Most friends know better than to call me during work hours. Once I'm installed at my easel, colors mixed, music blasting, I pretty much lose contact with the outside world. That doesn't mean my phone isn't right there next to a jar of brushes where I can see every damn number that flashes across the screen. It just means I try and impose a discipline on myself that doesn't allow me to talk. Unless it's urgent, a matter of life or death.
Which is why, when my dentist's cell phone number popped up on the screen the other day, I took the call. The last time I'd had a personal call from her, it had been bad. I'd been sitting in an auction at Sotheby's. "Now, you don't have to worry," she'd bubbled in her eternally cheerful voice. "Everything's going to be perfect. But I just had a look at your X-rays and... when do you get back from New York?" She'd gone on to talk about silent infection, antibiotics, teeth that needed to be pulled. That was three years ago. The problem was a big scary expensive deal that took two years to fix. And so now when she called, I grabbed the phone. I'd just had X-rays the week before. "Is it bad?" I whispered, swallowing down a feeling of panic.
"Bad? No. This isn't about your teeth."
"Oh." Big relief.
"Though it could be bad," she trilled. "Quite bad actually. I had dinner with my psychic friend, Gharith, the other night and he said there's a body buried under an artist's studio in Austin. Someone that was murdered."
I knew her psychic friend, Gharith. He worked for the police on criminal cases -- murders, abductions, disappearances. He also worked for regular citizens on such ordinary matters as their love life, health and careers. He had a high record of accuracy. "Elizabeth," I said, with a hollow feeling at the pit of my stomach. "Why are you telling me this?"
"The studio he described sounded like yours, with trees all around it and a blue-trimmed door. I thought that was interesting. Kind of gave me the heebie jeebies."
"Did he say when this might have happened?" My studio had been built ten years earlier. To my knowledge there were no bodies buried under it.
"No. Only that the person in question was controversial. Some sort of doctor."
Well, that gave me pause. I did know someone -- a doctor -- who'd disappeared ten years ago, right around the time my studio was built. His name was Victor Goodlove (sounds like a porn star, right?) and I think he'd specialized in dermatology. There were all sorts of crazy rumors about him, including that he could remove pain just at the touch of his hand.