Restoration Heights Read online

  Lane and Dean were already on-site. Lane was Lockstone’s manager. Alert with preppy optimism, twenty years younger than the man he replaced, he had been introduced to the crew two years ago, during a gritty job packing a collection of dense, precarious sculptures. He had shown up to the client’s apartment in chambray shorts and linen Toms—Allen had nearly crushed a finger when Lane couldn’t wedge his toe beneath a lopsided crate. But his white-bread smile soothed their clients, and the company’s owners adored him. Relations between Lane and the crew eventually settled into a wary truce—he stayed out of their way as much as possible, and in return they tolerated his supervision.

  Lane had picked Dean up and driven straight to the Sewards’ in order to prepare the space for the crew’s arrival. They had mapped routes through the house—rugs were removed, plastic runners edged the walls and snaked up the front staircase, moving blankets wound like scarves around the banister. Dean had been Reddick’s roommate since their final year of college—a decade plus and counting—but he’d lately been sleeping in his Bushwick studio several nights a week. His intricate balsa wood sculptures consumed his time, drove him to choose the ratty couch in his studio over the late-night G ride home. The hard work was slowly paying off; his sales had increased yearly and his practice nearly covered his expenses. He needed only about twenty hours a week at Lockstone to make up the difference. His parents paid his share of their rent but he and Reddick never spoke of it. His studio was a few blocks from Lane’s condo, which made him the convenient choice to accompany the manager that morning—but he also tolerated Lane’s blithe cheer better than the rest of them, so they were happy to let him go.

  The handlers changed into plastic booties and nitrile gloves, their snow-drenched boots quarantined alongside their coats in the outermost foyer. Dean waited in the gallery, gawking at a pensive Rachel Whiteread mounted on the rear wall.

  “The thought of this being in a box for the next year depresses me,” he said when they joined him.

  “Just hang it in your studio, then.” Allen eyed the sculpture’s soft geometry, its chalky surface. “I’m sure they won’t mind.”

  Dean ignored him, took off his glasses to wipe the lenses, his exposed eyes pink and tender. “Everything go okay this morning?”

  Allen shrugged. “Your roommate nearly screwed some girl on a pile of trash but otherwise, yeah, regular morning.”

  Dean looked at Reddick, who rolled his eyes.

  “It wasn’t exactly like that.” He started the story again, details trimmed. He barely had time to hear Dean’s reaction before Lane came in, broke them into teams and got them started.

  Dottie, the family’s house manager, oversaw the work. Dark-haired, exhausted but precisely assembled, she carried herself with impatient authority—no matter how succinctly Reddick addressed her she gave the impression that he was absorbing too much of her time. She came off as basically a Seward, the vast desert between her and the family collapsed by the crew’s distance from either, miles of social landscape swallowed by foreshortening. She conferred often with Mrs. Seward, who was the primary architect of the overhaul, dissecting issues of placement or spacing, at times pushing back against her employer with a lack of deference that Reddick found surprising—although there was often a moment, some signal of tone or inflection that he couldn’t detect, when Dottie would capitulate. Mr. Seward was not involved; he could speak eloquently about his family’s collection at charity dinners or museum galas, but seemed indifferent to the arrangement of the art in his home.

  Their only son, Buckley, was a few years older than most of the Lockstone crew, with heavy eyes and a narrow chin that jutted like a drawer pull from his compact face. He wore a sweater over his collared shirt, and had walnut hair that was wavy and thick to the base of his skull. The family called him Buckles. He greeted the crew briefly when they arrived, near eleven, and Reddick didn’t see him again until two hours later.

  Reddick and Allen had paired off to hang drawings in Mrs. Seward’s third-floor office. She gave them instructions herself—Dottie was busy with the gallery downstairs—then stayed to make a call while they worked silently. There was a portrait of her on the wall behind her desk, a large Schnabel that Reddick wanted to linger with but couldn’t get close to with her in the room. It wasn’t part of this installation. She was speaking with an accountant or financial advisor, sorting through a pyramid of open folders and splayed papers, discussing the wedding gift she had planned for Buckley—one of their Italian villas, a small one near Florence. She worried about the tax benefits of writing it off; the gift must be an act of generosity, she said, not financial manipulation. The eavesdropping handlers fought to keep their faces neutral.

  Her son entered the office. She hung up when she saw his pale, distraught face.

  “She still hasn’t called.” Buckley’s voice was deep and commanding, shoring up his willowy presence. He was struggling to keep it even, to mask his concern.

  “Oh, Buckles, I’m so sorry. I’m sure she has some reason we haven’t thought of.”

  “That was a fine response last night, when it was only dinner. But it’s been almost twenty-four hours.”

  Mrs. Seward considered it. “You’re right. This isn’t like her.”

  “I called Tony, and he seemed concerned.”

  “We can send someone down to her apartment. You could go yourself.”

  He looked terrified of the idea but he nodded. “Yes. Yes, I should do it.”

  Mrs. Seward caught Reddick listening and flicked her eyes at him, quickly enough that her son didn’t catch it. Reddick glanced away.

  “I’ll have Dottie call for the car,” she said.

  After Buckley left his anxiety infected the staff. A cough-like name moved through the air, Hannah, soundtracking the staff’s routines. The art handlers broke for lunch—when they returned a pandemic of unease had saturated the house.

  They split up and went back to work. When they got to the parlor, Reddick remembered that Dottie had wavered on whether or not to hang the Polke—the connections to Richter seemed too obvious—and postponed her verdict until they returned from their break. He went upstairs to get her. There were service areas on the first three floors, orderly hallways with teeming sideboards and austere worktables linked by an enclosed stairwell. He interrupted Dottie and one of her assistants eating lunch on the third, in a kind of converted break room. They were having the same conversation as the rest of the house and he came in midsentence, Hannah’s name hanging in the air like a ghost.

  The crew had pieced together a theory from the snippet of conversation that Allen and Reddick overheard—there wouldn’t be a better time to confirm it. “Is it Buckley’s girlfriend?”

  Dottie’s stare said it was none of his business. “His fiancée.”

  “She’s missing,” offered the assistant. Dottie tried to cut him off but he protested. “I’m sorry, Dot, but this is how rumors start. They can see something is wrong. You’re better off just telling them.”

  “Look, I wasn’t trying to pry.”

  “Of course you were,” Dottie said. “But he’s right. It’s better that you know the truth, or who knows what story might work its way around.” She placed her fork neatly beside her plate, slid her chair away from the table and squared her shoulders to Reddick. Her attitude, her tone, assumed the authority of a dean lecturing a wayward student. “Buckley’s fiancée, Hannah, didn’t show up for dinner last night, and he hasn’t heard from her today. Those are the facts and I expect you to be discreet with them.”

  The assistant sighed. “God, I hope she’s okay. Poor Buckles.”

  “That’s awful,” Reddick offered.

  “It isn’t anything, yet,” Dottie snapped. “Don’t make judgments before you know what you’re talking about. Now, did you need something?”

  He asked about the parlor, and after she clarified her intentions
he left to report to the rest of the crew. He was almost to the stairwell when he remembered that he had left his level in Mrs. Seward’s office. He thought of the Schnabel and doubled back, both to save himself a trip later and to steal a quiet moment with the painting. The room was empty, the portrait untended behind the desk. Reddick eyed the long canvas. Mrs. Seward looked at least twenty years younger, her angular silhouette carved by wild thrusts of oil and resin. The surface was uneven, lurching from translucent washes to an impasto so thick it bordered on geological. Reddick thought about how much material it took to build up those areas—he was numb to the prices that art sold for but not to the infinitely smaller costs of making it. It would burn a week’s paycheck just to paint that dress. Drawn in by the texture he moved closer, until he was almost leaning on the desk.

  “Do you like Schnabel?”

  He jumped and turned to face the speaker—Mrs. Seward. The transition was dizzying—from image to flesh, from decades past to the present. He anchored himself on the details of her appearance. Her coffee-brown hair was flecked with gray, pulled back into an ample, haphazard bun. She had a hard, handsome jawline that it must have killed Buckley not to have inherited, and large eyes set deep in a web of wrinkles so fine they seemed drawn in graphite. She walked toward him, moving with the loose comfort of someone whose equanimity hadn’t been threatened in years, perhaps decades. He was inexplicably nervous.

  “I came in to get my level and—it really grabs you, doesn’t it?”

  “Differently when you’re the subject.” She smiled and crossed her long arms at the wrist, a gesture meant to relax him. “But yes, it does. Are you an artist?”

  “We all are. I mean, except for one. But he’s a musician.”

  “I’ve always assumed that most of you were. To treat the work well you must have some reason to care for it. Do you show?”

  “Not...not in a while.”

  She was too polite to acknowledge his hesitation. “Well, just keep working. You never know what might happen.”

  “Oh. Thank you. I—you know. You never know.”

  She smiled again. He had a sense of the power she could put behind it. “I believe that I left my phone up here. On my desk, probably. Would you mind?”

  She gestured behind him. He turned around and saw the heel of it peeking from beneath a stack of folders. He slid it out carefully, to avoid an avalanche, and his thumb inadvertently pinched the home button. The screen flashed awake. He glanced at the image it revealed.

  “Thank you.” She held out her hand but he didn’t pass it to her. “Young man.” Her impatience was hemmed by courtesy. He caught the inflection in her voice that meant the discussion was over—it was easy to recognize when you were the target—but he didn’t let go.

  “Young man, would you please hand over my phone?”

  She seemed perplexed by his disobedience, and Reddick was suddenly unsure if her radiant authority was merely a bluff, if there would be no consequences for ignoring her. But he couldn’t stop looking at the image on the screen—at Buckley smiling behind a dining room table, clasping the hand of a thin blonde woman who reason insisted must be his missing fiancée but who nonetheless looked exactly like the girl who had asked to kiss him the night before, in an alley, surrounded by garbage.

  Three

  “And you are absolutely certain that this was her?”

  “Yes. I’m telling you. One hundred percent.”

  He was in the parlor, on a blocky Bauhaus chair they had moved to the center of the room. Other furniture was pulled away from the wall, tools laid carefully in strategic corners—the work abandoned until Reddick’s wild claims were resolved. Mrs. Seward was seated in front of him, leaning into his face, elbows on her knees. Her expression was worried and kind. Her husband reclined beside her with disinterested skepticism, his bored face a worn replica of his son’s. Whether he didn’t believe Reddick or simply thought that this was a crisis not worth his time was unclear. Dottie paced behind them, playing the part of bad cop with cinematic fidelity. Lane stood in place, straining to keep from sweating.

  Reddick only wanted to help.

  “It was dark,” Lane said, offering a way out, his eyes begging him to take it.

  “The lights in the alley came on. I could see perfectly.”

  “Winter clothes. Hat, scarf. Everyone is so bundled up this time of year.”

  “She wasn’t wearing a coat. She had been inside, was obviously not planning on being out long. Just a hat, and that was pulled back from her face.”

  “But why was she in Brooklyn alone?” Mrs. Seward said. “It simply doesn’t make sense.”

  “I have no idea. I mean, she didn’t really tell me about herself.” He thought of her clothes, her voice. “She didn’t seem out of place.”

  The version he offered hit different beats than what he had spun for the crew and for Harold. He omitted her abrupt pass. He didn’t need to heighten their suspicion. He felt it already; knew how he looked in their eyes. Just over six feet but reed-thin, shoulders hooked forward in a way they would never have allowed in their own son. A lanky Southerner with rough skin, blond hair and a motley face—lips full but jaw too narrow, eyes too close together. An ethnic background so muddled as to be wholly American, in a way that stripped him of context—without immigrant success or a colonial lineage, just guesses and inferences about who might have been what, marriages by people too poor and too scattered to bother noting which part of the Old or New World they were descended from. He had a Scottish first name that he received like an heirloom from the one person in his family tree that was decidedly not Scottish, who could lay claim to an ethnic heritage that an old New York family might understand—if privately recoil from. His paternal grandfather went by Red, because it was short for Reddick but also because it suited his clay-colored skin. Red was black. Reddick was not. That heritage had slipped through the cracks along with all the others, just another fact of DNA indistinguishable in his mongrel white face.

  What did the Sewards see when they looked at him? He supposed it was nothing. He did not figure into their idea of the world and therefore he was nothing.

  They could only receive his claims with suspicion. Their encounters with people like him were too circumscribed to do otherwise. Alone in a dark alley with their son’s fiancée—sex ran through that scenario like ether. He didn’t need to mention it for them to think of it, and if he did—even in denial—the innuendo would harden into fact. To claim he made the moral choice required acknowledging that there was another option, and once that other option was attached to him they wouldn’t let him shake free.

  He decided that her reckless offer was immaterial anyway. It was enough to know that she was drunk—her vulnerability could be assumed. What mattered were facts of timing and location, hard data that could be used to find her. He was clear about that and quashed the rest.

  “How out of it was she?” Dottie asked. “Did it seem as though someone might have drugged her?”

  Reddick shook his head. “I don’t know. I mean, she was—sorry—but she was pretty loopy. She just seemed drunk to me, but I don’t know much about it—being drugged, I mean. She smelled like alcohol. And she was coherent. She knew where she was.”

  He had asked for the police. They put him off, said they wanted to speak privately first—they were hung up on the unlikelihood of his claims. This fluke encounter, he wanted to shout, could save her life. Just accept your good luck and listen.

  Buckley returned from Hannah’s apartment. Dottie had texted him when he was on his way back but hadn’t given details. That morning’s vague concern had tightened into dread—something about the trip had shaken him. He was wide-eyed and flushed.

  “Mother, she wasn’t there, obviously, but—”

  “I think you should hear this.”

  “There was no break-in or anything like that.” His deep voice had
lost its commanding edge. He seemed diminished, cowed by the growing crisis. “Would you and Dad—I would like to speak with you both, about what to do next. Privately of course.”

  “Son, listen.”

  His mother’s command yanked him from his fugue. He seemed to finally assess the scene—his family arrayed in front of the art handler. It was a tableau of judgment, of accusation. Reddick saw Buckley’s face shift and knew it was over—he had tumbled from witness to suspect. He wondered why he thought it could have gone differently.

  “Reddick,” Dottie said, “tell him what you told us.”

  Buckley listened impatiently. “And where was this?” he asked when the story was finished.

  “Brooklyn. Bed-Stuy.”

  His cheeks paled. “That’s impossible. She wouldn’t have been out there.”

  “What’s that supposed to mean?” Reddick snapped.

  “Buckles, you both go to Brooklyn plenty,” his mother said.

  “Events at the museum. Drinks in Williamsburg.”

  “But isn’t this near—”

  He cut her off, barked, “Mother.”

  She slashed her eyes at him, and continued, “Near BAM, I was going to say. Where precisely was it again?”

  “Off the A, the Nostrand stop.”