“Hello, Nunn.”
Nunn turned, surprised to find Stan Ballard standing beside him.
“I didn’t think you were coming,” Nunn said.
“Well, a man has to be careful, don’t you think?”
“Careful about what?”
“Leaving his wife on the arm of her ex-husband,” Stan answered. “Old fires sometimes give off new sparks, right?”
Nunn shrugged.
Stan glanced around the room. “You must really be in your element, Nunn.”
“In what way?”
“Oh, you know, everyone gathered together in one place. All the suspects in the parlor.”
“Suspects?”
“Of murder most foul.” Stan smiled. “Don’t expect me to believe you’re not thinking of Rosemary’s case.”
Of course Nunn had been thinking of nothing but the murder since his arrival at the museum. He’d never been able to get it out of his mind-it had spread over his life like a stain, and even now he could feel that stain still spreading. He thought of the way those old Cold War films used to show the red tide of Communism sweeping over Europe and Asia. Rosemary’s crime and punishment was like that, he thought, a force that had engulfed his life.
“You must be reviewing the whole thing,” Stan said lightly, so that Nunn thought he was being vaguely mocked, or if not that, then reduced to a prissy little parlor-mystery stereotype, or worse, a rumpled gumshoe going over yellowing case files while his life trickled away in futile reenactments and baseless surmises. He was thinking that neither of these unflattering visions of himself was wholly inaccurate, as he watched Belle and Don McGuire arrive. Belle as beautiful as ever, the perfect California girl, Don every inch the thuggish ex-con.
“So what are you thinking, Detective?” Stan asked with a laugh.
“Actually I was thinking that that guy there once beat the hell out of Christopher Thomas.” It had come out at the trial, and briefly at the time Nunn had wondered if Don had been in some way connected to Christopher Thomas’s murder.
Stan’s gaze shifted over to the man Nunn indicated. “Who’s the girl on his arm?”
“That’s his wife, Belle,” Nunn answered. “Rosemary tried very hard to help her rise in the art world here.”
“And you think the husband might have felt that their relationship was a little too close?” Stan asked.
Nunn shook his head. “Who knows?” he answered impatiently, now tired of the little game Stan was still playing with him.
“The Shadow knows,” Stan answered with a laugh. “But the question remains.”
“What question?”
Stan’s smile slithered into place. “Who is the Shadow?”
With that, Stan stepped away, then walked over to Sarah, took her arm, and placed it in his, a gesture of possession Nunn knew he was clearly meant to see, and one that Sarah just as clearly resented. As well she should, he thought, since it was as crude as a prospector staking a claim.
Still, he found Sarah’s ultimate acceptance of the gesture somewhat painful, so that he turned from the scene and fixed his attention on Haile Patchett, who caught his eye and smiled. He’d wondered how much of anything she’d told him the other day was true.
Now in the museum she was drifting from place to place, sometimes stopping for conversation but clearly uninterested in engaging anyone for long. Something about her movements was odd, Nunn thought, purposeful, like a cat in an unfamiliar room, sniffing here, there, everywhere. Haile had always been something of a prowler, of course. Rosemary had certainly detested her, and for a moment Nunn could almost feel Rosemary at his side, watching with the same odd suspicion as Haile sauntered about. The tingling sense of Rosemary’s presence beside him was strange, but then that was the way it worked with a haunting case: it was like a body that never cooled.
And Rosemary’s never had.
The Shadow knows.
This time it was Rosemary’s voice, rather than Stan’s, and Jon felt an odd quiver because he had heard it so distinctly, a whisper, or perhaps a hiss, Rosemary’s angry ghost.
For a moment, he surveyed the “shadows” that surrounded him and it occurred to him that Stan, arrogant bastard that he was, had been right. Jon had come to this service not to remember Rosemary in death but to return her to his life, not to memorialize but to resurrect her. Perhaps all the debts he’d incurred in pursuit of her were now demanding to be paid no less adamantly than Rosemary’s ghost had suddenly demanded to be heard.
Without realizing it, he suddenly whispered her name: Rosemary.
In his imagination, all movement abruptly stopped, and slowly, as if controlled by invisible strings, each head turned to face him: Stan, Haile, Justine, Tony, Sarah, Belle, Don, even Rosemary’s own children, all of them now peering at him coldly, with their lips tightly sealed.
21 Diana Gabaldon
The door of Justine’s office opened with a loud click, but nobody was around to hear it. An attendant was guarding the roped-off ramp to the lower exhibit galleries, but Haile had gotten rid of him by telling him a locked car had its lights on in the parking lot-having made sure on her way in that there was a locked car with its lights on. By the time the attendant checked out the car for a license number, came in, went upstairs, and found the owner, she hoped to be done here and gone.
She could count on ten minutes clear, she thought, and with luck it would take no more than half that.
Justine, bless her heart, had left a small lamp on in her office. Great! No fumbling around in the dark.
Haile scanned the office, her fingers itching with acquisitiveness, trying to decide where to start. Her eyes fixed on Justine’s desk. As good a place as any. She walked over noiselessly and carefully opened one of the side drawers. There had to be something here, something she could use to get what she wanted from Justine.
22 Peter James
Away from the hubbub of conversation, the silence in this room felt intense, and the strong, sterile smell of polish was intense too. Haile’s nerves were popping and she had a faint throbbing, like a pulse, in her ears; she was nervous as hell. But she was here, ready.
Then she heard voices approaching. She froze. It sounded as though they were just opposite the door to the office.
Jesus, who was it?
She held her breath.
She tried to calm herself. It was probably just a couple of guests who had slipped away from the reception in the observation room of the tower, giving themselves a tour. They must have been staring at a painting that she’d seen and thought it might have been hung upside down. She caught a snatch of their conversation.
“It’s revisionist postmodernist,” one of them said. “Definite juxtaposition of Klimt and Chagall, you know what I’m saying, with a surrealist-or is it closer to Dada?-overlay. You wouldn’t perceive that in any visual context, but to me it’s there like a kind of metaphorical palimpsest.”
That old museum curator, Alex something-or-other. Haile remembered how much Christopher had resented him.
She waited until their voices drifted farther down the hallway, then took a deep breath and tried to focus on what she was doing, but her nerves were shot to hell, her eyes leaping erratically around the room. It was spare and minimalist, glass table, white furniture and blinds, bare wooden flooring. She looked at the prints and paintings hung on the walls, then the small, precious-looking objets d’art that sat on the flat surfaces. She looked down at the desk.
It had to be in here somewhere.
But where?
She noticed a tiny bronze statuette near the desk lamp and slipped it into her handbag-shit, this whole world could have been hers, a thought that kept recurring as she stood at Justine Olegard’s desk.