Diary

August 27 ... and Seven-Eighths

TODAY IN THE DARKNESS of the dim forest clearing, the green velvet landscape inside the lobby doors, the hotel’s fire alarm goes off. One long ringing bell, it comes out the front doors so loud the newscaster has to shout, “Well, this sounds like trouble.”

The summer people, the men, their hair all combed back, dark and wiry with some styling product. The women all blond. They shout to be heard over the alarm’s din.

Misty Wilmot, the greatest artist throughout history, she’s grabbing her way through the crowd, clawing and pulling herself toward the stage in the Wood and Gold Dining Room. Clutching at the elbows and hipbones of these ski

Her million smears of paint put together the right way. The urine of cows eating mango leaves. The ink sacs from cuttlefish. All that chemistry and biology.

Her kid somewhere in this mob of people. Tabbi.

The alarm ringing and ringing, Misty steps up on a chair. She steps up on a table, table six where Tabbi was laid out dead, where Misty found out about Angel Delaporte being stabbed to death. Standing above the crowd in her white dress, people looking up, summer men gri

Her born-again wedding dress tucked between her bony thighs, Misty shouts, “Fire!”

Heads turn. Eyes look up at her. In the dining room doorway, Detective Stilton appears and starts swimming through the crowd.

Misty shouts, “Get out! Save yourselves!” Misty shouts, “If you stay here, something terrible will happen!”

Peter’s warnings. Misty sprays them out above the crowd.

“We will kill every one of God’s children to save our own.”

The curtain looming behind her, covering the whole wall, her own self-portrait, what Misty doesn’t know about herself. What she doesn’t want to know.

The summer people look up, their corrugator muscles contracted, their eyebrows pulled together. Their lips pulled thin and down by triangularis muscle.

The fire alarm stops ringing, and for as long as it takes to draw the next breath, all you can hear is the ocean outside, each wave hiss and burst.

Misty is shouting for everybody to shut up. Everybody, just listen. Shouting, she knows what she’s talking about. She’s the greatest artist of all time. The reincarnation of Thomas Gainsborough and Claude Monet and Mary Cassatt. She shouts how her soul has been Michelangelo and da Vinci and Rembrandt.

Then a woman shouts, “It’s her, the artist. It’s Misty Wilmot.”

And a man shouts, “Misty honey, enough with the drama.”

The woman shouts, “Pull down the curtain, and let’s get this over with.”

The man and woman shouting, they’re Harrow and Grace. Between them, they each hold Tabbi by one hand. Tabbi, her eyes are taped shut.

“Those people,” Misty shouts, pointing at Grace and Harrow. Her hair hanging in her face, Misty shouts, “Those evil people, they used their son to get me pregnant!”

Misty shouts, “They’re holding my kid!”

She shouts, “If you see what’s behind this curtain, it will be too late!”

And Detective Stilton gets to the chair. One step, and he’s up. Another step, and he’s beside her on table six. The huge curtain hanging behind them. The truth about everything just inches away.

“Yes,” another woman shouts. An old island Tupper, her sea turtle neck sagging into the lace collar of her dress, she shouts, “Show us, Misty!”

“Show us,” a man shouts, an old island Woods, leaning on his cane.

Stilton reaches one hand behind his back. He says, “You almost had me thinking you were the sane one.” And his hand comes out holding handcuffs. He’s clicking them on her, pulling Misty away, past Tabbi with her eyes taped shut, past all the summer people shaking their heads. Past the aristocrats of Waytansea Island. Back through the forest glade of the green velvet lobby.

“My kid,” Misty says. “She’s still in there. We have to get her out.”

And Detective Stilton gives her to a deputy in a brown uniform and says, “Your daughter who you said was dead?”

They faked her death. Everyone watching, they’re just statues of themselves. Their own self-portraits.

Outside the hotel, at the foot of the porch steps, the deputy opens the back door of a patrol car. Detective Stilton says, “Misty Wilmot, you’re under arrest for the attempted murder of your husband, Peter Wilmot, and the murder of Angel Delaporte.”

Blood was all over her the morning after Angel was stabbed in her bed. Angel about to steal her husband away. Misty, the one who found Peter’s body in the car.

Strong hands shove her into the backseat of the patrol car.

And from inside the hotel, the newscaster says, “Ladies and gentlemen, it’s the moment of the unveiling.”

“Take her. Print her. Book her,” the detective says. He slaps the deputy on the back and says, “I’m going back inside to see what all this fuss has been about.”