Explain what happened, I think. You saw it. You saw me in the hole, bleeding. You know.
Hendricks watches me for a moment and then he shrugs, slow and elaborate, as if we’re talking not about an attempted murder but about some sloppy habit of mine to which he has resigned himself.
“My guess is that the victim fell,” he says finally. “Ground’s slippery. Nothing fencing the artwork.”
I make a noise and Ruiz looks suddenly puzzled.
“Did you fall?”
Hendricks nods behind her. Say yes, he mouths.
Ruiz spins on Hendricks. “Describe again what you found when you got the scene.”
“She was lying in the glass at the bottom of the hole, turned on her side.” His voice is casual, almost resentful, as if he’s told the same version of the story many times. “The suspect was nowhere in sight. I jumped down, cut up my hands”—he holds up one bandaged fist—“stopped the victim’s bleeding, and called for help.”
“Suppose you start a little earlier,” Ruiz says sharply. “You said you were on the estate already—why was that again?”
Hendricks tells her that Janis Rocque had asked him to attend a meeting between herself, Nelson de Wilde, and Bas Terrant to help determine the future ownership of the twelve paintings in Still Lives and other, earlier works by Kim Lord. Hendricks had just arrived at the parking lot when a friend of Maggie’s spotted him and said that Maggie had an urgent message for him. “And then I heard her scream,” he says, his eyes hard on mine. “I ran toward the sound and found her there, as I’ve described.”
“And you never saw the suspect emerge from the woods,” says Ruiz.
“No.”
“And you did not know the suspect was on the estate”—Ruiz extends every syllable to show her disbelief—“at the point you entered the sculpture garden.”
“Again, I guessed as much. I confirmed it with Maggie, at which point I called the unit.”
“Maggie, do you remember telling Detective Hendricks that you were pushed by Evie Long?” Ruiz asks me.
I shake my head. “I didn’t—”
“Did you fall or did someone push you?” she asks.
I stare back at Hendricks, shocked that this is the same man who gripped my hand last night. I see the new shadows in his face, the studied slouch that cloaks a fierce desperation. He’s not in Los Angeles to be a private investigator for rich ladies. He’s looking for something else here, and I, with my bumbling attempts to find the truth and save Greg, have been distracting him.
Now he wants me to lie. He knows Evie tried to kill me. Why does he want me to lie? So that he can get the credit for catching her? I did it. I stopped her. This is my story. Not his.
But he’s not taking the credit either.
My body feels bubbled, like I am a hot-water bottle filled to the brim, ready to pop.
“Did you fall or did someone push you?” Ruiz says again.
I did it. I stopped Evie. I want to shout this.
As soon as they leave together, the room expands. The window and walls are miles away, and my throat is so dry that I can’t swallow. I’m dying for water, though I am drowning in water. The capacity inside me to rise and get a cup, or to press the nurse’s button for help, has entirely disappeared. I close my eyes.
I don’t know why Hendricks asked me to lie.
I don’t know why, when I finally said I fell, it felt true.
Maybe I did fall. Maybe I goaded Evie to push me because I wanted to feel what her rage was like. To feel, face-to-face, a rage strong enough to kill so that I could finally understand it. I thought if I could slip inside the skin of a victim and emerge again, I might be able to explain why it happens. Wasn’t that the reason Kim Lord made Still Lives?
I lie on the hospital bed, motionless, under the weight of my own swollen flesh. I fell. I lived. I am nothing like Kim.
For the first time, a dark idea spreads in my mind: What if Kim didn’t choose this subject? What if it found her because she sensed, deep down, that she was about to die? She might have felt it somehow, when she caked her blond hair in fake blood, and painted her own slumped body, face down, the red gore pouring out of her. Nicole Brown Simpson was the first painting she made in the series. It took a year, according to Kim, until she “knew what to do with all the blood.” She shaped a tree with it, upside down, bearing its tiny fruit. A life-bringing image in the midst of a slaughter. Meaning in the darkest horror of human nature.
Did she believe in that herself? We’ll never know.
But I think it’s what she wanted us to see.
SUNDAY
29
My mother, Lillian, perches in the vinyl chair by my bedside from eight in the morning until seven at night, leaving tactfully and resentfully when the nurses come to change my dressing. She brings her yarn and needles, a British mystery novel, and ham sandwiches that she made in my kitchen; she brings her practical clipped-back blond hair, the graceful way her neck arches when she knits, and the little hisses she makes when she drops a stitch.
Against the backdrop of this busy urban hospital, my mother looks pale, lovely, and slightly stiff, as if she’s been washed on the delicate cycle and gently flattened to dry. She broadcasts a friendly voice at the nurses, but her eyes are glinty and watchful until all medical personnel leave the room. She doesn’t trust them. When she knows they’re gone, a rush of tenderness softens her features and she takes my hand and holds it tight.
I’m grateful for the tenderness. It keeps me from thinking about Hendricks or Evie or the dreams of falling that wake me every night for the last four nights here. My mother refuses to discuss the case or what happened to me in the bower.
“You need to move on so you can heal,” she says.
So instead of being pushed into a pit by a murderer, it’s as if I’ve contracted some terrible disease that has swollen my midsection and made me too dizzy to walk. Once I get over this illness, I will go back to being the Maggie she knew, the good daughter, instead of the clumsy, wannabe reporter who helped get a girl killed, traveled the world, and then moved far away.
“We could fix up the old homestead for you, if you want your own place,” she says. “Your father’s dying for a new project.”
My mother has decided that I’m coming home with her. I’m going on disability leave from the Rocque, and bit by bit, she is packing up my bungalow. I want to ask her if she found any evidence, something Evie planted to frame me, but I can’t. It now sounds crazy, even to me.
“Don’t throw away anything without asking me,” I tell her instead.
“Your furniture’s not worth keeping,” my mother says.
“I mean small things, Mom.”
“Small things add up,” she says.
“Just in case, ask me.”
But she doesn’t ask. Instead, we talk about boxes, temporary storage until I decide what’s next.
What we both don’t utter aloud: I might not come back to Los Angeles at all.
There is, of course, one formidable opponent to this plan. My mother, recognizing a sophisticated adversary when she meets one, won’t budge from her chair whenever Yegina comes.
“Oh I’ll just knit over here in the corner while you chat,” she says.
So we can’t talk about real stuff—not about Don or Bas or the case—but Yegina, not to be outflanked, brings a plethora of temptations to stay: dark chocolate laced with raspberry; honeybush tea; wrapped and beribboned macaroons from an overpriced bakery. The more exotic the edible, the more convinced Yegina is that it will heal me. She thinks people in hospitals suffer from the lack of sensory stimulation, so she’s also made me CD mixes, pasted reproductions of Kahlo and Matta paintings up on my walls, and scattered lemongrass sachets in my drawers.
“It’s so international in here,” my mother marvels, and pats my hand.
Today the doctors have come by with news about my discharge—a few more tests and I can go.