Diary

And Angel takes a felt-tipped pen from his camera bag and gives it to her, saying, “Here.” He points at the wall and says, “Right there, draw me a circle with a four-inch diameter.”

With the pen, without even looking, Misty draws him a circle.

And Angel sets the straight edge of the protractor, the edge marked in inches, against the circle. And it’s four inches. He says, “Draw me a thirty-seven-degree angle.”

Slash, slash, and Misty marks two intersecting lines on the wall.

He sets on the protractor and it’s exactly thirty-seven degrees.

He asks for an eight-inch circle. A six-inch line. A seventy-degree angle. A perfect S curve. An equilateral triangle. A square. And Misty sketches them all in an instant.

According to the straightedge, the protractor, the compass, they’re all perfect.

“Do you see what I mean?” he says. He pokes the point of his compass in her face and says, “Something’s wrong. First it was wrong with Peter, and now it’s wrong with you.”

Just for the record, it seems Angel Delaporte liked her loads better when she was just the fat fucking slob. A maid at the Waytansea Hotel. A sidekick he could lecture about Stanislavski or graphology. First she’s Peter’s student. Then Angel’s.

Misty says, “The only thing I see is how you can’t deal with my maybe having this incredible natural gift.”

And Angel jumps, startled. He looks up, eyebrows arched with surprise.

As if some dead body just spoke.

He says, “Misty Wilmot, would you just listen to yourself?”

Angel shakes his compass point at her and says, “This isn’t just talent.” He points his finger at the perfect circles and angles doodled on the wall and says, “The police need to see this.”

Stuffing the paintings and sketches back in her portfolio, Misty says, “How come?” Zippering it shut, she says, “So they can arrest me for being too good an artist ?”

Angel takes his camera out and cranks to the next frame of film. He snaps a flash attachment to the top. Watching her through the viewfinder, he says, “We need more proof.” He says, “Draw me a hexagon. Draw me a pentagram. Draw me a perfect spiral.”

And with the felt-tipped pen, Misty does one, then the next. The only time her hands don’t shake is when she draws or paints.

On the wall in front of her, Peter’s scrawled: “. . . we will destroy you with your own neediness and greed . . .”

You scrawled.

The hexagon. The pentagram. The perfect spiral. Angel snaps a picture of each.

With the flash blinding them, they don’t see the homeowner stick her head through the hole. She looks at Angel standing there, snapping photos. Misty, drawing on the wall. And the homeowner clutches her own head in both hands and says, “What the hell are you doing? Stop!” She says, “Has this become an ongoing art project for you people?”

July 24

JUST SO YOU KNOW, Detective Stilton phoned Misty today. He wants to pay Peter a little visit.

He wants to pay you a little visit.

On the phone, he says, “When did your father-in-law die?”

The floor around Misty, the bed, her whole room, it’s cluttered with wet balls of watercolor paper. The crumpled wads of azure blue and Winsor green, they fill the brown shopping bag she brought her art supplies home in. Her graphite pencils, her colored pencils, her oils and acrylics and gouache watercolors, she’s wasted them all to make trash. Her greasy oil pastels and chalky soft pastels, they’re worn down to just nubs so small you can’t hold them anymore. Her paper’s almost gone.

What they don’t teach you in art school is how to hold a telephone conversation and still paint. Holding the phone in one hand and a brush in her other, Misty says, “Peter’s dad? Fourteen years ago, right?”

Smearing the paints with the side of her hand, blending with the pad of her thumb, Misty’s as bad as Goya, setting herself up for lead encephalopathy. Deafness. Depression. Topical poisoning.

Detective Stilton, he says, “There’s no record that Harrow Wilmot ever died.”

To give her brush a sharp point, Misty twists it in her mouth. Misty says, “We scattered his ashes.” She says, “It was a heart attack. Maybe a brain tumor.” Against her tongue, the paint tastes sour. The color feels gritty between her back teeth.

And Detective Stilton says, “There’s no death certificate.”

Misty says, “Maybe they faked his death.” She’s all out of guesses. Grace Wilmot and Dr. Touchet, this whole island is about image control.

And Stilton says, “Who do you mean, they ?”

The Nazis. The Klan.

With a number 12 camel-hair sky brush, she’s putting a perfect wash of blue above the trees on a perfect jagged horizon of perfect mountains. With a number 2 sable brush, she’s putting sunlight on the top of each perfect wave. Perfect curves and straight lines and exact angles, so fuck Angel Delaporte.

Just for the record, on paper, the weather is what Misty says it will be. Perfect.

Just for the record, Detective Stilton says, “Why do you think your father-in-law would fake his death?”

Misty says she’s just joking. Of course Harry Wilmot’s dead.

With a number 4 squirrel brush, she’s dabbing shadows into the forest. Days she’s wasted locked up here in this room, and nothing she’s done is half as good as the sketch of a chair she did while shitting her pants. Out on Waytansea Point. Being menaced by a hallucination. With her eyes shut, food-poisoned.

That only sketch, she’s sold it for a lousy fifty bucks.

On the phone, Detective Stilton says, “Are you still there?”

Misty says, “Define there .”

She says, “Go. See Peter.” She’s putting perfect flowers in a perfect meadow with a number 2 nylon brush. Where Tabbi is, Misty doesn’t know. If Misty’s supposed to be at work right now, she doesn’t care. The only fact she’s sure about is she’s working. Her head doesn’t hurt. Her hands don’t shake.

“The problem is,” Stilton says, “the hospital wants you to be present when I see your husband.”

And Misty says she can’t. She has to paint. She has a thirteen-year-old kid to raise. She’s on the second week of a migraine headache. With a number 4 sable brush, she’s wiping a band of gray-white across the meadow. Paving over the grass. She’s excavating a pit. Sinking in a foundation.

On the paper in front of her, the paintbrush kills trees and hauls them away. With brown paint, Misty cuts into the slope of the meadow. Misty regrades. The brush plows under the grass. The flowers are gone. White stone walls rise out of the pit. Windows open in the walls. A tower goes up. A dome swells over the center of the building. Stairs run down from the doorways. A railing runs along the terraces. Another tower shoots up. Another wing spreads out to cover more of the meadow and push the forest back.

It’s Xanadu. San Simeon. Biltmore. Mar a Lago. It’s what people with money build to be protected and alone. The places people think will make them happy. This new building is just the naked soul of a rich person. It’s the alternate heaven for people too rich to get into the real thing.

You can paint anything because the only thing you ever reveal is yourself.

And on the phone, a voice says, “Can we say three o’clock tomorrow, Mrs. Wilmot?”

Statues appear along the perfect roofline of one wing. A pool opens in one perfect terrace. The meadow is almost gone as a new flight of steps runs down to the edge of the perfect woods.

Everything is a self-portrait.

Everything is a diary.

And the voice on the phone says, “Mrs. Wilmot?”

Vines scramble up the walls. Chimneys sprout from the slates on the roof.

And the voice on the phone says, “Misty?” The voice says, “Did you ever request the medical examiner’s