With the flash blinding them, they don’t see the homeowner stick her head through the hole. She looks at Angel standing there, snapping photos. Misty, drawing on the wall. And the homeowner clutches her own head in both hands and says, “What the hell are you doing? Stop!” She says, “Has this become an ongoing art project for you people?”

JUST SO YOU KNOW, Detective Stilton phoned Misty today. He wants to pay Peter a little visit.

He wants to pay you a little visit.

On the phone, he says, “When did your father-in-law die?”

The floor around Misty, the bed, her whole room, it’s cluttered with wet balls of watercolor paper. The crumpled wads of azure blue and Winsor green, they fill the brown shopping bag she brought her art supplies home in. Her graphite pencils, her colored pencils, her oils and acrylics and gouache watercolors, she’s wasted them all to make trash. Her greasy oil pastels and chalky soft pastels, they’re worn down to just nubs so small you can’t hold them anymore. Her paper’s almost gone.

What they don’t teach you in art school is how to hold a telephone conversation and still paint. Holding the phone in one hand and a brush in her other, Misty says, “Peter’s dad? Fourteen years ago, right?”

Smearing the paints with the side of her hand, blending with the pad of her thumb, Misty’s as bad as Goya, setting herself up for lead encephalopathy. Deafness. Depression. Topical poisoning.

Detective Stilton, he says, “There’s no record that Harrow Wilmot ever died.”

To give her brush a sharp point, Misty twists it in her mouth. Misty says, “We scattered his ashes.” She says, “It was a heart attack. Maybe a brain tumor.” Against her tongue, the paint tastes sour. The color feels gritty between her back teeth.

And Detective Stilton says, “There’s no death certificate.”

Misty says, “Maybe they faked his death.” She’s all out of guesses. Grace Wilmot and Dr. Touchet, this whole island is about image control.

And Stilton says, “Who do you mean, they ?”

The Nazis. The Klan.

With a number 12 camel-hair sky brush, she’s putting a perfect wash of blue above the trees on a perfect jagged horizon of perfect mountains. With a number 2 sable brush, she’s putting sunlight on the top of each perfect wave. Perfect curves and straight lines and exact angles, so fuck Angel Delaporte.

Just for the record, on paper, the weather is what Misty says it will be. Perfect.

Just for the record, Detective Stilton says, “Why do you think your father-in-law would fake his death?”

Misty says she’s just joking. Of course Harry Wilmot’s dead.

With a number 4 squirrel brush, she’s dabbing shadows into the forest. Days she’s wasted locked up here in this room, and nothing she’s done is half as good as the sketch of a chair she did while shitting her pants. Out on Waytansea Point. Being menaced by a hallucination. With her eyes shut, food-poisoned.

That only sketch, she’s sold it for a lousy fifty bucks.

On the phone, Detective Stilton says, “Are you still there?”

Misty says, “Define there .”

She says, “Go. See Peter.” She’s putting perfect flowers in a perfect meadow with a number 2 nylon brush. Where Tabbi is, Misty doesn’t know. If Misty’s supposed to be at work right now, she doesn’t care. The only fact she’s sure about is she’s working. Her head doesn’t hurt. Her hands don’t shake.

“The problem is,” Stilton says, “the hospital wants you to be present when I see your husband.”

And Misty says she can’t. She has to paint. She has a thirteen-year-old kid to raise. She’s on the second week of a migraine headache. With a number 4 sable brush, she’s wiping a band of gray-white across the meadow. Paving over the grass. She’s excavating a pit. Sinking in a foundation.

On the paper in front of her, the paintbrush kills trees and hauls them away. With brown paint, Misty cuts into the slope of the meadow. Misty regrades. The brush plows under the grass. The flowers are gone. White stone walls rise out of the pit. Windows open in the walls. A tower goes up. A dome swells over the center of the building. Stairs run down from the doorways. A railing runs along the terraces. Another tower shoots up. Another wing spreads out to cover more of the meadow and push the forest back.

It’s Xanadu. San Simeon. Biltmore. Mar a Lago. It’s what people with money build to be protected and alone. The places people think will make them happy. This new building is just the naked soul of a rich person. It’s the alternate heaven for people too rich to get into the real thing.

You can paint anything because the only thing you ever reveal is yourself.

And on the phone, a voice says, “Can we say three o’clock tomorrow, Mrs. Wilmot?”

Statues appear along the perfect roofline of one wing. A pool opens in one perfect terrace. The meadow is almost gone as a new flight of steps runs down to the edge of the perfect woods.

Everything is a self-portrait.

Everything is a diary.

And the voice on the phone says, “Mrs. Wilmot?”

Vines scramble up the walls. Chimneys sprout from the slates on the roof.

And the voice on the phone says, “Misty?” The voice says, “Did you ever request the medical examiner’s records for your husband’s suicide attempt?” Detective Stilton says, “Do you know where your husband might have gotten sleeping pills?”

Just for the record, the problem with art school is that it can teach you technique and craft, but it can’t give you talent. You can’t buy inspiration. You can’t reason your way to an epiphany. Develop a formula. A road map to enlightenment.

“Your husband’s blood,” Stilton says, “was loaded with sodium phenobarbital.”

And there’s no evidence of drugs at the scene, he says. No pill bottle or water. No record of Peter ever having a prescription.

Still painting, Misty asks where this is going.

And Stilton says, “You might think about who’d want to kill him.”

“Only me,” Misty says. Then she wishes she hadn’t.

The picture is finished, perfect, beautiful. It’s no place Misty’s ever seen. Where it came from, she has no idea. Then, with a number 12 cat’s-tongue brush full of ivory black, she wipes out everything in sight.

ALL THE HOUSES along Gum Street and Larch Street, they look so grand the first time you see them. All of them three or four stories tall with white columns, they all date from the last economic boom, eighty years ago. A century. House after house, they sit back among branching trees as big as green storm clouds, walnuts and oaks. They line Cedar Street, facing each other across rolled lawns. The first time you see them, they look so rich.

“Temple fronts,” Harrow Wilmot told Misty. Starting in about 1798, Americans built simple but massive Greek Revival facades. By 1824, he says, when William Strickland designed the Second Bank of the United States in Philadelphia, there was no going back. After that, houses large and small had to have a row of fluted columns and a looming pediment roof across the front.

People called them “end houses” because all this fancy detail was confined to one end. The rest of the house was plain.

That could describe almost any house on the island. All facade. Your first impression.

From the Capitol building in Washington, D.C., to the smallest cottage, what architects called “the Greek cancer” was everywhere.

“For architecture,” Harrow said, “it was the end of progress and the beginning of recycling.” He met Misty and Peter at the bus station in Long Beach and drove them down to the ferry.

The island houses, they’re all so grand until you see how the paint’s peeled and heaping around the base of each column. On the roof, the flashing is rusted and hangs off the edge in bent red strips. Brown cardboard patches windows where the glass is gone.