“I don’t know,” Sam said.
“What’s bothering you?”
“The message said, ‘Make someone’s dreams come true.’ Dreams aren’t that different from fantasies,” Sam said.
“What’s the name of the place?” Lincoln asked.
“Enchanted Petals,” she said.
“I know where that is,” he said after a moment. “It’s in Narragansett, and it’s not just a florist shop—it’s a nursery. They have greenhouses, big fields full of flowers. I’ve seen them—there’s a hiking trail along the edge of the property.”
Sam replayed the message in her mind. Dreams, enchanted petals. A shiver ran down her spine. She thought of that ad, placed in the Yellow Pages so long ago, and she suddenly had a growing feeling that 1740 was somehow alive and well at the garden center.
“I want to go there,” Sam said to Lincoln.
Tuesday, July 6; 11:00 a.m.
Conor found Fernando Harris’s house and thought it looked more like an 1800s sea captain’s home than a framing and art restoration studio. It blended in with all the other historic houses on Gravel Street, along the Mystic River. There wasn’t a sign out front; the neighborhood was residential, not commercial, and for a moment he wondered if he had the right place.
Cars were parked on one side of the waterfront street. He didn’t see Kate’s, so he walked down the driveway that ran alongside the house. Part of the backyard had been paved to create a parking area for a few cars. Conor saw a van with Fernando Harris’s logo on the side; behind it, just out of immediate view, was Kate’s car. He let out a big sigh of relief and began to walk toward the house.
There was a back entrance, so Conor headed up the stairs and knocked before he saw the small sign:
By appointment only, unless it’s your lucky day and I happen to be here.
Conor pushed the door open. He walked through a room lined with samples of picture frames, with a massive work surface in the center, and a small oak table and two armchairs off to the side. There were a few art magazines and exhibition catalogs stacked on the table.
He had clocked a security camera above the outside door, and there were two more set in upper corners of this room. At the far end was a narrow hallway that led to a white steel security door. To the right of the door was an intercom panel. Conor pressed the button. He listened for a faint buzz on the other side of the door but didn’t hear one. His phone was in his pocket; he took it out and checked to see if he had heard back from Kate.
He texted her:I am at Fernando’s now—I see your car, where are you?
Nothing.
He stepped back from the door, in case she was inside and hadn’t had time to respond yet, but he felt his blood pressure rise as he waited. He stood by the table and fanned out the top three catalogs. The top one was from the Woodward-Lathrop gallery, displaying the shadow boxes of gallery artist Claire Beaudry Chase. The second was a brochure from the Mystic Museum of Art’s exhibition a few years earlier, “Magic Hour: Art between Waking and Dreams.” The third was from Botanicum/Animalium, a gallery Conor had never heard of. The title of the show was “Judge not, Lest ye be Judged.”
Odd title for an art show, he thought. He stared at the brochure’s cover and was sure he had seen the painting depicted there—a still life of a bowl of peaches, four perfect and one rotten, brown and dotted with blow fly larvae, brown juice spilling out of the bowl and staining the white tablecloth on which it sat. He couldn’t remember who had painted it or where he had seen it before, but he recalled being repulsed by the decaying fruit and the way the juice reminded him of fluids leaking from a corpse.
He used the side of his fist to bang on the white steel door. It had been realistically painted to look like a cross-and-bible Colonial-era door but was in fact a bank-grade vault door, like ones Conor had seenin panic rooms—and like the one to the bedroom in the Bellevigne Island mansion.
“Kate!” he called. “Fernando, open the door!”
Conor knew that Fernando stored valuable paintings and other artworks here, and that definitely explained the extra security measures. Kate had recently upgraded the system at the gallery, adding alarms to every window—including the small sidelights, too narrow for any would-be thief to slip through, high-definition cameras that recorded continuously instead of just being motion activated, and extra-sensitive glass-break detectors. If Fernando had those in place here, wouldn’t Conor’s entry have tripped some of them and caused Fernando to come out?
He heard a door open, and when he turned around, Tom was entering from the parking area.
“Her car’s here,” Tom said.
“Yeah, and I rang the bell,” Conor said, gesturing at the steel door, “but Fernando’s not answering.”
“Just walk in,” Tom said, heading toward the door, then stopping in his tracks. “Where’s the doorknob?”
“There isn’t one. It’s a safe room.”
“In a framing gallery?” Tom asked.
Conor didn’t answer, just concentrated on the door.
“How does he open the door?” Tom asked, running a hand around the perimeter of the doorframe.
