Thirty-four
“There’s a man upstairs in the loft for you,” Jacket said as he pressed the security button to call the elevator.
“Really?” Cam searched his eyes for a hint but found none.
Jacket had taken to greeting her in the lobby each night when she got off her bus, sometimes even with a much-appreciated glass of wine.
Her bus entered Mt. Lebanon where the two big churches sat, at the peak of Washington Road.
She’d exited there and walked the last quarter of a mile to her building, past the cemetery where her father was buried, past the hardware store, past the Japanese restaurant, whose sushi she and Jacket loved so much.
It was a great way to unwind. The last couple weeks before the opening of an exhibition were always hard, and though everything was coming together, she was glad the long workday was over and all she had to worry about was getting Ursula into the sack, creatively speaking, with Peter.
Not that it was all that hard, after all.
She knew how persuasive Peter could be when he put his mind to it.
“A man?” she said, juggling the wine and her laptop bag. “Who?”
“Dunno. Didn’t give his name. Says he’s a friend of yours.”
Her heart did a lurch, and then she remembered Jacket and Peter had already met. Whoever the man upstairs was, it wasn’t Peter.
When the door opened in the penthouse, Cam saw Peter’s nosy apprentice, Mertons, sitting on the edge of her couch.
For an instant she didn’t know what to say.
She knew he’d arrived shortly after Peter, for Jeanne had told her so.
She also knew Jeanne had brought him to Orbis Coffee.
But that had been a week ago. Where he’d been since then, she had no idea.
He was dressed in a somber gray suit with a crisp white shirt and a tie so subdued it made regimental stripes look like fluorescent tie-dye.
If she didn’t know better, she’d swear he was an accountant.
She looked at Jacket, then back at Mertons, waiting for a clue on the backstory Jacket had been handed.
Mertons cleared his throat and stood. “Gregory Mertons. Do you remember our appointment? Sorry to arrive so late. I’m on my way to the airport.”
Was he supposed to be a pilot? A chauffeur? The new breed of British middle-class terrorist? She looked at the briefcase at his feet as well as a huge, oversized suitcase next to the fireplace. “Um…”
“I’m here to discuss the insurance you asked about. Whole life?” He returned to his seat.
“Riiiiiiight.” She dropped her laptop bag on the table, hugged the wine a little closer, and said to Jacket, “Sorry, I, uh, forgot.”
Jacket gave her a questioning look. “Insurance?”
She shrugged. “You’re welcome to join us. I’m trying to decide between whole life and term. I want to be covered, you know, with renewable or decreasing term, but I also keep thinking of the cash value. I asked Mr. Mertons to run a few different scenarios for me—”
“Seventeen, actually,” Mertons said, patting the briefcase at his feet.
“I might need your advice.” She smiled.
Jacket waved away the idea like it was a swarming cloud of locusts and broke into a jog. “Lots of work,” he said. “Wine’s in the kitchen.”
When she heard the studio door shut, she turned to demand an explanation, but Mertons had his head buried in the briefcase. Good God, she thought with a start, I’m not actually going to have to hear about insurance, am I?
He pulled out a piece of paper, nearly laid it on the table, then picked it up again. “I need to talk to you about Peter.”
She felt a charge of fear. “Is he okay?”
“He’s fine.” Mertons regarded her closely over the top of his glasses.
“Oh. Good. I guess.”
“Have a seat.”
She sunk into the couch opposite him and put her wine on the table.
“Is he your boyfriend?”
She flushed. “Look, I don’t know what he told you, but sleeping with Peter doesn’t exactly make you his girlfriend. If anything, it makes you something a little closer to an idiot.”
Mertons examined a nonexistent crease in his tie. “I was talking about Jacket, Miss Stratford.”
Great, Cam. Maybe you can post a snap on Instagram too. “Um, yes, I guess you could call him that.”
Mertons nodded and balled the paper in his hand. Pressing the bridge of his glasses upward, he said, “You’re aware what you’ve done is illegal.”
She felt a different sort of warmth creep across her cheeks, the sort of warmth one feels when called into the principal’s office. “I’m not aware of any law I violated.”
“Ignorance is a very weak defense.”
“Who are you?”
“Gregory Mertons, Guild time-jump accountant.” He held out his hand.
“Time-jump accountant?”
“Yes.”
“What were you doing in Peter’s studio?”
He lowered his hand. “I’m an envoy and an observer. I travel the world to ensure the appropriate time rules are being followed. Think of me as a UN ambassador, the painting world’s version of Angelina Jolie.”
She looked at his hangdog eyes and Abraham Lincoln–like lankiness. “Um…”
“The Guild has been watching you for some time.”
“Watching? Spying on, do you mean? And what is the Guild?”
Mertons reached into his pocket and retrieved a mechanical pencil. “It’s not spying when the use of the time tube is unlicensed.”
“Gee, and I swear I sent in my application.”
“We don’t consider this to be humorous, Miss Stratford. Time travel is exceedingly risky, especially unprecalculated time travel.”
“Good news. I aced precalculus in high school. I never travel without my quadratic formula.”
“Miss Stratford—”
“Mr. Mertons, why are you here?”
“How shall I put it? Your travel visa has been revoked.”
Jacket had won every game of strip blackjack they’d played until he taught her to read the “tell.” Mertons clicked his pencil.
“You’ve shut down the tube?” The laptop with the extra-special version of was in her bag on the table in the entry hall. She tried to keep her eyes focused on Mertons.
Click click click click. “Yes.”
“Gosh, it was my favorite part of the DeLorean.”
The pencil stopped. A muscle contracted at the corner of Mertons’s eye. She felt like her laptop was practically tapping her on her shoulder, and she cupped a hand around her eye to block her view.
“Yes, well, I’m certain you’ll find other uses for it,” he said uncertainly.
Well, wherever he’d been in his life, he hadn’t been anywhere in the western world in the 1980s. She should have introduced herself as Pat Benatar.
“I also want to talk with you about your book.”
“My goodness,” she said, “it’s just a festival of fun tonight. I think I would have preferred the insurance pitch.”
“This is a bit awkward, I know, but I’d like you to consider dropping it.”
“Drop my book?”
“Yes.”
“Did Peter send you?”
“No. In fact, he would be considerably unhappy to know I was here.”
“Well, I’d certainly hate to be the cause of any unhappiness for him.”
Mertons paused, clicked his pencil a time or two. His gaze cut to the rolled-up paper, then back to Cam. “May I show you something?”
“Sure.” She picked up her wine and tossed back a large gulp. It seemed only a moment ago that the Cabernet had had flavor.
He turned the paper facedown on the table and went over to the suitcase. It was a large beige hard-sided valise with leather straps and buckles, the sort her grandfather might have traveled with. “Gee, where are you heading? Nineteen forty-two?”
He gave a weak laugh, but only enough to remind her that that might be exactly where a time-jump accountant was traveling.
She wondered if he used too. Jeanne swore the laptop had been turned off the night he and Peter arrived, which had baffled Cam.
But he must not know about ’s unique “Look Inside!” feature, since he clearly didn’t have the faintest idea how she traveled.
He opened the buckles and cracked the top. Using both hands, he pulled a painting out of the case and set it on the table.
It was her. Done by Peter. She wore the olive dressing gown she had worn that night, but it was not quite the pose she remembered.
Her hair, which had been pinned up that night in his studio, fell loosely over her shoulder.
Instead of frank eroticism, the look in her eyes was one of relaxed delight.
And most important, she was clothed. The painting was an imagined moment of quiet joy, one that had not occurred, and she looked at it without knowing quite what to say.
“That’s not the painting from that night, is it?”
“No, but it was painted soon after. And many more were painted here.”
“Here? Peter’s still here?” She’d assumed Peter had left. “Why?”
“He says his desire is to stop you from writing your book.”
“What’s that supposed to mean? You’re not going to suggest that that isn’t his desire, are you?”
“No. I just wondered if there might be another reason for his single-mindedness.”
Her gaze went from the painting to the veiled hint in Mertons’s eyes. “Look,” she said with an iron edge, “the man gave me a bullshit story that nearly ruined me as a writer.”
“He did it for a friend. Under duress. I know. I helped make it possible.”
“Well, thanks a hell of a lot. You and Peter can take your little two-man Mean Boys act and go back to the seventeenth century.”
“Peter can’t go back.”
“What? Is his foot caught in a time crack? Tell him to hook that DeLorean up to a lightning rod. One-point-twenty-one jiggowatts of electricity shooting up his ass is just the thing to get him moving on his way.”
“You’re thinking of the Peter of 1673. The Peter you and I know lives in another place. The Afterlife. He’s dead.”
She nearly dropped her wine. “What are you saying?”
Mertons sighed. “The Afterlife is where we go when we die. You, me, Peter, anyone you’ve ever known.
Some stay forever, but only if they’ve reached the end of all the lives they were meant to live.
Most wait for a new life to be assigned.
While Peter was waiting for his new-life-to-be, he was asked to return to his former life for a short assignment—stopping you.
He had no wish to return and accepted the task with great reluctance. ”
“He didn’t appear very reluctant.” She thought of those lips as she and Peter stood on the balcony that night. There wasn’t a movement he’d made that had seemed even remotely hesitant.
“Then I’d assert you don’t know him very well.”
She made a peremptory sniff, and her eyes returned to the painting. It certainly seemed to have been drawn with honest regard. She looked at the curls framing her shoulders and felt a shiver as she remembered him removing that hairpin. “And this is what he’s been working on?”
Her companion’s moral superiority appeared to weaken. “Peter’s been working on a number of projects,” he said obscurely.
“So what are you telling me? I should stop the book because Peter found a conscience and now has feelings for me?”
Mertons let out a long sigh. “Yes.”
How much of her book was revenge, she asked herself, and how much was a story that should be told? She shifted uncomfortably. “Mertons—”
“Look, I’m not saying you two are another Romeo and Juliet—”
“You’re aware they ended up dead?”
“Fine, a Scarlett and Rhett—”
“Estranged and unhappy. But you’re getting warmer.”
“What I’m trying to say is, look at the work. You’re an art expert. What does that art tell you?”
She allowed herself to remove the lens of anger that had colored her thoughts about Peter since they’d parted. She was a seasoned art expert, after all. What would she see if she really let herself look?
She closed her eyes and opened them. What she saw made her heart ache, not just because Peter had painted the sort of moment of comfortable intimacy that makes the best part of a relationship, but because that moment reflected what she herself had desired for the two of them.
If this is what Peter’s art said about Peter, she thought, what does my book say about me?
Touching the corner of the canvas with care, as if it might spark under her touch, she said lightly, “It tells me a lot of things, actually.”
“You see! I’ve seen his work! He’s not painted something like this ever before, not even of his wife. Don’t you see the impact you’ve had on him?”
Wife? Ursula was his wife? She fought to keep her hand from shaking. “He painted his wife?”
“Oh, any number of times. She was his muse, I’m told. But it was never like this.”
No, one never paints one’s wife the way one does the woman one draws into adultery. She felt ill.
“I think,” she said softly, “you’d better leave.”
Mertons frowned, obviously confused. “But—”
“Go. Please.”
“I should like to leave you the painting.”
“That’s unnecessary. Peter will see it’s missing.”
“No. No, he—” Mertons came to a dead stop.
“He what?”
Mertons shifted his weight. “He asked me to dispose of it.”
“Then I’ll ask you to do the same.”
“Miss Stratford, all sentiment aside, do you have any idea how much a Peter Lely is worth in today’s market?”
“Not enough to tempt me a second time. Take it.” Cam made her way to the entry hall, hoping Mertons would take the hint.
His shoulders fell. He slipped on his coat, placed the canvas under his arm, and picked up his briefcase and valise. “And the book?”
She pressed the security button to call the elevator. “Tell Peter he’s been my muse. Now, if you’ll excuse me…” Cam made it all the way to her bedroom before she began to cry.
* * *
Jacket had been sneaking into the kitchen, hoping to grab a beer without being forced into the torturous conversation, when he heard an odd tone in the conversation Cam was having with the insurance agent.
He’d turned in the direction of the living room and strained to hear.
What he’d picked up had been garbled, as the ice maker had dropped a fresh batch into the storage compartment, but then, clear as a bell, he’d heard the insurance guy say, “Miss Stratford, all sentiment aside, do you have any idea how much a Peter Lely is worth in today’s market? ”
Peter Lely again? What the hell was going on? Who were these guys?
Then she’d rushed by the kitchen and into her room.
When he heard the door close, he stuck his head out for a look.
The insurance guy stood in front of the elevator with a canvas frame under his arm.
The door opened, and the man hesitated. He held the door with his foot, put his cases on the floor, and placed the painting down, front side against the wall.
Then he picked up the cases and got in. The door closed.
Jacket ventured from the studio, not sure what to think. He went to the row of windows in the dining room, the ones that faced down onto Washington Road. He saw the man exit the building, cross the street, and head into Orbis Coffee Shop.
Then Jacket crossed to the elevator and turned the painting. Jesus, it was Cam, and worse, it was good. He wondered if she’d keep it. He wondered if she wanted him even to know about it. He looked to see if Cam’s door was open. It wasn’t. He pulled his cell phone out and took a snap.
What the hell was going on?