flipping through my notes the next morning after resisting waffles for breakfast in favor of cold cereal and feeling massively virtuous for it, I turned my attention to the rest of the papers I had accumulated. I came across the copy of Larry Saylor’s handwritten list with the international phone number. I promised myself I’d look it up although I wasn’t sure I’d try to reach whoever it was. What would I say? This number was written by a man who later drowned on a golf course in a peaceful New England town in America, and do you know anything about it?
The financial reports I had in front of me only confirmed what I and Larry Saylor and everyone else knew. Margoletti got shares in the companies listed in Gabby’s research as payment for legal counsel on intellectual property rights and patent law. Logic dictated, however, that since he was still walking around, smiling and being a big shot, whatever games he played apparently weren’t criminal, or at least not provably so.
I realized Geoff Johnson’s mistrust had colored this project for me too. My brief contact with Larry Saylor had reinforced the feeling that something was fishy about Margoletti, but the reality was I hadn’t found a single concrete reason to recommend Lynthorpe turn down, modify, or re-negotiate what looked to be a tremendous boost for the college. I decided to recommend approval with a second valuation of the art once the ownership documents were in place. I’d contact Margoletti’s office to get the missing documents proving ownership of the handful of important paintings and wrap up the job.
I hadn’t heard back from Gabby, so I decided to go for a walk to add to my healthy morning. A little voice inside my head cheered, if only because that might mean I could have French fries with lunch. It was the same helpful voice that urged me to try the ginger and lime martini the other night after the green appletini, but which was silent the next morning when I woke up with a headache.
I wandered along a pretty street with shops selling collegiate merchandise and handmade paper goods, which gave way in a few blocks to more ordinary stores with signs for sodas and sandwiches, and then to a block of boxy buildings with signs for hardware and auto parts. Off to my right, down an abruptly residential side street, were some older apartment buildings, their brick façades shielded by tall, leafy trees whose roots were pushing up blocks of concrete sidewalk. A couple of moms were out with strollers and several young men with backpacks and cell phones walked quickly in my direction, passing me without seeming to notice I existed. From the conversation I overheard one guy having on his phone, I got the idea he was a university student, and realized this was probably where the graduate students lived who didn’t or couldn’t stay on campus.
As if to prove me right, I saw someone with a dark ponytail come out of one building. It was Gabby and I raised my arm to catch her attention, then dropped it when I saw Dermott coming out right behind her. She was frowning and talking over her shoulder, and he didn’t look any happier. At the bottom of the entry steps she turned and faced him, still talking and shaking her head, her ponytail whipping back and forth from the effort. He threw up his hands in a jerky movement, stepped around her, and marched down the street away from the corner where I stood, anger making his body stiff.
She stood still for a moment, her head turned to watch him go, then lifted one hand and appeared to swipe at her eyes. Suddenly she turned in the opposite direction, almost as if she realized I was watching. Before I could shrink back around the corner, she had seen me. She lifted her head and waved. There wasn’t anything to do except wave back and wait for her to reach me.
“I was wondering when I’d see you again,” she said, but her voice was tight and she looked away after a quick glance at me. To determine if I had seen her arguing with Dermott? I wasn’t going to bring it up if she didn’t, so we exchanged information about our schedules. I would work in my hotel room on the draft report and would meet her when she was free to go over the gaps in my review of artworks included in the gift, and to talk one last time about what might have been worrying Saylor. I figured there might be a stray remark or notes somewhere that we hadn’t found, so we agreed to meet in his office.
“My goal is to get a draft done by tomorrow morning, bring it to President Brennan, and revise it if he has questions or wants more detail.”
“You haven’t found any serious problems?” Gabby said, sounding more like herself as the minutes passed. “That doesn’t make sense to me. He was so convinced…of something.” She shrugged and shook her head.
“I promise I’ll be super cautious, but, no, I’ve done a bit of background checking and I’ve seen the public reports of what you might call ethical challenges, but nothing illegal, or at least nothing labeled outright as such. Margoletti may not be the person you’d like to go into business with, especially with your money or your bright idea, but there are lots of people I’d feel the same way about, and I’m pretty sure some of them are admired and envied for their success.”
Gabby wasn’t satisfied, I could tell. “Some people have all the luck, don’t they? The rest of us go paycheck to paycheck…”
“Working in the development office, you’re going to see that a lot, the discrepancy in wealth. If it really bothers you, you may want to rethink the next career move you make.” I tried to keep my tone light, but it was a truth that we working folk had to face up to at some point. Trying to look and sound sympathetic at a cocktail party while the women in a group compare notes about their vacations in Bali, or the men grumble about getting good tee times at Pebble Beach takes some mental flexibility. I once tried to bond with them by beginning a story about Fever’s habit of spitting up hairballs on the carpet right after I had it shampooed, but it didn’t seem to click.
“Oh, I don’t mind so much. Dermott, well, it’s all those student loans and so little chance for a tenure track job anywhere these days.”
Money might have been the reason the newlyweds had been arguing on their doorstep, and my heart went out to her. Marrying a millionaire had not been a deliberate strategy, but at the time it had cushioned me from the kind of life so many new college graduates faced. I couldn’t think of anything to say.
Maybe she thought my silence was a criticism of her. She shifted into professional mode and said, “I’ll spend an hour in Larry’s office before lunch, to organize what seems to be most important for you to look at. After that, I have some other work to do for Mr. McEvoy. Pretty soon I have to take all the papers over to the dean’s office. I’m cheating, though. Don’t tell him,” she said, lifting her eyebrows. “I’m making copies so that Mr. Saylor’s files are still useful for you.”
I laughed. Whoever said computers would end the need for paper files hadn’t given enough credit to the bureaucratic beast. “Fine. How about we meet in Larry’s office at five?”
****
By five o’clock, my stomach was rumbling, which reminded me I’d had nothing for lunch except a smoothie. That might have accounted for the fact that I was a little light-headed as I parked the rental car in the lot behind the old red brick building where the late financial vice president and his staff had their offices. A dozen parked cars attested to the fact that people were still at work. One, at least, was highly paid, judging by the glossy finish on a black sports car that almost blinded me as the reflection of the sun bounced off the hood. A couple of middle-aged women in summer dresses and sandals were coming out of the building’s back door, deep in conversation, and one smiled and held the door open for me with her free hand. In the other, she held a colorful paper plate with a napkin spread over it.
“Birthday cake,” she said when I looked at it. “My husband loves it when I bring him home some cake.”
I laughed and told her I knew what she meant.
The building was quiet except for some chattering that came from way down the hall, the site of the office party, I could guess. It got so quiet I could hear a fly buzzing against the window on the landing as I mounted the staircase. It was warm from the trapped heat of the day, and the printer in the small room on the second floor where Gabby had made copies for me the other day was making rhythmic sounds as it spurted out paper.
I poked my head in the late vice president’s outer office, but it was empty. I called Gabby’s name but didn’t hear anyone in his office. To the right, the bigger workspace seemed unoccupied as well, but I could hear someone moving around even though I couldn’t see anything. I crossed back through the reception area and into Saylor’s office. The place looked like work was in progress. Open files sat on the worktable and the top of the file cabinets, and one of the desk drawers was open.
“Hi,” a voice behind me said as I surveyed the room. Gabby made a face as she took in the mess. She tossed her bike messenger bag on a chair and closed the desk drawer as she passed. Looking at the file tabs as she flipped the open folders closed and stacked them up on the corner of his desk, she said, “I left the place neat when I finished, honest.”
“Did you lock up when you left?”
“His assistant said she’d lock up during the lunch hour. This looks like student workers midway through a project, maybe organizing his files to distribute to the people who’ll be handling parts of his job until they hire a new vice president. Don’t worry, I can round up what you need.”
We took seats at the big table near the window, where Gabby began to sort paper-clipped pages into short stacks. She stopped at one point, frowning at a piece of paper that was buried in one pile. “A note from Mr. Saylor asking me to find out what I can about a new IPO.” She fiddled with her ponytail. “One of the companies Mr. Margoletti’s involved with. I guess they went public recently.”
“Did he send it to you?”
“This is the first I’ve seen it. I’m sure he meant to pass it along the next time we met. It’s so weird. I can’t get used to the idea he’s dead, you know?”
“Did you go to the funeral? That sometimes gives a sense of closure.”
“Yes, but it was sad. His staff came, and some of the faculty, but the president wasn’t there. The church was half empty.” Gabby shook herself, glanced at her watch, and said, “I only have an hour before Dermott comes to get me. We have to meet with his student loan advisor.” She made a face, and sighed.
Shrugging off whatever was bothering her, she pulled over a file folder, and proceeded to walk me through the highlights of her research. Then, she held up something I hadn’t seen, a copy of a page from a Christie’s auction catalog with a color photo of a Sam Francis painting, estimated to sell between one and one and a half million. “We haven’t talked much about the individual pieces of art,” she said, “and this is one thing Larry was worried about.”
“This piece? I didn’t see much about the art in his files,” I said. “There was a list in the development office material, though.”
“Larry’s notes are around here somewhere. This page should have been in the folder with everything else, but I had pulled it to start verifying that the donor still owns it. It’s on the accountant’s list but not on the gift list. He got a phone call and after that, he started looking at them more closely. He told me the lists weren’t quite the same and asked me to check a few pieces, to see what might have happened.”
“There are two lists? I saw one in the files I borrowed from Larry’s office, but I figured it was a copy of the same one, the one that Margoletti’s lawyers made.”
“I did too until Larry explained that he received a second one, this one created by Mr. Margoletti’s accountant.”
“Do you have that list?”
She worked her way through some of the files that had been left on the table and on Saylor’s desk, but couldn’t find it. “Wait, I made myself a copy. I spent so much time here that I kept a work file handy in his cabinet. See?” She had stooped over a low lateral file and now pulled out a folder. “I labeled it with my name, under G.” And rifling through it, she came up with a stapled set of pages and handed it to me.
“Let me understand,” I said. “You were working off two different lists?”
“No, I was working with the lawyer’s list, the one that had on it all the artwork Mr. Margoletti was including in the donation. Larry had the list Mr. Margoletti’s accountant sent him to track where every piece of art was. Most of it was in storage in California.”
“Do you remember the names on the two lists that didn’t match?”
“Not offhand. Larry had highlighted the differences, but I don’t see his copy here.”
Rats, I had missed something. I hadn’t flipped through all the pages on the other list because the entries on the first page were all the same and I had assumed it was a copy of the same list. Damn.
Gabby saw my frown. “It’s easy enough to compare them once you have both lists. There are only a few differences.”
“Does the documentation explain the discrepancies? Maybe these were pieces he intended to hold on to?”
“They’re not marked that way, so I don’t know. For some reason, Larry thought there was a problem. I’m sure that’s why he needed to see the president. I picked that much up from his comments.”
She had been flipping through the piles of papers left out by the student workers. “Aha,” she said, raising her voice in triumph. “Here’s something.” She slid a sheet of paper over to me. It was another page from an auction sale catalog, advertising the upcoming sale at auction of a painting by Roy Lichtenstein, in the style he became most famous for. A stippled cartoon drawing of the close-up faces of an unhappy man and woman, accompanied by a dramatic text in a bubble. I looked my question at Gabby.
“I remember Mr. Saylor being especially interested in this. I had no idea a comic book picture could be so valuable. Read the provenance.”
Sold by the painter to such-and-such gallery for a few thousand dollars. The gallery sold it to a reputable dealer a few years later for many thousands of dollars. The dealer sold it to a collector and the collector turned it around at auction ten years later for a million dollars. Each time the piece sold, the price went up exponentially until, at the sale last year being advertised in the catalog, a handwritten note in Gabby’s writing reported, a new buyer paid twenty-one million.
“Art can be a great investment, but this isn’t unusual. This piece is one of a series that pretty much defined his style. There’s nothing here saying Vince bought it, however.”
“It’s not on the lawyers’ list, but it was one of the ones on the accountant’s list that I remember. All I know is we were working in here when the accountant from Mr. Margoletti’s office called him. I only heard Larry’s side, but he said something about how someone could have given Mr. Margoletti such a big gift, that you don’t pay a lawyer twenty million dollars, no matter how good he is.”
“Someone gave the Lichtenstein to him?”
“Apparently, although I’m only guessing that because of what I heard,” Gabby said.
“It might mean that Vince Margoletti didn’t mean to give it to Lynthorpe,” I said, thinking out loud. “Either that, or the gift list was outdated, although, frankly, this is not the kind of painting one would overlook.” I was thinking of the handful of pieces I had incomplete documentation for.
“If I can find his copy of the list, where he might have made notes, I’ll get it for you to save time. In the meantime, you can keep this because I have another copy in my folder. I’ll copy the Francis sell sheet for you. I’m guessing a lot of the art research has already been packaged up and sent to Mr. McEvoy’s office, or to Dean Anderson.”
Gabby had continued to flip through the papers in her “G” folder, and now she said, “Oh, good, here’s another one I was asked to check on.” She pulled out a copy of another auction house catalog page that was promoting a small oil painting of leaves in autumn colors by Georgia O’Keeffe.
Again, ticked off on an auction catalog page were tracings of the painting’s past to show it was not stolen goods or a fake. The piece was valued between one and two million dollars and was painted relatively early in O’Keeffe’s career, but the style was immediately recognizable. For this latest sale ad, the seller’s name wasn’t listed on the printed page, but that’s not unusual. Not too many people choose to advertise the fact that they may have expensive art hanging in their living rooms. Security systems are good, but art thieves are sometimes better. High stakes auction purchases are frequently made through dealers, middlemen who act for the real buyer and are well paid to preserve their privacy. “The O’Keeffe belongs to Margoletti too?”
“I’m sure this is one of the ones that was on one list and not the other. That’s why he would have asked me to do the research and get the sales information.”
I searched and found the O’Keeffe on Gabby’s copy of the accountant’s list. “Interesting. It doesn’t say how much he paid for it. It says ‘acquired.’ ” I looked up at the young researcher. “If he didn’t buy it, he has some remarkably generous friends or possibly a tax dodge going on, although if that were the case, surely he wouldn’t have approved his accountant giving you the information.”
There were oddities in what Gabby had told me, and I needed time to sort them out. I also needed to check the two lists against each other, maybe with Gabby’s help, first thing tomorrow. I laid the catalog pages out on the table in front of me. Lichtenstein, Francis, O’Keeffe. All offered through reputable auction houses. Could they be fakes? “You said there were others?” I said.
“At least one more. I wish I could think of the artist’s name. There was no auction sheet for it. Mr. Saylor just mentioned it and said he’d look into that one himself. All I remember is the style wasn’t as modern, it was a realistic painting, if you know what I mean.”
“Can you make me copies of these auction sheets?”
“Sure. By the way, there was another one that looked like it fit the same pattern, but Mr. Margoletti sold it two months ago.”
“He confirmed that he’d sold it?”
“His accountant checked with him, no problem. We noted the update and put it in the back of the file to make sure the paper trail was complete. See? Here it is.”
A small painting by Jim Dine, no doubt with a signature heart in it, although there was no photo of the piece included in the documentation Gabby had, only the handwritten annotation “Sold, per V.M.” dated three weeks ago.
I nodded. “Good work. Without a note like that, some future curator could spend a long time looking for a painting that didn’t exist in the collection.”
“I’ll go down the hall and make you copies of everything,” Gabby said. “Won’t be a minute.” She smiled. “I’m relieved that you’re going to help. I wouldn’t feel right knowing how upset Mr. Saylor was, if I didn’t make sure someone but us knew about this, someone who’d be able to make more sense of it than I can.”
“No promises,” I said. “I’m not a detective, and the college hasn’t asked me to do more than help ensure that the valuations are correct, but I guess this fits under that heading, doesn’t it?”
She grinned at me, her dimples blazing. “I guess it does. Be right back.”
I thought again about the pages Gabby had shown me. Taken together, did they hold the answer to Larry Saylor’s uneasiness? Maybe if I called the auction house, I could learn something, although they were notoriously close-mouthed. Might be wiser to call the accountant, whose contact information was probably on the list Gabby was copying for me. If it wasn’t, I’d ask her for it before leaving tonight.
It was late and the building was quiet. I heard Gabby talking to someone, probably that cute husband of hers, their voices inaudible but raised over the sound of the office machine. I glanced at my watch. It was almost six and time for him to pick her up. I gathered up my notes and my briefcase. Outside, a car backfired somewhere. The copier was still churning, but she must be about done. I got up and walked to the office door, looking toward the stairs. Nothing but the copier’s thrum. I figured I’d collect the papers on my way out, so I went back in, picked up my bag and headed down the hall toward the noise, which came from the small, open room right next to the stairs that I’d seen before.
The machine was cranking away, but the top was open. No sign of the young researcher or her husband.
“Gabby?” I said, raising my voice. Maybe she had gone to the ladies’ room across the way. I pushed the door open, but no one answered. There was a room next to it with a frosted glass door and what looked like a chart of office hours on an index card taped to the glass. The door was partly open. The other doors along the hallway were closed. I walked over to the open door and pushed it, hoping I wasn’t trespassing or interrupting a late-day student conference. “Hello?” I called, peering ahead at a wall of books stuffed to bursting. I took another step and my foot brushed against something at the same instant the door stopped in its swing. Looking down, I saw a hand resting on the floor.
“Gabby,” I breathed, dropping to my knees beside the still figure crumpled near the door. Out in the hall, the copier stopped suddenly and the silence was shocking. In the sudden quiet, I heard a door close and the hum of an elevator somewhere. “Help,” I yelled to whoever might be around.
“Gabby, can you hear me,” I said, leaning down and reaching to touch her fingers. She lay on her back, turned slightly to one side, her ponytail splayed out behind her head. Her eyes were shut and there was no movement, no sound from her. One side of her chest was blooming red blood, which had already dribbled to the scuffed wood floor underneath her.
At that moment, a door slammed somewhere, and footsteps came up the stairs rapidly. I looked back to the hallway over my shoulder, ready to yell for help again.
“Hey, Ms. O’Rourke,” Dermott Kennedy said, his mouth in a crooked grin, coming to a halt behind me. The smile evaporated and a crease appeared between his eyes. “Are you okay? Wait a minute—is that Gabby?”
He dropped down, pushing me roughly out of the way, and grabbed the unmoving hand I was hesitantly touching, the one whose third finger wore a narrow, still shiny, wedding band.