25

Bernie is gone, but all of his work has been destroyed.

His overly sexualized mermaids lie in pieces, strewn over his tables and tarp. In some places, they’ve been crushed to leather and dust, as if someone pushed them over and danced in the rubble.

Sarah is shocked…and disgusted.

Maybe she didn’t like Bernie, and maybe she hated his art, but she respects his right to make it and not have it destroyed.

She sets her breakfast on the nearest table, snatches up a pastry and her coffee, and marches right back up to the community house, chewing and gulping to fortify herself along the way.

“Hey, are you okay?” Reid asks as he opens the door for her on his way out with Kim.

“Yeah, I mean no, I mean…have you seen Gail this morning?”

“She popped in to refill the coffee and then went back to the main office, I thought.” He looks closely at her, worried. “What’s wrong?”

She shakes her head. “I just need to find Gail.”

Kim stares at her like she’s an absolute lunatic as she ducks under Reid’s arm and through the door, headed for the front office. Gail isn’t there, of course, because Gail is never where Sarah needs her to be. She pings the little brass bell multiple times, but no one appears, not even the sleepy wizard. Frustrated now, and feeling like she’s somehow done something wrong, she bangs on the door to Gail’s private residence, but even that doesn’t raise a response.

As a last resort, she finally pushes through the Employees Only door to the kitchen. Bridget is at the industrial dishwasher, blasting dishes with a sprayer and looking like it’s the last thing in the entire world she wants to do.

“Employees only,” she growls, glaring at Sarah like a dog protecting its shitty kibble.

“It’s kind of an emergency. Is your mom around?”

“She’s already dealing with an emergency. Something up at the old hotel. She and Dad are both up there. What’s your problem? Is someone hurt? Is something on fire?”

“No, it’s—”

“Then it doesn’t matter. I’ll tell Gail to find you when she’s done. Which one are you?”

“I’m Sarah.”

Bridget snorts and rolls her eyes. “I’m not going to remember that. What’s your medium?”

“Clay.”

At that, Bridget finally looks at her like she’s a person and not just a stain that won’t wash out. “So you’re the one who found Bernie?”

In the excitement of the morning, Sarah had almost forgotten that part—that there was a corpse in her studio yesterday and she was the one lucky enough to discover it.

“Yeah.”

“That guy was trash. He’s been creeping on me since I hit puberty.”

Bridget doesn’t stop blasting the dishes, but something about her seems just slightly more open.

“So he was friends with your mom?” Sarah asks.

Bridget nods. “He helped build some of the cabins, back in the day. They all wore jorts and no shirts and had long hair and drank beer while they built shit. They used to say they hammered all day and got hammered all night. He was always trying to get me to sit in his lap.” She shudders. “Is that your problem? Was he creeping on you? Mom told me the coroner already took him away.”

“It’s his artwork.” Sarah picks up a dropped fork, puts it in the sink. “He’d been working on these sculptures, these mermaids. They were fine yesterday, but I just opened up the studio and they’re all smashed.”

Bridget’s smirk is unrepentant. “Good. Every sculpture he ever did had huge boobs or a giant penis. It was embarrassing. He thought it was transgressive. I told him he was using that word wrong and it was actually just unoriginal and overdone. And then he told me there were better things to do with my pretty mouth. So, yeah. No big loss.”

“I just…I thought Gail should know.”

“You don’t want to get in trouble for it, you mean,” Bridget says, accurately summing up the situation. “Don’t worry. They’ll probably blame me. I begged Mom not to let him come back, but I guess he got kicked out by some woman who finally came to her senses and he needed a place to crash and just showed up and asked for a cabin, which of course he got. I’ll tell her you were here. I’d be working on my alibi, though, if I were you. She liked him, for some odd reason.” She goes back to spraying the dishes and glowers. “Now get out of the kitchen. There really is a legal reason you can’t be back here, and I’m not in the mood to get yelled at again.”

“Okay. Thanks.” Sarah gives a weak wave as she heads back out to the café.

She has an alibi—sort of. She and Ingrid were together doing something explicitly against the rules, but if they discuss it beforehand they can just tell Gail they were hanging out in her cottage or going for a hike or something, that they were together and therefore couldn’t possibly have been causing problems in the old hotel. Except—

Shit. What if Gail and George find her phone?

Ingrid must’ve dropped it, which means it’s just sitting in the old doctor’s office somewhere, obviously out of place. It’s locked and the lock screen isn’t a selfie of her or anything that obvious, but all they really have to do is ask everyone present to hold up their phone and Sarah would be sent packing immediately.

She has to get back inside the hotel and find that phone before someone else does. Which means she’s got to find Ingrid and get her to come along, because there’s no way she wants to be in there alone. She doesn’t particularly want to be there with company, either. If the whole place burned down right this moment, she would be just fine with that, even if it meant having to use what little money she has for a new phone.

The cafeteria is empty, and of course Ingrid is long gone. It would’ve been so easy if she was here, and nothing here is easy.

If Sarah hadn’t had the lorazepam, or whatever it was, she would be a lot more upset than she is…but as it is, she’s still extremely upset.

She quick-walks out to the photography studio, but Ingrid isn’t in there.

A strange sound makes her shoulders hunch up around her ears, and she walks to the music studio. It’s piano music, something old and sprightly that makes her think of Fourth of July picnics in a park with marching bands and gazebos and fireworks. It doesn’t sound at all like the sort of thing Lucas would play, and she sidles up to the window to peek in. There he is at the piano, hunched over, tension in every line of his wiry arms and long, elegant fingers. His hair falls over his face, but he’s playing like he’s learning the song under a strict master, his fingers mashing the keys harder than they need to as he feels his way along the melody. The song draws to a close, and his body moves in a wave as he draws a big breath, straightens momentarily, and then folds back over the keyboard. He shakes his hands briefly—they look reddish, the knuckles angry—and dives right back into the song with the energy of a runaway horse. On the ground is a violin or viola, tossed carelessly aside, the hair snapped away from the bow lying nearby.

Is Lucas angry? she wonders. The last time she saw him, he was upset about Ingrid’s pictures of the dead girl, but now he seems fully consumed by this strange, repetitive, mesmerizing, maddening song, playing it with a simmering sort of rage. She knows that most teen boys are angry in general, and that Lucas has plenty of reasons to be angry at circumstance and especially at his mother, so it doesn’t strike her as terribly unusual, just odd. An angry teen boy should be playing “Smells Like Teen Spirit” or death metal, not this weird old carousel song. Thus far, he’s seemed sensitive, quiet, and shy, but decently normal. Maybe he’s practicing this particular song for a performance or something he needs to get just right, but it feels…uncomfortable. Makes her want to plug her ears and screw up her face and turn away.

To each their own, she supposes.

Lucas is an artist, and his business is his business. She leaves him there and heads to the next studio, glancing in the window to see what Antoinette is up to. Of all the people here, she knows the least about the older woman, only that she’s often in cahoots with Gertrude Rose and that she appears to silently judge everyone through those big round glasses, her mouth pursed in what looks like distaste and one eyebrow raised in judgment.

Antoinette is perched at the center table again, leaning over the illuminated box, carefully dipping her pen in a round bowl of black ink. Her face is close to the page, her every movement thoughtful and tight. An artist at work—exactly as expected.

That is, until Sarah notices that the floor is absolutely covered in calligraphed pages. Letters march across the center of each creamy white sheet of paper, tightly packed together and dominated by diagonal slashes and flourishes. From where she stands, Sarah can’t make out any words, but the writing looks unfamiliar and off, a strange font from another time. As she watches, Antoinette holds up the piece of paper she’s been working on, shakes her head in dismay, and throws it over her shoulder. It swoops to the ground in elegant arcs to lie on the layers that fell before it. Sarah thinks she can see the word Obey.

Antoinette’s head whips around suddenly, and Sarah stumbles back at the power in that piercing gaze. She’s flooded with panic and something like shame, because peeping in at working artists is considered rude. When Antoinette beckons with one curling finger, Sarah has no choice but to go inside.

“What’s up?” she says with more cheer than she feels.

“You look guilty,” Antoinette says, twisting her back until it cracks.

“I know it’s rude to stare. I’m sorry. I was just curious about your studio. I don’t know anything about calligraphy.” It’s not a lie, but still, something about it feels dishonest. Sarah does feel guilty, but not about staring.

Antoinette focuses on her light box and puts a new sheet of paper on top, right over another paper with crosshatched lines to guide her hand. She dips her frilly glass pen in the dish of ink and looks down as she makes firm strokes. “The earliest calligraphy was done in ancient China during the Shang dynasty, we think. They carved auspicious tidings into animal bones—scapulae—and then baked them to make them last. It took nearly two thousand years before the Western world caught up and honored the gods—or god, in this case—with the famous illuminated manuscripts I seek to replicate.”

Sarah looks down as she speaks, sees that each piece of paper has one word on it.

Obey. White. Hurt. Lies. Flowers. Promise. Sane.

“Is this for your final project?” she asks, her voice much higher than it should be.

“Did you ever read about the Delphic Oracle?” Antoinette inspects her page, blows on it, and then lets it drop to the floor. December, it says.

“I think I read about it in school.”

An aristocratic sniff of dismay. “The procedure for consulting the priestess was complex, but in short, she drew her inspiration from the vapors that rose up from underground. Her poetic answers were gifts from the gods. Artists are like that, I’ve always believed.” Antoinette looks up, meets Sarah’s eyes through her huge glasses. “But you have to have the TV turned to the right station. This place?” She chuckles, a pleasant sound with a sinister edge. “It’s like that big dish antenna out west. This valley…it’s a cup.”

“Okay…”

Antoinette takes another piece of paper, writes the word Hades.

“So the question is this: Are you open to receive messages from the vapors, and what will you do with what you learn?”

Sarah swallows hard; her brain hasn’t really powered down from this morning, and Antoinette is acting just as strangely as everyone else.

“I had this idea,” she starts shyly. “Juxtapositions. Like the resort and the retreat. Old and new, hard and soft—”

Antoinette shakes her head like she’s disappointed. “Look deeper. Listen better. Separate signal from noise. There’s a story. Go find it.” She flaps a hand at Sarah and selects a new piece of paper, placing it on her light box. Sarah can tell that she’s been dismissed. She mutters her goodbye and hurries out of the studio, careful not to step on any of Antoinette’s work. It may appear as if Antoinette is tossing each page on the ground like trash but Sarah isn’t willing to test the calligrapher’s patience further. That’s what she gets for being nosy.

Not that it stops her from checking out Gertrude Rose’s studio. If she’s going to have one person annoyed with her for peeking in a window, she might as well have two. Gertrude Rose is the kind of person who’s eventually going to get involved, anyway, and it’s not like she’s immune to expressing curiosity about the other workspaces herself.

The fiber studio is set back in the woods with the rabbit hutch off to the side. Remembering how nice it was to pet the fluffy white rabbit, Sarah goes to the hutch and murmurs to the snowy forms nestled together in a corner.

“You guys awake?” she asks, wishing she’d brought a carrot, or some little tidbit from the buffet.

She puts her fingers through the cage like she did last time, and one of the rabbits turns toward her—and lunges. She whips her fingers away just in time, and the rabbit’s face slams into the metal wire. As she watches, it bashes its head into the wire mesh again and again like a windup toy that can’t stop going. She backs away hurriedly, not wanting the animal to hurt itself further on her behalf. It was sweet last time, but maybe it’s hungry or sleepy or angry today. Maybe they’re not meant to be pets and are only used for fiber and don’t get a lot of affection, hence the aggressive reaction.

She has to get away from the rabbit, so she dares a glance in the fiber studio window. It’s just as chaotic as last time she peeped within, maybe even more so. Swatches of fabric hang off the dressing dummies, pinned without the careful elegance she would expect from such a talented costumer. Bolts of cloth have been taken down from their neat stacks and unspooled, button boxes spilled across tables as if someone has been searching frantically for something they’ve lost. Gertrude Rose is knitting in a rocking chair in a formal black gown with a high neck, and the flash of her metal needles captures Sarah’s attention.

She steps closer to the window, certain Gertrude Rose can’t see her, as she’s angled away and intent on her work. It’s a scarf, but…

It’s long.

Really, weirdly long.

Longer than a Doctor Who scarf.

As wide as a hand and tightly knit in a rainbow of colors, the garment winds all over the room like a lazing python.

It must be some statement piece, the sort of art that was never meant to be worn but was instead inspired by some woman from history who died in a scarf factory fire, or maybe it has a different color for every suffragette. It has to mean something, and Sarah will most likely find out at the final exhibit when they all display the work they’ve created over the six-week residency.

Sarah doesn’t know much about knitting, but it seems like an awful lot of work for the few days they’ve been here. Has Gertrude Rose…been sleeping? Or maybe she started the scarf back home?

Sure, she could ask Gertrude Rose now, just walk in and say the words and hear the answer. But she would rather read a self-important, bombastic paragraph of an Artist’s Statement at some point in the future than have to stand in that disorganized room and listen to Gertrude Rose give a lecture on whatever it is that has motivated her to knit a scarf that could stretch to the moon and back.

All these people, Sarah thinks, are crazy.

But isn’t that what art is? The unique and personal expression of how a person sees the world in a way no one else can?

Maybe someone walking by her studio in a few days will think the same thing about her when she’s thrown an army of identical teacups.

At least when she looks in at Kim’s studio, she sees exactly what she was told to expect: piles of glass, neatly cut and sorted, assembly-line-style, the suncatchers all a little further along than they were yesterday. Kim is a woman on a mission, and her mission is to make a shit ton of succulent window catchers, and even if that sounds boring as hell to Sarah, she’s not going to look down on a woman trying to claw her way to financial freedom.

All along, she’s heard hammering, but it’s more of a background noise, like the waterfall. She’s been putting off going to see Reid because honestly, that pill Ingrid gave her made her all loose and sort of stupid and she doesn’t know if she trusts herself around him just now. Maybe she’ll tell him all about her morning of trespassing, or maybe she’ll jump his bones. She isn’t entirely sure. It depends on what his forearms look like while he’s hammering, which is why she suspects it may be a little of column A, a little of column B.

Following the sound of metal on metal, she finds Reid in an outdoor workshop under a rough tin roof, something like an old airport hangar. His white T-shirt is spackled to his chest, his biceps in stark relief as he hammers a piece of cherry-hot metal. He’s wearing work boots, beat-to-shit jeans, eye protection, and heavy leather gloves, and Sarah simply observes from afar, remembering what it was like to see Kyle at work. He was tightly wound, fussy, careful, frowning. Anesthesia is such a precise science, and the stakes so high, that he always looked like he was taking a really difficult test while constipated.

Now that she has some distance, she realizes that she hated how he tucked in his scrub top and slicked his hair back and always wore truly hideous gray sneakers. Sure, there’s not a lot of variance in a required hospital uniform, but…well, watching Reid work is like watching a god form the planets. There’s fire, smoke, sweat, skin, the hiss of water. It’s elemental, primal. His forearms do in fact look good enough to make her stupid.

He’s wearing earbuds, but maybe he senses her watching, as he looks up, sees her, and smiles.

“Want to hit stuff?” he shouts, taking out an earbud and hefting his hammer.

She smiles and shakes her head. “Maybe later. Just wanted to say hi. I’ve got pots to make.”

She waves, and he waves and goes back to hammering, and she is mercifully released from the spell of a man who knows what to do with his hands.

Back in her studio, she finds her breakfast cold and drawing flies. She pecks at her remaining pastries before portioning out a bag of clay and wedging the balls to get out all the air pockets. It’s meditative and pleasant, and she always enjoys this part of her work, preparing the space and materials and dreaming of what she’ll make, especially now that she’s alone here.

But when she sits down, she can’t get the clay centered, and her attempt to throw a simple teacup ends up collapsing into a mess. She beats on it with her fist a few times for good measure before tossing it in the slurry bin.

She can’t concentrate. When she looks up, she sees Bernie’s smashed work and knows she’ll have to answer for it soon. When she looks down, she remembers that she doesn’t have her phone. If she’s not centered, she can’t center, period. She doesn’t know if it’s the day’s emotions or, again, that stupid pill she stupidly swallowed in the stupid dark, but she’s fairly certain she’s not going to create anything worthwhile.

There’s nothing for it.

She’s got to go back and get her phone, and she might as well do it before someone else finds it and ruins everything.