Jeff Abbott - No Rest for the Dead

She glanced at the clock. Not much time left, and out the window, one of those dense San Francisco fogs had drifted in. That would slow traffic to a crawl, so she would need to hurry up if she wanted to get there early enough to look around a little before anyone spotted her and came over to talk. Hurriedly, she applied the last of her makeup. This had once been reassuring, but time was beginning to make it a lesson in the things she’d done wrong and now couldn’t change-the thought that always returned to her when she noticed some new crack in her mirrored portrait.

At the McFallArt Museum, Justine Olegard reached for her drink the way others reach for a brass ring. She looked at the little painting that had hung in a dark corner of the gallery for ages, ten years at least. Tony Olsen had made a big deal of its installation, a last wish for Rosemary. Part of the museum’s permanent collection, it was now installed behind a locked glass display case as if it were the Mona Lisa . Here it moldered in obscurity in this quiet room that didn’t see much traffic. She knew the artist was a friend of Rosemary Thomas’s, and the installation was a tribute to her friend, honoring her for all patrons to see.

Museums were haunted by such paintings. They were the naughty kids who were never introduced to guests, and this one now struck Justine as naughtier than most. Something about it was tense, gave off a disturbing little charge. Looking at the waves, you sensed something underneath them, a shadowy presence, silent, stalking, preparing to surge upward toward a pair of struggling white legs. Some paintings truly spoke, and this one did. Its true subject was the dark undercurrent of things, she thought, and the creatures that lurked there. She examined the signature.

B. McGuire.

Belle McGuire .

Rosemary’s friend.

As this night had approached, a night Justine had been dreading, she thought about her time with Christopher. She recalled the many things they’d done together, the tightrope she’d walked between the personal and the professional, and even the legal and the illegal, and how, at certain moments, she’d quite helplessly fallen off. Christopher would have liked this little painting, she decided. He would have liked its deceit, the way it played the one-eyed Jack. He would have admired its skill for betrayal and misdirection, the way it turned the sea into a shadowy back alley. And what about Rosemary? Rosemary, who had always believed that something good could not have something evil at its core? Someone would probably say all of this about Rosemary during tonight’s memorial service, and Justine knew that she would nod and agree while all the time imagining the world beneath the world that this dead woman had never glimpsed-or maybe she did.

Justine walked to the window and looked out over the city.

The white signature spire of the downtown San Francisco skyline was hung in fog.

Sheathed in fog like a knife.

Wrapped in it, like a shroud.

The McFall ArtMuseum was only a few blocks away now, and Tony Olsen knew that once his limo turned the corner, he’d be able to see its lit windows. The elegant place was also oddly playful in its overall design. The curl of the stairs that wound up to the exhibition floors was almost impish, and the bright colors painting the lobby were like a middle finger lifted at the old-lady interiors of the Uffizi and the Louvre. He had always loved to seed his philanthropy with a sense of mischief. He knew that the kid inside him was a nasty little bastard, and as his limousine turned the corner and the McFall swam into view, he could see his own nastiness on full display. How dark and amusingly impudent, he thought, to use an art museum to memorialize a woman put to death for murdering her husband. Sure, Rosemary had requested it in her last will and testament, but he took no pleasure in what he would normally have found a deliciously inappropriate juxtaposition. Something about Rosemary had actually penetrated his otherwise quite impenetrable character. He had played the mystery man all his life, and most of the time he had played it convincingly. Once a reporter had asked him how he wished to be remembered, and he’d replied, not without accuracy, “As a blur.” But Rosemary had somehow seen through the illusion he had created and lived behind. It was as if she had drawn the cloth up from one corner of the masterwork, seen only that tiny bit of canvas, and yet, with stunning intuitiveness, had grasped the work as a whole.

The limousine stopped abruptly.

“Sorry, sir,” the driver said. “A cat just ran in front of us.”

Olsen glanced out the window and through the light mist saw the cat as it leaped onto the curb, then stopped and looked back at the black car it had so narrowly avoided. It was black with white feet like a dancer’s shoes, and for a moment it stared directly into Olsen’s eyes, haughtily, as if it had proved its point, defied the odds again. But how many escapes were now left to it, Olsen wondered, how many lives, before chance turned the tables at last?

Jon Nunn’s gazeswept over everyone as they assembled in the room. They were like ornaments on some grim tree, each hanging from its own withered limb.

Sarah stood silently beside him. Why had she come? he wondered now. She had no relationship with either Rosemary or Christopher. He glanced over at her stunning, sphinxlike profile and thought of the last time they’d been here together, all those years ago at the fund-raiser for inner-city park programs. She seemed tense, more so than usual, but when he asked her about it, she shrugged it off. Perhaps she had come out of some weird nostalgia, since it was Rosemary’s case that had broken up their marriage. Sarah had always been good at keeping old wounds open, and he supposed she was busy plucking at whatever scabs she’d since gotten from Stan. But Rosemary was a different story. Sarah had not even known her. He shrugged. Maybe she’d just needed a night away from Stan. Who wouldn’t, after all?

The fog laid its frozen hand on the back of Haile Patchett’s neck. The day had been a summer dream of sun and heady breezes, but the fog had rolled in just after sunset, and the air that rattled the palm fronds now was straight out of Neptune’s bait locker, dank and cold, with a whiff of dead things. Ten thousand goose bumps were on her bare arms, her flimsy silk evening wrap no bar to the piercing, unexpected cold that so often rolled into San Francisco.

The museum’s courtyard was scattered with rocks, each the size of a large ottoman, and in her rush to get inside Haile had barely avoided running into one. She cursed under her breath. She’d be on her ass if she wasn’t careful.

She was outwardly cranky but could feel the excitement in her revving up like a Corvette at a stoplight. The invitation had said the gathering was to be held in the big observation room at the top of the tower, but the curator’s office was tucked away, down a short corridor.

She thought she’d let the crowd get started, talking, drinking, before she slipped away.

Haile thought of her time with Christopher Thomas, what she’d expected, all their pillow talk that had amounted to nothing.

The fog glowed ahead, the light from the museum’s entrance softened and diffused. Other people were coming up behind her, vague figures making their way through the courtyard; she could hear murmured snatches of disembodied conversation.

“Jesus, what are we in for?” a male voice said softly, but whoever he spoke to didn’t answer.

The tower was barely visible through the fog, an unlikely lighthouse, shaped like an upside-down ziggurat of glass and concrete blocks. The fog was thick enough to shroud the lower part of the building, making the low, circular roof look as though it were floating.