Page 128 of A Better Man

Homer shook his head. “No. Never. But if I stay with you, I’ll hurt you in other ways. When I kill Tracey, they’ll blame you.”

“And what’s this?”

Dominica Oddly went to lift the corner of the canvas, but Clara stopped her.

“Something I’m working on.”

“A portrait?”

“Sort of.”

Clara’s uninvited guest raised her brows in a way that would be comical, cartoonish, if it weren’t so terrifying.

Ruth Zardo had somehow managed to convince the art critic for the online journal Odd to come from Brooklyn to Québec. To come into the countryside, to Three Pines. To come into Clara’s home. Where Clara, against every instinct, had invited her into her studio.

Seemed courtesy beat good sense. Almost to death.

“Come,” Dominica Oddly said after an all-too-cursory glance around.

She indicated the shabby sofa against the wall of Clara’s studio. They sat side by side, the young woman turning her lithe body to Clara.

She was dressed in sort of harem pants, with combat boots and a T-shirt that read YES, HE’S A RACIST.

Clara doubted she’d passed thirty. Her hair was in long dreadlocks. Her face was unlined and unblemished. No piercings and, from what Clara could see, no tattoos. She didn’t need those to prove she was cool. She just was. So cool that Clara felt goose bumps rise on her forearms.

To say Dominica Oddly was a rainmaker was to vastly underestimate her power. Clara knew that the woman sitting next to her didn’t just make rain, she made the whole goddamned environment. She could cause the sun to shine on your career. Or a tsunami to sweep your life’s work away.

She had an eye for the avant-garde, an ear for undercurrents, and, perhaps above all else, a savant’s gift for social media.

Oddly had understood early that those platforms were the new “high ground.” The place from which attacks could be launched. Territory could be captured. Where hearts were influenced and opinions made.

Her online journal, Odd, had millions of subscribers while still managing to position itself as underground, even subversive. Dominica Oddly was like some hipster oligarch.

Clara subscribed to Odd, and every morning over coffee she read Dominica’s daily column.

Oddly’s pithy, articulate, often cruel, always elegant prose both amused and appalled Clara, as the critic stripped away the artifice in the art world. Ruthlessly.

All truth with malice in it.

But, despite Clara’s rise, Dominica Oddly had never reviewed her works. As far as Clara knew, Oddly had no idea she existed. She’d never met the woman and certainly had never seen her at one of her shows.

Every artist, every gallery owner, every agent, every collector scanned the horizon for Dominica Oddly.

And here she was. In Clara’s studio. Amid half-finished canvases, empty yogurt containers. A banana peel lay flopped on the arm of the sofa. Clara shoved it off with her elbow, but not fast enough for the keen, and disconcertingly amused, eyes of the critic.

Ruth was right when she’d described this young woman as her white whale. The one she sought. The one she dreamed of landing.

But where Ahab was obsessed with vengeance, Clara was not. There was nothing to avenge. Clara really just wanted Oddly to notice her. To acknowledge her. Okay, and to love and laud her art.

Now that she had the critic’s attention, Clara began to see something else. The size of the creature, and what would happen if it turned on her.

But it was too late. The white whale was in her home. In her studio. On the sofa kneading Leo’s ears.

With her latest show taking so many hits, one from this woman would be enough to sink Clara Morrow.

“Cake?” she asked, and saw Dominica Oddly smile. It was a nice smile. A nice face.

It was the sort of look that happened just before you’re eaten, Clara thought.