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“What on earth do you think you’re doing?” says Mrs. Vanders in an outraged voice, appearing beside her. “Just because that’s your aunt’s photo doesn’t give you license to take it apart! That’s an expensive frame!”
With trembling fingers, Jane removes the backing of the frame. Protective tissue-like paper lies under it, and through the tissue, Jane can see the outlines of what she knew she would find. Carefully, she takes hold of the edges of the thin paper and pulls it away.
Jane and Mrs. Vanders are looking down, astonished, at Lady Writing a Letter with Her Frog. Jane studies it. There’s something quieting, even awesome, about the fine web of cracks across the canvas, and its clean, soft light. It’s as if the lady, intent on her writing while sitting in a bath of light, is made of soft marble. As if marble can be a warm, living thing.
“Hold it up to the ceiling lamps!” says Mrs. Vanders.
Ever so carefully, Jane lifts the canvas by the edges and holds it up to the light. The lady’s eye glows like a tiny star.
“How on earth did you know?” says Mrs. Vanders.
Jane’s eyes are full of tears. Frightened she’ll drip on Vermeer’s masterpiece, she hands the canvas to Mrs. Vanders and says, “Aunt Magnolia led me to it.”
* * *
A week and a half after the gala, they finally get word from Investigator Edwards. Kiran tells Jane over a game of chess in the winter garden. “Turns out Buckley St. George has some interesting offshore accounts, and some irregular financials that possibly link him to a New Jersey heroin cartel.”
“Really?”
“The police raided the cartel and found a Delacroix that belongs to some friends of Ravi’s.” Kiran tilts her head to indicate Ravi, who’s sprawled in a nearby armchair, pretending to read an art magazine with a Rembrandt seascape on the cover.
“Delacroix?” says Jane.
“French painter,” offers Ravi in a grouchy voice, not looking up from his magazine. “Nineteenth-century Romantic. Influenced the Impressionists. I could take him or leave him.”
“Oh, stop it,” says Kiran. “You love Delacroix.”
“Nothing compares to the theft of a Vermeer.”
“It’s all over now, Ravi,” says Kiran. “Janie found your Vermeer. You can stop acting like you, personally, were the target of an outrageous conspiracy.”
“I’ll put it on my to-do list for the day after tomorrow,” says Ravi grumpily.
Kiran half grins at Jane. “Anyway,” she says, “Ravi’s friends didn’t even know the Delacroix was missing. They’ve had a forgery hanging on their wall, and they had no idea. Ravi introduced Colin to those friends.”
“That self-righteous shithead,” offers Ravi.
Kiran chuckles.
Raindrops ping like pebbles against the windows. Jane moves one of her rooks back and forth, idly. Kiran is a better chess player than she is.
“Did Colin really think that was going to work,” Jane says, “lying about my umbrellas? Out of spite? How much money could he possibly have made from them?”
“You humiliated him,” says Kiran. “He struck out to make you small again.”
“It’s kind of pathetic.”
“Yeah, well,” says Kiran. “It was stupid too, given what was at risk. I don’t think he’s the master manipulator he thinks he is. I’m really glad I broke up with him before we figured out he’s an art thief. Thanks for your help with that.”
“I helped too!” says Ravi.
“How did you help, exactly?”
“General moral support!” he says. “Through our psychic twin link!”
“Right,” says Kiran. “How could I forget.”
Their teasing is like the rain—gentle, and washing Jane with a kind of comfort, and a wistfulness too. Ravi pretends to be a child because it makes Kiran smile, which in turn gives Ravi the look of someone who’s made his favorite person happy.
“And you,” says Ravi, clapping his dark eyes upon her. “I have some ideas about you and your umbrellas.”
“Okay,” says Jane. “Anything specific?”
Jane has started a new umbrella, and Ravi knows all about it. It’s something to do with a house of mystery and intrigue. Jane hasn’t worked out the details yet, but she thinks this new umbrella might have windows made of clear plastic and doors that open and close, and art on the walls, and a freight elevator, and a basset hound. Ravi has taken to visiting her from time to time while she’s working on it. He asks questions about fabric tension and the placement of springs and inspects Jane’s inventory. He’s held her Aunt Magnolia umbrella out at arm’s length, trying to get some distance from it in order to understand it better. This hasn’t seemed to work for him.
“It’s the color of a frogstorm,” Jane has told him, not telling him all the rest.
He’s scrunched up his face, then put the lopsided umbrella back on the floor, muttering, “I guess every artist goes through a Frog Period.”
“You really think I’m an artist?” Jane has responded. But Jane is coming to know the answer to that question on her own. She’s seeing her umbrellas differently now. People other than she might love those umbrellas someday, probably not for Jane’s reasons, but for their own reasons—reasons Jane won’t know or understand. Jane is beginning to appreciate this wonderful, surreal fact about the creative process.
“You could start a business,” Ravi says now, stretching his legs out before him in the armchair and regarding Jane balefully. “I could help.”
“That’s not very specific,” Jane says.
“You’re young,” Ravi says. “You’ve got all the time in the world to establish yourself. And I bet we could get some millionaire designer to send you to college.”
“College?” Jane says. “Is there a college where I could make umbrellas?”
“Probably,” Ravi says, shrugging. “There’s a college for everything. How about a shop someday? I’ve been to an umbrella shop in Paris where each umbrella is different, and designed by the owner. Your umbrellas will be good enough for that.”
“Paris?”
“Or wherever,” he says. “The world is your rainstorm.”
He juts his chin at the windows and Jane smiles, because it’s pouring now, just like the day she arrived. Water streams down the glass and makes her feel safe, contained in a bubble. It’s a lot to think about. College, Paris, shops. Aunt Magnolia? Is this why you made me promise to come here? So
the world would be my rainstorm?
“Do you think someday, when I’m rich and famous, my umbrellas will be used in the drug world as currency?” Jane says.
Ravi flashes her a grin. “Did you know that drug dealers who use art as currency are considered classy?”
“Classy? Seriously? How do you know that?”
“Lucy told me, of course.”
“If she’s the one who told you, how do you know it’s true?”
“I guess I don’t,” Ravi says. “But I expect most of what she told me was true. Really, there were only a few details she needed to lie about.”
The police are saying that Buckley St. George placed his daughter not just in the path of the Thrashes to steal, but straight into the drug underworld, where it was her job to pretend to be an undercover investigator pretending to be a crook. It’s difficult for Jane to wrap her head around. All that pretending and manipulating seems an odd direction to focus one’s passions.
“I wonder if she enjoyed it,” Ravi says. “It must feel amazing to get away with a theft like that.” He adds, with some bitterness, “And to fool people.”
“I’m not sure she enjoyed fooling you, Ravi,” Jane says. “I think she cared about you.”
“Don’t defend her to me,” Ravi says heatedly. “No one who cared about me and knew me at all would steal my art.”
“That’s true,” says Jane, “but I think she was surprised, and upset, by how much it hurt you.”
The charges against Lucy now include the theft of the Rubens she “lost,” although apparently Lucy blames that theft on pressure from Buckley, just as she blames the Brancusi incident on Colin. Lucy seems to have entered some sort of delayed adolescent rebellion. When the police put her in the same room with her father, she began to scream at him for pressuring her about whom to date.
In another part of the house, the Brancusi is back. It appeared, complete and undamaged, in its usual spot on a side table in the receiving hall, six days after the gala. No one in the house can explain it to Ravi, who’s alternately elated and furious. Mrs. Vanders had been keeping the pedestal in the west attics, storing it safely until the fish was found, and one day, when she’d gone up there, it—the pedestal—was gone. Then she’d found it, to her amazement, in the receiving hall, the fish perched atop the pedestal once again, complete and as it should be, or so she says.
