A. Rich - The Hand That Feeds You

She held the leash with both hands. “Audie needs to know a person before you can touch her.”

Far from a welcome, this woman had brought backup. We walked from the jitney stop and headed slowly up Main Street away from the wharf. I chose to walk to the right of Pat since she had Audie on her left. I thanked her for agreeing to meet me. We passed three shops targeted for tourists before she said, “I thought we might take Audie over to Havens Beach. It’s about a fifteen-minute walk.”

We fell into an easy pace, and after a couple more blocks I said I needed a coffee and could I bring her one, too. She said she didn’t drink coffee, just tea, but when I offered to bring her tea instead, she said she only drank green tea and the deli I was heading into did not have it. I was in and out in a couple of minutes with only the coffee.

We continued up Main Street until Pat turned left onto a residential street. Everything I’d thought to ask or say was too lame to utter. The news I planned to deliver was the kind of news for which the time is never right. Still, I thought I would wait to tell her until we were on the beach.

Havens Beach, off-season, was nearly empty of people. But several unaccompanied dogs ran into and out of the gentle waves of the bay. I worried that Pat would unleash her unreliable dog, and then she did. Audie sniffed at my purse — the repository of so many treats.

“Just ignore her,” Pat said.

It came out in a rush. I told her that her ex-husband was dead.

“We were never married.”

Did Samantha lie to me, or did she really not know?

The moment Pat said that, Audie was at her side, fixing me in her gaze. Though Pat had not spoken loudly, the dog had picked up her distress and stood ready.

I told her the circumstances of his death. I told her that I had been engaged to him at the time. I told her that I was not the only one engaged to him at the time, and that another fiancée had just been murdered, possibly by Pat’s former lover.

So much for easing her into it.

“He never liked dogs and dogs never liked him.” Pat seemed remarkably composed, though her dog grew agitated, reacting to what I assumed were her true feelings. I waited for her to go on. Pat picked a piece of sea glass from the sand and examined it. “So he hadn’t changed. Only two fiancées?”

“This doesn’t surprise you.”

“He lived by his own rules.” Audie ran off into the waves. “But murder is a new one.”

“The police think he did it.”

“And you don’t?”

“I don’t know what I think.” I hadn’t noticed Audie’s return from the water until she shook off next to me.

“I know I’m not reacting the way you might have expected. But this man put me through it.”

“How long were you with him?”

“Long enough for him to derail my life. You?”

“I got off easy. Relatively.” I didn’t want to one-up her in any way. I wanted her to tell me what he had done to her.

“I was teaching an extension studio course out here, interviewing students during registration, when this cocky kid in tight jeans and a white T-shirt asked the department secretary if there was still room in my class. I was busy with another student. The kid — he looked about twenty-one — couldn’t or wouldn’t wait until I was free. When he turned to leave, I whispered to the secretary, ‘There’s always room in my class for him.’ I whispered, but the acoustics of the room were such that he heard me; I saw him stop. I had twelve years on him, but from then on he pursued me.

“I was painting then, looking for a gallery. He claimed great enthusiasm for my work and talked about opening a gallery someday. There was no biological clock ticking, but my gallery clock was ticking. You know the old joke about how the Holland Tunnel was built: they gave New Jersey artists teaspoons and said the first one to dig to Manhattan gets a gallery. It took years for me to see what he had seen in me: an opportunity.

“He didn’t have money. He had charm. And he charmed me out of everything I cared about.”

We were walking in step along the hard-packed sand, taking turns throwing a stick for Audie to retrieve.

“The irony was that I taught him everything he knew about art, without even knowing I was doing it. And when he knew enough to realize the value of my grandfather’s paintings, he stole the only two canvases of his that I had. His going-away present to himself.”

“Jesus.”

“It gets better. I was hurt that he didn’t steal my work.”

“He caused a lot of us a lot of hurt.”

“How many are we talking about here?”

“Including myself, four that I know about. That’s concurrent, not consecutive.”

That got a small laugh from her. Audie seemed to share in the mood change; she flipped onto her back in the sand and kicked her legs in the air, then righted herself and shook the sand off. We had been walking into the wind, and a further synchronicity had us turn together to head back. Pat asked if I’d like to see her studio.

We walked for another twenty minutes before she turned onto a narrow dirt drive through the woods. I feared ticks despite the low temperature. What was the cutoff point when you didn’t have to worry about them? We moved through scrub oak and pine, the soil sandy. I was wishing I had not worn my good suede boots. These woods had not been cleared of storm damage, and we had to climb over broken limbs.

Pat’s studio was a weathered silver-cedar barn about the size of a three-car garage, with an old sliding door bolted shut and padlocked. After turning the combination right, left, and then right again, Pat threw her weight into the push that slid the door open. She slapped the wall where a switch was, and fluorescent light filled the space. It was much larger than it looked from the outside.

I had expected generic seascapes and was surprised by the life-size nude photographs of her posed with a bloody heart held against her left breast.

“Don’t worry, it’s a pig’s heart.”

Was I worried? I was now. In the photos she looked about ten years younger than the woman standing next to me. Pat preempted whatever I might have thought to say with a single word: “Subtle. I did these right after he left; I got them out after you called last night.” She pointed to another wall. “Here’s what I’m up to now.”

Here were the seascapes, made modern by muted patterns of graphite waves. If Vija Celmins hadn’t got there first, Pat would have been onto something. Pat was adding to what was already in the world, instead of creating something new. It appeared that Bennett had also stolen her nerve.

She made us green tea and then gave Audie an enormous smoked femur to chew on. I was incredulous that Pat didn’t seem to see the horror of this after what I had told her about Bennett’s death. The sound of tooth on bone was unnerving.

As if on cue there was a noise outside — a sound like the snapping of branches underfoot. Audie raced to the window and set to barking and snarling. With the lights on in the studio, and the sun gone down, neither Pat nor I could see outside. Audie lunged at the glass and I feared it would break. I did a quick survey of the studio to see where I might hide. I was standing in a brightly lit, open space. I was close to panicking, yet Pat remained oddly oblivious.

“I switched to acrylic with this series. I don’t know if I like the surfaces as much, but I’m too impatient to wait for oil to dry.”

“Does Audie always act like this? Should we look outside?”

“It’s either a raccoon trying to get into the trash or a coyote. In either case, I’m not letting Audie out. My other dog was killed last week by coyotes.”

“Oh, God, I’m so sorry.”