“It’s going to complicate things, as in—just to give you one example—what’s her estate going to do in terms of the appeal Mully filed a couple of days ago?”
Rolanda frowned. “So she’s going to stand in our way even after she’s dead. God, how I hate that woman. It’s hard to believe that she could have had a daughter with as big a heart as Kathy’s.”
“And that’s not the only problem,” Alan said. “The police think I killed her.”
“You can’t be serious.”
“Very serious,” Marisa said. The coffee maker made an odd burbling noise, indicating that the coffee was ready. “We were just coming back from the precinct when we ran into you,” she added as she rose to fill their mugs.
“Now I know what you meant by ‘No comment,’” Rolanda said.
Alan nodded. “The media was waiting for us when we left the precinct. It was a zoo.”
“Well, if they’d wanted a real story, they should have been at the Foundation this morning,” Rolanda said.
Marisa brought the mugs over to the table, along with the sugar bowl and a carton of milk.
“What happened?” she asked as she poured a generous dollop of milk into her coffee.
“I’ll bet it had something to do with Cosette,” Alan said.
Rolanda nodded. She took a sip of her coffee and then told them about her own experiences with Cosette.
“She said that?” Alan asked. “That Isabelle made her?”
“‘Brought her over’ was the way she put it, but I definitely got the idea that she thinks Isabelle created her by making a painting of her.”
Alan closed his eyes. He could see the small red-haired girl again, perched on the windowsill. Could hear her voice.
I’d suggest that you simply use monochrome studies to illustrate the book ... but I have to admit I’m too selfish and lonely. It’ll be so nice to see a few new faces around here.
It seemed like something right out of one of Kathy’s stories, but as soon as Rolanda had come to that part of her story, Alan had found himself remembering the fire. How all of Isabelle’s paintings had been destroyed. How her art had changed so drastically after the fire. How she couldn’t—or wouldn’t, he amended now—explain why her art had changed so drastically. This even explained why she’d been so adamant that the finished art she did for Kathy’s new book had to always remain in her possession.
At the same time that all those disparate puzzle pieces were coming together for Alan, he saw that Marisa was shaking her head.
“I’m sorry,” she said, “but I can’t buy any of this. It’s just not possible.”
“You weren’t there,” Rolanda said. “I saw her draw that Xacto blade across her palm. She didn’t bleed. And then she literally vanished from my room. They’re still talking about how she appeared out of nowhere downstairs in the waiting room.”
“In front of the painting,” Alan said.
Rolanda nodded slowly. “Where I first saw her. Do you think it, I don’t know, draws her to it somehow?”
“It would be her anchor, wouldn’t it? If what she says is true.”
“Oh please,” Marisa said. “You can’t be taking this seriously.”
“I know what I saw,” Rolanda said.
“And I know what I felt,” Alan added. “There was something unnatural about that girl. I felt it right away. That’s why I found it so easy to pass it off as a dream. It just didn’t feel real to me. And what Rolanda’s telling us goes a long way to explaining Isabelle’s strange behavior after the farmhouse burned down and all her art was destroyed.”
“I don’t get it,” Marisa said.
But Rolanda knew. “If the paintings give these ... whatever they are. If it gives them life, then if something happens to the painting, if it should get destroyed—”
‘—then the beings she created with those paintings might die as well. After all, there is a connection between them, like in that Oscar Wilde story.” Rolanda shivered. “This is so weird.”
Marisa looked from her to Alan. “This is so ridiculous. We’re talking real life, not fairy tales.”
“I know how it sounds,” Alan said. “But you haven’t met Cosette. You don’t know what it was like in the old days with Kathy and Isabelle. There was always a kind of magic in the air.”
“It’s called nostalgia,” Marisa said with a smile.
Alan returned her smile. “I know how we can give everything a glow when we look back on the past, but this is different. I feel that it’s true.”
“And I know what I saw,” Rolanda added.
“I don’t have the answers,” Alan said, “but you’ve got to admit that we’re dealing with something unusual here.”
“You might not have the answers,” Rolanda said, “but you know someone who does.”
Alan nodded. “Isabelle. We’ll have to ask her.”
“Do you know where she’s staying?” Marisa asked.
“No. But Jilly would know.”
“Jilly Coppercorn?” Rolanda asked.
“We all go back a long way, but Jilly’s the only one who’s really maintained a relationship with Isabelle over the years.”
“Do you have her number?”
Alan nodded. He made the call and five minutes later they were leaving his apartment, on their way to Isabelle’s new studio in Joli Coeur.
IX
It took Cosette forever, and then a little longer still, to find Solemn John. It wasn’t just that John was hard to find, which he was. John was always on the move, as restless as the sky was long and always so sad, so serious. He could be grim, too, though he was never like that with her. But he could be infuriating in the way he almost always answered a question with one of his own. He was the oldest of them, the strongest and the fiercest. Cosette liked to think that she could be fierce, but compared to John, she could only play at fierceness.
So John was hard to find. But the other reason it took Cosette so long to track him down was that the strange black-and-white girl had frightened her so badly. Afraid of encountering her again, Cosette didn’t walk down the middle of the sidewalks anymore, she crept through the shadows and alleyways.
When she had to cross a street or the open stretch of a deserted lot, she did it with a scurrying sideways movement, trying to look all around herself at once feeling so very much like a tiny little deer mouse in an open field as the shadow of the hawk falls upon it.
She went almost all around the downtown core of the city, from Battersfield Road as far east as Fitzhenry Park, from the Pier as far north as the abandoned tenements of the Tombs, and then found John sitting on a fire escape no more than two blocks from where she’d first set out to find him. Of course, she thought. Wasn’t that always the way? But she was so relieved to see him that she couldn’t even muster up a spark of irritation.
“I’ve been looking everywhere for you,” she said. She dug out an empty crate from a heap of garbage on one side of the alley and dragged it over to the fire escape. “You can be ever so hard to find,” she added as she sat down upon her makeshift stool.
John shrugged. “I’ve been here.”
“I can see that now.”
This time he made no reply. His solemn gaze was fixed on something far beyond the alleyway.
“Something awful’s happening,” Cosette told him.
John nodded, but he didn’t look at her. “I know. I started to poke around after we talked the other night, listening to gossip, chasing rumors.”
“Someone else is bringing people across from the before,” Cosette informed him.
Now John did turn to look at her. “You’ve seen him?”
“Her. She has no color to her, John. She’s a black-and-white girl and I think she’s going to kill me.”