adventures, but three generations later the island would be poor again. Poor and crowded with rich outsiders.
Art school doesn’t teach you how to escape your soul being recycled.
Period revival. Her own homemade immortality.
“In fact,” Harrow said, “the diary you’re keeping right now, Tabbi’s great-great-grandchildren will find it extremely useful in dealing with you the next time around.”
Misty’s own great-great-great-grandchildren.
Using her book. This book.
“Oh, I remember,” Grace said. “When I was a very little girl. You were Constance Burton, and I used to love it when you’d take me kite flying.”
Harrow said, “Under one name or another, you’re the mother of us all.”
Grace said, “You’ve
To Harrow, Misty said, Please. Just tell me what’s going to happen. Will the paintings explode? Will the hotel collapse into the ocean? What? How does she save everyone?
And Grace shook her pearl bracelet down around her hand and said, “You can’t.”
Most fortunes, Harrow says, are founded on the suffering and death of thousands of people or animals. Harvesting something. He gives Grace something shining gold and holds out one hand, his jacket sleeve pulled back.
And Grace holds the two ends of his cuff together and inserts a cuff link, saying, “We’ve just found a way to harvest rich people.”
THE AMBULANCES are already waiting outside the Waytansea Hotel. The television news crew hoists a broadcast dish from the top of its van. Two police cars are nosed up to the hotel front steps.
Summer people edge between the parked cars. Leather pants and little black dresses. Dark glasses and silk shirts. Gold jewelry. Above them, the corporate signs and logos.
Peter’s graffiti: “. . . your blood is our gold . . .”
Between Misty and the crowd, a newscaster stands on camera. With the crowd milling behind him, the people climbing the hotel steps and entering the lobby, the newscaster says, “Are we on?” He puts two fingers of one hand to his ear. Not looking into the camera, he says, “I’m ready.”
Detective Stilton sits behind the wheel of his car, Misty beside him. Both of them watch Grace and Harrow Wilmot climb the front steps, Grace lifting her long dress with the fingertips of one hand. Harrow holds her other hand.
Misty watches them. The cameras watch them.
And Detective Stilton says, “They won’t try anything. Not with this kind of exposure.”
The oldest generation of every family, the Burtons and Hylands and Petersens, the aristocracy of Waytansea Island, they fall in line with the summer crowds entering the hotel, their chins held high.
Peter’s warning: “. . . we will kill every one of God’s children to save our own.”
The newscaster on camera, he lifts a microphone to his mouth and says, “Police and county officials have given a green light to tonight’s reception on the island.”
The crowd disappears into the dim green velvet landscape of the lobby, the forest clearing among polished, varnished tree trunks. The thick shafts of sunlight stabbing into the gloom, heavy as crystal chandeliers. The humped sofa shapes of boulders covered in moss. The campfire, so much like a fireplace.
Detective Stilton says, “You want to go in?”
Misty tells him no. It’s not safe. She’s not making the same mistake she’s always made. Whatever that mistake would be.
According to Harrow Wilmot.
The newscaster says, “Everyone who’s anyone is arriving here tonight.”
And there, then there’s a girl. A stranger. Someone else’s child with short dark hair, climbing the steps to the hotel lobby. The flash of her peridot ring. Misty’s tip money.
It’s Tabbi. Of course it’s Tabbi. Misty’s gift to the future. Peter’s way to keep his wife on the island. The bait to get her into a trap. A moment, a green flash, and Tabbi’s gone inside the hotel.
TODAY IN THE DARKNESS of the dim forest clearing, the green velvet landscape inside the lobby doors, the hotel’s fire alarm goes off. One long ringing bell, it comes out the front doors so loud the newscaster has to shout, “Well, this sounds like trouble.”
The summer people, the men, their hair all combed back, dark and wiry with some styling product. The women all blond. They shout to be heard over the alarm’s din.
Misty Wilmot, the greatest artist throughout history, she’s grabbing her way through the crowd, clawing and pulling herself toward the stage in the Wood and Gold Dining Room. Clutching at the elbows and hipbones of these skinny people. The whole wall behind the stage draped and ready for the unveiling. The mural, her work still hidden. Sealed. Her gift to the future. Her time bomb.
Her million smears of paint put together the right way. The urine of cows eating mango leaves. The ink sacs from cuttlefish. All that chemistry and biology.
Her kid somewhere in this mob of people. Tabbi.
The alarm ringing and ringing, Misty steps up on a chair. She steps up on a table, table six where Tabbi was laid out dead, where Misty found out about Angel Delaporte being stabbed to death. Standing above the crowd in her white dress, people looking up, summer men grinning up at her, Misty’s not wearing any underwear.
Her born-again wedding dress tucked between her bony thighs, Misty shouts, “Fire!”
Heads turn. Eyes look up at her. In the dining room doorway, Detective Stilton appears and starts swimming through the crowd.
Misty shouts, “Get out! Save yourselves!” Misty shouts, “If you stay here, something terrible will happen!”
Peter’s warnings. Misty sprays them out above the crowd.
“We will kill every one of God’s children to save our own.”
The curtain looming behind her, covering the whole wall, her own self-portrait, what Misty doesn’t know about herself. What she doesn’t want to know.
The summer people look up, their corrugator muscles contracted, their eyebrows pulled together. Their lips pulled thin and down by triangularis muscle.
The fire alarm stops ringing, and for as long as it takes to draw the next breath, all you can hear is the ocean outside, each wave hiss and burst.
Misty is shouting for everybody to shut up. Everybody, just listen. Shouting, she knows what she’s talking about. She’s the greatest artist of all time. The reincarnation of Thomas Gainsborough and Claude Monet and Mary Cassatt. She shouts how her soul has been Michelangelo and da Vinci and Rembrandt.
Then a woman shouts, “It’s her, the artist. It’s Misty Wilmot.”
And a man shouts, “Misty honey, enough with the drama.”
The woman shouts, “Pull down the curtain, and let’s get this over with.”
The man and woman shouting, they’re Harrow and Grace. Between them, they each hold Tabbi by one hand. Tabbi, her eyes are taped shut.
“Those people,” Misty shouts, pointing at Grace and Harrow. Her hair hanging in her face, Misty shouts, “Those evil people, they used their son to get me pregnant!”
Misty shouts, “They’re holding my kid!”
She shouts, “If you see what’s behind this curtain, it will be too late!”
And Detective Stilton gets to the chair. One step, and he’s up. Another step, and he’s beside her on table six. The huge curtain hanging behind them. The truth about everything just inches away.
“Yes,” another woman shouts. An old island Tupper, her sea turtle neck sagging into the lace collar of her dress, she shouts, “Show us, Misty!”
