Lie Still by Julia Heaberlin Read Free Book Online Page A

stacked one on top of the other, and a neat basket of clean rolled-up beach towels rested on the floor near the door, next to five pairs of size 6 flip-flops. They looked barely worn.
    I ventured farther inside, past the kitchen, into the sunken great room at the front of the house, my own flip-flops echoing like little drum clicks in the cool silence. Goose bumps pricked my legs and shoulders, and I wrapped the towel more tightly around me.
    “Misty?” I called louder this time, moving toward the spiralsteel-and-wood staircase that hung in the air at the far end of the room, invisibly suspended, a work of art in itself.
    I didn’t feel good about leaving without a goodbye. Or staying there alone, for that matter.
    A few more minutes and I’d call again. Probably she was in the bathroom.
    I wandered aimlessly around sleek leather furniture, running my fingers over a large vessel sculpted and hammered out of copper. I recognized the artist, found her mark, wondered if Misty knew the heat and sweat and muscle and pounding that went into making it an object of beauty. Ayesha. I sold her jewelry in my gallery after she figured out she could make more money per hour of sweat by melting metal into beautiful
little
things.
    I leaned in to inspect the piece hanging over the fireplace. Maybe not a wannabe. It looked like a genuine Kandinsky.
    Der Blaue Reiter
. The Blue Rider. A horseman riding with his girl, a blur across a green space, the background colors popping across the canvas. I’d seen it in person before, years ago. A small fortune in paper and paint. I couldn’t believe it was in a private collection now. This had to be a glorious copy. Even my practiced scrutiny couldn’t tell.
    My eyes swept the black-and-white photographs that lined the walls, almost certainly snapped by the same artist, one who favored farm landscapes and small-town America from the less blessed side of the tracks. No signature, but the work was somehow familiar, like I’d seen it in one of thousands of catalogs I had thumbed through.
    I was particularly struck by a shot of a frame house falling in on itself. An old Chevy was rusting on the lawn, and a man’s T-shirt hung on a clothesline, bleached white and stark, more like a flag of surrender than a symbol of hope.
    At the end of my tour, I found myself in the corner at a round glass table that held the few personal objects in the room.
    I lifted a heavy silver frame with a recent snapshot of Misty. Her arms were wrapped around a good-looking, dark-haired man I assumed to be Todd. He emoted nice and cute, like a really smart guy who came into his prime after high school and never looked back. But you never knew.
    I replaced it carefully and picked up the other picture on the table, also framed expensively. It was faded and a little blurry and not particularly well composed, the kind of photo that usually ends up in the bottom of the box or tossed out as unworthy. But it was easy to love the cherubic little girl with gold curly hair who grinned out at me, perched on a boy’s bike, shoving the toy bauble on her finger toward the camera, showing it off.
    Misty? The eyes, something around the nose. Maybe. I’d had blond hair at that age, too, but nature took its course. I smiled back.
    “Emily.”
    I jumped, almost dropping the little girl, and knocking Todd and Misty over, onto the glass. She had slipped up behind me.
    “Sorry, Emily, I didn’t mean to scare you. Can I please have that photo?” She didn’t wait for me to hand it to her, snatching it out of my hands. “Probably not good to scare a pregnant woman. I was on the phone with Todd.”
    Really?
I wondered. Why was I so sure that she was lying? That—wherever she had been—she’d been watching me? Then again, hadn’t I thought the same thing after I left that bizarre pink room last night? That someone besides Big Kitty had their eyes on me? When had I gotten this paranoid?
    Misty’s body language was tense. She was holding