Read Online False Impressions by Laura Caldwell - Free Book Online Page A

(although everyone had been kind and still were, when she went home, infrequently, to visit). Mostly, her parents visited her so they could take in Chicago, so they could show relief that she’d ended up here, somewhat close to them, and not in New York.
    New York. Madeline had fled there when she was eighteen, deliriously happy to have been accepted to a city college. In Manhattan, she’d found herself immersed in the melting pot of everything that was the city. She’d stumbled into the art world by mistake, then dove into that world with fierce determination and ambition. She did well. But not as well as she wanted. It was so very tough to make it in the New York art scene.
    That was when she got her inheritance—from a trust fund in Japan. Or at least “trust fund” was what she understood. Her parents had hired an attorney, who learned that the gift had been made by one of her birth parents or a family member, and that they wanted to remain anonymous.
    Her adoptive parents were great about it. They had asked if she wanted help managing the trust—it was a lot of money. But they also wanted to know how it made her feel, this gesture coming from Japan, from her biological family. They worried that she would be emotionally wounded somehow.
    But the inheritance had beguiled her with the opposite effect—she felt comforted; she felt taken care of. She had never really felt Japanese, but the gift helped tremendously.
    Of course, there had been many legal hurdles to go through. Her attorneys had explained this was not uncommon with an inheritance that size. But after everything was settled, even with monstrous legal bills, she had more money than she would ever need.
    Enough so that, soon after, when she heard from a friend that Chicago was a different kind of art city and in some ways much friendlier and more open-hearted, she knew it was time to leave New York. To spread her wings, with the lift that was now beneath her, both financially and emotionally.
    And now, decades later, here she was with these other Japanese women from Chicago, all of them leaning in over another kind of stewing pot. A real one—a vat full of what would soon be indigo. The vat sometimes reminded Madeline of a witches’ cauldron, steam billowing from the top.
    “It’s only supposed to take half an hour,” one woman said. It was Amaya, the woman she’d seen outside the club with Isabel.
    Amaya had joined the group at the same time as Madeline. She even bought two sculptures from Madeline after she learned of the gallery. But Amaya tended toward pessimism, and although Madeline wasn’t particularly superstitious, the weaving process was so organic, so filled with spirit that she irrationally feared that Amaya’s bad attitude could sour the process.
    Weaving was Madeline’s one consistent connection to her Japanese heritage. Evenings such as these, the process of dyeing and weaving, were how she escaped. And after the email, she needed escape.
    This was the moment in the dyeing process that she liked the most—when the contents of the pot turned into something different entirely and then from their depths something floated to the surface and then…
    “It’ll come,” Madeline said to Amaya. It has to come, she thought.
    “Maybe not,” Amaya said. She spoke in a soft, sing-song voice and looked right at Madeline. The words sounded like a taunt.
    Madeline glared at her. As she’d told Isabel, she and Amaya seemed to have struck up some kind of unspoken dislike for one another.
    After last week’s group, Madeline had looked up the name Amaya, and found that it meant “night rain,” which seemed just about right. Amaya’s personality tended toward dark and inky.
    “There it is!” one of the woman said excitedly, pointing.
    They all peered closer as a copper-green film rose to the surface, slowly, as if it were stalking them.
    The thought of that—stalking—made Madeline shiver. Her art, for one, was being stalked. Somehow,