It was no big deal. After a little cry, Misty never called her mom again.
Already Waytansea Island felt more like home than the trailer ever had.
The hotel fire alarm keeps ringing, and through the door someone says, “Misty? Misty Marie?” There's a knock. It's a man's voice.
And Misty says, Yes?
The alarm is loud with the door opening, then quiet. A man says, “Christ, it stinks in here!” And it's Angel Delaporte come to her rescue.
Just for the record, the weather today is frantic, panicked, and slightly rushed with Angel pulling the tape off her face. He takes the paintbrush out of her hand. Angel slaps her one time, hard on each cheek, and says, “Wake up. We don't have much time.”
Angel Delaporte slaps her the way you'd slap a bimbo on Spanish television. Misty all skin and bones.
The hotel fire alarm just keeps ringing and ringing.
Squinting against the sunlight from her one tiny window, Misty says, Stop. Misty says he doesn't understand. She has to paint. It's all she has left.
The picture in front of her is a square of sky, smudged blue and white, nothing complete, but it fills the whole sheet of paper. Stacked against the wall near the doorway are other pictures, their faces to the wall. A number penciled on the back of each. Ninety-seven on one. Ninety-eight. Another is ninety-nine.
The alarm just ringing and ringing.
“Misty,” Angel says. “Whatever this little experiment is, you are done.” He goes to her closet and gets out a bathrobe and sandals. He comes back and sticks each of her feet in one, saying, “It's going to take about two minutes for people to find out this is a false alarm.”
Angel slips a hand under each of her arms and heaves Misty to her feet. He makes a fist and knocks it against her cast, saying, “What is this all about?”
Misty asks, What is he here for?
“That pill you gave me,” Angel says, “it gave me the worst migraine of my life.” He's throwing the bathrobe over her shoulders and says, “I had a chemist analyze it.” Dropping each of her tired arms into a bathrobe sleeve, he says, “I don't know what kind of doctor you have, but those capsules contain powdered lead with trace amounts of arsenic and mercury.”
The toxic parts of oil paints: Vandyke red, ferrocyanide; iodine scarlet, mercuric iodide; flake white, lead carbonate; cobalt violet, arsenic—all those beautiful compounds and pigments that artists treasure but turn out to be deadly. How your dream to create a masterpiece will drive you nuts and then kill you.
Her, Misty Marie Wilmot, the poisoned drug addict possessed by the devil, Carl Jung, and Stanislavski, painting perfect curves and angles.
Misty says he doesn't understand. Misty says, Tabbi, her daughter. Tabbi's dead.
And Angel stops. His eyebrows up in surprise, he says, “How?”
A few days ago, or weeks. Misty doesn't know. Tabbi drowned.
“Are you sure?” he says. “It wasn't in the newspaper.”
Just for the record, Misty's not sure of anything.
Angel says, “I smell urine.”
It's her catheter. It's pulled out. They're leaving a trail of pee from her easel, out the room, and down the hallway carpet. Pee, and her cast dragging.
“My bet,” Angel says, “is you don't even need that leg in a cast.” He says, “You know that chair in the picture you sold me?”
Misty says, “Tell me.”
His arms around her, he's dragging Misty through a door, into the stairwell. “That chair was made by the cabinetmaker Hershel Burke in 1879,” he says, “and shipped to Waytansea Island for the Burton family.”
Her cast thuds on every step. Her ribs hurt from Angel's fingers holding too tight, rooting and digging under her arms, and Misty tells him, “A police detective.” Misty says, “He said some ecology club is burning down all those houses Peter wrote inside.”
“Burned,” Angel says. “Mine included. They're all gone.”
The Ocean Alliance for Freedom. OAFF for short.
Angel's hands still in their leather driving gloves, he drags her down another flight of stairs, saying, “You know this means something paranormal is happening, don't you?”
First, Angel Delaporte says, it's impossible she could draw so well. Now it's some evil spirit just using her as a human Etch A Sketch. She's only good enough to be some demonic drafting tool.
Misty says, “I thought you'd say that.”
Oh, Misty, she knows what's happening.
Misty says, “Stop.” She says, “Just why are you here?”
Why since the start of all this has he been her friend? What is it that keeps Angel Delaporte pestering her? Until Peter wrecked his kitchen, until Misty rented him her house, they were strangers. Now he's pulling fire alarms and dragging her down a stairway. Her with a dead kid and a comatose husband.
Her shoulders twist. Her elbows jerk up, hitting him around the face, smack in his missing eyebrows. To make him drop her. To make him leave her alone. Misty says, “Just stop.”
There on the stairs, the fire alarm stops. It's quiet. Only her ears still ring.
You can hear voices from the hallway on each floor. A voice from the attic says, “Misty's gone. She's not in her room.”
It's Dr. Touchet.
Before they go another step, Misty waves her fists at Angel. Misty whispers, “Tell me.” Collapsed on the stairs, she whispers, “Why are you fucking with me?”
August 21 . . .
and One-Half
ALL THE THINGS Misty loved about Peter, Angel loved them first. In art school, it was Angel and Peter, until Misty came along. They'd planned out their whole future. Not as artists, but as actors. It didn't matter if they made money, Peter had told him. Told Angel Delaporte. Someone in Peter's generation would marry a woman who'd make the Wilmot family and his whole community wealthy enough that none
