The gallery remained closed for two weeks while Dinah and Maris decided what to do. Dinah had been shaken to the core by her experience with the police and with Angela’s arrest. Maris had persuaded her to see a doctor and he had prescribed an anti-anxiety drug for six weeks to help her filter out the extreme feelings of stress and to help her sleep at night. Since she had no previous experience of stress brought on by trauma, or even mood swings, he decided against prescribing an antidepressant, and Maris was relieved. Dinah just needed a little time, some rest, and to have her confidence in the future restored.
She and Maris had many talks about the past and the future, but not much discussion of the present. The shock of what had happened to Peter hit them all over again now that they realized Angela had been involved.
“Do you think Angela might have poisoned him herself?” said Dinah. “She’s capable of it.”
“She might have,” said Maris, “but she may have been acting on orders from some gangster and afraid for her life.”
Dinah shook her head. “But to kill Peter? I just can’t get my head around it.”
“I know,” said Maris. “I guess she was in too deep to get out. But we don’t really know she did it.”
“I don’t care,” said Dinah. “At this point, all I know is that what she did got him killed. It’s the same thing.”
“Well, maybe something will come out at the trial, but I doubt it.” Maris hadn’t told Dinah much about her conversation with Angela, except to say that Angela knew Dinah hadn’t been involved. “She definitely did not want you to be charged.”
“That makes me feel so much better,” said Dinah. “I won’t be blamed for killing my own brother. Thanks, Angela.”
There are some wounds that don’t heal, Maris thought. And this was one of them. They both believed that Angela should pay for what she did. But in Singapore, that probably meant the death penalty. At the very least, it meant a long stay in prison. Angela’s life was effectively over. She believed they wouldn’t be able to prove the charges, but Maris was pretty sure they could. There would be a trail somewhere. And Axel and Interpol were after the big fish. They wouldn’t stop until they caught them.
Maris had thought long and hard about whether she should tell Axel about her conversation with Angela, but now that Dinah was free, she saw no reason to. Nothing would bring Peter back. They knew the truth now, even if they didn’t know all the names. Peter had been killed because he’d accidentally stumbled on the evidence of wrongdoing. If he had just written the letter to Maris and not said anything to Angela, maybe he’d still be alive. But his mistake had been to assume that Angela knew nothing about it. His mistake had been to trust her.
Axel had called twice since Dinah’s release. Once he had spoken to Dinah to make sure she was all right. And the second time he had talked to Maris, to apologize again and to try to explain.
“Just go back to your wife, Axel,” she said. “Whatever we had is over. I could never trust you again. Let’s just move on.”
Move on. That was a laugh, she thought. What did moving on mean, anyway? You just forget it happened? You pretend it didn’t happen? You draw a line, step over it, and never look back? It was easy to say, but not so easy to do. She thought about Axel most of the time, especially last thing at night and first thing in the morning. He was just there, in her thoughts, all the time. She truly had fallen in love with him. It wasn’t so easy to let that go. And then, of course, there was the baby. She was sure now, but she hadn’t said anything to anyone. Pretty hard to move on when you were going to have a baby.
She wanted the baby; it hadn’t taken long for her to decide to keep it. What took longer was deciding whether to tell Axel about it. But finally she decided not to. Maybe someday, for the child’s sake, she’d say something. But that was a long way off. Right now, the important thing was to have a healthy baby and to raise her child.
So for now, she concentrated on getting the gallery going again. She told Dinah she wanted them to run it together. Technically, the gallery belonged to Dinah. Angela had agreed to sign the necessary papers so that Dinah had sole ownership. Nobody could take it away from her. That was ultimately what pulled Dinah out of her funk. The gallery was hers and she could keep Peter’s memory alive in it.
“Maris, are you sure you want to stay and help me?” she said. “I’d understand if you didn’t.”
Maris told her she was sure. She would tell Dinah about the child soon. But first they would make plans for the gallery.
“I’m going to get my brother Ray to come here,” she told Dinah. “I want us to give his photography a show. I promise you he’s good enough.”
Dinah smiled. “I’m sure he is,” she said. “If he’s half as talented as you, he’ll be very good.”
“And next year, we’ll have a show for me. I promise.”
“I’ll hold you to it.”
“I’m serious. I want to paint again, and I will. I’ve already started.”
“I know,” said Dinah. “I love what you’ve been doing.”
“You peeked?” said Maris.
“I peeked.” Dinah hesitated. They hadn’t talked about Axel, but it was Axel who had told her that Maris was working again. She had begun soon after their visit to the bird park. She had been inspired to paint by the brilliantly coloured parrots, lorikeets, peacocks, and, especially, the scarlet macaw. The macaw’s magnificent plumage, starting with the vibrant red head and shoulders, moving into a ring of molten yellow around the middle, and extending into a stunning cerulean blue on the lower body and tail, had grabbed Maris’s heart and hadn’t let go. The bird was an explosion of colour that reminded, re-minded her, of why she painted.
It was then that she had known that life was full of colour and possibilities.