“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.”
“Right, but that’s the beauty of it,” Ravi says. “It’s the human experience of a fish. There isn’t a single scale or fin. It’s just an oblong sliver of marble. But it has such a sense of movement.” He waves a hand, beginning to move around the room in his enthusiasm, finding the spaces that are clear of umbrellas. “It practically disappears from a certain angle, like a fish flashing through water. It’s a perfect representation of what you really see when you see a fish in water, before your brain tries to fill in all the things you know about what makes a fish a fish. And no one but Brancusi could capture it that way. I expect it’s the reason he mounted it on a mirrored base, for the movement and the flashing.”
“I’m sorry it’s missing,” Jane says, partly because at this point, she wants to see it for herself. “How much is it worth?”
“I don’t care,” Ravi says. “That’s not what this is about.”
Jane suspects he isn’t trying to be endearing; he’s just being honest. And of course he can afford not to care about the money.
It’s endearing anyway. “I get that,” Jane says. “But it’ll matter to the investigation. I’m sure it matters to the thief.”
“Yes,” Ravi says, wiping his eyes tiredly with a hand. “Lucy will need to know. Lucy is going to find our fish and our Vermeer, and when she does, I’m going to tell the whole world. This is going to redeem her from the Rubens she lost.”
“It’s nice of you to think of your loss that way,” says Jane. “As Lucy’s redemption.”
“I’m a nice person,” Ravi says miserably. Then he picks up an umbrella, a closed one that’s propped in a corner. It’s not one Jane has given much thought to recently, one of her simpler, smaller affairs, with pale gores of various complementary yellows and a varnished mahogany rod and handle. With careful fingers, Ravi caresses the umbrella’s ferrule and its notch, its hand spring, for all the world looking as if he appreciates the care with which Jane created it.
“May I open it?” he asks her.
The only person who’s ever asked Jane’s permission before opening an umbrella is Aunt Magnolia. “Yes,” she says breathlessly. It really is one of her more decent umbrellas; as Ravi slides it open, she warms with sudden, unexpected pride.
“It’s elegant,” Ravi says. “You’re talented.”
“Thank you,” Jane manages to say.
“For a teenager,” he says with a cheeky grin.
“You were a teenager not that long ago.”
“True. It makes me think of Kiran,” Ravi says. “The soft colors. She should have it. Can I buy it from you?”
“Seriously?”
“Of course.”
Jane almost tells him he can have it, as a gift. But, rich people love to spend money, says Colin. “It’s a thousand dollars,” she says, obeying a slightly hysterical whim.
“Done,” Ravi says. “Can I give you a check later?”
“Ravi,” Jane says, stunned. “I was kidding.”
“Well, I’m not. I’ll leave it here until I’ve paid you.”
“You can take it with you! I trust you not to steal!”
Ravi’s grin flashes bright. “That’s something, I guess.”
“Not to steal the umbrella,” Jane amends.
“Good to know I’m on your list of suspects,” he says. “You may as well know you’re not on mine. I wouldn’t even know about the forgery if you hadn’t blurted it out about Mrs. Vanders’s suspicions.”
“I guess that’s true,” says Jane, alarmed to realize her role.
“I could see people paying thousands for some of these umbrellas, you know,” he says. “Have you thought of working with a dealer? I could show a few to Buckley.”
“Colin has already offered,” Jane says, “and I think you’re both delusional.”
“Damn Colin,” Ravi says cheerfully. “He’ll get the credit, and the commission.”
“I’m sure you’ll miss that ten dollars. You say thousands, but Colin says hundreds.”
Ravi shakes his head. “Buckley will value them higher. Not all of them, but a few of them. And he’ll want to see what you do in the future.”
He leaves with the yellow umbrella under his arm.
* * *
At dinner, Colin is the only person who seems to want to talk. Ravi isn’t even there. Phoebe frowns at her plate and Lucy glances up from her phone now and then to pretend she’s paying attention. Kiran looks tired, flinching every time Colin begins to speak, as if listening is an unbearable strain.
It’s hard to watch, but Jane hopes Colin will keep talking nonetheless, because he’s asking some of the very questions she wants to know the answers to.
“Is either piece insured?” he asks the table.
When no one else responds, Kiran finally stirs herself and says, “No.”
“Why not?” asks Jane, who can’t fathom why anyone wouldn’t insure art that’s so valuable.
Lucy speaks absently, as if bored, not raising her eyes from her phone. “Insurance on pieces like that, especially a Vermeer, is prohibitively expensive.”
“None of the art is alarmed, either,” says Kiran. “Octavian trusts people. I’ve never understood it,” she adds sadly.
“Well, at least that rules Octavian out as a suspect,” says Colin. “He’d gain much more by selling them than by stealing them.”
Kiran’s face hardens. “No one in my family stole the fucking art,” she says in a low voice.
“Sweetheart,” says Colin in amusement. “I just said he didn’t.”
“Maybe you think I took it?” says Kiran. “Or my brother, or my mother, or my stepmother?”
“Darling,” Colin says, in a deliberately soothing voice that makes Kiran’s shoulders stiffen more. “Of course I don’t, but you know it had to be someone. We figure it out by eliminating people.”
“Yes,” Kiran says, “I’m not twelve years old, I understand how it works. But since it has to be someone, let’s not talk about it at dinner. There’s no way to consider any of the suspects without getting someone’s back up at this table.”
Phoebe frowns extra hard at this. Jane wonders then if Kiran might suspect anything about Patrick. Could that be why she seems so miserable?
“Would you feel better if I spoke more generally?” asks Colin, in an avuncular tone that’s starting to grate on Jane’s nerves. “Do you know much about Vermeer?” he asks, startling Jane by addressing the question to her. “Did you know there are few Vermeers in existence? Another of them is missing too, stolen from a Boston museum in 1990. It’s probably being passed around as collateral in the drug world, maybe at seven or eight percent of its market value. That’s the going rate at the moment for a stolen picture.”
“Colin,” says Lucy, emerging from her phone and speaking sharply. “We don’t want to talk about it. Just sh
ut up.”
At that moment, Ravi comes exploding into the banquet hall. “Lucy,” he says, swooping down on her. “Colin. I’m taking another look at the fake. I want you both to look at it too and give me your thoughts on the forger.”
“Right now?” Lucy says, not even glancing up, her fingers moving furiously across her phone keyboard. “I’m eating.”
“Right now,” Ravi says.
“I’ll come later.”
“You’re not actually eating, Lucy,” Ravi says. “Anyone can see that.”
“Ravi—”
His voice changes, to something quiet, and forlorn. “Luce. Please?”
Lucy looks up, into Ravi’s face. Then, sighing sharply, she pushes herself back from the table.
Colin, watching these proceedings, speaks in his careful, singsong voice. “Kiran,” he says, “do you mind if I go with Ravi?”
“No, it’s fine,” she says. “You should help.”
It’s a relief to watch him go. A minute later, Phoebe finishes her food and also excuses herself. Jane is alone with Kiran, who picks up her fork and stabs a green bean, then stabs it again.
“Kiran?” Jane says, then stops when Kiran flinches. It occurs to Jane that Kiran doesn’t want another person asking her if she’s okay. “Is there—anything I can do to help with the missing art?”
Kiran coughs a laugh, then stabs a different green bean. “It’s not funny, of course,” she says. “It’s awful. Or anyway, Ravi feels awful, which makes me feel awful. And I feel awful speculating about who might have done it too.” She shakes her head briefly, as if clearing it. “Ravi gave me the yellow umbrella,” she says. “It’s lovely. Thank you. I hope you charged him lots of money.”
“I did, actually,” says Jane, surprised that Kiran remembers that money matters to Jane in a way it doesn’t to her.
“It’s really special,” Kiran says. “I’d like to see the rest of them.”
“I’d be happy to show them to you,” Jane says, “anytime,” realizing she means it, because Kiran feels different from everyone else. Kiran is careful. She’ll be respectful. She understood Aunt Magnolia, and she’ll understand the umbrellas.