“They grow up so fast.” Clara Beetleman stood at her side, beatific smile in place, hands folded serenely over her ample stomach. The aging Madonna, Kate thought, and saw the portrait in various shades of pale brown and gold. “Is she your only one?”
“Yes.”
“Not that there is such a thing as an only. One is plenty.” Her laugh was light and easy, but her eyes watched Kate with a birdlike intensity.
“How many children do you have?” Kate asked automatically because it was polite. She didn’t want to talk with this woman who looked as if she could worm her way to the heart of Kate’s insecurities. Did she know that they’d tried unsuccessfully for years to give Grace a sibling? She felt trapped against the windowsill, looking past the woman’s shoulder to try and catch Ian’s eye, but he was deep in conversation and didn’t see her.
“Three boys. All of them raised right here and educated at Wickfield.” Clara Beetleman laughed again. “I understand Grace will be studying in the music department?”
“Yes, she was accepted into Dr. Beetleman’s program.”
“She must be very talented if Laurence has taken her on. A piano prodigy?”
“Yes, I guess.” Kate tried to smile. She hated that term because it carried with it so much expectation. Weren’t prodigies the ones who burned out early, walking away from that which had once consumed them? She didn’t want Grace to experience her talent as a burden or a liability.
Her own parents had been good about that, their ignorance of an artist’s life keeping them from any expectations about her future. They’d been older than her friends’ parents and having given up on conceiving, were eager to help their only child follow her dreams even if hers was a passion they didn’t understand.
All they knew was that as soon as Kate could talk she’d spoken of color, that each and every Christmas letter to Santa had begged for crayons, paints, palettes, and easels. And as grateful as she was for the teachers who’d recognized her talent and helped steer her toward an education appropriate for it, she was still more thankful for those years when she’d enjoyed the gift she’d been given without being defined by it.
She’d tried to give this same freedom to Grace, but the truth was that she and Ian had the education their parents lacked. They could identify what they were seeing almost from the first moment, when Grace reached a chubby toddler’s hand above her head to carefully tap, not pound, the ivory keys of a friend’s piano.
A man wearing a dress shirt striped like stick candy joined them near the window. He had dark curly hair and large, square-framed black glasses. “Clara, you’ll have to scold Laurence for me—he completely forgot to tell us that Kate Corbin came along with the new dean.”
Before Clara could respond, the man extended his hand for Kate to shake. “Jerry Virgoli.” He smiled at her and took a sip from a balloon glass of deep red wine. It swirled in the glass, and she thought of carmine spilling onto a canvas, and had to pull her eyes back to his face. “I’m a big fan of your work.”
“Thank you.”
“I saw your show in Brooklyn—when was that?”
“A year and a half ago.”
“It was superb.”
“Thank you.” Her last show. For a while she’d wondered if it really would be her last. The months when she’d stared at the same blank canvas and been unable to pick up a brush. The months when all she saw when she looked at the pots of paint was how they’d been knocked to the floor of her studio when he’d slammed her back onto the table, and how she’d seen them swirling on the floor as she struggled, the colors rushing together, muddying the stained concrete floor.
She took a quick swallow from her glass of white wine. Therapy hadn’t chased those images away, but at least she could paint again. Halting progress, but still progress.
“Did you read the article about Lily Slocum?” Jerry’s voice lowered. Clara Beetleman nodded, but Kate asked, “Who?”
“She was a student at Wickfield,” Jerry began, but Clara corrected him.
“She is a student.”
“You don’t seriously think that she’s still alive?”
Clara shuddered. “I don’t know, but I hope so.”
“She disappeared in May,” Jerry Virgoli said to Kate. “Broad daylight, walking back to her apartment from campus, and she just vanished.”
Clara shook her head, whether in disagreement or regret Kate couldn’t tell. “Someone must have seen something.”
“The police would have found them by now.” Jerry Virgoli twirled his wineglass lightly in his hands. The nails were manicured and he wore a signet ring on his fourth finger. Light sparkled in the turning glass, glinted against the burnished gold of the ring.
“It’s been three months and they still have no leads,” Clara said. “It’s just horrible.”
“I’m sure things like this happen every day in the city,” Jerry said to Kate.
“I don’t think so.” His eyes seemed larger because of those boxy glasses and she felt exposed by them, wondering again how many of those at the party knew about what had happened to her. It had made the news, her identity revealed by a tabloid reporter. Once they knew the name of the artist who’d been assaulted, the other media decided they had free reign, and Kate had fifteen minutes of unwanted fame.
“Her poor mother,” Clara said, and Kate remembered the voracious reporters calling and visiting, their false sympathy and strident pleas to tell her story, some of them arguing that the public had a “right to know” and others that she should “warn others.” Warn them about what? That their lives could be interrupted by tragedy?
“I just keep hoping to open the paper and read that she’s been found alive and well in another state. Like that runaway bride.”
Jerry Virgoli smiled, but it didn’t reach his eyes. He said to Kate, “Wickfield must seem very provincial to you.”
“We were hoping so.” Kate gulped at her wine and it burned in her throat. She looked out the window again, anxious. Grace was gone. Kate’s eyes flicked over the clusters of partygoers, but she couldn’t find her.
Jerry Virgoli talked on, but the words flowed over her like water, a rush of sound she couldn’t process because her entire focus was on her daughter.
“I think mothers worry wherever they are,” Clara Beetleman murmured. She’d followed Kate’s gaze and was searching the lawn, too.
“Even with these missing girls, the crime rate is still lower than Manhattan’s,” Jerry Virgoli said.
“Excuse me.” Kate moved past them and out the French doors. Anxiety propelled her through the people milling about on the deck. A group on the lawn shifted, and suddenly she spotted Grace leaning against the wall of what looked like a cottage tucked in a back corner of the yard.
Kate felt relieved just to have her in sight, though she could see the boredom clearly visible on her pretty face. As she watched, Grace dug into the small knit bag hanging from one shoulder and brought out her cell phone.
Kate’s body responded before her brain, tension tightening the muscles in her back, knotting at the top of her spine. She knew what number was being tapped into Grace’s phone.
“If I find out you’ve called him again, I’m taking away your cell phone.” Ian’s declaration had been backed up by Kate, even though she knew that by drawing that line Ian was practically daring Grace to cross it.
Kate’s heels sunk in the soft grass as she stepped off the deck. Grace didn’t hear her approach across the