Now his breath travels down my neck and over my breasts, warming the flesh with his mouth, drawing a trail of heat across my body the way a soldering iron draws a bead of melted lead along the seams between two pieces of glass to seal them together.
I touch my mouth to his skin, unbuttoning his shirt, his pants, peeling the wet clothes off him to find the warmth underneath, the living part of him underneath the drowning man. The part that’s still him. In my dreams I always knew it was still there underneath the drowned apparition that came to me. The real Neil, not drowned, not crazy.
He wraps himself around me, a vine around a tree, and I press myself into him, Salmacis clutching Hermaphroditus in her sacred pool until her flesh sank into his and they became two spirits in one body. We sink onto the floor as if drifting down through water, our bodies weightless as they press against each other, each taking the weight of the other so that even when we move into the bedroom, it’s as if we’re making love in a still, clear pool of water.
WHEN I WAKE UP IN THE MORNING I’M ALONE. FOR A MOMENT, LYING ON MY BACK and staring up at the flawless blue square of skylight, I think it was just another one of my dreams, but when I hold my hands up in the sunlight I see the cuts on my fingertips from when I tried to take the glass out of Neil’s hand. I remember then that he’d woken me up at four to tell me he had to be back at The Beeches before morning or he’d get kicked out of the trial.
“No trial, no Pieridine,” he said, picking up his damp clothes from the living room floor and shaking bits of glass out of them. “But you can still come and sit for me later, right?”
“I have to go into the city,” I told him. I considered lying but I didn’t want that to be the way we started out—or started over again—whatever it was we were starting. “Detective Falco wants me to look at Christine’s desk before her apartment’s packed up.”
I thought I saw a muscle twitch in his face when I said Falco’s name but he kept buttoning his shirt and when he was dressed he came over to me, drew my hair away from my neck, and brushed his lips against my throat.
“Should I come back here tonight?” he asked.
I told him yes, forgetting Falco’s suggestion that I spend the night in the city and help Amy clean out the apartment.
Oh well, I think, stretching lazily in the sun streaming into the loft from the skylight, I’ll just take the train back tonight and catch the early train into the city tomorrow. I won’t even have to mention it to Falco.
At the thought of the detective I realize I should be getting up and ready for him, but I stay in bed another few minutes, basking in the sun. I lift my arms up over my head and twirl my hands in a light that is stained emerald and violet from the grapevine pattern in the glass. The green light snakes around my arms and, when I look down, I see it has wrapped around the length of my body. Like one of Ovid’s nymphs, I seem to be turning into a tree.
Although I’m down on the street by 9:20, Falco’s already there, leaning against his car and sipping from a blue and white paper coffee cup, looking fresh in neatly pressed khakis and a blue cotton shirt. I’ve showered and put on a nice linen dress but I feel rumpled in comparison, bleary from lack of sleep and unreasonably covetous of his coffee. Before I can build up too much resentment, though, he hands me my own cup and a cinnamon brioche.
“Gosh, Annemarie only makes these by special request. How’d you rate one?”
“I happened to ask Gavin Penrose a few questions about some unpaid bills with local businesspeople and the next day he paid up all his accounts. I have no idea how your cousin decided I was the one to thank but she loaded me down with so many baked goods that I’m afraid I’ll be accused of graft.” Falco brushes some powdered sugar from his shirt and grins. “As you can see I’ve been trying to eat the evidence.”
“And you want to make me an accessory to the cover-up?” I ask, biting into the warm, sweet bread. Annemarie’s version of a brioche contains pine nuts and currants and, she once confessed, a hint of pepper.
Falco shrugs and opens the passenger side door for me. The whole car is so fragrant with coffee, fresh baked bread, and cinnamon that I feel suddenly light-headed and unreasonably happy. Maybe it’s the night I spent with Neil or just the way the sun reflects off the Hudson as we head south toward the city that makes me feel like I’m back in college on a road trip and that the day offers endless possibilities.
Falco seems in a pretty good mood, too. Maybe the trip reminds him of college as well because instead of talking about the case he spends most of the time reminiscing about his years at John Jay: his classes, some of his more memorable professors, and the friends he made there. It’s only when a few too many of his stories end in a too early death—one in a drug bust in the South Bronx, two heart attacks, and a classmate who died in uniform at the World Trade Center—that his mood shifts. As we cross over the Henry Hudson Bridge into Manhattan we both lapse into silence.
We pass near the entrance to the Cloisters and I remember the winter day Christine and I walked through the snow toward the medieval monastery and I felt like a pilgrim looking for sanctuary. I found Neil instead.
Falco exits the highway on 95th Street and we head south on Riverside Drive. Riverside Park is full of flowers and dog walkers and bicyclists—a bright panorama of city life that fails to revive my mood. When we pull up in front of Christine’s apartment—into a spot that says NO PARKING—Falco turns to me before turning off the engine, his face still full of regret not, as it turns out, for his fallen comrades, but for me.
“I didn’t want to point this out to you, but I guess I’d better since I’m not sure you made the connection.”
“What connection?”
“Gavin paying off his debts so quickly. It looks like he mustn’t have real money problems—he just doesn’t bother to pay his bills on time.” He pauses another moment to turn the car off and reach across me to take a laminated permit of some kind out of the glove compartment. “It kind of kills the theory that he needed to marry Joan Shelley for money.”
RUTH WEBB HAS GIVEN FALCO THE KEYS TO HER DAUGHTER’S APARTMENT—AND permission for me to stay overnight—so after showing the doorman his search warrant we ride the elevator up to the fourteenth floor. As he opens the Yale lock and dead bolt on Christine’s door I still can’t help but feel that I’m somehow invading Christine’s privacy. I’ve only been to the apartment a couple of times in the six years Christine has lived here. It’s so small that whenever I came into the city Christine would usually suggest we meet at a restaurant or a museum. I’d thought that she was embarrassed by living in such a tiny, modest apartment, but now, when I step into the narrow entry hall—made narrower by bookshelves lining both walls—it occurs to me that Christine had become more and more reclusive over the years and that the apartment, with its copious artifacts of her studies, had become a too private manifestation of her obsessions for her to enjoy sharing it with even her best friend.
At the end of the hallway, though, is a reminder that I still had a place in her world. It’s a three-quarter oil portrait of Christine wearing a green Indian kurta and jeans, leaning against a tree. When I pause in front of it Falco says, “Yeah, I keep looking at that, too. I always like to look at pictures of a homicide victim so I picture them alive and not as the corpse I see in the morgue … but this … the girl in this picture looks so young it’s hard to believe she’ll ever grow old, let alone die at thirty-seven. I looked to see who did the painting but there’s only this green stamp in the corner. Some kind of stylized bird. It’s on a bunch of paintings in the apartment. I wondered if they were done by your ex.”
I shake my head. “Neil did use a Japanese style stamp on his paintings, but his was a tree—because he thought his name meant beech forest.” I don’t bother to explain that I’ve also heard that Buchwald means “book forest.” “He made the peacock stamp for me,” I say, lightly touching the green square in the corner and tracing the corona of feathers surrounding the long-necked bird,
“because it’s an attribute of Juno.”
“You painted this?” he asks, looking genuinely surprised. I nod. “And these other ones in here?”
I follow him into the tiny living room. Every inch of wall space that hasn’t been taken up by bookshelves has been filled with pictures: watercolors, prints, sketches, oil paintings. Some are reproductions from museums of Christine’s favorite artists but intermixed with the Pre-Raphaelites and medieval tapestries are dozens of pieces I did—from careless rough charcoal sketches I’d torn out of my sketch pad to throw away to the larger oil paintings I did in my last year of college and that I’d given to Christine when Bea and I moved back in with my father.
I don’t have room for these at my dad’s, I told her, although we’d both known I just couldn’t live with them anymore. Most of them are of Neil.
“These are really good,” Falco says, pausing in front of an oil painting of several people standing in a rose garden. “Do you still paint?”
I shake my head and turn away from the detective’s gaze. “Christine’s desk is in her bedroom, right?” Without waiting for an answer I turn on my heel and go into an even smaller room, most of which is taken up by a queen-sized platform bed. Christine’s desk—a mission library table that we’d found together at the Poughkeepsie Salvation Army—is fitted into an arched alcove on the wall opposite the foot of the bed.
Immediately I see what Falco meant by the desk being a kind of diorama. The arched alcove frames the desk like a proscenium stage. The stacks of books on either side and leaning against the back wall are like stage sets; the domed glass lamp, when Falco switches it on, reveals a bucolic scene of shepherds and milkmaids that could be a painted scrim for an eighteenth-century farce, the array of postcards thumbtacked to the wall over the desk background scenery.
I look at the postcards first. When I was last here two years ago the postcards were confined to the bulletin board above her desk, but now they’ve spread over the entire wall so that it’s hard to tell where the bulletin board ends and the wall begins. Many are art postcards that Christine collected over the years and reflect the progression of her taste from swooning Pre-Raphaelite beauties to chaste medieval maidens carved in ivory or stitched in silk. Many are reproductions of Penrose’s paintings—the same wan nymphs that decorated her childhood bedroom—although I notice more of the wood nymph variety than the water nymph. Along the top of the wall she’s arranged the pictures that line Forest Hall—all those figures turning into trees: Baucis and Philemon, Daphne, the three paintings of Iole and Dryope, and then the unnamed girl leaning over a pool with her hair hanging in the water, the tips of her hair just beginning to turn into trailing beech leaves, incipient bark creeping up her legs.
“Do you mind if I untack one to look at the back?” I call, thinking Detective Falco’s still in the other room, but when he answers I’m startled to find he’s just behind me.
“Go ahead.”
I take down the one of the girl leaning over the pool and turn it over. Penrose Collection, it reads, The Drowning Tree, Augustus Penrose, 1893. And then underneath, a note in Christine’s handwriting: Same year as Iole and Dryope? Part of the same series?
“Something wrong?” Falco asks. He’s standing next to me looking down at the card. I try to give it to him, but he takes my hand instead and lowers it so the card is in the light of the desk lamp. The gesture brings to mind the way Neil took my hand last night when I was plucking glass from his knuckles and that image stirs a fleeting ache that makes me shift my weight and brings a flush to my face. Falco turns my hand over so he can see the picture. “Yet another one of those Greek girls turning into a tree. What did this one do wrong—or was she trying to get away from some lecherous god?”
I shake my head. “No one knows what myth it depicts, but from the note on the back it sounds like Christine thought it might be part of the Iole and Dryope series.”
“You mean that one with the two sisters and the baby?”
“Uh-huh.”
“Why would she think that?” Falco asks.
“Well, it does hang next to the ones of Iole and Dryope in Forest Hall.”
“I don’t remember it.”
“No, it’s been taken down for cleaning.”
Falco angles the desk lamp to get a better look at the postcard. Unfortunately, it’s not a great reproduction, so it’s hard to see details. “I don’t know,” he says. “If it’s part of that series where’s the sister? Where’s the baby?”
“Maybe this one is of Dryope after her sister takes the baby away. It’s her all alone, mourning.” I shrug and slide the card into his hand, forcing him to take it, and try to pull my hand away, but he holds onto it.
“What happened to your fingers?” he asks, pulling my hand back into the light. The red scratches look particularly garish under the lamplight.
“Occupational hazard,” I tell him, “of working with glass.” I take my hand back and cross my arms over my chest, tucking my right hand underneath my left arm. “Is this why you thought Christine was interested in Gavin Penrose,” I ask, “because she has all these Augustus Penrose paintings?”
“No, I expected that because of her research on the window. It’s this—”
He takes a folder off the desk and hands it to me. Inside are color Xeroxes of paintings that look vaguely like Penroses or someone imitating Penrose. I don’t recognize any of them. I turn one over and see in Christine’s handwriting, “Untitled work by Gavin Penrose, date?”
“Did you know Gavin Penrose painted?” Falco asks.
“Actually I just found that out a few weeks ago. He said he’d spent a year in Paris studying painting but that he gave it up … how did Christine get these?”
“I was hoping you could tell me. Here’s another thing—”
He opens another folder and takes from it a piece of heavy drawing paper with rough edges—as if torn from a notebook—on which is a sketch of a woman at a loom. It takes me only a moment to recognize the figure as the lady in the library window.
“Fay was right,” I admit reluctantly. “Christine did tear a page out of Eugenie’s notebook. I could have sworn she wouldn’t have done anything like that—” But how well, I wonder, did I really know Christine? “—I wonder what was so important about this sketch.”
I look at the drawing more closely and notice that the cloth on the loom, which is blank in the window, is woven with a finely detailed rendering of the landscape in the window only—
“It’s not the same,” I tell Falco. “Look, the tree is weird, almost—”
“Like a person. Yeah, I see what you mean. And it looks like there’s something, or someone, in the water. Hey, look at this.” Falco lays the postcard of The Drowning Tree next to Eugenie’s sketch. “The picture in the loom looks just like the one in this postcard.”
“You’re right. Christine mentioned in her lecture that the original glass panels for the loom were broken and that’s why they were blank. But I wonder why she didn’t mention this sketch.”
“Maybe she wanted to find out more about it before going public with the information. There’s also a letter in the folder.”
He hands me a sheet of cream-colored stationery embossed with the gold monogram EBP. Eugenie Barovier Penrose.
“This is an original letter from Eugenie Penrose,” I say. “Fay Morgan would have a fit if she knew where it was.”
“I know. My guess is that Christine found it in one of those notebooks she borrowed and held onto it. Read it. It’s to a lawyer in Albany.”
Even when the ink was fresh it would have been hard to make out this thin spidery handwriting (which I recognize from Eugenie’s diary and notebook) so I sit down and place the paper under the lamp so that I can see it better. Falco sits on the edge of the desk.
Dear Mr. Arnot,
In answer to your letter of June the twelfth, I must insist once again that you honor the letter of my husband’s will. Although it’s possible, as you believe,
that he did not intend to leave the persons in question quite so destitute, we must remember that my husband and I have dedicated our lives to the institutions we’ve founded and that my husband’s will—although some might call it harsh—reflects that dedication. I must repeat that all of my husband’s paintings were left to the college. That includes the one to which your clients have claimed ownership.
In closing, let me point out that I have no complaint living out the remainder of my life in modest circumstances. Your clients will simply have to content themselves with the same.
Yours truly,
Eugenie Penrose
“Wow, she sounds like a bitch in this. I wonder if Christine showed this to Gavin.”
“From these notes, I think she might have.” Falco turns over the folder that held the letter. On the back Christine had written: Arnot’s clients? Gavin’s father? Gavin himself? Ask Gavin exactly what he did inherit from estate—which paintings? Who else inherited? Did anyone else inherit paintings? And written in boldfaced caps and underlined: Ask about The Drowning Tree?
I look up and catch Falco still staring at my injured fingertips. “If she asked Gavin these questions he would have thought she was pretty interested in his financial situation,” I say, trying to meet Falco’s gaze without looking away.