Three Dog Island Page 26

  “It’s not even the right way to do it.” Angelo’s voice was raspy and harsh and I realized these were the first words I had heard him speak. “An artist must allow the stone to speak to him. His job is to free the spirit from the stone.” And yet he was copying the same pattern that he found so vile, and stealing another artist’s work in the process.

  His dusty hands covered his forehead, “I’m just as good as he is. I always have been. So, why didn’t my art become successful? Why was he a success and I wasn’t? I was supposed to be the world famous sculptor. Not him!” Anger quivered in his body and he removed his hands from his face. “I was the one whose father and grandfather were master sculptors. I was the one who was named for the greatest sculptor of them all.”

  Michelangelo. Was that his full name? When had he let part of it go? I wondered. When he realized he was not following in the artist’s glorious footsteps? The burden of expectations our parents place on us. Wasn’t it enough that he had Dante for a last name? They had to give him Michelangelo for a first name?

  When his arms dropped to his sides, his wrinkled and worn, tear-stained face looked like that of a little boy, crushed with disappointment. The burden we place on ourselves. “I had to resort to making clay pots to sell my work! Clay pots!”

  My eyes scanned the room, slowly passing by the shelf of imitations of Jasper’s models, resting for a moment on his “Tug of Heart” model. I would be taking that one with me.

  As I turned, I saw a shelf of Angelo’s pots along the wall, resplendent in their vibrant colors and their originality. “They’re beautiful, Angelo. Your pots are truly beautiful.”

  “My work has never commanded the respect that Jasper’s has.” He looked at me in horror. “They’re clay pots for God’s sake!”

  It was then that I realized what the humming sound behind us was. It was the machinery for mass producing his pots. He was an artist, too proud to resort to mass production. Rather, too ashamed to let anyone know that he had. He failed to realize it was not others’ judgment of him that would destroy him. It was his judgment of himself.

  “You’re not in a wheelchair.” Sam was still focused on that revelation.

  Angelo shook his head.

  “Were you ever?” Somehow Sam was taking this as a personal betrayal. I understood. He had been duped, along with the rest of the island residents.

  “Temporarily. For a back injury.” He was holding his arms across his chest and rubbing his hands up and down for comfort, oblivious to the fact that dust from the stone was covering him.

  “But once you healed, you realized that the wheelchair would come in handy,” I said. “No one would suspect you of stealing or duplicating Jasper’s work because you couldn’t create these from a wheelchair. And of course, you made certain the focus was on your clay pots—and Emilio’s—so everyone would believe you gave up sculpting stone.”

  His eyes darted at me. “Who are you?”

  “I’m Jenny McNair,” I said. He had obviously not remembered Sam’s introduction. “I’m Winnie Wainwright’s niece.”

  His expression seemed to soften, or maybe I believed that because I wanted to.

  “Tell me, Winnie’s niece, tell me why him and not me? I’m as gifted as he is!” He gestured toward the sculpture that was almost complete.

  I stared at it for a long time before answering. “I don’t know.” But I did know. I knew exactly why Jasper’s work had been successful and Angelo’s had not. It was such a close likeness to Jasper’s that it was eerie. But something was missing. The heart, the warmth, the compassion. The soul. These were all qualities that would be conveyed by the artist’s inspiration for creating it and by the artist’s connection to spirit. It had lost that in the translation just as the mass produced pots had. I wondered if it had always been that way or if it had happened after Dawn left.

  “Tell me why I had to resort to making clay pots to sell my work.” He was pleading with me to make sense of his life, a life I scarcely knew. Unable to offer an answer, I waited in silence for him to continue.

  “It was okay for a while because I got the girl, didn’t I?” His smile was manic. Then it turned to something different, something tainted by anger and rage. “But then she left.”

  “And that’s when you started doing this.”

  He was unable to meet my eyes.

  “There’s something I need to ask you, Angelo.”

  “What is that?”

  “Why did Dawn leave?”

  “You know about Dawn?” His laugh was contemptuous as his back straightened with pride. “I got the girl. Jasper lost that round.”

  I wondered if Jasper had realized they were in competition.

  “She loved me, not him. She picked me.”

  “What happened?”

  His stature went from bold to that of a defeated man, crumbling like a clay sculpture that lacked moisture and substance. “She told me I was a tormented soul. She loved me. But she said that wasn’t enough. I was obsessed with having to be as successful as Jasper.”

  Sam’s hand on my shoulder made me turn toward the door. Emilio and Jeff had arrived. They were standing in the doorway, listening. Emilio walked toward us, his eyes focused on his father.

  “That’s why she left? That’s why my mother left? You told me there was another man. That she’d had an affair with Jasper Rosenthal.”

  And that was why Emilio had been sucked into their operation. He had justified his actions because he believed that the person he was harming was his mother’s lover.

  If I ever sculpted human figures, I would look to that moment on Angelo’s face to capture shame. “I’m sorry, my son. I am truly sorry.”

  “She wasn’t having an affair with Jasper?”

  “If she was, it was because I drove her to it. She said that he was all I thought about and talked about, wanting to do better than he did. She said that I didn’t love her. She believed that I did not love her.” An honest confession flowed from his lips. He had no where else to go. I suspected there was some relief in that.

  Tears sprang like waterfalls. “I did. My God, I did love her with all my heart. But I could not get it to come out.”

  Much like his sculptures. He could not free the heart from the stone.

  “She said it wasn’t love, that it was my need to compete with Jasper that made me want her.”

  Emilio stared at his father in horror. A son betrayed. I looked back at his father. A broken man. I wondered if Jasper would sculpt these next.

  Sam and I left Emilio and Angelo to talk. There were open wounds that would take a long time to heal. I made my way around the room, studying the different art work from Angelo Dante’s hand-thrown pots to the mass produced replicas. I also found several stone sculptures that I knew immediately were his. Clearly they had not sold. You could almost trace the progression of his life in his work, even without the assistance of the labels which included dates as well as titles. The earlier pieces were lighter and softer, but still he had failed to free the heart from the stone.

  It was his later pieces that were dark and disturbing. I was tempted to reach out and touch his piece entitled, “Survival,” but resisted for fear that the anger would permeate my fingers. There was irony in that piece. He had survived, but at what cost?

  “Jenny, I think we should go,” Sam said.

  I nodded, my eyes still fixed on the stone sculptures.

  “I think we should talk to Jasper, see what he wants to do.”

  “Right.” I helped Sam lift Jasper’s clay model of his cloud piece that had not yet been replaced.

  “I think we should take the ‘Circle of Musicians’ model for evidence,” he said. “Is it the real one or an imitation?”

  “Imitation.” The more refined imitation.

  “And the sculpture of it that Dante’s working on.” Sam motioned for Jeff to assist him in packing the two models and carrying them to the boat.

  While they were doing that, I took each piece of
the “Tug of Heart” imitation model and packed them up myself. More evidence? I wasn’t sure.

  Jeff and Sam carried those out to the boat for me. We did not say good-bye to the father and son. Jeff murmured an apology and a weak explanation, claiming he didn’t realize what was going on.

  He too had played a part. I had no doubt that he was the one who had stolen the glaze formulas for Jasper’s models. I wanted to tell him that they had stolen an artist’s work and made duplicates of it. They might as well have stolen his thoughts, his feelings, his hands.But I didn’t even try to explain that. Sam just shook his head and assured him that he’d be in touch.

  The fresh air was a welcome relief from the tension and dust of the compound. I wondered why it had imprinted such a sinister image on my memory. It wasn’t as though some hideous rituals or crimes were taking place there. It was just a place where an angry artist with unreasonable expectations of himself sculpted artwork, some his own, some another artist’s. The only explanation for the desolate feeling was Angelo Dante’s anger and the deep pain and resentment stored inside of him, oozing like an open wound into his sculptures. And the deep festering sense of betrayal.

  “Are you okay, Jenny?” Sam steered the boat back toward my beloved Anamcara Island. “You keep sighing.”

  “I’m just relieved to have this one solved and behind me.” Of course Sam didn’t know there was a more urgent situation I was dealing with. Yes, we were relatively certain we knew what these corrupt cops were up to, but we needed strong evidence against them, strong enough to ensure Josh’s future safety and solid enough for the prosecution to lock up Mark Simpson and Al Wallace. “And I’m glad to be going home,” I said.

  “I’m kind of dreading it actually.”

  “Dreading it? Did you and Frankie have a fight?”

  He looked over at me, obviously surprised which told me I was way off. “No way. When Frankie and I fight—” He smiled and his face creased as though he’d had way too much sun. “Let’s just say fighting with Frankie is a lot of fun.”

  “So you’re looking forward to seeing Frankie, but you’re dreading—?

  “Telling Jasper what we found. This is going to be difficult. These two go way back.”

  “How good of friends were they?”

  “Artists on the same island? Both sculptors?”

  “Good point. If you’d like, I’ll tell him, Sam. I want to spend time with my son who’s visiting from Seattle. Then I’ll go see Jasper. You can check in with him tomorrow to see if he wants to press charges against Dante.” I chuckled. “Or you could get back at Dan and make him tell Jasper.”

  Sam’s eyes lit up. He wasn’t adverse to the concept. “Believe me, I would if he wasn’t over on the mainland for a couple a days.”

  “How’s it going with Dan? Did you ask him about the attempted break-ins?”

  Sam cringed. This was not a conversation he wanted to have.

  “What? He’s a good friend and you don’t want to be thinking bad thoughts about him?” I guessed.

  He shook his head. “No, it’s not that. I mean, we get along okay, and I guess we’ve become friends, but—” He raised his cap and scratched his head looking like a bewildered child who had been hurt by a friend and couldn’t make sense of it.

  “You feel like he’s stabbing you in the back?”

  Again he shook his head.

  Wow, my intuition must have decided it had worked hard enough for one day. I took a deep breath and remembered my promise to Matthew that I would take a day off to relax. It was probably rebelling or even punishing me for going back on my word. But it was its own fault. It had kicked in and taken me on this day’s journey in the first place.

  Another gigantic sigh as Sam applied more sun screen to his face. Apparently my sighs were contagious. He turned to look me in the eye. He trusted me. “Something’s off, Jenny. Really off.”

  “Something to do with Dan? Why do you think that?”

  “Well, when I think back to when he first came to work with me, he was so determined to get hired on at Anamcara. The islands are usually rookies’ least favorite locations. Unless they grew up here or they’re married and have young kids.”

  “Neither of which he has.”

  “Right. I mean, what young cop starting out wants to be stuck on an island with no bars to speak of and no place to let loose?”

  “Good point.” Not one I’d thought about. “So, why do you think he requested Anamcara? Were there other openings?”

  “Sure. He could have gone to several places, but he wanted the islands, said he liked to fish.”

  “Does he?”

  “Not much.”

  “Do you still think he didn’t tell you about our trip to Aurora and the attempted break-ins because he wants your job?”

  “I really don’t think so, Jenny. I think something else is gong on with our young Deputy Grulen.”

  “Grulen? His last name is Grulen?” Why did it sound so familiar? Probably because I’d heard it at some point in the past four months since I’d moved to the island.

  “Yeah, Daniel Grulen.”

  Those all too familiar chills again. I knew exactly where I’d heard it. Right alongside the name Marcus Simpson. He was part owner in the lot on Waterloo Island. Not only was Josh a sitting duck at the cottage but so was my son.

  “What’s wrong, Jenny? You look like you’ve seen a ghost.”

  Did I risk sharing any of this with Sam? I trusted him. He was one of the good guys, but why put him in the position of having to continue working with someone he knew was corrupt until we had enough evidence to have him arrested?

  “Uh, just a wave of nausea,” I murmured. Not untrue. “You said Dan is out of town? When does he get back?”

  “Some time tomorrow, I think. Or maybe tonight. Why do you ask?”

  “Oh, I’m just thinking about who should tell Jasper. I should probably be the one to break it to him. I’ll go ahead and talk to him as soon as I can.” Just as soon as I knew my boys were safe and sound and as far from the islands as they could get.

  Now all I had to do was call my house and warn the boys without Sam’s hearing. I went to the furthest end of the boat and dialed the cottage. No answer. My stomach was doing somersaults. I called Matthew’s cell.

  “Mom? Are you back?”

  Thank goodness. “En route.”

  “Is everything okay?”

  “Fine, but I need you to listen. Where are you?”

  “What? I’m having trouble hearing you.”

  Not now. Please not now. I looked up at the sky pleading with the Universe to maintain my cell phone reception. “Matthew, can you hear me?”

  “I can now. What’s up?”

  “Where are you?”

  “Josh and I went for a run. We’re at Sasha’s.”

  Thank God. “Okay, stay there.”

  “What?”

  “I want you to stay there until I get home. Okay?”

  “Okay, but why?”

  “Just do it. I’ll explain when I get there. And make sure the windows and doors are locked. Promise?”

  “I promise, but you’re starting to freak me—”

  One of us lost reception and cut out and I was left staring at my phone. A second later it rang and I pressed it against my ear. “Matthew?”

  “McNair?”

  “Oh, MacGregor.”

  “Could you sound any less enthusiastic?”

  “Sorry. I’m just worried about the—” I lowered my voice. “The boys.”

  “What’s going on?”

  “I’ll call you when I’m back on land.”

  “You’re still on the boat? You’re okay though? Safe?”

  “I’m fine. Why?”

  “I dinna ken. I just had an odd feeling that you were somewhere— that you were in jeopardy? Somewhere you did not want to be perhaps? It’s nothing, I’m sure. Just my imagination. I’m glad you’re fine.”

  Was MacGregor’s intuition taking ov
er where mine had left off? Was he sensing how worried I was—all the way from Seattle? Or how uncomfortable I had been returning to the compound? Either one was impressive.

  “Call me as soon as you can talk.”

  “I will.” Before I could say good-bye, my phone cut out.

  The remaining ten minutes it took us to reach Anamcara felt like a month. I’d never been so anxious in my life. Rarely had I felt that I was in an unsafe situation working on any of Charlie’s cases, or any of my own for that matter. Charlie had often cautioned me and even gone to the extent of lying in order to convince me that a case was closed simply because he felt it was too dangerous for me to remain involved.

  I would have to apologize to him for ignoring his pleas and causing him stress and worry. Parenthood was tough enough with worrying about their crossing the street alone or facing the kindergarten bully or remembering to wear their jackets in the rain or that first date from which they might very well come home in tears. I now understood what it felt like to worry about your children in truly life-threatening situations.

  Sam and I carefully loaded the sculptures into the back of my car. He thought they should go to Jasper. If Jasper did press charges, Sam would pick up the “evidence” from him.

  “You sure are in a hurry, Jenny,” Sam commented when I climbed into the driver’s seat of my Volvo and started the engine.

  “Can you let me know when Dan returns to the island?” I asked.

  “Why do you care?”

  “I just need to know.”

  “Okay. Sure.”

  I exhaled a deep breath as I drove off like a mother on a mission. I would not be breathing normally again until I saw Matthew and Josh. Maybe not until I knew they had made it safely to Seattle and Dan was back on Anamcara, if I dared trust that he was not back already.

  Chapter 24

  By the time I arrived at Sasha’s, my car was covered with dust. “Sorry, Winston, I promise I’ll wash you soon.” Normally I drove the country roads slowly. Today was anything but normal.