The Muse Read online

  Sally picked up her purse and tote. “I have to work in the morning. Brunch soon?”

  “I’ll walk out with you,” Libby said.

  Betsy walked them to the door, then came back to top off Arden’s wine and set the plate of truffles in front of her. “Want me to help you put the furniture back?”

  “Carlotta and I will take care of it in the morning,” Betsy said. She looked around the room. “It’s rather bohemian. I might keep it this way.” Arden contemplated a second truffle, settled for topping off her glass of wine, then dragged Betsy’s cashmere throw from the back of the sofa. Betsy pulled the trailing end over her feet and snuggled them companionably against Arden’s calf.

  “He was hot.”

  No need to name the subject of that sentence. Except hot didn’t quite cover Seth Last-name-unknown. He was compelling, and Arden was suddenly of the opinion that hot was what you settled for when compelling wasn’t available.

  “He was,” Arden said, assuming Betsy would stop there. They had a deal: they were ruthlessly honest with each other about everything except the fact that Arden never got over Nick leaving her for Betsy. In exchange for Arden being the smiling, attentive, picture-perfect maid of honor at the wedding of her best friend to her former lover, Betsy stayed out of Arden’s love life.

  “He was interested in you.”

  Arden flicked Betsy a look. “Everyone’s interested in me at the moment.”

  “He didn’t do the double take,” Betsy said. “Either he doesn’t know, or he doesn’t care.”

  “The last thing I need right now is a date.”

  “So don’t date him.”

  “Let me rephrase that. The last thing I need right now is a man.”

  Betsy shrugged. “Your family name is being dragged through the mud by every news outlet on the planet. People are sending you hate mail, picketing outside your offices, and you’re vibrating like a hummingbird on crack. Maybe you don’t need a date, but you could sure as hell put that man to good use.”

  “The drawing class was supposed to help with the hummingbird thing.”

  “So try two things at once.”

  “How will I know which one worked?” Arden said lightly. Betsy knew all about randomized double-blind controlled studies because she was trained as an epidemiologist. After she married Nick she put that training to use on boards and charities focused on public health. Arden used to donate significant sums of both her personal money and the MacCarren Foundation’s annual budget to programs Betsy vetted.

  “If you get drawing and him, who cares which one works?”

  Arden threw Betsy a glance her oldest friend had no trouble interpreting. Enough. Move on.

  “What comes next?”

  “Neil’s cleared his schedule to handle this full-time. I have an appointment with the FBI in a couple of days.”

  “Again? I thought they interviewed you.”

  “They have done. Twice. I suspect I’ll be at their beck and call for a very long time,” Arden said. “This time they want to go over the family assets.”

  “That sounds ominous,” Betsy said.

  “It is. Neil’s been rather vague on the subject, which is even more ominous.”

  Betsy reached out and clasped Arden’s hand. “Want to stay the night? Carlotta will make you crepes.”

  Derek was waiting downstairs, but he could just as easily drive the SUV back to the garage and head home whether she was in the back or not. A week ago she had work, a schedule filled with both professional and personal obligations, but right now she had only one goal: to salvage what she could from the wreckage of her family. She found herself remembering the ease with which Seth undressed, his confidence in his own skin. He’d forged that confidence in the Marine Corps, while she couldn’t even handle Manhattan traffic.

  Daydreaming about a tattooed former Marine wasn’t in her plan at the moment, let alone actually dating or sleeping with him. “Why not?” she said, and put Seth out of her mind.

  – TWO –

  The gap between the alley wall and the delivery truck narrowed as the truck slowed to make its left turn. Seth knew to the micron how wide he was on the bike; the question wasn’t fitting his body through the gap, or the bike’s handlebars, but rather the messenger backpack slung across his back. He had two boxes crammed in there, the straps straining to close. If he misjudged the space, the box would catch between the truck box and the wall, snagging him off his bike as neatly as a bomb blast blew souls into the afterlife.

  He’d proved fucking hard to kill, so he probably wouldn’t die. The digital monitor strapped to his handlebars ticked relentlessly; three minutes to deliver the contents of his messenger bag. All senses focused on the narrowing gap, his thrumming heart rate, his lungs straining for air to fuel his muscles, he leaned forward and found another gear deep inside. He shot through the gap and out of the alley into the intersection, and felt only the faintest brush of metal against Cordura nylon as he did. The truck driver honked indignantly and extensively, right next to his head, but Seth heard only a faint bleat. He swerved around a taxi, popped up over the median and back down into what would be oncoming traffic when the lights turned, dropped his head and ignored his screaming lungs, and dipped into what he mentally dubbed the I don’t give a fuck if you’re dead, you hold your goddamn position, marine reserve tank and made it across the avenue before the traffic arrived.

  One minute. Six blocks. Not enough time, or air in his lungs, in the city, in the entire fucking ecosystem. He blew past a line of cars waiting for the light at the end of the street, hit the light just as it changed, swerved to avoid a left-turning black SUV, lather, rinse, repeat at the next intersection. He was going too fast to time the lights right, so there’d be a red in the next block.

  He blew through it.

  Brakes, a horn barely denting the thick, pervasive silence enveloping him, twenty seconds. Three blocks. Too close but he could see the building now, and surely he hadn’t survived Iraq and Afghanistan to die of a heart attack on a Manhattan city street. Slight uphill he knew only because his quads quivered on the verge of giving out on him, but he was through the last intersection and braking at the building’s entrance. His bike would disappear if he left it unlocked on the street for more than a split second, so he rode right through the open door beside the revolving doors, startling the man holding the door for the women behind him, swerved to avoid them, ignored the indignant Hey, braked in front of the reception desk, and glanced down at the digital readout on his handlebars.

  Six seconds to spare. Fuck, yeah. “Mirinda Castille,” he said with the last air in his lungs, then heaved in a breath. Sweat dripped from his jaw. He used his shoulder to smear the droplets, but his jersey was as soaked as his skin. The fabric snagged on his stubble and the still-unfamiliar arrangement of straps. The bike helmet’s straps didn’t quite match the configuration of his combat helmet. It was the little things that hooked him out of the adrenaline rush, back into reality.

  A woman stepped up beside him. “I’m Mirinda,” she said, her voice faint under the thrumming heartbeat in his ears.

  “Sign there,” he said, handing her his phone, then shrugged off the messenger bag, opened the clips, and pulled out the packages. “What is it?” he asked. His heart rate was separating into distinct jackrabbit beats, not the chest-exploding thrum of high-intensity exercise.

  “Running shoes.”

  “What?”

  “Running shoes, and wing tips,” she said, and opened the box for him to see. “My boss is on his way to the Hamptons for the weekend and he forgot his shoes at his club.”

  Seth peered into the bag. They were Nikes, blue with red accents, showing some road wear, and what the ever-loving fuck? He damned near killed himself getting some hedge fund manager his running shoes for a weekend in the Hamptons? The irony tasted like blood, or maybe he’d bitten his lip when he hit a bump. He touched his hand to his mouth. Yup. Bitten his lip. Didn’t feel the sting until the adr
enaline started to ebb.

  “He could buy new shoes for what that delivery cost.”

  “But not for what the wing tips cost,” she said in the mild tone of a woman who’d long since given up making sense of unreasonable demands.

  Seth peered into the box. There was no identifying mark on the insole or leather, so . . . handmade? He had no idea. “Shoes.”

  “I would have waited,” she said with a smile he’d seen fairly regularly since leaving the Corps. He questioned her sanity, given that he was dripping sweat onto pink granite floors and his legs were literally shaking.

  “It’s the principle,” he said. “I said I’d be here by two fifteen, and I was.”

  “Let’s hear it for principles,” Mirinda said.

  “Sir, on principle, we’d like you to remove your bike from the lobby,” said the receptionist.

  “Understood,” he said, and popped the bike up on its back wheel to walk it out the door.

  “Thanks,” Mirinda said. Running shoes firmly tucked under her arm, she climbed into a Lexus SUV not that much smaller than a tank, leaving Seth on the sidewalk.

  He walked his bike over to a low wall separating the building’s plaza from the sidewalk, sat down, and fumbled his cell phone from his cargo shorts pocket. The phone was like his rifle now. He always knew where it was, constantly checking for it like he’d check for his rifle. He was registered with three different online delivery services, picking up jobs based on where he ended up, taking multiple jobs at once if he could do a quick delivery in one zone while on a longer one between zones.

  Sweat dripped from his chin and elbows to plunk on the sidewalk, dripped onto his phone’s screen. Absently, he wiped the screen, then activated it. The screen saver was a picture of him and his three best friends, a candid shot taken by their lieutenant of them laughing just after they’d shrugged out of body armor and flak jackets. Seth looked at it, looked at the tremor in his hand and the quiver in his legs, and felt nothing. He’d just chased down a legendary run, set every neuron and nerve ending in his body on fire. He should feel something. At a minimum he should hear something.

  He didn’t. He had, of course, held conversations, but they all echoed across a canyon, like someone was standing on the other cliff face, shouting at him through cupped hands. He’d had his hearing checked during his discharge physical. It was perfectly normal. Except it wasn’t.

  The app refreshed while he scratched at the stubble on his jaw, where the sweat itched under his bike-helmet straps, then dried his fingers on his cargo shorts. A new job was available, a pickup in Midtown with the delivery on Wall Street, to the building that used to house MacCarren. When the news broke about MacCarren, Seth hadn’t paid much attention to the story until Ryan Hamilton, who’d retained him to make deliveries to Irresistible, a high-end lingerie shop in the Fashion District, was identified as the whistleblower who brought the entire scheme crashing down.

  That explained a lot about Ryan’s demeanor over the course of the summer. Seth joined the Corps at eighteen, so while he didn’t know much about a lot of things relevant to civilian life, he recognized all the signs of someone under incredible pressure: sleeplessness, weight loss, but the big tip-off to Seth was the extravagant, inexplicable way he threw money around. To secure Seth’s services to make deliveries to Simone at Irresistible, he had handed Seth a manila envelope full of more money than Seth made in a year with the Marines, including the bonus for combat pay. Seth had been worried that the guy was going to eat a gun, but then again, he saw potential suicides everywhere these days.

  He swiped over to his texts, tapped on Ryan’s name, and sent a quick one. You okay? Back in the app, he tapped on the Wall Street run to claim it, then set his bike upright, swung his leg over the seat, adjusted the messenger bag to his back, and set off into traffic again.

  He waited for a light near a flower shop in Midtown. The blooms of vibrant purple orchids caught his eye. The color reminded him of Arden’s violet gaze, flicking from him to her drawing paper during the class on Fifth Avenue. He really had to stop thinking about her, or just think about her less, which was low-hanging fruit because he thought about her basically all the time. Not actively, but sunlight reminded him of her hair, and a certain pensive expression glimpsed as he waited in a lobby or foyer reminded him of the way she looked as she drew, thoughtful, brow furrowed, attacking the drawing with a fierce concentration that made him want to run his thumb over the lines between her golden eyebrows, tell her to ease up, just let it flow. But Micah didn’t do that, so Seth sure as hell wouldn’t. He was the model, not the instructor. She and Betsy were friends, and Betsy lived on Fifth Avenue; maybe there was some sort of “wrong side of the track” friendship there, but he didn’t think so. She was beautiful, expensive, and while he could make the effort to get to know her, in the end she was something he couldn’t have.

  Where did she get those scars?

  The train of thought was wearing a groove in his brain. Back on the bike, he rode slowly downtown, stopping at the intersection of Broadway and Morris, across the street from the fabled bull. There was still a fair amount of foot traffic in the area, heading for the Staten Island Ferry terminal or the Lex Avenue line, but he found a delivery doorway where he could lean the bike against the building and hunker down out of the way. With a sigh of relief, he lifted the messenger bag over his head and set it down beside him. Unfastening the seat-belt clasp, he rummaged around in the front pockets and pulled out his Moleskine journal and a Micron pen.

  Ease up. Let it flow.

  He’d never had official drawing classes like the ones he modeled for, just books checked out from the school or public library and thousands of hours of practice on long, solitary walks back home in Wyoming, his muse a constant, subtly demanding presence in his life. He had every sketchbook he’d ever used, one continuous record of what he saw, where he was, from fourth grade on, but the one in his bag was brand-new, the cover a pristine black, the pages cream and crisp, ready for his pen.

  Open the cover and flip to the first page. Uncap the pen.

  He couldn’t do it. It felt wrong, a jump in time, like gaps in the fossil record, because the last one he’d been using during his last tour in Afghanistan was jammed in a bag in the tiny closet in his motor home.

  Just start. Draw the bull. It’s a New York City landmark, and a fine piece of sculpture. Just draw the curve of the nostrils and the horns, the bellied side of the bull leaning mid-breath, the lifted forefoot.

  Hunkered down on his heels, he watched suits stride past him, talking on Bluetooth headsets or on phones, rarely to each other. He felt invisible here, enveloped in silence and the smell of cement and asphalt, which was just fine with him. In this city of art students and designers, no one paid any attention to a man with a notebook. It should have been the easiest thing in the world to whip off a quick sketch of the bull.

  Not today. He shut the sketchbook, snapped the elastic strap over the cover to keep it closed, and jammed it back in his messenger backpack. Then he got back on the bike and merged with traffic heading outbound on the Brooklyn Bridge. He easily outpaced the vehicle traffic by splitting the lanes. The practice of riding between cars was technically illegal but almost impossible to enforce, as long as he didn’t ride past a police cruiser. When traffic picked up, he reached out and snagged a strap holding down a truckload of lumber, and let the truck power him the rest of the way into Prospect Heights.

  Home. Home until he was eighteen was Laramie, Wyoming. Then, for the next ten years, it was an assortment of bases, barracks, camps, and forward operating bases, both stateside and in Iraq and Afghanistan. Now he was living in a twenty-three-foot motor home he bought from a former city employee, parked a couple of blocks from the west edge of Prospect Park. After detaching the front wheel from his bike, he unlocked the heavy metal chain from around his waist, and secured the bike’s frame to a rack attached to the motor home’s grill. It wasn’t the most secure thing in the world; anyone d
etermined enough to steal the bike could work the bolts free and make off with both the rack and the bike in very little time. Taking the front wheel inside was a more effective deterrent. Even more effective was the fact that the bike was an old ten-speed, and not really worth the trouble it would take to steal it.

  By the time he unlocked the door, took the three steps up into the motor home, and flicked on the lights and the air-conditioning, all he could smell was himself, the garlic from three slices of pizza working its way out through his pores. The first order of business was to take a shower. Every few days he filled up the motor home’s hundred-gallon tank at an open fire hydrant or the local VFW, but he was stingy with water, as stingy as he had been on deployment. He rinsed out his compression shorts and his bike jersey, then hung them up to dry on a clothesline strung the width of the bathroom. He had a couple of sets of each—one to wash, one to wear, each set drying in the heat accumulated in the motor home over the course of the day.

  A life executed within normal tolerances was a life, no matter if the silence threatened to crush him. He’d shared the same amount of square footage with three other Marines. Of course it was quieter.

  He opened the tiny closet and pulled out jeans and a river driver’s shirt, resolutely ignoring the blood-stained pair of cammies neatly folded on the top shelf, the Moleskine in the left-side pocket. Wallet and keys in hand, he scuffed his feet into flip-flops and set off for dinner with Phil.

  * * *

  But when Seth arrived at the bar, a trendy combination of microbrews and Middle Eastern food, Phil wasn’t there yet, probably caught in some delay on the subway in from Manhattan. Seth snagged the last table and ordered a beer to nurse while he waited, his gaze divided between the television screens tuned to the Yankees game over the bar, and the door. Twenty minutes late, Phil walked in the door. He lifted his chin in greeting and stopped at the bar for a beer before making his way through the crowd to Seth. The resemblance to his brother was unmistakable. Same dark hair, pale blue eyes, but at twenty-three and four years younger than Doug, Phil hadn’t developed into the wall of muscle Doug was. Used to be, Seth corrected himself. Doug used to be, and that’s why you’re here.