Paul Christopher - Michelangelo_s Notebook

“You’re a smart young lady, aren’t you, Finn?”

“I’d like to think so.”

“Who do you think killed your boyfriend, and why would anyone have wanted to do anything so terrible?”

“I don’t know.”

“And if you were me, what would you be thinking?”

“What you obviously have been thinking: that there’s some connection between the two deaths.”

“Not deaths, Finn. Murders. There’s a world of difference.”

“Does there have to be a reason?” Finn asked. “Couldn’t it just be coincidence?” Her voice was almost pleading. She was so tired it was almost a physical pain dragging at her. She felt as though she were the criminal, somehow, and not the victim.

Delaney looked at her for a long, thoughtful moment. Finally he spoke. “What do you think would have happened if you’d come back half an hour later than you did? That’s the real question, isn’t it? Or what would have happened if you’d gone to Peter’s place instead?”

“Why are you asking me a lot of stupid hypothetical questions? Peter’s dead. You don’t know why, I don’t know why, and it’s your job to find out.” She shook her head. “You keep on asking about the drawing. Why are you so goddamn interested in a drawing? I was wrong! It wasn’t Michelangelo, okay!”

“Dr. Crawley had a dagger stuck in his throat. We think it’s Moroccan. Called a koummya. You know what that is?”

“No.”

“Peter might have been killed by the same kind of knife. Sure you never saw one around the museum?”

“No!”

“You’re sounding a little tired, Finn.”

“Guess who made me that way.”

Delaney looked down at the old Hamilton he wore. It was after one in the morning. “Do you have someone to stay with?”

“Myself.”

“You can’t stay here alone, child.”

“Oh, for God’s sake! I’m not a child. I can take care of myself, all right?” It was taking everything in her power to hold back a flood of tears. All she wanted right now was to curl up in her bed and go to sleep.

Delaney stood up. “Well then,” he said quietly, “I’d best be on my way.”

“Yes, you’d best.”

Delaney took a couple of steps toward the door, edging around the bloodstain. He turned. “You’re sure it was a Michelangelo, aren’t you?”

“Yes,” she said flatly. “It was a Michelangelo. I don’t care what Crawley said or why he said it.”

“Maybe saying it is what got him killed,” said Delaney. “Did you ever think of that? And your knowing about it might have gotten your friend Peter killed instead of you.”

“You’re just trying to scare me.”

“Now why would I want to do a thing like that?” He turned back to the door and let himself out. A few moments later she heard the thump of the elevator arriving and then it was gone. She was alone. She stared at the dark stain and then looked away. Why would he want to scare her, and why was he so interested in a drawing that perhaps wasn’t by Michelangelo at all?

Finn climbed wearily to her feet, double-locked the door, put the chain on, edged around the carpet stain and went to her bedroom, leaving the living room light on; there was no way she was going to be able to sleep in the dark tonight.

In the bedroom she stripped off her clothes, found a long “Ohio-Home of Elsie” T-shirt with a huge illustration of the daisy-necklaced cow on the front and slid into bed. She turned off the bedside lamp and lay there, light spilling over the end of the bed from the open doorway. She could hear the city around her like a huge storm of energy that never ended. The building creaked, there were strange echoing sounds from the elevator, a scream from the projects behind her, the rumble of somebody dragging open a window downstairs. Maybe she had been stupid to stay here tonight.

She could remember when her father had died. She’d been fourteen. When her mother had told her that Dad had died from a massive heart attack in some godforsaken place in Central America while on a dig she’d lain in bed just like this, staring up at the ceiling, listening to the night sounds, wondering how things could go on without the slightest acknowledgment that her father had died-that he was gone and would never be back, that he’d been totally removed from the entire scheme of things, exiled from the universe. Peter was dead; she’d never hear his voice again, feel his lips on hers, never even get the chance to choose whether she’d make love to him or not.

She listened hard, squeezing her eyes shut, trying as hard as she could to sense some remnant of his being still lingering in the apartment. She could feel the tears coming again; it hadn’t worked when her father had died and it didn’t work now. He would come to her in haunting visions instead.

She knew that like her father, she’d see Peter for weeks, just turning a corner, a passing glimpse in a crowd on a busy street, a face in the window of a cab, the sound of a whispering voice that wasn’t there, and then slowly, over time, it would all fade away like the rustle of old dead leaves in the wind, and then it would be gone for good. Memories and old bones-in her father’s case, lost in a jungle cenote, lying in the cold stony depths of some black, bottomless well.

Finn lay there for a long time and finally sat up in bed. She knew her mother was off in the Yucatбn digging up the royal tombs at Copan but the crazy old girl had been known to pick up her messages from time to time and Ryan really did need to talk to someone, even if it was by voice-mail proxy.

She switched on the bedside lamp, picked up the phone and began to dial her mother’s number in Columbus from memory. She waited, listening to the ring, and as the recording of her mother’s smoke-splintered drawl started, her heart almost stopped in her chest. Bile rose like hot acid in the back of her throat as she sat up, gently putting down the phone, not wanting to scare her mother with a message in her panic-stricken voice, because right now she knew that’s how it would sound.

The doodle she’d made of the Michelangelo drawing was gone from the pad beside the telephone. She reached out gingerly and picked up the pad, rubbing her fingers across the blank page. Whoever had taken it had torn off several pages under it because there wasn’t the slightest impression. It was as though it never was.

Had never been. Like Dad. Like Peter. Like she might be too, if the killer hadn’t panicked. She twisted herself around and dropped her bare feet onto the cold wood floor. Crawley dead, Peter dead, the drawing she’d made gone. Somebody was trying to make it seem like the page from the notebook had never existed, but why? A forgery? Something that the Parker-Hale was trying to offload on some poor unsuspecting curator at another museum? It didn’t seem likely, not for a single misfiled drawing, not to mention the fact that a museum with a reputation like the Parker-Hale’s wouldn’t put everything on the line for a single possible Michelangelo drawing.

She swore she could hear the creaking step of somebody on the fire escape outside her kitchen window. She knew it was locked, but she also knew that a shirt wrapped around the hand and a single punch could break the glass. She looked around the bedroom frantically, saw her softball bat and glove in the corner near the door and flew to them, grabbing the bat and charging out into the living room. She turned to the kitchen alcove, stepped up to the sink and took a roundhouse swing at the dark reflective glass. It shattered into a thousand pieces as the blow struck, but there was no sound from the fire escape except the pattering of broken glass as it rained down five floors and eventually crashed into the Dumpster in the alley at the bottom.