CHAPTER TWENTY

“So you just want to stay here for the rest of your life? Get your degree, marry an Ivy League brat, join a country club and chuckle at all the fools who don’t want to live like rich snobs?”

“What on Earth are you on about, Annie? I’m in school here. I can’t just leave that behind because you don’t get on with Mother.”

Annie chuckles and looks up at the ceiling. “Oh my God! Do you even realize how pretentious you sound? ‘Mother,’ and ‘Father.’ Like we’re all characters in some Victorian novel.”

“Do you realize how childish you sound?” I retort. “‘Oh, I’ve had such a rough life. I should throw away all of my opportunities and hitchhike across the country until I find myself. And while I’m at it, why not convince my sister to do the same thing?’”

“I don’t want to be here anymore!" she shrieks. "God damn It, Mary! I don't want to be here! I don't want to fucking be here!”

She falls silent, breathing heavily. Her face is filled with color, and her expression mirrors my own shock. We stand there for several minutes before she says again, “I just don’t see the point. So we have money. So what? We’re not happy. Dad’s pulled away from everyone and everything. Mom’s either going to kill herself or all of us one of these days. Maybe both. You’ve put on a shell of aggressive ordinariness and convinced yourself that you’re the only sane person and it’s everyone else who’s troubled.” I roll my eyes, but she ignores me. “And I can’t breathe anymore. It’s like I’m just screaming internally, but I can’t show it on the outside.”

“You did a pretty good job of screaming on the outside a few seconds ago.”

She meets my eyes. I see hurt in those eyes, but beneath the hurt, I see accusation, the same accusation she wore on her face when mother placed her next to the stove at five years old, and I didn’t warn her about the heat, the same accusation she wears when I watch mother try to drown her when she’s nine and do nothing to save her.

Then that hurt and accusation morphs into understanding. She sees me, or at least thinks she sees me more clearly than ever before. She scoffs and says, “You know, underneath it all, you’re just like Mom.”

I recoil as though slapped. “That’s enough, Annie.”

“It’s true, though. You hide it better than she does, but you’re just like her. You come across as sweet and nice and responsible, but there’s an evil streak in you that shows itself when push really comes to shove.”

“You don’t know what you’re saying.”

“Do you remember when Mom tried to drown me?”

My lower lip twitches. “I was ten years old. There was nothing I could do.”

“You’re right. She would have just killed you too. But you know something? When Dad showed up and pulled Mom off of me, and I finally lifted my head out of the water, you were the first person I looked at. And guess what? You were smiling. Just like this.”

She smiles at me, the bare-toothed grin of a witch. Reason flees me, and I rush at her, lips pulled back in a snarl, fingers extended like claws. “You lying bitch!”

***

I scream and flail my arms in front of me. They slice through the air but find no purchase on my attacker. I cry out again and shake my hair from my eyes.

The room is empty. I am staring at the drawings strewn on the floor. It’s dim, the only light present coming from the moon, unencumbered by clouds this night.

I’ve fallen asleep in Celeste’s room. I don’t remember lying down, but I must have. It’s still light out when I enter here, and now it’s the dead of night. I look at my phone. Two o’clock in the morning. I’ve been sleeping for hours.

I look up at the mirror then quickly away from the harpy that looks back at me. I try to remember my nightmare, but this one flees the instant I wake. It’s probably just as well. Whatever it was has frightened me to the point of nausea.

I release a ragged sigh and get slowly to my feet. Once again, I am too awake to expect any more sleep. I head downstairs to Victor’s art room instead. I don’t know what I’m looking for exactly, but as long as I’m awake, I might as well look through the rest of the drawers in the desk where I find his journal.

The stairs are dim as I descend them, and the basement is ghostly in the soft gray light of the moon. When I flip the switch in the art closet, and the bright yellow light tears the shadows from existence, the effect is jarring. I have another sigh, then walk into the room.

I open the top drawers and begin looking through the financial paperwork. I don’t expect to find anything here anymore than I did when I first looked, but I need something to do to calm the animal terror lurking in the recesses of my mind.

The paperwork is hundreds of sheets thick. Most of them are bills of sale for artwork dating back to when Victor was a student under Elias’s tutelage. A few record purchases of art supplies. Rarely, I’ll pull out a sheet with comic doodles on them, evidence of a bored Victor killing time while he waits for inspiration. None of the doodles appear connected with Victor’s or Celeste’s disappearance.

My mind slowly calms. When it does, it turns to the problem of Lisa. She is the odd woman out, but at the same time, not so much. She knew Elias, and she's worked with Victor for many years. She would have known Annie at least in passing, and Celeste hated her enough to attempt violence on her.

But why would she also be targeted? I have reason to believe that she would come after Victor herself but not reason to believe that someone would attack and kidnap both of them. I don’t believe Sean’s speculation that this is some sort of debt collection attempt. If it were only Lisa taken, I could believe it, but Victor is Lisa’s source of income and by extension the source of income for whoever she owes money to. I suppose that criminals aren’t logical, but it stretches reason to think that Victor could simply have been caught up in Lisa’s troubles.

It's not so unreasonable to think that he’s also in financial straits. If, as Marcus told Sean, he’s been unsuccessful commercially in recent years, he might be in debt as well. It still seems rather cartoonish that he would be taken by some cigar-smoking gangster in a pinstripe suit, but I suppose it’s at least conceivable. Maybe I’ll find more recent records here that will reveal if Victor was also in trouble.

I find nothing in the two smaller drawers more recent than twenty-nine years ago. I wonder if Victor even remembers that they’re still here. The thoroughness of these records indicates that at one point, at least, Victor was fastidious when it came to tracking his money, but the age of these records suggests that it may have been Elias pushing him to take care. Or perhaps part of his personality change when Elias was killed was to become more flippant about money in his quest to honor the artistic legacy of his teacher.

My mind is wandering again. God, I just hate not knowing! I hate swimming in a sea of secrets without understanding what the truth is! If only everyone could just be out in the open with everything. It might be possible to trust people then.

I open the last drawer, the larger one opposite the one that contains Victor’s journal. There are more financial records in there, and they appear far more recent than the ones in the smaller drawers. That’s promising.

The top papers are from six years ago. They include bills of sale for more recent works, commissions paid to Lisa, and gallery fees paid to Marcus and a few other gallery owners from venues outside of the Bay Area. It seems Victor was doing well for himself as recently as a few years ago.

In fact, as I leaf through the papers and come to more recent records, it appears that Victor has continued to do well. I don’t take time to do the math, but just from what these records indicate, he’s sold over one-point-five million dollars’ worth of art over the past six years. That is not extravagant wealth, to be sure, but it’s enough to support the lifestyle he enjoys.

And there are indications that he remains responsible, too. One of the records is the title to his home with a statement from his mortgage lender that the loan has been paid in full. This is dated eight months before he hires me, which explains how he can afford my salary without difficulty.

So he can’t be in debt. Unless he has a second home in Monaco and sails there on his four-hundred-foot superyacht, he hasn’t squandered his money.

I leaf to the last few pages in this stack and my eyes widen when I see them. They’re bank statements with four particular transactions highlighted. The statements begin ten months ago and end four months ago. Every four to eight weeks or so, Victor transfers twenty thousand dollars to Lisa Reinhardt, totaling eighty thousand dollars during the six-month timeframe he loaned her money.

But why? And what does this have to do with their disappearance?

One possibility is that Victor and Lisa are in love with each other, and Celeste's hatred of Lisa is motivated by jealousy. Lisa may have come to Victor for help, and he paid her a great sum to cover her debt. Then, once it became clear that his help wouldn't be enough to save Lisa, he staged their disappearances so they could leave and be together. It's a fanciful idea, but not less fanciful than any of the other possibilities, and certainly not unheard of.

The other possibility is that Victor's mental break was unrelated to Lisa's debt, and Lisa staged her own disappearance because she lost her source of income. That explains the tension between the two of them at dinner. Victor may have been refusing to help her recently, and she may have come to beg him for money again. Celeste's hatred would in that case be contempt for Lisa and protectiveness toward her father.

I sigh and bring my hands to my chin, interlacing my fingers in front of my mouth. I’m so close. I’m right on the cusp of an answer, I can feel it. It just won’t come to me. The fate of an innocent young girl may rest on the answer to this question, not to mention mine and Sean’s fate.

And time is running out.