Around midmorning the next day, when he could finally open his eyes without squinting, he pulled himself back onto the mattress. His head was a soupy mess of leftover aches and twinges, punctuated by the occasional sharp stab behind his left eye. He propped himself up on a pile of pillows recognizing the irony, he was Bayber’s doppelgänger in such a position, and sat frozen, breathing as shallowly as he could in deference to the still-lurking migraine. After a period of perfect stillness, the static in his brain gave way to a more tolerable white noise. His thoughts slowly flocked back to him and resettled, nesting out of order.
Without turning his head, he reached over and pulled a pencil and sketch pad from the top drawer of the bedside table. There was something soothing in the rhythmic placement of graphite lines, and before he knew it he had sketched a cartoonish version of the painting that haunted him, the Kessler sisters sitting on the sofa with a wolfish Bayber insinuated between them. He flipped to a new page and this time drew only the hands and forearms he had seen in the hidden layer of the painting, those belonging to Alice and to the woman he imagined was the other Alice, the older Alice, their digits companionably intertwined. Then he did the same for Natalie.
From the angles of their forearms, it was easy enough to imagine how the older Alice and Natalie might be positioned in their respective panels. He was sure enough of their presence, certain he’d gotten that much right, but it was the only part he could envision: a vertical slice of an Alice and another of a Natalie, the visible musculature in their arms suggesting they were pulling their younger selves toward the future. But he had no idea if Bayber had overpainted sections of the missing panels as well, and if he had, why? Had the triptych, when finished, disappointed him? Stephen thought of the man lying in bed, the stunning ferocity of his grip. Disappointment in the work seemed an unlikely reason.
Stephen sat up, looking at the walls of his bedroom, covered with reproductions of Bayber’s cataloged works and with the photographs he’d taken of the painting, close-ups and distance shots. Looking at all of it in such close proximity, he could easily see that nothing else Bayber had done was as captivating as Kessler Sisters. When he lay back on the bed again, myriad figures swam around him, but he had eyes only for the girls on the sofa and for Bayber, the trio surrounding him from all angles until he was inside the painting with them, the breeze that rifled the curtains pricked his flesh, the toasted green of summer at its zenith filled his nose. What of it was real?
He got out of bed and picked up the backpack he’d tossed in the corner, looking for his camera. He reviewed the shots he’d taken of the sketch at the Edells’, pleased to see he’d remembered most of the details correctly. The color pencil sketch was easily placed at the beginning of Bayber’s career and was consistent with the date, 1963, before his style had completely developed. There they were, the uncomfortable Kesslers sitting on that same sofa, the husband and wife in the center, Alice with her wild mane of blond hair, next to her father on the left; Natalie on the right, her eyes cast down. The background was rough, but Stephen recognized things he and Finch had seen at the cabin: the grandfather clock, the stacks of atlases, the rugs.
Then there was the cage. Three appearances: in the Doughty study, in the oil, and in all of its decrepit physical glory, sitting on the bedside table at the cabin. Stephen looked at the photos pasted on the walls in front of him, on the ceiling above him. Only in the panel of the triptych was the door to the cage slightly ajar, as if something precious had flown away.
He stumbled into the kitchen and made a bowl of instant oatmeal, drowning the dusty particles of oats with milk on the edge of turning before spooning the watery porridge into his mouth with a ladle, the only clean utensil he could find. What was he overlooking? He turned to a clean page in the sketch pad and scribbled notes in his usual shorthand. Where had the Kessler sisters gone, and why had they left in such a hurry? After thirty-five years, why had the house never been sold? And the bird. Although Finch had convinced him this last was of little consequence as far as finding the paintings, Stephen’s instincts hummed the moment he’d seen the empty cage. Everything means something to someone, his father had often told him, hoping to entice Stephen to discover what an artist was trying to convey. So, the bird. He outlined the letters heavily in ink.
His unappealing breakfast dispensed with, he set the bowl and ladle in the sink to join the week’s worth of dishes gathered there and went back to the bedroom to retrieve his laptop. He sat down at the kitchen table and swept his arm across the face of it, sending every bit of paper and crumb to the floor.
He focused on a speck on the opposite wall, determined to approach the problem from a different angle. It all revolved around the girls. Everything went back to them. He pulled up the searches he’d saved shortly after Cranston tasked them with finding the paintings. He’d checked the Social Security Death Index several weeks ago, and found neither of their names, which meant he wasn’t tracking a pair of ghosts. And the living left trails, dropped little bread crumbs of data unintentionally. He just needed to find the trailhead.
His search on Natalie Kessler had turned up little more than the most basic information. Graduated from Walker Academy, an all-girls prep school, in 1965, then from a small local liberal arts college four years later. There was no need to search the names in small print at the base of her class photo. Among the staggered rows of square-shouldered, serious-looking young women, her face stood out: a penetrating gaze, a frozen prettiness.
He added the black-and-white photo to the other images of her he carried in his head and realized he was becoming accustomed to her beauty, her unapproachability keeping him safely at arm’s length everywhere but in his dreams. That was where Natalie and Chloe became interchangeable. It would be Chloe he was in bed with; Chloe’s long, pale body stretched out next to his, the bends and folds of her as sinuous as a river cutting its course through soft earth. But at some point her skin turned to gold; her hair lightened to wheat and grew longer, curling up at the ends; her fingers dug sharply into his shoulder, fusing herself to him. And realizing suddenly she was the wrong one, he’d be ashamed of what he’d done to her, this woman he’d never met; the way he’d pressed her down, laced her hair through his fist. He would wake in a sweat, willing the women out of his head, out of his limbs, the lingering scent of them away from his nose, their taste from his mouth.
He accessed Murchison & Dunne’s Intelius account, then dug around more deeply on the Web. Nothing for either of them after 1972. But searching for images proved more fruitful, if only by one. What popped up on his screen was an old newspaper photo of a group of young people clustered together, raising glasses in the air. The caption read, “New Fairfield County College Grads Celebrate the Fourth” and the photo was dated July 5, 1969. There was Natalie, front and center, hands folded in her lap while everyone surrounding her was a pixilated blur of black and white. And standing behind her, her shoulders disappearing into his hands, a hulking young man. Stephen zoomed in on the caption to check the names. George Reston, Jr.
George Reston, Jr. had no qualms about leaving a trail. By carefully turning the dial—a different query here, some fortunate logic there—Stephen opened a vault of information, a digital portrait of George Junior almost embarrassing in its comprehensiveness: his father’s brief imprisonment for securities fraud, articles in the society pages regarding his parents’ donations in support of several arts organizations, property ownership records, including a summer house on Seneca Lake. Stephen checked the address and stunned, leaned forward in his chair, the planks of his arms stretched out on the gritty tabletop. Surely, it couldn’t be that simple. The most basic of ties and he’d been blind to it. Friendship. Why had he not considered the house next door to Bayber’s? The house rented, every August, by the Kesslers. The house owned by the Restons. That Finch had overlooked the connection as well only disheartened Stephen more. Perhaps this was what Lydia had so easily detected, their commonality: an obtuseness in regar
d to friendship.
Once he’d found the map, the trail unfolded before him. The Edells mailed their monthly rent checks to Steele and Greene. When he cross-referenced Steele and Greene with George Reston, Stephen found several entries. A brief newspaper article from 1972 detailed Constellation Investments’ launch of a newly formed subsidiary, Steele and Greene, a property management company. George Reston, Jr., age twenty-eight, had been named president and CEO.
There was a grainy, black-and-white head shot of George Junior looking annoyed and bored, his chubby, bland face sporting a topper of closely cropped curls. He had the same face as the nameless hundreds Stephen passed on the streets of the Financial District daily; the same starched collars, the healthy sheen of wealth coloring their cheeks, a purposeful stride, out to mind the business of the world. At least have the humility to smile, you prig, Stephen thought, a quick tang of envy coating his tongue. But it dissolved when he clicked on a page listing Constellation Investments’ management team and found that in 1972, a George Reston, Senior, had served on the board of directors, having previously held the position of president of the investment company. Wouldn’t Stephen’s own father have done the same for him? Hadn’t he tried?
There was no website for Steele and Greene, no telephone number. When he looked up the address Winslow Edell had provided, Stephen found it was for a postal service center in Hartford. If Steele and Greene had any physical presence, it was well-hidden. A quick check of a few real estate websites confirmed the Kessler property was zoned only for single-family residential. As far as Stephen had been able to tell, there wasn’t much acreage associated with the property; it seemed unlikely the land could be subdivided and sold for development. So why would a property management company bother with the headaches involved in renting out a single-family home in a small Connecticut town, in the middle of nowhere? He went back to the picture of the Fourth of July celebration. George’s firm grip on Natalie’s shoulders looked as if he was trying to pin her into that chair, into that particular moment. What one wouldn’t do in the name of friendship, Stephen thought. Or in the name of love.
Short of staking out the mail center in Hartford, he’d reached the end of his investigative skills. If the house still belonged to the Kesslers, and he could find no property records to indicate otherwise, then either the rent the Edells were paying was lining George Junior’s pockets or he was passing it on to Natalie. By following the money, Stephen might be able to find her. And if he could find her, quite possibly, he could find the other two panels of the triptych.
It was enough for him to have solved the puzzle. Let Finch and the others discern what the work meant. Stephen wanted only for his reputation to be restored, for there to be another painting and then another and another, each waiting for him in unattributed limbo. Wasn’t that all he cared about, the discovering and the naming? The satisfaction in being right? He was accustomed to living in a state of agitation when tracking the provenance of a piece. He was not accustomed to being haunted by one, weighed down by the gravity of its story, imagining beginnings and endings for people existing in more than two dimensions.
He shook his head, refocusing on the task at hand. Mining a warren of dead ends and false starts in an effort to follow a trail of money was not his specialty. But after staring at his laptop screen for a few minutes more, he realized there was someone who might help him. Simon Hapsend, the person whose office he had inherited at Murchison & Dunne, could likely find the answers in his sleep.
Stephen had received an e-mail message not long after Simon left the firm, typically cryptic, reading only, “In case of emergency. Memorize and delete. SH” followed by ten digits. In the two and a half years that followed there had never been occasion to use it, until now. The area code had been easy enough to remember—347—and Stephen had assigned each of the remaining seven digits to one of the letters of Simon’s last name. He picked up the phone and dialed. When he heard the beep at the end of the message, a computer-generated recording requesting he leave his name at the tone, he stumbled, blurting out, “Simon, you said in case of emergency. Well, this is an emergency. I need someone with your particular skills, your talents, shall we say, to help me locate a missing person. I need you to follow a money trail. Probably nothing illegal, although you would know better than I. Contact me as soon as possible, please. Oh, it’s Stephen. From Murchison & Dunne.” He left his contact numbers and e-mail address, and hung up the phone. He would see Finch at dinner the next night, and there was no point in calling him until he knew whether or not there was anything of value to share. So he picked up his pencil, made a list of the clothes he owned that might be appropriate for the following evening’s dinner, and waited for Simon Hapsend to call him back.
TEN
“What’d she look like, Miss Alice?”
A hundred times, by her count, she’d asked Frankie not to call her that. Miss Kessler or Alice, either would have been preferable to the title that sent a quick shiver down her back, the unattractive hiss of it combined with her name. It made her feel every one of her fifty-eight years. But Phinneaus had raised his nephew with southern manners, and try as she might, she could not dissuade him.
“You’re supposed to be studying. And that’s an extremely impolite question to ask. What would your mother say?”
Frankie had the good sense to look mortified, at least momentarily, although Alice’s mortification probably surpassed his when she realized how thoughtless it was to bring up the boy’s mother. Fortunately, Frankie seemed more concerned that a report of his ill manners would find its way back to his uncle. “You won’t tell, will you, Miss Alice? I never knew a dead person before. I didn’t mean nothin’ by it.”
She looked at the boy, his mouth pursed, waiting for some word from her, and she widened her eyes. “Miss Natalie looked the same as she always did.” She paused for effect. “Only stiffer.”
She felt awful the moment she said it, macabre and unhinged. What was wrong with her? But Frankie whistled. That was just the sort of detail he’d longed for, gruesome enough to satisfy his cohorts and generic enough to allow for embellishment.
“And it’s anything. Not nothing.”
His face crumpled with the effort of sorting out her corrections. He had the vigorous curiosity of an eight-year-old boy; an expression like one foot in the grave opened the door to a whole universe of sinister imaginings. Frankie had heard Saisee use the expression some weeks ago about an aunt who was lingering. It was clear the idea had unnerved him by the way he clung to his uncle’s side until they’d passed the long block of the cemetery on the walk home from school.
“That’s what the fence is for, isn’t it, Phinneaus?”
“This fence?” he’d asked, grabbing hold of one of the speared iron posts.
“To keep people’s feet out. So they don’t get grabbed.”
Phinneaus told all of this to Alice later, the two of them collapsing into laughter. She’d felt a flood of affection for Phinneaus, thankful for the space he’d carved out for her once Frankie had come into his life, taking pains to keep their friendship intact. Frankie wasn’t hers, she’d never thought that. There was a mother, Phinneaus’s sister, who might someday decide to claim him again. But until then a part of the boy felt tethered to her, and for that she was grateful.
“You realize this means he thinks we’re old,” Phinneaus said. “Maybe not a foot in the grave, but he’s worried there’s a toe or two there. No wonder he keeps pullin’ me to the other side of the street.”
“Are we old?” Time had flown away from her, minutes like birds, gone in a flash of wing. How odd it was, all those years spent feeling old while she’d been young. And now that she couldn’t be considered young anymore, not by anyone’s standards, she didn’t feel old. Instead, she felt like she’d finally caught up with herself and was exactly the age she was supposed to be.
Frankie bent his head over his schoolwork with an audible sigh of discontent. Alice smiled—being a monito
r was one of her better skills—and looked around the room. When had the house turned from strange to familiar? Those things that used to annoy her: the slope of the hardwood floor from front to back, the web of cracks etched into an upper window, the musty smell of turnips clinging to the walls, drifting up from a long-abandoned root cellar; those things had interlaced themselves so firmly into her consciousness, they became hers. Even the house itself was hardier than she’d initially given it credit for. Thirty-five years she had lived here, much of it spent reassuring herself she did not belong. Thirty-five years of living a half-life, like something radioactive, encased in concrete and buried away.
If she had lived only part of a life, then Natalie had taken the rest. Her sister had grown older, but railed against the process with an arsenal of creams and potions, with undergarments that realigned her soft flesh, with hair dyes and tooth whiteners and contact lenses. She kept her hair long when other women cut theirs short, smoothing it with mayonnaise. She wore her skirts well above the knee, exposing a creamy expanse of thigh, when fashion magazines trumpeted the return of the maxi skirt. When others opted for punch, Natalie asked for a second gin and tonic, and enjoyed more than one Ramos gin fizz with her friends, or with those who gave the appearance of being friendly in order to partake of the latest gossip. At least she’s drinkin’ ladies’ drinks, Saisee said, as if that redeemed Natalie, but only barely.
The Gravity of Birds: A Novel Page 18
