The Affliction Page 27

  It didn’t take long to discover that Florence’s exuberant teaching style did not translate well to fiction. Her prose was sentimental and florid, and the plotting creaked with the weight of her research, which she was as much in love with as she had been with Velázquez himself. The scenes were about the wrong things, and she had the fatal tendency of writers who don’t trust their readers to tell you what she was going to tell you, then telling it, then summing up what she’d told. Maggie wanted badly to like it, both because of what it had meant to Florence and because she was going to have to say something about it to Suzanne. And that was before she suddenly understood that Florence might actually have died for it.

  Maggie had begun to swipe rapidly through the electronic pages, assessing chapter breaks, getting a feel for length and structure. This was to distract herself, if briefly, from a lifeless sequence introducing the young Velázquez to the studio of the Seville master Pacheco, who employed him, taught him, and finally became his father-in-law. There were exhaustive lists of the equipment and furnishings of the studio, the names and personalities of the other apprentices, the trouble one of the lesser talents had in painting a still life of a bowl of eggs.

  Then the story stopped. What Maggie had thought were many more pages of text were instead camera rolls of photographs that Florence had taken during her research.

  First came Madrid. There were endless shots of Las Meninas, Velázquez’s complex portrait of the little infanta Margaret Theresa and her ladies-in-waiting. Florence had taken it from every angle she could, always including the crowds surging around it and the backs of a lot of heads. Then of other works in the Prado, and elsewhere in Madrid. Then Seville, where Florence had concentrated on genre pictures. There were many that were familiar and many more that were not, and Maggie relished the art history lesson, especially as Florence, the good teacher, had carefully annotated the images. She could see that the genre paintings were invaluable sources of information and detail for the historical setting Florence had tried to paint in words. The clothes. The food. The pictures practically included the smells.

  At the Met Museum in New York she’d captured the court portraits, of course, but especially focused on the heart-stopping portrait of Juan de Pareja, Velázquez’s slave and studio assistant. Was Florence planning a plotline about the Moors in Spain? And then the pictures from the Boston MFA. There were more portraits of Philip IV, with his giant Hapsburg jaw, and other members of the family. But then the transfixing picture of the poet Góngora, so like a Manet or Eakins. And then, Maggie turned the page.

  There was the John Singer Sargent picture The Daughters of Edward Darley Boit. Such an homage to Las Meninas, such a masterpiece in its own right. Maggie could see what Florence would do with that as a teacher. It was almost as hard to get a clear shot of The Daughters as it had been of Las Meninas at the Prado. Of course, you could pull professional pictures from the Internet, but here Florence was making visual notes to herself, taking details of the girls’ faces, of their dresses, of the beautiful vases as tall as the children. There were six or eight pictures from different distances and angles. Maggie was fully enjoying her ability to enlarge the pictures with a flick of her fingers and zoom in on different parts of the image when she saw, standing at the edge of one frame and before a different picture entirely, a couple kissing. The man’s back was sideways to the camera, his body stocky, his coarse hair ash blond. His arms were around the young lady, one hand in her hair. She was mostly out of frame, but Maggie could see that the hair was dark and worn loose and long in the manner of the young.

  She swiped to the next picture. Florence had moved; her angle on the picture was such that she must have come closer to the amorous couple, who had now broken from each other. By enlarging the picture and moving as far to the edge of it as she could on the screen, Maggie could see that the man had turned and was looking directly at Florence. It was Hugo Hollister.

  Chapter 20

  Monday, May 11

  Angus Westphall had almost forgotten that he had a landline when he took the first phone call he’d had from Avis Binney Metcalf in some forty years. Not that they hadn’t seen each other en passant; that happened quite frequently in certain seasons, or had until the terrible thing happened to her daughter. Since then she’d been raising her grandchild and was not as often on the social circuit, though she still turned out from time to time for a cause she cared about, and once in a while appeared at the auctions, though she was shy and preferred to bid by phone.

  He would have loved to think that her call meant she had remembered she had a yen for him after all these years, but reason suggested that the impulse more likely sprang from something else. True to her natural reserve, apparently unchanged from the young woman he remembered, she had not wanted to say much on the phone, so his curiosity was unabated as he arrived at her club for their lunch date.

  “Thank you for coming,” she said to him as he crossed the reception room toward where she sat on a narrow couch upholstered in yellow striped silk. She rose to kiss him on the cheek with cool, dry, slightly chapped lips.

  “It’s my pleasure,” he said with a little bow. He followed her to the elevator, which they rode to the top floor where the terrace was newly open after the winter. Angus had plenty of opportunity to notice how well she had maintained her figure. She was wearing a charcoal gray cashmere skirt with matching sweater, and a dark silk scarf knotted in some attractive way. He liked well-dressed women. He wondered if she thought he had changed much. And why she wanted to see him. A board or committee she wanted him to serve on, was his best guess. But maybe a letter to some club or co-op board on someone’s behalf . . .

  Or maybe an escort to the Costume Gala? That would be fun . . .

  “You’re sure you’re happy eating outdoors?” she asked.

  He was.

  “You don’t mind that it’s buffet?”

  He didn’t.

  When they had filled their plates, or half-filled in Avis’s case, and were seated face-to-face at a table in dappled sun, and had said all there was to say about the view and the weather, Avis said, “I hope . . .”

  And paused so long that Angus finally had to smile at her and say, “You hope what?”

  Avis said, “I hope I’m not about to offend you.”

  What on earth was she going to say? That his breath was the talk of Park Avenue? That he needed to lose fifteen pounds?

  “We’ve been friends a long time, Avis,” he said, smiling.

  She pushed some salmon mousse around on her plate. Finally she said, “Do you know a woman named Maggie Detweiler?”

  Angus felt as if his brain were a kaleidoscope and it had just refocused itself in an entirely unexpected design.

  “Maggie Detweiler. Winthrop School, is that the one?” Hope had mentioned her too, he thought.

  “It is. Nice woman. She’s retired now. Apparently doing some consulting for the Rye Manor School. She came to see me about something that”—she hesitated, then plunged on—“that affects your sister Caroline.”

  “Caroline’s daughter goes to Rye Manor.”

  “So I understand. How is she, by the way? Caroline? She was so appealing when I first knew her.”

  “Still is. She’d love to see you, I know.”

  Avis gave a brief smile but returned to her topic.

  “Maggie told me something I hadn’t known, that Caroline is married to Hugo Hollister.”

  Angus sat up straight. Anything to do with Hugo had that effect on him.

  “She is, yes.”

  “I’m not going to ask if you and he are close, because the answer might make it hard for me to say what I feel I have to say.”

  “Put your mind at ease then,” said Angus seriously. “Hugo is good company and I love my sister, but . . . put it this way, I haven’t put him up for any of my clubs, and I’m not likely to.”

  Avis smiled briefly. This she understood perfectly, and it answered her question.

  She
paused, reassured, and ate a spear of asparagus with her fingers. Angus felt himself beginning to adore her.

  “Maggie Detweiler needed some background information, which I happened to have, because Hugo was once close to my stepmother, Belinda Binney. You knew her, I’m sure. Oh yes, I know you did. You wrote me that very nice letter when she died.”

  “She was a treasure. So kind, and so much fun.”

  “Yes. Well, Hugo agreed with you, but if you don’t mind, I’ll skip that story. It doesn’t reflect well on anyone involved, and you don’t really need to know.”

  Angus said only, “Then there’s something else that I do need to know?”

  “I think so. Yes.”

  A waitress came to take their plates and offer coffee. That settled, Avis went on.

  “This came to me more or less by accident. It reminded me of Maggie Detweiler’s questions and I found myself thinking that you or Caroline might . . . that you should probably be aware. In case you are not already.”

  Angus watched her with complete attention. He wasn’t even blinking.

  “You know I’m an art dealer. Mostly my partner minds the store these days, but he had an appointment out of the gallery. Something we’d bought in London was being delivered to the shop; we were trying a new shipper and someone had to be there to watch the uncrating. While I was there, an old client of ours came in. Dutch, a brewery heir. We hadn’t seen him in some years. He was hoping to talk with my partner, but there he was and there I was. He wanted our advice on a ‘situation.’ To be brief, he’d met Hugo Hollister somewhere, maybe Newport or the Cape or somewhere like that, the client’s a great sailor. Hugo did what Hugo does best, and soon they were going to exhibitions together. And Hugo was letting innuendos slip about who had been badly advised in the art market and how Hugo had saved the day.

  “Eventually, Hugo told our client that he knew of a Bierstadt that might be available for the right price, a particularly desirable one. Sioux encampment or some such subject, big scale, dramatic sky, had never been publicly exhibited. It would cause a fuss if it came to auction but the owner didn’t want it known that he was deaccessioning.”

  “I have a feeling I know what’s coming.”

  “Well, our client—he’s a little sheepish, as you can imagine—was nervous about the piece, although it looked gorgeous in snapshots. Hugo was pressuring; he said the word was getting around to other collectors that it might be available.”

  “Had he seen the actual painting?”

  “Once. It was at the owner’s house out on the Island somewhere, Hugo got him in on the quiet. He couldn’t stay long, he couldn’t touch it or examine the frame or the back or any of that sort of thing, but he said it was magnificent. He’d been looking for just such a thing for years.”

  “Which Hugo had known perfectly well, of course.”

  Avis didn’t respond to that, but the line of her mouth suggested what she felt about it.

  “So he bought it,” said Angus.

  “Yes.”

  “And now there are problems with the provenance.”

  “Yes. But our client is no fool and something was making him nervous. He bought on the condition that if he changed his mind, Hugo would buy it back.”

  “For the same money.”

  “Yes.”

  They sat in silence for a minute. Angus ate a macaroon.

  Avis shifted a little in her seat. By barely moving a finger, Angus signaled a waiter, and Avis, grateful, asked for more coffee. Then she resumed.

  “The Hudson River School is not my field, so my partner went to see the canvas.”

  “Where is the picture now?”

  “In Delaware, where the client has a house. You really don’t need the details. But the chit has been called in. He’s lost confidence in the piece and wants Hugo to take it back and make him whole.”

  “For how much?”

  Avis named a figure, and Angus whistled.

  “So far, Hugo is stalling. I thought you should know, in case . . . I have no idea about how Hugo runs his business or if cash flow might be a problem, but . . . a man with that kind of money pressure. I just thought you ought to know.”

  “Thank you,” said Angus.

  “It’s not a tale I enjoyed bearing.”

  “No. But you did the right thing. Thank you.”

  He wondered if she would go to the Costume Gala with him if he asked, and decided that now would not be the time.

  It wasn’t until Tuesday that Bark and Phillips could get over to Rye to talk to Maggie Detweiler. They had a pair of suspects in the Scarsdale home invasion case in custody and they had been working all Sunday night and most of Monday on trying to get them to rat each other out. A disgusting pair of grifters, one of whom had been out on parole for only six weeks. They’d had to let them go, only to get a tip from the prison cell mate of one of the suspects, still in Comstock. He said the suspect’s brother mowed lawns in the neighborhood of the break-in and had told the pair which family would be out of town until Memorial Day. Bark and Phillips still weren’t sure if the tip had been wrong or these mental giants had hit the wrong house, but now they had to find and catch them again. And now Mrs. Detweiler had a bee in her hairnet about the Meagher case.

  Maggie was down at Greenleaf Field watching her girls play softball when they found her. Pinky Tyson was catcher and the Rye girls were ahead by three runs. Not at all unhappy to be outside in sunlight with no one in the immediate vicinity bleeding, the detectives sat down beside Maggie and watched with her until the end of the inning. Bark had coached his older daughter’s high school team, and he even started cheering for plays he liked, in spite of not knowing which team was which. Maggie had the distinct impression he’d rather have stayed there to see how the game turned out than follow her to the library where they could talk in private.

  They talked about the book Florence Meagher had been working on as they walked. In the Katherine Jones room two senior girls were doing calculus homework, but they politely gathered their books and skittered off when the grown-ups came in. Maggie took her tablet from her book bag and scrolled to the pictures that had been haunting her. First she showed them the Sargent the way Florence probably saw it, then enlarged the image and moved to the edge of the frame, where a couple embraced. She let them study it. Then she moved to the next picture on the roll, in which the man has turned to face the camera.

  Phillips enlarged the face even more than Maggie had. “He was at the funeral,” she said. “I saw him talking to Ray Meagher.”

  “He’s a trustee here. His daughter is in the junior class. Lily Hollister.”

  “The girl who found the body?”

  “The same. This is Hugo Hollister. Married to a woman named Caroline, maiden name Westphall. From a prominent midwestern family, newspaper fortune, from back when newspapers made money.”

  “Currently married, you mean?”

  “I do.”

  “He have money himself?” asked Bark.

  “Champagne taste, for sure, but I very much doubt the money to pay for it.”

  “So it would put quite a spoke in his wheels if someone showed this picture to his wife?”

  “I presume it would,” said Maggie.

  There was a silence while the detectives pondered what Maggie had been thinking about from all angles for days.

  “Any idea when this picture was taken?”

  “The pictures are in date order,” said Maggie. “The Madrid ones are from her trip last summer. She went to New York in late fall, her sister says. The Boston ones are quite recent, maybe as late as mid-April. She might not even have really sorted through them. She had just sent this file to Suzanne the week before she died.”

  “Are you thinking,” Bark said at last, “that this picture could be a motive for murder?”

  “He’s seen Florence aiming the camera toward him. He’s got to assume that she’s seen him already, or would eventually find his picture on her camera roll.”

&nb
sp; “And would he have reason to think she wouldn’t keep it to herself?” Phillips asked.

  “With Florence I think the question is whether she could keep it to herself. The woman could not shut up. He’d have had to expect that with the best will in the world she’d spill it to someone sooner or later.”

  “But she hadn’t yet, as far as we know,” Phillips said.

  Maggie agreed. “Which probably means she hadn’t seen him in the pictures yet. She was teaching a full schedule plus preparing for the evaluation during the time between her Boston trip and the murder.”

  After a long silence, Bark said, “Well, this throws a new light on things.”

  “Yes. Would you like to hear my theoretical, while you’re adjusting?”

  Both would.

  “Hugo and his wife have a weekend house up the Hudson. A village called Hatfield. He was up there the morning Florence was found; I remember that he was one of the first from the outside world to arrive on the scene because he was relatively close.”

  Phillips and Bark both took out their notebooks.

  “Florence disappeared Wednesday morning. Hugo and his wife were on campus, or had been the night before.”

  “You know that how?” Bark interrupted.

  “I was here evaluating the school. My team had arrived that afternoon, and the trustees were all here to meet us. There was a reception Tuesday evening. Hugo must have been nervous as a fox with his wife and Florence in the same room.”

  “Florence was there?”

  “Very much so,” said Maggie and thought of Florence rattling on about olives in her cereal in Madrid. Then she had a flicker of a memory of Hugo going to intercept his wife when . . . ? Then she lost it.

  “Go on.”

  “From what I’ve learned, Florence was a creature who loved routine. She left the house about the same time on school mornings, drove into the village for a coffee and the paper, then got to campus about eight. Morning prayers start at eight-thirty. She’d spend a half hour in the faculty room, then begin her day. Wednesday morning, she never showed up.”