Free The Gallery by Barbara Steiner Page B

short as it was, as few years as they had lived. She wanted to love him forever.
    Pulling her legs up, she wrapped her arms around her knees, hugged herself into a small ball to contain her feelings. She realized she was imitating Johnny’s position in her painting of him, but where in the picture Johnny was filled with pain, she was filled with love, with passion, with such a deep emotion that it both thrilled and frightened her.
    She had to leave. Johnny couldn’t know this—how she was feeling about him. She had no idea if he would return the emotion. She had no idea how he felt about her. They were friends, buddies. They had been friends forever, bonding together in mutual misery, driven by art and music, the need to express themselves with paint and melodies, and in no other way.
    Crawling quietly, she moved toward the doorway. Could she leave without Johnny knowing? She didn’t want him to stop playing. She didn’t want to interrupt, intrude on this space he had entered. She had shared it. That was enough. And he had forgotten—for a short time. He was free of fear, of memory. He lived for this moment, and this moment only.
    Placing her hand on the doorknob, she twisted it slowly, pulled, stepped into the hall, pulled it closed behind her. Then for a few seconds she leaned against the wall, breathing deeply.
    Paint with your passion, your emotion . She heard Mr. Sable speak to her. Yes, she must go immediately to the basement art room. She must capture this emotion that filled her, threatened to spill over, to melt her whole body like candle wax. She must paint.
    She turned and fled down the hall to the stairs. Halfway there she froze, staring, at seeing a familiar figure.
    Her father leaned forward, his head pressing on the wall. He was crying.

ten
    â€œD AD, IS THAT you?” She knew it was. She just didn’t know what to say to him.
    Her dad looked at her through teary eyes. “Donnie?”
    He hadn’t called her that since she was little—four or five. It touched her deeply, mixing with the well of emotion already filling her from Johnny’s music, filling her, spilling out. She felt her own eyes water. She blinked to clear them.
    â€œDad, what’s wrong?” She touched his shoulder. She couldn’t remember the last time she had touched him.
    â€œShe was so beautiful—so beautiful. I was standing here remembering. She always spoke to me.”
    LaDonna stepped back. “Katherine?” For some reason, finding her father in the hall, this near the practice room where Katherine Taylor was murdered, didn’t feel good to her once he had spoken her name.
    â€œYes, she was so beautiful.”
    A ring of keys hung at her father’s belt. He would have access to any room in this building. Even a practice room that was locked. Locked without anyone in it. Locked from the inside by a student who was practicing. A student who didn’t feel secure up here alone at night in an unlocked room.
    â€œI was up here with Johnny.” LaDonna felt compelled to tell her father what she was doing in The Tower, but not to stay here talking to him for long. “He’s practicing the piano. And I’m going over to where I’m working to paint.”
    â€œWhere is that?”
    Had he forgotten? For some reason, LaDonna didn’t want her father to know exactly where she was. “In the art building.”
    For some reason? She knew why. Her father was scaring her. The suspicion that had flitted through her mind, unbidden, was there now. She felt guilty about it, but it had surfaced, mainly because she realized she didn’t know him really well. The idea of her father killing someone was absurd, but the idea had come to her. It would take some work on her part to make it go away.
    â€œI’ll see you later, unless you think you need to go home. Want me to drive you home, Dad?”
    â€œOh, no. I’ll be all right in a minute.”