The time was 5:30 p.m., and the adult continuing education classes were just getting started. The students, he guessed, were mostly middle managers, salespeople, administrative assistants and the like, vaguely dissatisfied with their jobs and hoping for new careers in the magical world of creativity. They passed through the grimy revolving door, all of them weary, a long workday made longer yet by their elusive aspirations.
Shaw circulated, stopping students and teachers and asking if any of them knew Fontaine. Unlike a cop, he had no authority to get people to talk to him. When he approached someone he politely introduced himself, displayed Fontaine’s picture on his phone and said she was missing and that he was “helping the family try to find her.” True enough.
The results he got were typical of those on a missing persons job: the majority of people he approached brushed him off but only because — Shaw could tell — he was a stranger with an unusual request, not because they had something to hide. Most of those willing to listen didn’t know Fontaine or, if they did, had no idea as to her whereabouts or whether she was frequently seen in the company of any particular man or woman or might have even had a stalker.
To his question about whether they had any impression of her, those who responded said, uniformly, that she was a brilliant artist who spent every spare moment drawing and painting. She confided to one coworker that she was teaching only for the money; the minute class was over, she fled to one of the studios to paint.
Shaw ducked into a diner and sat at a rickety table, where, between sips of coffee and bites of club sandwich, he called a half-dozen names on the list Matthews had sent him. Four didn’t answer — including the friend whom Fontaine had contacted just after her disappearance. The two who picked up were of no help.
He finished the meal and called the galleries on Matthews’s list to get the hours they were open. Only two still were.
The first gallery was a dead end.
At the second gallery, however, he got answers. More than he bargained for, in fact.
Shaw entered as the owner was just getting ready to close. He was an affable man of fifty or so, wearing a white, loose-fitting Native American embroidered shirt and jeans. He was balding and had gathered his remaining hair, which was brownish gray, in a ponytail. He was large — about six-two — with a round belly but thin legs. On his nose were perched glasses with thick black frames. He was jotting entries in a ledger.
His name was David Goodwin, and, in response to Shaw’s question about knowing Evelyn Fontaine, he nodded broadly. “She’s exhibited here a couple of times. As soon as she gets back, I hope she’ll think about another show.”
Shaw felt his pulse quicken. “She’s missing.”
“You mean she’s not in Muncie?” The man’s lined face frowned.
“Muncie?”
“I haven’t talked to her for a while — two, three months — but I’m sure she said she was planning on spending August at a couple of artists-in-residence retreats. Schaumburg was one. That’s in Illinois. And after that she and Jason were going to a retreat in Muncie... You a friend of hers?”
“Jason?”
“Jason Barnes. He owns a gallery too, Chicago.” Goodwin’s face tightened. “Nice one. Bigger than mine. Of course, he’s Abstract Expressionism. As if that’s ever going to come back.”
“And who is he, exactly?”
“Oh, her boyfriend. Didn’t you know?”
Friday, August 31
Shaw’s eighty-five percent hypothesis was playing out: if David Goodwin was right, Fontaine had found a lover, and one with some means, assuming that his “bigger” gallery made a sizable profit.
As sometimes with domestic conflict situations, which often turn bitter and toxic, he wondered if he should simply step away. He certainly had every right to.
The rustic cabin where Colter Shaw and his older brother and younger sister were raised contained shelves holding close to ten thousand books, including an entire set of law school casebooks and hornbook texts. In his teens, Colter pored over these, fascinated with the drama of life as refracted through the prism of human conflicts that ended up in court.
Most contracts are “bilateral,” each party agrees to perform some obligation to the other. Rewards, on the other hand, are “unilateral contracts.” A party offers to pay a reward, generally to the public, but no one is required to pursue it. The obligation arises only when a reward seeker successfully delivers. What this meant for Shaw was that he was never bound by an agreement to find a missing person or a fugitive. If he wanted to pursue a reward, he did. If he wanted to walk, at any time, for any reason, or for no reason at all, he did. This was why he’d never considered becoming a cop or a private eye.
Restless...
But Shaw decided to follow through. And he was now steering the Toyota over the city limits of Muncie, Indiana. His impression was that Ronald Matthews was more or less what he seemed to be: an older man who’d fallen for a captivating woman and was still in love. He deserved an answer to the question tormenting him: Could he sell himself as a new, improved husband, devoted to making the marriage work?
The time was close to noon, the sky turquoise, the temperature in the high nineties. Muncie was a nineteenth-century industrial town, a mini Detroit, battered but not KO’d by the gravitational swing to high tech and the promised land of overseas labor. Holding its own, Shaw concluded.
There was no elevation to Muncie. The buildings were low, the surrounding land flat. Red brick was the building medium of choice. He drove through a decrepit area, where skinny men, all of them white, sat with scorched meth pipes or greasy bottles of malt liquor naked of paper bag shrouds. Seeing the dark Toyota cruise by — resembling an unmarked cop car — they showed no interest, and no one hid liquor or drugs. They weren’t even defiant; they simply didn’t care.
Driving on, he passed the elegant Ball State University. He’d learned the school was named after the five Ball brothers, who’d relocated their glass production company to Muncie in the late nineteenth century, when the city was thriving with newly discovered natural gas repositories. Shaw felt a twinge of nostalgia. He and brother Russell and sister Dorion had helped their mother put up preserved food in Ball canning jars every fall. He hadn’t known that the jars had Midwestern roots.
Shaw’s research disclosed that Muncie had been the core of the Middletown sociological study in the past century, an examination of the typical small American city. Muncie wore the word “middle” proudly.
He parked the rental car in a largely deserted lot on Jefferson, in the Downtown District. He climbed out and began canvassing the locals to find the artists-in-residence retreat that David Goodwin had mentioned. Goodwin had added that as a veteran of many such retreats, he knew they were usually private, not announced online — to make sure only serious artists attended, which explained why Shaw found nothing in his preliminary research.
Shaw began his hunt with the art galleries in this part of town. The first three he browsed were essentially gift shops selling mostly kitsch that was humorous or homey: goofy cats or dogs welded together from nuts and bolts, plaques with inspirational sayings like You can if you try, crystals, cheap jewelry, mugs and a quarry’s worth of ceramics. The framed pieces on the wall were mass-produced prints and photos of rural scenes.
As he’d guessed, none of the clerks — the majority being teenage girls or women in their sixties and beyond — knew anything about a local artists’ retreat.