with unambiguous clarity-that they no longer want to be married. For others, it’s a glance in the mirror at a face lost beneath years of self-neglect. Or the bank foreclosing on the house. Or a body that has lost its strength.
Most people experience a singular moment when they pause to take a hard look at their lives and don’t recognize what they see. For Alice Humphrey, that sobering moment came when she saw Drew Campbell’s body being carted through the narrow gallery door to a medical examiner’s van waiting at the curb.
An ambulance had previously arrived, just after the first marked police car. But the paramedics hadn’t bothered moving the body. Drew was that dead. Now his body was simply evidence. She felt herself flinch as the side of the metal gurney bumped the door frame.
That was the moment.
And, like anyone confronted with the fact she had been living a life she couldn’t recognize, she asked herself, How did this happen? And like anyone trying to answer that unanswerable question, she kept rewinding the clock, struggling to identify the second when the path of her life veered in this direction.
Maybe if she hadn’t walked into the gallery this morning, none of this would be happening. In retrospect, it made no sense that the front entrance had been unlocked, yet the windows covered with paper, when she had arrived. Maybe she ought to have walked away right then and there. If she’d gone home and forgotten all about Drew Campbell and this place, someone else eventually would have ventured into the gallery and been the lucky winner. Slipped in the blood. Called 911.
Or better yet, what if she hadn’t come to the gallery this morning at all? What if, instead, she had marched over to her brother’s apartment the second she saw that news story about his arrest? What kind of sister keeps a meeting at work when her brother might be in trouble? If she had tracked Ben down instead of simply trying his phone, maybe then, things would be different.
But eventually she would have been pulled into the investigation. She worked at the gallery. She had keys. She ran the place. She’d still be an essential part of the story of a man’s murder.
So she rewound the clock. How did this happen?
How did this happen? She took the job. It sounded dumb even to say it, but she was swept off her feet by Drew-not romantically, but professionally.
So if Alice was trying to figure out how all this had happened, she’d have to rewind the clock pretty far. Far enough so that when Drew Campbell first came along, she would have smiled at his generous offer and politely declined. She would have to have been in a position not to take the bait. She could have returned to her comfortable job as a teacher, or as a banker, or maybe as a wife and mother. She would not have become the proud manager of the Highline Gallery. She would not have walked into the gallery that morning to find the entire inventory missing. She would never have been forced to see those awful wounds. And she would not be sitting on a street curb, looking up at a detective and his note pad, while she could still feel the warm, sticky shadows of Drew’s blood on the palms of what her brain knew were now her cold, dry, clean hands.
“Was it usual for Mr. Campbell to be at the gallery this early in the morning by himself?”
“Um, no. I mean, nothing’s really
She watched the detective’s head nod. She fiddled with the business card he had handed her. His name was John Shannon. Had Detective Shannon known about the protests before he arrived here? Or was he just now drawing the link between this location and a news story to which he’d paid only vague attention? Was he wondering about a connection between the protesters and Drew’s murder?
She found herself wishing this were an episode of one of those hour-long crime shows she loved on television instead of her new reality.
“Alice!”
She looked in the direction of the voice to see Lily bounding from the back of a cab, all long, skinny limbs and that baby-bird blond hair. A police officer immediately stepped in front of her to block her rapid movement toward the gallery.
“That’s my friend. I called her after I called 911.”
The detective made a beckoning motion toward the younger man in the uniform as an all-clear, and Lily ran to the curb, giving Alice a quick squeeze of the shoulder before settling down beside her. The detective acknowledged her with a polite nod but nothing more before continuing his questioning.
“We didn’t find a wallet or any other possessions on the body. Was that your experience with Mr. Campbell?”
“Um, no. Well, I guess I don’t know for sure.” She tried to clear her thoughts to think rationally. “No, he carries a wallet. When I first met him, he asked me for a card, but I didn’t have any. He wrote my number down on the back of some piece of paper from his wallet. And keys. He should have keys to a gray BMW.” For the first time, she realized Drew’s car should have been parked on the street in front of the gallery when she’d found the door unlocked before her arrival.
If she’d noticed the discrepancy then, would things be different? So many thoughts she had now that she should have had an hour earlier.
She saw the detective’s gaze follow hers up and down the street. She watched the detective make notes on his pad. No BMW at the curb. No keys or wallet in Drew’s pockets.
“And you say that when you left last night, the gallery wasn’t vacant like this?”
“It definitely wasn’t vacant. It was an open, functioning gallery. There was art and a desk and a computer and furniture.”
“And I assume this art was valuable?”
She had no idea how to answer his question under the circumstances. “Our current showing featured reprints of photography with a potentially limitless run, so the price point was relatively low-seven hundred dollars for a photograph. But I had more than a hundred copies already printed and ready to ship in the stockroom. I also had, I don’t know, probably ten canvases from other artists in the back, ready to show, once we were done with Schuler’s initial run.”
She realized she would need to call the artists whose works she had acquired for showing and explain that the paintings were gone. She had trusted Drew that the gallery was insured, but now had no idea whether she’d be able to make it up to the artists.
She watched as the detective scribbled more notes in his pad. She imagined the gears of his mind at work, churning through the possibilities. Religious protesters looking for vengeance? Art heist?
“What else can you tell me about the deceased?”
She had no idea what he meant. “I’m not sure what you mean.”
“Date of birth? Family? Friends? Without his wallet, we don’t even have an address for him.”
She shrugged. “I don’t know. I met him at a gallery a few weeks ago, and he hired me to manage this place.”
“So he’s the owner.”
“No, he was an intermediary.” She explained the backstory of Drew’s anonymous business contact, motivated by his relationship with the elusive Hans Schuler, and noticed the detective’s pen moving furiously in his notebook. He may as well have said it: rich, spoiled perverts.
“And you have no idea who the owner of the gallery is, or how to reach this man, Hans Schuler, other than through his Web site?”
“I’ve texted with Schuler and can give you that number, but that’s all I’ve got. I’m sorry.” Why was she apologizing?
“The place is pretty cleared out, as you know, but we did find a few of these on a shelf in one of your back storage closets.” He held up a clear plastic bag filled with the personalized thumb drives that served as freebies with every Schuler purchase. “Are they yours?”
“Not
