Page 25 of Over Her Dead Body

When I am certain, I let go.

For a moment, no one in the room moves.

I straighten.

I fold the tie in half, then in half again.

Ruined, of course.

Silk is unforgiving.

I drop it on the table next to Sean’s hand.

“Take him out the back. Burn the tie with him.”

Mark, the man who gave me the tie, nods. “And the woman?”

I pause.

He is asking because the woman is the obvious next move and he does not want to be wrong about whether I have given the order.

“The woman is not my problem. She is staying at the Whitcomb under a name she chose poorly. She has spent the last three days, I am told, drinking other people’s vodka and laughing at things that are not funny. But that is not the point. She will, given time, walk into a hundred other rooms and damage a hundred other paintings, and the people who own those paintings will be too polite or too late or too unaware to do anything about it. I am not those people.”

Mark nods. “Understood.”

I don’t think he does.

“There comes a point in every person’s life where they must discern what is their problem and what is not. The painting is my problem. Sean was my problem. The woman is what she is. We do not punish weather, Mark. We close the windows.”

Mark nods again.

He is not paid to react, but it is clear what he is thinking.

I should be more selective about who I let into my house.

He is not wrong.

I do not look at Sean again. There is no reason to. Looking at the dead is a habit of people who are not sure the dead are dead.

I am sure.

The men work around me.

I am looking at the painting.

The tear runs from just below the horizon line to the lower right corner. Eight, maybe nine inches. The canvas threads have separated cleanly, which is a small mercy. I know two conservators who can do the work.

The painting will recover.

The friendship will not.

I turn Sean’s chair toward the Vance and sit.

I look at the Vance the way I have looked at it on perhaps forty quiet evenings over nine years.

The looking is the same.

The thought of Emma Calloway is not.