by T F Allen
So I decided to find someone who had even more.
When I needed to, I could travel faster than a blink. First I’d close my eyes and create a mental chain linking myself with any person or place I wanted to visit. Once I knew the chain was fully formed, I pulled, and when I opened my eyes, I was in that place or with that person. It was a scary way to travel, and I never got used to it. But it worked more reliably than anything else I’d ever tried.
I focused on the man I wanted to visit. Locked my mental chain into place. Pulled. And when I opened my eyes, I was there with him.
Day or night, Grant Thatcher’s office looked as bright as ever. The stark white walls seemed to generate their own special light, never seeing a shadow. They were a reflection of their owner, who also seemed to be on, no matter the hour or season.
Thatcher reclined in his white leather chair, a tablet propped on his belly, his long clawlike fingers working the navigation tools of whatever app he was running. He was still in his robe, but this time it looked securely tied. The retro digital clock behind him signaled it was closing on midnight. I jumped into his mind before I wasted any more time.
Like Donnie, Thatcher was a man who could focus on many things at once. Though he stared at the screen on his tablet, his mind spun in several directions. His browser held seven tabs open as he flipped from one to another.
Paintings. He was looking at paintings from top students at the best art schools in the country: Yale, Columbia, UCLA, even the Art Institute of Chicago. It didn’t take a detective to know what he was up to. But I stayed quiet inside his mind to be sure.
He tapped on a thumbnail and expanded the picture to full screen. It showed a painting an artist at Yale had created by mixing different acids on a sheet of copper. Dozens of bright colors exploded on his screen, their shapes resembling a space nebula. Thatcher was impressed. He tapped on the artist’s contact information and jotted it onto a legal pad he kept on his desk.
When it came to identifying the Next Big Thing that could take the art world by storm, he knew he had a gift. Trends could start, peak, and become passé all within the span of a dinner party. He’d seen it a hundred times. Artists with hot new ideas and gimmicky techniques could draw huge audiences for a short time, but without a solid foundation of natural-born talent, most collectors would end up regretting their purchases. And that was bad for business. He could mark up the paintings he acquired because his opinion of the artist and the work mattered. His customers trusted him when he quoted a painting’s value. They’d even buy pieces he suggested to them sight unseen—all because he was the dealer who’d discovered Michael Delacroix.
He remembered the first time he met the thin young artist. According to Michael’s online bio at the time, a professor had found Michael in Golden Gate Park participating in a community project run by the Art Institute aimed at engaging the homeless youth in the city. The painting he created was breathtaking, featuring a kaleidoscope of colors that wound themselves into the viewer’s heart. The school recruited him by offering a full scholarship, a residence, and a studio. Soon he was creating paintings that made his instructors jealous.
Thatcher signed him to an exclusive contract during a lunch of raw oysters and caviar. The papers granted him the option to buy any painting Michael created. Seven years later, his Delacroix collection was valued at over ninety million dollars. And the money from the paintings he’d sold funded the rest of his dealer empire.
I didn’t hate Thatcher for jumping on Michael’s bandwagon so quickly. He’d practically built the bandwagon all by himself. But he didn’t understand what made Michael special. He never experienced the how and why of any painting Michael created. He only saw the reaction of art critics and collectors who couldn’t get enough. And it all started with Jolene.
Thatcher shook his head, thinking how distraught Michael had become over the disappearance of a fellow art student at SFAI named Jolene Anderson. A year later, when the police finally admitted defeat and her case was filed away, Michael fell into a deep depression and locked himself inside his studio for weeks. Only when Thatcher forced his way in with a crowbar did he realize how deeply her disappearance had affected the young artist.
Michael hadn’t eaten in days. He hadn’t shaved, hadn’t brushed his teeth, hadn’t done a hundred other things a healthy person would have done. Tubes of expensive oil paint lay scattered around his studio, their insides either piled in a mound or smeared in a line of trajectory from where Michael had stomped on the tube. His brushes were broken into pieces and arranged like campfire kindling in one corner of the room. An open bottle of Liquin lay on its side in a pool of itself, filling the studio with its raw, acidic odor. His easel was knocked flat on the ground, lying at the base of a column of sunlight coming from the only set of windows he hadn’t blacked out. Amazingly, it still held a painting, but the frame was twisted and bent. It looked like a victim of a domestic assault. Thatcher remembered his first glimpse of the image on that canvas, how the beautiful-yet-forgettable female figure suffered new angry marks from her creator, marks that somehow made her look anything but ordinary.
Jolene became the rage of the art world a week later when Thatcher unveiled it during a dinner party hosted by a powerful Hollywood producer. After that night, Michael couldn’t paint fast enough for Thatcher. And now, after the stunt he pulled in Chicago, collectors were climbing over each other for the chance to buy an original Delacroix. Even if Michael painted nonstop for the rest of his life, he’d never outpace the demand for his work.
I lowered my voice to a whisper, hoping Thatcher would mistake it as his own: Maybe I should check on him. Make sure he’s painting.
Unlike Donnie, Thatcher didn’t bat an eye. My whisper didn’t sound exactly like his internal voice, but it was close, and it sounded a fear I knew Thatcher held deep inside. Michael was notoriously lazy. He didn’t care how much money his paintings sold for or how many art critics tweeted his praises. In those early days, Thatcher would visit Michael in his studio each afternoon to make sure he’d made progress. After Chicago, Thatcher might need to check on Michael more often. Maybe in a few days he would, but not tonight. Tiff was waiting for him in the hot tub. And she was on her second bottle of wine.
But time is money, now more than ever. I need to check on him.
Michael never answered his phone. His studio apartment was a twenty-minute drive. And it was almost midnight. Nope, it could wait.
But what if something happened? What if he’s in trouble?
Thatcher sat up straight in his seat. His tablet tumbled to the floor. He laughed. Sometimes he had the craziest thoughts. Nothing would ever happen to Michael. His rags-to-riches story proved he was living a charmed life, no matter how many times he tried to ruin it.
He bent over and picked up his tablet. Not a scratch.
Tiff appeared in the doorway, holding an empty wine glass. Somewhere along the way, she’d lost the top half of her bikini. She drew her finger to her bottom lip. “You coming?”
“Be right there.”
Thatcher had to admit it. He was living a charmed life, too.
CHAPTER 7
When Thatcher strolled out of his office to pour Tiff another glass of wine, I stayed behind, staring at Michael’s incredible paintings and wondering what I’d done wrong.
I needed to try someone closer to Michael, someone who’d care enough to try to find him. That was a very short list. He didn’t have any real friends, and acquaintances only liked him for what he could do for them. He also never had any girlfriends, which wasn’t surprising. Michael’s whole life had been shaped by the relationships he’d almost had with women.
First there was his mother—or rather, there wasn’t. Neither of us had any memory of her. Any hope of tracking her down through forensics or interviews with the sisters of Saint Bartholomew’s had died long ago. The only things other than Michael that she left behind were unanswered questions, including the only one that really mattered. Everyon
e—including me—needs to know where they come from, who their family is. This basic question gnawed at his heart like a festering wound. I could never soothe that kind of pain. We would never know what chain of events had led to the night someone tossed him into that dumpster behind the cathedral, and not knowing was the daily fuel that fed Michael’s sense of unworthiness.
Many of his foster mothers were kind and well-meaning women who did their best for a young, mixed-race boy who needed a family. But he remembered just as many screamers, slappers, and drug-numbed zombies who stitched into his childhood a patchwork of scary experiences. Considering the rapidly changing conditions of his youth, it was no wonder Michael had so much trouble relating to women as an adult.
After he moved to San Francisco and joined a community of street kids, he lost his virginity one night in Golden Gate Park during a game of “Never Have I Ever.” But when the girl he’d slept with crawled into another boy’s sleeping bag an hour later, he didn’t know how to react. The casualness of it all confused him. Within a week, the girl had moved back to Idaho, and Suzie—her name and home state were the only things he knew about her—disappeared from his world forever.
The women at SFAI seemed much more formal and aloof than any he’d met before. But when Jolene Anderson strolled into his Advanced Figurative Painting classroom and set up her easel next to his, Michael was stunned speechless. Her hair was cadmium yellow, her eyes a deep Winsor blue. She was in many ways his exact opposite—pale skin, oval face, terra rosa lips he wanted to touch but never did. He could only think in paint tube colors when she was near, and he felt nervous for reasons he couldn’t understand. The nude models who stared at him while he sketched their forms didn’t affect him as much as Jolene. He saw them only as shapes and colors he transferred to his paper, while Jolene was an enigmatic creature whose every curve and shadow he wanted to memorize. Michael drew the nudes in class but saved his best work for his apartment studio, where he painted the image of the woman he loved but couldn’t speak to. He never said a word to Jolene the entire semester. On the first morning of finals week, he brought her portrait to class, setting it on his easel with shaky hands. The painting would tell her everything he wanted to say. But Jolene never showed up for finals week. She never showed up anywhere, ever again.
The only constant female presence in Michael’s life was Sister Mary Elizabeth. She’d committed herself to keeping in touch with the boy whose life she’d saved, using her natural charm along with the religious weight of her habit to track Michael’s journey from foster home to foster home. Sister Mary Elizabeth would visit each new family a few days after Michael’s arrival and talk with them, making sure the foster parents knew the special place he held in her heart—and that she’d be watching. Her warnings had saved Michael from more than one bad situation. In many ways she was as good at protecting him as I was.
Even after he left Louisiana for the steep hills of San Francisco, she continued to worry over him. While she didn’t always approve of his communication skills (he wouldn’t carry a phone even when she sent him one) or his choice of subject matter (nonreligious nudes were outside the bounds of acceptable artwork—didn’t he know this?), she remained his champion from two thousand miles away. Most people looked at Michael and saw someone who’d beaten the odds to become a famous artist, but Sister Mary Elizabeth only saw bigger dangers ahead that she needed to warn him about.
Now that those dangers had arrived, I hoped she’d be easier to convince than Thatcher. But to find out, I needed to commit a sin.
I closed my eyes. Focused, locked, and pulled.
When I opened them, I was inside the convent at Saint Bartholomew’s. In front of me stood a long unlit hallway with a Gothic arched ceiling. Twelve recessed doorways connected to the hall, each as dark as the passageway—except for the second one to my right.
No decorations hung on the walls. The dormitory was sparse, reflecting the possession-free lifestyle the sisters had chosen. Maybe it was the quiet of the hour or the darkness of the dormitory, but I felt like I was trespassing on sacred ground as I trekked down the hall.
I knew the room with the light on would be Sister Mary Elizabeth’s—actually her cell, as I heard her describe it to Michael once. Even though the twelve sisters who lived here took an active role in the community and were no strangers to the outside world, they still held to the tradition of retiring to cells with no personal possessions where they could do only two things: pray and sleep. If prayer was an option, I knew Sister Mary Elizabeth would be the last to finish hers. I passed through the door and into her room.
I found her kneeling by her bed, still dressed in her habit. It hid her gray hair and might have helped disguise her age if not for the worry wrinkles that ran across her forehead and between her eyebrows. Her lips moved as she silently prayed. Since I couldn’t read them, I dove into her head.
The energy inside her mind felt much different from Donnie Harkrider’s or Grant Thatcher’s—it glowed with a warm, inviting light. She stayed so focused on the welfare of others that her mind hadn’t suffered the bruises and scars common to the constantly self-absorbed. She was able to block out the messages coming from her body—complaints from her knees about the hardwood floor, protests from her back that she’d prayed long enough in this position, her neck and scalp begging her to take off her veil and get into bed. Instead she asked God for comfort, healing, and understanding for each person she’d met today. Clear and focused, pure and unique to a sister of Mary Elizabeth’s experience, her internal voice would be tough to copy. But I needed to try.
She was busy listing her wishes for the people she met at the grocery store this morning. The bread deliveryman, God bless him, had to start his day so early. He probably never got to see his daughter off to school, but he’d stopped to help her select the freshest loaves on the shelf. She asked a blessing for this man—Carl, she now remembered—that he’d receive extra time off to spend with his daughter.
She paused, creating a perfect silence in her head, waiting for the next person to come to mind. I saw my chance and broke into her silence with a whisper: Michael. What about Michael?
Spikes of fear prickled the base of her neck. She opened her eyes and looked at the ceiling. She checked the door—still closed. She was alone. But someone had spoken to her. Someone close enough to whisper in her ear.
I feared I’d already ruined my chances by scaring this poor woman half to death. But then I heard her try to work out the logic of it all in her head. She’d been at least an hour into her nightly prayers and in a near-meditative state. A quiet mind drew one closer to God. When she drew closer to God, she was more open to His voice and to the many saints and spirits who worked on His behalf. Matthew, Luke, and David each wrote about unseen protectors who sometimes appeared or spoke. It was the same message she shared with those she cared about most. So why wouldn’t God or one of these protectors try to speak to her while she prayed? And why did He mention Michael?
She’d almost convinced herself when doubt crept back in to make its arguments. How could she assume God or an angel had spoken to her? It was only a thought, a whisper much like her internal voice, but different in a way she couldn’t begin to describe. Hearing the voice of God—this was Old Testament territory. Mary-Mother-of-Jesus territory. And who was she compared to the Holy Mother? Maybe it was time to go to bed. Maybe her mind was overtired and skipping like a damaged record player. Several logical real-world reasons might explain how she’d heard those words in her head. But maybe there was a singular extraordinary one as well.
She closed her eyes, bowed her head, and made the sign of the cross over her chest. “Tell me. What about Michael?”
I didn’t want to scare her more than I needed to. Better she found the truth herself. Given the special place he held in her heart, I only needed to nudge Sister Mary Elizabeth into action. He needs you. Michael needs you right now.
In an instant she climbed to her feet and ran down the hall, ca
rrying her shoes in her hand. As soon as she left the dormitory, she threw down her shoes, stepped into them, and started running again, through the main hall and into a small office that had the only phone in the convent. She dialed Michael’s studio and counted the rings. She hung up when she got to twenty and redialed. After another ten rings she slammed the phone down.
What to do? She knew she’d heard the voice of God, twice warning her that the boy she’d saved as a baby desperately needed her again. But he was half a continent away, and it was the middle of the night. Michael rarely answered the phone at any hour, much less after midnight. Her doubt crept in again, and for a moment she thought about going back to her cell and finishing her prayers with a promise to check on Michael in the morning.
She stared at the blank computer screen on the desk. Despite taking vows of poverty, the sisters kept a few connections to the modern world, one of which included a website Sister Rachel managed from this tiny office. Often Sister Rachel had shown her how the internet could be helpful and encouraged her to learn the basics for herself. Anyone with a browser could learn about the good work the sisters of Saint Bart’s were doing—and more importantly, contribute to their cause. And with a few keystrokes and clicks, she could find the latest news on any topic she wished.
She turned on the computer and launched the web browser. It was a long shot, but Michael had a unique last name, and people considered him an important modern artist. If God had spoken to her, maybe something would show up. Either way, she could go to bed telling herself she’d done everything possible to find out if Michael was really in trouble.
In the search window she typed his name: Michael Delacroix. Instantly I felt the weight that name carried with her. Her mind worked to hold back the flood of emotions that came with the memory of how he’d received his last name, of what she saw early that morning when she looked into the dumpster. She needed to stay on task now. To focus not on that horrible, tragic scene but on the beautiful, talented artist Michael had become. She swept those memories aside and clicked the search button.
