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“I get that.”
“What are you up to?”
“Something drew me here.”
“Not the weird house noises, I hope,” says Lucy.
“I don’t think so,” says Jane. “I think I was hoping to see the painting again. The copy, I mean. I guess I should’ve known it wouldn’t be here, on public display.”
“Mrs. Vanders put it in the house safe, for the police,” says Lucy dryly. “She won’t even let me see it unless she’s hovering over me the whole time.”
“Has she called the police, then?”
“So she says.”
“You don’t think she has?”
“Well, I have contacts with the police, and the FBI and Interpol,” says Lucy. “I’ve asked a couple of deliberately vague leading questions, but no one’s mentioned it, even though I would’ve thought this would be big news.”
“Do you suspect her?” says Jane. “I mean, she’s the one who called attention to the forgery in the first place.”
“Let’s just say I don’t suspect her for the Vermeer,” says Lucy.
A new understanding of things begins to touch Jane’s mind. “Wait. Do you mean you think there are two different thieves?”
“A thief with the expertise to forge the Vermeer would never perform a hack job on a Brancusi,” says Lucy. “So, yeah. Two separate thieves. One with a lot of knowledge, time, and resources, and another—” Lucy pauses, shaking her head in disbelief. “Who’s arrogant and foolish.”
Staring at the blank space on the wall, Jane thinks about this. She wouldn’t have called Mrs. Vanders arrogant and foolish. She’s bossy and controlling, but not foolish. Neither is Patrick, nor Ivy. It sounds more like . . . Lucy’s idea of Colin, or of Ravi.
“I wonder which thief Ravi will hate more,” says Lucy, “the competent one or the incompetent one.”
“So, you don’t suspect Ravi?”
“Didn’t you see his histrionics?”
“Couldn’t that have been an act?”
Lucy twists her mouth. “Ravi is a child. What you see is what’s there. Apparently the art, at least, is capable of breaking his heart.”
She says this with an interesting bitterness. Jane finds herself wondering if Lucy is jealous of the art, but it’s hard to figure out how to ask. “What do you mean?”
“Oh, nothing,” says Lucy. “Forget it. It’s interesting Philip took off last night, isn’t it? He and Phoebe are always showing up for the galas early, eager as beavers to spend time in this house. They could’ve had time to plan the forgery of the Vermeer.”
“You’re connecting them to the Vermeer? Not the Brancusi?” says Jane, with mild disappointment, because it’s the Brancusi that’s connected, possibly, to the little girl, and the little girl who’s possibly connected to the Okadas. Then again, Lucy St. George doesn’t know about the late-night secrets of the Okadas. And the little girl might’ve just been carrying that family portrait. “What’s Phoebe Okada’s job, anyway?” Jane asks.
“Oh, she’s a mathematician,” Lucy says, “in the computer science department at Columbia. People talk about her as if she’s a genius.”
This doesn’t fit in anywhere, and Jane is getting frustrated. “I saw the Okadas sneaking around last night,” she blurts out. “With Patrick.”
Lucy’s eyes narrow on her. “What do you mean? Where?”
“In the servants’ quarters,” says Jane. “Just after four in the morning.”
“I think that’s when Philip was called away,” says Lucy. “Patrick was probably just helping him organize a boat.”
Jane almost says something, then stops. She doesn’t mention the girl, the diaper bag, the puzzling conversation, the gun. It’s not that she doesn’t trust Lucy; it’s that she doesn’t trust anyone. She needs to keep thinking.
“What’s wrong with that dog?” Lucy asks.
Jane looks down to see Jasper with his head tilted sideways, cradling her ankle gently in his long mouth. He’s not biting; until she sees him there, she doesn’t even feel it, although now she’s conscious of his drool soaking through her jeans leg.
“Jasper!” she says. “What are you doing? You look like you’re waiting for the right moment to eat me whole!”
“Maybe you taste good,” says Lucy with a chuckle.
Jane extricates her ankle and says, “The dog is the only person not on my list of suspects.”
“I noticed you seem to be detecting,” says Lucy with a grin. “Are you interested in a career like mine? Chasing down thieves, finding forgeries, recovering originals?”
Jane has been thinking about this; about copies of precious things, in particular. What if it turned out that there were copies of Aunt Magnolia? Like a Cylon, or a cloning project in some sort of sci-fi story? What if Jane’s personal copy wasn’t the original? Would that make Jane’s aunt Magnolia less precious? Wasn’t Jane’s copy precious because she was Jane’s? Jane isn’t trying to solve this crime because of forged art. She’s trying to solve it because she wants to understand the people. Ravi, Mrs. Vanders, Ivy. She wants to know why Aunt Magnolia sent her here. She wants to know what everything means.
“Not really,” Jane says. “The truth is, I don’t really care about the art being forged, not personally. I mean, I liked the forgery. I thought it was beautiful. Everyone’s said so, everyone’s been talking about it all day. And hardly anyone even noticed it was forged. Who cares if it’s the one worth a hundred million dollars or not?”
Lucy is watching her with a small, wistful smile. “A lot of people care.”
“Well,” says Jane, “I hope Ravi gets his painting back.”
“You hope that out of niceness,” Lucy says. “Not because you’re concerned about the money. It’s for the best. My job isn’t all it’s cracked up to be, and Colin showed me your umbrellas. Anyone with half an artistic eye can see that that’s meant to be your career.”
A small implosion of happiness roots Jane to the floor. Then Lucy’s phone rings. Mouthing the word Dad, she steps away to answer it.
Jane goes back to her rooms, still glowing from Lucy’s words. There, her eyes fall upon her uneven blue umbrella in progress.
She realizes, suddenly, what the unevenness of saturation in the fabric has been reminding her of. It’s the discoloration in Aunt Magnolia’s eye, the blue blotch inside her brown iris. Aunt Magnolia’s muddy star, with its spikes, its spokes, like a broken umbrella.
Jane is going to make an umbrella that looks like a broken umbrella, but isn’t. It will be a working umbrella, but uneven and blotchy, a blue splotch umbrella that looks like Aunt Magnolia’s eye. Jane’s heart holds the idea, and her hands know what to do.
* * *
Sometime later, Ravi knocks on Jane’s bedroom door, comes into the morning room, and stands there, glaring.
“Yes?” Jane says, the word muffled around a bite of trail mix she’s found in one of her bags. She’s missed lunch.
“Octavian has forbidden me from searching anyone’s private property,” Ravi says.
Jane’s hands are measuring umbrella ribs against each other. The ribs of this umbrella will be unmatching, varying in length, which means that the canopy will be an odd, uneven shape, not round. “You’re welcome to look through my things,” she says.
“That’s what a thief would say,” Ravi says captiously. “Knowing I never would.”
“I don’t think, if I were a thief, I’d be the type to take that kind of chance.”
Ravi’s still glowering, but seems interested in this. “I think I would, if I were a thief.”
“That doesn’t particularly surprise me,” Jane says with a grin. “You like games.”
“That’s true,” he says, then softens his eyes on Jane. “You should play with me.”
It’s such an abrupt change of focus, and such an un
mistakable invitation, that Jane bursts out laughing from the shock of it.
“Ravi,” she says. “No, and stop it.”
“Lucy and I are off again,” he says. “I told you.”
“I don’t care.”
“Okay,” he says with a shrug. “Just being frank about what I like.”
Just being Ravi, Jane thinks to herself.
“I keep picturing Ivy,” says Ravi.
“What?” Jane says, startled.
“She used to stand in front of the Brancusi, jumping up and down, singing it a song about tuna fish. She was three.”
“Oh,” Jane says. “That’s adorable.”
“I remember her in pigtails, wearing little saddle shoes.”
Jane can imagine this too, though the three-year-old she’s picturing has a big camera around her neck and smells like jasmine and chlorine, which is surely ridiculous. Jane can’t really picture the fish. “The way Colin described it to me,” she says, “it’s pretty abstract, for a fish.”
