Jane put her arm around Maggie’s shoulders and shepherded her out of the conference room and towards the elevators. A small crowd of curious secretaries, file clerks and editors had gathered in the reception area, drawn by the sounds of Harry’s shouting and by the rumors that had circulated around the office about Heather’s e-mail.
The crowd made a path for Harry as he walked through like a school of minnows parting before a shark. He called loudly over his shoulder to the receptionist as he passed, casting a glance in Jane and Maggie’s direction.
“I want the head of I.T. in my office immediately! And Meyers, I want you there too! She’s going to regret these scare tactics. I swear to God!”
“Go fuck yourself, Harry!” Jane said as the elevator opened and she and Maggie stepped in. “You know you don’t believe in God.”
The doors closed and Jane pressed the “down” button. An instant later, the elevator started to move. Compared to the reception area and the conference room, it suddenly seemed very quiet.
“Well, I guess that didn’t go too well,” Jane began to say when Maggie turned and flung her arms around her and hugged her tight. Until that moment, Jane had not realized how strong Maggie was, or how tall. She kissed Jane easily on the forehead before releasing her again. Her face was flushed as if she’d been exercising on a hot summer day.
“Please stop it,” she said. “I’m very grateful.”
“I thought you’d gone into shock.”
“You’re right. My brain was in a vapor lock. I couldn’t talk. But I didn’t have to. You stood up to that son-of-a-bitch for me. I can’t begin to tell you how good it felt.”
The elevator doors opened and they walked briskly through the lobby and into the plaza outside. Maggie stopped when they reached the sidewalk, looking up at the dark blue sky and white puffy clouds. She hadn’t really appreciated the beauty of the day when she had been heading in the opposite direction an hour earlier. With the meeting over, she felt as if she had been released from a prison.
They walked a block or so in silence, matching their steps, an easy sense of companionship between them after the battle with Harry.
“So, what do you think is going to happen now?” Maggie asked.
“I’m not sure. Harry is a pain in the ass, but deep down he’s a pain in the ass businessman who listens to his pocketbook above all else. I’m still hoping that Meyers will tell him that we can keep him tied up in court for a long time, and scare him into making a deal. Maybe we can give him a right of first refusal for Staying There if you ever write it.”
“I never will,” Maggie said.
“I know that, and you know that, but he doesn’t. You would never actually have to write it.”
Maggie smiled.
“Okay then.”
“And in the meanwhile, we have to be ready with the second installment of the Diana book. I’m going to e-mail Meyers when I get back to the office to say we will send it to him as soon as they withdraw their threats of legal action.”
Maggie nodded her agreement.
They walked on for another block at the same easy pace.
“You really didn’t send the picture, right?” Jane asked.
Maggie stopped walking and turned to Jane, a smile playing at the corners of her mouth.
“No, I didn’t.”
“And you don’t know who did?”
“No more than anyone else does—a woman who calls herself Diana.” She paused. “You don’t believe me, do you?”
“I wouldn’t have put it quite so harshly. I think you may be leaving out some details. It’s a little hard to believe that it was just a big coincidence the e-mail arrived right when we were in the meeting with Harry.”
“Anyone who looked at the ‘findingmaggie’ website would have known about the meeting and how important it was to me.”
“So you think a fan of yours killed a man to help you and your book?”
“No. I think a woman read my book and killed a man. Period.”
Jane tilted her head to the side, rolling the scenario over in her mind.
“Stranger things have happened.”
“I swear that’s the truth, Jane. I have no idea who that woman is. I hope you can trust me on this.”
“Oh, I can trust you. I’m just not so sure that the police will.”
“Whether they do or don’t, it’s the truth.”
Jane’s shoulders lifted in a shrug.
“Okay, I’m just the lawyer. But please bear in mind that I work most effectively when I know all the facts.”
“I saw the way you work,” Maggie said. She put her arms around Jane and hugged her again, kissing her on both cheeks as she let Jane go. Tears appeared at the corners of her eyes. She whisked them away. “Don’t worry, Jane. I’ll tell you everything you need to know very soon. And thank you, again. I really mean it.”
Jane spotted a cab and waved it down.
“I’m going back to my office. Can I drop you anywhere?”
“I’m on my way to the Iphigenia Gallery. I promised Ellen I would help her this afternoon with the WPW exhibit. But I think I’ll walk. I’m feeling too good right now to sit. I’ll cut through the park and come out near the gallery.” The cab stopped and she opened the door for Jane. “I’ll pick you and David up tomorrow morning then? I’m looking forward to meeting him and having you visit. You’re still coming to the country. Right?”
“I’m looking forward to it.”
“Around eight-thirty, okay?”
“Eight-thirty it is,” Jane said, getting into a cab.
The cab drove off, and when Maggie started walking again a quiet smile appeared on her face. She thought about showing Jane around her house and the surrounding grounds and of falling asleep at night free of the fear that it would soon be taken from her. For the first time in many months, she felt confident and happy. Or had it been years?
* * * *
The Iphigenia Gallery occupied the second floor of an old townhouse between 68th and 69th Streets on Madison Avenue. Ellen Briars had been at work all morning, helped for the last hour or so by her friend, Ariel (“please call me Ari”) Fields. Every year since its inception, the group Women Protecting Women, best known by the acronym WPW, sponsored an artistic event as part of its yearly fundraising activities. This year they had planned a show of photographic self-portraits donated by prominent female artists, celebrities and executives from the New York area, to be sold at auction following the two-week run. Three years earlier, a similar show by WPW had been well attended and financially successful. When Ellen heard they were going to organize another exhibit, she leapt at the chance to have her new gallery host it.
Her husband, Thomas, was not nearly as keen on the idea since all of the proceeds of the admission fees and portrait sales would go to benefit WPW. In essence, hosting the exhibit would require the gallery to shut down any revenue-producing activity for about four weeks, allowing time to remove the existing art, set up the photographs, and get everything back to business order afterwards. They had already lost money in the short time since Iphigenia opened, and the thought of giving up an entire month of income struck him as supremely foolish. Then again, lots of things seemed foolish to him lately.
“I can certainly understand his point, Ellie,” Ari said.
“You always side with him, Ari,” Ellen pouted, pulling a few strands of her dark hair back into place behind a velour headband.
“Someone has to.”
“Well my best friend doesn’t.” Ellen wore a navy blue sweatshirt that somewhat disguised the bulk of her upper body, along with a pair of powder blue tights and a short distressed denim skirt to emphasize her relatively thin legs. Her body shape had plagued her teenage years with diet after unavailing diet until she discovered that there were men out there—quite a few, actually—who liked a woman with her shape. During college, increasingly comfortable with her self-image as a kind of earth mother, she’d had her fare share of sexual adventures and even spent one long, lazy, summer on a commune in a remote section of New York State. All of that ended in grad school when she met her future husband, and now at age 37 she was earth mother to a pair of eight-year-old twin boys and a four-year old girl. She didn’t miss that phase of her life and rarely thought about it. The entire topic was not one she had ever mentioned to Thomas, although she had never deliberately concealed anything.
“I don’t know why I bother talking to you about him,” Ellen said.
“Because I tell you what you should hear, not what you want to hear. You’re picking a fight over something stupid and maybe threatening your marriage over it. Listen to the wise old head, Ellen.”
Ellen laughed.
“Wise old head? Now there’s a crock.”
Ari was a few years over forty (not even Ellen got the true birth date), but she was slim and trim from the tip of her delicately featured face to her size six shoes and looked to be in her mid-thirties. So far, she’d been married three times to husbands who’d each had the good grace to leave her a sizable sum of money and property when they died or moved on to others. She never begrudged them, so long as their generosity extended to her bank account. She ran her own boutique public relations firm “to keep busy,” although she did not need the money. Her hair was a wonderful red applied by the best colorist on the Upper East Side. This, along with Ari’s matchstick-like figure dressed in a perfectly fitting designer rag, caused Ellen an involuntary pang of jealousy every time she looked in her direction.
“Don’t sass your elders,” Ari said with a smile.
They were standing together in the gallery, a large rectangular room on the second floor with a row of evenly spaced, tall, thin windows looking onto the street side. A partition ran down the center to increase the wall space. The photographs were spread around the gallery’s interior, propped against the bare white walls. The two women stood near the entrance, arms folded across their chests, focusing for the moment on which images they most wanted to be seen first upon entering.
Ellen walked over and switched the positions of two pictures and came back to Ari again.
“How does that look now?”
“Nice. But if you separated them by another inch, I think they would be even better.” She paused. “And all I’m saying, Ellie, is that Thomas is right when he says that a business is supposed to make money.”
“I want to make money, and I will make money,” Ellen replied with a frown. She walked back over to adjust the photographs as Ari had suggested. She had never intended moneymaking to be the be-all and end-all of her life, but Ari (bless her heart) was not the right one with whom to argue that point. Nor had Ellen confided just how close she was to divorce, or why. “I just need a little time. And a nice big boost from this WPW show.”
“Well, I hope you get it. Word of mouth has been good so far. We’ve got a good crowd coming for the opening, and I’m expecting several members of the media. Once it’s in the papers, we’ll be attracting crowds for two weeks, I think. Lots of people will have heard of and visited the Iphigenia Gallery by the time the exhibit is over.”
“From your mouth to God’s ear,” Ellen said. “Tommy has been pushing pretty hard lately to close this place down. ‘Do you know what kind of rent we could get for this place, Ellie?’ he says to me.” Ellen adopted a flat nasal voice that approximated her husband’s slight Cleveland accent. “‘We could use the income stream to buy more properties. I’m telling you Ellie, if you would start doing the bookkeeping and get involved with the rentals, we would have enough properties in fifteen years to retire to a monster beach house in the Islands.’”
“You got something against the Islands, Mon?” Ari asked dryly.
“I don’t know. I just don’t think I could stand my life if I didn’t have this gallery.”
Ari smiled.
“You lived without it for most of your life.”
“I know that, Ari. But it was always my dream, and now that it’s in my grasp, I can’t let it go. Since I was a girl, I’ve loved art. I can’t make any that’s worth a damn. But I love everything about it—the artists, the buyers, the museums, and the history, even the smells of the studios where artists work. I quit work when the twins were born, but I always thought I would return to that world, with my own place. So, I don’t want to retire. And I can’t stand the thought of being a bookkeeper or a landlord.”
The doorbell rang for the entrance downstairs. Ellen took a step over to the intercom and buzzed the door open without checking who it was.
“Are you expecting someone?” Ari asked.
“It’s probably Maggie. She said she would stop by to help this afternoon.”
“Excellent. I haven’t seen Maggie for a while. Has she entered a self-portrait?”
“Not yet, but she said she would before the opening next Thursday.”
Ari cocked her head to one side.
“Maybe I can use that to drum up some more media interest. Did you see that story she wrote for The Portal this week?”
“Yes. It was almost as big of a turn-on as her first book—until the knife appeared.”
“Well, here’s the interesting part. The police found a man early today. And guess what part of his anatomy was missing?”
“You’ve got to be kidding,” Ellen said. “Wow. Wait ‘til I tell Tommy. He’ll freak. Remember that woman who cut off her husband’s penis while he slept? Tommy couldn’t hear about that without crossing his legs, I swear.”
“I don’t think he’s the only guy to have that reaction.”
Ellen laughed, and then realized that Maggie had never come up to the gallery. She pressed the buzzer again. “I wonder what happened to Maggie.”
Ellen opened the door to the hall and looked down the stairs but saw no one. As she was about to go back inside, the bell rang a second time.
“It must be some school kid fooling around on his way home,” she said.
Ellen walked down the stairs, and when she reached the bottom, she saw Maggie through the door’s panes of glass. She opened it and gave Maggie a kiss on the cheek in greeting.
“Did you buzz twice?”
“No. But I saw someone leave a package for you.”
Now Ellen noticed the thin package that was leaning against the foyer wall. It was wrapped in brown paper and fastened with twine. The hand-written address was for WPW care of the Iphigenia Gallery.
“Here it is. Strange. I wasn’t expecting another entry for the exhibit, but that’s what it looks like. Well, whatever. Come upstairs. Ari stopped by too.”
As they climbed the stairs, Ellen loosened the string on the package. By the time they reached the second floor, she had removed the wrapping paper to find that it contained an 8 x 10 mounted black and white photograph. A note fell out to the floor.
“What is that?” Ari asked, peering over Ellen’s shoulder. “Maggie’s self-portrait?”
“It’s not mine,” Maggie said. “I’m doing mine this weekend.”
Ellen handed the photograph to Ari as she read the note.
“It’s a little weird,” Ari said.
“A little?” Maggie asked.
The photograph was a montage whose central figure was a naked woman lying on her back in a field of tall grass. A man’s face had been cut from another picture and superimposed on hers, and a man’s chest was pasted where her breasts would have been. Covering her pubic area was the bloody image of a castrated penis.
“Okay, it’s very weird,” Ari said. “Who did it, Ellen?”
Ellen shrugged.
“The note says it’s from some woman by the name of Diana,” she said. “There’s no address. No phone number. Nothing.”
“It’s her again!” Maggie said.
“What do you mean?” Ari asked.
“I was meeting with Harry Lesdock and my editor and Jane Larson around noon today when an e-mail arrived with a photograph attached of a man who had nothing but a bloody mess between his legs. The e-mail was from a woman also named Diana. And if I’m not mistaken, the cut-outs on this submission came from that photograph.”
“Do you think this woman actually killed the guy and photographed it?” Ellen asked.
“In imitation of your writing?” Ari added.
“I don’t know,” said Maggie. “But I think this is getting kind of freaky. I’d better call Jane right away.”
Maggie’s hands were trembling as she dialed Jane’s office number, putting the phone on speaker so that Ari and Ellen could hear as well. On the third ring, the answering machine came on. But when it was halfway through the greeting, Jane’s voice interrupted.
“Jane, I’m so glad you’re there,” Maggie said quickly. “I’m here with Ellen and Ari.”
“I just arrived and I’m talking to my landlady, Dorothy. Somebody broke into my office.”
“What!”
“Yeah. They didn’t seem to steal anything. Just dropped off a present for me in a nice little pink bag, wrapped up in pink paper with a pretty little pink bow. Dorothy’s opening it for me.”
Suddenly there was a piercing scream from Jane’s end of the phone.
“Jane, what’s going on?” Maggie asked. Ellen and Ari drew closer to her, looking concerned.
They could hear the sound of the receiver being placed hurriedly on the desk, muffled curses, and then Jane’s steady calming voice punctuated by that of another woman, nearly hysterical, asking over and over again, “What is it? What is it!”
Finally, Jane succeeded in calming Dorothy. Maggie could hear Jane walking back across her office and picking up the phone again.
“Still there?” Jane asked evenly.
“What happened to you?” Maggie demanded, echoed by Ellen and Ari.
“Nothing happened to me. Apparently, our friend Diana just left a little present for me and for WPW. That’s how the card is addressed. I feel the way a cat owner does when her pet leaves a mouse on the doorstep. Only this isn’t a mouse. It’s a man’s penis, all wrapped up in butcher paper. I’ll give you three guesses who it belongs to, Maggie.”
“I think we can all figure that one out,” Ellen said. “Maggie told us what happened to you guys earlier. And we were calling you because this Diana woman submitted a photo of a similar subject matter for the WPW exhibit.”
“Wow. Really?”
“Jane, what is she doing?” Maggie asked. “And why?”
“I don’t know, Maggie. But I would say it’s time to call the cops. So hold on to anything Diana may have touched.”
“I will,” Ellen said.
“And right after I call the police, I think I’ll put in a call to Scott Harper at The Portal. What do you think, Ari?”
“My head is still spinning with all of this,” Ari said. “But I believe your instincts are correct. As a practical matter, the publicity from this woman will only help the WPW exhibit and Maggie’s book as well. It just seems a bit unseemly to use death as a promotional device.”
“I think the publicity is inevitable now anyway,” Jane said. “The guy’s already dead. Why not make use of it to aid the living?”