Hemlock Bay

Ian showed me your picture, I ordered the Frasiers to stay away from you. I sent Alpo and Nikki to California to fetch you back to me. They were clumsy also, but it turned out not to matter because you, my dear, are here at last.”
    Lily said slowly, “I don’t look like anyone special. I’m just myself.” But she knew she must look like someone who mattered to him, and so she waited, holding her breath, keeping still as his fingers stroked her arm, up to her shoulder. She saw that his nails were dark and unhealthy-looking.
    The old man said finally, “You look exactly like Sarah Jameson when I first met her in Paris a very long time ago, before the Great War, when the artistic community in Paris broke free and flourished. Ah yes, we enraged the staid French bourgeoisie with our endless and outrageous play, our limitless daring and debauchery. I remember the hours we spent with Gertrude Stein. Ah, what an intelligence that one had, her wit sharper than Nikki’s favorite knife, and such noble and impossible ideas. And there was the clever and cruel Picasso—he painted her, worshiped her. And Matisse, so quiet until he drank absinthe, and then he would sing the most obscene songs imaginable as he painted. I remember all the French neighbors cursing through the walls when he sang.
    “I saw Hemingway wagering against Braque and Sherwood—it was a spitting contest at a cuspidor some eight feet away. Your grandmother kept moving the cuspidor. Ah, such laughter and brilliance. It was the most flamboyant, the most vivid time in all of history, all the major talent of the world in that one place. It was like a zoo with only the most beautiful, the wildest and most dangerous specimens congregated together. They gave the world the greatest art ever known.”
    “I didn’t know you were a writer or an artist,” Simon said.
    “I’m neither, unfortunately, but I did try to paint, studied countless hours with great masters and wasted many canvases. So many of my young friends wanted to paint or to write. We were in Paris to worship the great ones, to see if perhaps their vision, their immense talent, would rub off, just a bit. Some of those old friends did become great; others returned to their homes to make furniture or sell stamps in a post office. Ah, but Sarah Jameson, she was the greatest of them all. Stein corresponded with her until her death right after World War Two.”
    “How well did you know my grandmother, Mr. Jorgenson?”
    Olaf Jorgenson’s soft voice was filled with shadows and faded memories that still fisted around his heart, memories he could still see clearly. “Sarah was a bit older than I, but so beautiful, so exquisitely talented, so utterly without restraint, as hot and wild as a sirocco blowing up from the Libyan desert. She loved vodka and opium, both as pure as she could get. The first time I saw her, another young artist, her lover, was painting her nude body, covering it with phalluses, all of them ejaculating.
    “She was everything I wanted, and I grew to love her very much. But she met a man, a damned American who was simply visiting Paris, a businessman, ridiculous in his pale gray flannels, but she wanted him more than me. She left me, went back to America with him.”
    “That was my grandfather, Emerson Elliott. She married him in the mid-1930s, in New York.”
    “Yes, she left me. And I never saw her again. I began collecting her paintings during the fifties. It wasn’t well known for some time that she’d willed paintings to her grandchildren, such a private family matter. Yes, she willed eight beautiful paintings to each child. I knew I wanted them all for my collection. You are the first; it is unfortunate, but we managed to gain only four of the originals before the Frasiers became convinced that you were going to leave their son, despite the drugs they were feeding you. They knew you’d take the paintings with you, so they decided to kill you, particularly since your husband was your beneficiary after your daughter’s death.”
    “But I didn’t die.”
    “No, you did not, but not for their lack of trying.”
    “You’re telling me that my husband was not part of this plot?”
    “No, Tennyson Frasier was their pawn. His parents’ great hopes for him were dashed, but he did manage to make you his wife. It’s possible he even fell in love with you, at least enough to marry you, as his parents wished.”
    She’d been so certain that Tennyson had been part of the