THREE
I was still pretty much a Luddite, but in 2007 even Luddites with AARP cards know their way around certain corners of the internet. So it was no problem for me to find out more about Sashi Bluntstone than I could ever hope or want to retain. My daughter wasn’t kidding when she said that Sashi had lived a very strange life. Fame and money are difficult enough to deal with when you’re twenty or thirty. I can’t even imagine how it messes with you when you’re four. It’s the precarious nature of child stardom. Where is there to go when you start at the top? Most parents tell their kids they’re wonderful, though kids are usually smart enough not to believe everything they hear, especially when it comes out of Mommy or Daddy’s mouth. What must it be like, I wondered, to have everyone in your world telling you you’re wonderful and talented and a prodigy? How long would it be before you noticed that all the good things everyone was saying about you also made you a freak? No kid wants to be a freak, not at that age. Being a freak is what the teenage years are all about. And how would a little girl react to being the family ATM? Questions, I had lots of questions.
I started with the most recent stuff and worked my way back to that first article about Sashi, the one Sarah slid across the table to me. Then I worked my way back to the first articles about Sashi bursting onto the scene, the first mentions coming in local Long Island papers in the late ‘90s when she was around three. I saw the damning expose done by that Flowers guy on CNN and watched several segments of a video the Bluntstones had produced of Sashi doing a painting called “Orange Meets Blue Swirlies.” Christ, watching paint dry was more exciting than watching the kid paint. It wasn’t must-see TV. More like torture. I’ve got to admit that the end product, the painting itself, was quite impressive, but what the hell did I know about art?
What’s the old story?
One friend says to another, “I don’t know art, but I know what I like.”
And the friend says, “Yeah, but so do cows.”
I’d taken two terms of art history in college before I took the police entrance exam. I liked art history, but did better on the entrance exam. Katy had been a graphic designer and schlepped Sarah and me around to art museums all over the place, so I guess I knew a little bit more about art than the average cow. At least I knew who Pollock and Kandinsky were. I knew some of their works and I could see how Sashi’s paintings got compared to theirs. Anyway, as impressive as the painting done in the video was, it didn’t exactly erase any doubts from my mind about the authenticity of the work. I had about as much faith in the production of this “documented proof” as I did in test studies paid for by the industry they benefited. Ford Pinto Safe! So says a new study funded by the Ford Motor Company. Then again, I was a born cynic. I didn’t believe in the Tooth Fairy either.
Frankly, I didn’t give a rat’s ass about whether Sashi did the paintings or not. That’s not why Sarah had come to me. If she wasn’t already dead, there was a frightened little girl out in the world somewhere and it didn’t really matter if she was the next Mozart or a future trailer park princess. She needed to be found and I needed my own daughter back in my life. Even I could do the math: doing the one would get me the other. Unfortunately, the newspaper articles and reports I found on various websites were incredibly sketchy and unhelpful. They repeated the same vague story about how the Bluntstones thought their daughter had gone for a walk on the beach and didn’t come back for dinner. There was literally nothing beyond that except a lot of speculation. I was pretty good at speculation myself and wasn’t in need of any help on that front.
I hadn’t looked in a mirror for hours, but could feel my eyes were bagged and bloodshot. They burned in need of sleep, but I couldn’t sleep, not yet. I kept flicking through the web images of Sashi. At three, she was a lovely girl with fire and mischief asparkle in her green eyes. They were eyes much like her mother’s. Sashi also shared Candy’s reddish hair, yet she didn’t look like Candy. Over the years, I’d forgotten what Max Bluntstone looked like, but Sashi’s face refreshed my memory. Except for her eyes and hair, Sashi had Max’s face. She had her father’s granite jawline and high cheekbones, both kind of odd features on such a little girl. Still, she managed to pull them off. As she aged, Sashi’s looks softened, but her eyes grew old, older even than mine. The mischief seemed to have been extinguished, but not the fire. The fire raged. Maybe I was just seeing things that weren’t there. Tired old eyes do that. When I let sleep come to me, I was wondering about Sashi’s old tired eyes.
FOUR
Sea Cliff is one of those tiny villages on Long Island that even most Long Islanders have never heard of. Across Hempstead Harbor from Port Washington and just south of Glen Cove on the cusp of the Gold Coast, it is a place contentedly trapped in a narrow swath of the past. And that swath was marked on the one side by the village’s rather grand and fanciful Victorians, some, like the Bluntstones’, overlooking the harbor and Long Island Sound beyond. The other edge of the swath was drawn in a line of classic ‘60s ranches and splanches. It was the kind of place where you could imagine freckle-faced boys in stiff, cuffed blue jeans and canvas sneakers, eagerly clamping baseball cards to their bikes so that they clickity-clacked along the spokes as the wheels turned. It was a place where people set their clocks to the pealing bells of the Russian churches, and those bells were ringing when I pulled up to the Bluntstone house.
The house was a Queen Anne Victorian, its design as busy as a beehive and its seven-colored paint job nearly as noisy. It must have taken a forest full of trees just to supply the stock for the spindles and gingerbread work on the wrap-around porch alone. No doubt a second forest had been sacrificed for the shakes, clapboards, fish scales, and row after row of diamond-shaped accent shingles. I more admired this kind of architecture than liked it. The house called too much attention to itself for my taste, screaming “Look at me! Look at me this instant!” It was nearly impossible not to. As I stood out of my car and beheld the behemoth before me, I couldn’t help but think that Candy had come a long way from the basement apartment in Sheepshead Bay that she shared with her long- divorced mother and two Siamese cats.
I patted the. 38 I kept holstered between the waistband of my pants and the small of my back. Nervous habit, I guess. It felt like a fifth limb. I didn’t anticipate having to use the damned thing, but I’d carried it in that same spot for many decades, initially as my off-duty piece and then as a kind of conceit. When I got my PI license, I fooled myself that it was a necessary piece of equipment for a man swimming alone in dangerous waters. Figures that the first time I really needed it-a quarter century ago in an abandoned hotel in Miami Beach-I didn’t have it on me. If I had, rather than the pea-shooter automatic I was forced to borrow from a friend, history might’ve been very different. Not world history, my history, my family’s history. With my. 38, I’d’ve killed the man who ambushed me on that long ago night. Instead, I just wounded him and he escaped. Seventeen years later, seven years ago, he helped murder my wife. These days my. 38 was a shopkeeper’s gun because, until Sarah convinced me to take this case, that’s what I’d been for the last several years, a shopkeeper.
The steps of the porch creaked slightly under my weight. Funny, the creaking added a kind of character and an air of authenticity to the place. This was an old house and all the pretty paint in the world couldn’t hide that. Somehow those creaking steps made this case real for me. This was Sashi’s home and suddenly that mattered. It mattered a lot. Candy stepped out onto the porch before I made it to the door. She didn’t say a word, but came to me and hugged me. I hugged her back. I hadn’t seen her since her wedding day. How strange, I thought. Candy had been a semi-permanent fixture at our house back in Brooklyn. Christ, I think we fed her more meals than she ever ate at home. Life is like that, though. People fall away when you’re not looking. People fall away.
“Mr. Prager. Mr. Prager,” she kept repeating. “It’s going to be all right now, isn’t it?”
“I hope so, Candy. I hope so. Let’s see.”
Candy wasn’t crying. I suppose she’d cried herself dry during the last three weeks, but I could tell her nerves were raw. She was ashen faced, her eyes flitting from place to place. When I let her go and she hooked her arm in mine to show me into the house, Candy walked as if on a high ledge. It seemed that any loud noise or unexpected movement would split her in two. I’d been to that place. It was a very lonely place, empty but for guilt and self- recrimination.
Paying a visit to someone’s home under these circumstances was an odd thing. It wasn’t entirely business and it wasn’t exactly social. I’d learned long ago that at the beginning of a case it was best to treat people like water and let them find their own level. Besides, people reveal all sorts of things if you just give them enough space
