“He’s been a lifesaver in this whole thing. His gallery’s doing well.”
“For Abstract Expressionism...”
“Do you ever smile when you’re being funny, Colter?”
No answer required.
“Not my style,” she continued. “But we didn’t bond over art. It was... personal.”
“How long’ve you know him?”
“Not long. Met him at a retreat in Schaumburg. He’d gotten out of an abusive relationship a year ago and we compared notes. His lover was just like Ron. I mean, it’s funny. I don’t think of gay people being abusive. That’s sort of reverse prejudice, isn’t it?”
Fontaine turned off 83 onto a dirt road. “Where the retreat is, up ahead, the land used to be farms. But when Muncie was booming — a hundred fifty years ago — there were factories here. All abandoned now. A nonprofit arts council leases the land and hosts retreats. Mostly painters, but writers and poets too. You can stay for a month or two, cheap, and work on your masterpiece. It’s been heaven for me. I don’t have to worry about coming home. Worry about the insults. Worry about the fist... Did you see his ring?”
Shaw nodded.
“It was like brass knuckles. He gave me a hairline fracture.” She rubbed her cheek. “Right here.”
Shaw glanced at his phone, which seemed to make Fontaine uneasy.
He reassured her. “It’s not Ron. Another job.” As he sent some texts, he said, “He’ll want to hear something soon, but I can keep him at bay a little while longer.”
“Thank you, Colter. Really.” Then her eyes brightened. “Can I show you what I’m painting now?”
They pulled onto a wide strip of grass, bordered by trees and shrubbery, and parked. Shaw could see a narrow river and low concrete dam over which the current flowed in a smooth, gentle arc.
Fontaine shut the engine off, and they both climbed out of the car. They walked to the river. A breeze stirred ripples, and geranium petals floated nonchalantly past. Ducks paddled by, while a larger waterbird, starkly white, lingered in the shallows. Shaw didn’t know what it was. He and his siblings had learned a great deal about wildlife on the Compound but only from the perspectives of surviving it, preserving it or cooking it. This stately creature wasn’t made for the casserole pot.
She guided him between an eastern arborvitae and a towering box elder, then along banks thick with foliage. Shaw recognized black chokeberry, sedge, and Brazilian waterweed, a troublesome invader that got a toehold in the U.S. when water from dumped household aquariums made its way into storm drains. Waving hypnotically along the banks was a thick growth of pale bluejoint grass, for which Shaw had a fondness, as he’d once spent three hours in a wide strip of it hiding from a pack of wolves.
“Pretty,” Shaw said, looking about. “So, you’re doing a landscape.”
“Landscape?” She frowned. “No, no, no, Colter. Come on this way.” Fontaine led him along a trail, into a grove where the trees grew thicker, the shrubbery more tangled. Their destination, apparently, was a low brick structure, vaguely visible through the vines and the trees’ late-summer paling green leaves. “I don’t do pretty. This is what I’m painting.”
They broke from the tree line, and she pointed to a wreck of an old, two-story building. He squinted at a weathered sign above the loading dock. “Samsons’ Manufacturing,” he read aloud. “Founded 1889. Wheelwrights.”
“I like gritty, hard, incongruous. Industrial Revolution meets Norman Rockwell. Oliver Twist meets Pride and Prejudice.”
Shaw pulled out his phone and took a picture. “I’ll compare your painting to the original. I read about the layering, how the final painting is just a reflection of the first sketch.”
“You did? Really?” Her voice was soft, as she stared at the structure intently. “Inside’s even better. Come on.”
They climbed the stairs to the loading dock, mindful of the rotting wood. She followed Shaw through the open doorway and he found himself in a large, dimly lit factory space, aromatic of mold and of chemicals he couldn’t identify. As his eyes grew accustomed to the faint illumination — from a gap where a skylight used to be — he saw that the area was largely bare except for some ancient machine mounts, gears, and narrow-gauge rails for transporting gondolas.
As they walked, Shaw looked out a window — also missing its panes — to a weed-filled parking lot. He stopped walking. He saw a car.
Ron Matthews’s black Mercedes.
Shaw saw something else too. Eyes now accustomed to the dimness, he looked at the two other occupants of the factory. One was Matthews himself, gagged and bound with duct tape. His red face was distorted by fear, eyes wide as he desperately sucked air through his nostrils. The other man, crouching over Matthews to check the gag, was David Goodwin, the gallery owner who’d directed Shaw to Muncie. His eyes wide with shock and dismay.
Shaw ignored him for the moment and turned to see what he now guessed he would: Evelyn Fontaine, holding in a latex-gloved hand her husband’s black Glock, pointed at Shaw’s chest.
And the odds that Evelyn Fontaine was conspiring with David Goodwin to murder her husband: one hundred percent.
“The hell’s he doing here?” Goodwin said in a furious whisper.
“It’s all right, dear,” Fontaine answered calmly.
Goodwin stammered, “But, Evie... I mean, it’s not what we talked about.” The words trickled out cautiously. He was afraid of making her mad.
Shaw noted that the two of them were ignoring Matthews, who was moaning and thrashing on the floor. Shaw now saw that his arms and legs were not duct-taped directly on the cloth, nor was the tape applied to his mouth. Goodwin had first wrapped the man with what looked like plastic wrap, presumably so that no suspicious adhesive from the tape would be found by the police.
Cable TV had taught the world how to beat forensics.
“We need to add just another piece or two,” said Fontaine, the voice of reason. “Otherwise, it won’t work.”
Goodwin shot a contemptuous nod toward Matthews. “I said I’d help. After all he did to you. But this guy?” Now Shaw got the nod. “No, Evelyn...”
“It has to be done right,” she said, untroubled by his distress. “Unless you want to go to prison forever.”
“But, honey, you didn’t... you didn’t say anything.”
Fontaine’s plan was impressive; Shaw had to give her that. After convincing Goodwin to help her kill Matthews, they would wait for a fall guy — a PI, or, as it turned out, a reward seeker named Colter Shaw — to search for the “missing” Fontaine. In the course of the investigation, he’d find Goodwin, who would direct him to Muncie. Goodwin would then kidnap Matthews — and steal his gun — and deposit him in the Samsons’ factory. Fontaine would then trick Shaw here, as well.
To the police, the ensuing double homicide would have a simple explanation: Matthews, enraged by his philandering wife, had come to the retreat to kill her. Trying to protect the artist, Shaw had been fatally wounded, but grabbed the gun and killed Matthews before dying.
Tidy.
“She’d need a third party to pull the trigger,” Shaw said to Goodwin. “A wife killing her husband? She’d be suspect number one, even if she claims abuse.”
The poor, balding man looked horrified. “Isn’t there some other way? There has to be.”
“Dave, come on. You’ve already kidnapped Ron. And Shaw knows everything now. We can’t exactly let him live, can we?”
“But... I just didn’t...”