Transgressions by Stephen King & John Farris

“There’s time. I want to see the Ransome they’ve borrowed for their show of twentiedi-century portraitists.”

“Oh, dear God!” But he got off the elevator with Echo. “I detest Ransome! Such transparent theatrics.

I’ve seen better art on a sailor’s ass.”

“Really, Stefan?”

“Although not all that recently, I’m sorry to say.”

The gallery in which the exhibition was being mounted was temporarily closed to the public, but they wore badges allowing them access to any part of the Highbridge. Echo ignored frowns from a couple of dithering functionaries and went straight to the portrait by Ransome that was already in place and lighted.

The subject was a seated nude, blond, Godiva hair. Ransome’s style was impressionistic, his canvas flooded with light. The young woman was casually posed, like a Degas girl taking a backstage break, her face partly averted. Stefan had his usual attitude of near-suicidal disdain. But he found it hard to look away.

Great artists were hypnotists with a brush.

“I suppose we must give him credit for his excellent eye for beauty.”

“It’s marvelous,” Echo said softly.

“As Delacroix said, ‘One never paints violently enough.’ We must also give Ransome credit for doing violence to his canvases. And I must have an Armagnac, if the bar downstairs is open. Echo?”

“I’m coming,” she said, hands folded like an acolyte’s in front of her as she gazed up at the painting with a faintly worshipful smile.

Stefan shrugged when she failed to budge. “I don’t wish to impose on your infatuation. Suppose you join me in the limo in twenty minutes?”

“Sure,” Echo murmured.

Absorbed in her study of John Leland Ransome’s technique, Echo didn’t immediately pay attention to that little barb at the back of her neck that told her she was being closely observed by someone.

When she turned she saw a woman standing twenty feet away ignoring the Ransome on the wall, staring instead at Echo.

The woman was dressed all in black, which seemed to Echo both obsessive and oppressive in high summer. But it was elegant, tasteful couture. She wasn’t wearing jewelry. She was, perhaps, excessively made up, but striking nonetheless. Mature, but Echo couldn’t guess her age. Her features were immobile, masklike. The directness of her gaze, a burning in her eyes, gave Echo a couple of bad moments. She knew a pickup line was coming. She’d averaged three of these encounters a week since puberty.

But the stare went on, and the woman said nothing. It had the effect of getting Echo’s Irish up.

“Excuse me,” Echo said. “Have we met?” Her expression read, Whatever you’re thinking, forget it, Queenie.

Not so much as a startled blink. After a few more seconds the woman looked rather deliberately from Echo to the Ransome painting on the wall. She studied that for a short time, then turned and walked away as if Echo no longer existed, heels clicking on the gallery floor.

Echo’s shoulders twitched in a spidery spasm. She glanced at a portly museum guard who also was eyeing the woman in black.

“Who is that?”

The guard shrugged. “Beats me. She’s been around since noon. I think she’s from the gallery in New York.” He looked up at the Ransome portrait. “His gallery. You know how fussy these painters get about their placement in shows.”

“Uh-huh. Doesn’t she talk?”

“Not to me,” the guard said.

The limousine Stefan had hired for the day was parked in a taxi zone outside the Highbridge. Stefan was leaning on the limo getting track updates on his BlackBerry. There was a Daily Racing Form lying on the trunk.

He put away his BlackBerry with a surly expression when Echo approached. My Little Margie must have finished out of the money.

“So the spell is finally broken. I suppose we could have arranged for a cot to be moved in for the night.”

“Thanks for being so patient with me, Stefan.”

They lingered on the sidewalk, enjoying balmy weather. New York had been a stewpot when they’d left that morning.

“It’s all hype, you know,” Stefan said, looking up at the gold and glass facade of the Cesar Pelli-designed building. “The Ransomes of the art world excel at manipulation. The scarcity of his work only makes it more desirable to the vulturati.”

“No, I think it’s the quality that’s rare, Stefan. Courbet, Bonnard, he shares their sense of. . . call it a divine melancholy.”

” ‘Divine melancholy.’ Nicely put. I must remember to filch that one for my ART news column. Where are we having dinner tonight? You did remember to make reservations? Echo?”

Echo was looking past him at the Woman in Black, who had walked out of the museum and was headed for a taxi.

Stefan turned. “Who, or what, is that?”

“I don’t know. I saw her in the gallery. Caught her staring at me.” Uncanny, Echo thought, how much she resembled the black queen on Echo’s chessboard at home.

“Apparently, from her lack of interest now, you rebuffed her.”

Echo shook her head. “No. Actually she never said a word. Dinner? Stefan, I’m sorry. You’re set at Legal’s with the Bronwyns for eight-thirty. But I have to get back to New York. I thought I told you.

Engagement party tonight. Peter’s sister.”

“Which sister? There seems to be a multitude.”

“Siobhan. The last one to go.”

“Not that huge, clumsy girl with the awful bangs?”

“Hush. She’s really very sweet.”

“Now that Peter has earned his gold shield, am I correct to assume the next engagement party will be yours?”

‘Yes. As soon as we all recover from this one.”

Stefan looked deeply aggrieved. “Echo, have you any idea what childbearing will do to your lovely complexion?”

Echo looked at her watch and smiled apologetically.

“I can just make the four o’clock Acela.”

“Well, then. Get in.”

Echo was preoccupied with answering e-mail during their short trip up Memorial Drive and across the river to Boston’s South Station. She didn’t notice that the taxi the Woman in Black had claimed was behind them all the way.

Hi Mom,

Busy day. I had to hustle but I made the four o’clock train. I’ll probably go straight to Queens from the station so won’t be home until after midnight. Scored points with the boss today; tell you all about it at breakfast. Called Uncle Rory at the Home, but the Sister on his floor told me he probably wouldn’t know who I was …

The Acela was rolling quietly through a tunnel on its way out of the city. In her coach seat Echo, riding backwards, looked up from the laptop she’d spent too much time with today. Her vision was blurry, the back of her neck was stiff, and she had a headache. She looked at her reflection in the window, which disappeared as the train emerged into bright sunlight. She winced and closed her laptop after sending the message to her mother, rummaged in her soft-leather shoulder bag for Advil and swallowed three with sips of designer water. Then she closed her eyes and rubbed her temples.

When she looked up again she saw the Woman in Black looking solemnly at her before she opened the vestibule door and disappeared in the direction of the club car.

The look didn’t mean anything. The fact that they were on the same train didn’t mean anything either.

Even so for a good part of the trip to New York, while Echo tried to nap, she couldn’t get the woman out of her mind.

Two

After getting eight stitches to close the cut near his left eye at the hospital in Flatbush, Peter O’Neill’s partner Ray Scalla drove him to the 7-5 station house, where Pete retrieved his car and continued home to Bayside, Queens. By then he’d put in a twelve-hour day, but he had a couple of line-of-duty off days coming.

The engagement party for his sister Siobhan was roaring along by the time he got to the three-story brick-and-shingle house on Compton Place, and he had to hunt for a parking space a block and a half away.

He walked back to the house swapping smack with neighborhood kids on their bikes and skateboards. The left eye felt swollen. He needed an ice bag, but a cold beer would be the first order of business. Make it two beers.

The O’Neill house was lit up to the roof-line. Floodlights illuminated half a dozen guys playing a scuffling game of basketball in the driveway. Peter was related one way or another to all of them, and to everyone on the teeming porch.

His brother Tommy, a freshman at Hofs-tra on a football scholarship, fished in a tub of cracked ice and pitched Pete a twelve-ounce Rolling Rock as he walked up to the stoop. Kids with Game Boys cluttered the steps. His sister Kathleen, just turned thirty, was barefoot on the front lawn, gently rocking an infant to sleep on her shoulder. She gave Pete a kiss and frowned at the patched eye.

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