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The realization comes to me with a lurch of horror. If Gavin didn’t return, then it means that it’s me who left the light on last night in the second gallery. It’s me who left the front door open.
“I think we’ve been robbed,” I mutter, then hang up. I flick on the lights in the main gallery. Seeing the empty space on the wall like that physically hurts. It’s like someone flashing you a beautiful smile with one front tooth missing.
I fold myself onto the front step to call the police with my forehead in my hand.
They ask a million questions, but my head is still spinning and I’m confused. Was anything else taken? I don’t think so, I say, but I haven’t looked. Any sign of forced entry? I press the heel of my hand between my eyes. “I don’t know, I think so.” I tell them about Summer, how she said the door was already open. Did I leave it open when I left yesterday? Did I do this? I left in a hurry immediately after Tara Fuller’s call. I called Gavin. I can see myself with the phone against my ear and the keys in my hand. Then I dropped the phone, that’s it. And the keys. Did I lock the door before or after I dropped the keys? Did I lock it at all? I didn’t check even though it happens all the time, that the bolt doesn’t engage fully, and I should have checked but I didn’t and now it’s my fault.
But I’m not saying that to the police. Any sign of forced entry? I don’t know, I say. I haven’t checked.
“Don’t touch anything until we get there. Is there another room where you can wait? Somewhere where they haven’t been?”
“Y-yes,” I say. “There’s a storeroom at the back. It’s still locked so they haven’t been in there.”
“Good. Wait for us there, please. We won’t be long.”
“I’ll come back some other time,” Summer says behind me after I’ve ended the call. I spin around.
“Would you mind staying?” I ask. “The police will want to ask you some questions…I mean, I’m sure they could call you if you prefer, but—”
She hesitates, then gives a little shrug. “No, that’s cool, I can stay if you want.”
“Thank you so much. You can sit back there, you’ll be comfortable.” I unlock the storeroom. There’s a big table, with chairs, we use it as a meeting room if we need to. I get her settled in, offer her water from the cooler.
“I’m good,” she says. “You go, do what you have to. I’m fine here.”
“Okay, thank you, Summer. I really appreciate it.”
And now it’s just me, standing in the gallery, wringing my hands together, my stomach twisting within an inch of its life. In the silence I can hear my heart pound behind my ears. I should call Bruno, tell him what happened, but instead I stare at the front door with its bolt sticking out, at the empty white wall, and then at the middle distance while I add up the costs. That work was sold for fourteen thousand dollars, and now it’s gone. Will the insurance even pay if they find out I left the door wide open all night? Would Bruno pay the client back? He’s done nothing wrong. He’s not the one who left the door wide open with a sign at the front that said:Back at 4!It may as well have read:Help yourself!
I try to imagine asking Bruno for an advance on my salary while at the same time explaining that I left the door open last night. If I get fired,Jack and I will both be out of work. Brilliant timing, really. I’m thinking school fees, mortgage, birthday parties, incidentals like food and shelter, and of course I’m thinking,wedding, and I’m especially thinking,Bronwyn.Bronwyn who is coming to stay with us in a few days, and what will she find? Jack and I broke and at each other’s throats. Charlie thrown out of school because we couldn’t pay the fees. A mortgage that we will be mere weeks away from defaulting on.
What if Bronwyn decides Charlie is not in good hands with us? That we are not capable of looking after her because we are not capable of looking after ourselves?
I’m not even thinking anymore. It just happens. As if I am watching myself from above in slow motion. My mind is blank, as blank as that empty square on the west wall. I am fast. I am a bullet. I am not thinking. I am an automaton. I am a robot running at warp speed. Before I know it, I have walked over to the desk, opened my bag and fished around for my keys. I catch sight of my metal nail file at the bottom of the bag. Perfect. I grab it, along with my phone.
There’s a door in the passageway that is completely flush with the wall. It’s a cupboard where we keep the basics: white paint, tools, red dots, hanging wire. It’s locked, and I open it gently, twisting the key and pressing on the door at the same time so it doesn’t audibly click. I gently lift out the claw hammer before pushing the door closed. In a few quick strides I’m back at the front door and position myself so that if Gavin arrives, he won’t see what I’m doing. My fingers are shaking and it takes a few tries to slip the key in the lock and with one quick flick of the wrist the bolt is gone, disappeared back inside the door where it belongs.
I study the lock, the plate, the door. I just want to smash something. I want to make it look like robbers had a really hard time getting in and they had to tear the place down, but I can’t because Summer is back there. I consider hacking at the plate, levering it off with the claw of the hammer, but that’s not the way to do it. I search on my phone,How can you tell a lock has been tampered with?My search takes me to a YouTube video that I watch at three times the speed as it describes something called a bump key. It’s used to break into any lock just like ours, and frankly they make it look so easy it makes you wonder there aren’t more robberies in this city.
I have the door open about a foot and I stand in that narrow space, hunched over, and make a few nicks with my nail file close to the keyhole. Clear evidence that someone used a bump key, I think. Although, is that what it should look like? Is that enough? I have that YouTube video on a loop on my phone and now I’m on a roll, holding the nail file like it’s a dagger and frantically scratching crisscrossing marks all over the metal. My heart is hammering and I’m biting down on my own teeth. My jaw hurts, but I can’t stop.
I don’t know how long I do that for, but suddenly it feels like I’ve woken from a really bad dream. I’m breathing hard, panting like I’ve been running. I look at my work and my heart sinks. That looks bad. Really bad. I look down at my shaking hands, one of which still holds the hammer. My hair has fallen over half my face and I blow it away, swipe it with the back of one hand and when I finally look up, I find that on the other side of the glass door, watching me with detached interest, is Summer.
FIVE
It’s Saturday. I woke up with a renewed sense of purpose, the overwhelming relief that I’dgotten away with itstill bouncing inside me, lifting me up, making me feellucky. I managed to drag Jack off the couch, off his iPad, so we could spend the day out as a family. We used to do that all the time on weekends: special outings for the three of us. I try to remember the last time we did that and all I can think is the time we took Charlie to the Ferry Wheel. The flowers were in bloom. Spring, then. Ages ago.
Today, we had lunch at Cafe Nordstrom, then spent a couple hours wandering around Pike Place market, and now we’re settled at Bottega Italiana because Charlielovesice cream.
“It was horrible,” I say. “Walking in and seeing that blank space…”
Jack and I are sitting at the table and Charlie is in the children’s nook, cross-legged on the floor with a book on her lap and a bowl of ice cream in her hands. I’m telling Jack the story all over again even though we went through it last night.You’ll never believe what happened. Her best work too, gone.But he doesn’t seem to mind. He’s got his head down, scrolling through his phone and I can’t think of what else to talk about, and I have to fill the empty space between us, even if it means repeating myself. He must have realized I’ve stopped speaking because he makes a sound, a kind of grunt, to show he’s listening.
“Then Bruno called this morning while you were in the shower—” this is new information, so I can say it with renewed vigor “—because he saw the CCTV footage, and around midnight a person came and walked right in. That’s what it looked like, they just walked right in. They must have hacked the lock before the CCTV came on outside. That’s what he said.” Oh God. Bruno. He arrived less than ten minutes after I’d finished tampering with that lock, even though he doesn’t come to the gallery on Fridays, unless he’s got a good reason. The thought that he might have walked in while I was…No. Don’t even go there.
I wish, with all my heart, that I hadn’t done that. The memory of it makes my stomach lurch. When the police told Bruno that the lock had been tampered with, I had this sudden urge to tell the truth. No, it was me, sorry, I panicked. I apologize. But I didn’t, then as the day wore on and more questions were asked, and they took our fingerprints“for elimination purposes,” I realized with a shock that I wasn’t thinking about fingerprints when I attacked that lock, which meant the only fingerprints they were going to find were mine, and I didn’t think they’d eliminate me so easily. I wondered if it was too late to go back, back to that fork in the road, and take the path where I told the truth but I thought, no. It’s too late for the truth. Also, I couldn’t understand why Summer was taking so long to tell them what I’d done, and I thought that’s what it must feel like when you stand in the dock waiting to hear the verdict and you know it’s going to be bad, but a small part of you still clings to the impossible hope that when they found the body, they didn’t notice you were holding the bloody axe.
“You came in first. Tell me what you saw,” detective O’Sullivan said to Summer. We were all sitting around the table in the storeroom and we all watched her, Bruno closer than anyone, I noticed. I couldn’t bear it and I stared down at my hands, picking at the cuticles around my nails, waiting for her reply with my heart bouncing around my chest.
