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“Fine, thank you.”
“Good to hear. Would you mind sharing your ID with me now?”
“Uh, sure,” I say, extracting my license from my wallet and sliding it across the table in his direction. After briefly studying the front, he glances up at my face, then returns it to me. Our hands never touch.
“Is it just going to be the two of us after all?”
“No, someone will be joining us, but I thought it would be good for you and me to speak alone first.”
“Is the other person who’s coming an artist, as well?”
Kane narrows one eye, as if someone’s blown smoke in it. My question has clearly confused him.
“No, we’ll be joined by Mr. Whaley’s mother, Caroline.”
“Hismother?” I say, startled. “But I thought you said this wasn’t the reading of the will.”
“It’s not. That took place the day after the funeral. What this involves is a trust set up by Mr. Whaley’s grandfather to benefit Chris’s father, who later exercised his power of appointment to make Chris the beneficiary. That power of appointment then passed to Chris. As he and I were consulting about the trust, he indicated that he wanted his mother to learn how he’d exercised his own power of appointment because he knew it might affect what she decides to do with the trust his father assigned toherupon his death.”
Nothing he just said made much sense, but my heart skippedwhen he used the wordtrust. Aren’t trusts generally a big deal, something rich people set up for their kids?
“Um, okay.”
“Before we start, let me ask if you’ve had a chance to mull things over since we spoke on Friday. Perhaps by now you’ve recalled meeting Mr. Whaley.”
I shake my head. When I wasn’t working like crazy on my collage over the weekend, I did nothingbutmull over the name Christopher Whaley and all the details in his obit, and yet none of them spurred a memory of how I might have crossed paths with him.
“I’m almost positive we never met,” I say. I realize I’m rubbing the yarn of my sweater between my thumb and forefinger, like it’s a security blanket. “But since you mentioned that he knew I was an artist, I’ve been wondering whether he’d seen some of my work online or at one of the street fairs I’ve exhibited at and decided he wanted to support me in some way—you know, as a kind of patron.”
Again, the narrowed-eye thing.
“I’m sure that’s not it,” Kane says after a beat. “From what I know, C.J. wasn’t into art.”
It doesn’t come across as a dig exactly, more a suggestion that Whaley was one of those guys who might have looked at an Agnes Martin or a Jackson Pollock and said,A fifth grader could have done that.
I shift in my chair, feeling a fresh blister of unease. Why am I sitting here, then? Why has Christopher Whaley deemed me worthy of an inheritance?
As Kane continues to study me, I realize that his last comment about Whaley has begun to burrow into my brain. And not simply because it means that my art patron theory has been debunked and the idea sounded stupid to Kane. No, it’s because the nickname he used—C.J.—is ringing a bell.
For a few seconds those two initials hover just out of reach, but then, finally, a memory explodes into view, and my heart jolts.
Almost a dozen years ago, I met a man who called himself C.J. and spent an electrifying night in his Boston hotel room. And then I never set eyes on him again.
5
Then
BY THE TIME I LET MYSELF INTO MY APARTMENT AFTER THEparty, I was fuming and nursing a nasty headache. I’d called Chloe once more on the drive back to Boston, and also texted her, but she never responded.
And there was still no word from her when I woke up Saturday morning. I figured she was sleeping in and would surface by midday—and decided that when she did finally make contact, I would let her have it.
I spent the entire morning working on an oil painting in one of the campus art studios on Comm Ave., and then headed back to my Brookline apartment on foot. I used the walk home to catch up by phone with my friend Tess, who had a few minutes of downtime at her job. She’d been my freshman-year roommate as an undergrad at Tufts and happened to be in Boston now, too, working as a desk clerk at a fancy boutique hotel called the Kensington until she figured out what she really wanted to do with her life.
“I can’t believe it,” Tess said after I described the situation withChloe. “I mean, how long would it have taken her to type the words,Got a ride home.”
“Exactly.”
“Do you think she wanted to try something kinky—I mean with the couple?”
