Innocent Monster (3 page)

SB:
(Shrugs her shoulders) Sometimes.

NF:
When do you like them?

SB:
When I make swirlies. I love blue swirlies. (Rotates her hand as if painting circles)

NF:
When you do the blue swirlies, does anyone help you with the other parts of the—

MB:
(Standing up) That’s it! Stop filming, now. (Camera shakes, shows fingers covering lens)

NF:
Why does that question irritate you so? (Audio only)

SB:
Where’s Cara, Dad?

MB:
(Deleted) you, Flowers! Come on, Sashi. Let’s get Cara.

I was still pretty much a Luddite, but in 2007 even Luddites with AARP cards know their way around certain corners of the internet. So it was no problem for me to find out more about Sashi Bluntstone than I could ever hope or want to retain. My daughter wasn’t kidding when she said that Sashi had lived a very strange life. Fame and money are difficult enough to deal with when you’re twenty or thirty. I can’t even imagine how it messes with you when you’re four. It’s the precarious nature of child stardom. Where is there to go when you start at the top? Most parents tell their kids they’re wonderful, though kids are usually smart enough not to believe everything they hear, especially when it comes out of Mommy or Daddy’s mouth. What must it be like, I wondered, to have everyone in your world telling you you’re wonderful and talented and a prodigy? How long would it be before you noticed that all the good things everyone was saying about you also made you a freak? No kid wants to be a freak, not at that age. Being a freak is what the teenage years are all about. And how would a little girl react to being the family ATM? Questions, I had lots of questions.

I started with the most recent stuff and worked my way back to that first article about Sashi, the one Sarah slid across the table to me. Then I worked my way back to the first articles about Sashi bursting onto the scene, the first mentions coming in local Long Island papers in the late ‘90s when she was around three. I saw the damning exposé done by that Flowers guy on CNN and watched several segments of a video the Bluntstones had produced of Sashi doing a painting called “Orange Meets Blue Swirlies.” Christ, watching paint dry was more exciting than watching the kid paint. It wasn’t must-see TV. More like torture. I’ve got to admit that the end product, the painting itself, was quite impressive, but what the hell did I know about art?

What’s the old story?

One friend says to another, “I don’t know art, but I know what I like.”

And the friend says, “Yeah, but so do cows.”

I’d taken two terms of art history in college before I took the police entrance exam. I liked art history, but did better on the entrance exam. Katy had been a graphic designer and schlepped Sarah and me around to art museums all over the place, so I guess I knew a little bit more about art than the average cow. At least I knew who Pollock and Kandinsky were. I knew some of their works and I could see how Sashi’s paintings got compared to theirs. Anyway, as impressive as the painting done in the video was, it didn’t exactly erase any doubts from my mind about the authenticity of the work. I had about as much faith in the production of this “documented proof” as I did in test studies paid for by the industry they benefited.
Ford Pinto Safe! So says a new study funded by the Ford Motor Company.
Then again, I was a born cynic. I didn’t believe in the Tooth Fairy either.

Frankly, I didn’t give a rat’s ass about whether Sashi did the paintings or not. That’s not why Sarah had come to me. If she wasn’t already dead, there was a frightened little girl out in the world somewhere and it didn’t really matter if she was the next Mozart or a future trailer park princess. She needed to be found and I needed my own daughter back in my life. Even I could do the math: doing the one would get me the other. Unfortunately, the newspaper articles and reports I found on various websites were incredibly sketchy and unhelpful. They repeated the same vague story about how the Bluntstones thought their daughter had gone for a walk on the beach and didn’t come back for dinner. There was literally nothing beyond that except a lot of speculation. I was pretty good at speculation myself and wasn’t in need of any help on that front.

I hadn’t looked in a mirror for hours, but could feel my eyes were bagged and bloodshot. They burned in need of sleep, but I couldn’t sleep, not yet. I kept flicking through the web images of Sashi. At three, she was a lovely girl with fire and mischief asparkle in her green eyes. They were eyes much like her mother’s. Sashi also shared Candy’s reddish hair, yet she didn’t look like Candy. Over the years, I’d forgotten what Max Bluntstone looked like, but Sashi’s face refreshed my memory. Except for her eyes and hair, Sashi had Max’s face. She had her father’s granite jawline and high cheekbones, both kind of odd features on such a little girl. Still, she managed to pull them off. As she aged, Sashi’s looks softened, but her eyes grew old, older even than mine. The mischief seemed to have been extinguished, but not the fire. The fire raged. Maybe I was just seeing things that weren’t there. Tired old eyes do that. When I let sleep come to me, I was wondering about Sashi’s old tired eyes.

Sea Cliff is one of those tiny villages on Long Island that even most Long Islanders have never heard of. Across Hempstead Harbor from Port Washington and just south of Glen Cove on the cusp of the Gold Coast, it is a place contentedly trapped in a narrow swath of the past. And that swath was marked on the one side by the village’s rather grand and fanciful Victorians, some, like the Bluntstones’, overlooking the harbor and Long Island Sound beyond. The other edge of the swath was drawn in a line of classic ‘60s ranches and splanches. It was the kind of place where you could imagine freckle-faced boys in stiff, cuffed blue jeans and canvas sneakers, eagerly clamping baseball cards to their bikes so that they clickity-clacked along the spokes as the wheels turned. It was a place where people set their clocks to the pealing bells of the Russian churches, and those bells were ringing when I pulled up to the Bluntstone house.

The house was a Queen Anne Victorian, its design as busy as a beehive and its seven-colored paint job nearly as noisy. It must have taken a forest full of trees just to supply the stock for the spindles and gingerbread work on the wrap-around porch alone. No doubt a second forest had been sacrificed for the shakes, clapboards, fish scales, and row after row of diamond-shaped accent shingles. I more admired this kind of architecture than liked it. The house called too much attention to itself for my taste, screaming “Look at me! Look at me this instant!” It was nearly impossible not to. As I stood out of my car and beheld the behemoth before me, I couldn’t help but think that Candy had come a long way from the basement apartment in Sheepshead Bay that she shared with her long-divorced mother and two Siamese cats.

I patted the.38 I kept holstered between the waistband of my pants and the small of my back. Nervous habit, I guess. It felt like a fifth limb. I didn’t anticipate having to use the damned thing, but I’d carried it in that same spot for many decades, initially as my off-duty piece and then as a kind of conceit. When I got my PI license, I fooled myself that it was a necessary piece of equipment for a man swimming alone in dangerous waters. Figures that the first time I really needed it—a quarter century ago in an abandoned hotel in Miami Beach—I didn’t have it on me. If I had, rather than the pea-shooter automatic I was forced to borrow from a friend, history might’ve been very different. Not world history, my history, my family’s history. With my.38, I’d’ve killed the man who ambushed me on that long ago night. Instead, I just wounded him and he escaped. Seventeen years later, seven years ago, he helped murder my wife. These days my.38 was a shopkeeper’s gun because, until Sarah convinced me to take this case, that’s what I’d been for the last several years, a shopkeeper.

The steps of the porch creaked slightly under my weight. Funny, the creaking added a kind of character and an air of authenticity to the place. This was an old house and all the pretty paint in the world couldn’t hide that. Somehow those creaking steps made this case real for me. This was Sashi’s home and suddenly that mattered. It mattered a lot. Candy stepped out onto the porch before I made it to the door. She didn’t say a word, but came to me and hugged me. I hugged her back. I hadn’t seen her since her wedding day. How strange, I thought. Candy had been a semi-permanent fixture at our house back in Brooklyn. Christ, I think we fed her more meals than she ever ate at home. Life is like that, though. People fall away when you’re not looking. People fall away.

“Mr. Prager. Mr. Prager,” she kept repeating. “It’s going to be all right now, isn’t it?”

“I hope so, Candy. I hope so. Let’s see.”

Candy wasn’t crying. I suppose she’d cried herself dry during the last three weeks, but I could tell her nerves were raw. She was ashen faced, her eyes flitting from place to place. When I let her go and she hooked her arm in mine to show me into the house, Candy walked as if on a high ledge. It seemed that any loud noise or unexpected movement would split her in two. I’d been to that place. It was a very lonely place, empty but for guilt and self-recrimination.

Paying a visit to someone’s home under these circumstances was an odd thing. It wasn’t entirely business and it wasn’t exactly social. I’d learned long ago that at the beginning of a case it was best to treat people like water and let them find their own level. Besides, people reveal all sorts of things if you just give them enough space and silence. Candy and her husband had no doubt gone over the story of their daughter’s initial disappearance a hundred different times with the police and the press. Problem with that was, once you’ve repeated a story several times, it takes on a life of its own beyond the facts, a life that often has a fastdiminishing connection to reality. The story becomes the reality and your mind naturally embellishes and alters it. I was interested in what really happened, not in what three weeks of anxiety, worry, and guilt had done to change the truth.

Inside, Candy took my coat and hung it on a hook in the etched glass and oak paneled vestibule. It was toasty inside, but Candy, dressed in a white cable-knit sweater, kept her arms folded around herself as if she were on the verge of chills.

“Come on, Mr. Prager, I want to show you something,” she said, leading me into the house, past the curving front staircase, and to a door that led to the basement.

“You’re gonna have to start calling me Moe.”

“That’s not going to be easy for me, Mr. Pra—Moe. I know I never said anything back when I was a kid, but I used to wish you were
my
dad too. I was always really jealous of Sarah that she had you.”

“That’s a lovely thing to say, Candy. I’m honored.”

“All I ever had was the assembly line of worthless boyfriends my mom slept her way through. Sarah was really lucky to have you.”

“I’m not so sure she would agree with you anymore.”

“God, I’m sorry, Mr. Pra—Moe. Moe, I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to bring that up. I know that you and Sarah... I mean, since Mrs. Prager was...”

“It’s okay, Candy. Let’s not worry about my hurt feelings and let’s concentrate on finding Sashi, okay?”

“I’m just not thinking real clearly these days.”

“That’s understandable. You’re doing fine. Come on and show me what you wanted to show me.”

One steep and narrow set of stairs later we were down in Sashi’s studio. It was a brightly lit, almost sterile room. I don’t know how else to describe it. The place had a kind of movie set vibe. The walls were painted in white semi gloss and the ceiling was covered in those ubiquitous white drop-in tiles. The flooring was a kind of spongy blue material and it was only the floor—stained here and there by colorful splotches from where Sashi had dripped, drizzled, or splattered paint over the edges of her canvases—that felt broken-in or touched by human hands. Blank canvases of varying sizes were lined up in neat rows at one corner of the studio. One wall was covered with low shelves and on some of these shelves were quart-sized Chinese soup containers half-filled with myriad colored paints. Another shelf was stacked with tube after tube of acrylic paint and another shelf was for jars full of brushes. No easels here. Candy explained that Sashi preferred working on or close to the floor so that she could look down at her work. Good. This confirmed what I’d seen in the video the night before.

“This room doesn’t look familiar to me,” I said, wanting to see how Candy would react.

“So you saw the video we did?”

“Some of it.”

“And?”

“It bored the hell out of me, Candy. Sorry.”

“That’s okay. It can take Sashi weeks sometimes to finish a painting. It bores me too. She works best when we just leave her alone.”

“Like the day she disappeared.”

“Like that day, yeah,” Candy said, and began hugging herself again.

“The room,” I said, “what about the room?”

“Oh, sorry... what?”

“I didn’t recognize the room from the video.”

“We were living in a rented house then on the other side of town.”

“I’ll want to see that house,” I said.

Candy seemed not to hear me. “We bought this place three years ago and Max had this studio made just for Sashi.”

I let the thing about the old house go for the moment and I noticed there were framed photographs on another wall, but no paintings. Most of the photographs were of Sashi and a sad-eyed beagle.

“That was Cara,” Candy said, following my gaze.

“Was?”

“She died last year. She loved that dog. Cara meant everything to her.”

“Do you think Sashi could have run away?”

“Because of Cara?”

“Because of anything: Cara’s dying, the pressure of creating... anything.”