The man was clearly uneasy.
Jackie made a show of looking for her pen as she considered how to proceed in light of this.“To answer your question,”she said, opening her notebook,“I’m hoping this won’t take long at all. Do you have someplace you need to be?”
“Just my gig tonight, but there are some other things that need doing before I leave.”
She smiled. “Okay, I’ll be as speedy as I can.”
If it was up to her, she’d take the bold frontal approach and come right out and ask it: “What exactly was your relationship with this woman you’ve hired us to find?” But that would definitely be a bad idea, considering how stiff her potential employer seemed to be. Still, the idea had its charm...
Curran was staring at her.“When Ms O’Brien called this morning, I thought she had news for me. Have you found out anything?”
Jackie shook her head.“It’s pretty early, and you didn’t give us much to start with. One thing we’re doing is checking all the airports to see if that gives us any fresh leads on where they took your girl.”
The client squirmed and coloured a bit at her deliberate choice of words. “I saw you at the club last night,” was his deflecting response.
“Seems you’re not the only one hung up on this girl. I think half the people I spoke to last night have a crush on her.”
This time Curran visibly cringed. Jackie felt a bit sorry for him, but she also didn’t like people who lied – or at least played around with the truth.
Making a show of flipping pages in her notebook, she asked, “You worked with Olivia how long?”
“A little under two months.” “You told my employer that she lived on the street. Surely that can’t be true.”
“Olivia kept to herself. I don’t know much more about her than I told Ms O’Brien yesterday.”
She pounced, but gently. “How did you get in touch with her then? Go down to the train station whenever you wanted to tell her something?”
Curran flopped back into the chair and looked out the window over Jackie’s shoulder, his eyes far away. She waited silently for a good half minute.
“I asked Olivia to move in here shortly after we asked her to sing with the trio. Before that, she was sharing a room somewhere in the west end.”
“Why didn’t you tell us this yesterday?”
“I don’t know.” He shook his head slowly.“I didn’t want you to get the wrong idea. I just want to find out if she’s okay.You see, I feel responsible.”
“Why?”
“That’s sort of hard to explain. Maggie, the friend Olivia shared a room with before she came here, was dead set against her performing. She tried really hard to talk Olivia out of it, really hard. I was pushing on the other side. She is an amazing talent.”
“We’ll talk about this Maggie a little later. So you asked Olivia to, ah, move in?”
He took a deep breath. “I have a lot of room. You see, my wife and I separated recently, and well, there are three bedrooms not being used. The trio also rehearses here, so Olivia only had to go down to the basement. It just seemed like a good idea.”
Now Jackie waited a moment, but it was all for effect. “Did she sleep in her own room?”
Curran coloured deeply. “She had her own room.”
His response neatly dodged the question. Jackie decided to move past and circle back later.
“Could I see her bedroom? There might be something there that would give us a clue as to why those men showed up or why she went so willingly.”
“I don’t believe she did go with them willingly. To me it seemed as if she had no choice.”
“That’s splitting hairs. What I meant was that she didn’t put up a fuss. If someone came after you, would you go so docilely?”
He got up. “I’ll show you the room.”
Upstairs, the house was even more devoid of furniture. The absent wife had obviously taken nearly everything. The room at the top of the stairs had nothing in it but dust and empty shelves and a laptop computer on a small table. The next (obviously Curran’s room) had just the bare bones: a double bed, dresser and small square of carpet.
The daughter’s room at least had a couple of stuffed toys and pictures on the walls, mostly her artwork. But the bed and dresser were brand new.
Olivia’s room was at the end of the hall next to the bathroom. Curran swung the door back and Jackie pushed past, but stopped, barely through the door.
What was in front of her was like nothing she’d ever seen, unless it was under the influence of drugs. Every surface but the floor and the wall to her left had been painted by a hand that was childlike but at the same time masterful.“Standing in a clearing in the forest,” Jackie said out loud.
On the wall opposite the window in the unpainted wall, the forest disappeared into darkness. On the wall in front of her, a clearing extended to a spot where a waterfall gushed over a high cliff. Overhead on the ceiling, a night sky glowed with stars and a crescent moon. Stepping farther into the room, she saw on the wall behind her more forest with the shadowy bulk of mountains rising in the distance. It would take hours of study to appreciate every detail that had been painstakingly painted. The whole effect was quite charming – until you noticed what was under the bushes and behind the trees. Everywhere eyes stared out, big eyes, small ones, and all of them filled with menace. Jackie found the effect profoundly disturbing.
“Olivia did this?”
“My daughter helped a bit when she visited, but this is almost all Olivia’s work.”
“Did she ever sleep?”
Andrew Curran actually laughed. “Very little. She was especially prone to staying up all night after gigs when she was really wired, but unless she was singing or listening to music, she was up here working. Sometimes she’d do all three at once.”
The rest of the room was spartan: a mattress on the floor and a lamp on a low table nearby. Jackie went to the closet, where she found five dresses hanging from a rod and shelving stacked with neatly folded underwear, socks, jeans and a few blouses and sweaters.
“Do you mind?” Jackie asked before starting to go through the clothing to see if anything had been hidden among it.
“There’s nothing there,” Curran told her as she searched. “I was the one who kept all her clothes in order, otherwise they’d just be scattered around the room.”
She continued anyway, then asked, “How about under the mattress?”
“I already looked there. I’ve searched the entire house.”
“When Olivia arrived here, what did she have with her?”
“One clean set of clothes besides what
