Cover

Lesson in Red

ALSO BY MARIA HUMMEL

Still Lives

Motherland

House and Fire

Wilderness Run

Dedication

for Margaret Parmelee Hummel

There is a wonderful kidnapped hunted raped and betrayed girl

In fairy tales. She has a name, but the vowels and subjects

Around can’t be switched to fit.

She wants to escape but letters won’t let her.

She never thinks about darkness or dying because they’re natural

And don’t require thought.

She carries her darkness everywhere.

What is not natural

Is being here an utter stranger.

And flight being no metaphor.

—FANNY HOWE, from “The Definitions”

Cast of Characters

The Rocque Museum

Maggie Richter, copy editor

Yegina Nguyen, exhibitions manager

Janis Rocque, founder and chief donor

Hiro Isami, grant writer, Yegina’s boyfriend

Dee Rager, crew manager, Janis’s girlfriend

Lynne Feldman, chief curator

Phil and Spike Dingman, graphic designers, twins

Bas Tarrant, museum director

The Westing Gallery

Nelson de Wilde, gallerist

Hal Giroux, LAAC MFA director

Pearson Winters, former LAAC student

Layla Goetz-Middleton, LAAC student

Erik Reidl, LAAC student

Zania de Wilde, LAAC student, Nelson’s daughter

The Investigations

Brenae Brasil, LAAC student, deceased

Ray Hendricks, private investigator

Calvin Teicher, art history scholar, half brother of Ray, deceased

Alicia Ruiz, LAPD detective

Davi Brasil, musician, brother of Brenae

Nancy and Fernando Brasil, parents of Brenae

Jay Eastman, journalist, Maggie’s former boss

Nikki Bolio, Maggie and Jay’s informant, deceased

Art World

Steve Goetz, collector, father of Layla

Kim Lord, artist, deceased

James Compton, 1990s artist and organizer, deceased

Lesson in Red

1

SOON AFTER I MOVED TO Los Angeles to start a new life, I went to an anniversary screening of Dr. Zhivago in the dark, ornate theater where it had once premiered. Afterward, the art director took the stage to tell some stories about the filmmaking.

“Remember the scene on the moving train,” he said, “where the peasant woman runs and leaps into the speeding car? She’s wearing all that heavy wool, and she almost doesn’t make it up through the doors in time.”

That was because the actress had to do the jump twice, weeks apart. “The first time she tried, she slipped, and the train badly smashed her legs,” the art director said, nodding at the gasps in the audience. So the woman had to heal, and then hurl herself again. The second time, she succeeded. “Her sacrifice was a sign of everyone’s devotion to the movie,” he marveled. “She caught her train, and the scene was saved.”

Yet when they cut the film together, he added, they spliced in the footage from the first take, when the woman knows she won’t make it. You can watch the fear flash and deepen in her face. “You hear her scream,” he said. “The scream is real.”