Evie’s flipping open her phone every two minutes now, glancing over her shoulder back to the parking lot. She’s going to bolt. I want to bolt. I want to knock on the door of Janis Rocque’s solar home and hide in some clean, modernist parlor until Evie escapes and someone else chases her. My purse—stuffed with the recorder—is dragging on my shoulder like a stone. I could make an excuse and run to the gatehouse, tell the old guy to let no one out. Maybe there’s even a phone in there. I could call the LAPD right now.
Dee’s voice interrupts my thoughts. “And through this hedge is your special surprise, Maggie.” She bows to me and points to a path snaking into a bower of trees. “I stumbled on it yesterday,” she says. “Janis said she bought it years and years ago—but she didn’t trust anyone to install it properly until she met Brent Patrick. He did this and a couple of other tricky installations for her last year.” She takes a breath and shakes her head. “He’s kind of clueless, really. I don’t think he knew about your connection, or he would have told you it was here.”
At the mention of Brent, Evie stays expressionless, but I see her hand tighten on her phone.
I walk through first, keeping a cushion between me and Evie. As the green branches close around me, I hear Yegina call out, “Hey, I have to make a quick call.” And then, “There’s no reception. I’m going closer to the house.”
Her departure sends needles of fear into me. I wanted her to go for help, but I also need her here.
Dark limbs stretch overhead. Although the path is clear and level, the grove seems jumbled compared to the open fields. A pleasurable coolness seeps up from the earth. The ground here is deep grass, broken by a hole in the earth, long as a schooner and about six feet across. They must have dug it out with shovels. You couldn’t get an excavator in here, not with the thick ring of trees that surround the clearing, not with this lush, trackless grass. How far down did they go? The hole looks like a miniature version of the fault lines I have seen out in the desert, but its depth seems dark and forbidding.
Dee bumps into me and I fight back a squawk. She’s urging me to step closer, read the plaque.
Instead I look back at Evie, whose face glows with curiosity.
“Read it,” Dee says.
I drift sideways, out of Evie’s reach, and bend down to see the bold brass lettering:
THERESA FERGUSON
CLEFT, 1970
“Must be a different artist,” I say. “Greg’s mother sculpted in glass.”
“Look closer,” Dee says. I keep an arm’s length from Evie as I tiptoe to the edge of the rift. The ground is firm up to the last step, and then I feel its looseness, a spongy, crumbly edge where the grass roots cannot hold it. The air smells of soil and dampness.
“The main trick was getting the sun and shade right,” says Dee as I crane my neck and see them fifteen feet below: dozens—no, hundreds—of glass apples piled on either side of a long, gleaming blade, sharp as a guillotine. “So you could discover them all at just the moment you might fall in.”
The blade runs the entire length of the hole, as high as my knee, its edge slightly beveled. Heaped around it, each glass apple is curvy, fleshy. And each is severed cleanly in half.
I step back, suddenly choked by an emotion I cannot name. When I look over, Evie is also stepping back, gingerly, like her footsteps might crush the grass.
A beeping fills the glade. Dee claws at her hip and pulls out her slim blue flip. “It’s Janis,” she says in a complicated tone. She waves at the far end of the clearing. “Just go that way. You won’t be disappointed.”
And she sprints off through the same gap in the trees, leaving me and Evie alone.
For a moment neither of us speaks. We just circle the hole, peering in, moving back. I slide a hand into my purse and turn my cassette tape on. How many minutes are left on it? Do I really expect a confession? No, but she will speak. I will get her to speak.
In the dappled shade, Evie’s gaze has softened, and she seems incapable of hurting anyone. I step closer to her anyway, because I have to, because I have put myself here. Out of the corner of my eye, I catch sight of the apples piled on either side of the blade. They look lush. And amputated. I remember Kevin’s notes: Symbol of female sexuality. Cleft apple = woman’s reproductive parts. Also, implied violence.
One of the last pieces in the puzzle comes to me.
“You thought I’d never figure it out.” My voice is low but sure. “I almost didn’t. I was looking for why, not how. And I couldn’t see the why for you. Jealousy wasn’t enough, though you were jealous of Kim. I know I was.” I step toward Evie.
She is backing up, cradling her phone.
“I hated her,” I say. “I hated the way she could just step in and absorb every last bit of Greg until there was nothing—and never would be anything—left for me.”
I move closer. Evie holds her ground. She stares at me with such intensity that it burns. My skin feels loose and hot on my face.
“But I couldn’t have killed her for that,” I say. “And neither could you. Until you heard Kim tell Brent about the baby. A baby meant it was all true.” I pause. Anger swells my voice; it’s my own anger. The bower is drawing closer with its black-gold-green light, and Evie’s rapid blinking tells me I’m right, but she’s as silent as a statue. “It meant he never really loved you.”
As I’m talking, the murder plays again like a movie in my mind, only I don’t see Evie doing it, I see myself: flicking the table saws on, and walking in on Kim alone, changing her clothes in Brent’s office. I bring the mallet down on the back of her head in one heavy, awkward blow. The body falls. The blood spurts and flows. I wrap the body in one of the painting tarps. Stab Kim’s belly with the Jason Rains syringes. Roll a crate in from the carpentry room, load it, and order a storage delivery. Clean the room and dump the clothes and gloves in the crate.
“You’re her size,” I tell Evie. “You could wear her disguise out of the museum. If you went fast enough, no one would know.”
A wind from somewhere shifts the trees, freckling the glade with fresh light. Inside the hole, the glass apples shine and darken.
“I should go,” Evie finally says in a remote voice.
“You took the elevator so people would see you,” I say, my mind racing ahead. I see myself departing the museum in Kim’s clothes, wig, and sunglasses, hurrying down to Pershing Square. “And then you changed somewhere, maybe your car, and came back through the loading dock, and escorted the crate to the storage facility. Then rerouted it again somewhere. Your loft.”
It was barely possible. Evie’s loft rose in a warehouse neighborhood of brick and rust and emptiness. No one would hear Kim dying there. And the burial in the Angeles National Forest? She might have dug the grave at night. Buried the body on the weekend. What terrible, exhausting, lonely tasks, in a city filled with them. I can’t reconcile the slight figure in front of me with the dread and struggle of what she’s done. Was it really Evie who struck the blow? Was it really Evie who closed her ears to Kim’s muffled screams? Was it really Evie in my apartment last night? It’s easier to still picture a strange man, a nameless perpetrator. Then I remember Evie in the mirror of the gym studio, the determination that can flush her strong and rigid. Stronger than anyone I know.
In the distance, the dull roar of a mower. Evie shakes her head, presses her lips together. I’m losing her. I’m losing the connection I made with her over hating Kim Lord.
“You did it for Brent’s sake. He didn’t want a baby,” I say.
Evie almost nods.
“It wasn’t his, though,” I say. “It was Greg’s. Greg’s baby is dead. And now Brent is leaving—with you or with Barbara?”
With Barbara. It has to be.