And then there was the problem of what to say. He’d been counting on Finch to smooth the way with Alice. The two of them had Bayber in common, and what did he have? Nothing. Finch would have known how to start, how to ease into the conversation so that they might discover something before getting the door slammed in their faces. Although Stephen hated to admit it, while he’d found out where Alice was, Finch was the one who’d gotten them into the house.
Finch was right. He was constructing a future based on the successful outcome of this one venture. He could call each of the hotels now and ask for Alice Kessler, but if there was no guest by that name he’d be going back to New York empty-handed. Cranston would cut him loose. Stephen foresaw a move back to his mother’s house, the terse snippets of conversation, the Help Wanted section she’d slide beneath his door, her suggestions evenly highlighted in yellow marker. He groaned and rolled onto his back, staring at the moonscape of the popcorn ceiling before falling asleep in his clothes.
FIFTEEN
The next morning Stephen dragged his suitcase down the steps behind him, not caring much who he woke. Where was the damn cab? He stamped his feet on the frost-tinged asphalt trying to warm them up. After a few minutes of waiting and pacing, he walked to the front office. The clerk was nowhere to be seen, but Finch was waiting for him, holding two cups of coffee.
“I canceled your cab. I hope you don’t mind.”
Stephen couldn’t recall ever being so glad to see someone and chuffed Finch on the arm, nearly upending both cups of coffee.
“You changed your mind?”
“It would appear so.”
“But . . .”
“I had a conversation with my spiritual adviser last night. She convinced me it was the right thing to do, and that I owed you an apology. She was right, as usual. My suggesting Bayber wanted you for the job because he pitied you was inexcusable, Stephen. In all the years I’ve been acquainted with him, I’ve never known Thomas to do something out of kindness or concern for another human being. I see no reason for him to start now. I think he asked for you because you are talented and determined and, as you reminded me last night, not easily swayed by emotions.”
“You do realize this means another flight?”
“At least it’s not raining. I’ll sock in a supply of pink pills when we get to the airport.”
“Finch, I’ve narrowed it down to five hotels.”
Finch nodded. “You’re steering this boat now, Stephen. I’m just along for the ride.”
“I don’t know who your spiritual adviser is—I wouldn’t think you’d go in for that sort of thing—but I love her.” Stephen threw his bags into the backseat of the rental car.
“Get in line,” Finch said, under his breath, and Stephen saw him look to the heavens and shake his head.
* * *
They had an hour-and-a-half layover in Houston. Finch spent the time trading e-mails with Lydia, and since Stephen didn’t want to push his luck, he ignored the impulse to ask Finch if he might mention him favorably in one of his replies. On the flight to Albuquerque, he was so jumpy the flight attendant asked if he was ill. For the first time since they’d undertaken the endeavor, Stephen was less than one hundred percent sure they would succeed. If only he’d been able to communicate with Bayber. There were so many questions he wanted to ask him. Though it was illogical, Stephen still fostered the hope that finding the missing paintings would initiate Bayber’s miraculous recovery. Seeing the old man gasping for breath had been a horrible experience, one he wasn’t anxious to repeat. He longed to see all of them together in a room: Bayber, Finch, Cranston, his mother. They’d beam at him, and in unison speak one simple sentence: Your father would have been proud.
“I reserved a car for us while we were in Houston. The trip to Santa Fe is just over an hour,” Finch said as they landed. “What are our plans?”
“I made hotel reservations for us downtown. One of the five hotels on the list. I thought we could have an early dinner, turn in, and get started first thing tomorrow.”
“You don’t want to start tonight?”
Stephen didn’t answer, only rubbed his hands together, trying to rid them of peanut skin flakes and the grains of salt lodged beneath his fingernails. “What if you’re right, Finch? She could have come and gone by now.”
“Well, it’s doubtful she’ll be holding a sign with our names and waiting for us in baggage claim.” Finch thumped him on the back. “Stephen, let’s take advantage of this one night, before we have any inkling of what the outcome may be. We’ll spend a bit of Cranston’s money on good wine, sleep in comfortable beds, have a ridiculously large breakfast tomorrow morning, and then we shall see what we shall see. Agreed?”
“Agreed.”
The cars Finch rented were getting larger with each trip, which Stephen took to be a bad sign. The professor was spending Cranston’s money while it was there to be spent, and as he slid back and forth across the seat of the SUV with every curve, he was sure Finch was only humoring him.
Finch tapped the leather-wrapped steering wheel and smiled. “It’s like manning a boat. Four-wheel drive, heated seats, DVD entertainment system in the rear.”
“Should I be sitting back there?” Stephen asked.
“It’d be impossible to manage a hulk like this in the city. But out here we’re practically alone on the highway.”
“Maybe we’re just sitting up too high to see any of the other cars.”
Finch gave him a wary glance. “This would not be a good car to be sick in.” He pressed a button, and Stephen’s window opened a crack, flooding the interior with cold, sharp-scented air that tickled his nose.
“It’s the elevation I’m not used to,” Stephen said. He’d practically had to vault himself into the front seat.
“You’re right. The air is thinner.”
Stephen couldn’t remember the last time he was surrounded by so much open space. The sun was a purpled orange disk, its lower third sliced off with scalpel-like precision by the table of a mesa, the rest of it backed by clouds in sherbet hues. The mountains rising above Santa Fe were dusky blue, interrupted by dark saw blades of pines crisscrossing the lower slopes. Elsewhere he saw dead beige: the mat of dun-colored grass running along the highway, the plains stretched out in front of them. It was late afternoon, and as dusk settled it fuzzed the outlines of things and flattened them out.
Santa Fe, by contrast, was a sparkling maze of low, blocky buildings and shadow-casting lights. A pale gold suffused the town. It glowed from ranks of paper bags outlining the tops of buildings and walls and the borders of drives; it twinkled from the branches of trees and the undersides of eaves; it blinked at him from tangled clumps tossed over hedges like nets flung across dark water. It was all magical and enchanting, and he entertained the notion that things might right themselves after all.
The restaurant, too, was warm and glowing, painted in candlelight. He and Finch ate and drank, settling into comfortable, sparring conversation. No mention was made of the painting, of the Kesslers, of the letters, or of the child. It was the kind of conversation Stephen would have loved to have shared with his father, but could not remember the two of them ever having had.
His phone buzzed in his pocket, and Finch scowled. It was a piece of technology the professor had no use for, bemoaning the slow death of written correspondence, the U.S. Postal Service, and the corded phone, all of which, he said, allowed for occasional, and necessary, interludes of blessed silence. Stephen checked the device under cover of the tablecloth.
“It’s Lydia,” he said, and Finch’s indignant look melted. “She’s texting me, asking why you don’t have your phone on.”
“Is she all right? What’s the matter?”
“Well, we can assume her thumbs are fine,” Stephen answered. “As happy as I am to be the go-between, why don’t you turn on your phone and ask her yourself?”
Finch stood up and dropped his napkin on the table. “It’s after eleven there, late
for her to be calling. Can you sign the check, Stephen? I’ll try calling her back from the phone in my room. The buttons are bigger.”
* * *
Stephen woke the next morning with the buzz of a headache circling the back side of his brain and swallowed aspirin with the water he found on the bedside table. Altitude, drink, and apprehension were not the makings of a productive day. He took a hot shower and scrubbed himself with the entire bottle of eucalyptus body wash he found in the bathroom. His head cleared, and smelling like a forest, he went downstairs to meet Finch in the restaurant.
Finch didn’t look as though he’d slept at all, his face the color of skim milk, a hint of stubble bracing his chin.
“Lydia’s not ill, is she?” Stephen asked, with some degree of trepidation.
“Not in so many words,” Finch said, looking preoccupied. “She’s pregnant.”
“Oh,” Stephen said. Well, that wasn’t going to advance his cause. No doubt she’d be even fonder of the Kelvin in light of this development. “Aren’t you happy about it?”
Finch nodded, a ridiculous grin taking over the lower half of his face. He had the doting expression of a grandfather already. Stephen worried he was looking for someone to hug.
“Boy or girl?”
“I don’t know. What I mean is, they don’t want to know in advance.”
The man was practically giddy. Stephen had never heard so many consecutive contented sighs; he feared Finch might be hyperventilating. But the professor gave him a quick embrace, slapped him companionably on the back, then wrinkled his nose at the smell of eucalyptus still lingering on Stephen’s skin. In the hotel’s dining room, Finch ordered champagne, then interrupted Stephen’s drinking of it with several toasts: first to Lydia, then to the grandchild, then to himself, employing the word grandfather as often as possible.
“Finch, this is all well and good, and I am happy for you, but we have important business to attend to. You haven’t forgotten?”
“Of course not.” But his expression was one of muddled distraction. Stephen shook his head and forced himself to eat the toast crusts that remained on his plate.
After breakfast they walked to the lobby and sat next to each other in stiff leather chairs, the house phone on a table between them. “I don’t suppose there’s any point in waiting,” he said.
“No. Best to get on with it.”
Stephen picked up the receiver. “I’d like another guest’s room, please. Could you connect me with Alice Kessler?” There was a pause while the desk clerk ran through the list.
“I’m sorry, sir. I don’t show a guest by that name staying with us.”
Stephen put the receiver back and shook his head. “Should I try the others?”
“What say we walk to them? After all, it’s a lovely morning. Might give us the chance to look at a few galleries along the way. You did say the other hotels were on the square, or nearby, didn’t you?”
Stephen had to give Finch credit for putting up a front. After all, it was no pressing concern of his anymore. He’d be going back to his cozy apartment, the lovely mushrooming Lydia, and after the holiday break, his classes. There was a family waiting for him in the truest sense of the word. Stephen thought of his mother’s dusty artificial tree, its branches bent at odd angles, the painted metal showing through where needles had dropped like teeth, after years of being crammed into and pulled out from the same too-small box.
In less than an hour they had checked the remaining four hotels. No Alice Kessler at any of them, nothing further volunteered as to whether or not she had already come and gone. “Against our policy to provide that sort of information” was the repeated refrain. Aside from going back to Orion and throwing himself on Phinneaus’s mercy, Stephen was forced to admit they’d run out of options. He could feel the walls of his tiny office at Murchison & Dunne closing in and hear the screech of the elevator as it passed his floor and set the odds and ends on his desk rattling. Would Cranston keep him through the holidays or dispense with him immediately, putting his meager paycheck toward the expenses incurred funding this wild-goose chase? He stopped walking and leaned against a light pole, suddenly exhausted, his hand on his forehead.
“Stephen.”
“I’m all right. Just give me a minute, please.”
“Stephen.”
“For God’s sake, Finch, you have to admit it’s horrible.” He looked up to see Finch standing in front of a gallery, staring through the window at a piece of sculpture.
“Look at this,” Finch said, then ran inside.
Stephen walked to the window and put his hand to the glass, shielding his eyes from the sun. Finch was gesturing expansively to a young woman in a denim skirt and dangling earrings that brushed the tops of her shoulders. The sculpture was stainless steel, a sensuous form, like a cross between a cloud and a splotch. The edges were curved and exquisitely smooth, and the metal gleamed with reflected and refracted light, throwing prisms of color at the ceiling. The sign at the base read, “Vertical Puddle #3—A. Kessler.”
A. Kessler. Alice. It hadn’t occurred to him she might be an artist. Admittedly, he hadn’t given much thought to how she’d earned a living after she dropped out of graduate school, though a career in ornithology seemed a far leap from sculpting. But if she was a sculptor, it made sense for her to be in Santa Fe. And if she was here, she could be found. He reached for the window ledge to steady himself. They had actually managed to track her down.
He headed into the gallery at the same time Finch was coming out, running square into him in the middle of the doorway.
“We’ve found Alice!” He was suddenly ravenous and breathless and happier than he could ever recall being. “Did you get a number? Where is she staying?”
Finch had an odd look on his face, wistful and uncertain. “It’s not Alice we’ve found.”
“What do you mean? ‘A. Kessler.’ It says so right beneath the piece in the front window.”
“Agnete. A. Kessler is Agnete. Stephen, we may have found Thomas’s daughter. Not Alice.”
“But Alice was here, in Santa Fe. I saw the note on the calendar. Maybe she was coming to visit her daughter. This is perfect.”
“Hardly the word I would use, but I suppose we’ll find out soon enough. I left my card with the gallery owner. She’s going to contact Agnete and try to set up a meeting.”
“But what did you say?”
“I lied.”
* * *
A lie had never come to him so quickly. He hadn’t stopped to think—A. Kessler could only be Alice—and he’d charged in, asking about the sculpture in the window.
“A local artist. She does the most beautiful, unique pieces. Most of them are quite large; she did this one especially for me to showcase in the gallery. Agnete Kessler.” The woman pushed her hair behind her ears and smiled warmly, assessing his potential as a buyer.
“You said Agnete?”
“Yes. Would you like some information? I have a tear sheet here somewhere.”
He’d panicked, completely unprepared to stumble upon her so easily, now, when he thought the whole thing finally finished. I want to talk to her about a commission. A total fabrication, and once he’d said it, there was no way to circle around to his real reason for wanting to see her. The tear sheet was already creased; he’d folded it immediately and tucked it inside his coat pocket. He didn’t want to see Agnete’s face. Alice was the one they had to talk to first, not her daughter. There was nothing he could say to Agnete without betraying Alice, and he wasn’t willing to do that to the young woman who stared at him intently from the painting, or the slightly older girl in the photograph, the one who’d looked so blissful.
“She might not contact us at all.”
“Finch, why wouldn’t she? She’s an artist, it’s a commission; she’s likely starving, most artists are. The thing is, I actually like her work, at least this piece. It is just like looking in a puddle. Or a fun-house mirror. Or both.”
“Fine. Yo
u offer to buy something and we can leave it at that.”
“You’re joking.”
“I’m not so sure.”
“Finch, we have to find out if she knows anything about the painting. That’s the whole reason we’re here. If she happens to want to come back to New York with us and meet her father, so much the better. We’re heroes on all fronts.”
“Heroes?” Finch shook his head, stunned Stephen could be so oblivious to the larger picture. “Do you seriously suppose Alice will see it that way? Don’t you think it’s her decision when and what Agnete should be told about Thomas, if anything at all? You can’t get that sort of news from total strangers.”
“Well, we haven’t found Alice, have we? And aren’t you supposed to be on Bayber’s side in all of this? As her father, shouldn’t he have a say in whether or not she knows?”
“It’s not a question of taking sides.”
“Finch, I know you think I’m only concerned with myself, and that’s mostly true. I’m honest enough to admit it. But I have to see those paintings. I lie awake at night thinking about Natalie and Alice, wondering if I’ve gotten it right. The only thing I know about with any certainty is the hands, nothing else. Not how old they are, or what they’re wearing; not if there are other people with them, or if they’re alone. Look, whatever sordid mess the three of them made of their personal lives isn’t my business; I’m sorry for them if that counts for anything. But for the first time in my life, I actually want to know the story, Finch. I want to know what Bayber was trying to say, not just what the other panels look like. It’s the closest I’ve ever come to feeling like my father. How can you not want to know? How can you not do everything in your power to find out?”
The Gravity of Birds: A Novel Page 31
