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AT THE TIME of her disappearance at age fifty-four, Ula Frost was already a mystery. There were no records of her selling a painting in almost seven years, and she had never given an interview, attended a public showing of her work, or indicated to either the press or any of her clients where she lived. Social media sightings were rare and scattered across four continents. If she owned property, she did not own it under her name. The disappearance was reported to the police by her assistant, Gordon Priddy, who’d only ever communicated with Frost via mail and, once a week, a brief phone call. The mail was directed by Gordon to an address in London, which, upon investigation, turned out to be the terraced home of a man who’d died several years earlier and whose residence had been left unoccupied by his feuding children. The calls were placed through an internet phone service, and when the police attempted to trace their origins, they discovered the source had been obfuscated through IP redirection. Gordon, a middle-aged bachelor who’d found the job in the classified section of the local paper, told authorities that Ula had never missed a call in the twenty-two years he’d been working for her. But now he hadn’t heard from her in three weeks.
Gordon answered the police’s questions with a distracted but intense concern, though the shallowness of his information quickly frustrated the detective assigned to the case, a man named Jamie Marchand who’d spent two decades with the NYPD before moving to this sleepy Connecticut town—Frost’s hometown—where Gordon lived and filed his report. Marchand had been ready for a quieter, easier life, only to find himself responding to opioid overdoses, incidents of domestic violence, and not-infrequent hate crimes directed at the few people in town who looked like him. Occasionally, there was a call about a stray chicken someone found, and once, a llama. This spring, there’d been an uptick in calls about bear sightings, the bear lumbering through affluent residents’ backyards, unhurried in its exploration, sniffing the expertly landscaped hydrangeas, pausing to investigate a child’s play set, to take a turn on the swings.
Marchand had initially been energized by the possibility of doing some actual detective work for a change but found himself stymied at every turn in his investigation. There were few records of Frost’s existence in any of their databases. She’d never been arrested or married. Her sister and presumed sole surviving relative, Tilda Hogan, still lived in their childhood home, but every time Marchand called or stopped by the house, no one answered, except for three greyhounds who would gather at the window and look out at him with unnerving stillness. Gordon sat in Marchand’s office for hours, but his response to question after question was I don’t know. What Gordon did know, or was willing to reveal, was that Frost was extremely selective in accepting new commissions and had not done so for a long time. When Mar-chand asked Gordon why he thought that was, Gordon shrugged.
“There could be any number of reasons,” Gordon told him.
Gordon had gone to art school with his own ambitions but soon realized he had neither the vision nor the tolerance for criticism necessary to carve out a career for himself, and thus devoted himself to delivering to the world the work of other artists, which, in the case of Ula Frost’s work, he considered to be a sacred calling. His primary job was maintaining the small collection of the local historical society, which contained a few odd pieces by minor artists who’d passed through town at one time or another, as well as several early pieces by Frost. The historical society was housed in a former general store on Main Street that was built in 1778 and was the closest the town came to having a tourist attraction. Ula Frost, it turned out, had something of a cult following.
Marchand had heard her name, of course, and the stories about her work, but he found the reverence with which some people spoke of her silly and off-putting, and thus had never ventured to the historical society himself. Those who believed the stories believed with fervor. He kept watch for the out-of-state license plates when he drove through town, and locals knew to be careful on Main Street, where Frost tourists paid little attention to road signs and occasionally wandered into traffic. There was no common denominator among the believers in terms of age or class or race, but they all had a distracted quality about them, their faces glazed with daydreams. Frost’s work had that effect on people, rendering them oblivious to the real world around them, immersing them instead in worlds that existed, as far as Marchand was concerned, only in their imaginations.
Ula Frost had a cult following for a reason: her portraits—at least those painted in the last twenty-two years—were said to unlock alternate versions of their subjects from parallel universes, bringing them, somehow, into this world, the one that Marchand inhabited. Marchand wondered fleetingly about what alternate versions of himself might exist. A version of himself who’d never watched his own mother die, a version who never got shot while buying a Dr Pepper and a banana at a bodega that was being held up. A version of himself who’d studied harder, gotten better grades or advantages from life, and turned out to be someone completely different. Marchand had always liked building things as a kid. Maybe in a parallel universe there was an architect version of him, who lived in a house he’d designed himself, an A-frame, with those spindly white chairs he saw in magazines and fluffy white rugs. He could imagine that version of himself walking across those rugs, barefoot, holding a mug of hot chocolate, digging in his toes. It felt good, he thought. That rug felt good under his old feet.
The evidence surrounding the claims about Ula Frost’s work was ample, though easy enough to explain away. There were photographs of several clients, whose birth records indicated that theirs had been a single birth, with what appeared to be their own twins. Marchand wasn’t any good with computers, but he knew what Photoshop could do. The accounts of those who’d managed to purchase a Frost portrait, or rather those who were willing to talk about the experience, were more compelling, though not particularly heartening. The first client to go on record had spoken of it only once. He was a painter himself, an abstractionist named Victor Morgan, who claimed he’d met Frost at an exhibit for an obscure surrealist when they were in their early twenties, only to reconnect years later in a fishing town in France. The fishing town was known for an unusual number of drownings, a fact that had drawn them there, independently, at the same time. In his sole interview, with the fine arts magazine Ekphrasis, Morgan refused to answer questions about his relationship with Frost, or whether Frost had anticipated the outcome of the painting when she’d begun painting it. He wanted only for the public to know there was nothing in his life he would ever regret more. French authorities found a photo of the two together after Morgan’s death, both of them standing stone-faced in front of some unidentifiable ruin. Morgan’s body was discovered a few months after his interview, decomposing in his flat, the portrait slashed to shreds beside him.
Marchand made a few phone calls and learned there were pills involved, and there was no indication of any contact between Frost and Morgan after the portrait was completed. Marchand asked if the investigator on the case at the time had attempted to locate the alleged alternate version of Morgan after Morgan’s death. The woman on the other end of the line, who sounded very much like she was smirking, would only say that the case had been closed. The damaged portrait had eventually been released to a team of art historians whose extensive analysis of the work revealed nothing remarkable about the materials or technique. Marchand found a photo of the portrait online and spent too long looking at the gashes running through the canvas, as if the destruction itself were transmitting something of importance. There was an image now stuck in his head—irrational, nagging at him—an image of himself in a pressed suit, wearing the pair of wing tip shoes he admired in the window of a store he walked past every morning knowing full well he’d never be able to afford them.
Many of the other stories, which were widely and sensationally published, played out the same way—in terms of the clients’ regret, though never again, as far as Marchand could tell, in terms of the personal connection to Ula Frost. According to Gordon, after Victor Morgan’s death, Frost only entertained applications for commissions through the mail. Early on, it was rumored that she distrusted people who typed their letters, and Gordon confirmed that much of the mail he forwarded to the London address arrived in fine, handcrafted envelopes. Sometimes they were scented, sometimes they had wax seals. Sometimes the paper was homemade, imprecisely folded, with dried flowers or leaves or—once—a lock of hair embedded in the pulp. Gordon had been instructed never to open the envelopes he forwarded, and though a number had been seized by the post office under suspicion of containing hazardous or illegal materials, he did not disobey Frost’s orders. The letters came from all over the world, and Ula Frost had received thousands of them a year, for years on end.
Gordon’s role in the operation seemed to Marchand to be deliberately limited, as if the support he provided was secondary to his function as a touchstone who was able to verify Frost’s continued existence. He forwarded the letters, attended to administrative tasks, and, crucially, once a week, he spoke with Ula Frost on the phone. In the years when his work also included screening potential clients, Frost had rarely responded to Gordon’s reports with more than a hmm. It had been seven years since Frost had assigned this kind of task, though, and as a result, most of their calls since had been brief.
Marchand asked Gordon if he’d ever requested a portrait of himself.
“I wrote a letter once,” Gordon said. “I didn’t tell her I was sending it. I just stuck it in with the others.”
“And what did she say?” Marchand asked. Marchand was chewing on licorice strings, and one fell out the side of his mouth like a tusk. Licorice strings were his thing.
“She never said anything about it,” Gordon answered. “I don’t know if she even read it or realized it was me.”
“You didn’t ask her?” Marchand said.
“No, of course not,” Gordon told him. “I would’ve been mortified.”
* * *
DESPITE THE ANGUISH on Gordon’s part, which Marchand felt confident was genuine, he declined to provide Marchand with any of the records he’d kept on Frost’s behalf, claiming that would be a violation of her trust. And because there was no evidence that a crime had actually been committed, nor was there even a clear indication of where Frost had been living prior to her disappearance, Marchand could file a missing person report and enter Frost into the Interpol database, but he could not compel Gordon to provide access to any documentation. Gordon returned home to his antique colonial and waited what he thought was a safe interval of time before slipping out to the studio he kept in the back.
The building at the rear of his property had been added in the early 1900s as a workshop, and though Gordon’s research failed to uncover what kind of work the original owner had done in it, the studio still smelled faintly like a lit match. Gordon had transformed the space into a kind of tribute to Ula Frost and filled it with prints of her lesser-known work, often acquired through sketchy art dealers on the internet. Sometimes he painted there himself, though he would never presume to compare his impressionistic experiments to anything approaching Frost’s brilliance. Her style was difficult to describe—she lacked the pained surrealism of Frida Kahlo, though critics often noted that, like Kahlo, Frost seemed to give physical space to suffering in her work. Her paintings were by no means as overtly feminine as Georgia O’Keeffe’s, though they had a way of making the viewer feel like a voyeur. Gordon had been known to involuntarily blush in the presence of Frost’s work, even pieces he’d seen many times. She had a fondness for texture, the paint improbably thick on the canvas, and there was a sensation upon looking at them that the paintings reflected and absorbed more than light.
When Gordon had visitors, he kept them clear of his studio.
Gordon had a secret.
Gordon couldn’t quite say how it had happened, but one afternoon twelve years prior, he’d stolen a Frost original from the historical society. It was an early painting, juvenilia, donated to the historical society by the local high school, which Frost had attended for three years before dropping out, after they found it swathed in cobwebs in the corner of a humid storage room during a renovation. She’d left it there, along with the contents of her locker—a hairbrush and a pair of sneakers, a backpack of neglected textbooks—most of which had been trashed or repurposed after she and her parents had failed to claim them. The painting was a simple landscape depicting a vernal pond by the field near the edge of town. Gordon had recognized the spot immediately—he’d taken a woman there once on a date, lugging a picnic basket full of charcuterie and cheeses, a loaf of crusty bread, and a chilled bottle of rosé. They’d walked to the center of the field and, as if by magic, fireflies blinked into being around them. Gordon had shaken out the blanket he’d brought, but the woman had touched his arm and pointed to the piles of goose droppings that dotted the field and said, “Maybe we have different ideas about romance.”
It was always like that with Gordon. Sometimes he imagined a version of his life where these things didn’t constantly happen to him, where this woman, the registrar at a museum of the history of whaling in New England, had instead grabbed him by the face and kissed him, and they’d slow-danced to imaginary music with the fireflies all around them, and then she’d grabbed him by the face and kissed him again, more tenderly this time, and they’d fallen to the ground, unsullied by goose shit, forgetting about the blanket, laughing. Somewhere, Gordon thought, that version of him existed.
Copyright © 2022 by Aimee Pokwatka
