Chapter 13
Chapter Thirteen
The following morning at seven fifteen, Oriana was up and in the hotel gym, running fast on the treadmill, letting her long legs stretch out and pull back.
Upstairs, Reese was still asleep. When she’d left him in bed, he’d again looked so meek, so gray-faced, that she’d had to fight the urge to burst into tears.
She’d come down here to push her heart and her mind and her body in a way that might help her forget all her violent fears.
At mile four, she gasped with a mix of adrenaline and panic and felt tears drip all the way to her chin.
She stopped, gripping both sides of the machine, and realized an older woman on the exercise bike a few feet away was watching her.
When Oriana turned to look at her, the older woman frowned and said something Oriana couldn’t hear over her music.
Oriana forced a smile and removed her headphones. “I’m sorry,” she said. “My music was too loud. Could you repeat yourself?” It felt bizarre to try to interact with someone when she felt so out of her mind.
But the older woman continued to cast her an annoyed look. “Your music,” she said. “I can hear it through your headphones. You need to turn it down.”
Oriana felt bashful, like a little kid who’d been caught doing something wrong.
It was true that she’d tried to drown her sorrows with a mix of very loud Aerosmith, Billy Joel, and Bruce Springsteen.
She’d tried to stop her panicked thoughts.
She hurried to clean her treadmill, then took the elevator up to the room she shared with Reese, where he was wide awake and smiling over a cup of coffee.
“There she is,” he said. “How was the run?”
Oriana showered, scrubbing herself clean, then put on a robe and enjoyed a cup of coffee with her husband. She didn’t mention how strange it had been in the gym. Reese was in good spirits, eager to drive up to Larry’s cabin and “take his temperature.”
“You’ve been talking about him for months and months,” Reese said. “It’s made me wonder if I remember him correctly. Did we meet a monster without even knowing it?”
They took the SUV through the serpentine roads and deeper into the mountains.
Larry was on his front porch with a cup of coffee, bundled up in what looked like old hunting gear.
He raised a gloved hand and beckoned for them to hurry through the path he’d dug through the snow.
Oriana’s ears froze on the brief walk from the car to the house.
“My eighty-year-old bones don’t take kindly to this weather anymore,” Larry said, laughing as Oriana and Reese shook themselves of snow. “Welcome back to Colorado. It’s been a whirlwind. But I have a surprise for you.”
Oriana was filled with sudden dread. But she put a smile on her face.
“Can’t wait.” She and Reese removed their winter clothes and hung them in his mudroom before following him into the kitchen for mugs of steaming tea.
If Larry noticed how different Reese looked from last time, he didn’t mention it.
Being that old probably meant being well-versed in how quickly people could change over time or due to illness.
Larry set the steaming teas on the counter and put his wrinkled hands on his hips. “I don’t know if I ever told you this,” he began, his eyes alight, “but I had an art show in Boulder all the way back in 1975. Most of the paintings you’ve sold for mega-millions were shown at that very art show.”
Oriana already knew about the art show. Isabella had learned about it. It had been held the same summer his wife Henrietta had gone missing.
“Is that so?” Oriana shook her head in mock disbelief.
“People from Boulder came in and out and walked right past my paintings. They didn’t see them for what they really were,” Larry said.
“I didn’t get a single buyer. Not one! I’m sure those same people are kicking themselves right about now.
I mean, they could have a Larry Calvin Johannes original!
I would have taken fifty bucks for one of them back then. ”
Anxiety fluttered around Oriana’s heart.
She reminded herself that she was the one who plucked him out of anonymity. She was the one who gave him this arrogance. No one else was to blame but her.
Then again, it sounded as though he’d been born with this arrogance. The stories Isabella had dragged out from the townspeople around in the seventies certainly verified that.
“For years, I gave up on painting,” he said. “For years, I sat around this cabin, waiting to die. And then, you came into my life, Oriana. You saw my paintings the way I always wanted them to be seen. And that’s been the most inspiring thing of all. Let me show you.”
When Larry turned and beckoned for them to follow him, Oriana cast Reese a look of panic.
Reese squeezed her hand to tell her he was right there, that nothing bad could happen.
But how could he be so sure? Slowly, they walked to the back of the house, to the windowless room where Larry had kept the paintings he’d given them when they were first in Colorado—the same paintings that now hung on the walls of mega-millionaires and the Manhattan elite.
Larry announced it grandly, as though he were a king. “I’ve been painting again. I have new paintings for you. I know it’s what you need if we’re going to keep making money together.”
Despite who Larry was and everything he might have stood for, Oriana couldn’t help but feel a jolt of happiness. Usually, she had to chase her artists for new works. But Larry had seen an opportunity and charged right in. He flicked on the light and showed them what he’d done.
Larry had finished six paintings. Like the others she’d sold so far, they had the themes of loneliness and isolation up here on the mountain.
His use of color had changed slightly. It was almost otherworldly, as though his eyesight had become tinted through the years.
The way he shaped trees had changed as well.
They were almost cartoony rather than wicked and spindly.
Oriana cocked her head and crossed her arms, assessing them.
She could feel Larry’s eyes on her. She could feel his expectation. He needed her to tell him how brilliant they were. He needed her to tell him that they would bring in millions.
“Wow,” she said finally. “These are quite the departure.”
Larry’s smile fell just the slightest bit. “I’ve evolved as an artist,” he told her. “I couldn’t do the same things over and over again. Picasso didn’t. Van Gogh didn’t.”
Oriana wanted to laugh at the idea of this man comparing himself to two of the greatest painters who’d ever lived. But she kept this same smile plastered to her face.
“They’re wonderful,” she said. “Truly. I think my buyers will love them.”
She told Larry to stand next to his brand-new paintings so that she could take a photograph of him.
He stood proudly, his hands clasped at his waist. After that, she and Reese carefully wrapped up the paintings in linen sheets and put them in the back of her SUV.
When they finished, Larry beckoned them back inside for grilled venison and cheese sandwiches.
Realizing she was both starving and on the brink of freezing, Oriana sat down at the kitchen table and took a nourishing, cheesy bite.
Reese looked tired but pleased and joined her.
“You know,” Larry said, sitting with them, his own sandwich untouched, “when that news story about my past came out, I just about panicked.”
Oriana set down her sandwich and blinked at him, waiting. She knew he meant the story about Henrietta’s disappearance.
“I don’t know who wants to drag my name through the mud,” Larry stated. “It could be anyone in Nederland or Boulder. Anyone can pick up a phone and tell a few lies, right? I mean, my fame puts a target on my back, don’t you think?”
Oriana hesitated. She didn’t want to say the wrong thing. She knew better than to anger one of her artists. “That can happen,” she offered finally.
“There’s so much they don’t know about my time with Henrietta,” Larry said darkly. “She was a cruel and manipulative person. You should have heard some of the things she said to me. She didn’t know how to make her husband happy.”
Oriana couldn’t keep herself from asking, “Is a woman’s only responsibility to keep her husband happy?”
Larry barked with laughter and looked at Reese to say, “She’s taking me the wrong way, isn’t she?”
“I think she’s trying to get a sense for what you mean,” Reese said. He sounded easy, confident. But he wasn’t going to take Larry’s side just because he was a husband and a man. He wasn’t going to cozy up to him just because he was Oriana’s client. His eyes flickered.
“It’s always the same with the younger generations,” Larry said. “You want to make us older people out to be mean and anti-feminist and whatnot. It wasn’t like that.”
“What was it like?” Oriana asked, trying to sound sweet.
Larry put his large, wrinkled hands on the table. Oriana wondered whether his paintings were so different because his bones had changed. He wasn’t as dexterous as he’d been in the seventies. He didn’t have the same body, the same mind.
“Henrietta didn’t respect my art career,” Larry said. “I think that might be one of the reasons she left me, in fact. She thought making art was a waste of time.”
Oriana remembered what Isabella had said—that Larry supposedly wanted children terribly and had told everyone that Henrietta couldn’t get pregnant. She wondered if it was too dangerous to ask him about it now.
She plunged in anyway.
“Was there a reason you didn’t have children?” she asked.
Larry looked as though he’d lost his breath.
“I mean,” Oriana was quick to fix the mood, “most people had children back then. It wasn’t like it is now, with so many people being childfree on purpose.”
Larry cleared his throat. “Well, I wanted children. I wanted them terribly. I think Henrietta didn’t want children.
That was another of our problems. Maybe she should have been born in a later generation.
Maybe she should have been young now, when those kinds of childfree decisions were more common.
As it was, she broke my heart. I don’t know if I’ve ever gotten over it.
But that’s all I can really say about Henrietta.
Wherever she is, she’s a stranger. But wherever she is, I hope she’s seeing how famous I’ve gotten.
I hope she’s feeling some regret right about now. ” He took a long sip of water.
There was an air of finality to what he said, proof that he wasn’t going to continue any discussion about Henrietta. The fact that he’d brought up Henrietta himself didn’t matter.
A half-hour later, Oriana and Reese were driving back down the mountain. Oriana had to focus hard on her breathing to keep from shivering too hard. Reese had the heater on full blast, but it still didn’t feel warm enough.
“What do you think of his new paintings?” Reese asked finally, breaking the anxious silence between them.
“I think they’re fine?” Oriana struggled to make sense of them.
“Maybe he’s lost his edge over the years,” Reese said.
“Maybe,” she offered. “Maybe he’s out of practice?”
“Do you think they’ll still sell?” Reese asked.
“Honestly? A lot of my buyers don’t care much about the art they hang up,” Oriana admitted. “They love the story of Larry Calvin Johannes. They especially love that he…” She trailed off because it felt too heinous to admit it. “Do you think he did something to Henrietta?”
Reese put his face in his hands and sighed. “I think there’s a darkness in that man’s heart,” he admitted finally. “But I don’t know if that means he’s a murderer.”
When Oriana pulled into the hotel parking lot, Reese said he was exhausted and needed to rest. She dropped him off at the front door and watched as he crept through the falling snow, looking every bit as old as Larry Calvin.
Oriana’s heart dropped into her stomach.
She hurried to park in the indoor lot, then made a call to an art historian and expert in Denver.
She needed another opinion about something. She wasn’t sure what she could trust.