“Art’s only worth what someone will pay for it, unless it’s made of glitter paint and your kid did it in pre-school – then it’s priceless. So either it’s worth money, or someone thinks it’s made of glitter. Tell us who the artist is, so we have a place to start,” Dan said. It was a remarkably astute observation.
Markham studied Dan through narrowed eyes and didn’t look at me at all. Finally he gave a quick shake of his head. “No, she doesn’t matter. It was a long time ago, and if the painting’s gone, it’s gone. Now, get out of my office. You’re fired.”
Dan’s eyes hardened, but he kept his expression neutral as he nodded once. “Right.”
He looked at me and then quickly around the room, as though directing my eyes to all the things I’d already taken in - cameras aimed at all the art, and the faint red glow of the motion sensors in the doorways. The office art was better protected than the painting in the safe room had been, and I said as much to Dan when we were finally outside the building.
“He let the painting go too easily,” Dan said. It wasn’t an answer, but I’d felt the same.
“First the son pitches a fit to me about no police and threatens me with the wrath of dad, and then when we want to know more about the artist, we get told to leave it alone and mind our own business.” I pulled my phone out to call for a ride and noticed a text from Shane. It was the names and address of Anna’s parents in Rockport, MA.
Dan looked up at the building which housed Gray’s office, a thoughtful expression on a face more suited to menacing glares. “He’s hiding something big, and he’s an asshole.”
I thought about the break-in at the Gray mansion, and the woman who was likely a thief waiting for me at the Gardner Museum. She’d lied and then disappeared when her lie was discovered. She was embroiled in a mysteriously hidden Manet, and she continued to lie by omission about how she’d found it. I had enough proof from her own lips to go to the police, but not enough to get a conviction on the theft of a painting Gray hadn’t insured and didn’t want the police to know about.
“There are mysteries here – a couple of them. About Gray, about the woman who may or may not have stolen his painting, about the painting itself, and even about a thirty-year-old art heist that may have nothing to do with anything, but is damned compelling,” I said to Dan, who raised an eyebrow but said nothing. “I have a couple of sick days accrued. I’d like to stay in Boston to look into some things here, if you don’t mind.”
Dan considered me for a moment. “You said the kid threatened you with Gray’s wrath if the painting wasn’t found, yeah?”
I nodded. “He implied that the senior Gray had connections in the Chicago press with which he wouldn’t hesitate to smear Cipher.”
He grunted and scowled in response. “I’m not taking your sick days. Sometimes you muzzle the fuckers with the law, and sometimes you muzzle ‘em with the truth.” His gaze found mine again, and his smile had an edge to it as she shrugged. “He fired us. As far as I’m concerned, anything you find is a muzzle.”
25
Anna
“Are you criminally-minded just because you can plan the crime?”
Darius Masoud
Crystal was a delight. I spent the hour that Darius was gone trailing her around the museum as we whispered stories to each other about the art. Her imagination was enough like mine that we had a shorthand for our theories about why Isabella had hung certain pieces together, or what the placement of the different columns could mean.
She showed me her favorite corners, where she could stand and see into three completely different spaces, and I invented stories about the patrons who came through the rooms where she was supposed to be working.
“There are only really ten people in the world,” I said under my breath as I practiced staying out of the line of sight of the cameras in the room, even though Darius had said they weren’t manned. It was a habit – a game that I’d always played with myself. Spot the cameras, then avoid them, just because it’s what Honor would do.
“Okay,” she said, nodding to a patron who stood admiring the portrait of a beautiful redheaded woman who hung high on a wall of the Blue Room, “who’s that?”
The patron was a handsome middle-aged man, and his gaze up at the painting was thoughtful as he stood for several minutes, utterly still.
“King Arthur, the Clive Owen version from the movie. He accidentally stepped through a time travel portal in the Tapestry Room and has been wandering around the museum trying not to freak out, until he came in here and saw the portrait of Guinevere. And now he wonders if he’ll ever hold her in his arms again or if he’ll be stuck in this awful time for the rest of his life.”
Crystal tilted her head as she watched him for another moment before he finally moved on to Madame Auguste. “I can see that. And now he’s making sure that the witch he imprisoned in the painting will stay locked in there.”
I grinned at Crystal. “The subjects of the paintings walk the halls at night, don’t they?”
“Totally,” she said with utter conviction. “I would never want to work as a night guard, especially because—” she dropped her voice and looked around nervously, “because of the heist. I’m pretty sure the place is haunted now.”
“You think?”
“Sure. I mean the guy in Chez Tortoni,” she nodded toward the small empty frame that hung beneath Madame Auguste, “he flew out of the room without leaving a motion detector footprint behind.”
“But the thief left his frame on the museum director’s chair, right? That’s kind of a big F-you to the establishment and is a little more rebellious than your average ghost.” I said.
“Know a lot of ghosts, do you?” A voice came from behind me. His voice. Just hearing it brought back the sensory memory of his hands on me, his mouth kissing down my body. I shivered with it and met his eyes.
“Apparently, I do.”
He had an odd expression on his face as he looked at me, and I felt unequipped to decipher it. Then he turned to Crystal with a smile. “I hope we didn’t get you into trouble yesterday.”
She smiled in return. “It’s fine. They just don’t like us to dwell on the heist, even though it’s the thing that keeps the tourists coming in. Everyone wants to solve it, you know?”
Darius met my eyes for a brief, conspiratorial moment that I felt all the way down to my toes. “I admit to a degree of fascination with solving mysteries myself.” I tried to ignore the stress his words inspired as he chatted with Crystal for a few more minutes. I impulsively hugged Crystal goodbye, then headed to the door.
I stopped in the doorway and looked down at the motion sensor just inside the frame. “Do you think this was the type of sensor they used thirty years ago?” I asked Darius.
He studied it. “If not this, then something similar.”
“But the placement is right?” It was about set about seven inches above the floor.
“The sensor is aimed into the room. At that height, the average person wouldn’t be able to jump over it and land outside the sensor’s reach, so yes, it is adequately placed for the job.”
I stepped back and looked at the door from outside of the room. “Look at that,” I said, pointing to a decorative metal piece set above the door frame with a ring attached. I jumped up and grabbed it, ignoring Darius’s stunned expression when I hung from it for a moment before dropping back to the floor. “I’d run a rope through that ring, get a running jump, and swing into the room over the sensor. It would be tougher to come back across carrying a painting, but Chez Tortoni was small, so maybe the thief tucked it under his shirt.” I shrugged, then started down the hall toward the museum entrance and bag check.
When I realized Darius wasn’t next to me I stopped and turned to face him. “What?”
He was looking at me in a way I couldn’t interpret. Finally he shrugged and joined me. “Nothing,” he said.
I was silent for a while as we walked in the cool Boston afternoon to my crappy renta
l car. “How was your meeting?” I finally asked.
“It was … surprising,” he said in a voice that told me it was all I was going to get.
I took a breath and bit back the snarl that threatened.
I had spent the night before in a hotel room as crappy as my car, definitely not sleeping because I alternated between the sweats (from stress) and heat (from thoughts of him). I had used up my quota of cheerfulness playing imagination games with Crystal, which had allowed me to spend more time in close proximity to Madame Auguste, but hadn’t otherwise netted me new information. So I was tired.
“Feed me tacos, and I’ll tell you a story,” I said, in a bid to push tired and annoyed back into the closet.
I apparently surprised him, because it took him a minute to respond. “Have you ever had Iranian food?”
A little grumpiness fell off me and wriggled into the cracks in the sidewalk. “No. What is it?”
“Kebabs, stews, rice and vegetables. I don’t know if you remember your seventh grade social studies lessons, but Iran was the original bread basket of the world.”
“There are parkour schools in Iran just for women,” I said. “And Iranians used to be able to vote at fifteen.”
He smiled. “I actually knew that. Come,” he turned down a different street, “I scouted a restaurant today that looks like it has good food. And maybe while we’re eating, I’ll tell you a story too.”
26
Darius
“Fairy tales are more than true: not because they tell us that dragons exist, but because they tell us that dragons can be beaten.”
Neil Gaiman
She ate with her fingers, talked with her hands, and she laughed with her whole body.
I had been raised in a household with five-piece settings for every meal by a mother who forbade elbows and open mouths and conversation while chewing. My mother had perfect posture, perfect manners, and perfect etiquette, and she made very sure her sons did too.
The woman who sat across the table from me moaned in appreciation for the piece of grilled lamb she had just popped in her mouth with her fingers. She was so wrapped up in the eating and talking that she didn’t notice that I hadn’t been able to take my eyes off her lips.
“I’ve never met Markham Gray,” she said, after licking her thumb clean. I shifted uncomfortably, but she didn’t notice. “Colette knows Sterling, of course, because her ex was his architect.”
“So that was all true?” I asked in surprise.
She shot me an eye-roll. “Of course. There’s no way I could’ve scored an invitation to the Gray mansion. I’d never met the guy or his dad. I have to say, from everything I’ve read about the guy, Markham sounds like a jerk.”
“He is. I’d never dealt with him face to face before today, but his reputation isn’t helped by proximity.”
She giggled and bit into an olive. “You speak like an English school boy.” I raised an eyebrow, and she added, “The English are the best at making an insult seem like a compliment, otherwise known as baffling them with b.s. I bet you’re good at it.”
I smirked. “My mother said I should have been a lawyer.”
She sipped her wine and added another lamb kebab to her plate. “A good lawyer knows the law, a great lawyer knows the judge.”
“Exactly why I didn’t go into law,” I said, still struggling not to be distracted every time she licked her fingers.
“Did you ever want to be a journalist like your parents?” Her question caught me off guard. I’d been prepared for a discussion about Gray and his painting, not anything personal about me.
I thought about it for a moment as she watched me. “Investigation has always appealed to me, but I’ve never felt that I connect well enough with people to be good at anything that requires getting someone to open up to me.”
“I think it wouldn’t be hard for you to get people to trust you. You have principles – people like that. It’s pretty rare to meet someone who knows what he stands for, and I think people would respond to it.” She spoke the words as though they were obvious, as though everyone knew that what she said was true. It was a degree of certainty I’d never had about myself.
“Sometimes,” I sighed, “I feel like my principles are all on paper.”
She frowned as she considered me over the piece of pita that she was tearing into bite-sized pieces and dipping into toum, the Lebanese garlic sauce that came with the kebabs. I took a bit of my own food to distract myself from her mouth.
“You mean,” she finally said, still frowning, “that you think they’re a good idea, but you can’t back them up?”
“Something like that,” I said, surprised at the accuracy of her simple translation.
She thought for a moment. “I think belief is like that. You decide which ideas fit your world view, and you believe them.” Then she shrugged. “Who’s to say your principles are any more or less valid than the idea of the Ten Commandments or the Four Noble Truths? The point is that you believe them. If they work for you, and nobody else gets hurt because of them, that’s all the back-up you need.”
Her casual words felt solid and substantial in a way I hadn’t expected from this woman whose exuberance couldn’t be contained by something as corporeal as her skin. Her hair was evidence of that. It moved as though it was as alive as the rest of her – restlessly, relentlessly. I wanted to gather up the curls in my hand and then watch them slip through my fingers, just to see all the different paths they took to get free.
“What do you believe in?” I asked, completely aware of the potential minefield such a question presented.
She took a sip of wine and smiled.
“I actually made a list once, when I was sick and holed up in a hotel in New Delhi, contemplating the fact that my stomach seemed to rest on the bed outside my pelvis when I lay on my side. I think I was trying to decide if getting up for water was worth the effort, which was really just me figuring out whether anything was worth the effort of moving. I needed the list to remind me.”
She held up her fist and ticked her statements off on her fingers. “I believe in throwing your hat over the wall and then figuring out how to get it. In saying yes, in making time, and in learning as you go. I believe that fear and excitement produce the same physical symptoms, so why not decide something is exciting instead of scary, and I believe that travel is the best education money can buy.” She waggled the fingers of her open hand as if to make sure she had remembered everything, sat back in her seat, and only then did she take in the expression on my face. “You look surprised.”
I shook my head, then nodded. “I didn’t … I am.”
Her smile slipped a little, and it made me inexplicably sad to see. “You don’t agree. That’s okay. That’s the cool thing about believing in things; other people don’t have to believe for it to be true for me.”
“It’s not that. I just … wish I believed as you do. I want to trust that I’ll learn as I go, and to say yes even when I don’t know how it could be possible. In my experience … I just don’t.”
“I’m sorry,” she whispered, as though it actually were her fault.
I shook my head in wonder. “Where did you come from?”
She shrugged, and I could see confusion on her face. “From everywhere. Anywhere that would have me, really. I mean, I grew up in Rockport, but once I left home, I was gone. What about you? Where did you grow up?”
“Tehran. London. New York. Chicago.” My voice sounded flat to my own ears. Each city had had its own culture and rules and structure, and I’d had to learn each one like a language in order to navigate life there.
“That sounds so much more cosmopolitan and sophisticated than Rockport, Boulder, Nevada City, and Zion,” she said.
“And yet the view seems so much better from those places.”
She smiled a little dreamily. “They do have pretty great views. Have you ever been to Zion? The colors in those canyons are surreal – like the earth was formed in a giant taffy p
ull from all the colors of the sunset. The sandstone isn’t really great for climbing, but if you look for them, you can find just enough footholds to feel like you’ve fallen into a Willy Wonka candy world. Almost like you could lick the wall and taste lemon and orange and strawberry, except it would taste like fire and wind and the ripple of heat over the desert floor.”
I felt as though I should only ever travel with this woman from now on – that her view of the world was so fascinating and unique that listening to a tourist guide would be a pale fragment of the experience I’d have seeing the world with Anna Collins.
But then the sound of her full name in my head pulled me away from visions of multi-colored taffy walls and back to the land of the larcenous Collins sisters.
“You said you grew up in Rockport?” I said with what I hoped was casualness.
The fanciful look in her eyes faded. “I promised you a story, didn’t I?” Her tone was more statement than question, and I regretted that I’d caused the playfulness of her tone to disappear.
The waiter came to remove the plates, and I signaled him for the check. Anna noticed and pulled her wallet – a slim metal card case – from the back pocket of her jeans.
“You did,” I said, noticing the way her eyes had gone stormy gray in the dim light of the restaurant.
“Once upon a time there was a family with two daughters,” she began. She watched me as she spoke, but warily, as though she would run at any sudden movement. “One daughter grew up knowing she would become a princess, and her whole life was spent preparing for the job.”
“Princess is a job?” I asked with a smile, because I hadn’t been expecting a fairy tale.
“You’ve seen how hard Kate and Meghan work? And yeah, I know they’re both duchesses, not princesses, and I know Meghan isn’t doing the official gig anymore, but there are rules, and it’s a job,” she snapped back.
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