Finding the Forger

by Libby Sternberg

  “Are you thinking what I’m thinking?” I said, even though I wasn’t even sure what I was thinking, only that Neville was hiding something.

  “Yup. C’mon!” She stood, took a final, caffeine-jolting gulp of her drink, and tossed the empty cup into a nearby trashcan. “We’re going to follow him.”

  “Not again!” I clambered after her, juggling my drink with my purse and bags.

  “What again? We never followed Neville before.” She took long strides toward the door.

  “Maybe you didn’t,” I muttered, but she didn’t hear me.

  Following Neville this time was tricky business. The parking lot at the mall has a crazy layout, and sometimes we’ve had trouble finding where our own car was parked, let alone following another car. But we were in luck. Neville was getting into his dad’s Mercedes just a couple rows over from where Connie had parked her car. We walked a few rows out of the way, though, so he wouldn’t see us.

  I’d barely gotten into the car before Connie was taking off.

  “This’ll be tricky,” she said, slowing down. “Not many cars around and I don’t want him to notice us.” She reached behind her, pulled a white canvas beach hat out, and scrunched it on her head. “Duck.”

  “What?”

  “Duck down. Or slouch. Or something. At the very least, we can try to make ourselves unrecognizable.” She placed sunglasses on her face to add to her new beachcomber look. Meanwhile, I slid down in my seat.

  “Don’t you have another hat?”

  “I don’t know … Look in the back seat!”

  She was turning left and right in quick succession as she wove through the parking garage, so searching through the debris in her back seat was like trying to find a life preserver while the ship was pitching to and fro. Not good for the stomach. Especially one that was now home to a double chocolate mocha espresso cappuccino ice. Ugh.

  All I found was a hideous straw thing with plastic flowers on it and a chiffon bow tie for under the chin.

  “Yeah, wear that,” Connie said.

  “Are you nuts?” I said. I put the hat on my lap and just stared at it. For all I knew, it was alive and could hurt me. “Where’d you get this thing?”

  “Second hand shop. It was going to be a gift for you.” Connie veered out onto York Road and headed south. “Put it on!”

  I did as she said, but hated it. “A gift for me? You are nuts! Or maybe just unusually cruel!”

  “It was going to be a gag gift, silly. Don’t worry, I already picked out a real gift.” She slammed on the brakes at a red light, and my flowered hat nearly flew off my head, which would have been okay with me.

  I put on sunglasses, too, so no one would recognize me. To heck with Neville. I didn’t want anyone I knew to see me in this get-up.

  “He’s getting away from us!” As soon as the light turned green, Connie took off down the road, quickly turning right to find a back street that paralleled York Road, and checking at each intersection to see if she could find Neville’s car in the traffic. He was heading into town, and there weren’t many places there he could be going.

  “I’m thinking the museum. What do you think?” she asked me.

  “Uh … I think so,” I said, even though I had no idea where he was headed.

  “Yup. The museum. He’s probably headed there.”

  I didn’t feel this was the right time to tell her that Sarah and I had already done this follow-Neville-to-the-museum-and-home routine. I’d left out the details of that trip when I’d given her my Neville information. It didn’t matter. Connie was intently staring at the road.

  She eased off the accelerator and turned back to York Road. She was going to let him get ahead of her and meet him at the museum. Okay, I’d go along for this ride.

  “Poor Neville,” I said, suddenly feeling sorry for the guy.

  “Yeah, it’s sad. Kid’s caught in the middle of a divorce. Mother’s trying to get ahead in the art world but isn’t doing the stuff that’s in vogue right now. Kid’s shipped off to Dad. Kid decides to make parents enter a world of hurt, and what better way than this? Embarrass Daddy on his home turf. Show Mommy how much he loves her …”

  “You’re freaking me out here, Connie. You sound like a psychiatrist or something.”

  She shrugged. “It’s not complicated. Just common sense.”

  Before long, we were at the museum, which wasn’t open yet for visitors. But there, alone in the parking lot, was Neville’s father’s car. And Neville was just sitting behind the wheel, staring at his hands as if he didn’t know what to do.

  It was oddly disappointing and kind of anti-climatic, if you know what I mean. I’d expected a long chase and some melodramatics. Maybe even a race on foot around the museum grounds. Instead, Neville just sat there, as if he were waiting for us—or someone—to come along and stop him before he stole again.

  Before I could say “boo,” Connie veered into a spot behind him and was out of the car. I followed her, completely forgetting I had that kooky hat on. Funny thing about hats—you forget you have them on while they’re on, but you feel like you have them on once you take them off. Go figure.

  “Neville!” Connie shouted.

  Neville looked up, and his face was ghostly white, stricken, as if he were coming to grips with some painful event. He rolled down the window.

  “What are you doing here?” he asked quietly.

  “I think you know.” Connie stood next to his car and I stood right behind her. What a pair we made—she in her beach headgear, me in my clown outfit. “What’s in the bag, Neville? It’s not a shirt, is it?”

  His mouth fell open, and it looked for an instant like he would protest. Then his eyes widened as if he realized all was lost. “No, it’s not,” he said slowly. “I … I …” He hung his head in shame. Then he pulled the bag from the passenger seat and handed it to Connie. She carefully pulled out the bag’s contents—an abstract expressionist painting about the size of a calendar, with bold clean lines done in reds and grays.

  “Can I talk to my father first—before you do anything?” he asked. He sounded so pathetic, you could hardly say no. Connie handed him her cell phone.

  “How do you work this thing?” he asked softly.

  Chapter Twenty

  IN RETROSPECT, giving Neville the cell phone may have been a mistake. It meant Neville’s dad came swooping in before the police got there, refused to let the cops talk to the kid, and whisked him away before I even had a chance to say goodbye, let alone remove that darn hat from my head. Just my luck, too, that a Sunpapers photographer showed up with the men in blue. They snapped a photo of the scene, including me in the floral contraption. Connie had wised up and removed her headgear by then.

  It was a sad story, though, and I can’t say that I feel really proud of myself. In fact, I think all of us—Kerrie, Sarah, and Doug—had a case of the guilts after it came out. Connie had pretty much gotten the story right. Neville was really troubled by his parents’ divorce, had even been seeing a therapist for awhile, and had come to America specifically to see if he could snap himself out of a depression and start over. His father and he hadn’t always gotten along. He adored his mother … it was practically a textbook case.

  But once we heard it, we all wished we’d reached out more to him beyond the superficial “isn’t he the cutest thing” stuff. And in Doug’s case, he wished he’d made an effort beyond the “get your hands off my girlfriend, ugh ugh” stuff. Doug had even imitated Neville a couple times in the last week, and been pretty darn good at it, too.

  But all that quickly evaporated into the past because, just two days after Neville’s arrest, he was gone—as in out of the country. His father must have arranged it, even though Bertrand Witherspoon said he had nothing to do with it. And his mother, contacted in London, wasn’t sure where Neville was even though she didn’t sound all that worried in the television interview I saw.

  To make up for all this trauma, Mom took me shopping on Tuesday ni
ght and let me buy a burgundy velvet dress that screamed “oh yeah, baby.” Meanwhile, she promised to finish the green dress for Christmas.

  The only cloud on this horizon was that it was too late for Mistletoe Dance tickets. So Kerrie, Sarah, Doug, Hector, and I decided to make a special night of it by going out to dinner on the last day of school before the holiday break.

  And you know what? With Neville taken care of, Doug and I back together, and Kerrie and Sarah friends again, I wasn’t too upset about not having tickets to the Mistletoe Dance. Sure it was the biggest dance outside of the prom. And it was a holiday dance, which meant it would be particularly festive, with mistletoe and everything. And it would be the only dance where you could wear a totally cool winter dress … Wait a minute, maybe I was upset!

  I pushed those feelings aside as I powdered my nose and glided on some lip gloss. The usual holiday hits were blaring from my clock radio. Focus on the good stuff, I kept thinking—it wasn’t too bad going out to a posh restaurant with Doug and my friends. Giving him his Christmas gift. Getting mine from him. And no Neville around to mess things up.

  But the thought of Neville brought the black cloud of nagging sadness into my room.

  “What time is Doug picking you up?” my mother called from the hallway.

  “In a half hour. Why?”

  “I want to take pictures.”

  Since she couldn’t see me, I rolled my eyes. “Okay!”

  Standing, I looked at myself in the mirror and felt pretty darn good, even though I was just in my slip. This haircut looked even better, now that the just-cut edges had mellowed out a bit. It was a keeper. After dabbing perfume behind my ears, I was just about to shimmy into my dress when my mother knocked on my door.

  “Connie’s on the phone for you!”

  Opening the door a crack, I grabbed the cordless from her outstretched hand. “I didn’t even hear it ring!”

  Mom just shrugged. “Turn your radio down.”

  “Hello?” I said into the phone.

  “Bianca? I can hardly hear you. Turn your radio off!” Connie’s melodious voice shouted at me through the receiver. I did as she said.

  “Why are you calling? I’ve got to get ready to go out.”

  “This’ll take just a minute. Can you go in my room and get my Witherspoon file?”

  Groaning, I pulled on my robe and walked to her room. “Why didn’t you have Mom do this?”

  “I figure you’ve already snooped in the file, so I’m not breaking any confidentiality with you. Why involve Mom?” she snickered.

  “Where are you, anyway?” I opened her bedroom door and flipped on the light. She didn’t need to tell me where the files were. Without being directed, I headed to the standing file on the corner table by the window.

  “His office at his home. Witherspoon’s.”

  “You forgot to take his file with you?” I plucked it from the bunch, and for once it was easy to suppress the temptation to look at the other files stuck there. I needed to get going. My little burgundy dress awaiteth.

  “I grabbed the wrong one. No big deal. I just need to check on one thing. Open to the expense account information. It should be in the back. I need to tell him …” She chuckled and I heard a bell-like noise followed by a whir and music. “His office is phenomenal. Tons of electronics. You should see this clock he has.”

  “Huh?” Flipping through the pages, I found the ones she was looking for. “Got ‘em. What do you need? And why are you meeting with him, anyway? I thought you were off the payroll once you turned his son in.”

  “He’s leaving his firm. Going to London to meet with his ex about Neville. Then taking early retirement. I thought he might leave a recommendation for me with someone else at the firm.”

  “That sounds like a long shot.”

  “Well, yeah. But I’ve got to make a living.”

  “What do you need? I’ve got the file, but I’ve to get going.”

  “The total. It should be at the bottom of the page. It should be the expenses plus retainer.”

  As I rattled off different figures in response to her questions, she interspersed our conversation with more awe-struck comments about Mr. Witherspoon’s at-home electronics. Just as we finished, her tone changed and she started talking to someone else, telling him she was describing his office to me, her sister, because it was so “dazzling.” Dazzling? Was that supposed to impress him? I held the phone away from my ear and silently gagged. Then I heard Witherspoon speak. “Yes, I’m a gadget aficionado. I think I should have been an engineer.” Connie came back on to say thanks, she had to go.

  After I replaced the phone in its hall cradle, I went back to my preparations, which didn’t take long. But I was distracted. Something nagged at me I couldn’t quite figure out. After attaching my fake diamond chip earrings to my ears, I shook my head to try and knock the feeling out of me, and went downstairs.

  In a few minutes, Doug came in and Mom did the “ooh, aah” routine and snapped some pictures. Even Tony poked his head out of his room and his silence was as close to a “you look great” pronouncement as I’d ever get from him, so I was a pretty happy camper.

  The beginning of the date went well, with Doug giving me a goose-bump-inducing kiss in the car before we took off. This was going to be a great night.

  Next stop was Kerrie and Sarah’s, where we did the ol’ picture-taking routine again. As I waited in the Daniels’ foyer with Doug, the nagging feeling came back. What was it? Connie calling me for help. That had to be it. Something out of the ordinary. Something that didn’t fit.

  No, it wasn’t that. It was something else that didn’t fit. What was it? What did she say? He said he’d wished he’d been an engineer.

  An engineer. Someone who was good with electronic things. Someone who could fix a VCR/DVD so it wouldn’t blink. Someone who could tape shows in a flash. Not someone like Neville, who didn’t know all the functions on his cell phone!

  “You look nice, Bianca,” said a smiling Mrs. Daniels. Kerrie came into the room and frowned.

  “Where’s Dad?” Kerrie said. “We have to get going. Sarah and Hector are already at the restaurant.”

  “He’s on a business call. He’ll be right down.” Mrs. Daniels walked upstairs to get her husband. In a few minutes, he was downstairs snapping pictures, and we were all going through the “ooh aah” routine all over again.

  On to the restaurant, and still I couldn’t shake it—something not fitting. Why should it matter if old Witherspoon had wanted to be an engineer? And there was something else now—Mr. Daniels on the phone, his business phone.

  But I couldn’t think about those things because we were starting our festive dinner with a gift exchange. I was thrilled to get a book I’d been wanting from Kerrie, and a bunch of body sprays and nail polish from Sarah. They were both pretty pleased with my gifts of scarves and earrings. And Doug was genuinely happy with his riding gloves, which he tried on right away.

  But man, oh man, did he take the cake! He gave me a little velvet-covered box, and in it was—a locket! An oval locket in shiny gold. And inside were two goofy pictures of us we’d had taken at one of those machines at the mall one Saturday.

  “Doug!” I looked him in the eye and squeezed his arm. “This is beautiful!”

  “Let me help you put it on.” He took it from me, stood behind me, and attached the clasp.

  “Kerrie,” I said, suddenly teary-eyed. “You knew. You helped him pick it out.”

  “Hey, at least he thought to ask for help!”

  “Yeah, I do get some credit,” Doug laughed.

  “We almost didn’t think he’d be able to get it,” Kerrie said. She picked up her menu and looked at it again. “I’d seen it at that antique jewelry store, and they were getting ready to close …”

  “So I called them,” Doug said. “And then I called Kerrie to make sure it was the right one.”

  “Yeah, and then we had to convince the guy to hold it for him. I think he want
ed to jack up the price!” Kerrie laughed.

  So that was probably when my mother had seen Doug and Kerrie together—when they were shopping downtown for my gift. What a crazy couple of weeks this had been!

  Sarah rubbed her head like she had a headache.

  “I should have driven,” Hector said, looking at her with concerned eyes.

  When we all looked at them with question marks on our faces, Sarah explained.

  “My trunk is still broken,” she said. “Because of that, Hector thinks the exhaust leaks into the car and gives me a headache.”

  “He could be right about that—get it fixed,” Doug said seriously.

  “I’m taking it to a mechanic tomorrow.”

  I remembered the night we’d opened up Sarah’s trunk and found the painting—a painting that had yet to turn up, by the way. Maybe that was what was bothering me—that incident. The painting there one minute, and gone the next. Someone who had known where she was had to have taken it. And the only one who’d known where she’d gone that night was Hector because he was the only one to call her at the Daniels’s house.

  Wait a minute. Hector had called Sarah on the Daniels’ home phone. There was another phone in the house. The business phone.

  “Kerrie,” I said with sudden urgency. “Do you remember the night Hector called looking for Sarah—the Sunday we went to the museum opening? The Sunday when I spilled sushi all over you?

  Kerrie looked at me like I had two heads. “Yeah.”

  “Did anybody else call—on the business phone—that night?”

  She pulled back as if I had crazy cooties she might catch if she got too close. “Yeah. I remember because my mother wanted Dad to watch a PBS show with her that night and he waved me into his office and told me to tell Mom he’d be right down, he was on the phone with Bertrand Witherspoon.”

  My heart was thumping fast. Bertrand Witherspoon. He knew electronic gadgets. He knew how to switch the video tape on the security cameras. He had access to the museum. He knew art! And Connie was talking to him right now, finalizing her account with him.