The Wedding Thief

by Mary Simses

  I guessed that made us about even as far as art expertise went.

  He looked back at the hand, touched the bent section of the pinkie, and grimaced as though it were his own finger that had been damaged. “I only did this as a favor for Anastasia. And now she’ll probably lose her job.”

  “Anastasia?”

  “My girlfriend. She’s Alex’s assistant.”

  “Oh.” The pieces of the puzzle were starting to fit together. “So, you drove this from…”

  “Brooklyn.”

  “As a favor for your girlfriend.”

  “Yes. There was a mix-up with the art-transport company. And now I’ve got this crisis to deal with.”

  “There has to be some way to resolve it,” I said. I knew from years of planning events that there was always a way to fix a problem. “I assume it’s insured?”

  He looked at me as though I’d lost my mind. “Of course it’s insured. But that’s not the point. It’s supposed to be in a show of Alex’s work at the Brookside Gallery. It opens a week from Friday.”

  I’d been to the Brookside Gallery. It was right in town. They exhibited a lot of contemporary art and had a large following. I was about to tell him I thought it would be best to let the artist know and then help him make an insurance claim, but then I had another idea. “Let me ask you something. What’s this made of?” I reached out.

  “Don’t touch it!”

  I drew back my hand. “Okay, okay.”

  “It’s papier-mâché. Alex does a lot of work with paper.” He stepped closer to the hand, staring at the thumb, as if by some magic trick or mind game he could get it to straighten itself.

  “And when did you say the show opens?”

  “A week from Friday.”

  The day before Mariel’s wedding. Today was Tuesday. That was ten days away. Ten days was an eternity in my line of work. In my fifteen years as an event planner, I’d solved all kinds of crises. Usually in a couple of hours, and sometimes much faster than that. I’d tracked down a best man who’d gone missing, found him drunk by the hotel pool, sobered him up, and written his speech just minutes before he had to give it. When a guest knocked over a dessert table, sending a wedding cake to the floor, I’d substituted two sheet cakes from Costco and had them sliced and plated. And all that was just one wedding…

  “Ten days is plenty of time,” I said. “What about repairing the fingers with more papier-mâché? You know, fill them in or whatever so they’ll stand up straight, fix the parts that are crushed and bent.”

  The man squinted at me as though he were trying to figure out if I was real or not. “Are you kidding? I can’t do that. It’s a piece of art. I’m not in the art world, but I’ve learned enough about it from Ana. Even if I could straighten the fingers, the paint is another thing altogether. Alex mixes his own colors and he uses lots of different shades and pigments to get the effects he wants. It’s complicated.”

  I stepped closer to the hand and took a long look. Sure enough, there were all sorts of green shades in there—fern green, olive green, kelly green, hunter green, and dozens of others blended together. Still, as he began to rewrap the hand, I continued to think the problem had to be fixable. After all, I’d had ring bearers lose the wedding rings or swallow them. I’d cleaned up red wine spilled on brides’ dresses, stopped fistfights at bachelor parties, and halted at-the-altar confessions by brides and grooms who’d had sex with each other’s college roommates. I was a fixer. It was in my nature.

  “I have an idea,” I said. “Why not take the hand to Carl’s?”

  “Carl? Who’s that?”

  “Carl’s Arts and Crafts. It’s a store here in town. See what they say about fixing it. Get a professional opinion. You know, I’ve done a little work with papier-mâché in the past, and I doubt repairing this will be as hard as you think.” Sure, they were Christmas ornaments and I’d been five, but it was still papier-mâché.

  He opened the van’s back doors, lifted the hand, and slid it inside. “Oh, right,” he said. “I walk into the local crafts shop and ask for their opinion on repairing a hundred-thousand-dollar sculpture.”

  A hundred thousand dollars? I’d had no idea it was that valuable. I swallowed hard, hoping we could pull this off.

  “Why take that kind of risk when we might end up making it worse?” he said.

  “Because we might end up making it better. I’m sure it can be fixed. Everything can. Well, most things. If there’s a problem, there’s a solution. That’s what my father always said.”

  The man looked at me for a moment as though he could see inside me, and his face softened. “You honestly believe everything can be fixed, don’t you?”

  I smiled bravely. “Yes, I do. Maybe not matters of the heart…” I wasn’t going to get into that. “But most things. Look, I’ll go to Carl’s with you. It’s my fault, and, well, I’m actually very handy to have around when it comes to disasters.”

  He broke into a smile. “You mean you can do something besides cause them?”

  I couldn’t help but laugh. “Yes, I mean I can fix them. I’m an event planner. I handle disasters all the time.”

  He shut the van’s back doors. Then he looked skyward as if he couldn’t believe what he was about to say. “All right, Miss Fix-It. I’ll go along with your suggestion. Let’s see what they have to say at Carl’s.”

  I offered my hand. “The name’s Sara Harrington.”

  He shook it. “David Cole.”

  What a morning. And the day had barely begun.

  Chapter 3

  Carl’s

  We got in the van, David at the wheel, and headed down the long driveway of the Duncan Arms, passing a cluster of Adirondack chairs on the lawn. The van rattled and shook as we flew over a speed bump.

  “Sorry.” He tapped the brake. “I don’t usually drive this thing. It’s a rental and the suspension’s awful.”

  I asked him what he normally drove, and he told me a Range Rover. That was definitely a cut above what we were in.

  “Take a left at the bottom there.” I pointed. “Carl’s is just a few miles from here, a little after the downtown area.”

  We pulled onto the main road, passing a field that stretched lush and green for twenty acres, the property bounded by a post-and-rail fence, horses grazing at one end.

  “I take it you’ve been here before,” David said.

  I grabbed my sunglasses from my handbag. “I grew up here. My mother still lives in town.”

  “But you were staying at the Duncan Arms.”

  I understood the confusion. Why would someone come back to a place where she had a family home and go to an inn? “I didn’t want to stay at the house. My sister’s there right now and…well, we’re not exactly speaking.”

  “Families can be complicated,” he said.

  I turned away and looked out the window as we passed an antiques shop. What could I say? How could I explain the way things were with Mariel? Sometimes the ice on our chilly relationship would thaw, and we’d become friendly again. Then we’d argue—usually over a topic we’d quarreled about too many times before. I’d tell her she should stop asking Mom for money. She’d say I should stop telling her what to do.

  What I really wanted was for her and Mom not to exclude me from their conversations. It hadn’t bothered me as much when Dad was alive, because he and I were close. But in the years since his death, I’d felt like Mom and Mariel were living together in one bubble and I was off in another one.

  “I hadn’t talked to Mariel in a year and a half,” I said. “Until last night. And I’m not sure I’d really count that as talking. We just happened to be in the same room for a couple of minutes.” We stopped at a traffic light; the engine idled. “Do you have siblings?”

  “I don’t,” David said. “Not anymore.” Two girls walked their bikes across the road. “I did have an older brother. Beau. But he died when I was twelve.” His comment would have seemed matter-of-fact if I hadn’t caught the sadness in
his eyes.

  “I’m sorry. Was he…was he ill?” Too late, I realized I shouldn’t have asked, shouldn’t have pried.

  “Nope. Not ill.” David stared through the windshield. “He dove off a cliff into a lake. He didn’t know the water was shallow. ‘Cervical spine injury secondary to blunt trauma.’ That was the official cause of death.”

  “How awful. I’m so sorry.” I couldn’t begin to imagine the effect that must have had on David and his parents.

  “It was a stupid, stupid thing to do.” His voice was tinged with anger, almost as though he were speaking to his brother instead of me. “We were really close. He was two years older, but we did a lot together. Played Nintendo, fished, skateboarded, watched movies from the video store. But he had this wild—no, careless—he had this careless streak. I wish I’d been with him that day, but I wasn’t.”

  I could hear the regret in his voice, and as the light turned green and we drove on I wondered what it would be like to be that close to a brother or sister and then lose them. Especially that way. Devastating was the only word I could come up with.

  I studied the dials on the dashboard, the bottle of water in the cup holder. “My sister and I were never very close,” I said. “It was better when we were young, but even then, she was always trying to compete with me. I took violin lessons; she took violin lessons. I learned to ride a pony, so she had to ride. When I was a senior in high school, I quit the school paper because she’d joined as a freshman. I had nothing of my own; she was always chasing me. The worst thing, though, was when she stole the guy I was in love with. Still am in love with. She’s marrying him in two weeks. Right here in town.”

  David turned to look at me. “Your sister is marrying your ex-boyfriend?”

  “Yes.”

  He let out a low whistle. “Oh, boy.”

  “Obviously, I’m not going to the wedding. I’m leaving town tonight.”

  “Did she think you were going?”

  “I don’t know. And I don’t care. I just want to get back to Chicago.”

  We passed a grassy hill, the site of an old Indian burial ground. “So home is the Windy City?” he asked.

  Was it? “I guess so, although it doesn’t feel like home. Not yet, anyway. I’ve been there only a year, so maybe that’s not surprising.”

  “Where did you live before Chicago? Were you here on the East Coast?”

  “No. I lived in Los Angeles. I went to UCLA and never left after that. I loved it there. Even after Mariel followed me to LA to go to Cal State, I stayed. And we got along for a while. But now she’s wrecked California for me. There isn’t enough room there for the three of us.”

  “The three of you?”

  “She and Carter and me.”

  “Oh, yeah. Carter.”

  “I got lucky and found a job in Chicago. Moving seemed like a good solution. I would have taken almost any job to get out of LA. So home is definitely not Chicago, but where it is, I don’t know.” We drove alongside the stone wall that bounded Four Winds, a boarding school. “What about you? Do you live in Brooklyn?”

  “Brooklyn? No, that’s where Alex’s studio is. I live in Manhattan. Upper East Side.”

  Upper East Side. He looked like an Upper East Side kind of guy. Nice clothes. That almost-beard thing. A Range Rover. I could imagine his apartment: on a high floor, all windows, modern furniture, no food in the fridge because he ate out every night, like Carter.

  “Where are you from?” I asked. “I mean, originally.”

  “I’m from here,” he said.

  “Connecticut?”

  “No, the East Coast. I grew up in New York. Pound Ridge.”

  “I’ve been to Pound Ridge,” I said. “It’s pretty.” It wasn’t that far from Hampstead, about fifty miles, but far enough for our paths never to have crossed.

  “My parents are still there. They have a business in the area. They’re accountants. Semiretired, though. Funny, I’m the son of two accountants and I’m terrible at math. Go figure.”

  “I’m terrible at math as well.” I heard the hand rattle in the back as we went over a bump. “So why did you have to drive that sculpture here?” I asked. “Doesn’t Ana do that kind of stuff?”

  “She had to catch a plane to Aspen to meet with Alex and a couple of his clients. To help her out, I stayed at his studio to make sure the art-transport company got everything off all right. But the hand was in another room, and I didn’t realize until it was too late.”

  I didn’t know anything about art or art-transport companies. I’d never thought about how things ended up at art shows or museums, but I was sure there had to be an inventory.

  “And there was some confusion with the inventory,” he added, as if reading my mind. “Anyway, I felt like an idiot. And I don’t want this to be Ana’s problem. She’s got a tough enough job as it is. Alex can be a real pain in the ass.”

  I tapped Alex Lingon into my phone’s browser. Up popped dozens of pictures of a man with…what was he with? “I’m looking at pictures of him. What are these things? They look like giant fish heads.”

  “They are giant fish heads. That’s what he used to do. It’s how he got started, back in the eighties.”

  “Are they papier-mâché as well?”

  “They’re made from some other kind of paper substance.”

  I scrolled on, through oversize body parts, arteries, a kidney—his more recent work. I’d seen enough. I put away the phone and rolled down the window. The breeze smelled like summer, trees, and sunlight, and you could almost touch the sky.

  We arrived in Hampstead’s downtown, with its clapboard colonial buildings, mullioned windows, wraparound porches, and window boxes of purple dahlias and pink hydrangeas. There was a sign in front of the Book Nook, probably advertising an author event. People were going into the Rolling Pin bakery and the cheese shop. A banner at the park by the town hall advertised the annual Sunflower Festival at Grant’s Farm, the big antiques weekend, and the upcoming outdoor movie night where North by Northwest was going to be shown.

  “How are the restaurants around here?” David asked, glancing at the people eating breakfast on the porch of Abigail’s.

  “They’re very good.”

  “I would think they would be, with so many people coming out here from the city.”

  “New Yorkers like you,” I said in a teasing tone.

  “Ha. Except I’m not like most New Yorkers that way. I’d rather cook than eat out.”

  That was a surprise. I had friends in Manhattan and they always ate out. “You must be a good cook, then.”

  He grinned. “I’m an excellent cook. I’d never want to do it professionally. Too crazy a business. And horrible hours. But I like cooking for myself and Ana, and for friends. It’s relaxing.”

  Relaxing? “That’s the last thing I’d ever do to relax. I hate to cook. Except the occasional dessert. I have a sweet tooth.” Cooking took too much time, my kitchen was small, and it got really hot in there. But good for him that he found it relaxing. “What do you like to cook?”

  “Pretty much anything. I can make chicken in about thirty different ways. I do some nice meals with swordfish and salmon and tuna. And I can’t resist a good steak every now and then. But I’m happy cooking just about anything, as long as people enjoy it. I always try things out on Ana first, though. Then I tinker until I get it the way I like it.”

  I hoped Ana appreciated having a man who cooked for her.

  “What do you do to relax?” he asked.

  Lately I wasn’t doing much at all, letting my job fill a lot of my time. “I don’t know. Read books, watch movies. I used to ride. Not too much anymore, though. That was when I lived here.”

  “You mean ride horses?”

  I nodded. “Yes. My mother still has two of them. They’re semiretired, but I hop on every now and then.”

  “I’d never do that in a million years.”

  “Why not?”

  “To start with, you could fa
ll off, get thrown, break a leg. It’s not safe.”

  “Everything has some risk,” I said.

  He was silent for a moment. “Yeah, it does. Not everyone considers that as much as they should, but I do.” I wondered if he was thinking about his brother.

  The business district was behind us and the road quiet again. We drove by the turnoff that went to the river and the covered bridge, the place I’d once hoped would be the location of my first kiss. Instead, it happened behind the school gym, Tom Parker having suffered from a distinct lack of imagination.

  Carl’s was up ahead, a converted wooden barn surrounded by a field. David pulled in, parked, and opened the van’s back doors. We slid out the hand and carried it into the store, where Carl stood behind the counter, talking on his cell phone. His slight frame seemed overwhelmed by his full head of curly salt-and-pepper hair. “That’s him,” I said. “He’ll know what to do.” At least I hoped he would.

  I started to walk toward the counter, but David grabbed my arm. “Hold on a minute. I was just thinking—what if he recognizes Alex’s work?”

  He had a point. Alex had just been in the New York Times and he had a show coming up here in town. I didn’t see any way around it, though. “I think we have to take that chance. Besides, the hand looks a little different from his previous work. And if you don’t want Ana to lose her job…”

  “Just let me do the talking.”

  “Of course. I’m only trying to help.”

  “That’s what I’m afraid of,” he said, but I could see he was struggling not to smile.

  “What’s this?” Carl asked as we approached the counter. “A giant hand giving people the finger?”

  “It’s not supposed to be giving people the finger,” David said. “It’s supposed to be a regular hand.” He placed the sculpture on the floor and turned it to display the palm and the four crushed and bent fingers. “It’s been in an accident.”

  Carl rubbed his chin. “I’ll say.”

  “I was hoping you could tell me the best way to repair it. You sell materials to make papier-mâché, right?”