Finding the Forger

by Libby Sternberg

  So, after a quick turn around the Harbor, where I pointed out things of interest in a thin, high-pitched voice, I pretended to not really know where most things were (Fort McHenry? Must be in Washington!), and asked him to take me home, the location of which I absolutely knew.

  As we neared the final dropoff, it was getting dark. Neville double-parked in front of my house, but before I could say “thanks for the near-death experience” and scoot out, he was bounding around to open my door and escort me to the door.

  Once there, he told me he’d like to see me again. And he kissed me goodnight.

  As soon as I saw what he was up to, I pulled away, but it was too late. He grabbed my arm and planted a wet one on me in the blink of an eye. Not that I did blink. I had my eyes wide open.

  Now, I’m not going to lie to you and say that being kissed by a suave, good-looking Brit is some kind of hardship. And come on— even the most loyal of girlfriends can fantasize about a super hunk or two. If Doug hadn’t been so paranoid about Neville to begin with, I’d probably have laughed off the kiss as a friendly gesture best not repeated.

  But instead, I felt guilty. And what do we do when we feel guilty? All together now—we confess!

  After I slammed the door shut and said hi to Mom, who was at the kitchen table sipping a cup of tea and doing the Sunday crossword puzzle, I headed to the computer.

  “Can I get online?” I asked.

  “Huh? Sure,” Mom said. “Did you have a good time?”

  “Yup. Great,” I said. But I was already clicking through to my email box. Nothing there except a few Viagra ads, but I could see that Kerrie was already on-line, so I IM’ed her right away.

  “you’re home early,” she wrote back after my hello.

  “didn’t like being out alone,” I responded. “how was doug?”

  “fine. he left right when we did. haven’t talked to him.”

  Hmm … didn’t like that. It implied that she did talk to him on other occasions.

  “have fun with Neville?” she asked.

  “it was okay.” Then, the confession: “he kissed me goodnight, can you believe it?”

  “you’re kidding.”

  “i think he likes me.”

  “watch out for him.”

  “don’t worry. i’m doug’s girl.”

  “glad to hear that. doug’s a great guy.”

  For some reason, this last message irked me. It implied a familiarity I didn’t care for—“don’t go breaking Doug’s heart because I, Kerrie, am his guardian angel, and he’s been great to you.”

  But all I wrote back was “i know. what are you doing?”

  Then she started telling me about how she just finished her English paper and Sarah was talking to her dad about colleges. It made me feel good to know they were on an even keel again, even if my life was a busted dinghy in The Perfect Storm.

  Okay, I know what you’re thinking about now. You’re thinking, why did I blurt out that Neville had kissed me? But I felt unguilted as soon as I did it. It made the whole incident feel normal, run-of-the-mill. “Oh, by the way, Neville kissed me.” That sort of thing. It put it in perspective.

  Just as I was about to log off, something odd happened. Sarah chimed in, using Kerrie’s IM screen name.

  “sarah here. give me a call,” she typed.

  Uh-oh. She must have found out how I’d ruined her budding romance with Hector. That’ll be a fun phone conversation, I figured. Before I was able to type a response, though, she sent another message my way.

  “is connie home?” she wrote.

  Egads. Why was she asking that? I felt like screaming.

  As if on cue, Connie wandered into the kitchen just then with the cordless in hand, and sweetly asked me if I’d free up the phone line.

  “Haven’t you been on there long enough?” she said in her usual dulcet tones.

  “I just got on.”

  Connie turned to Mom for reinforcement. “How long’s she been on?”

  Because she didn’t answer right away, I could tell that Mom hadn’t been paying attention to the time. It didn’t matter, though. She took Connie’s side all the same.

  “Let your sister use the phone, Bianca,” she said.

  With a loving grimace in Connie’s direction, I typed a quick “g2g, connie’s here—needs to use phone,” said my goodbyes to Sarah and Kerrie, and exited the email program.

  Connie immediately punched the phone’s “on” button, clicked off, and dialed the seven-digit voice mail retrieval system. As she listened to the recording, she smiled wickedly at me, which meant it was a message for me.

  “Hey, let me listen!” I said, reaching for the phone.

  “Be quick! I need to make a call.”

  No wonder she was smirking. It was debonair Neville, calling from his father’s cell phone on the way home, telling me what a really “fine time” he’d had and how he hoped he could call me sometime soon.

  “I thought you had a boyfriend,” Connie said when I handed her back the phone.

  Mom looked up again, puzzled and concerned. “What?”

  “I do have a boyfriend. Neville’s just a … friend. Someone I just met.”

  “Who’s Neville?” Mom asked.

  “Someone I met at the art exhibit. Neville Witherspoon. The son of one of the museum directors.”

  “Neville Witherspoon?” Connie asked, her eyes wide as saucers. “As in the Witherspoons?”

  “Yeah, that’s the one. Why?”

  “I’ve been trying to get in to see the elder Mr. Witherspoon for months,” she said. “His law firm keeps a PI on retainer. I’ve been wanting to do a presentation but can’t get my foot in the door.”

  My mother looked at me and I instantly knew what she was thinking: maybe you can help out your sister, hon.

  “I hardly know him!” I practically shouted. Yup. But he did kiss me goodnight. “And besides, I have a boyfriend.”

  “Boyfriend or not, if you see Neville again, tell him about me, would you? Maybe mention that I’ve been trying to see his father.”

  I got up and started to leave the room, but Connie continued talking after me. “Ask him if there’s anyone in particular I should ask to see!”

  On the stairs, I turned to her and smiled. Now was my chance to cash in. I’ve found you can’t put sibling-capital in the bank. You can only spend it when you get it. So, if your sibling wants something from you, use up the goodwill payment early.

  “Let me use the phone first,” I said sweetly.

  “What?”

  “I’ve got to call Sarah quick. She said she needs to talk to me. And maybe to you, too,” I said, reaching for the phone from Connie’s hand. She didn’t resist.

  As I ran upstairs to my room, I punched in the Daniels’ phone number. Sarah answered on the second ring, which meant she’d been hoping I’d call her.

  “What’s up?” I asked nonchalantly.

  “I’ve got a big problem!” she whispered. “Hold on.”

  I could hear her walking, and knew she was probably headed for a private spot in the house where no one would overhear. I was in my room by now and closed the door so the cone of silence could descend over both of us.

  “I … I found something,” she said breathlessly after a few seconds.

  “Found what?”

  In the background, I heard Mrs. Daniels’ voice saying something about carry-out for dinner tomorrow night. I love carry-out.

  “Can I come over?” Sarah asked. “I’ll show you.”

  I thought about the little bit of homework I’d yet to do. I thought about the hem on my uniform skirt I had to fix. I thought about the call to Doug I wanted to make. And I sighed.

  “Sure,” I said. “Connie’s here, too.”

  “Good.” After she hung up, I sat for a minute with the phone in my hands, wondering what I was getting myself into.

  Twenty minutes later, Sarah was knocking at the door. But when I went to ask her in, she shook her head “no”
and asked me to come outside with her.

  “Maybe I should get Connie,” I offered, remembering her request to talk to my sister. I didn’t want to get in over my head. I’d done enough of that already.

  Quickly, I two-at-a-timed the steps upstairs and barged into Connie’s room without knocking. She was still on the phone from when I handed over the cordless fifteen minutes earlier. From the sappy smile on her face, I could tell it wasn’t a business call.

  “Tell Kurt you have to go,” I said. “I need you. Business.” I rushed back out before she had a chance to ask questions, but saw anger clouds storm onto her face. I figured the Witherspoon connection was enough to entice her. She might assume I had Neville by the ear, waiting to hear her sales pitch.

  Shortly after I landed outside on the top marble step, Connie joined us. If she was disappointed the Witherspoon firm wasn’t there waiting for her, she didn’t let it show.

  “What’s up?” she asked, thumping her hands against her arms to warm up. It was getting a bit nippy.

  Sarah looked at both of us with wide, scared eyes. “Come with me.”

  We followed her down the street to where her old beat-up car was parked, its front fenders the only two inches of the car safely inside the “No Parking Beyond This Sign” sign. Looking up and down the street both ways to make sure no one saw her, she went to the trunk, which she smacked hard with her fist. It popped open. (Some old fashioned automatic opener, I guess.)

  Inside, on top of some old newspapers, a tire, a flashlight, a battered case of some kind, and two Cosmopolitan magazines, was a painting. It was blue and white and gray, kind of streaky, with a yellow ball the size of a quarter painted in the upper right hand corner. Outside of the museum, it didn’t look like art any more. It looked like a child’s imagination gone wild, kind of whimsical and playful, and if it hadn’t been on stretched canvas, I could have seen it smiling from some proud mom’s refrigerator door, anchored by magnets from the local appliance repair shop.

  “Holy sh—” Connie began to say, but I trumped her with my own shriek of “Sarah! How on earth did you get this?”

  Her eyes teared up, and she shook her head and shrugged her shoulders. “I don’t know! I don’t know! It was there when I went to get my blouse out of my car, when I was trying to find a blouse Kerrie could change into at the museum!”

  Oh, man! That was when she couldn’t get back in because the car door had been locked. Whoever put it in her trunk had keys. Probably Hector!

  Connie leaned over and studied it. “This is it,” she said definitively. “I’d put money on it.”

  “This is what?” I asked.

  “The painting that went missing this weekend.”

  “There weren’t any missing paintings that I saw,” I said. Yup, like the museum would just let an empty frame hang on the wall as an advertisement for would-be art thieves (“Steal from us! We won’t notice!”)

  “A Bargenstahler,” she said, accent and all. “Some up-and-coming German. Worth about twenty grand or more. And if he gets hot, it could be worth lots more in a few years.” She must have been studying art appraisals.

  “When was it taken?” I asked.

  “They’re not sure. A replacement was hung in its place, but no one noticed until this weekend.”

  “You mean a forgery was put up?” I pressed. Sarah stood mute and afraid in the cold dark evening.

  “Yup,” said Connie, who turned the moment she heard a car drive up behind us, and quickly slammed the trunk so no one would see the painting.

  Then Connie pulled a Polaroid photo from the breast pocket of her blue Oxford shirt. She held it out for us to see. Although it was cheesy, it appeared to be a picture of a painting about the same size as the Bargenstahler, and in the same shades. But the streaks in the Polaroid’s painting were at a sharper angle. And the yellow ball was muddy, as if the painter hadn’t bothered to clean his brush before dipping it in the new color.

  “Whoever did that fake isn’t very good,” I murmured.

  Connie laughed. “That’s the beauty of this scheme. Whoever’s taking these things only takes abstracts and doesn’t even bother to do a full-court-press forgery. He just uses whatever paint’s on hand and throws it on the same-sized canvas in the same general shapes.” She tapped her nail on the photo. “That’s standard-issue gray paint from Home Depot.”

  “What am I going to do?” asked Sarah. “I can’t just take this to the police! I didn’t even know what it was at first!” She sounded like she was going to cry.

  Connie’s head snapped up. “What do you mean, at first?” Connie said. “Who’d you talk to? How’d you find out?”

  “I called someone,” Sarah said sheepishly.

  “Hector!” I said. “Oh no!”

  “The guard?” Connie asked. Can we all say “Deep doo-doo”?

  Sarah nodded.

  “You called Hector?” Connie shook her head in amazement and didn’t wait for an answer. “Okay, here’s what I’m going to do. I’m going to call Fawn at the museum and tell her I’ve got the Bargenstahler and will drop it off tonight. Wait right here.”

  She ran back to the house while Sarah and I stood out in the cold.

  “Sarah,” I said, “why’d you call Hector?”

  “Because I thought I was in trouble. I needed help.” She rubbed her cold arms. “And he’s innocent!”

  But she sounded like she was still convincing herself of that point. She called Hector, I guessed, because she wanted to reassure herself that he wasn’t guilty. Whatever he’d said, it hadn’t quite done the trick. She still had doubts. And so did I.

  In a minute, Connie was back with her car keys and two sweaters, one for each of us.

  “Come on,” Connie said. “We’re going for a milkshake. I want to talk.”

  I had a strong feeling that the talk would have to take priority over the milkshake.

  Chapter Twelve

  SHAKEY’S OLDE FASHIONED Soda Shoppe, a new corner store just two blocks from home, was designed as a cheery little spot, what with its white and black tile and wrought iron chairs and tables. Tonight, however, as Connie laid it on the line, a cloud of gloom hovered over our table by the door.

  After gathering information from Sarah—when had she last looked in her trunk, where had the car been parked at the museum, who had keys to that door, and what did Sarah know about Hector—Connie set it all out for her, cold and hard.

  “Hector’s the obvious suspect,” Connie said, staring at Sarah. Sarah’s fingers played with the bottom of her milkshake glass. “He had the smarts, the know-how,” Connie continued. “And he probably knew your trunk would pop open.” She sipped at her kiwi smoothie.

  “But why would he put it in my trunk?”

  “To throw people off the trail. If they suspect you, the heat’s off him,” said Connie.

  “Hector wouldn’t do that to me!” protested Sarah, whose milkshake was hardly touched, whereas mine was already gone. She reached over and grabbed Connie’s hand. “You’re not going to turn him in, are you?”

  “It isn’t my job to turn him in,” Connie said, matter-of-factly. “It’s my job just to tell my client what I’ve found out and the conclusions I’ve drawn from it.”

  Well, that was hardly fair. We all knew what conclusions she was drawing.

  “When will you be doing this telling?” I asked Connie, squinting my eyes at her to send the message I was on Sarah’s side in this fight.

  “Probably tonight.”

  “Tonight?” Sarah pulled back from the table.

  “You can’t be running around town with that stolen painting in your car, Sarah,” Connie said to her. “It has to go back.”

  Sarah slumped in her seat and sighed heavily. She looked down at her nail-bitten fingers, twisted her mouth to one side, and looked up suddenly. “Why can’t we just replace it?”

  “What?!” Connie and I said in unison. Neither of us said what we were both thinking—that Sarah’s desire to make
things right meant she also thought Hector was responsible.

  But maybe Connie wasn’t thinking that exactly. She leaned into the table and looked intently at Sarah. “If you helped a friend because you thought it would keep him out of trouble, but you weren’t part of the original trouble, that isn’t as bad as being responsible for the trouble itself.”

  Okay, I can be dense sometimes, but when it comes to understanding my sister, I’m practically a member of sibling-Mensa. Her compassionate little speech meant only one thing—she thought Sarah was in on it! It was bad enough Hector had betrayed Sarah. Now Connie was piling on the guilty verdict, too.

  “Lay off, Connie!” I said. “Sarah didn’t do anything wrong. She told you—she found it in her car.”

  Connie was silent. I tried to stare at her, but the daggers in my eyes didn’t fire.

  “I didn’t help anybody do anything wrong!” Sarah said with the indignation of the unfairly accused. “And neither did Hector.” She looked around her as if trying to decide whether to bolt. “And … and there’s an easy enough way to prove it. The security camera tapes. Have you looked at them?”

  Connie slumped back in her seat. Sarah had hit on something.

  “Just got ‘em. But they’ve been looked over already.”

  “What about the ones from today?” Sarah asked defiantly.

  “I can pick them up tomorrow.”

  “That sounds like a good idea, Connie,” I said. “If Hector put the painting in Sarah’s car, it would show up on a security tape—at least it’d show him walking down that corridor with the painting.”

  “All right.”

  Connie’s “all right” inspired me. I pressed forward. “It’s getting kind of late. If you’re so concerned about your client, shouldn’t you be getting the painting back to her instead of jawboning with us?” Yes, I actually said “jawboning.” I thought it sounded, oh, I don’t know, kind of detective-like.

  “You’re right,” said Connie. She reached in her jeans pocket and pulled out a few bills, which she threw on the table like the private investigator she was. Then we all stood and made our way to the door.

  Connie drove us home in silence and easily maneuvered into a just-her-car’s-size parking spot not too far from Sarah’s car.