Page 38 of Drawing Home
She shrugged. “I guess I just want to be normal. Coming here makes me feel like I’m not.”
“What’s normal? You’re an artist. Some would say that’s not normal. But you wouldn’t change that, would you?”
Of course she wouldn’t. But sometimes she wondered what good it did her.
Chapter Sixteen
Emma, two things,” Jack Blake said, appearing in front of the desk. “I need a bar table, party of four, for dinner in an hour. We’ll need a bottle of the 2010 Lucien le Moine Chevalier-Montrachet from downstairs.”
“Got it,” she said, jotting down the name of the wine.
“Also, Emma, I had a conversation with Bea Winstead this morning. Seems she’s less than happy about this turn of events with the Wyatt house.”
So Bea had spoken to him after all. Her heart beat faster. “Yes, I know. I’m sorry. I’m not sure what to do about that.”
“Just keep the drama out of the hotel, okay?”
“Of course. No drama—I promise.”
That should be easier now that Bea Winstead had checked out. Thank goodness! Hopefully, she was on her way back to New York City at that very moment. Or, at the very least, checking into another hotel.
Jack smiled, tapped the desktop, and said, “Make that two bottles of the Montrachet.”
Emma blocked off his table in the reservation book, shaking her head. That woman had some nerve, making trouble for her at work. But what was Emma supposed to do about it? She could only hope Bea would get tired of arguing over a house that she had absolutely no legal claim to.
“Emma, hello!” said Mrs. Fleishman, a regular who always booked room number 8 for a week in June with her husband.
“Hi, Mrs. Fleishman. Wonderful to see you again. Let me just check to see if your table is ready.”
“We’re in no rush, dear. We’re going to have a drink first. But I had to ask—is this you?”
Mrs. Fleishman slid a copy of theNew York Postacross the desk. Emma followed the woman’s finger as she pointed to the wordsdaughter of the desk manager of The American Hotel in Sag Harbor.
Her name. In theNew York Post.
Her eyes scanned upward for the headline: “Battle Lines Drawn over the Estate of Artist Henry Wyatt.”
Society maven and art patron Bea Winstead is using her considerable clout to mount a legal challenge to the will of the late artist Henry Wyatt in a bid to preserve his art for the public.
Winstead has hired the firm Smythe, Bonivent, Worth to look into the will filed by the legendary painter and sculptor, which leaves his Hamptons home and the bulk of his estate to the daughter of the desk manager of The American Hotel in Sag Harbor.
The article went on to chronicle the significance of Henry’s body of work and suggested that Emma would somehow damage the legacy by selling it off piecemeal and not making the works available to museums. It said that the house, “designed by Wyatt, a piece of museum-quality art in itself,” should be a public space.
It concluded with a quote from an anonymous source: “We are investigating all avenues, including the possibility this will is a forgery.”
A forgery! This was absurd. Who would have forged it?Her?
She looked up to find Mrs. Fleishman beaming at her, as if Emma had just been profiled inTimemagazine as its Person of the Year.
“Yep,” she said, handing the newspaper back to her. “That’s me.”
Bea tossed and turned in the darkness of her old friend’s bedroom.
The silence of the house on that remote, waterfront road was absolute. She would have liked to hear the stir of New York City outside her window, a distant car honking, the pipes of her upstairs neighbor. Anything to root her in the present, to assure her that she was tethered to the earth. Henry was gone, but she was still there.
Focus on the art.It had been the guiding principle of her entire adult life.
The thing that nagged at her most was the shift in style. Why the line drawings? The portraiture? She stared at the ceiling, growing increasingly certain that she was onto something, that if she could figure out the meaning of the last stage of Henry’s artistic career, she could decipher the mystery of his inexplicable will.
