I held up both hands in surrender. “Sorry, please continue.”
She sighed. “One sister was princess-in-training, so the other one became a thief.”
My eyebrows shot up, and her eyes narrowed, but she otherwise ignored me.
“The thief was named Honor, and she wasn’t really an actual thief, she just had mad thief skills. Everyone wanted to be friends with the princess, but a couple of the lesser-known villagers realized that the thief played the best games, and her hide-and-seek plans were always legendary. She was the best at capture-the-flag because she was ruthless and could anticipate every move the opposition would make. They called her a thief because she stole every game she played with the villagers, until finally even they wouldn’t play with her anymore.”
Anna paused to take a sip of water as I picked through her words looking for recognizable landmarks. Colette was the princess, obviously, which made Anna the thief, Honor. I might have smirked at the irony, but she wasn’t laughing.
“Eventually, Honor learned to play games that didn’t need playmates, and to use her thief’s brain to catch real thieves rather than become like them. She traveled the world playing solo games and catching thieves and pretending it was enough.”
She had her hands wrapped tightly around her wine glass and was swirling it gently to watch the red wine dance against the sides. Another man might have taken her hand to comfort the lonely girl she’d been. I wouldn’t have taken her hand, even if one had been free, because that would have meant letting go of something I couldn’t stop holding on to.
She exhaled and didn’t meet my eyes as she continued speaking. “One day, in a hiding spot only she could find, she found a letter addressed to her containing a request that only she could fulfill. It was a quest, noble and honorable, and a way for a thief to distinguish herself. A treasure was hidden in a dragon’s lair to keep its rightful owner captive. If Honor could take the treasure from the dragon, the captive could go free. Honor knew the history of the treasure, and she knew that it didn’t belong to the dragon, so she decided that stealing from a thief wasn’t stealing at all, especially if it freed someone she loved.”
She looked at me then, and her eyes were sad. “But when she took the treasure from the dragon, she found another treasure hidden inside, and suddenly it felt very much like stealing, and maybe the dragon had been the thief, or maybe someone else had been, but she didn’t know who the hidden treasure belonged to, and putting it back would be much, much harder than taking it had been. And so she was afraid.”
“Of getting caught?” I asked carefully.
She smiled, not very convincingly. “Oh, she’s Honor among thieves, and everyone knows that thieves are just one bit of bad luck away from getting caught.”
She pushed herself back from the table and stood. “I should go find the waiter to pay my bill.” Her voice caught, and it sounded almost like a swallowed sob.
“Anna, let me help you,” I said quietly.
“You can’t,” she whispered. “You have principles that won’t let you, and that’s good.” She smiled, and her lips trembled. “I’ll let you pay for dinner though, thank you.”
She tucked her little metal wallet back in her pocket as she strode through the restaurant to the door, wiping her eyes as she went.
27
Anna
“The minute you walk through that door you’re no longer a guest, so help yourself.”
Sophia Collins
I needed to find someplace else to sleep. I sat in my crappy rental car where I had parked it for both of the days I’d gone to the museum and searched up places to stay in Boston that don’t make you itch.
I disliked crying. I especially disliked doing it where anyone could see me. I was not a particularly tall person, but I was strong and athletic and could do enough things well that I rarely felt vulnerable – except when I cried.
Analyzing my distaste for tears was much easier than figuring out why I was upset, so I indulged in self-analysis while entering a new search for comfy beds for cheap in the greater Boston area.
Kids in America grew up with “cry like a girl” and “only babies and sissies cry” as the standard taunt for tears. The average girl could just shrug that off as par for the course. I am a girl, ergo I cry like one. Boys, tomboys, and girls who identified with the male gender generally had a tougher time with such teasing, as it was meant to belittle and hurt. I pretty much self-identified as a tomboy, mostly to counter my sister’s girly-girl status, and as such, I didn’t cry.
Except when I did.
I finally got a hit on bed and breakfasts that don’t break the bank in Massachusetts, except it wasn’t a Google search hit, it was a text.
Mom: Colette said you’re in Boston. Come home.
Me: Hi Mom. Thanks, I will.
See? A hit. Bed, breakfast, and about sixty minutes and a world away from Boston. Plus laundry facilities and a place to send the underwear I’d be buying online.
I thought about stopping at the police station to check on Junior on my way out of town, but it was already dark and I was tired, and the prospect of bribing my way past cops who should know better than to take my bribes was a little more than I could handle after a dinner with the principled Disney prince.
Sigh. Why couldn’t I have fallen for someone who saw the world with a few more shades of gray? Darius Masoud had the kind of principles that would never let him see what I’d done as anything other than the darkest black in a checkerboard world, and frankly, I felt as far away from the black queen as a player could get.
My phone paired with the rental car stereo, and as I drove out of downtown, it rang. I checked the number and hit the button that put me on speaker phone.
“Hey, Sister.”
“Hey,” she said. “How’s Boston?”
“Weird,” I said as I passed a cop who had pulled over a Chevy. I checked in with my conscience and it felt clean – no racing pulse or sweaty palms at the sight of the flashing lights.
“You’re weird,” she said automatically.
I smiled. “No, you.” It was a game we’d played since we were kids, and playing it with her reminded me that I had – and was – a sister.
It was an antidote to alone.
“What’d you find out about the Manet?” she asked. The room had a slight echo around her.
“Dude, what if someone else had been in the car with me? And p.s., are you on the toilet?”
I could practically hear the eye-roll in her voice. “You’re always by yourself, and I called you, which means I’m definitely not on the toilet. I’m doing my make-up.”
“But if I’d called you and you were on the toilet, you would have picked up?” I tried to ignore her comment about my aloneness, but it stung.
“Even mid-push. That’s how much I love you,” she said, with the open-mouth sound that meant she was putting on mascara.
I laughed and gave her a point for it.
“So? What’d you find out about Madame Auguste?” she prompted.
“Well, she’s not missing from the Gardner,” I said, but even I could hear the lack of easy confidence in my voice.
“But …?”
“But our Madame Auguste is pretty much a dead ringer for the one on the Blue Room wall.”
There was silence on the other end of the phone. I tried to picture my sister studying her reflection in the mirror as she thought about what I’d said, but all I could see was WTF written all over her expression in black Sharpie.
“So one of them is a forgery,” she said in a hushed voice.
“But which one?” I answered back as quietly.
“Dude.”
“Right?”
Single word sentences were also in our communication style guide. Translation: Are you freaking kidding me? How did we end up with a possible forged, or worse, real Manet painting? Answer: I know! I can’t stand this much longer. What the hell are we gonna do?
“Why would Mom and Alex stretch T
he Sisters over Madame Auguste – real or forged?” she finally said.
I hadn’t had a chance to talk my theories through out loud with anyone because, of course, Darius was the only other person who knew about Madame Auguste, and we were still talking in fairy tales around each other where the paintings were concerned. “Well, either they reused a frame and just wanted the Madame August to stiffen up the canvas on their own painting, or they did it to hide Madame Auguste. Or they didn’t do it.”
“You think it’s possible Markham Gray used The Sisters to hide a Manet?”
I shrugged as I pulled onto the expressway. “It was in his possession, and it was the only art hanging in his panic room.”
“But why— no, never mind. If he’s the one who hid Madame Auguste, it’s probably because she was stolen,” Colette finally said.
“And if Alex or Mom hid it, it’s because they shouldn’t have had it. The only explanation that doesn’t get people into trouble is that it was just a copy on a frame that they re-used.”
Colette was silent for so long that I thought the call had dropped. “You still there?” I asked.
“Yeah. I’m just wondering if I should ask Sterling about it.”
“What? Why would you do that?” I had to swerve to avoid a dead raccoon in the road. Not because I had any particular affinity for raccoons, because I definitely didn’t. They were trash pandas and chicken killers, and I sent a mental “That’s right” to the universe, as I did whenever I passed a dead one. But this one was recently dead, which meant it would likely squish under my wheels unpleasantly, and at the rate my luck was going, I’d get a flat and then have to pick through raccoon guts to change the tire.
“I’m seeing him tonight,” my sister said. Her voice sounded odd, or maybe it was just the words that sounded odd to my ears.
“I’m sorry, I was avoiding trash panda guts. Could you please repeat that?”
She sighed, and then sounded annoyed. “I’m going out with Sterling tonight. On a date. To a private gallery opening.”
“Wow, he’s actually taking you out in public?” You could have infected the whole state with the snottiness in my tone.
She hung up on me.
I counted to five and then the phone rang.
“Sorry, that was bitchy,” I said when I answered.
“It was.”
We stayed on the phone in silence for a long moment. I could hear her thinking. She could hear me grinding my teeth. It’s what we did when we didn’t want to say the thing that needed to be said, and it was also in our communication style guide. Finally, I took a breath and tried for calm.
“Do you have actual feelings for the guy? Because what you’re doing is really dangerous, Sister.”
“It’s only dangerous if you get caught,” she said. “And you won’t, because you’re smarter than they are. And besides, Sterling said they didn’t even call the cops.”
I thought about the grim expression on Darius’s face when he set up his meeting with Markham Gray. “Why wouldn’t they call in police?”
“I don’t know, except his dad has been freaking out on him since the painting went missing, and now he’s threatening to cut him completely off if he doesn’t get it back. Basically, turn him out of the house, his job, the company - everything.”
“Sterling’s job isn’t our problem.” I said. Neither was Darius’s job, I thought to myself, even as my conscience twinged.
“Are we sure Markham didn’t have a right to The Sisters?” she asked.
“Mom and Alex painted each other, worked on the painting together, and then it disappeared. The artists are the owners of their art until they sell it. Mom didn’t sell it, and Alex didn’t have the right to give it away without her permission, so no, it wasn’t Markham’s to keep. And honestly, if he’s that freaked out, it makes me think he’s the one who hid Madame Auguste. Because let’s face it, if our Madame Auguste is the real thing, she’s worth millions.”
Colette sighed the long-suffering sigh of the reasonable sister. “Well, maybe we should find a way to get Madame Auguste back to them if that’s the reason Sterling’s dad went psycho. Then the heat will be off.”
I barked a laugh. “How do you propose I give it back? Should I break back in and staple her back into the frame? Or are you going to drop her off behind a dumpster at the mansion next time you go to Sterling’s for a booty call?”
“Don’t be ugly,” she said.
“Don’t be stupid,” I snapped back.
“You’re stupid,” she snapped, but there was a hint of a reluctant smile sound in her voice.
“No, you,” I groused. And then, because I was seriously sick of arguing with her, I said, “I’m on my way to Mom and Dad’s.”
“Tell Mom to look for a package from me,” she said. “How long are you staying?”
“I don’t know. If the police aren’t looking, maybe I can come back to Chicago.”
“What about the Cipher guy?”
Yeah, what about him? I heard his quiet words in my head – let me help you. I didn’t need help; I was the strong one, I was the one who went on quests, the boy my dad never had. I didn’t cry because thieves don’t cry.
“The Cipher guy will do what he does, and I’ll stay out of his way,” I finally said.
“Well, give him a couple more days to forget about you,” my sister said.
I swallowed the hurt, and then swallowed again to make my voice work. “Yeah.” I let the sounds of the road fill my ears and numb my brain. “I’m going to do some more digging into Madame Auguste, maybe ask Mom for help. You know where to find me if you need me,” I finally said.
The old-fashioned doorbell sounded in the background. “Just think about what I said, please. If it goes back, it’s not our problem anymore.” Colette disconnected the call and there was silence.
“Bye,” I said to no one in particular, and the word tasted sour in my mouth.
28
Anna
“Show me where you’re from and I’ll tell you who people think you are.”
From the T-shirt collection of Anna Collins
My parents’ house sat high above the rocky shore, but the windows in my old bedroom had been cracked open for fresh air, so I’d slept with the sound of the sea and woken up with the pale eastern light illuminating the familiar space.
I’d long since determined that I was a morning person. Growing up with an east-facing bedroom had probably been a major contributing factor to my tendency to rise with the sun. Colette’s room was on the west side of the house, and she had taken those night owl proclivities and turned them into a thriving social life – something people who are usually in bed by nine don’t have.
My dad had waited up the night before to make sure I made it home, so I doubted I’d see him for a few hours. I could hear mom in the kitchen, talking to her dogs. We’d always grown up with at least one dog in the house, but since Colette and I had moved out, mom had started fostering rescues for the local shelter. She said it was because our dad still traveled for work and she wanted the dogs for protection, but we knew it was for the company they gave her.
I pulled on yoga pants and one of my dad’s T-shirts and padded downstairs in bare feet with a handful of my clothes. “Good morning,” I said as I entered the kitchen. “Can I do laundry?”
“Good morning. Yes. Add it to the pile on the machine,” my mom said while measuring out dog food into dishes on the counter.
I counted five dogs seated around her waiting with expectant faces for their food dishes. Two or three of them had looked over at me when I entered, but at least two – a beagle I didn’t know and a black lab named Timmy – had eyes only for my mom.
“Help me with these, would you?” she asked, indicating two of the bowls.
I grabbed the bowls and followed her out to the sunroom that had been added onto the hundred-year-old house sometime in the fifties. With time it had become sort of a glorified mud room. Coats hung from hooks on the wall
s, and a line of boots and clogs stood sentry beneath them. A big orange construction bucket held umbrellas and walking sticks, and a stack of beach chairs leaned against one wall, with towels draped to dry over them.
“You can put those two over there for Conor and Lucas, the two corgis. They’re brothers and they share everything, even if they have to wrestle for it,” my mom said, indicating two handsome little corgis with wiggling tail stubs. She put bowls down for Timmy, the beagle, and a shepherd mix I vaguely remembered was called Maggie. “Come,” she held her hand out to me when all the dogs were eating, “let’s fill thermoses with coffee and take them down to the beach.”
At the word “beach,” Timmy looked up at mom and wagged his tail adoringly before finishing his food. She laughed and gave him a pat before heading back into the kitchen.
I got two thermos mugs out of the jumble of random coffee cups and promotional mugs mom saved from every convention my dad ever went to. He was a sales rep for several different building supply manufacturers, all the while living in a house that had been built before WWI and was in its original condition. She filled the mugs with fresh coffee from the pot, and I had just pulled on my dad’s sweater when the doorbell rang.
All five dogs swarmed to the front door, barking like a pack of rabid hunting hounds, while Mom waded through them to open it. I’d started the laundry and gone back into the sunroom for a pair of clogs when Mom finally returned from the front. “Anna, there’s someone here to see you,” she said with a smile in her voice.
I looked up just as Darius entered the kitchen, herded there by several dogs and holding a large FedEx box. “You can just set that on the counter over there,” Mom told him as she pulled a knife from the butcher block.
I stared at the scene in shock. “What are you doing here?” I gasped to Darius, somehow afraid my mom had pulled the knife on him. But then she got busy cutting into the FedEx box, and I could refocus my shock on its intended recipient, who looked far too handsome to be standing in the kitchen of my childhood home looking at yoga-pants-and-dad-sweater-wearing me.
Code of Honor Page 17