painting and hadn’t painted since it happened.
The reference hadn’t been lost on him. He understood perfectly what she was saying and responded angrily by demanding that she be ready to leave on time since he couldn’t afford to be late to his first official function in his capacity as new dean of the College of Arts and Sciences at Wickfield University.
So the three of them got dressed in more or less sullen silence, unearthing clothes from the boxes and garment bags still lining the halls of their new house on one of Wickfield’s tree-lined streets.
And here they all were, Ian in a pale linen suit and dashing blue silk tie, looking handsome and arty, and Grace with her long hair pulled back for a change, wearing a batik sundress instead of her usual black T-shirt and jeans, and Kate herself in a navy blue wrap dress and high-heeled strappy sandals that Ian had called sexy when she’d bought them a year ago.
They looked like the perfect family. Smile pretty for the nice people. She could feel the corners of her jaw aching with the effort.
Clara Beetleman touched her husband’s elbow, a tiny nudge that hardly anyone but Kate noticed, the unspoken signal between husband and wife that he’d talked long enough and needed to let their guests mingle.
Ian was pulled into conversation by a tall, stoop-shouldered architecture professor with a rope of beautiful African shells hung around her neck. Grace wove through the crowd, unconscious of her lithe beauty, exiting through French doors into the summer evening. Kate started to follow, but caught herself, and stopped by the window instead, looking out on the deck and the manicured lawn beyond it with its tiny iron lanterns winking among the hostas.
The windowsill was lined with immaculate pots of African violets. She stroked one fuzzy leaf, watching her daughter standing on the lawn looking at something out of Kate’s view, a drink clutched in one small hand. Grace’s hands remained a young girl’s, small and rounded, with short, bitten nails that she liked to paint black, green, or purple. Grace was changing in so many other ways—her figure maturing, her mood mercurial—that it was pleasing to Kate to see this last glimmer of her little girl.
“They grow up so fast.” Clara Beetleman stood at her side, beatific smile in place, hands folded serenely over her ample stomach. The aging Madonna, Kate thought, and saw the portrait in various shades of pale brown and gold. “Is she your only one?”
“Yes.”
“Not that there is such a thing as an only. One is plenty.” Her laugh was light and easy, but her eyes watched Kate with a birdlike intensity.
“How many children do you have?” Kate asked automatically because it was polite. She didn’t want to talk with this woman who looked as if she could worm her way to the heart of Kate’s insecurities. Did she know that they’d tried unsuccessfully for years to give Grace a sibling? She felt trapped against the windowsill, looking past the woman’s shoulder to try and catch Ian’s eye, but he was deep in conversation and didn’t see her.
“Three boys. All of them raised right here and educated at Wickfield.” Clara Beetleman laughed again. “I understand Grace will be studying in the music department?”
“Yes, she was accepted into Dr. Beetleman’s program.”
“She must be very talented if Laurence has taken her on. A piano prodigy?”
“Yes, I guess.” Kate tried to smile. She hated that term because it carried with it so much expectation. Weren’t prodigies the ones who burned out early, walking away from that which had once consumed them? She didn’t want Grace to experience her talent as a burden or a liability.
Her own parents had been good about that, their ignorance of an artist’s life keeping them from any expectations about her future. They’d been older than her friends’ parents and having given up on conceiving, were eager to help their only child follow her dreams even if hers was a passion they didn’t understand.
All they knew was that as soon as Kate could talk she’d spoken of color, that each and every Christmas letter to Santa had begged for crayons, paints, palettes, and easels. And as grateful as she was for the teachers who’d recognized her talent and helped steer her toward an education appropriate for it, she was still more thankful for those years when she’d enjoyed the gift she’d been given without being defined by it.
She’d tried to give this same freedom to Grace, but the truth was that she and Ian had the education their parents lacked. They could identify what they were seeing almost from the first moment, when Grace reached a chubby toddler’s hand above her head to carefully tap, not pound, the ivory keys of a friend’s piano.
A man wearing a dress shirt striped like stick candy joined them near the window. He had dark curly hair and large, square-framed black glasses. “Clara, you’ll have to scold Laurence for me—he completely forgot to tell us that Kate Corbin came along with the new dean.”
Before Clara could respond, the man extended his hand for Kate to shake. “Jerry Virgoli.” He smiled at her and took a sip from a balloon glass of deep red wine. It swirled in the glass, and she thought of carmine spilling onto a canvas, and had to pull her eyes back to his face. “I’m a big fan of your work.”
“Thank you.”
“I saw your show in Brooklyn—when was that?”
“A year and a half ago.”
“It was superb.”
“Thank you.” Her last show. For a while she’d wondered if it really would be her last. The months when she’d stared at the same blank canvas and been unable to pick up a brush. The months when all she saw when she looked at the pots of paint was how they’d been knocked to the floor of her studio when he’d slammed her back onto the table, and how she’d seen them swirling on the floor as she struggled, the colors rushing together, muddying the stained concrete floor.
She took a quick swallow from her glass of white wine. Therapy hadn’t chased those images away, but at least she could paint again. Halting progress, but still progress.
“Did you read the article about Lily Slocum?” Jerry’s voice lowered. Clara Beetleman nodded, but Kate asked, “Who?”
“She was a student at Wickfield,” Jerry began, but Clara corrected him.
“She is a student.”
“You don’t seriously think that she’s still alive?”
Clara shuddered. “I don’t know, but I hope so.”
“She disappeared in May,” Jerry Virgoli said to Kate. “Broad daylight, walking back to her apartment from campus, and she just vanished.”
Clara shook her head, whether in disagreement or regret Kate couldn’t tell. “Someone must have seen something.”
“The police would have found them by now.” Jerry Virgoli twirled his wineglass lightly in his hands. The nails were manicured and he wore a signet ring on his fourth finger. Light sparkled in the turning glass, glinted against the burnished gold of the ring.
“It’s been three months and they still have no leads,” Clara said. “It’s just horrible.”
“I’m sure things like this happen every day in the city,” Jerry said
