We had reached the driveway by this time, and I stopped to put my shoes back on, using a hand on Tav’s shoulder to balance myself. I tried to slip him forty dollars, but he shook his head. “I want credit for doing my part in keeping Maurice out of jail. I only hope this cartridge contains something useful after all the hassle we went through to get it.”
The sun highlighted yellow flecks in his brown eyes as I smiled up at him. “You and me both.”
Since Tav was late for a meeting, I dropped him off at the Metro station before returning to the studio. Vitaly and I taught an international standard class at Wednesday lunchtime, and I had to hustle to get back for it. We introduced the Viennese waltz-harder than the regular waltz-to applause and groans.
“I don’t know how you manage to look like you’re floating, Stacy,” one woman said. “I feel like I’m wearing cement shoes.”
“Practice,” I said with a smile. “It’s all about practice. You can float, too; I promise.”
The class wrapped up at twelve thirty, and Vitaly stayed in the ballroom to coach an amateur-amateur pair who were excited about entering their first competition. I descended to my kitchen and called Maurice, leaving a message to let him know we’d finally acquired the typewriter cartridge. My hand was still on the phone when it rang, startling me.
“Stacy, I’ve got the CD with your proofs on it,” Sarah Lewis said when I answered. “I’m going to be at Tate Slade’s Fine Arts this afternoon, taking photos for a brochure for their new exhibition, and I can drop it by afterward, if you like.”
“How ’bout I meet you at the art gallery,” I said, feeling restless. “It’s on Royal, right, near the Episcopal church?”
I mopped the kitchen floor and then changed into white cotton slacks with a thin red stripe and a red peasant blouse before scooting upstairs to tell Vitaly I was leaving and to ask him to lock up when he finished. Walking the few blocks to the art gallery, I felt myself relaxing, sinking into the moment. I deliberately put aside thoughts of Corinne’s murder and the studio’s precarious financial position to enjoy the beautiful day. A calico cat looked down on me from his perch in a bay window, bricks herringboned the sidewalk in a hypnotic pattern, and the drone of an airplane high overhead made me glance up briefly. Reaching the gallery before I was ready to, I strolled past it to linger in front of St. Paul’s Episcopal Church, letting the sand-colored stones of its Gothic revival facade warm me, and admiring the swooping arches that fronted the church. Reluctantly, I retraced my steps to the art gallery and went in.
Dimness cloaked me, and I blinked while my eyes adjusted. The space was largely open, with bleached wooden planks on the floor, white panels for walls, and lighting provided by stainless-steel fixtures directed toward the paintings. A thin man on a stepladder and a minion struggled to hang a wall-sized painting that seemed to consist of little more than a canvas painted off-white with a wavy blue line bisecting it.
“We’re closed to set up for the exhibition. The opening’s Friday night,” the man on the stepladder called.
“I’m looking for Sarah Lewis,” I said, wandering closer to see whether the painting offered anything more up close. Nope. I peered at the discreet price tag on the wall and almost gasped: twenty thousand dollars. Eep.
“Back there.” The man jerked his balding head toward the rear of the gallery. As he spoke, a flash of light told me where I’d find Sarah.
“Thanks.” I wended my way around the panels and past more paintings as monochromatic and inscrutable as the first one. I like my art to have recognizable objects in it-people, dogs, flowers-or at least to feature bright colors. As far as I was concerned, these paintings took minimalism, or monochromatism or whatever the style was called, to heights of boringness seldom scaled by an artist. I left off critiquing the paintings as I rounded a corner to find Sarah Lewis adjusting a light on an aluminum pole.
“Do you think you could hold this just so?” she asked, spotting me. “It keeps slipping.”
I obligingly wrapped my fingers around the cool metal, and watched as she checked a light meter and then took a few photos of the canvas in front of us.
“Thanks.” Letting the camera hang from a strap around her neck, she reached into a multipocketed duffel and withdrew a CD case. “Let me know which ones you want. Eighty dollars each.”
I took the case from her, noting that she seemed a bit stiffer than when we’d last met. She broke eye contact almost immediately to shift the strap around her neck.
“Vitaly and I will look at them and let you know,” I said. I hesitated, wanting to ask her about Marco, but feeling awkward about it.
“Look,” she said as I was on the verge of leaving. Her head snapped up and her eyes met mine squarely for the first time. “Marco told me about your visit yesterday.”
“Um.”
“He said you know.”
“I didn’t know you knew.”
“Since I was eighteen.” She tossed her head so her dark braid slipped over her shoulder. “He and Mom took me aside to tell me that I wasn’t my father’s daughter, that I was Marco’s daughter. They thought I should know the truth for medical reasons and what have you. Great birthday present, huh?”
“It must have been hard to hear.”
She met my gaze, unsmiling. “The hardest. Not only did I have to come to terms with the fact that I wasn’t who I thought I was, but my mom wasn’t the person I thought she was either. All her blather about integrity and living authentically was just so many words. Great for spouting in the classroom but without any applicability to real life. We didn’t talk for a couple of years.”
“I’m sorry,” I said, feeling intensely uncomfortable in the face of her anger and grief.
“Yeah, well, a lot of therapy has gotten me-us-through the worst of it. But then Corinne Blakely told Marco she was publishing her memoir, and that she was including the story of their romance and why she broke it off.” Sarah popped the lens off the camera and stowed it roughly in the duffel. She was silent for a moment, searching for a new lens and fitting it to the camera body. She mumbled something I didn’t catch.
“What?”
“I said I didn’t want Dad to find out that way. He loves my mother; he still thinks I’m his biological daughter. It would break his heart.” She looked up, her chin tilted a bit, defiantly. “That’s why when Marco told me you had the manuscript, I broke into your house to find it.”
My jaw dropped. “Say what? It was you?”
She nodded. “It wasn’t hard. I bought a crowbar at a hardware store and waited till I thought you’d be asleep. The waiting was the hardest part. I pried the door open and started searching, but then you woke up.” She loosed a long sigh. “I’m sorry I knocked you down. I hope you weren’t hurt?”
“I’ll live.” This conversation felt surreal. This woman had broken into my house with burglary on her mind, and now she was looking at me with concern. I tried to muster some anger, but the fact that it was my own lie that led her to break in kept me from working up any righteous indignation.
“Were you telling the truth when you told Marco you don’t really have it?”
I nodded.
“Then what am I to do?” Tears filmed her eyes.
“I think it’s totally possible there isn’t really a manuscript,” I said, relating what Mrs. Laughlin, Corinne’s housekeeper, had told me.
“Really?” Sarah stood a little straighter. After a beat, she added, “So someone killed Corinne for nothing?”
“Why would you assume Corinne was killed over the memoir?” I asked.
“Because the thought crossed my mind. And if it occurred to me, chances are someone else thought of it, too.”
I stared at the woman in front of me, so like me in many ways: She was close to my age; she worked for herself in an arts-related field; she was single (I thought) and childless. Had she just confessed to planning a murder?