Chapter Eleven
ELEVEN
“What are you doing?” Izzy reappears in the bedroom doorway, her eyes red and puffy from crying.
“Just looking at some articles,” I say from my position on the floor. I twist around to look at her properly. “Are you okay? What did your mom say?”
“I’m fine, but she almost got in the car to come and get me.
” Izzy sighs, sinking down next to me. “But I think I talked her down. She’s going to speak to your mom and seems happy that your dad is on his way home, but I don’t know how long that will last. She made me promise to have my tracking on twenty-four seven and was about to call the police to hound them about our phones.
” She looks at the floor. “If she wasn’t in the middle of all this stuff with my sister, she’d be knocking at the door, but I think the only reason Sophie hasn’t relapsed yet is because Mom is with her all the time, so it’s better for her to stay put.
” Izzy goes quiet then, picking at the hot pink polish on her fingernails.
“So.” She tries again, crouching to look at one of the newspaper clippings. “What is all this?”
I shrug, holding up the sheaf of paper. “I’m not sure yet.
When that painting was here, Dad and Kim went out for a bit, and it fell off the wall.
The back panel cracked and all this stuff was inside.
” I hold up my hand so she can see the red line of the healing paper cut.
“I reopened this trying to get them all out—it still stings when I wash my hands. Anyway, they look like articles about The Four, when they were bought and sold, all that stuff, but these are handwritten notes. They’re hard to make out, though.
” I point at the letterhead on the thick writing paper as Izzy tilts her head to read them.
“Professor Williams? Didn’t you find the painting at his house?”
“Yeah. Do you remember him?” I ask. Izzy thinks for a second, then shakes her head. “I didn’t either, until Dad told me about his wife. She used to make really good chocolate cake.”
“So you think he put these in the painting? Why would he do that?”
“He must have. I think he was looking into links between The Four and a serial killer. Look here.” I start to show her a bunch of Professor Williams’s notes that I found this morning, but Izzy raises her eyebrows at me, and I know it’s too soon to talk to her about this particular theory, so I drop it.
“Think about it, Iz. He was an academic, so if The Four were real women, then surely there would be historical documents about them somewhere. I bet the self-portrait would have been way more valuable if he had some actual evidence they were murdered…” I feel my jaw drop and eyes widen in what I can only assume looks like a cartoon “Aha!” moment.
“Izzy, that’s it! If he had solid proof that the self-portrait was of a killer, it would be even more sought after.
No one knows where he got it, which means he probably bought it on the black market.
What if he was never planning to go public with it, he was going to verify it and sell it privately to the highest bidder? ”
“But then he dropped dead from a heart attack, and someone was killed on the first night it was shown publicly?” Izzy wraps herself in a hug. “I think both of those things put big ticks in the painting is definitely cursed box.”
“No, it doesn’t.” I roll my eyes. “Anyway, he obviously never got to the bottom of it.”
“And if I know you, Felicity Keller, future investigative journalist, you’re thinking of picking up where he left off?”
“Maybe,” I say, refusing to catch her eye.
“Hmm. Well, I’ll leave you to your weird little hobby while I go and have a shower,” Izzy says, pushing herself up to standing.
I check the time on my iPad. “Do you want to go in today? I know we missed pottery this morning, but we can still make it in this afternoon.”
Izzy hesitates at the threshold and then nods. “Yeah, I think I do. It’ll be good for us to get out, right?”
“Yeah, I think it will.”
“You just want to do your creepy research,” she says, but then she breaks into the smile I was hoping for.
“Unfortunately,” I joke, though that’s exactly why. “Go on, get ready.”
“Won’t be long.”
I listen to Izzy bustling around the bathroom and choose an article from the bunch dated from five years ago, my eyes drawn to the accompanying photograph.
It’s a large print of the portraits of The Four hanging in a gallery, though it’s not the Heywood.
The quality is poor and pixelated, meaning the photo itself is years old, but it’s still an arresting image.
It must have been taken the only other time Dad said the paintings were shown, when they were at the National Portrait Gallery.
I settle back against the bed and read the headline: “Legacy of a Killer?”
Now we’re talking.
I skim-read as the steady thrum of the shower starts in the next room. There’s not much real information here, and I can tell from the style of writing this was probably snipped from a tabloid, but it paints a clear enough picture.
The Four are now headed to the brand-new Heywood Gallery after the previous owner of the paintings and founder of the gallery, millionaire Clifford Heywood, left them to Blackwood University in his will.
The celebrated paintings come with a dark history attached.
First discovered in 1911 in New York, five canvases in total were officially recorded, along with the dead body of a male.
The deceased was thought to be the artist, but his name was never recorded.
He had, disturbingly, appeared to mix human blood and hair in with the paint, and the final portrait was said to be unfinished.
Though this John Doe’s official cause of death was listed as consumption, the tenement building was filed as a crime scene, due to the large amounts of other people’s blood discovered there.
Jesus, was this what the appraiser meant when he said “disturbing anomalies”? An unpleasant lump forms in my throat as I remember touching the paint. Does this mean the paintings of The Four contain blood and hair too? I feel sick, but I carry on reading anyway.
This incident occurred after a spate of murders in the summer of 1911, when at least four transient women were brutally slaughtered on the Lower East Side.
Though there was very little documentation and a fire in the 1950s wiped out many earlier records, due to the way The Four are depicted, some armchair detectives suspect the artist of being a serial murderer known as BBK.
This killer earned the moniker Bind, Bleed, Kill because of how he treated his victims before staging the bodies in different ways.
“Posing,” I mutter to myself, annoyed at the journalist’s error. Anyone who has watched Criminal Minds knows the difference. “The bodies were posed. Crime scenes are staged.”
I finish reading, but I hang on to the mention of a name—BBK.
Could he be the same man who painted The Four?
I pick up the article again and stare at the portraits.
On impulse I go to the kitchen, riffling through drawers until I find a roll of tape and some scissors.
I raid the recycling and find a large, flattened cardboard box; then I go to the living room and scour the bookshelves, taking a mug I bought Dad when I was six that is now filled with colored Sharpies.
I head back to my room and break down the box so it’s one long piece of cardboard.
Then I carefully cut a strip of tape and stick the article with the photo at the top, right in the center.
I uncap a red marker and draw three vertical lines, creating columns that I label from one to four, leaving space for a copy of each painting underneath.
“Jesus, Fliss. You know this is creepy, right?” Izzy says from the doorway, and she enters the room and looks at my handiwork.
“It’s like one of those murder boards you see on TV, or those people so obsessed with a conspiracy theory that they plaster the walls of their house with articles and stuff. ”
“It’s only one article,” I say, not letting her know I intend to stick the rest on at some point too. “I need a distraction, that’s all.”
“Fine,” Izzy says, her voice softening, but she marches over to the cardboard, picks it up and flips it over so it’s facing away from us. “But I cannot sleep in this room looking at that, I’m afraid. Those paintings freak me out, even more since yesterday.”
“Fully moveable.” I pick it up and fold it along the box lines. “See? Gone.”
“Thank you.” Izzy shrugs into an oversized yellow cardigan. “Are you ready?”
“Almost.” I throw my notebook and a few other essentials into a tote bag, holding up the iPad. “You think we’ll get our phones back today?”
“Mom said she’d text you as soon as she hears back from the police, iPad girl, so bring it with.”
We leave the room, and I grab my keys from the little dish next to the front door, wondering if I’ll be able to Google BBK while everyone else is busy with their projects.