Painted to Death, page 12
With that, he pushed past me and into the building, leaving me standing there dumbfounded. Whatever grudge I had? In the voice silently screaming in my head, I added about ten question marks to that sentence.
I walked down the cobblestone sidewalk, taking a left on autopilot. After nearly three years here, I had my routine down pat for when I had to get away from school, when I needed some time to sit and think. Probably no surprise here, but it involved an art museum.
Chapter Eleven
I kept my mind clear as I walked towards the nearest pedestrian bridge that crossed the Charles River, focusing on taking deep, even breaths of the icy air. The pedestrian bridge I used most was only a few blocks away, and I paused in the middle of it like I always did. In one direction, the river pointed in towards Boston, now a landscape of boats wrapped up in swaths of shiny white vinyl, stacked for the winter. In the other direction, it was all trees and the river winding out towards Cambridge, and eventually the suburb of Watertown. I always took a minute to pause here, to notice the texture and the color of the water. I could cross this bridge every day and still always see the water differently. Today, when the sun was mostly covered by a dense blanket of gray, the water appeared almost black, with the surface eerily still.
Once across the bridge, I continued down the path that ran alongside the Charles, dodging the occasional biker and group of moms with strollers. In the summer, I would often jog along this path, pausing to rest on one of the benches, but now I hurried on against the cold, keeping my head down and seeing the river only out of the corner of my eye. I focused on the path, the gravel and dirt pockmarked with icy puddles. It was not lost on me that the metaphorical path I had been on this past week was similarly marked with icy obstacles. Some undoubtedly of my own making, from an active imagination saturated with one too many whodunits.
After about a mile along the river path, I veered right, crossing the street towards Harvard. Weaving through the groups of tourists and students in Harvard Square, I made my way through the Yard, towards the art museum, not slowing down until I was walking up the stone steps at the entrance. Only then, in the airy warm atrium at the entrance, did I stop, unwinding my scarf and taking a deep breath. Despite the echoey, open space, it was quiet and peaceful here.
I strolled through the current exhibitions, taking in a show of Renaissance women painters and a group of prints about historic Harvard architecture. I stopped at a few pieces along the way: a Renaissance view of Judith holding the head of Holofernes (a gory classic); a Greek coin with a satyr on it (I made a quick sketch for my urns); a painting of two women by a local artist working in the early twentieth century. The painting, The Family, showed two women standing with their backs to the painter, one sister looking over her shoulder towards him. The second sister has one arm around the first, her other hand held behind her back, with her fingers in some kind of enigmatic gesture. The painting is dark, all umber and verdigris fabrics against the stark brightness of the sisters’ pale skin. I had probably passed by this painting a dozen times before, giving it little notice, but something about it seemed oddly compelling today. All throughout the museum, but especially in front of these two women, I had felt like an antenna, receiving some staticky, far-off signal through the hairs on the back of my neck, hairs that had been standing on edge since I got here. I shifted on my feet. Maybe I was just getting lightheaded from standing for too long.
I had a particular route that I always traveled through in this museum, starting on the ground floor and working my way up, always ending on the third floor. The atrium was open for the whole height of the building, so from the walkway here you could look down to the marble floors three flights below, or up to the fourth-floor research laboratories. The museum was famous for its collection of different kinds of pigments, showcased in cases upon cases and thousands upon thousands of bottles, in every shade imaginable, from ochre pigments that could basically be dug out of the ground and used without any processing, to newly minted colors made with complex formulas in company laboratories. I loved the possibilities these bottles contained, from natural pigments that were a perfect pine tree green, to the deepest black you could imagine, a synthetic pigment capable of creating visual black holes.
I leaned against the railing and looked up, taking in the now-familiar array of midnight blues, carmines, and umbers. It was only once I was here, the exact spot near the staircase that I always came to last, that I finally let myself think about Catherine. Calmed now from my walk and three floors of art, I could let myself admit the doubt that had been growing all day. Sure, I had been buoyed by my conversation with Arun the previous night, which did seem to cement the possibility that Professor Thompson was someone capable of harming a woman like Catherine. But lying in bed later that night, I’d had a sudden, almost panicked thought (and we all know the ideas you have right before falling asleep are your best ideas). It occurred to me that I could have been looking at this the wrong way all along. I had been considering all of these motives about Catherine, about things she might have done (threatened to expose Thompson) or not done (rejected Dan). But what if the truth was something much more personal? About who Catherine was, not something she did.
Sorry, I don’t actually have an immediate answer to that, just thought it would be a nice stopping point. Give the question more weight and all that. But I was not going to find the answer by staring into bottles of powdery pigment, as stunning as this array of colors might be. And that was okay: I just needed to admit to myself that I might have been going in the wrong direction.
No matter how many times you walk outside from inside during a Boston winter, the cold air is always shocking. I pulled my hat down as far as it would go over my hair, zipping my coat all the way up for my walk back to our apartment. Although it was only four pm, the sky was already darkening, with the ominous pattern of smooth, heavy clouds that could only spell snow.
As if on cue, my phone rang: Mom. Before I could even get a “hello” out, she was asking me about the weather.
“Samantha, are you sure you’re well stocked? I was just looking at the weather and it seems like you guys could be getting a big storm tomorrow.”
“Yes, Mom. All stocked,” I replied, before promising her that I would stop for even more groceries on my way home, right now, even though the storm wouldn’t start until overnight tomorrow.
“Okay, and hand warmers? What about gloves?”
Many more promises were made as to the contents of my closet and what I was currently wearing.
“Good, let me know how it goes.” She paused, halting the preparedness questions momentarily, her voice softening. “And how is everything else, Sammy? How are you?”
“Actually, pretty good,” I said, and realized I was really not lying.
I felt lighter from my afternoon away from school, my pondering while gazing at paintings. I caught her up on my school work, Rebecca, hanging Catherine’s show tomorrow, and the parts of my investigation that felt Mom-worthy, glossing over the break-in and anything that might lead her to question me about Arun. We were still happily chatting away as I crossed back into Boston, the sun setting and the water a glistening black ribbon.
Chapter Twelve
By ten am the next morning, Rebecca, Benny, and I had managed to arrange a set of Catherine’s paintings in a more or less neat row around the edge of the school gallery. The gallery had been a newer addition and something of an afterthought in the old building, shoved onto a corridor in the first floor, converted from a couple of old classrooms that had been knocked together. Windows ran along one side of the room, on a wall of white-washed brick. Great in theory, or in an architectural design magazine, but terrible when it came time to try to hang any kind of artwork on the brick, inevitably backlit and invisible against the windows.
The three of us stood back now, appraising the line-up we had just more or less amicably decided on. Whoever said that organizing artists is like herding cats had it absolutely right: it was something of a miracle that not only had we managed to pick out a selection of paintings together, but we’d even gotten them down to the gallery on the scheduled day. Even with the ever-responsible Rebecca involved, this had not been a guaranteed success. After all, she was balanced by Benny’s inevitably pie-in-sky attitude, with him always wanting to do more than was reasonable, and my own carefully designed stance, of being present and helpful without ever taking on any real management responsibility. Now we were just waiting on help from the gallery staff to start hanging the work. I knew help would come in the form of a work study student and had my fingers crossed that it wouldn’t turn out to be a particular teal-vest-wearing, massive-pile-of-laundry-having male student.
But, of course, luck wasn’t on my side that day. Dan walked into the gallery now, carrying a four-foot level and pushing a utility cart full of assorted drills, fasteners, and wires.
“Morning, everyone,” he said, nodding at Benny and Rebecca.
Apparently I was not a part of “everyone” and would be receiving the silent treatment today in response to my remarks about the insulin vial yesterday afternoon. That was honestly fine with me, as long as Benny and Rebecca didn’t notice or assume it was for some other reason, especially for anything even remotely related to a failed hook-up.
I was content to hang back as Benny and Dan proceeded to mark off a spot for each painting, such that each would hang centered on fifty-six inches high, a gallery standard. I might have loved miniatures, but maintaining rigid ratios of 1:12 was never my thing; I was more than happy to leave the precise measuring to someone else. Rebecca walked along the wall with them, holding up each painting as necessary.
“Sam, how’s this looking?” she called out now, holding the first painting in the line.
Catherine had finished this one earlier in the year, and it was a bit reminiscent of a Lucian Freud. It showed her and her mother as two figures entwined in an almost spherical ball, set against a rusty gray backdrop and overlaid with washes of ochre and orange, so that the whole scene had an autumnal glow to it. Against the clean white wall, it was a beautiful contrast. I gave Rebecca a big thumbs-up.
The three of them quickly developed a steady rhythm of measure, mark, and hang, working their way methodically down the wall over the next couple of hours. Everything was going so smoothly, and Benny even set up his phone to start playing music, some poppy ’80s playlist that garnered a momentary, ever-so-slightly noticeable grimace from Rebecca. I guess, like me, she hadn’t realized that hanging a memorial show for your dead friend could be such a cheery affair.
“R, did Sam tell you about the meeting on Monday?” Benny was asking Rebecca now, who shook her head.
“Only a bit, but it sounded like it went well?”
Benny nodded, momentarily silenced as he held a pencil in his mouth, his hands full with a drill and several screws.
“It definitely did!” he said, maneuvering the pencil to one side as if it were a cigarette. “I had an email from the dean this morning. They’re still considering some of the requests, I guess working out the logistics. But, in the meantime, he said they’re going to be able to start a scholarship in her name. It’ll open next year.”
I guess the meeting had gone even better than I’d realized and I kicked myself now for not paying better attention. Although, in my defense, I had been pretty preoccupied with solving Catherine’s murder, so. It’s not like I wasn’t thinking about her.
“That’s really wonderful to hear,” Rebecca said, sounding sincerely on the verge of tears.
Benny put down his tools and went over to hug her, only letting go and turning around at the sound of someone else walking into the gallery.
“Thought you might need lunch!” Ricky chirped, swinging a white plastic bag of takeout towards us as she came into the gallery. She paused dramatically, putting a hand to her heart as she took in the paintings around us, about half of which were now on the wall. “Wow,” she said, “Just wow. What an amazing collection of work.” She shook her head, theatrically in awe of the show. I had to shut my eyes to keep from rolling them. “It’s truly an amazing thing you guys have done here.”
Rebecca and Benny thanked her, like normal people, while I stayed where I was, against the back wall where I had the distance to tell whether a painting was being hung crookedly. Ricky was unpacking the bag onto the utility cart, taking out sandwiches for her two roommates and Rebecca. I guess there had been some internal memo sent out that I wasn’t to be considered a part of “everyone” today. Thanks, I guess I’ll just go down to the cafe.
I tried to gauge Dan’s reaction to all the talk of Catherine as he put down his tools and got up to grab lunch. But, like Ricky, he was studiously ignoring me, his face a meticulous blank. I sighed, edging around the group gathered around the cart and heading out the door. If I wasn’t going to learn anything new by standing around watching four people eat sandwiches, I might as well get some lunch of my own.
Ricky had departed by the time I got back from my quick lunch break. Benny, Rebecca, and Dan had gotten back into the swing of hanging work and Rebecca quickly enlisted my help in the next step of affixing labels for each piece to the walls. The rest of the afternoon passed by smoothly, and we finally got all eighteen paintings up just as the sun was starting to set. Rebecca and I left Benny and Dan to tidy up in the gallery, and headed out together to walk back to our apartment.
Walking out of the gallery while still trying to get on all our various layers of coats and scarves, we both nearly collided with Professor Thompson.
“Hi, girls, excuse me,” he said, neatly stepping around us and into the exhibit space. “Benny, hi there. Just wanted to see how you had got on today.” He stood with his hands on hips, nodding as he assessed the placement of each painting, looking from one gray portrait to the next. “Great work, Benny. Really, it looks great here. Very professional.” Thompson took a long stride over to Benny, giving him one of those manly handshake, shoulder pat combos.
Rebecca and I didn’t wait to hear the rest of his praise and continued on our way, heading out of the building just as the first snowflakes were starting to fall. Again, I had to wonder: With his supportive, involved teacher act, was Thompson laying down a little red herring or a big glaring clue?
Chapter Thirteen
For once, my mother’s worries about the weather were not overblown. By the time we woke up the next morning, classes were canceled for the day, with six inches of snow having fallen overnight and another five to eight forecast to come down by the end of the day. Bet you were thinking some big resolution would happen while we were all snowed in, right? Wrong. What is this, Murder on the Orient Express? We all just played Monopoly and broke our “no smoking inside” rule as soon as we could figure out how to disengage the smoke detector (though we left a chair in the hallway just in case someone had to quickly hit the button to turn it off again, you know, for safety). The three of us had put off homework, instead making pancakes and hot chocolate, taking a slippery walk around the block, and watching Knives Out for the umpteenth time. By this late in the day, all sequestered together, the three of us would usually start to get on one another’s nerves, experiencing cabin fever in our own unique and generally incompatible ways. Really, we were normally great as roommates, hardly ever fighting. But on snow days, I was reminded that this was primarily because we were apart for work and school most of the time.
Like clockwork, at four pm, Rebecca had had a meltdown at the state of the kitchen post-pancakes, storming off to her room, no doubt to commiserate with Benny about what pigs we were. Mel, for her part, had started the day out in a bad mood, frustrated at being kept from the studio, but by late afternoon had mellowed, cheering up into a remarkably insufferable version of herself whom no one else was in the mood for. It was only after I had thoroughly checked every streaming app at our disposal and found absolutely nothing else worth watching, did I relent to Mel’s entreaties, allowing her to entertain me with photos from the weekend’s party.
She curled up next to me on the couch, leaning farther onto my legs than should have really been necessary, such that I had to fight off the urge to kick her away as she held her phone up to swipe through the various Fresh Prince, Full House, and Boy Meets World costumes on display at Ricky’s party. So far, I had seen four senior girls dressed as two identical pairs of Mary-Kates and Ashleys, a dance floor full of couples and small groups barely identifiable in the dim lighting, and a close up of a smiling Benny, holding his drink with one hand and adjusting his Elaine wig with the other.
“Look, here’s one of the whole group, all of us together!” Mel nearly squealed, showing me a dimly lit snapshot of Rebecca and me dancing together, Mel and Benny just behind us.
“The whole group,” I said slowly. I could feel my voice rising in my chest. “All of us!”
Mel gave me a funny look as I shouted.
“Yes, Samantha, the four of us,” she said, giving every syllable of my name its own beat. “You, me—”
“Wait, shut up. Hang on,” I cut her off, gesturing for her to be quiet.
I knew I had just realized something important, something I was struggling to visualize, when my mind suddenly went back to Catherine’s studio, like the kind of visual room you would use for a memory palace. No, not her studio. I turned my mind’s eye towards the easel. It was the painting. This is what had bothered me from the start, in the photos the police had shown me of her studio. For two years, I had seen Catherine’s paintings, at all stages from sketch to exhibit. And as far as I knew, she had only ever painted her and her mother, adding in different, blurred settings and backdrops, drawn from her own and stock family photos. When she’d died, she’d left a painting in progress out on her easel, a painting that was in the police photos and still there the morning I’d gone to look around. A painting with three figures. Catherine, her mother. And a male figure. What if Catherine had found out who her father was, and that’s who was in the unfinished painting? What if she had found out, and it had somehow ended badly? I looked down, realizing my hands were bunched into fists in my lap. Mel was looking at me with raised eyebrows, clearly slightly pissed that I had told her to shut up.
