“You don’t have to go to San Francisco, you know,” said Belle. “Those aren’t your people up there.”
“They’re not yours either.”
“It’s for Rosie. Only and purely. I made a promise.”
“If you go, I go. I might get to punch somebody out, make a scene. Get thrown in jail.”
Belle smiled and shook her head. “I’m giving you an out.”
“I don’t want an out.”
“I don’t mind if you see Rusty. I understand. But the Farallons spook me.”
“They spook everybody, even Rusty.”
“But he dives them anyway.”
“Yes.”
“And you do too, which spooks me even more.”
I looked at my wife, then out toward Laguna. The town was hidden beyond the hills, but I could see the glow of the city lights rising into the pale cloud cover. Down below us, the cars moved along Laguna Canyon Road, sending up a distant hiss.
Belle went to the house and came back with two snifters of cognac.
We walked up the road to a flat spot in the hills and looked down on the city.
“I wish it had never happened,” said Belle. “None of it. I wish it was over. But it isn’t. It never ends.”
“Then we’ll stay away.”
“We can’t. It’s cowardly. And I have to be there.”
It was a long drive but he’s found Laguna Canyon Road.
Now he follows the couple from a safe distance, watches as they cut across a large swath of land studded with wildflowers and sagebrush.
When they stop in front of a small outbuilding, he waits behind a tree, raises the binoculars to his eyes, turns and adjusts the lenses until everything snaps into focus-the woman’s face in close-up, blond hair, blue eyes.
He turns his attention to the man, focuses on the muscular arms, a blurry prison-type tattoo of a snake on his biceps, and wonders when the hell he will get out of there.
Binoculars back on the woman, the one who interests him. She knows something, this pretty woman with the worried, innocent face.
10 Lori Armstrong
I’ve never been a morning person. But this morning I couldn’t wait for the muse to drag her lazy bum over here and sprinkle inspirational dust on me. The commission was due next week. I struggled with it but I absolutely could not miss the deadline. Despite assumptions associated with my chosen profession as an “arteest,” I’m not a go-with-the-flow kind of gal. I plan. I fret. With bills to pay I have a timetable to keep. Inspiration is a luxury I can’t afford.
In my younger years, I’d postulated that creativity didn’t hold normal office hours, nor did it owe allegiance to a singular space. I’d painted some of my best works in the dead of night, in a crappy apartment, no eye on the clock. Just me, paint, and canvas, locked in battle, the potential of the piece in my mind’s eye warring with reality-misshapen forms, mismatched colors, misaligned borders-which fed my frustration with the process but fueled my creative spirit to hold something tangible in my hands at the end of the fight.
My youthful idealism had been worn to a nub over years of feast and famine in the art world. Now with two kids to wake, coddle, and send to school, two dogs to pet, feed, and walk, plus a husband to tend much in the same manner as dogs and children, my middle-of-the-night painting sessions are as much a memory as the cramped apartment, the shrill sounds of sirens blaring outside my window, and the sickly bluish green fluorescent lighting that used to glow over my workstation. Gone too are the days of having to scrounge up items to pawn in order to buy another tube of Sennelier.
These days I bask in natural light pouring from the skylights above my workstation. In this dedicated “creative” space the younger me would’ve scoffed at, I’m treated to humid, salty ocean breezes wafting through the windows, rolls of canvas stacked against the wall, stretched in frames, draped across every horizontal surface, and dozens of tubes of paint in every hue imaginable. Still, in deference to my eco-consciousness-the only conviction left from my youth-they are environmentally friendly paints. I’ve got space and light and time-the latter at least until the school bus pulls up.
But I don’t have concord.
You think too much, Belle.
It made me smile to hear Don’s voice resonating inside my head. Don understands my neuroses better than anyone else. But he rarely lets me give in to them.
Even after managing to make a living as an artist for the past fifteen years, I still suffer from no-confidence days, when I’m reminded of harsh words from a decade past, words that slice my thin strip of confidence into a single frayed thread. On those bad days, my retreat to prove my critics wrong seems more like hiding than working.
Squinting at the blobs of paint on the canvas, I harkened back to the time I slaved feverishly, hoping to create a masterpiece that’d put me on the map-or at least on the wall of a successful art gallery. Rosemary had tried to give me that chance, despite her husband’s attempt to screw me over, in more ways than one.
The irony isn’t lost on me, trying to duplicate Waves 27 for this new commission, a moody piece that was perfectly suited to the tragedy, secrets, and lies surrounding the Thomases. Working on the painting brought back a coterie of memories, most painfully, my final visit with Rosemary in prison when we’d last spoken of Waves 27. And with the shadowy underpainting in front of me, and the implications of Tony Olsen’s invitation whirling in my head-knowing that the time had finally come, knowing what I was going to have to do-I was filled with a strange sense of foreboding.
Bang-bang-bang-bang ricocheted throughout the metal building as loud as gunshots. I jumped and whirled around, terrified I’d see something more menacing than spray cans of paint rolling across the floor after they’d been blown from the windowsill. A window I’d left open.
God. Spooked much, Belle?
Once I’d calmed down, a tiny bit of resentment arose. If I gave in to fear, I’d never accomplish anything-not what I’d promised Rosemary, not even the commission. So I propped the side door open to harness the lovely cross-breeze and took a deep breath.
Ha. There. Take that. I’m not afraid.
Leaving the cans where they fell, I gathered cleaning cloths soaked with linseed oil, wadded-up paper towels smeared with paint, and the spent, capless tubes of manganese blue and cinnabar green on my way to the garbage.
I lingered before the canvas, unhappy with the images, unhappy with myself. I was so lost in self-reproach that I didn’t sense the intruder until air whooshed past my cheek, followed a split second later by metal flashing in front of my face. I recognized my palette knife-oddly sharp due to Don’s whetstone skills-an instant before the edge was pressed into my neck. Then my left arm was chicken-winged behind my back, sending an excruciating shaft of pain from my wrist to my shoulders, which made me cry out.
“Don’t make another sound,” he said.
The man’s voice was cloaked with a deep rasp, soft as a whisper, but as deadly as the steel against my throat.
“Put your right hand all the way into the front pocket of your jeans. Slowly.”
I complied. I may have grown up on a ranch but I’m not exactly a scrapping tough girl. My mouth was bone-dry. My heart was jackhammering. My eyes watered like crazy. I could not pull enough air into my lungs.
He thickly whispered, “Good girl, Belle.”