Nothing could have stretched an already desperate run of hours into an impossible grind like trying to get Miss June through her day. It should have been good—a cheerful, lucid granny and pretty weather. But Emma wanted to be anywhere else.
She tucked June into her recliner with her two blankets, three pillows, and tea, diluted just right. Emma switched on the television to a roundtable gossip show.
She wanted to be alone, to think. To rewatch the video. To decide what to do about it.
“Emma!”
She pulled back from her deep drift. “Yes?”
“You worried me, honey. You’re a million miles away. I called you. It’s like you didn’t hear me. I thought I’d died and was the last to know it.” June’s blue eyes sparkled in humor that disguised the slight tinge of the actual fear of confusion.
“I’m sorry! You called me?” Emma looked down at the phone in her hands.
“Called your name, for goodness’ sake.”
• • •
Marcelline Gossard had been answering to the name Emma O’Connor for nearly four years. She’d left her real name behind, shedding it unknowingly at first, in Owen Haig’s apartment. He’d made a magic trick of Marcelline Gossard. Her coworkers had seen her leave for the day. A few people, all now dead or fled, had seen her at the secret meeting to sell the Flinck.
Then poof. She vanished. First, from her own train of thought.
The first time she woke up in his spare room, not that she recognized it as such, it was like clawing up through miles of crumbling darkness that dragged against every gain she made toward thinking. She’d swim up, pulling and fighting to hold on to an idea or even a question. She’d get as far as the wall of pain, then slip back to sleep before she could make sense of anything. She slid so deep that she hadn’t been dreaming. She couldn’t swear that she’d even been breathing except that she was still alive to wonder about it. She was just gone, unplugged, then plugged back in for rebooting. Over and over.
She was there for nine days, with the first two only accounted for by working backward on a calendar. Then nearly three days of the molasses swimming.
When she saw Owen for the first time, she thought she might finally be dreaming. Or possibly dead. He was wearing a long-sleeved T-shirt and jeans. Marcelline searched her catalog of impressions of him and realized that she could never have pictured him in anything but a dark suit, buttoning and unbuttoning the jacket when he sat down or stood up—smooth, graceful, as automatic as a machine.
A rippling soft crewneck on Owen Haig was all wrong. He had his costume like a paint job, as if he hung himself up in it every night and shrugged free of the hanger each morning, already set for business when he hit the floor. She could imagine him shooting his cuffs and straightening his tie, but that was about it. She slid her jaw sideways for a bolt of pain to test reality, just to be sure.
It was real.
And he was real.
He was there in the room with her and he didn’t always wear suits, and he had, apparently, given her a lot more thought over the time they’d known each other than she’d ever given him. She tried to make his having saved her life stay up top of the growing list of things that were on her mind.
Everything came back into focus. Gains were made by the hour and the day. The pain became understandable, and thereby bearable. She rediscovered her voice and a way to talk through a mouth that didn’t move right. She found that she could now remember, from one sleep to the next, where she was and what this was all about. But she wasn’t inclined to show her progress. Owen was kind, almost sappy, when she was weak and aching, but he sharpened as she did. He had a lot of questions about what had happened. She had a lot of questions about what was happening.
Her phone was gone. The clothes she’d been wearing, too. She didn’t have any shoes. He took the medicines out of the room after dosing her, but left her bottles of water to drink.
She had doctors and nurses to tend the damage to her face and neck, but Owen wouldn’t let her have a mirror. She burrowed into the bed, deliciously piled in softness and warmth, when the painkillers kicked in. The curtains kept out the light, so she could rest and heal. But it took hours, not days, to realize that the room was actually a well-appointed cell.
She’d asked for her phone, any phone, every time a nurse or doctor or the timid housekeeper came into the room. And every time, they’d avert their eyes and say that she’d need to talk to Mr. Haig about that.
When she did, Owen, in a tone with no inflection, had asked her if she’d be willing to call her partner. He obviously expected her to say no. He didn’t mind showing that the question was a prod. He watched her for a squirm. Her heart revved in her chest.
“He’s not my partner, Owen. I swear. I only met him a few days ago. He wouldn’t talk on the phone at all. I don’t even have a number for him.”
“Hmmmm. That’s a shame. But okay. There’s no reason for you to have the phone, then. But you can have the battery.”
He slid the silver-and-black square onto the bedside table.
Even the cell signal of Marcelline Gossard was gone. No one would find her that way.
Over the first days, the situation sketched in. Jonathan had taken the painting and the money in the interrupted sale. That was only known “in-house,” as Owen put it. The two people who came with Owen were dead. That was also being kept private. Marcelline Gossard had been officially reported missing by her family. Owen said her picture had made the news, but the nurse had gone pale and shut her down when she’d tried to plead with her to get a message out.
On day five, Marcelline started practicing standing and walking on her own. Her legs trembled and her heart pounded her blood into a froth that carried not near enough oxygen up to her head. But she did laps to test her stamina when she heard Owen in the shower or on the phone. She couldn’t help but notice that he never left her alone in the apartment.
She wasn’t ready for it on the day she had to leave, but Owen had asked her if she needed anything.
“No.”
“Okay.” He turned to go.
The stabbing pains in the constant yammering ache were keeping her from deep sleep, especially at night, but she was trying to take less medicine. She was exhausted and stir-crazy, then just regular crazy on top of that from trying to hide that she was feeling well enough to walk around, count hours, and churn.
The urge to tip something over, to give a spur to the dragging clock, won out.
“Actually, I do need something,” she called out to him. He came back to her bedside. “I need to know what you’re going to do.”
The disappointment in Owen’s expression was the freezing part. He was furious. He was frustrated. But his reaction to everything had matured into a kind of acceptance. He was wounded, but somehow bored and ready to move on.
He sighed, but never raised his voice out of the soft near-monotone. “I don’t know. Losing cash by the quarter millions isn’t what I’m hired to do. Having not a fucking thing to show for it doesn’t help. No painting. No hint as to where it might be. Two dead people . . .
“If you won’t give up your partner, then it’s either you or me on the hook for this whole mess. But really, in the end, no matter what, it’s only me, isn’t it? I let this happen. I trusted you.
“Besides, everyone’s looking for you, so that’s a consideration. They’ll want interviews and press conferences. If they were to find you, in this—” He touched her cheek above the bandage. “I can’t be sure of what you’d say. Or what any of your family would say either. There’s not a lot holding this together.”
She didn’t let him trap her in a hard stare. Instinct warned that softer was better, shoulders dropped, eyes gently out of piercing focus on his. “I wouldn’t say anything. They wouldn’t say anything. I’d make something up about my face. You have to know that. You saved my life. You think I don’t know I’d be dead without you? Jonathan is not my partner. I’m sorry, Owen. I’m trying to remember something that will help us.”
She put a quiver on us for sparkle, then again on we and our and every word that made her part of a pair with him. “We will figure this out. It’s not our fault, neither one of us. He did this.”
She stopped babbling. He hadn’t relaxed into a single pleading word she’d said. The clock wasn’t plodding anymore. It was flying.
Owen ticked his head, only half a nod. There wasn’t nearly enough agreement in it to make her feel better.
Marcelline had forced her voice down to a pained rasp. “Actually, if it’s okay, can I have a couple of those Percocets? My jaw is killing me.”
She palmed the pills and fought to keep a grip on her fear, to keep the terror in its lane. She invented and discarded plans, burning through to a useless blank far too soon. She couldn’t think. Her ears strained at the quiet.
She watched the clock add minutes to her desperation. Owen didn’t come back in. Marcelline turned her head deep into the pillow so when the housekeeper checked, she saw her sprawled in the pose of narcotic oblivion.
Marcelline heard Owen walk past her room into his own.
But then the front door opened and closed.
When she heard the shower come on in the master bathroom, her fear whispered that she shouldn’t trust it, she didn’t know why the housekeeper had stepped out, or for how long. Marcelline was too weak, and where the hell would she go anyway? But then the plastic clatter of a dropped shampoo bottle bouncing off tile was like a starting gun. No plan necessary. Just go.
She peered from the open bedroom door, listening. All quiet except for Owen in the bathroom. She wobbled from her room out into the unfamiliar apartment. She was across from the laundry room.
Shedding the string-tied hospital gown that the nurses swapped out for a clean one each day, she ransacked the dryer for an enormous T-shirt. She yanked it down over her head and, in her rush, scraped over the bulky bandage at her jaw. It pulled free and the gauze dangled onto her shoulder. The air hit the wound and lit up the damp, tender wreckage, mapping the extent of the ruin that she hadn’t yet seen. Her stomach rolled. Suddenly, running seemed like a terrible idea. But she pushed the tapes flat, as best they would go, and swiped at the thread of fresh blood that tickled her neck. It didn’t hurt much. Terror was almost as good as morphine.
The shorts she tried wouldn’t stay on her hips. She kicked them away in frustration and snatched up the discarded gown and tied it around her waist as a ragged skirt.
Her medicines were lined up on Owen’s bookshelf, and she raked the orange bottles into a fold of the giant T-shirt she wore and held it closed against her body. Straining her ears to both the front door and the steady rain of the shower, she pulled open the desk drawers in the office, looking for her phone, for money, for anything that would help her.
Near the top of a loose fan of business cards scattered in the center drawer was a plain white card, a silver stripe in the middle separating a phone number below from the embossed initials above: S.K.
Marcelline had taken the card, an empty manila envelope for the pill bottles, and a nasty-looking letter opener for just in case she ran out of alone time or strength in her legs before she got out.
The sound of water still hissed from the master suite. Marcelline closed the door to her room, tucked the laundry back into the dryer and eased it shut, and considered Owen’s gym shoes by the door. That would never work. They were way too big. But she took his socks, still grotesquely damp, from the pile of towels and gym-bag flotsam that he’d left on the floor by the breakfast counter. His keys were there, too.
She’d never given much thought to Owen Haig when they’d worked together. Rich people and their minions were a staple in her life; their polish and bling and attitudes were wallpaper to her. But Owen’s beautiful silver Mercedes, with its muted orange calipers, now that had caught her eye, she had to admit.
The silence thunked into place as Owen cut the water. Marcelline’s Jell-O heart tried to stop in her chest. She folded her fist around the keys to keep them from clanging, double-checked the room for anything obviously out of place, and tiptoed out the door in Owen’s sweat-soaked socks.
Adrenaline had gotten her down the elevator and through the garage in Owen’s building, first to find the car in a frantic, swivel-headed stagger through the gloom of the concrete cavern, then driving through the exit, trembling behind the tinted glass. The gate lifted with no alarm, and she turned onto the street, gripping the steering wheel until her fingers ached.
She’d burned through the last of her energy in only a few miles. She was exhausted and anemic, sweating and gasping for air—and all of that was before she’d even gotten out of the apartment. Her once-booming heart now limped along in her chest. Her teeth chattered. The car was conspicuous, and too much of her concentration was diverted to wondering if Owen had discovered her gone yet. A few days of confinement with too much of it spent being unconscious had warped her sense of time. She hadn’t looked at a clock on the way out. He might have showered more than an hour ago, or she may only have been gone ten minutes.
She’d ground the bumper of the Mercedes over a too-high curb when she’d pulled in between a dog park and a line of shops.
In her own wallet, wherever that was, Marcelline had the same business card that she’d taken from Owen’s desk.
S.K. was Samantha. Marcelline couldn’t remember her last name, something long, lots of letters. She didn’t know what the woman’s official job title was either, but the handful of transactions that had involved Samantha had been with the shadiest characters Marcelline had ever seen in the gallery.
Whenever Samantha was part of the exchange, the layers of discretion were the answer to their own questions: Don’t ask.
Samantha’s personal style was changeable. A tousle of the hairdo and one accessory more or less and she’d blend into a school board meeting or an audience with the queen, a get-together in a pub or a church. It wasn’t hard to imagine her charming bikers and politicians alike. Her appeal was sparkle eyed and harmless, and Marcelline enjoyed it, but didn’t buy it for a second.
In the work they’d done together, Samantha was somewhere between an ambassador and a greased skid. She got things done. She erased negotiation and replaced it with introductions and efficient payments and everyone feeling like friends in the end. The last time they’d met had been with the Eastern European heavies who dealt with the Anningers through Owen.
Samantha would have been the next person Marcelline would have called if the Anningers hadn’t wanted the Flinck. As it was now, she seemed like the only person Marcelline could call at all.
So she did.
She’d refolded her makeshift skirt to look a little less obvious and steadied her hands and breath. She’d checked the mirror and wished she hadn’t. At least the bandaged, hollow-eyed wreck that she was in the moment wouldn’t likely remind anyone of any photo the media might have used in the search for her.
Marcelline had fished the stream of passersby and went for a kindly, confused-looking older woman with a flip phone that had to be a decade old. She begged to borrow it. The call went through and Samantha remembered her.
Samantha had done three circuits of Holy shit! in the first moments of that call and never acted shocked about a single thing beyond that.
Once Marcelline described where she was, Samantha told her to get out of sight, directing her, with her keyboard clicking over the line, checking online photos and maps, to a row of trash and recycling containers at the far end of the run of buildings.
“Wait there. Oh, and delete this call from that woman’s phone before you give it back. Don’t worry, we’ll take care of the rest from this end.”
“How—”
“Don’t ask. Hang in there. Sit tight.”
When she was retrieved to Samantha’s office, then fed and medicated, Marcelline’s story, all of her regret and terror, flooded out past any good reason not to. She had no energy left to spare on defense.
“Let me just finish one thing, here,” Samantha said, looking from her keyboard to the screen. Marcelline’s story had wound down to exhausted silence. “Then I’ll take you home with me.”
“Why would you do that?”
“You need rest. Also, because I have an idea. This is interesting.”
Marcelline worked up a weak smile. “I’m not sure I can handle any more things that are interesting.”
“Don’t worry. I can help you.” Samantha looked away from her work. “Do you believe me?”
Relief filled up Marcelline’s throat. She could only nod.
“Good. All it will cost you is a little blood. Not that you look like you can afford to lose much more.”
Marcelline closed her eyes. It was work to even lift her lips into a better smile. She should laugh. It was the kind of thing people said as a joke. Why didn’t it sound like a joke?
Samantha noticed. “I’m not kidding, actually. Sorry. I’ll have someone come out to the house to draw a little blood tomorrow. It’ll be okay. We won’t need much.” Samantha emptied a small brown-paper shopping bag of its lunch leftovers and held open the sack toward Marcelline’s shoeless feet. “Put his socks in here.”
Samantha’s grin was adorable, mischievous even. A gray swoon of unreality threatened to tilt Marcelline out of her chair. “Why?”
“Why? Because you’re a missing person. And not just plainly missing. You’re gorgeous and well missed by good, upstanding photogenic people who pay their taxes. That’s why. It’s quite an opportunity. A little mingled DNA on some artfully hidden socks can be very compelling to police and juries. Did you never see anything about the OJ trial?”
“You’re going to set him up? But Owen didn’t do anything to me. I mean, I don’t even know that he would have. I might have overreacted. It might just have been his way of making sure I didn’t know where Jonathan is.”
“You think Owen Haig is all talk?”
Marcelline couldn’t bring herself to say yes, but no would have been close to a lie.
Samantha sighed. “I know it’s horrible and terrible. It’s also not fixable. And, no, I’m not necessarily going to set him up. He didn’t do anything to you, but he didn’t get the chance, did he? Let’s just say that your concerns for your well-being—and your family’s—weren’t ridiculous. He’s humiliated. It’s not safe to make him angry. You’ll have to trust me on that. Seriously.”
“But the socks . . .”
“Right. In our weird world I actually like Owen, for the most part. But he gets in my way. And I get in his. Being able to divert him, should I ever need to, is a gold coin. The police crawling up his ass over a missing person like you?” Samantha laughed, delighted. “I could drop that little bomb for years and it would still play.”
The guilt made Marcelline’s stomach lurch.
“Look. I probably won’t ever do it, but leverage is very important in what Owen and I do. It would probably be just as effective to send him one of the two socks and tell him what it is. It’s worth taking you on as a little side project just for this piece of rainy-day insurance.
“I know you think this is a disaster. And from where you’re sitting, it is. For me, though? This, dear M, is easy. And maybe even worthwhile.”
Samantha called everyone she liked by the initial of their first name. She’d started calling Marcelline M the second time they met in the gallery, and Samantha picked it up again now, automatically, in the moment of taking her on as a pet project.
After a few weeks of lying low at Samantha’s, they’d come to a decision. The two of them together, S&M, was a joke—funny because it was a little bit funny on its own, and funny because their situation demanded honesty that was true to the point of pain.
M couldn’t stay. It wasn’t safe to be so close. She couldn’t hide there forever. Marcelline’s family was frantic over her disappearance. Owen Haig was on a rampage. And no one knew where the painting was.
When Samantha was prepping Marcelline for her next life, far away as someone else, picking her new name had been the hardest part. Well, not the first name. That had been easy. M—Em—Emma.
S had been typing, her ever-present purple manicure flashing quickly over the keys, the clicking a soothing white noise over Marcelline’s anxiety. It sounded sure. And competent. And not crazy. This was crazy.
“Okay, for the last name, just pick one of someone you love. A name that always means good things to you. You’ll answer to it quicker that way. That’s the hard part, responding naturally when your new name is called. So, what do you think?”
The prospect of not seeing her sister sprang to Marcelline’s mind. “Bethany.”
Samantha sighed. “I know. But Bethany is a weird last name. Emma Bethany? That won’t work.”
“Okay.”
“And you have the same last name as your sister. So, that won’t work either. What else?”
They settled on O’Connor after Marcelline’s third-grade teacher, a woman she’d adored and who had let her take home the class rabbit over the summer as her first pet.
“I assume you were fingerprinted for the gallery?” Samantha asked.
“Yes. They had to do everyone.”
“That’s what I thought. So a life of crime is out. Got it?”
“Probably should have told me that a couple of months ago.”
Samantha smiled and kept typing. “No, really. Don’t get arrested. Okay, now all that’s left is—” Samantha had stopped short, hands hovering above the keyboard.
All that’s left had drawn a hiccuping sob from Marcelline.
“It’s going to be okay, M. I know how to do this. I know you’re scared, and I am, too, which is weird. I’ve never had to do this before for someone I care about. And I don’t have a lot of friends. But I’m good at my job. I never get to save the day. I’m not going to screw this up. Okay?” They’d stared into each other’s tears, a pin in the map of their odd new friendship. “It’s going to be good. You’re going to be fine. We’ll work this out. I promise.”
Samantha scratched her nails over Marcelline’s shoulder. A friendly, reassuring grand gesture from the least touchy-feely person Marcelline had ever met.
“And now you need to pick a birthday that’s a holiday— What? It makes the date easy to remember. And it makes good stories that are easy to come up with. Fourth of July, Christmas, Halloween, something, any of those. And”—Samantha snapped her fingers—“you need a trauma, a reason not to talk about things, a reason not to be on social media.”
Marcelline had looked at Samantha as if she’d turned into a beetle on a path straight across her foot, and cupped her hand over the sunset palette of scars at her jawline. “How will we ever think of anything?”
Samantha shook her head. “Right.” She looked Marcelline over. “Okay. Simple. You’ve got a psycho ex-husband. You ran. He’s cut you off from your family. It’s PTSD and you won’t even say his name.” Samantha looked unselfconsciously at the scar when Marcelline dropped her hand. “They’ll believe you.”
So in her new life, whenever she talked about herself at all, Emma O’Connor said she loved having a birthday on Halloween. The story was that all her life there was always a masquerade that no one had to go to any extra trouble for. And she was effectively a refugee from a horror that would be cruel to prod. It was the exit to any conversation she didn’t want to have.
Her official paper trail was shallow, but reliable. Marcelline Gossard was gone. Some people, a lot of people, thought she was dead. Knew she was dead. Counted very much on her being dead. Samantha stayed close, always there by phone and text, and kept a watch for who looked for Marcelline online.
• • •
Emma watched the video dozens of times after June was once again situated for the night.
She read the comments on the different postings, searching through the You go, girl, and cheers and horrid troll commentary for clues as to where this attack had taken place. As to where the painting was hanging right now.
She wrenched her eyes off the taunting wedge of it in the video to study the girl, the street, the direction of the late-afternoon light to orient the house to the compass.
She sifted the internet chatter for leads. She found the police website, and the map of the town.
Her eyes burned. She finished the wine and rolled into a paralyzed sleep. She waited ninety minutes after she woke up, watching the clock in a blank trance, before she set about packing her bag and calling Eddie to plead a case of a family emergency. The fictional family of pain needed her. No one could ask her to deny the drama.
Eddie was sweet and understanding, as Eddie could only be.
She called Samantha as she settled south at highway speed.
“I don’t understand, M, tell me what this video is. Send me a link. Let me check into this.”
“It’s okay. I’ll be careful. I have to try.”
“You really don’t. Just come back. I’ll fly in. We’ll talk it through.”
“Owen thinks I screwed him over. You didn’t see how he acted. He was . . . It wasn’t just the money and going back to the Anningers empty-handed. He was so upset that it was me. He thinks I set him up. I’m the only one who can fix it. It has to be me. If I can bring back the painting, he’ll see—”
“Okay, that’s one hell of an if, and it doesn’t really undo what went wrong that night. Owen has been in the naughty corner with his bosses for four years. Can you imagine how that is for a guy like him? You can’t ever make that go away. I don’t need to have seen him to know what you’re saying. That’s exactly why I’m not convinced the painting can be traded for a clean slate.”
“I want my life back.”
“Um, one small detail—you have to be alive to have a life. You could make a new life if you’d just get out a little bit. I know it’s hard. But you don’t have to be a hermit. It’s making you crazy. This is crazy. Your cover is solid. It’s at least solid enough to try to live a little. Give me some credit.”
“It’s not you. I owe you. I owe you everything. I know that. But it’s not just the painting. What if I could give Jonathan to Owen? Let him see for sure that it wasn’t me?”
“You don’t even know that Jonathan is still in the picture. He might not be anywhere near there. What if he sold it to someone else?”
“Sold the Flinck to some random people who hung it up as a decoration in the suburbs? Come on. It has to be him.”
“I don’t even want to remind you that if you break in and something goes wrong and your fingerprints are on anything—”
“I know.”
“Sure you do. You’re the expert. Oh, wait! No, that’s me. This thing is only as good as you not delivering yourself on a platter to the police.”
“I know.”
“You say that a lot. But if you don’t listen to me now, you’ll definitely know soon, one way or the other, about a great many things. And if it goes a particular way, you also have to know that I can’t help you.”
Emma chewed her bottom lip. “Are you saying that because you think it’ll stop me?”
“No. I’m saying it for the other reason.”
“That it’s true.”
“Yeah, if you think you can trust me,” Samantha said.
“I’m sorry. Shit.”
“No shit, shit.”
“I’ll be careful. I promise,” Emma said.
“Uh-huh. Just call me.”
• • •
Emma watched the exodus from across the street in front of Gordon Hawley Middle School. It felt impossible to sift for any single kid in the liquid rush of young people pouring from the doors. They wore different colors and carried different things, but in the distance, they all seemed as alike as a romp of otters. And just as energetic. You only noticed any particular one of them when they drew some leaping attention to themselves.
Some of the kids split off for a line of buses. Some milled around in front of a queue of cars, waving their goodbyes as they matched to their rides home. But the girl in the video had been walking when she was attacked. So Marcelline looked to the margins of the crowd as it went ragged in all directions into the surrounding neighborhoods.
There. It had to be her. Same hair. Same stride. A plaid shirt tied around her waist an awful lot like the one in the video. Her features had been blurred out, but Marcelline had seen her on the screen so many times now. She was with another girl. It had been eleven days since the attack. Marcelline watched her for wariness.
Marcelline dropped the transmission back into drive and blew out a deep breath. She didn’t know how to follow anyone. She didn’t want to know how to follow anyone. The girl turned the corner with her friend, heading up the hill and out of sight.
Like the inverse of Emma’s family, who had become just images on a screen to her, it was strange to see this girl in three dimensions in plain daylight. Emma had sought her out and studied this girl’s life the way she had her sister’s. Emma felt both predatory and protective of her. Why and how the Flinck came to be in the girl’s foyer, none of this was her fault.
There were roughly a hundred ways this could go once she found the right house. And only if she discovered a streak of stealth within herself that let her get close enough to do anything about it. But sneaking wasn’t much like her. Emma was untested, but Marcelline had always been a by-the-horns kind of person.
She ran her thumb over the braille of her ruined jaw, the pits and peaks of the scar retelling the story of what was lost to her. And with whose help.
Jonathan had only thought he’d found an old painting, but once she’d explained what it was and the infamous Boston gallery heist, they’d decided together to skip the media attention and the pat on the head and the splitting of the FBI reward for only one small part of the Gardner Museum’s lost haul.
It was unethical and clearly against her contract’s details, but in a business that dealt with rarities every day, the truly unique was understood to be tempting, and not terribly difficult to get away with.
Collectors who bought on the sly tended to stay sly about it, and their impulsive purchases could change the lives of garden-variety art dealers. Most of these transgressions were forgiven in principle, with the understanding that if you got caught, the payoff had best be enough for you to fade into an entirely different circle of friends and colleagues.
Still, even as the doldrums set in and her thirties became the fixed grind that they were for most everybody, it wasn’t anything Marcelline had ever entertained. She’d gotten out on the wrong side of the bed on the morning she’d met Jonathan, and not figuratively. Normally she slept on the right side of the bed, with the left side too-long vacant until the next time she fell in love, or at least into deep like.
But on that day, the sooty morning light had put an end to a night’s restless sleep. She’d woken up before her alarm went off, way over to the left side of the bed, stuck in a sweaty tangle of sheets. She’d kicked them away and crawled out, feeling headachy and off and in the perfect storm of a weirdly expectant mood. Ultimately, it didn’t disappoint.
After lunch, a guy walked in off the street with a photo of the Flinck on his phone and the skeleton of a story of wanting to sell it.
After the decision to go rogue with the painting, and after too much wine and kissing beyond that, the next morning the left side of her bed was full of a hungover Jonathan. Always just Jonathan. He never told her his last name. He wouldn’t. He thought it was funny.
And a few days later, he had left her to die. It could possibly have been forgivable. Anyone would be afraid. Something had gone horribly wrong. Anyone could panic.
But Jonathan hadn’t been panicked, and that’s what was unforgivable. She never saw a ripple of raw worry on his face. For all the world it looked as if he’d shaken off the shock of it as if a fly had landed on his sleeve. He’d knelt and looked her over, but not into her eyes. He was measuring. Adding. Subtracting. He’d pinned her hands down as she tried to hold in her own blood. He looked across the lot to check how far away Owen was. Calibration. Triangulation.
And he knew the shooter. For fuck’s sake, Roy! Get the hell out of here!
Jonathan had looked up at the sky, shaken his head regretfully, almost annoyed, mouth drawn tight. Marcelline had seen the decision settle in through his shoulders. Her fear, the warm river of blood pooling under her shoulder, the look in her eyes, none of these things figured into his sum. She grabbed his wrist. She believed the last thing she’d ever feel was fury. He would look at her, goddammit. She wasn’t letting this go without that. He would look at her.
But he didn’t. She’d had the strength of cobwebs, and he flexed his wrist in her grip and brushed her fingers clear. Then he ran. The scene went dark and silent, and the next sharp moment was realizing that she had become something like Owen’s catch-detainee-responsibility-pet.
Now she was close to . . . well, something that was the next part of this painting’s story.
The two girls came back into sight as Marcelline’s car slowly crested the hill. Jonathan might not be a part of this scenario. If he was here, if he was still part of this story, well, that particular what-if dead-ended at a curtain. But she wouldn’t look behind it until she knew for sure.
Marcelline unclenched her teeth. The ruined side of her jaw was aching. It reminded her to be angry. The watch-and-wait phase was a whetstone for sharpening that feeling into something useful.