Inside, Candy took my coat and hung it on a hook in the etched glass and oak paneled vestibule. It was toasty inside, but Candy, dressed in a white cable-knit sweater, kept her arms folded around herself as if she were on the verge of chills.
“Come on, Mr. Prager, I want to show you something,” she said, leading me into the house, past the curving front staircase, and to a door that led to the basement.
“You’re gonna have to start calling me Moe.”
“That’s not going to be easy for me, Mr. Pra-Moe. I know I never said anything back when I was a kid, but I used to wish you were my dad too. I was always really jealous of Sarah that she had you.”
“That’s a lovely thing to say, Candy. I’m honored.”
“All I ever had was the assembly line of worthless boyfriends my mom slept her way through. Sarah was really lucky to have you.”
“I’m not so sure she would agree with you anymore.”
“God, I’m sorry, Mr. Pra-Moe. Moe, I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to bring that up. I know that you and Sarah… I mean, since Mrs. Prager was…”
“It’s okay, Candy. Let’s not worry about my hurt feelings and let’s concentrate on finding Sashi, okay?”
“I’m just not thinking real clearly these days.”
“That’s understandable. You’re doing fine. Come on and show me what you wanted to show me.”
One steep and narrow set of stairs later we were down in Sashi’s studio. It was a brightly lit, almost sterile room. I don’t know how else to describe it. The place had a kind of movie set vibe. The walls were painted in white semi gloss and the ceiling was covered in those ubiquitous white drop-in tiles. The flooring was a kind of spongy blue material and it was only the floor-stained here and there by colorful splotches from where Sashi had dripped, drizzled, or splattered paint over the edges of her canvases-that felt broken-in or touched by human hands. Blank canvases of varying sizes were lined up in neat rows at one corner of the studio. One wall was covered with low shelves and on some of these shelves were quart-sized Chinese soup containers half-filled with myriad colored paints. Another shelf was stacked with tube after tube of acrylic paint and another shelf was for jars full of brushes. No easels here. Candy explained that Sashi preferred working on or close to the floor so that she could look down at her work. Good. This confirmed what I’d seen in the video the night before.
“This room doesn’t look familiar to me,” I said, wanting to see how Candy would react.
“So you saw the video we did?”
“Some of it.”
“And?”
“It bored the hell out of me, Candy. Sorry.”
“That’s okay. It can take Sashi weeks sometimes to finish a painting. It bores me too. She works best when we just leave her alone.”
“Like the day she disappeared.”
“Like that day, yeah,” Candy said, and began hugging herself again.
“The room,” I said, “what about the room?”
“Oh, sorry… what?”
“I didn’t recognize the room from the video.”
“We were living in a rented house then on the other side of town.”
“I’ll want to see that house,” I said.
Candy seemed not to hear me. “We bought this place three years ago and Max had this studio made just for Sashi.”
I let the thing about the old house go for the moment and I noticed there were framed photographs on another wall, but no paintings. Most of the photographs were of Sashi and a sad-eyed beagle.
“That was Cara,” Candy said, following my gaze.
“Was?”
“She died last year. She loved that dog. Cara meant everything to her.”
“Do you think Sashi could have run away?”
“Because of Cara?”
“Because of anything: Cara’s dying, the pressure of creating… anything.”
“She didn’t run away!” She was emphatic and there was more than a little anger in her tone. That was fine. I wouldn’t have liked the maybe-you’re-bad-parents implications of the question either. “Someone took her.”
I dropped it and pointed at a lone canvas on the floor. “And this…”
The entire canvas was covered in a thick, textured coat of black acrylic paint. Looking more closely, I noticed a fine mist of crimson among the textured waves and folds of the black base. It was as if Sashi had put blood-colored paint in an atomizer and sprayed the air over the canvas, the tiny droplets falling where the air currents in the room took them. Christ, it was bleak.
“That’s what Sashi was working on when Max and I came downstairs to get her for dinner. We thought she went for a walk on the beach across the way, but she didn’t come home. When she didn’t come home, we went to look for her on the beach. Then we called the police. They said she probably ran away, but they came and we looked for her. Our neighbors helped, but we couldn’t find her. There were no signs of forced entry and there were no fingerprints that didn’t belong.”
I didn’t like that. I didn’t like that at all. Candy was repeating the story verbatim. Her recitation had an eerie Manchurian Candidate feel to it. Raymond Shaw is the kindest, bravest, warmest, most wonderful human being I’ve ever known. I didn’t ascribe any specific negative judgment to it beyond my original misgivings about a frequently repeated story taking on its own reality. I didn’t, for instance, think she was lying to me, though I suppose she might have been. Candy’s canned response had an upside, though. It would serve as a reminder to me to count as fact only those things I knew to be so. There had been too many times in the past that I had trusted too quickly, believed too easily. Watching my ex-wife get murdered before my eyes cured the shit out of that problem for me. Katy had been killed as much by my easy trust as by the bullets that severed her arteries.
“Where’s your husband?” I asked as we walked back up the stairs.
“I sent him out to do some errands.”
That set off some alarm bells. “He doesn’t know about my being here, does he?”
“No,” Candy confessed as we reached the first floor. “Come on upstairs. I guess you’ll want to see Sashi’s room.”
“I do.” I followed Candy up the more grand and beautifully restored main staircase. “Why didn’t you tell Max?”
“Because we’ve already hired three other investigators and it’s costing us a fortune. Max worries about those kinds of things.”
“And…”
“And because he remembers you hated him.”
“I didn’t know him. I hated him getting you pregnant and rushing you into marriage. I hated that.”
That stopped her in her tracks. Candy turned on her heel to face me and planted herself on one of the carpeted steps.
“ He didn’t get me pregnant, Mr. Prager.”
“Come on, Candy.”
“I got me pregnant.” You could have knocked me back down the steps with a whisper. “I needed to get out, to get away from my mother, away from… I knew Max would do the right thing. He loved me. He really loved me.”
“I can’t be hearing-”
But she wasn’t finished. “He was happy, Mr. Prager. He didn’t run because he knew he could have me forever.”
“Did you love him?”
“Enough, I guess. Enough to let him get me out of there.”
“I did the math last night, Candy,” I said. “Sashi isn’t that baby.”
She hung her head. “There wasn’t a baby. I went off my birth control pills and when I had my next heavy period, I told him I miscarried. Don’t hate me, Mr. Prager.” She was crying now, finally, for a baby that never was and a lie that would live forever.
“I couldn’t hate you and believe me, I’m in no position to chastise people for their secrets. Does Sarah know?”
“Oh, God, no. Please don’t tell her.”
“Listen to me, Candy. I won’t tell her, but this is where it ends. From this point on, I won’t keep any secrets for you except if they help me find Sashi. So don’t tell me anything else that doesn’t have to do with Sashi. She’s who I’m here about. Do we understand each other?”