He looks at the phone on his desk as if it’s a dead mouse he hasn’t yet cleared away. I hold my breath. Finally, he just shakes his head. “You said you got the account number?”
I recite it to him. He turns to the ancient computer on his desk and spends a few labored minutes trying to get it to do whatever he needs it to do. Then, with a heavy sigh, he stands and disappears into the back office, returning a few seconds later with a key. But before I can grab it from the counter, he nudges a heavy leather-bound security log in my direction.
“Sign, date, and print your name clear,” he says. “Name of the unit owner, too.”
Not until then do I fully register the cameras winking at us from the ceiling. And for a split second, I have a feeling like waking up abruptly from a dream and seeing the real world rush at you.
But what rushes at me now is the gravity of what I’m doing. I don’t remember enough of criminal law code to know exactly what law I’m breaking—false pretenses, maybe, or larceny-by-trick, but only if I remove something—but either way, a violation of this size could get me disbarred.
I nearly leave the key where it is. I nearly mumble an excuse, turn, and hurry back to the car.
But I don’t. I scrawl a fake name into the ledger. The key—a new one—is very small and extremely light. Cheap keys for cheap locks for a cheap storage facility filled with cheap belongings. A no-man’s land of possessions: sufficiently disposable to be locked away, but too dearly loved, or at least too familiar, to be abandoned. I wonder how many storage rooms are built out of broken hearts and broken relationships, dead fathers and brothers and wives. I also wonder how many of them are just meth labs.
Standing in front of unit 34, I could swear there’s a low hum radiating down the long metal alleys. And I wonder whether in fact the keys and locks were meant to keep these old memories and broken objects safe—or if they are really meant to keep them from getting out.
—
The unit is full of art.
The storage space is roughly 10 x 20, but so packed with canvases and old art supplies I still have trouble squeezing inside. Many of the paintings are wrapped in tarp and duct tape and garbage bags while a few are left exposed. Not all of them are finished, although it’s difficult to tell: there’s an image of a woman’s face that seems to simply explode or disappear into white space, even though her clothing is painstakingly detailed. They’re Kaycee’s.
Some paintings are better than others. But all of them are good. I can tell that much without knowing a thing about art. I move as carefully as I can, afraid to touch or disturb anything. I peer through the clear garbage bags to puzzle out the shapes she pinned down with her brush: cornfields, the football stadium, even the Donut Hole. All familiar and deeply ordinary—and yet somehow, in her frenzy of brushstrokes and colors, they all light up with a strange and terrifying beauty. The football field opens like the jaws of a shark to consume the sky. The Donut Hole glows against dusk, and its sign casts a fluorescent halo into the clouds, but in the parking lot a figure lies curled in the fetal position.
There are portraits, too: I recognize a young Misha in one, a shadow splitting her face. The next painting, distorted through plastic, looks at first like a collage of random shapes. Then I find a pair of eyes buried deep in the thickness of the paint, and another, and another. It’s like one of those visual deceptions where a vase is buried in a woman’s hair—in a millisecond the jigsaw of random shapes becomes instead a series of faces staring out at me from the paint.
Some glower, others appear to weep. All of them are Kaycee. It’s a self-portrait, an explosion of her—or versions of her—again and again on canvas. One has hair the color of blood. In all of them, her features are obscured, cut up, or erased, some imagined in negative space.
Even when we were little, she had that gift: she could study something I’d seen every day, take it apart and make it new. I labored over line drawings while she made flowers ripple on the page. She spent hours one day in the sun drawing the same enormous mushroom, over and over, until she was satisfied she’d got it right. When she asked if I liked it, I asked her to show me the actual mushroom she’d been staring at all day, but there wasn’t one. Just a scattering of shattered beer bottles in the middle of the field.
It amazed and scared me, the way her unseen world could seem more vibrant and alive than the real one. There was a time when I loved her imagination, would follow her anywhere. And yet even then, I hated the way she could make me question things that were obvious facts, things that were right there before my eyes.
I suddenly feel bad. I shouldn’t be here. Whatever Mr. Mitchell says about Kaycee now, he loved her and he still does. Why else would he be so careful to preserve her art? Kaycee’s paintings feel like live things, bits of skin and bone strapped down beneath their protective covering: but still bleeding, invisibly, all over. Even after I’m back in the car, I imagine the smell of paint, and keep checking my fingers and clothes for residue. Kaycee transmuted into oil paint looks different from the Kaycee I remember: lonelier, deeper, even desperate. I remember what Kaycee said to me that day, the day she turned beer bottles into a mushroom that seemed to be growing right out of the page. You know the problem, Abby, isn’t that you can’t draw, she said, out of nowhere. It’s that you can’t see.
I’m beginning to think she was right.
Chapter Eighteen
On Tuesday morning, my ass has barely touched the chair before my phone rings: an upbeat clerk announces that Dev Agerwal, the county prosecutor, is on the line for me.
I unroll the same song and dance I gave when I spoke to his junior prosecutor Dani Briggs just a few days before, and he listens patiently and without interruption before politely telling me that Ms. Briggs had already filled him in. I like him for that; he’s the type who likes to get the same story from different angles, more journalist than lawyer.
“But I don’t know how much help I can be,” he says carefully, and though it’s exactly what I expected him to say, my chest deflates. “My predecessor never announced a formal investigation into Optimal’s business practices.”
“But he spoke about it in interviews,” I counter.
“Off the cuff, sure.” He sighs. “Look, Ms. Williams, I’ve built my career on trying to take big business and big money out of local politics. But unfortunately, it’s mostly a gray area. Optimal has done a neat job of blurring the line. And corruption has to be provable.”
“Only if you plan to prosecute,” I say. “We just need a reason to open up the books. A subpoena would be a slam dunk, but right now, you’re the one with the best shot at a case.”
Agerwal is quiet for a while. Then, abruptly: “Have you thought of speaking to Lilian McMann?”
I scribble the name on the back of a coffee receipt. “Never heard of her.”
“She might have some things to tell you about Optimal, and about their relationship to the…political climate. She used to work at the Indiana Department of Environmental Management. She was at the Office of Water Quality.”
That, I have definitely heard of: IDEM works directly with both local monitors and the feds. Just my kind of girl.
Dev Agerwal hangs up after taking down my e-mail address, with a promise to send me Lilian McMann’s contact information. And a few minutes later he makes good.