“In art history?” He shook his head. “Dismal. Which was discouraging because financial security is important to her. She said her mother struggled to make ends meet as a single parent. Even though it was only for a few years, poverty and abuse leave a mark on a child.”
“Did she mention abuse?”
“She didn’t go into detail, but she said there was violence in her mother’s earlier relationship. It’s probably why Amy chose the topic she did for her thesis.” He shuffled through the stack of papers on his desk. “I have it here somewhere. When you called to say this meeting was about Amy, I thought you might want to see it.” He pulled out a folio and slid it to Jane.
“Amy wrote this?” said Jane.
“It’s the first draft of her thesis about the artist Artemisia Gentileschi. She was a female painter of the baroque era. The paper still needs work because Amy failed to address an important issue in Artemisia’s life, probably because she found it too uncomfortable to write about. But what she has written so far is very good.”
“What could be uncomfortable about art history?”
“Let me pull up an image, to help illustrate the point.” He typed on his laptop, then turned the screen toward them. “This is a painting by Artemisia. It hangs in the Uffizi Gallery in Florence. Many people find it disturbing.”
With good reason. Jane frowned at the grotesque image of two grim-faced women pinning a terrified man to a bed as one of them brutally sliced his throat with a sword. Every detail, from the blood spurting from his neck to the folds of the dying man’s sumptuous robe, had been rendered with shockingly exquisite accuracy.
“This is Judith Beheading Holofernes,” said Harthoorn.
“That’s not something I’d want on my wall,” said Jane.
“And yet, look at the detail, the power. The cold rage on Judith’s face! This is a portrait of female vengeance. It was a personal theme in Artemisia’s life.”
“Why?”
“As a young woman, Artemisia was raped by her teacher. In this painting you can see her fury, feel her satisfaction in delivering her own brand of justice. It glorifies violence, but it’s violence in the name of justice. That’s why so many of my female students are fascinated by Artemisia. She gives life to female fantasies of punishing the men who abused them. It’s power to the powerless.” He closed the laptop and looked at Jane, as if she in particular understood what he was talking about. “You can see why the subject appealed to Amy.”
“Power to the powerless.”
“A universal theme. Victims fighting back and winning.”
“You think Amy saw herself as a victim?”
“She told me one of the reasons Artemisia’s work fascinated her was because of the abuse her mother suffered from that previous partner. I gather this happened years ago, but these sorts of traumas echo through the rest of your life. And now, if she’s being stalked—” He paused, a thought suddenly occurring to him. “That hit-and-run accident in March. Does it have something to do with her stalker?”
“We don’t know.”
“Because if it wasn’t an accident…” He looked at Jane. “Then this man is trying to kill her.”
Something is happening across the street.
As much as I try not to be nosy, despite the warnings from my daughter and the Revere Police Department, I simply can’t ignore what’s in plain view from my living room window: That white van is back again. The van that’s been hanging around my neighborhood for no apparent reason. This time it’s parked a little way down the street, almost directly in front of the Leopolds’。 Yesterday afternoon I saw it cruise down the street, moving slowly enough that I caught a glimpse of the driver, a man with short hair, his head turned toward the Greens’ house.
Now here it is parked at the curb, facing in my direction.
I don’t know when it arrived. I didn’t see it at five p.m., when I glanced out the window, but now at eight-fifteen it’s sitting at the curb, the engine and lights turned off. A parked vehicle isn’t necessarily alarming, but when the driver’s just sitting there, something is not right. It’s too dark to see the driver’s face; from this distance he’s just a silhouette in the windshield.
I call the Leopolds. Lorelei picks up.
“The van’s parked outside your house,” I tell her.
“The van?”
“You know, the white one that keeps showing up in the neighborhood. Don’t draw his attention! Turn off your lights before you look out the window.”