The Trouble With Tulip

by Mindy Starns Clark

  She started in Edna’s guest bedroom/sewing room, systematically going through every drawer, shelf, and closet to throw away, box up, give away, or set aside for a yard sale every single item she came across. Today she had thought to bring along tiny stickers and a pen, and she priced the yard sale items as she ran into them, placing them in a large box on the floor. She figured she could hold the sale either this Saturday or the next, depending on how soon she could get an appraiser to price out anything that might be of value.

  At nine fifteen she took a break and sat down with the phone book, going through antiques and appraisals until she found someone who was willing to come out the very next morning. They made the appointment, and then she called Marie’s real estate office to tell her she wanted to list a house for sale. Marie wasn’t in, so Jo left a message; she wanted to deliver the news in person. Finally, she called the newspaper and placed a description of Edna’s car, offering it at five hundred dollars above the price Sally Sugarman had suggested. This way there would be some room for negotiating and the buyer might feel he had really gotten a deal.

  When she was finished with the more practical phone calls, Jo turned her attention to the college, calling first the science department and then the art department. As it turned out, a professor in the art department could see her in about two hours. Her old chemistry professor wasn’t in, so she left a message.

  In the meantime, she ran a few quick errands, first to the hardware store to have a key made for Danny and then to the bank to deposit her check from Sally and to put the original photos and notebook into the safety deposit box. When she arrived back to Edna’s house, the next-door neighbors were in their yard, a woman playing in the leaves with two small children.

  Jo watched for a moment, remembering that this was the neighbor who had first spotted Edna’s dead body and called the police. She headed for the fence and gave a wave, wondering if she might be able to get any useful information from the woman.

  They chatted for a good while. Jo explained who she was and what she was doing. The lady was friendly, if a little nosy, saying that her name was Betty and that she had only just moved there in the past year. She had met Edna over the fence one day, much like this, and in talking she learned that Edna frequently swam at the Y.

  “I know an opportunity when I see one,” Betty said, glancing toward the kids as they began raking a pile back to its original height. “A good, consistent workout buddy was exactly what I needed. I decided to join the Y too so we could go together. The timing was perfect because my husband doesn’t head off to work until nine, so he could be here with the kids in the mornings while I would go work out.”

  Edna and Betty had started driving to the pool together each day, becoming more than acquaintances but not exactly good friends.

  “We would talk in the car, coming and going, of course,” she said. “But swimming isn’t exactly a social activity. Things remained polite but friendly. She wasn’t the nicest person in the world, and a bit of a pill as a neighbor—but I sure never expected to find her dead on the floor!”

  Jo nodded, shuddering at the image of Edna in her tomato-juice-filled shower cap.

  “She wasn’t very neighborly?”

  Betty rolled her eyes.

  “Well, like this,” she said, gesturing toward her children, who were laughing and screaming as they played. “The noise of my children drove her crazy. But they’re just running in the yard, just being kids.”

  Jo nodded, thinking of poor Sally, Edna’s daughter, wondering how it must have felt to be the child of a woman who didn’t like the sounds of children. No wonder Sally was bitter.

  “Did you hear an argument last Friday night, the night Edna died?”

  “The police asked me that too. I told them that with the window unit air conditioner, we don’t hear a thing at night.”

  “Did Edna have many friends?” Jo asked, hoping to hear news of a silver-haired man.

  “A few,” Betty replied. “Simon was at her house a lot, of course, and the ladies from her club dropped in from time to time.”

  Jo tried not to react too enthusiastically.

  “Simon?”

  “An older gentleman. You don’t know him?”

  “Sort of sixtyish?” Jo asked. “With silver hair and a mustache?”

  “Yeah, that’s him. I don’t know if he was her boyfriend or a relative or what. I never saw them holding hands or anything, but they sure spent a lot of time together. She was pretty vague about it when I asked her. I was surprised he didn’t come to the funeral.”

  Jo’s heart leaped. More than likely she now had a name for the man in the photos—and that name was Simon, the same name the women at the funeral had been whispering about.

  “What about this club of hers?” Jo asked, thinking of Mrs. Chutney and Mrs. Parker. “They played Bunco or something?”

  “Bunco?” Betty replied, laughing. “Not that I know of. According to Edna, it was a women’s investment club. Simon was helping them make some wise choices.”

  Jo blinked, her mind reeling.

  “Were they earning a good return?” Jo asked.

  Betty glanced at her kids and lowered her voice.

  “Rumor has it,” she said, “that this guy Simon has the Midas touch. Apparently, everything with him turns to gold, if you know what I mean.”

  Jo nodded, wishing Danny were in on this conversation.

  “If we weren’t living paycheck to paycheck,” Betty continued, “I think I would have invested with them myself.”

  “So where does this Simon fellow live?” Jo asked.

  “I don’t know,” Betty replied. “Being new to the area, I’m not familiar with the whole town. But I don’t think Edna ever said.”

  “How about his car?” Jo asked, hoping she didn’t sound too persistent. “What kind of car does he drive?”

  Betty excused herself to pick up her daughter, who had fallen short of the leaf pile and banged her knee. By the time she had comforted her and returned to the fence, Jo’s mind was filled with even more questions.

  “What kind of car?” Betty asked, considering. “I don’t think he had one, from what I saw. Edna usually drove him around.”

  “He’s got the Midas touch but doesn’t own a car?” Jo asked.

  Betty shrugged.

  “Sometimes older folks don’t like to drive.”

  “But he was only in his sixties. That’s not old.”

  “Mom!” the boy yelled, in a tussle with his sister over the rake.

  “I don’t know,” Betty said, hurrying over to settle the fight. “I never saw him driving.”

  “Has he been around since she died?” Jo asked.

  Betty picked up her son and distracted him with a big pine cone.

  “Come to think of it,” she said, looking as if she was ready to head inside, “no. I haven’t seen Simon around for a couple days.”

  17

  Awesome wheels, dude!” Danny said, rolling the boy toward the standard blue background.

  When the mother and son arrived for their photo shoot, she confirmed that the child had cerebral palsy and that he would have to stay in the chair because of the straps that helped hold him upright. Danny had cleared away the table and props, glad to work with what he’d been presented. At least the wheelchair was cool looking, very state-of-the-art.

  “My…chair…is…new,” the boy said in a garbled voice. “I…can…pop…wheelies.”

  Danny laughed, glad to see a glint of mischief in the kid’s eyes. If he could capture that spark, they could get some excellent photos.

  “You’ll have to shoot him from the neck up,” the mother said. “Can we drape something directly behind him so the wheelchair doesn’t show?”

  Danny hesitated, surprised at her request. He’d had a handicapped friend in college, a paraplegic, and from what he’d learned in that relationship, a disabled person’s chair is often very much a part of who they are.

  Still, the customer’
s always right. He took out the fabric he usually draped under babies and covered the back of the chair with it, tucking it in behind the kid’s shoulders. He adjusted the lights and the camera and then snapped a few shots. Finally, he swung the TV screen toward the anxious mother.

  “How’s that?” he asked.

  She studied the image for a minute and then shook her head.

  “It still looks obvious that something’s there. Can you go in closer and just get his face?”

  Danny did as she asked, zooming in. He tried to get the kid to smile, but it wasn’t easy.

  “That’s better,” the mother said, looking at the screen. “You can’t see the stupid chair at all.”

  Danny tried to snap a few more pictures, but the spark was completely gone from the boy’s eyes now.

  Even though the mother was pleased with the pictures he was taking, Danny felt himself growing upset. Finally, he called Tiffany into the room and asked if she would stay with the child for a minute.

  “There’s some paperwork I need for you to do down the hall,” he said to the mother. “Come with me, if you don’t mind.”

  Tiffany looked at him oddly as he led the woman out of the studio, closing the door behind them. He brought her out to the empty waiting area and waved his hand toward the couch. She sat, looking confused.

  “Ma’am,” he said, sitting across from her, “I don’t mean to be disrespectful, but I wonder if we could talk for a minute about your son.”

  “What about him?” she asked defensively.

  Danny offered a silent prayer for wisdom and then let out his breath.

  “I don’t pretend to know how hard it must be to raise a handicapped child, but I do know one thing. Whenever you try to hide that chair or call it ‘stupid,’ it’s like you’re insulting your son himself.”

  “What?”

  He took a deep breath and tried again, lowering his voice.

  “Am I correct in assuming he’s always been in a wheelchair—and probably always will be?”

  “Of course.”

  “Then that chair is an extension of who he is. It’s his legs. It’s his mobility. If I can be so bold, in a way it’s his whole world.”

  She was silent, her forehead wrinkled into a frown.

  “Please, ma’am, don’t try to hide that chair in these pictures. Why don’t you celebrate it? Why don’t we get some full-length shots, even? Why don’t we let your son know how good-looking he is in it? It’s not stupid to him. It’s like a part of his body. It’s his ticket to freedom.”

  Speech over, he sat back, hoping he wouldn’t take big heat for this conversation from his boss. All the woman had wanted was some simple shots to put in her Christmas cards. Instead, he had turned it into a federal issue.

  Still, the look on her face told him she was considering all he had said. After a moment, tears formed in her eyes.

  “No one ever said that to me before,” she told him, reaching up to wipe a tear that spilled onto her cheek. “But you’re right. That chair isn’t his enemy; it’s his friend.”

  “Exactly,” Danny replied. “So what’s more important? That you hide the chair in the photos or that you show your son you embrace it as much as you embrace him?”

  She nodded, a new determination on her face. Fortunately for him, she was the kind of person who was willing to learn and change. So many folks might have taken what he’d said and stormed out of there, furious.

  “Let’s go try again,” she said softly, reaching out a hand to him. “And thanks. You’ve really given me something to think about.”

  Jo had to go home and change into something nicer before heading over to the college. She made it to Lancaster Hall just a few minutes before her appointment, easily finding the office of Archibald Pike, the dean of Arts and Humanities.

  She tapped on the door and the man looked up, a bald fellow in his fifties with a warm manner and an easy smile. She introduced herself and thanked him for seeing her on such short notice.

  “Not a problem,” he said. “I had an appointment with a student at this hour, but she canceled just before you called.”

  “Well, I sure appreciate it. This shouldn’t take long.”

  She sat where he indicated, in a padded chair next to his desk. Reaching into a tote bag, she pulled out the print of the painting of the Nativity and held it out to him.

  “I’m trying to get some information about this print,” she said. “The artist, the date, the value—you know, just the standard stuff.”

  He took it from her and looked at it, nodding almost immediately.

  “That’s funny,” he said. “You’re not the first person to ask about this same picture recently.”

  “I’m not?”

  He shook his head.

  “No, in fact, I loaned out our slide of it to a colleague a few weeks ago because he wanted to study it.”

  “Who was that?” she asked.

  “Professor McMann, over in the history department,” he said. “Same thing. He described this picture in detail and asked what I knew about it. I let him go through the slides until he found the one he was looking for.”

  She didn’t reply but made a mental note to pay a little visit to Professor McMann.

  “Let me see if I can find the slide,” he told her, standing and going to the shelf. He pulled down a fat notebook, inside of which were pages of slides interspersed with pages of text. The man hummed to himself as he flipped through until he found what he was looking for.

  “Here it is,” he said, coming back to the desk. “The Nativity by John Singleton Copley.”

  “When was it painted?”

  “About 1776,” he replied. “Copley was a well-known portrait artist in the colonies in the seventeen hundreds. Just before the American Revolution, he moved to Europe, gave up portraiture for the most part, and began working on more historical subjects instead, like this one.”

  Jo nodded, scribbling notes in the little notebook she kept in her purse.

  “Do you know where the original of this painting is located?” she asked.

  He scanned the text and then nodded.

  “Says here it was acquired by the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston in 1972,” he said. “I have no idea of the value of the original, but certainly this print of yours has no great value beyond the nice frame. You could probably sell it for twenty or thirty dollars.”

  “How could I get a look at the original?”

  “Well, here’s the slide,” he said, pulling the small white square from its sleeve. “To see it in person, I suppose you’d have to go to Boston and look at it there, if they even have it in their active collection.”

  He handed her the slide and she held it up to the light, vaguely surprised to see the silver-haired man in the painting. Somehow, she had assumed he was painted in later by a forger. Then again, she thought as she handed the slide back, someone could have tampered with the slide as well.

  “If you want to see the museum’s collection,” he said, “you might go online to their database. You’d be surprised how many images have been uploaded there.”

  “Thank you, I will,” she said.

  She picked up the print and looked at it again.

  “May I ask you another question?” she said.

  “Of course.”

  “When an artist paints a picture like this, how do they decide to use these particular faces? Do these people just come out of their imagination, do they go by some historical record, or do they set up this scene with models and pose it out?”

  “More than likely the latter,” the professor said. “Chances are that these were simply local folks who had a biblical look to them or an interesting face. Copely would have brought them into his studio, one or two at the time, posed them in a way that would relate to the painting as a whole, and then worked on their part of the picture.”

  Jo nodded, looking into the eyes of the kindly professor.

  “So even though this painting depicts an event from two
thousand years ago,” she said, “you’re telling me that the faces in the picture were probably people who were alive two hundred years ago?”

  “More than likely, yes,” he said, smiling. “Just as our movies today might use actors to depict historical figures. It may be the man we know as Mel Gibson, but he’s playing the part of William Wallace in Braveheart. We may recognize Dame Judi Dench, but she’s posing as Queen Elizabeth in Shakespeare in Love.”

  He went on with several other examples, but she got the point: If the painting was genuine, then the man with the silver hair had been alive and serving as an artist’s model in 1776.

  Danny was exhausted but happy, thrilled with how the sitting with the handicapped boy had gone after talking with the mother. She really was a good woman, and once they went back into the room, her whole attitude had changed. Danny got a number of great shots of the kid grinning from his chair, the glint fully visible in his mischievous eyes. When Tiffany sat down to make her sales pitch, it wasn’t even necessary. The woman bought the deluxe package—and thanked Danny again for his honesty and wisdom as they were leaving.

  After the door closed behind them, Danny went back to the lab to give Jo a quick call on her cell phone. She sounded a little out of breath and said she was jogging from one side of the campus to the other, hoping to pop in on a history professor by the name of McMann. She had also heard from her chemistry professor, who told her to leave the photocopy of the notebook for him to go through later.

  “I’ve got lots to tell you,” Jo said. “But the most important thing is that I might have an ID on the silver-haired guy in the pictures from Edna’s next-door neighbor. According to her, a silver-haired man named Simon has been around a lot, and he was either a friend or boyfriend of Edna Pratt.”

  “I’ve got lots to tell you too,” Danny replied. “I was able to track down two of the original photos on the Internet, and in both cases, the man simply isn’t there. He was definitely added in later using trick photography.”

  “I thought so. Too bad things don’t seem quite as cut-and-dried with this painting.”

  “No?”