records for your husband’s suicide attempt?” Detective Stilton says, “Do you know where your husband might have gotten sleeping pills?”
Just for the record, the problem with art school is that it can teach you technique and craft, but it can’t give you talent. You can’t buy inspiration. You can’t reason your way to an epiphany. Develop a formula. A road map to enlightenment.
“Your husband’s blood,” Stilton says, “was loaded with sodium phenobarbital.”
And there’s no evidence of drugs at the scene, he says. No pill bottle or water. No record of Peter ever having a prescription.
Still painting, Misty asks where this is going.
And Stilton says, “You might think about who’d want to kill him.”
“Only me,” Misty says. Then she wishes she hadn’t.
The picture is finished, perfect, beautiful. It’s no place Misty’s ever seen. Where it came from, she has no idea. Then, with a number 12 cat’s-tongue brush full of ivory black, she wipes out everything in sight.
ALL THE HOUSES along Gum Street and Larch Street, they look so grand the first time you see them. All of them three or four stories tall with white columns, they all date from the last economic boom, eighty years ago. A century. House after house, they sit back among branching trees as big as green storm clouds, walnuts and oaks. They line Cedar Street, facing each other across rolled lawns. The first time you see them, they look so rich.
“Temple fronts,” Harrow Wilmot told Misty. Starting in about 1798, Americans built simple but massive Greek Revival facades. By 1824, he says, when William Strickland designed the Second Bank of the United States in Philadelphia, there was no going back. After that, houses large and small had to have a row of fluted columns and a looming pediment roof across the front.
People called them “end houses” because all this fancy detail was confined to one end. The rest of the house was plain.
That could describe almost any house on the island. All facade. Your first impression.
From the Capitol building in Washington, D.C., to the smallest cottage, what architects called “the Greek cancer” was everywhere.
“For architecture,” Harrow said, “it was the end of progress and the beginning of recycling.” He met Misty and Peter at the bus station in Long Beach and drove them down to the ferry.
The island houses, they’re all so grand until you see how the paint’s peeled and heaping around the base of each column. On the roof, the flashing is rusted and hangs off the edge in bent red strips. Brown cardboard patches windows where the glass is gone.
Shirtsleeves to shirtsleeves in three generations.
No investment is yours forever. Harry Wilmot told her that. The money was already running out.
“One generation makes the money,” Harrow told her once. “The next generation protects the money. The third runs out of it. People always forget what it takes to build a family fortune.”
Peter’s scrawled words: “. . . your blood is our gold . . .”
Just for the record, while Misty drives to meet Detective Stilton, the whole three-hour drive to Peter’s warehousing facility, she puts together everything she can remember about Harrow Wilmot.
The first time Misty saw Waytansea Island was while visiting with Peter, when his father drove them around in the old family Buick. All the cars in Waytansea were old, clean and polished, but their seats were patched with clear strapping tape so the stuffing stayed inside. The padded dashboard was cracked from too much sun. The chrome trim and the bumpers were spotted and pimpled with rust from the salt air. The paint colors were dull under a thin layer of white oxide.
Harrow had thick white hair combed into a crown over his forehead. His eyes were blue or gray. His teeth were more yellow than white. His chin and nose, sharp and jutting out. The rest of him, skinny, pale. Plain. You could smell his breath. An old island house with his own rotting interior.
“This car’s ten years old,” he said. “That’s a lifetime for a car at the shore.” He drove them down to the ferry and they waited at the dock, looking across the water at the dark green of the island. Peter and Misty, they were out of school for the summer, looking for jobs, dreaming of living in a city, any city. They’d talked about dropping out and moving to New York or Los Angeles. Waiting for the ferry, they said they might study art in Chicago or Seattle. Someplace they could each start a career. Misty remembers she had to slam her car door three times before it would stay shut.
This was the car where Peter tried to kill himself.
The car you tried to kill yourself in. Where you took those sleeping pills.
The same car she’s driving now.
Stenciled down the side now, the bright yellow words say, “Bonner & Mills—When You’re Ready to Stop Starting Over.”
What you don’t understand you can make mean anything.
On the ferry that first day, Misty sat in the car while Harrow and Peter stood at the railing.
Harrow leaned close to Peter and said, “Are you sure she’s the one?”
Leaned close to you. Father and son.
And Peter said, “I’ve seen her paintings. She’s the real deal . . .”
Harrow raised his eyebrows, his corrugator muscle gathering the skin of his forehead into long wrinkles, and he said, “You know what this means.”
And Peter smiled, but only by lifting his levator labii, his sneer muscle, and he said, “Yeah, sure.
And his father nodded. He said, “That means we’ll be rebuilding the hotel finally.”
Misty’s hippie mom, she used to say it’s the American dream to be so rich you can escape from everyone. Look at Howard Hughes in his penthouse. William Randolph Hearst in San Simeon. Look at Biltmore. All those lush country homes where rich folks exile themselves. Those homemade Edens where we retreat. When that breaks down, and it always does, the dreamer returns to the world.
“Scratch any fortune,” Misty’s mom used to say, “and you’ll find blood only a generation or two back.” Saying this was supposed to make their trailer lifestyle better.
Child labor in mines or mills, she’d say. Slavery. Drugs. Stock swindles. Wasting nature with clear-cuts, pollution, harvesting to extinction. Monopolies. Disease. War. Every fortune comes out of something unpleasant.
Despite her mom, Misty thought her whole future was ahead of her.
At the coma center, Misty parks for a minute, looking up at the third row of windows. Peter’s window.
Your window.
These days, Misty’s clutching the edge of everything she walks past, doorframes, countertops, tables, chair backs. To steady herself. Misty can’t carry her head more than halfway off her chest. Anytime she leaves her room, she has to wear sunglasses because the light hurts so much. Her clothes hang loose, billowing as if there’s nothing inside. Her hair . . . there’s more of it in the brush than her scalp. Any of her belts can wrap twice around her new waist.
Spanish soap opera skinny.
Her eyes shrunken and bloodshot in the rearview mirror, Misty could be Paganini’s dead body.
Before she gets out of the car, Misty takes another green algae pill, and her headache spikes when she swallows it with a can of beer.
Just inside the glass lobby doors, Detective Stilton waits, watching her cross the parking lot. Her hand clutching every car for balance.
While Misty climbs the front steps, one hand grips the rail and pulls her forward.
Detective Stilton holds the door open for her, saying, “You don’t look so hot.”
It’s the headache, Misty tells him. It could be her paints. Cadmium red. Titanium white. Some oil paints are loaded with lead or copper or iron oxide. It doesn’t help that most artists will twist the brush in their mouth to make a finer point. In art school, they’re always warning you about Vincent van Gogh and Toulouse-Lautrec. All those
