This past week we had an official launch party for Harmony House here in Atlanta at a wonderful independent book shop called The Book Bird. It was well attended by lots of engaged folks— friends, family, and fiction lovers all came out and I was truly moved by the overwhelming support.
I did a short reading and miraculously managed not to choke on all the * spicy * language I had somehow forgotten was in there. My children might have been a little embarrassed. My parents were proud. You can see some pictures from the event below.
The book is out in the world now and you can grab a copy anywhere you buy books. Order it from your local bookstore or grab it direct from my publisher, Tiny Worlds! If you’ve read it and enjoyed, please leave a review at Goodreads.
Daedalia is a serialized novel, with a new chapter released every Monday morning. The story is designed to unfold slowly, the days in between, a space for it to settle into your imagination. Each chapter is a 10–15 minute read/listen. Check out the Table of Contents if you want to jump to a specific chapter. Want something to binge while you wait? Three novels, complete with audio narration are ready for you to dive in.
Previously…
Kelly’s push to sell the community paintings triggered a brutal fight with Lefty over who owned her work and who got credit for it, which Marabelle overheard through her bedroom door. The show went up anyway at the family’s small gallery, drawing no critics and little money, all of which went to Maria’s family.
The white crescent of beach was barely visible in the small cove. If there hadn’t been a mostly full moon, Greta wouldn’t have been able to see it from the skiff as they made their way over the dark, rolling water.
She had no idea what body of water this was or what island they were approaching. It had been a surreal day, even by her standards.
“You’ll have to stay until Sunday night. I wasn’t kidding about that. I’ve got a boat full of people expecting a fun weekend. We can swing back and pick you up, but Sunday’s the earliest.”
That’s what her insufferable host had said a few minutes earlier as she was stepping off his yacht down into the skiff. She turned back to the open water and saw the lights of the massive vessel like a floating city, retreating. While she had astonishing reserves for suffering the wealthy and petulant to sell them expensive art, she was glad she didn’t have to spend the weekend with the aging tech bro.
As they neared the shore, a figure appeared with a flashlight and waved. A few minutes later, the man piloting the boat maneuvered them to shore, and she was instructed to “jump out” into the surf. At sixty, Greta was in good shape, but jumping from a rocking boat wasn’t on the menu of options. The figure with the flashlight, a man, waded into the water and helped her. With only a few words of introduction, he hefted her bag and helped her to the beach and then just kept walking toward the trees. She hurried to keep up, wringing the water from the hem of her cover-up as she went.
Greta was relieved to see there were some footlights along a path once they were in the trees. She asked him to wait while she put on her sandals, and then they were walking again. Eventually, the path ended at some wooden stairs that led to a boardwalk that led to more stairs, and so on for what felt like an hour. Finally, they came to what she assumed was the tech billionaire’s eco-friendly retreat. It kept a low profile, but the dim, indirect lighting behind the ten-foot panes of glass that fronted the place revealed an expansive lair.
They entered through a side entrance, the man punching in a security code to unlock the door. Greta hadn’t realized how loud the noise of the jungle and distant surf was until the door closed behind them.
“Mr. Gaines said you should make yourself at home,” the man said. “You’re the only guest this weekend, but I will be around if you need anything. I’ll show you where you’ll be sleeping.”
Greta had money, and she had spent enough time among the ultra-wealthy to understand the flex of allowing a virtual stranger to stay in one of your homes without you there. She had been maneuvering for the better part of a year to make it into Gaines’s inner circle. Her persistence had paid off, and after pulling the right combination of levers, she had gotten an audience with him. He had been collecting art for a decade and, like most collectors, was motivated by the obsession to possess what others could not. His appetite for impossible acquisitions meant he wasn’t troubled with the provenance of a piece, mostly because in art, unlike his business dealings, he didn’t expect a return on his investment. Greta had heard rumors for years about what might be in his collection, but she wasn’t interested in stolen Renoirs.
When she told him she had been instrumental in launching Daedalia’s career, he had sent the buzzing swarm of assistants and hangers-on who were always hovering around him away. She had his full attention for an hour, and then she was dismissed and hadn’t heard from him for a month. Then she got the call in the middle of the night and an invitation to join him on his private yacht in Miami. She wasn’t told where they were bound, but spent two days at sea among his entourage eating extravagantly, all of which was fine, but eventually she pressed him on wanting to see what she had come for. Soon was all he had said. Why hadn’t he come with her? This was truly a confusing turn. Surely he wasn’t immune to the thrill of showing off a collection the world could never know he possessed.
When they reached the room where she would be staying, the man set her bag inside the door and turned to her.
“I’ll need to take your phone, Ms. Krieger. Also, I’ll need to search your things to make sure you don’t have any other devices.”
She knew it would be pointless to protest. She was completely vulnerable here in the middle of nowhere, and this man was humorless. She handed over her phone and pulled the tablet from her bag. He thanked her but insisted on dumping the contents of the bag on the bed to look through it. He also insisted on checking the earrings and necklace she was wearing and groping around her torso, which she secretly found thrilling.
“Okay, you can do anything you like while you’re here. I’ll return your devices to you on Sunday when you leave. I can prepare most anything you’d like to eat, just ask. Otherwise, the kitchen is fully stocked. You’ll find a pool and spa out front off the deck.”
“Yes, yes. Do you have a name?”
“Sorry, I’m Roberto.”
“Roberto, I don’t really care about all these things. If I’d wanted a weekend getaway, I could have done that anywhere and with better company. Where’s the art?”
“You will get a chance to see it tomorrow. Tonight you should rest.”
That was all. End of discussion. After he left her, she cursed herself for not bringing a book or something to keep her mind busy. She had no idea what time it was, but she wasn’t tired. She pulled on a light sweater and went exploring. The house was gorgeous, modern, minimalist, and beautifully lit. There were some pieces hanging throughout the space, and they were impressive, but none of them was what she was looking for. But then, she hadn’t expected Gaines to just have them out for any of his swimsuit-clad sycophants to stumble upon. She enjoyed the titillating foreplay, but she was old and tired, and she’d been searching for a long time for the prize that was promised to be somewhere very close to her now.
I suspect she was lonely and probably tired of all the cloak-and-dagger. I don’t know. She would never have admitted such a thing to me, but it’s clear she loved my father even though it’s also clear that she was only ever a means to him. They had been a thing for a while– I suspect longer than Lefty ever acknowledged. I’ll never really know the extent of their relationship, but Greta was a ghost, always hovering at the periphery of our lives. In some ways my parents owed everything to her.
Early the next morning, she found Roberto in the kitchen making an espresso. She asked for a couple of hard-boiled eggs and some juice and then asked to see the collection immediately after. She took her breakfast on the upper veranda, a perch just above the canopy of trees that afforded a view of the turquoise water that surrounded this private island in the middle of nowhere. When Roberto returned for the dishes, she demanded he take her to see what she had come for. He nodded dispassionately, left the dishes, and told her to follow him. He led her through the house and stopped before a small painting by an artist she didn’t recognize. He pushed on the wall to the left of the frame, and the wall opened up onto a dark, narrow stairwell.
“You’ve got to be fucking kidding,” she said. “No iris scan? No trap door?”
“Mr. Gaines enjoys his security. There’s a light here.”
Roberto flicked a switch just inside the door and footlights illuminated the stairs. He stepped back and gestured for her to enter.
“You’re not coming?” she asked.
“Whatever you’re going to see is above my paygrade.”
“You’ve never been down here before? Seems like you’re probably alone here a lot.”
“Oh, I’m never alone,” he said, and pointed to a little red light winking in the corner above the stairwell. “I keep my job because I can keep a secret, and I get paid enough not to be curious.”
“You’re not going to lock me up in this dungeon, are you, Roberto?”
“No, ma’am. I’ll leave the door open. Knock yourself out.”
Greta descended the stairs and found herself at the end of a dark corridor, the walls trimmed with a strip of amber light that made her feel like she was queuing for a ride at Tomorrowland. As she made her way down the hallway, the light seemed to brighten slightly. From speakers hidden somewhere in the walls or ceiling, the ambient sounds of a city faded up — foot traffic, car horns, people talking. Gaines had really gone all out, and she couldn’t help but think of Lefty. At the end of the hallway, there were three steps down into what she assumed was the gallery, but it was pitch dark and she felt anxious. Though she couldn’t make out its dimensions, the room felt cavernous and cold. Before she could turn back, there was a subsonic rumble followed by a metallic thunk and a square panel on the back wall of the gallery lit up. She gasped and nearly slipped on the stairs. She took another step, the sound repeated, and another panel next to the first one lit up. How was it possible? She had trouble finding her breath. She took another step, triggering the third panel.
After a decade of searching, she had found them. Rather than rush to take them in, she discovered she couldn’t move. It felt like a desecration, a betrayal. But she had come this far. The parlor trick continued with each step she took to cover the fifty feet between her and the first panel, but she no longer flinched.
She had never made it to see them in the twenty-month run they had. She meant to, but it just hadn’t been a priority. Like millions of other people, she had figured the panels would always be there — a fixture of the city as sure as the Brooklyn Bridge. She had dozens of future visits to the city to see them. Then on a bright morning in September, half a million tons of concrete, steel, and glass and 2,753 souls fell from the sky and buried them deep.
How was it possible they survived?
Standing before Panel #1, she could see the damage. Whoever Gaines had hired to restore the pieces had done an expert job, but had understood the value in not trying to erase history. The thick lucite had preserved the pieces but was considerably scarred and chipped. The top right corner of Panel #1 was charred black, and a trio of deep cracks ran like veins of lightning through the center. None of this mattered. The determined vibrance of the painting shone through. It was achingly beautiful — delicate green shoots of spring in Central Park, the slant of golden light bent and refracted through skyscrapers and illuminated the maze of streets bustling with life. Greta’s chest tightened, and she clutched at her heart — a thing that would have brought her deep shame had she been in a gallery anywhere else in the world.
After a moment, she stepped back and then back again as she looked to the right to take them all in like windows on a passing subway car. Just as thousands of lonely commuters had in the days before the panels were buried, she stepped through the door that opened in the first panel and disappeared. She would wander through the liminal space, suspended in the world Daedalia had created, a journey from birth to death in twelve frames. Greta understood she was one of perhaps twenty people in the whole world who had witnessed the miracle of their resurrection. But more importantly, she was one of three people in the whole world who knew who the artist was.
She had dismissed Lefty’s plain wife after meeting her for the first time when their child was born. Later she had dismissed her as being just plain crazy and irresponsible when she had run off to New York and left her family. But Greta had seen her chance with my father during my mother’s self-imposed exile, and she had taken it. I suspect it was during this time that Greta first started entertaining the idea that my mother was Daedalia. There was simply no other explanation for the hold Kelly had on my father. The hideous barnyard animals painted on rusty watering cans were a good sleight of hand for the rest of the world, but Greta hadn’t bought it.
A few years later, long after she had stopped talking to Lefty, she returned to Santa Fe under the guise of a ski trip with friends. She stepped into our little family gallery with “Desert. Family. Home.” stenciled on the window out front. Peering into each piece, she found the evidence that she was looking for. My mother had stepped a little too far out into the light. None of the sheep grazing through the Santa Fe art scene noticed, but Greta had. Daedalia’s mark was there in every one of those garish, kindergarten-finger-painting canvases just as it was in each of these twelve panels rescued from the 9/11 wreckage.
As Greta sat on the single, austere couch centered in front of the panels, she felt a renewed sense of hope. Lefty hadn’t returned her calls in over two years. That would change.
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Did this chapter take you in? Leave a ❤️ below to help fellow travelers find it. Speaking of fellow travelers, a lot of friendships have started in the comments of my serials.
Ohmygod. Your imagination is so fun and wildly elaborate. That secret gallery slash tomb you painted is never going to leave me. Now I fantasize that when this novel is published, some Basquiat-esque painter joins your world tour and together you re-create some of these scenes for your readers to experience in all their sensory detail.
Ben, oh my goodness you worried me when you didn’t post at the usual time. But wow yes… What a chapter you’ve delivered… I love that these panels survived 9/11 - a phoenix from the ashes… literally, and how they have been secreted away in a personal gallery, I am not certain yet of how they survived or indeed if they were obtained in any honest way but I have a feeling the next chapter will be electric!!