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No. Please, God. No.
My heart somersaults and the room tilts, and I feel the step ladder wobble under me. For a moment I think I must be dreaming, but I know I’m not. I rest my forehead in my hand for a second, try to quieten my heart. Because what is wedged behind the box of Christmas decoration is a plexiglass box, the size of a paperback, with a miniature scene by Claire Carter.The Inverted Garden.
I shove the box of decoration back in front of it, I just want that thing out of my sight right now, but I’ve done it too hard, and I hear the plexiglass scrape against the brick wall.
My heart is pounding, I almost give up on the shin guards, but then I spot the right box and pull them out. I walk down the two steps on the ladder and hand them to her. She lets out a sigh of relief.
“Can you take them to your room please? And can you ask Mommy to come see me?”
She nods, disappears inside the house, and I close my eyes, rest my forehead against the edge of a metal shelf.
“What is it?” Bronwyn asks. I turn around. She’s frowning at me. I didn’t even hear her come in.
“Can you take Charlie to soccer training?” I tell her the time, where to go, take the car, I say. You know where the spare keys are.
“Of course, everything okay?”
I drag a milk crate and sit down, drag my hands down my face. “I’m in trouble, Bronwyn.”
Bronwyn had heard about the robbery, although not about my insanely stupid reaction to finding the door open, and this time I tell her what really happened.
I’m pressing my fingers against my eyelids. “What am I going to do? Summer saw me, you see? And she asked me out right if I’d stolen it and faked the robbery, but I didn’t. It was just a stupid mistake, and I’ve let it go for so long, I can’t admit to it now. Nobody would believe me. I assumed someone took it because they had the opportunity. They saw the door was open, they realized what that meant, they walked in, took one work and walked out again. But now they’ll say it’s me, that I did it, and I don’t know what to do! What am I going to do?”
“Where is it?” she asks.
I hold on to the ladder to stand up, go up the two steps and retrieve the plexiglass box.
Bronwyn’s hand flies to her mouth. “That’s it? the artwork that was stolen?”
I nod. It’s scratched all over from where it scraped against the wall. My hands are shaking when I take it down. “She’s setting me up,” I say.
She takes it from me, studies it. “You think she stole it and put it there.”
I nod, gnawing on the corner of my thumbnail. I can just see her, that very first time she came into the gallery.That’s my favorite, I told her.Oh really? Let me make a note of that.
“She watched me when I was trying to get out of the gallery. I wanted to get to Charlie, I was frazzled. Phone, keys, hands, sign on the door. She would have seen that I didn’t lock the door properly. Or maybe she walked past after I walked away. It was still early in the day, around three. She walked away, came back late at night dressed like a cat burglar and tookThe Inverted Garden. Because let’s face it, there’s only so many possibilities. So many people who could possibly have put it there on that shelf. There’s only one person who might have had access to the gallery after I left that day, and who later came here, for Charlie’s birthday party.” I think of her that day, with her magic wand and her big bag of tricks like Mary Poppins. She didn’t even need the step ladder. She could have stood on that milk crate and she could have reached that shelf.
“Do you think Jack knows about this?”
“I don’t know. I’m so confused!”
“I know, I understand, but look. God knows I’ve had my own problems with Jack, but I can’t imagine him doing something like this to you. It doesn’t make any sense.”
I pull away, wipe my tears. “I don’t know what to think anymore.”
“Is it expensive? If he wanted to sell it? Could it be why they took it?”
I wipe my cheeks with the back of my hand. “It’s worth fourteen thousand dollars which is a lot of money, but who would he sell it too? There are collectors of Claire Carter’s works out there, but they’ll know instantly that’s the one that got stolen from Bruno Mallet, and if they were prepared to overlook that detail, they’d want to pay below market value for their trouble. Ten thousand dollars, maybe? Five? I can’t imagine it’s worth the risk, do you? And then he’d have to find these collectors. How would he do that? I mean, does he have contacts in the underworld stolen art scene? Is he some kind of criminal mastermind?”
She makes a face. “I doubt it.”
“Exactly.”
She picks it up again. “I don’t think Jack knows about this. I know him, and I just can’t see it, Laura. I think it’s just her.”
I nod, press my fingers between my eyes. “I hope so.”
“I know so. What are you going to do?”
