for her on the sidewalk without notice.
“Sure. Come on up.”
They’d followed her into the apartment. She’d poured herself a glass of water. They declined, but helped themselves to seats, selecting the two kitchen bar stools. She opted for the inside chair of the two-seat breakfast table, leaving herself cornered, she now realized, both literally and figuratively. But hers was the obvious choice, the only place to sit in the small apartment and still face her unannounced guests.
She’d unzipped her fleece, and found herself wishing she’d showered before leaving the gym.
They’d eased into the conversation smoothly enough. Initial banter up the stairs about how they should both get more exercise. Just a few follow-up issues, Shannon had explained.
But there was something about the tone. No longer so friendly, polite, or deferential. The surprise visit. Her heart still pounding in her chest, sweat still seeping from her scalp, even though she had finished her workout nearly half an hour ago. Maybe it was a subconscious shaped by television crime shows, but somehow she knew why they were here—not the reasons behind the why, but the superficial why. Even before the kiss, she knew they were here about her.
And then came their questions. Her finances. Her family. The endless “tell us agains”: Tell us again how you met Drew Campbell. Tell us again about this artist. Tell us again about the trip to Hoboken. Like they didn’t believe her the first time.
But it wasn’t until she saw the kiss that she realized her life was about to be destroyed.
Shannon had dropped the photograph on the table so casually. It was almost graceful, the way he’d extended his stubby fingers to slide the eight-by-ten glossy toward her across the unfinished pine.
She looked down at the woman in the photograph and recognized herself, eyelids lowered, lips puckered but slightly upturned, brushing tenderly against the corner of the man’s mouth. She appeared to be happy. At peace. But despite her blissful expression in the picture, the image shot a bolt of panic from her visual cortex into the bottom of her stomach. She inhaled to suppress a rising wave of nausea.
“You’ve heard what they say about pictures and a thousand words.”
She’d pulled her gaze from the picture just long enough to look up at Detective Shannon. His clichéd words echoed in her ears, her pulse playing background percussion, as her eyes returned to her own image. There was no question that the man in the photograph was Drew Campbell. And even though the cognitive part of her brain was screaming at her not to believe it, she had to admit that the lips accepting his kiss were her own.
She ran her fingertips across the print, as if the woman in the picture might suddenly turn her head so Alice could say, “Sorry, I thought you were someone else.” She felt the detectives looking down at her, waiting for a response, but she couldn’t find words. All she could do was shake her head and stare at the photograph.
Alice Humphrey knew the kiss would destroy her life because thirty-one hours earlier she had stepped in Drew Campbell’s blood on a white-tiled gallery floor. She’d fumbled for a pulse, only to feel doughy, cool skin beneath her trembling fingers. And until she’d seen this picture, she would have sworn on her very life that, other than a handshake, her palm pressed against his still carotid artery was the only physical contact she’d ever shared with the man.
She’d had a crappy year, but had never paused to appreciate the basic comforts of her life—its ordinariness, the predictability, a fundamental security of existence. All of that was in the past now.
Alice had no idea what would happen next, but she knew the photograph would shatter everything. And she knew this was only the beginning.
CHAPTER ONE
FOUR WEEKS EARLIER
Most of the best things in life came to Alice organically. Not because she asked. Not because she looked. Not because she forced. They happened because she stumbled onto them. The high-flying philosophical question of whether the pieces of her life fell into place through luck, randomness, fate, or unconscious intuition was way above her pay grade, but somehow things usually worked out for her.
She ended up an art major because a course she took on the art of Italian Renaissance courts turned out not to count toward her declared history concentration. She wound up back in Manhattan after college because she followed a boyfriend home. She’d found her current apartment when she overheard a man sitting next to her at a bar tell his friend that he’d been transferred to the Los Angeles office and would have to break his lease. The opportunity Drew Campbell handed to Alice came not only when she’d needed it most, but also in a way that felt exactly as it should—natural, discovered, meant to be.
The gallery was in the Fuller Building, one of her favorites. She paused on her way in to admire the art deco features dotted generously inside and out. The opening reception was the artist’s first public appearance in a decade, so she expected the exhibition to be packed. Instead she found plenty of room to pace the spacious gallery, wineglass in hand, as she leisurely studied the overlapping abstract shapes, layered so meticulously on the canvases that it seemed they might leap weightlessly from the wall and float away into the sky.
She noticed him before he ever approached her, flipping through the price list as he admired one of the larger works, a carnival scene in oil. Beneath a few days of fashionable stubble, his face was very severe in a way that was both handsome and out of place in a froufrou gallery, but his clothing signaled he was in the right spot. She watched him speak to the emaciated, black-bunned woman she recognized as the gallery’s owner. She wondered what he’d be paying for the canvas.
Alice was pleased when she felt him looking at her. Optimistic enough to meet him halfway across the gallery, she paused in front of an abstract of layered triangles and then smiled to herself as he made his way over.
“It’s a shame there aren’t more people here,” he said. “Drew Campbell.”
She returned the handshake and introduction.
“So, Alice, what are your theories about this dismal turnout?”
“It’s crazy, right? You know some gallery down in Chelsea is packed tonight for a gum-chewing punk just out of art school who doodles celebrities. Meanwhile, this man could have been Jackson Pollock, and it’s like Mormon night at the vodka bar in here.”
The artist, Phillip Lipton, was at one time a recognized figure in the New York school of abstract expressionism, a contemporary of Pollock, de Kooning, Rauschenberg, and Kline. Apparently none of this was lost on her new acquaintance.
“I know an art dealer who used to represent him. You would not believe the player the old man used to be. You’ve heard of picky guys who only date skinny girls or blondes? Well, he supposedly only dated ballerinas, and yet—despite that very narrow limitation—always managed to have a new nimble babe at his side each week. There was a joke that he must have been fattening them all up with steak and ice cream so the New York City ballet company would have to replace them one by one. He’d hold court in the Village at One if by Land.”
She could picture the younger version of the artist at that restaurant, smoking cigarettes, wearing that fedora he always seemed to sport in the few photographs available of him in that era. Now Lipton was a ninety-one-year-old man whose sixty-year-old wife was brushing away crumbs from his jacket lapel at an underattended exhibition with, so far, only two “sold” tags posted,
