Sketched Page 6

  “I mean that a diet of red wine and misery is not necessarily the best for you. You need to throw a lettuce leaf in there sometimes at least.”

  Piper blushed. She could feel her cheeks become hot and she looked away.

  “I eat,” she said lamely.

  Adam walked to the dual door refrigerator his last scholarly article had paid for and opened it. His expression more aloof than Piper had thought possible, he pulled the plate she had neglected last night out. He held it toward her.

  “It was great, Adam. Really hit the spot,” he said, twisting his mouth to create a tragic recreation of her voice.

  “That was a terrible accent.”

  “You’re a terrible liar.”

  Piper opened her mouth to retort, her tired and severely hung over brain scrambling for something clever enough to say to get him off her back. She was coming up blank. Adam placed the plate on the long, picnic-style table in the center of the room. He leaned against it, adjusting his glasses in the way that Piper knew signaled a speech was coming.

  “Your new paintings are utterly incredible Piper,” he began.

  “Uh oh, he used my name,” Piper said, her attempts at levity falling flat between them.

  “They are terrifying. Really unsettling, I’ll give you that. I can barely handle looking at them for longer than a few minutes. I have no doubt that the dreams you’ve been having in order to create them are even more so. But that’s all they are. Dreams.”

  Frustration fell like a fog across Piper’s mind. She had heard this monologue so many times that her brain was starting to automatically ignore it. It was becoming so that whenever Adam jumped on his soothing, reassuring scientific platform, she didn’t hear a single word.

  She fidgeted, pulling the towel tighter around her.

  “There are no ghosts. No spirits. No unsolved murders. I know we’ve talked about this for years, but I get the feeling you’ve not actually taken it seriously. There is no mystic door in your mind that connects you to some psychic world. You’ve always been a highly creative person Piper. The visions when you were younger?”

  Piper interrupted him, still shivering.

  “Undiagnosed seizure disorder, got it.”

  “Which we’ve got under control,” Adam continued. “Anything you’re seeing or feeling now is your brain responding to the injury, that’s all. It’s like pouring gasoline on an already blazing inferno, really. I mean, obviously, it seems real but that’s entirely due to its position in the …”

  Piper chewed on the inside of her cheek, growing impatient like a teenager.

  She interrupted him again.

  “I know. The occipital cortex and countless other little hotspots it damaged along the way. I know. I get it. It’s all explainable, right? All I’ve got to do is deal with it. Pick up a brush and paint it away, right?” Piper was dismayed to feel herself losing control. Her throat began to thicken as her frustration threatened to turn to sadness. Don’t cry. Not standing here like a miserable, drowned little rodent. “Or even better, go sit crossed legged somewhere and practice our little self-hypnosis exercises, right? Breathe in positivity. Breathe out negativity and the pictures along with it. Ten minutes a day to freedom.”

  Adam crossed his arms as he watched her struggle to contain herself.

  “What you see as ghosts, or links to other people is just the damage in the brain working on what was already a very sensitive area for you. It’s a sensitive area for all extremely creative people.” His attempt at comforting her was failing that was obvious. There was moisture in her eyes causing her irises to glitter like something from an animated movie. His heart constricted with a sudden hit of guilt.

  Without warning, he picked up the food from the table and moved to the bin. He dumped the whole thing out, plate and all.

  “You love that plate!” Piper sniffed, shocked. “Isn’t that the one you ordered online?”

  Adam shrugged. “Thrift shop find. I didn’t like the way Lincoln’s hat looked. It was far too jaunty.”

  Piper smiled again and Adam relaxed. Success. At least he hadn’t lost his touch. It would be a sad day for him indeed when he couldn’t win her back.

  “Like any life-altering condition,” he continued, back in full command of her attention, “I’m afraid your tired, brilliant, damaged little brain is just something that needs to be managed. Wine, starvation and forty-five-minute naked swims may not be the best course of action.”

  “I’ll eat,” Piper said quietly. She brushed away a tear at the corner of her eye. “I promise. Tonight, I will eat.”

  “Can you get dressed first? I heard New York art dealers are a bit leery of backwoods nudity.”

  CHAPTER SIX

  * * *

  Piper’s Studio

  Annalisa French, despite her high social standing and country-wide acclaim in the modern art world, was a really ugly crier.

  Adam patiently escorted her through the bottom floor of Piper’s studio, his hand barely against the small of her back. The idea of touching her was appalling to him, even in her current emotional state. Chiefly, it was because he regarded the woman as nothing more than a vulture, circling his friend’s pain to pick away and feast on it later. Piper’s first set of paintings had made Annalisa’s career. In fact, the woman he was escorting from the studio had single-handedly transformed what was supposed to be a therapeutic practice for a dangerously injured young woman into a highly lucrative personal cash cow.

  She was a predator and Adam wasn’t in the habit of getting too chummy with those.

  “I’m sorry,” Annalisa gasped, placing one expensive shoe in front of the other unsteadily. “The work…it’s just so moving.” She let the word roll around in her mouth and then dribble out slowly. “So moving. This new series will stun the art world. Absolutely stun it.”

  She came to a halt at the door. Removing her plastic framed glasses which Adam estimated to be about three times too large for her face, she attempted to swipe away her tears. She made a fluttering gesture at Adam. “Tissue?” she asked. “I’ve made a big mess of myself.”

  He paused before reaching toward the catch-all table by the doors. She knew he wasn’t a butler, right? They hadn’t seen each other in person for a few years, but they’d began corresponding more often when Piper began painting again a few months ago.

  You mean, when Piper began suffering again.

  She’d even commented on his latest book in passing. Not that she read it of course. He’d place money on the fact that she hadn’t read anything not connected to gossip in over a decade. “Tissue?” She repeated, glaring at the mascara now dappling her fingertips. Adam snatched a few from the box and handed them to her. She took them without thanks and with more shuddering sighs began to dab carefully at her eye makeup.

  “So, I suppose I’ll keep in touch and let you know how the series is progressing.” Adam looked impatiently to the door. He wanted her out. How wonderful would it be to tell her to flap those withered grey wings of hers and fly home?

  Annalisa had apparently not heard him. She placed her glasses back on her face and looked to the ceiling as if gathering herself.

  “I mean, I am still so affected by them. It’s otherworldly you know, like a visceral response to the work. Particularly the old woman. There was something so familiar about her, I mean…she could be all our grandmothers, all our mothers, the displaced senior in a youth obsessed culture. The eyes, my god…you are living with a genius you know that? Do you know how lucky you are? That girl is easily the strongest voice in modern portraiture today. To be able to witness her process? It must be fascinating.”

  She had stopped gazing heavenward and had turned back to Adam. Despite her weeping earlier, her eyes were clear and sharp. The woman was calculating. Circling Piper’s body and waiting for those final, golden breaths.

  Adam felt himself slipping from impatience to annoyance. Her process? Did she mean the one that was practically killing the girl?

 
“Well, to be honest, process implies some kind of system and Ms. Cooke is more of an…” Adam paused, choosing his words carefully. More than once he’d found himself quoted on Annalisa’s webpage and the last thing he wanted was to aid her carrion feast in any way. “She’s more of an emotional painter. The portraits just emerge, I believe that’s how she puts it.” He trailed off, gesturing stiffly at the door. “Anyway, I’ll be in touch.”

  He was disappointed in himself for startling a bit when Annalisa stepped in front of him. She clasped her hands under her chin in what he supposed she thought was a charming manner. Despite the glossiness of her ultra-moisturized skin, her hands were spotted and lined with age.

  “That’s just it. I was hoping you could help with a rumor.”

  “Spreading it or stopping it?”

  She moved closer. Adam moved back, trying to maintain a comfortable distance between the two of them as subtly as he could. Annalisa wasn’t having it. She peered at him through the magnifying lenses of her ridiculous looking glasses.

  “There’s a theory about her work,” she said. “It started when her first series came out and now that word’s out that she’s working again it seems that everyone is talking about it.”

  Somehow, Adam managed to stiffen even more.

  “We try not to pay attention to that kind of thing,” he said. He heard his own voice becoming more clipped. He had found that his accent came in handy when it came to intimidation for some people and he put it on as thickly as he could. “It rather tends to get in the way around here, I’m afraid.”

  Undeterred, Annalisa moved even closer. She dropped her voice to a false tone of confidentiality that made Adam have to work to stop squirming. He was reminded of the caresses of drunken aunts at Christmas parties and he was a bit surprised when her breath smelled more of cigarettes than eggnog.

  “They say,” the woman began, “that her work is a kind of communication with the beyond.” Having practically hissed it in his ear, Annalisa moved back. She scoured Adam’s eyes for a response. She got nothing. “Her first series, they say there are details in there that there’s no way she could’ve known. She has no memory of who shot her in that house, how could it be possible she remembers so many other things? About what was done to the girls, about how their bodies looked? Why they were there?” Her eyes were glittering, callous little specks. “Even the girl that survived it, she doesn’t remember a damn thing and it’s been almost five years. The buzz is that she’s some sort of psychic visionary.”

  Annalisa was pleased to see a sudden blush rising from Adam’s greyish beard and onto his cheeks. His mouth went hard with annoyance.

  “Absolute rubbish,” he said. “She’s an artist that’s all.”

  “Not to her buyers. Not the people willing to spend half a million on her smallest canvas. Her fan base, if you want to call them that, are firm believers that the little girl up there is the world’s first successful medium/painter.”

  Adam shook his head. He stepped away firmly to the right. She needed to leave. The last thing Piper needed, the last thing that he would allow was for her to overhear this conversation. Feeding into her own delusion that her dreams and subsequent paintings were links to dead people might be the one thing that would push her over the edge. As it was, he had the distinct impression that it was just a matter of time before Piper decided to find out just how deep that pond really was.

  He slid one of the large barn doors open. It rattled on its hinges, allowing the burnt late afternoon light into the room. He was a little harsher than necessary and it made a satisfying boom as rolled to its fully open position.

  “It’s getting late,” he announced. “The world’s first successful medium/artist hasn’t been sleeping very well. I think it’s about time we called it a day.”

  Annalisa was undeterred. She swallowed the space Adam had created between them again, the edges of her cape-like dress fluttering like feathers around her. The vulture was landing.

  “The thing is, Mr. Broughton…”

  “Doctor Broughton.”

  “The thing is, I’ve already got more pre-sale requests than I know what to do with. This next series stands to make Piper more money than she’ll know what to do with. It stands to make all of us more money than we know what to do with. But honestly, I expected more. Three canvases aren’t enough.”

  Adam crossed his arms over his chest. He looked down to where the glossy wood of the studio barn floor met with the stone stairs outside. Would he lose his license if he were to toss her down them? Likely not. The only punishment he might have to endure was a social media shit storm and a few mentions on various blogs and late night talk shows. The longer she stared at him expectantly, the more he started to think the attention would be worth it.

  He took a deep breath.

  “You told me to contact you when she started painting again and I did. Three paintings are a start. Is she going to do more? I don’t know.”

  It was clear that the woman was becoming just as annoyed as he was. Her mouth, railroaded with smoker’s lines badly hidden by over applied lip liner, worked on itself. She was struggling to keep her composure. “What I do know is that she was a hell of a lot happier when she was drawing for the New Yorker. The amount of time she spends trying to decompress after a day’s work is obscene. I’ve barely got enough guided meditation exercises and cognitive behavioral tricks up my sleeve to calm her down as it is. If she stops at three, then she stops at three.”

  “Half a million, Mr. Broughton, for a canvas a quarter of the size of the biggest one upstairs.”

  Adam blushed further. He didn’t lose his temper that often. Years of studying and working with human emotions had beat it out of him. However, with this caricature of a woman in front of him, he could feel flashes of rage like a distant storm rolling up from his chest.

  He glanced nervously to the broad wooden stairwell that led up to the loft. Piper could probably hear everything they were saying. Crouching at the side of the top stairs and eavesdropping was something he wouldn’t put past her.

  He glared at Annalisa, his eyes narrowing even further.

  “She’s lost about fifteen pounds since she started painting again,” he whispered, “So that’s, what would you reckon, five pounds a painting? Two point five-ish kilos? And that is just for the three. How many more did you want her to do? There won’t be anything left of her.”

  “Ten,” Annalisa whispered back. “Ten would be extremely lucrative. Ten would mean she wouldn’t have to go back to graphic design or whatever it is she’s doing that makes her so happy. Ten would mean a fortune, Adam.”

  “Ten would kill her.”

  “Posthumous work is even more desirable.” She had spoken without thinking.

  Adam saw her blanch and she reached out to touch him. Her hands danced around his arms and chest, her mouth opening and closing like she was struggling to breathe. “How terrible, I’m sorry. I didn’t mean that at all. It’s been a long drive up here and that work? It was so moving, I’m just not thinking clearly.”

  Adam moved to the table where the tissues were and picked up the entire box. His body tight with indignation, he handed the box to Annalisa. Still blathering uselessly, she took it.

  “Be moved somewhere else,” Adam stated simply.

  “Please, I didn’t mean to sound so callous. It’s my job to make as much money as I can for the artist. I was overenthusiastic and terribly tacky. Please don’t take a word I say seriously.”

  “I won’t. I never do,” Adam said. He nodded in the direction of the white Tesla parked beside the barn. It looked incredibly out of place against the shaggy innocence of the property. Out of place and unwelcome.

  Her sagging cheeks bright pink, she followed his gaze.

  “Oh right. Of course.”

  “Keep the tissues in case you decide to get moved again on the way out.”

  “Adam, please don’t take what I said to heart. Like all of us, I’m just excited that Pi
per is back to doing what she does best.”

  He was done with her, although he could feel her peering at him from behind those Euro-trash glasses of hers, he stared instead at his feet. His toes, still grass stained from mowing the lawn earlier, poked from his sandals.

  Annalisa halted when she got to the bottom step and turned back to him. Like her car, she looked more alien than anything else. She was a strange, cold traveler from a universe Adam had no intention of exploring.

  “The rumors may be true Adam. Call it conspiracy theory, call it whatever you like. Her fans, experts, critics, they’ve tried to understand it and they can’t. The internet has been buzzing for years. Adam, it may be unexplainable but it’s not hurting anyone.”