Chapter 28

I RACED HOME AS soon as Franny and his mother took off in their old truck. Michael immediately stopped what he was doing when I came through the apartment’s front door. He looked up at me, closed the laptop, as if my timing had been perfect.

“Don’t tell me,” he smiled warmly. “Franny painting number three.”

“Sure.”

He got up and stared at the painting. After a silent time he turned to me.

“You and Moll,” he said. “You and Moll at the stream on the day it all happened.”

I nodded.

Like Robyn before him, he traced the letters to the word ‘Taste’ which had been painted in blue-white letters inside the stream water.

“I really see the word this time.”

Then I told him everything else. About my morning get together with Caroline; about the basement art room; about the painting Franny did of Molly and me many years ago—the one that matched precisely a black and white snapshot I just happened to discover on the porch floor of my parents’ home as if somebody had purposely set it there for me; somebody able to anticipate my every move.

“This photo,” I told him, pulling the tattered snapshot from out of my jeans pocket, setting it on top of the closed laptop.

While he turned his attention from the ‘Taste’ painting to the photograph, I told him about the jimmied window; how someone had definitely tried to break into the house. I told him about my confrontation with Franny; about how I didn’t get a word out of him other than confirming my own suspicions. That, number one, he’d somehow witnessed Whalen assaulting Molly and me thirty years ago. Maybe witnessed it through a basement window. And number two: he was trying to warn me of something. I also told him that it was time I went to the police.

Michael looked at me with squinty eyes.

“So long as they believe you,” he said, handing the snapshot back to me. “It’s the right thing to do. But they’ve got to believe you.”

My portfolio bag was stored in the narrow space between the couch-back and the far wall. I pulled it out, unzipped it, reached inside and took out two of my own blank canvases, setting them against the bookshelf. Then I slipped Franny’s paintings inside. I zipped up the bag, slung it over my shoulder and checked my pockets for my cell phone and car keys.

“I really want you to come with me,” I said. “But if you’d rather keep out of it.”

He pursed his lips and shot me a wink of his right eye.

“Let’s go make believers out of the cops,” he said.