Circles of Confusion

  Finally the detective said, "So, Ms. Montrose, please tell me what has happened here. And who this Charlie is, and why you think he is missing."

  "I think maybe someone was looking for a painting and took Charlie instead." She watched his reaction carefully, but his face stayed expressionless as he wrote down the word painting and underlined it. His eyes remained guileless as he looked up, pen poised.

  "A painting?"

  "A little painting I recently inherited." She took a deep breath. "I think my finding the painting is related to everything that's happened."

  "And may I see this painting, please?"

  "Is that really necessary?" Uneasiness brushed her. Had it been a mistake to tell him about the painting? But she had to, didn't she, if she wanted Charlie found?

  His voice was peevish. "I am attempting to obtain as complete and accurate an understanding of events as is possible. And to do that, I'll need to see the painting."

  "I don't have it." Claire took a deep breath, exhausted by the thought of explaining how she had hidden it in her office, then having to take him there and introduce him to Bruce the security guard.

  Before she could say anything else, his face began to change. Suddenly his long white teeth and pale eyes reminded her of a wolf. "What?" It was as if the functionary who existed only as a tool to take down her words had been put away, and something more feral—and more real—was taking its place. "Where is it, then?" He leaned forward and grabbed her wrist, enunciating each word through clenched teeth. "Where is the painting?"

  Before Claire's mind could react, her body did. She watched her wrist move down and then back up, rotating toward his thumb, breaking his hold. Claire was on her feet and almost to the door before she felt his hand again close on her arm. Like a dancer executing a showy move, he brought her back to him with a snap.

  A squarish silver shape loomed in the corner of her eye, and she reared her head back to see what it was. A gun had appeared in his right hand. At least she thought it was a gun. Although maybe if he wasn't a police detective—which was beginning to seem pretty likely—maybe this wasn't a real gun. Claire had never seen one up close. Maybe it was a lighter or a squirt gun, a novelty item purchased for $3.99. A play gun purchased at the same place he had bought the shiny gold badge that he'd probably paid an extra dollar to personalize.

  Then he pressed its cold open mouth against her temple, and she knew it was real.

  Everything was moving in slow motion. Claire had once gone scuba diving on a cheap package tour to Hawaii, and this was how it

  had felt. The claustrophobic sound of her own breathing, heavy and slow, filled her ears. It was the sound you heard in disaster movies when the shark was about to make an appearance. Only this shark was already preparing to take a bite.

  Paul Roberts—if that was who he really was—hooked one foot behind her ankles, locking Claire in place, then moved his left hand from the small of her back and ran it roughly under her arms, between her legs, over her breasts. The world narrowed to his groping hand. This was it, then, he was going to rape her, probably right here on the floor amid the shattered remains of her life.

  "What is this?" She realized he had been frisking her. His cool fingers fumbled under her chin, then with a jerk he unzipped her jacket, exposing her forgotten backpack. It now hung, slack and half-empty, over her black turtleneck.

  "It's the painting," she said, striving to make her voice dejected. "See?" She didn't give him time to react, simply pulled the backpack's zipper open just far enough to allow her hand to wiggle in, past pens and PowerBars and a paperback mystery, until her fingers closed on a cylinder the size and shape of a cigarette lighter. It was Evan's gift from last Valentine's Day—a canister of pepper spray. With a jerk, she pulled it free, pointed it in his direction, and then closed her eyes and mouth and turned her head away as she depressed the trigger. Acrid droplets pricked her face, and her eyes and nose immediately burned and began to run. "Shit!"

  Claire felt more than saw him loosen his hold on her, and she was off. One foot landed on a magazine and sailed out from under her, but she somehow managed to break her fall and bounce back to her feet again in a single movement. Weebles wobble but they don't fall down, she thought. She waited for a bullet to drill into her flesh. There was a crash behind her as her assailant tried to navigate the same obstacle course more or less blind.

  Outside, her slitted eyes revealed a world that was not nearly dark enough, lit by a three-quarter moon and the distant spangle of stars. The cold, fresh air relieved the stinging in her eyes and nose a bit. Claire ran past her Mazda, then a late-model white four-door parked behind it. Complete with a portable police light resting on the driver's side of the dash. Did that mean the man who was now chasing after her really was a cop?

  Claire risked a glance behind her in time to see him stumble to the doorway. She turned back and ran harder than she ever had in her life. Across the empty street, between the neighbor's overgrown arborvitae, across their yard, over a low fence, through an apartment parking lot, past the neighborhood fire station. She could run in there for help, and for a moment she could picture it—brawny men leaping up to protect her—but Paul Roberts, whoever he was, was such a smooth talker that he could probably flash his badge and reclaim her over any protests she might make.

  Lungs burning, she ran on, thankful that she had chosen to wear her Nikes to breakfast with Troy, nearly twenty-four hours ago. Past Manana's Mexican restaurant, dark for the night, through the pumps of the closed Chevron station, and then right on to Barbur Boulevard.

  She risked a glance over her shoulder, but the dip in the road hid her house. No white car, though, at least not yet. No cars at all, in fact, which posed another problem. Paul Roberts would probably be less likely to shoot her if there was a potential witness. But Barbur Boulevard at nearly one in the morning offered the exact opposite of what Claire needed. It was both too empty and too bright to offer her any protection, lit by neon signs advertising businesses that were shuttered for the night.

  While her mind fretted over what to do, her feet made their own decisions, determined to put as much distance as possible between Claire and danger. She darted from shadow to shadow, behind the

  Subway shop, past a sour-smelling Dumpster, through a motel parking lot, behind a darkened mini-mall offering a variety of useless services. Her left Achilles tendon knotted up. In her mouth was the faint coppery tang of blood. She imagined capillaries in her lungs popping under the pressure.

  A tan car passed her, then a purple compact going the other way. There was a white blur of a face turning to watch a woman wearing street clothes running flat out in the middle of the night. But no one stopped or even slowed down. What to do, what to do? Should she turn off Barbur into one of the sleeping residential neighborhoods that bordered the street? It would be darker there, but even more deserted. Too easy to draw attention to herself. She imagined crouching behind someone's garage while their slavering Rottweiler held her at bay, just waiting for the police—in the form of Detective Roberts—to arrive.

  Claire kept running, running, still not knowing where she was going, risking an occasional glance behind her. With all the muscles that ran down her left leg constricted, it was now more of a lurching lope than a run. She wanted nothing more than to sink down on the sidewalk outside the shuttered Boston Market, draw her knees up to her chest, and curl into a ball.

  Just then she saw her savior in the turnaround at the Barbur Boulevard transit mall. A maroon-striped Tri-Met bus, idling.

  L8RG8R

  Chapter 24When Claire knocked on the bus's folding door, the driver started and dropped the paperback he was reading. She pressed herself flat against the side of the bus, her chest heaving as she sucked in great gulps of acrid exhaust. The driver looked at her curiously, then leaned forward and pulled a lever to crack open the door a half- inch.

  "When are you leaving?" Claire managed to gasp out. That was a lot more important than where he was
going. She risked a peek around the nose of the bus—was that a white car three blocks down the street?

  "In twenty minutes I'm going to the downtown transit mall." The bus driver, a guy in his mid-fifties who looked like an Irish bartender—black hair, blue eyes, and a nose as big as a potato— leaned forward to pick up a tattered copy of Pride and Prejudice off the floor.

  "Any chance I could talk you into going sooner?" It definitely was a white car, moving at a crawl, the driver's window rolled down.

  The bus driver followed Claire's gaze. The white car was near enough now that she could make out the burnished glow of Paul

  Roberts's hair and the rectangle of a black cellular phone pressed against his ear. His head was turned away from them as he scanned the parking lot shared by Barbur Boulevard Foods and a liquor store. In the next few seconds he would surely swivel his gaze to examine the other side of the street.

  "Like that, is it?" the driver said, and the door sighed all the way open. Claire scrambled on board and crouched on the front seat behind the driver. "I guess it wouldn't matter if the bus left a little early. You're the first passenger I've had on this route in at least a month." The book thumped on the dash, and he shifted the bus into gear.

  When they passed the white car, Claire raised her head far enough to watch Paul Roberts's eyes flick right past the bus as he drove farther down the street.

  Thirty minutes later, Claire stood in front of the door to Evan's apartment, licking clean the plastic square that a few seconds earlier had been filled with neon orange processed cheese, part of a cheese and cracker "Snak-Pak" she had discovered in the bottom of her backpack. Snak-Pak. Good Lord. No wonder American kids couldn't spell. The cheese, like the crackers before it, tasted wonderful, salty and greasy and even a little bit sweet. She realized the last thing she'd eaten had been a Flybees turkey sandwich on unadorned white bread.

  After three pushes on the bell, she finally heard Evan shuffling to the door. Claire hastily stuffed the empty cracker packet in her pocket, then took a half-step back so Evan would be able to see her clearly through the peephole. Locks clicked and chains rattled before the door finally opened to reveal Evan in his blue cotton-poly pajamas, eyes screwed half shut. The back of his hair stood up in a rooster tail. Claire had never been so glad to see him. She ran forward to give him a hug.

  He gave her a half squeeze, then pulled back from her grasp.

  Then he frowned at the black digital Timex that never left his wrist. "It's one-seventeen in the morning." Evan did not appreciate being woken in the middle of the night, as Claire had discovered on their first trip out of town when she had tried to awaken him after having had a sexy dream. "What's the matter?"

  At his question, something clicked within her. She was finally safe, safe enough to contemplate the magnitude of what had happened. Tears began to stream down her face. "Oh, Evan, God, I'm in trouble. I came home and Charlie's missing and someone trashed our house and maybe killed our neighbor instead of me and now some guy with a gun is chasing me and I think he's a cop!"

  "What?" He scrubbed his face with his hands. "What are you talking about? Slow down and start from the beginning."

  Claire realized she didn't know where the beginning was. A half- century ago, when Goring had used his newly acquired power to assuage his lust for art? Or had the whole thing really been set in motion by her aunt's death two weeks ago? Or should she begin with Avery's and the appraisal of her painting as a fake? Or the moment she had first seen a painting so very much like hers—only hanging on the walls of the Metropolitan Museum of Art?

  The last time Claire had talked to Evan had been when they argued about her going to New York. How was she supposed to explain everything that had happened in between?

  Claire decided to tell the story more or less in chronological order, beginning with the appraisal at Avery's. She tried, but once Evan realized the painting might be real he kept stopping her to quiz her about how much it could be worth. When was the last time a Vermeer had come on the market? How much had it been sold for? Did she know how much that translated into in today's dollars?

  On her walk from the bus stop, Claire had imagined Evan taking her in his arms while she sobbed out her story. Instead he got the calculator from his desk and began to tap in numbers, not even looking at her while she talked.

  And there was no way to tell her story without mentioning Troy and Dante, much as she was reluctant to. Here in Evan's practical apartment, all hard-edged modern furniture that could be wiped clean with a sponge, the two men seemed like insubstantial ghosts. They both cared so deeply about art, while the only art Evan owned was a reproduction abstract—shades of gray and black with a single slash of red—that had been the same one used in the furniture store's display.

  Even though he was now paying more attention to her words than to money, Evan didn't make telling this part of her story any easier. He quizzed her from a chrome-armed chair while Claire sat on the equally uncomfortable couch across from him, holding her head in her hands like a penitent. She was so exhausted that her cheekbones felt as if they had been replaced by balls of lead.

  "Do you mean to tell me that you went out with two different men in the jive days you were in New York?" Well, she hadn't meant to tell him that at all, but it had been impossible to avoid mentioning what she had learned over wine or espresso or bagels with lox. Evan continued to ask question after question, but about nothing that Claire considered important. What did this Dante do for a living, exactly? Why had she gone out to breakfast with this Troy instead of prudently arriving at the airport several hours early?

  While Evan fixated on the wrong things, a part of Claire tried to make sense of the things that were really important, asking herself the questions Evan didn't know enough to. Were the break-in at her hotel and the destruction of her house related, or had two different people been behind them? And why would someone blow up her neighbor's car—especially if killing Claire would probably mean destroying the painting at the same time? And what about the man who had told her his name was Paul Roberts? Was that his real name? Was he a real cop? Did he know what had happened to Charlie?

  The more questions Claire thought of, the more she realized she didn't have the answers. There was only one thing she was certain of. The painting must be real, or else why would it be causing her so much trouble?

  A sound in the hall behind Evan made Claire straighten up, her mind blank with panic. Footsteps. Someone else was in this apartment, then. She had been foolish to think she had escaped. Paul Roberts must have broken in. She imagined silver eyes leveling on her again, remembered the way the gun had bit into her temple.

  Moving faster than a thought, she ran for the door and began to fumble with the locks. Too slow. Too slow. Behind her, Evan was silent and she imagined his shock as he faced a gun—one of his feared statistics coming to life. She braced for a bullet that never came. Finally—although it was really only a matter of seconds— Claire turned to confront whoever had entered the room.

  It took her a minute to recognize Marcia, Evan's receptionist from Kissling Insurance. For one thing, she lacked the strappy four- inch heels she habitually wore. But she was still dressed in a Marcia-ish way, in black satin tap pants and bustier, topped by a red satin robe that she made no attempt to close. Her legs were as impossibly long and slim as a Barbie doll's, and like Barbie, Claire saw that she was forced to walk on her toes, her Achilles tendon shortened by too many years of too-high heels.

  Despite her outfit, or lack thereof, Marcia wasn't flustered at all. She sat on the arm of Evan's chair and regarded Claire coolly. Evan was the one who blushed, pulling at the collar of his pajama top as if he wanted to cover up the few blond hairs that sprouted there.

  "What is she doing here?" It was Claire who should have said those words, but Marcia who spoke them, as calmly as if she were in her own apartment. Claire wondered how long she had been coming here. Since Claire had found the painting, she was seeing sides to people
she would never have guessed existed.

  "Nothing," Claire said. "I'm not doing anything at all." She sprung the last lock and stepped out into the hall. It was only as the door clicked closed behind her that she wondered where she would go.

  IRITEI

  Chapter 25Trouble, Claire realized, would best be faced by someone who was familiar with it. Someone who knew what to do when the police might be out to get you and old friends couldn't be trusted. Someone who knew how to keep his mouth shut. And it didn't hurt if that someone was family—someone like J. B., Susie's live-in boyfriend.

  Claire called him from a pay phone on the corner, facing out, reflexively checking the passing cars to make sure none of them was a white, late-model four-door. Less than fifteen minutes later, J. B. was pulling up in his beat-up red pickup. At the sight of J. B.'s untrimmed beard, face pitted with acne scars and tattered blue-and- gray Pendleton that predated Nirvana by at least two decades, Claire felt her tension begin to unravel. And unlike Evan, J. B. didn't seem driven by a need to know exactly what had happened to leave her stranded at two in the morning on a downtown street corner with no money, no car and no desire to go home.

  "Mind if I smoke?" J. B. asked after they had ridden five minutes in silence.

  "Would it be okay if you waited until we got to your place? I'm so

  hungry I feel nauseated." The last time she had used the word had been when she corrected Troy in Cri du Coeur, a world away from this battered pickup. The side window was cold against her cheek. She would have pulled her legs up on the bench seat, except the space was occupied by her nephew's dark blue car seat.

  "So it sounds like the first thing you need is food. What else?"

  "What?" Claire started, then realized she had been someplace between waking and sleeping.

  "You called me. You're out all alone in the middle of the night and jumpy as a cat. I figure something is wrong. So what else do you need?"