Charles De Lint - Memory and Dream

“Paintings,” Davis repeated.

Hermanez nodded. “Me, I’d have them evaluated and insured if they’re that valuable, you know what I mean?”

But Davis wasn’t listening. The connections were weaving more tightly together now. He’d seen those paintings. They were by the same woman who, according to Alan Grant, was going to be illustrating this collection that Margaret Mully had been so set on suppressing before she’d been murdered. Had the Indian killed her? Maybe they’re running some kind of scam together and when it goes bad, the Indian kills Mully, then tries to pull this heist so that he can still come out ahead.

Flimsy, Davis, he told himself. Very flimsy. But he was curious now. “You remember who they talked to?” he asked the desk sergeant.

“I forget her name. Remember the black woman who brought that bunch of kids by for a tour of the precinct last month? She was a real looker.”

Davis had to think for a moment. “Something Hamilton,” he said. “Rosanne. No, Rolanda.”

“That’s her. She’s the one that stopped them and did most of the talking. Want me to get someone to track down their report?”

Davis shook his head. “No. I think I’ll swing by the Foundation on my way home and have a talk with her myself “

“Now you’ve got me feeling itchy,” Hermanez said. “What do you see here that I don’t?”

“Nothing,” Davis told him. “At least not yet. But the only lead I’ve got in a case that Mike and I are working on is a ponytailed Indian and the really interesting thing is that our case has a connection to the Foundation as well.”

“You’re talking about the old witch that got murdered last night—the one who wanted to take away all the money from the Foundation’s kids.”

Davis nodded.

“Maybe you should give the guy a medal, if you find him,” Hermanez muttered.

“If it was up to me,” Davis admitted, “maybe I would.”

“Course, we don’t condone murder on our turf,” Hermanez said. “No matter how much the victim deserved it.”

“Of course,” Davis agreed.

The two men smiled at each other. Davis tipped a finger against his brow and headed out to his car.

VIII

Isabelle recovered first. While Cosette still wept quietly against Marisa’s shoulder, Isabelle finally stepped out of Alan’s embrace. She didn’t look any better, Alan thought. All that had changed was that the tears had stopped. Lodged in her eyes was a wild and desperate grief. She started to speak, then dropped her gaze and swallowed thickly. Turning away, she picked up a clean rag from the work-table and first wiped her eyes with it, then blew her nose. With her back to them, she squared her shoulders and stared at the unfinished painting on her easel.

“How ... how much do you know?” she asked.

She spoke with the same empty voice she had earlier. Alan glanced at Marisa, but Marisa only shrugged as if to say, Play it however you think is best. Alan sighed. It was probably the wrong thing to do, considering how Isabelle was feeling at the moment, but he knew the time had come to put aside all the bullshit.

“I think we’ve pretty well figured it all out except for a couple of things,” he said.

“Even the numena?”

Alan glanced at Cosette. “Maybe especially the numena.”

Isabelle let the silence hang between them for a moment. Alan shifted from one foot to another, but before he could speak, Isabelle asked, “So what do you need to know?”

“Why did you keep Kathy’s letter from me?” Alan asked. “Why did you pretend that Paddyjack had burned in the fire? And why did you turn your back on me at Kathy’s funeral?”

He wasn’t trying to rekindle old arguments or make her feel bad. He asked because he had to understand. Before they could go on from here, before he could be of any help, he had to have something more than old ghosts and memories to work with. There was a solution to their current situation, and he was sure they could find it. But the trouble was, he also knew it was tangled up somewhere in the middle of all the lies and evasions that had grown up between them over the years. Not just since Kathy’s death, but from before that. It dated back to the fire on Wren Island, when all of her artwork had supposedly gone up in flames along with the farmhouse.

Isabelle turned to look at him, but her gaze could only hold his for a moment. It shifted to the worktable, where she picked up a yellow-handled utility knife with a retractable blade from in among the brushes and tubes of paint. Turning it over and over in her hands, she walked over to the nearest wall.

With her back to the wall, she slid down until she was sitting on the floor, legs drawn up to her chest. She put the knife down on the floor beside her and hugged her knees.

“I ... I’ve got a problem with negative situations,” she said.

She still wouldn’t look at him. Her voice was so soft that he had to walk over to where she was and sit down across from her. Marisa followed suit with Cosette in tow, settling down beside Alan. Isabelle took a deep breath and slowly let it out.

“When something ... bad happens,” she went on, “I ..” She broke off again, but this time she looked at Alan. “Remember how Kathy used to say that all we had to do was reinvent the world when we didn’t like it the way it was? If we believed it was different, then it would become different?”

Alan nodded.

“You and I, we always argued with her about that. We’d try to tell her that the world was a far more complicated place and just because one person decided to see things different, it didn’t mean that things would actually change.”

“I remember,” Alan said. “And then she’d say, if it changed for you, then that was enough.”

“Except I could never do it—at least that’s what I’d say—but I learned the trick too well and the irony is that Kathy couldn’t do it at all.”

“You’re losing me.”

“I found her journal. She didn’t lead a very happy life, Alan. She couldn’t reinvent the world at all.

But I did. I just didn’t know I was doing it. Something bad would happen to me and I’d simply shift the facts around until it was something I could deal with. It’s like when I’ve talked about my parents in interviews, I’m always going on about how supportive they were, how they were so proud of me, right from the first.”

Alan remembered the first time he’d read that in an issue of American Artist and how he’d thought she was saying that just so that she wouldn’t hurt her mother’s feelings. Because he’d known the truth.

“It was such bullshit,” Isabelle said, “but I wanted to believe it. I didn’t want to remember how I was a disappointment to my father from the time I wasn’t born a boy right up until the day he died. I never did one right thing in my life, so far as he was concerned, and he was always ready to tell me about it. And my mother wouldn’t say a thing. She’d just keep on doing her chores, as though it was normal for a parent to batter down their child’s self-esteem the way he did.”

She picked up the utility knife and began to play with it again, rolling it back and forth on her palm.

“I got tired of being the person who came out of that environment,” she said, “so somewhere along the line I reinvented how it happened, and you know, Kathy was right. Once you do it, once you really believe it, the world is different. All of a sudden you have that much less baggage to drag around with you.

“So at Kathy’s funeral—”

“I really believed that she’d died in the hospital of cancer. I I ... I convinced myself that that was the truth because I couldn’t live with what had really happened. Kathy just couldn’t have killed herself. Not the Kathy I knew.”