I kept my lights moving in big swaths, forward and out and back again, making sure I didn’t miss anything. The light in my right hand shot past something huddled against the far wall and I jumped, dropping the light and then kicking it toward the shadowy figure as I scrambled for it. It rolled in an arc, the heavier end rotating around the lighter handle. When it stopped it sent a stream of light in the direction I was headed, illuminating nothing but the concrete floor and a pair of legs.
I shrieked, clutching at my remaining light and shooting it up and around so I could see what I was dealing with. Or who. The light touched on a face and I screamed again, making the light bobble and glance off yet another bowed head and then an upturned chin. The fear became giddy relief as the faces remained motionless and I realized I’d found Moses’s paintings, complete with dancing forms and intertwined bodies spread across a ten by twenty foot section of wall. I stooped and picked up my flashlight, grateful that my clumsiness hadn’t robbed me of the additional light.
It was almost whimsical, the painting. And it was much more cohesive than Moses’s smeared, terror-filled depictions on Kathleen Wright’s walls. The terror had been in Moses’s hand, not in his subjects, if that made any sense. He had been terrified, and it showed in every brush stroke. This was different. It was a cornucopia of delights, full of oddities and wonder, little puzzles and pieces all interspersed throughout the nonsensical display. And it was nonsensical. It brought to mind our discussion of favorite things and well-loved memories, and I wondered if I was simply seeing the five greats, multiplied by a dozen contributors who were also depicted on the wall. I trained my light on each part, trying to connect it with the next, wondering if it was just the darkness and the difficulty of illuminating the entire thing all at once that made it seem so new. I remembered some of it. But he’d clearly added more after the fact. I had seen it in October. He’d left at the end of November. And in that time his painting had grown.
And then I found her. The face that had stuck in my mind and bothered me throughout the last two weeks.
I centered both of my lights above her face so I could see her better, and she gazed down at me reproachfully, light spilling down over her head like she wore a biblical halo. I felt a little sick and more than a little shaken as I realized I did know her. It was the same face I’d seen on the newly painted wall the day I’d gone to retrieve my photo album from Moses. Maybe it was the angle or the expression on her face, but where the image had seemed merely familiar on Kathleen Wright’s wall, it was recognizable now. I had known her. Once.
The sound of old hinges being engaged ricocheted around the mostly empty space, and for a split second I couldn’t place the sound. Then I realized the back door, the door I’d come through only minutes before was being opened. I’d left the key in the lock.
Moses
THE LEVAN CHURCH was a cool old building with light colored brick, soaring steeple, and wide oak doors built in 1904. There had been some renovations done in the intervening years, and I thought it could use some stained glass, but I liked it. It always made me think of summers with Gi as a kid and the sound of the organ, peeling out over the community as I ran out the double doors and headed for home, eager for movement, desperate to be free of my tie and my shiny black church shoes.
I was restless. Anxious. I hadn’t seen Georgia since the day before, and other than a quick text message, complete with my five greats for the day and her smiling emoticon for a response, we hadn’t interacted.
I had a client come all the way to Levan for a session, and I’d spent the day painting a woman asleep at her desk, her hand clutching a pair of reading glasses, a messy pile of books nearby. Her mouth was slightly open, her hair gently curling against her cheek as she rested her pretty face on her slim arm and slept. The man who had commissioned me had told me how she often fell asleep that way, among her books, nodding off to dream land and never making it to their bed. His wife had died suddenly the previous spring, and he was lonely. Rich and lonely. The rich and lonely were my best clients, but I felt for him as we’d talked, and I hadn’t been as brusque or as blunt as usual when I had communicated the things I could see.
“I didn’t see the signs. All the warning signs were there . . . but I just didn’t want to see them,” he’d said. The woman had died of heart failure, and he was sure he could have prevented it if he’d been more proactive.
He’d left without his painting, which was the norm. I had some finishing touches to add and it needed a few days before it would be dry all the way through and I could send it to him. But he’d left happy. Satisfied, even. But I wasn’t happy or satisfied, and I set off on a walk I didn’t want to take in hopes of ridding myself of the excess energy that hummed beneath my skin. And I wanted to scout out Georgia’s house and see if she was around. I shot her a message with no response and ended up swinging past the church, the dry leaves scurrying around my feet like a mouse battalion, racing across the road as the wind caught them and pushed them onward.
My client had talked about a snow storm coming. But the night wasn’t especially cold, and it was still October. But Utah was like that. Snow one day, sunshine the next. The homes around the church were decorated for Halloween—ghosts twirling in the wind, fat pumpkins resting on porches, bats and spiders crawling up windows and hanging from trees. And when the organ started up, it was so Halloween appropriate I jumped a little and then cursed myself when I realized what I was hearing.
The lights were on at the church and a dark colored pick-up was parked close to the chapel doors. I stopped to listen and within a few bars knew exactly who was playing. I walked up the wide steps and pulled at the big oak door, hoping it was open, hoping I could sneak in the back and slide into a pew and listen to Josie play for a while. The door swung wide with a well-oiled sigh and I stepped into the rear foyer, my eyes immediately falling on the blonde at the organ and the man in the back row, closest to the foyer, listening to her play something so beautiful it made the hair rise on my arms and chills shiver down my spine.