Like take this job.

  The house, if you wanted to call it that, was up Butner way. It was a ramshackle thing with a wraparound porch and a sagging barn, and most of the fields around it had gone to seed. Squint, and you’d think the landscape was moving in on the house and waiting for a sign of weakness before devouring it.

  Inside, the place was under siege. The kitchen was neat, and so were a couple of chunks of common area. The rest was given over to dust and clutter, like Carson had given up on keeping the place tidy and was fighting a holding action to protect the bits he used. Everything I saw in the place spoke of him - no sign of a woman’s touch anywhere in the decor. I could see why a girl would want to get away from this place.

  But he’d said she was going to school in the fall. Escape hadn’t been so far away.

  I cleared my throat to ask Carson a question but he was already plunging down a hallway toward what I guessed was Michelle’s room. “Sorry, bulb’s out,” he offered, then opened the door.

  It was a revelation.

  Every square inch of wall space was covered, half in posters of faraway and imaginary places. The other half was hand drawn or painted, clearly the work of the girl who lived here. They were passable, I suppose - landscapes and castles and misty mountains far away, executed with energy but not a whole lot of skill.

  Naturally, I lied about them. “These are some nice pieces. Your daughter has some skill.”

  “They’re crap,” Carson said, stomping into the room. “They’re crap, I told her they were crap, and her teacher told her they were crap, and she kept on saying she was going to be an artist anyhow ‘cause she had vision. I wanted her to go to ECU, get a degree in something useful, but she was having none of it.” He stopped unexpectedly and stared down at the floor. “That was our last fight,” he said sadly, and sat abruptly on the white-sheeted bed.

  “What did her mother say?”

  He looked up at me. “Her momma’s gone. Been that was since she was a little girl. Been just us for fifteen-odd years. And now she’s gone, and I’m goin’…” He coughed a couple of times, which made me not want to ask about his health.

  “What did her mother die of,” I asked instead, looking for something useful and safe.

  If we’d been outside, he would have spat. “Never said she was dead. Just that she was gone. Don’t know where she went, wouldn’t tell you if I did.”

  “If your daughter had communication with her, maybe she…“

  “My daughter knows her momma left her. She wanted no part of that if it came back into her life. You find her, you ask her and she’ll tell you it’s true.”

  I thought about saying something, but thinking was about as far as that idea got. “You got a name for that teacher you said thought her art wasn’t good enough?”

  “Why you want to talk to her for?” Carson grumbled.

  “If she really did say that Michelle’s stuff wasn’t any good, that might have sent her off in a different direction - or it might have made her try harder. Either way, I’ll just be asking a few questions.”

  “Fine. I’ll go get the name.” Carson stumped off. I took advantage of the opportunity to case the room.

  There wasn’t much to see, apart from the art on the walls. Clothes were neatly folded, and I had a hard time seeing what she might have taken with her. No computer on her desk, no diary in her desk drawer, and all the sheets and window shades were white. The kid couldn’t have had less personality in her room if she tried. I checked the lone closet and it was full, too - dresses and jeans and suchlike, and if she’d taken anything from there, I couldn’t tell you what it was.

  I stepped back out and closed the door, and Carson handed me a sheet of paper. “Her last report card,” he said. “Make of it what you will.

  The school she went to was in Oxford, and the teacher I wanted to talk to was out sick. I bullied her home number out of the receptionist, then dialed what she gave me.

  On the third ring, someone picked up. “Hello?”

  “Jean Nimitz?”

  The answer was cautious, defensive. “Speaking. Do I know you?”

  “No ma’am, you don’t, but I promise you, I’m not asking for money. I’m calling on behalf of a parent whose daughter has gone missing, and-“

  “Jubal Carson can go to hell, if that’s what this is about.” The venom in her voice took me aback.

  “Ma’am, I can assure you that while I may be working for Mister Carson, I in no way share his views. Whatever they might be.”

  There was a pause, and then a chuckle. “All right, then. I’ll tell you this: Michelle had the eye of an artist. Not the control, not the means to make her visions real. Which was fine. She wanted to study art so she could go into advertising. Pick the pictures that would convey the message, instead of trying to make them herself. Her father never understood that, and thought she was signing up for a life of disappointment, just like her mother.”

  “Do you know what happened to her mother?”

  The response was distinctly flat. “They say she ran off. Funny thing is nobody can seem to agree on who she ran off with. You can make of that what you will.”

  “Popular lady?” I ventured, which got me another laugh. “Thank you for your time and help with this. I just have one more question. I don’t expect her father to know this one, and I won’t be bringing the answer back to him, but did she have any friends she hung out with whom she might have told her plans to? Any place she liked to go.”

  Nimitz harrumphed a bit before finally deigning to answer. “She didn’t really have friends at the school. Too dreamy. Too…fey, I guess you’d call it. So I encouraged her to find other people who might be more understanding. There’s a lot of artists in Durham, painters and sculptors mostly, and she started hanging around with them. And the more she did that, the madder her dad got, or at least that’s what she told me.”

  “That’s extremely helpful,” I said. “Thanks for your time.”

  “Listen to me: that girl went away two weeks before graduation. There was a whole world waiting for her. A whole wide world. You find her, all right? You make sure she’s OK.”

  “I’ll do my best,” I said, and cut the connection.

  Every small city's First Friday is the same. Every third floor walkup in the downtown district suddenly turns into a gallery, every piece of art hung on a wall is a showing, every plate of store brand crackers and cheese is a reception. 90% of the foot traffic is just the artists drifting from neighbor to neighbor, nobody selling nothing because the only ones there to sell to are exactly like them.

  Which is to say, broke. And broke and dreamy put together sometimes makes for a bad luck combo, which is why I went downtown when the doors got propped open, and the lights went on. Nimitz had emailed me about half an hour after we’d hung up, given me a list of names she’d suggested Michelle go looking for.

  I’d checked those names out. Found a couple that matched up with local artist types, the sorts who’d call it a big deal if they got their stuff hung on the wall of a local pizza joint. And I went looking for them.

  The first name on the list was Jason Hernan. His place was unusual, in that it was ground floor and he’d put out grape bug juice to go with a plate of chocolate chip cookies. “Don’t drink wine,” he said apologetically when I caught his eye, “but help yourself.” Then he turned back to someone who'd had a momentary inclination to buy, and I was forgotten.

  I looked around. He had a couple of rooms’ worth of art hanging on the walls, all of it jagged, irregular shapes and unrecognizable portraits. Everything was grey and red and black, sharp lines and bold slashes. A few people, some of them looking like they weren’t members of his immediate family, circled around the space and sipped their juice. Occasionally one would say something like “primal ferocity,” and someone else would nod, and I’d pretend I’d heard nothing.

  Instead, I studied one particular piece that struck me as better than the rest put together. It was a portrait, full length, but done up in the kid’s style so it was all sharp angles and bloody grey lines. There was no face, but somehow the impression of the model’s personality came through: strong, defiant, bloodied but unbowed.

  “You like it?” he said, bumping up against my elbow. I managed to avoid spilling my drink.

  “It’s striking,” I said, and turned to look at him. He was young, maybe 25 at the outside. Sharp features, an axe of a nose, and short black hair cut close to the scalp. He was maybe 5’8”, wide-eyed and eager, and he didn’t look like he could take a decent sized kitten in a fair fight. “You really got her essence.”

  He nodded. “So much of this comes from the subject matter. You get a good model, it inspires you so much. Other times,” and he shrugged, “you might as well be painting potatoes.”

  “You got lucky with this one,” I said. “How much?”

  He thought for a minute, pride in the piece warring with fear of scaring me off. “$500.”

  I gave a low whistle. “That’s a lot. You got any other pieces with the same model? Maybe smaller?”

  His shoulders slumped. “No, that was the only time she sat for me. I told her I wanted her back for another session and she just sort of laughed. Said she’d seen how I saw her, and now she wanted to see how someone else did.”

  “You know who else she modeled for?”

  He nodded. “Upstairs. Kelton, in 31. I saw her going up the stairs. Asked her to come back and pose again, and she said it wasn’t what she was looking for.”

  I looked at those savage lines, those harsh reds and dirty greys, and I thought about what they must have said to her. “Never can tell,” I said instead. “Tell you what. $300, and I’ll take this. $350, I’ll take it if you tell me the model’s name.”

  Hernan thought about it for a minute, and rubbed his scalp for about as long as he was thinking. “$450 and I give you her name?”

  “$400,” I replied. The actual price didn’t matter to me, but I needed to make the kid feel like he was getting one over on me.

  “$425?”

  “Deal.” I put out my hand to shake. After a second’s hesitation, he took it. “All right. Let me put a “sold” sticker on it and I’ll …“

  “You can keep displaying it,” I said. “Piece like that ought to be seen. I’ll come back for it in a few days. But right now, I need that name.”

  He blinked. “Shelly Carson,” he said. “She said her name was Shelly Carson.”

  Shelly. Michelle. And the man who’d come to see me was a Carson.

  “Thanks,” I told him, and handed him a piece of plastic to ring up the sale with. He popped it through his iPhone, had me scribble a few loops with my finger, and said we were done.

  “Don’t sell it again,” I told him. “That picture’s mine now.”

  “Oh, no, no no.” The kid was white as a sheet. “Whenever you want. Come back. Whenever.”

  But I was already out the door and climbing the stairs toward 31.

  The story in 31 was the story I’d get all night. There was one painting there that stood apart. It featured a female figure, this time leaning up against a wall in the near distance but staring out at the viewer with frightening intensity. Only her eyes had been filled in; the rest of her face was a blank.

  Amie Kelton, who was the artist in residence at this apartment, cheerfully talked about her model. Said she’d been in for one sitting, then moved on. Said that pretty much everyone in the building had worked with her, that she’d only done one sitting. That they’d all love to work with her again because she was so damn good.

  I thanked her and went out into the hall. This time, I didn’t feel the need to buy the painting.

  The last door on the floor opened up into a room that was a little livelier than I was used to. Music was playing, some European whump-whump thing popping out of impossibly tiny speakers. The room was mostly full, the walls hung with pieces that ranged from “had potential” to “actually good”. I spotted the artist immediately, as she was holding court in the center of the room. Johnette Lee, maybe five foot four, mixed Asian-white ancestry, solid build and dried paint under her fingernails. She was laughing and the rest of the group was laughing with her, so I decided not to interrupt, and instead went looking for the one picture I was looking for.

  I found it soon enough, hanging on the back wall. It was a small thing, maybe nine inches by twelve, done up in warm yellows and deep brown and accents of green. No way it should have worked, but it did, with a splash of blue for the dress of the female figure who danced in front of a ramshackle house with light in its windows. A look around told me the girl - Shelly or Michelle or Mickey or any of the other names she’d given the artists and would-be artists who’d paths she’d crossed wasn’t in any of the other paintings. The house was, though, and the hills and fields beyond it. They were landscapes of a place that never was, a panorama of an imagined world that went on and on. All of them, it seemed, peeked in on this other place and made it seem warm and inviting.

  But it was the girl in the blue dress I was after.

  Eventually Lee’s admirers drifted away, and I was able to drift closer. She saw me coming, sized me up as someone who probably didn’t have enough money to buy anything, and decided to smile at me anyway. It was a nice smile, and it went all the way up past her eyes.

  “Beautiful work,” I told her, and I mostly meant it.

  “Thanks!” she said, and immediately went into details of technique that made about as much sense to me as particle physics. I nodded and uh-huhed at all the right places, and when she wound down, I asked her how much the painting with the blue girl in it was.

  “That one?” she said. “Sorry, not for sale. Personal collection, you know. Best thing I’ve done so far.”

  “It’s good,” I agreed. “Though everything you’ve got here seems to be part of, I don’t know, a bigger world? Different pieces of a bigger painting?”

  She smiled again. “You noticed? Yeah, it’s this place I sort of invented in my head, and I love painting it. Sharing it with someone, you know? Cause otherwise it just stays locked in my head.”

  “Some folks, the stuff they’ve got locked in their heads ought to say there,” I said, thinking of things I’d seen and things I’d had to put down, and she looked worried and a little shocked. “No, no, not this. This is something else entirely.”

  That got half the smile back, and I decided to push my luck. “So the woman in the blue dress, is she part of this imaginary world? Or did you use a model.”

  “A model,” she said hesitantly. “She sort of blew in here and turned everything upside down. Invited herself into the picture, if you know what I mean, and suddenly it didn’t make sense without her. So I had to paint her in. And then that was it. No more. She was gone.”

  I’d heard the same note in many of the others’ stories, that little coda at the end that had loss and longing and maybe a little bit of love in it, too. She’d left her mark, Michelle had.

  “One last question,” I said. “You miss her?

  And Miss Lee’s face brightened up all over again, and she pointed at the painting. “How could I miss her? I could see her any time I want.”

  I nodded, and I thanked her, and I went out the door into the relative quiet of the hallway.

  No one else in the building had seen Michelle or a model like her. The same went for a building across the way. She’d just gone out of that world and hadn’t been seen again.

  Later that night, I went back to the office. The remorse was sitting on my desk, still wrapped up, right where I’d left it. Carefully, I undid the packaging and let myself have a little taste. Not much, as the real stuff will knock a psychopomp like me on his ass for a week if you just slam it straight. Just a hint, enough to get the flavor and the texture of his feeling, and to maybe get a sense of what he was remorseful for.

  It was there. Bitter, oily, like almonds dunked in spoiled cream. I pulled back, pushed the package away from me.

  It was remorse, all right. Rare. Powerful. Genuine.

  And I knew why his daughter had finally run, and how far she’d go to get away from him.

  Carson was digging a hole in his yard when I drove up, a funny thing for a man to be doing at three in the morning.

  “Evening,” he said as I got out of my car. Like he’d been expecting me.

  “Evening,” I said in return, and walked over to where he stood. He took that as a sign to stop moving dirt, and leaned up on the shovel instead. “You’re not Blood, are you? But your wife was.”

  He nodded slow, and took a drag off a wreck of a cigarette that dangled from his lip. “Right in one. Her momma was what you’d call a wild talent. Could do damn near anything if she concentrated on it. Told me all about the Blood; was convinced I had it even if it never showed. I,” he paused there to take a deep breath. “I didn’t ever argue with her on that. You didn’t argue with her.”

  “What happened to her, Carson? Where’d she really go?”

  He gestured out at the farm, a vague wave that took it all in. “She’s still here. In all of that. Put herself into it, she could. She could feel the whole farm at once, everything living in it and growing. That was the big one of her Gifts, is what she told me. But every time she used it, she went a little further out. Was a little harder for her to come back.”

  I stepped up onto the porch. “Until one day she didn’t come back at all?”

  He nodded, looking miserable. “She was out there, and she stayed out there. Couldn’t come back. Wouldn’t come back. To our daughter. To me. I took care of her, but her body just…stopped. No breath. No life. So I did the only thing I could.”

  “You buried her out in the field?

  “That I did. Thinking maybe if she was in the field, and her body was in the field, then maybe she’d find a way into it, rise up and come home. Stupid idea, but it was all I had. And it wasn’t til I was done that I realized I had someone watching me the whole time.”

 

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