There had indeed been an investigation into her mother’s death, but Taured’s people had protected him, backing up the story that her mother was mentally ill and had overdosed on drugs, either accidentally or on purpose. There was no way to prove that she had been injected against her will. The community was asked why they hadn’t contacted anyone for help about Lorraine’s drug addition, and Taured had said that they hadn’t known; Lorraine had taken great pains to hide it from everyone. Her death had been ruled an accident, and Taured got away with it—all of it. The only thing he didn’t get was Rainy herself: the courts had ruled that she would stay with her grandparents. He’d never gotten her back. She knew how enraged that would make him.
She took classes slowly, while working forty hours a week at a sports bar, serving beer and burgers to the late-night crowd. Nothing fit quite like the feel of welding iron. At first, the idea of spitting fire at metal seemed like hot, heavy work. But despite her reservations, she’d loved it, and had taken more classes, choosing metal sculpture for her senior project, a depiction of inner self using an outer medium. She chose to make a full-body sculpture of herself as an old woman, using reclaimed metal. She wanted to show not who she was in her current state, but who she would be. It took her months just to find the pieces of metal she wanted to work with, scouring junkyards and old construction sites. She hoarded scrap metal for months, stacking it against the wall in her bedroom.
When it was finally time to start working, she sketched drawings of herself as she thought she’d be in fifty years. Nothing was working, and she couldn’t get it right until one day she realized that she needed to go deeper than skin. She stripped her sculpture of its topical flesh and started making a figure out of muscle. She hadn’t wanted to make something beautiful, as so many of her classmates had; rather, she wanted to make something so ugly it was a warning. At the end of a grueling ten months of work, Rainy submitted her piece: a five-foot-five statue of her seventy-year-old self, her back rigidly straight, but the muscles on her arms sagging low in hammocks of flesh as she gripped a walking stick that looked like a baseball bat.
Her senior project made it into the school’s yearly art show and a reporter was there to do a write-up. He’d interviewed her and asked to take a photo of her standing next to her work; when she’d refused to be in the photo, he’d taken one of her hand touching the hand of the sculpture instead. He called the piece A Millennial View of Self and put the photo of Rainy’s hand reaching for her sculptures alongside the article.
She never could pinpoint what it was about the piece that captured the art world so suddenly, and she didn’t have time to think on it. Suddenly, Rainy’s sculpture was on the front page of the art section in the Times and interview requests began to pour in. Her first commission after she graduated was for the public library and was put directly in the vast lobby with a plaque with her name on it. Caught Up in Books is what she called it: a ten-foot tornado of books hurtling in every direction. It was a whirlwind of fame and acclaim that could never be attached to her real name or her face. She’d never allowed a photo of herself to be taken, in case he were to see it. What would he do after all these years if he saw her photo in some magazine? But still, she lived in fear, walking in the shadows in case he noticed her. How angry it made her on some days that she had to live her life both without her mother and constantly looking over her shoulder. But she wasn’t angry enough to not be scared.
24
Now
Rainy stared out the window at the gaudy lights and the silent desert beyond. Beside her, on the seat, sat her phone.
I’m going to kill her. You’d better come if you want to save her, the text had read.
She looked up at the cabdriver. “If you could drop me off a couple blocks away, I’d appreciate it.” She looked down at her hands as they shook in her lap, the chipped red nail polish reminding her of her mother.
A brief nod from the driver and the car veered sideways. It was too early for the city to be beautiful; Vegas was a moon child, and under the sun’s microscope, she looked like costume jewelry. Hands pressed between her knees, she stared at the Bellum, the crawl of it toward the sky. A vertical tomb.
Go to the Bellum Hotel. Wear dark leggings and a yoga top, no bra. Tight clothes with no pockets. I don’t want to have to pat you down.
Her dread was feasting on her thoughts, a dark dive into all the ways this could go wrong. She’d bought the top on the strip: sleeveless, with a high neck. I don’t want to have to pat you down. He liked to toy with women, hurt them, but what he was doing wasn’t sexual, she was convinced of that. Rainy—Summer—knew the verbal cues of a sexual predator; the way interaction with them made you feel violated and probed without ever being touched. She’d always got that feeling from Taured; that’s why her gut told her this wasn’t him. Nothing about Paul gave her pervert vibes; no, he was creatively angry. She had a theory, and she’d checked the articles about Sara and Feena on her laptop from the hotel: neither of them had been sexually assaulted. He wasn’t a rapist, he was a murderer.