The Drowning Tree (41 page)

“Do you mind if I untack one to look at the back?” I call, thinking Detective Falco’s still in the other room, but when he answers I’m startled to find he’s just behind me.

“Go ahead.”

I take down the one of the girl leaning over the pool and turn it over.
Penrose Collection
, it reads,
The Drowning Tree, Augustus Penrose, 1893
. And then underneath, a note in Christine’s handwriting:
Same year as Iole and Dryope? Part of the same series?

“Something wrong?” Falco asks. He’s standing next to me looking down at the card. I try to give it to him, but he takes my hand instead and lowers it so the card is in the light of the desk lamp. The gesture brings to mind the way Neil took my hand last night when I was plucking glass from his knuckles and that image stirs a fleeting ache that makes me shift my weight and brings a flush to my face. Falco turns my hand over so he can see the picture. “Yet another one of those Greek girls turning into a tree. What did this one do wrong—or was she trying to get away from some lecherous god?”

I shake my head. “No one knows what myth it depicts, but from the note on the back it sounds like Christine thought it might be part of the Iole and Dryope series.”

“You mean that one with the two sisters and the baby?”

“Uh-huh.”

“Why would she think that?” Falco asks.

“Well, it does hang next to the ones of Iole and Dryope in Forest Hall.”

“I don’t remember it.”

“No, it’s been taken down for cleaning.”

Falco angles the desk lamp to get a better look at the postcard. Unfortunately, it’s not a great reproduction, so it’s hard to see details. “I don’t know,” he says. “If it’s part of that series where’s the sister? Where’s the baby?”

“Maybe this one is of Dryope after her sister takes the baby away. It’s her all alone, mourning.” I shrug and slide the card into his hand, forcing him to take it, and try to pull my hand away, but he holds onto it.

“What happened to your fingers?” he asks, pulling my hand back
into the light. The red scratches look particularly garish under the lamplight.

“Occupational hazard,” I tell him, “of working with glass.” I take my hand back and cross my arms over my chest, tucking my right hand underneath my left arm. “Is this why you thought Christine was interested in Gavin Penrose,” I ask, “because she has all these Augustus Penrose paintings?”

“No, I expected that because of her research on the window. It’s this—”

He takes a folder off the desk and hands it to me. Inside are color Xeroxes of paintings that look vaguely like Penroses or someone imitating Penrose. I don’t recognize any of them. I turn one over and see in Christine’s handwriting,
“Untitled work by Gavin Penrose, date?”

“Did you know Gavin Penrose painted?” Falco asks.

“Actually I just found that out a few weeks ago. He said he’d spent a year in Paris studying painting but that he gave it up … how did Christine get these?”

“I was hoping you could tell me. Here’s another thing—”

He opens another folder and takes from it a piece of heavy drawing paper with rough edges—as if torn from a notebook—on which is a sketch of a woman at a loom. It takes me only a moment to recognize the figure as the lady in the library window.

“Fay was right,” I admit reluctantly. “Christine did tear a page out of Eugenie’s notebook. I could have sworn she wouldn’t have done anything like that—” But how well, I wonder, did I really know Christine? “—I wonder what was so important about this sketch.”

I look at the drawing more closely and notice that the cloth on the loom, which is blank in the window, is woven with a finely detailed rendering of the landscape in the window only—

“It’s not the same,” I tell Falco. “Look, the tree is weird, almost—”

“Like a person. Yeah, I see what you mean. And it looks like there’s something, or someone, in the water. Hey, look at this.” Falco lays the postcard of
The Drowning Tree
next to Eugenie’s sketch. “The picture in the loom looks just like the one in this postcard.”

“You’re right. Christine mentioned in her lecture that the original
glass panels for the loom were broken and that’s why they were blank. But I wonder why she didn’t mention this sketch.”

“Maybe she wanted to find out more about it before going public with the information. There’s also a letter in the folder.”

He hands me a sheet of cream-colored stationery embossed with the gold monogram EBP.
Eugenie Barovier Penrose
.

“This is an original letter from Eugenie Penrose,” I say. “Fay Morgan would have a fit if she knew where it was.”

“I know. My guess is that Christine found it in one of those notebooks she borrowed and held onto it. Read it. It’s to a lawyer in Albany.”

Even when the ink was fresh it would have been hard to make out this thin spidery handwriting (which I recognize from Eugenie’s diary and notebook) so I sit down and place the paper under the lamp so that I can see it better. Falco sits on the edge of the desk.

“Wow, she sounds like a bitch in this. I wonder if Christine showed this to Gavin.”

“From these notes, I think she might have.” Falco turns over the
folder that held the letter. On the back Christine had written:
Arnot’s clients? Gavin’s father? Gavin himself? Ask Gavin exactly what he did inherit from estate—which paintings? Who else inherited? Did anyone else inherit paintings?
And written in boldfaced caps and underlined:
Ask about
The Drowning Tree?

I look up and catch Falco still staring at my injured fingertips. “If she asked Gavin these questions he would have thought she was pretty interested in his financial situation,” I say, trying to meet Falco’s gaze without looking away.

“Right. Of course, we don’t know for sure that she did ask—”

“Christine wasn’t one to leave a question unasked when it came to her research.”

“But she never mentioned this to you? She didn’t ask you what you knew about Penrose’s financial situation?”

“No—” I finally look away because what I think I see in those calm, gray eyes is sympathy—as if he knows how much I want to make Gavin the one responsible for Christine’s death, and why. As if he can see every touch of Neil’s hands on my flesh as easily as he can see the scratches on my fingertips. I pick up a glass paperweight just to feel its cool roundness in my palm and smooth out the folded newspaper that it had been weighing down—a section from the
Times
listing gallery shows with one at the Queen Gallery on Arts & Crafts painters circled in red. “You don’t really think it’s Gavin, do you? You don’t think he’s the one responsible for Christine’s death?”

“I haven’t made up my mind yet. If she were having an affair with him I think she’d have his picture up there.” Falco points to the wall behind me—the right inner wall of the alcove, which is plastered with photographs. A lot of them, I notice right away, are of me—some from college and some with Beatrice. Some of the ones from college have Neil in them, but these aren’t the only pictures of Neil. When Christine helped me move out of the apartment I lived in with Neil I’d given her a box of pictures I had of Neil.
I’ll burn these if I keep them
, I told her,
and Bea might want them some day. Will you keep them for me?
I never expected her to hang them up though.

“This is what you really wanted me to see, isn’t it?”

“I just want you to be careful,” he says.

“It doesn’t prove they were seeing each other. She might have felt
something for him—”
Love, which absolves no one beloved from loving
, she’d said at the train station that last night. Had she been talking about Neil? Did she think if she loved him long enough he’d have to love her back? “—but that doesn’t mean he reciprocated the feeling.”

Falco’s eyes darken from pale gray to slate, like the river just before a storm. “I think you should look at this.” He turns around and takes down a calendar from the left-hand wall of the alcove. It’s the Tiffany calendar that I bought at the Met and gave Christine for Christmas. He opens it to May. On the third Saturday Christine has drawn a little tree.

“You said Neil used a stamp with a beech tree to sign his paintings. Does that look like the same symbol?”

“It’s just a tree … I mean, it might be—” I look closer at the little drawing. There’s no point in lying because it would be easy enough for Falco to find one of Neil’s old paintings and compare the stamp he used to this design. “Okay, yeah, it looks like the design Neil used, but this is in May. We know they saw each other in May.”

Falco flips the page back to April. There are five trees. Then he turns back to March. There are too many trees for me to count at first glance—a whole forest of trees that starts to blur as if a mist had risen from the forest floor.

“I’m sorry, Juno,” Falco says, covering my hand with his, “but I thought you’d better know. I got the lab results back today. The baby was Neil’s.”

“I
T DOESN’T MEAN HE KILLED HER.”

“I didn’t say it did.”

“It still could have been Gavin Penrose. Maybe he didn’t like being asked all these questions about his family history and his finances. Maybe he had something else to hide. Maybe she was sleeping with him, too—”

On that last conjecture—my third
maybe
—my voice cracks and I press my fingertips into my eyelids to keep the tears back. They come anyway, seeping into the little cuts until my fingertips burn. Falco looks sadly toward the scene on the lamp, as if gravely disapproving of the shepherds and milkmaids’ antics. When the worst is over, he hands me a clean white handkerchief, neatly folded in quarters.

“I’m sorry,” he says when I have dried my eyes, “that you had to learn about it here in your friend’s apartment, but I wanted you to realize that this wasn’t a onetime thing—”

Falco gestures at the pictures of Neil and the calendar with its swelling grove of trees. They were seeing each other every couple of days in March. Christine must have taken the train past the factory each and every time—unless she drove.

“How was she getting over there to see him?” I ask, sniffling into my handkerchief. “She didn’t have a car and the train only runs on the east side of the river.”

“Why do you assume she went there?” Falco asks, his voice soft and reluctant.

The notion startles me out of my chair. I turn around to face the bed and the sight of it propels me into the living room, Falco so close on my heels that when I wheel around he nearly collides with me.

“How could you have brought me here? Did you really think I could stay here after learning about … them?”

“I’ll drive you back.”

I look around at my own paintings of Neil, done fifteen years ago and stamped with the little green bird that he designed. “You knew the paintings were mine, didn’t you? You just wanted me to tell you about Neil’s tree stamp so I couldn’t deny it was his sign in Christine’s calendar. What you said about having information on Gavin Penrose’s involvement was just a lie to get me here to confirm your hunch.”

“No, Juno, I still consider Gavin a suspect, but I thought you ought to know about Neil and Christine for your own sake.” He reaches for my hand and grazes the cuts on my fingertips ever so lightly, but I can feel his touch travel through my broken skin and pour into my veins like molten glass. I look up at him and then look away, unable to bear the look of pity in his eyes. It’s clear from the way he looks at me that he knows everything—not just that Neil and I are lovers but how much I’ve allowed myself to fall in love with him again.

“I have to get out of here,” I tell him, turning in a full circle as if I’d forgotten where the front door was.

“I’ll take you back. I can leave the key with the doorman for Amy—”

I’d forgotten about Amy.

“No. Why should she have to suffer for my stupidity? I’ll stay. I’ll start packing tonight.” I look around the room as if I can’t wait to start peeling the paintings off the wall. Yes, that’s what I’ll do. I’ll stay here all night until the walls are bare and all traces of Christine’s life are erased from inside these rooms and then I’ll start erasing all traces of her from inside my heart.

“If you’re sure that’s what you want,” he says, handing me the keys to the apartment, “maybe it would be safer for you to stay here tonight.”