The stabbing itself was the only variable he could not predict in all its details, but he trusted his research and his choice of method. Most of all, he trusted his resolve. And his experience: Even if the first death by his hand had not been planned, he knew at least that he could take human life. The man’s painting, the one his father so badly wanted, would remain in the stately home, perhaps in the very room Johanna hated above all others, to be embroiled in an estate war that might well outlast his father’s arteries. Clay guessed, too, that any investigation into the painting’s provenance might point to a more rightful owner. An accidental good deed done on the side, perhaps making up for some small harm he’d caused in his life’s work without realizing it — some unknown collateral damage with his name on it.
After draining his glass, Clay worked two fingers between the buttons of his shirt and made contact with the soft, flawless skin of his stomach — his most beautiful material.
Marion
Her shift was busy, her mood strangely buoyant. Whenever she caught herself trying to dissect the buoyancy, she stopped, telling herself to enjoy floating on the surface of her life for a change.
On her way home, she walked her bike the first couple of blocks, pausing to look into Johanna’s workshop, which was empty. She saw the light on in the upstairs window and figured that Johanna lived up there. She imagined her making tea, or reading, or washing her face. All guesses — she knew nothing about Johanna’s life even though she had envied it, or envied what it might be. She wondered what Johanna was to Clay and Clay to her, but it didn’t really matter. She liked both of them, in the end, yet she would also be glad to be done with them and with everything else the storm had brought into her life. Eddie was the exception; she had chosen him.
She pedaled the rest of the distance home, enough tips in her purse to treat Henry to a meal out. Maybe she’d call and invite Eddie, too, though she wasn’t sure she wanted to mix friend and family just yet. She and Henry were building a new relationship, not resuming an old one, and so they still circled carefully, practiced a civility that would remain artificial as long as it had to be practiced.
Her place was dark when she got home, and she felt the prick of small disappointment. Usually she kept her bicycle inside, but since Henry had moved in she’d taken to locking it to the front stair railing to give them a little more interior space. She was risking theft, but her bike wasn’t worth much, and she’d sprung for a good lock.
She decided she’d work for an hour to see if Henry showed up and then go eat either way. Her growing tattoo had inspired a shift in her work, and she was sketching for a painting more stylized than anything she’d done before. Still Biloxi but cleaner in its lines and more exaggerated. One day soon, she thought, maybe after she finished this one, she was going to turn her attention to New Orleans. The trick was to find a new way to depict such well-trodden territory, to see the city in different colors. Or maybe she could make it new because it was new — no longer that place it had been before.
When she heard people in front of her house, she was about half an hour into a sketch of a particular block of beachfront Biloxi before it was leveled. Telling herself a secondhand bicycle wasn’t worth getting shot over, she peeked out her front window through the split in her curtains. What she saw wasn’t a thief but a woman and small girl bringing a cat carrier and a large box into the house across the street.
Marion stepped out. When the woman gazed at her, she felt self-conscious. “Need any help?” seemed like the best response.
“We got it,” the woman said and turned back to the house, which looked undamaged by the storm but long in need of fresh paint. It had been blue once, perhaps a turquoise now diluted by the bare wood emerging through the paint. “You didn’t live here before,” she said over her shoulder.
Marion shook her head in agreement. “The place I use to live is no more.”
The woman faced her again, hip popped out to one side. “You and a lot of people. Next thing you’ll be telling me is that white kids are moving into the Desire Projects.”
Marion laughed a little because the woman’s face was softer than her words. “I don’t think that’s happening anytime soon.”
The little girl took the cat from the woman and disappeared inside, but the woman stayed out front. “I thought my house would be worth even less now than it was before, but you make me think I got a chance of selling it.”
“I’m about the last person you should take advice from, real estate or otherwise.” Marion lingered, half expecting the woman to have some sage words for her, but she just made a small grunting sound and said, “I’ll keep that in mind.” She turned around again at her front steps and added, “And I guess I’ll be seeing you around.”
As soon as Marion walked through the kitchen, she realized that something was wrong with the third room, which she’d started calling, just to herself, the studio instead of the bedroom. What she wasn’t sure of was whether the composition had changed in the few minutes she was outside or whether she just hadn’t noticed when she’d got home from work because she had been mired in her thoughts.
Regardless of when it had been taken, the knowledge that the architect’s bag was gone lodged in her esophagus. She’d looked into the bag within minutes of Clay’s departure — perhaps curiosity is the simplest human impulse, even if its consequences are so often messy — and so she knew that it contained a small and expertly done painting. It was the kind of painting people pay real money for, though from what she could make out of the signature, she had never heard of the artist. While it was possible that Clay had got her in over her head, she settled on the more likely conclusion. She had been failed by Henry, and as a result she would fail Clay and Johanna. To trust another was to be made untrustworthy yourself. She was a victim of both her own stupidity and the paltriness of her origins.
She was rocking herself on the floor, arms around her bent legs, when she heard Henry come in. Though she’d turned off all the lights, he walked straight through the house and stood near her.
“I’ve got to tell you something,” he said. “I’ve done something I’m not sure I can fix.”
Marion cradled her knees harder. “No kidding. Why did you come back?”
“To try to fix it, or at the very least to give you the money.”
“You sold it?”
“I was going to buy, but I worked my tools and I want to stay clean. They taught us that it doesn’t have to be automatic, that you can stop the process by thinking about it. It’s not something I could have done a year ago, and I’m not sure it’s something I can even do tomorrow, so I want you to take the money and put it where I can’t get it. It’s important that you don’t trust me.”
Marion laughed and said that maybe they were biologically related after all. Though the envelope Henry handed her was fat with money, and money was what she most needed from the world to make a new life, she found herself calling Eddie with the idea of trying to close things right. She focused on the simple steps of doing this and allowed her positive impulse to remain as unexamined as her baser ones always had been.