The Mistaken Masterpiece

by Michael D. Beil

  “Whatever happened to her?” Margaret asks.

  “Thankfully, she stopped coming to family functions,” Aunt Cathy says with a relieved expression. “The first couple of years after Phillip’s funeral, I ran into her a handful of times. I know it sounds quite juvenile of me, but if I saw her first, I turned and ran in the other direction, as fast as my legs would carry me.”

  “Is she still alive?” I ask.

  “Last I heard, yes. Still in that same apartment.”

  “Father Julian, you have to go visit her,” Margaret declares. “She can’t be hard to find—how many Prunellas can there possibly be?”

  “Oh, let’s hope she’s the last. One is more than enough,” Aunt Cathy says.

  “If Phillip made a copy of the painting and kept the original,” I say, “she might still have it. And even if she doesn’t, she can probably tell you what happened to it.”

  “Have you shown your aunt the pictures from her birthday?” Leigh Ann asks.

  “No, but I have them right here,” Father Julian says, handing an envelope to Aunt Cathy. “Although I’m not sure it matters anymore. If the original painting is gone, the year the pictures were taken just isn’t that important.”

  Aunt Cathy smiles when she sees her birthday pictures. “Oh my. This handsome young man is Denny McCormack. He lived next door, and my parents were always hopeful that we would fall in love, but neither of us was much interested in the other, except as good friends. He went away to Indiana or Illinois for college, and the summer after his senior year, he came back married.”

  “Can you tell which birthday you’re celebrating?” Margaret asks.

  “Seventeen? Could be eighteen or even nineteen. Honestly, I can’t be sure. Denny was always around at family affairs. I’ll bet our families took a dozen pictures of the two of us in front of birthday cakes over the years.”

  She flips through a few more pictures, stopping to laugh at two grumpy-looking old people on the couch in one of the more recent color snapshots. “Ask and ye shall receive. You wanted to see Prunella and Phillip, and here they are. And don’t they seem just thrilled to be with one another?”

  She hands the picture to Debbie, whose mouth drops open when she sees it. Her eyes get a little watery right away.

  “Oh my,” Debbie says. “Cale Winokum.”

  “Who’s that?” Father Julian asks.

  “He’s the young man in the picture standing in front of the fireplace,” Debbie says. “He taught art at some school in the city—Bramwell, on the West Side—but he really just wanted to be an artist. I met him through Phillip, but I don’t remember how they knew each other. They didn’t exactly have much in common, to put it mildly. Cale was this gentle, quiet, shy person. He was … well, wonderful, and so talented.”

  “Was?” I ask tentatively.

  But before she can answer, Margaret points to the older man standing in the background of the picture. “Who’s this?” she asks.

  Aunt Cathy squints at the picture and shakes her head. “I have no idea. If I had to guess, I’d say he’s a friend of Phillip’s—they’re about the same age. I don’t ever remember seeing him again. To tell the truth, I don’t really remember him from this party, but I guess photographs don’t lie.”

  “I want to hear more about this Cale Winokum guy,” Becca says to Debbie. “Whatever happened to him? Did you two ever, uh, get together?”

  “Becca, that’s kind of personal,” I say, even though I’m dying to hear her answer.

  “No, it’s all right,” Debbie assures me. “We went out on a few dates, but then, seven years ago, he just disappeared from the face of the earth, right in the middle of the school year. The school where he taught went crazy looking for him. Someone told me he joined the army, but I never believed it. He wasn’t the type, not at all. Others said he went to Europe to study painting and never came back. That one always seemed more likely to me, so that’s what I’ve chosen to believe all these years.”

  Leigh Ann sighs. “That is so sad. And you never even heard from him? A letter, a postcard, even?”

  “Not a one. I thought about looking up his family, but I never did. He made his choice, and I had to get on with my life.”

  “You, however, should go see Prunella—but please don’t tell her I sent you,” Aunt Cathy says to Father Julian. “I don’t want her looking me up. Do tell me about your visit, though. I can’t wait to hear.”

  That makes two of us, at least.

  In which Tillie provides invaluable assistance

  Finding Miss Prunella Scroggins requires some serious detective work; the four and a half brains (Margaret has the extra half) of the Red Blazer Girls are pushed to their absolute limits. And it doesn’t happen without some sacrifice; we lose a lot of good people on the way.

  Okay, so I’m exaggerating. The truth is, Rebecca opens a Manhattan phone book and—bam!—we have a phone number and address for a P. Scroggins.

  Father Julian tells us about the phone call and visit after school the next day. Despite some initial reluctance on her part to see a member of Phillip’s family, she changes her mind when she learns that he is now a priest.

  “I suppose to her that means I’m not a threat,” Father Julian says. “She was—is—definitely suspicious of my motives.”

  “What did you tell her?” Rebecca asks, grinning mischievously. “You didn’t lie, did you?”

  “Let’s say I shaded the truth a little,” he admits. “I told her that I’m doing some research about the family, and I wanted to learn more about Uncle Phillip. All of which is true, by the way.”

  “What’s she like?” Leigh Ann asks. “Is she as nutty as your aunt says?”

  “Wait, wait, wait!” Margaret insists. “First—what about the painting? Does she still have it?”

  Father Julian smiles slyly. “You girls will be proud of me. I was a regular Father Dowling in there.” He takes out his cell phone. (Yes, Father Julian has a cell phone. Weird, isn’t it? He even knows how to text, which I suppose gives him something to do during really boring confessions. His ring tone? Church bells, naturally.) “I have a picture,” he says, and hands the phone to Rebecca.

  “Did you ask her about it?” I ask.

  “I didn’t want to make her too suspicious, but when I casually remarked that I liked it, she said, ‘You too?’ which definitely struck me as odd. When I asked what she meant, she told me that a few days ago, an art gallery contacted her out of the blue about it. They told her they knew from their records that she had owned a Pommeroy—which is complete nonsense, because that painting never spent a second in their gallery—and wondered if she still did. They told her that the market for his work is down a little, but even if they couldn’t produce a buyer, they would be willing to buy it themselves and take their chances.”

  “It does seem like too much of a coincidence to be a coincidence,” Margaret says. “Did she say who it was?”

  “No, but I’ll bet you it’s the people I talked to—the Svindahl Gallery. Phillip must have done business with them; how else would they know about her owning the painting?”

  “Wait a minute!” Becca shouts. “The Svindahl Gallery? That’s where you went? Sophie, that’s the gallery where Gus works! I knew it. They’re running some kind of scam down there.”

  I have to admit, it does seem a bit odd, their contacting Prunella about a Pommeroy just days after telling Father Julian that his painting—by the same artist—isn’t worth anything unless he can prove its age. Maybe it’s not a scam, but something strange is going on.

  “So what’s Prunella going to do?” Margaret asks. “Do you think she’ll sell it?”

  Father Julian shrugs. “It seems likely. She’s no art lover, believe me, and any sentimental attachment she may have had is long gone. But back to your question, Leigh Ann. Yes, Prunella is everything Aunt Cathy said, and more. She certainly is … colorful.”

  Becca tips an imaginary bottle to her lips and staggers around.

&
nbsp; Father Julian’s eyes widen and he laughs out loud. “Like you wouldn’t believe! Ten in the morning and already going strong. I took a small glass of sherry to be polite; meanwhile, she’s drinking Manhattans—heavy on the bourbon—like they’re going out of style.”

  “So, what do we do now?” Margaret, ever the detective, asks.

  “I don’t think there’s anything we can do,” says Father Julian, scratching his head.

  Margaret digs in her heels at the injustice of it all. “This Prunella woman doesn’t have any right to the painting. And now she’s going to sell it! Even if she was married to Phillip, he never had the right to the painting. Let’s face it, he was a crook; he stole it from his own family. And then he either painted the fake or had someone else do it. Father Julian, you have to get it back.”

  “She’s right,” Leigh Ann says, with Becca and me chiming in with our agreement.

  “What do you want me to do? Take her to court? That could take years—and cost thousands and thousands of dollars.”

  But my sweet, brilliant—and sometimes devious—best friend has something else entirely in mind. “We switch the paintings,” she says.

  “Margaret, you really are a genius,” I say. “That’s perfect.”

  “And exactly how do you think you’re going to pull that off?” a doubtful Becca says. “You can’t just walk into her apartment carrying a big ol’ painting and switch it with the one on her wall. I think she’d notice.”

  Margaret’s index fingers press against her temples. “I don’t know … yet. But we’ll figure it out. We always manage to find a way. We snagged the ring right out of Mr. Winterbottom’s hands, and had to solve a locked-room mystery in order to recover the violin. We can do this. I’m sure.”

  Father Julian holds up his hand. “Girls, hold on a second. Before you start planning something, uh, illegal, or even questionable, keep in mind that at this point we don’t even know if either painting is real. None of this matters if the original painting is post-1961. Unless—”

  “Unless what?”

  “It’s possible she has some other way of proving the date—like a letter from Pommeroy.”

  “All right, so we prove, once and for all, in our own way, when that thing was painted,” Margaret says. “Then we go after it.”

  “Yeah,” Becca agrees. “I mean, let’s face it. Even though we haven’t proved it yet, you know that Pommeroy gave a painting to your great-grandfather, right? Which means that he at least started out with a real Pommeroy. It’s like a jigsaw puzzle where you know what the final result looks like, but you’re missing one stupid little piece.”

  “One really important piece,” I correct.

  A piece that I am determined to find.

  That shoe box full of photographs has taken on new significance for me. Yes, part of me sincerely wants to help out Father Julian and his family, but a more selfish part of me is motivated by something else entirely: I am craving a little adventure. It’s hard to describe the rush of adrenaline I got at that moment when I totally pulled the rug out from under Mr. Winterbottom, or when Raf drove me across town on his uncle’s scooter, my arms wrapped around his waist, the wind blowing in my face. And while I don’t know how we’re going to switch paintings with Miss Prunella Scroggins, I’m starting to imagine the four of us on the roof of her apartment in the middle of the night, dressed head to toe in black, and crawling between the red laser beams of her super-sophisticated security system.

  Then again, maybe I’ve seen too many movies.

  Whatever the case, I push Tillie, who is sprawled across the middle of my bed, off to one side and arrange the pictures that we’ve already targeted as helpful:

  “Come on, Tillie, help me out here. What do you see?”

  She tilts her head at me in a way that makes her look like she understands every word I’m saying. Instead of telling me the solution to the problem, however, she rolls over on her back and grunts at me—her way of saying, “Rub my belly, you simpleminded human.”

  She kicks out her back legs, knocking the shoe box to the floor, and hundreds of pictures spill out in all directions.

  “Tillie!” I roll myself off the bed and am just about to start scooping when something catches my eye. It’s a picture I haven’t seen before, but one that might easily have been overlooked by any of us. Five kids are posed in the yard outside a house—not at all what we had been looking for. It’s the picture window behind them, though, that’s interesting. You see, it’s clearly the same picture window that you can see behind the people on the couch in that other photo.

  Now take a good look at the two people facing each other. Do you see it? It’s the same two people sitting on that bench next to the TV—Aunt Cathy and Denny McCormack. She has a drink in her hand, and he’s holding a plate with a big piece of cake. That picture must have been taken a few seconds before the one that shows the TV.

  Behind the kids on the other side of the picture are the sliding glass doors that lead into the kitchen—the doors that are barely visible behind Aunt Cathy and Denny in the birthday cake picture. There’s a floor vase filled with fresh flowers and a dog with its nose pressed against the glass. But no sign of the painting, and nothing else that screams out a date at me. I know I’m onto something, but I just can’t quite fit the pieces together. Yet.

  “There just has to be a way to put a date on one of these pictures, Tillie.”

  She woofs at me, and jumps off the bed in search of something to chew on, no doubt. A few moments later, she’s standing at the threshold to my bedroom, a piece of the cover of the baseball she destroyed hanging proudly from her mouth.

  “Woof,” she says.

  “If I were you, I wouldn’t be bragging about that. You’re lucky to be alive. If you weren’t Nate Etan’s dog, you’d be dead.”

  When I say the word “dead,” Tillie drops to the floor as if she’s been shot, lying on her side with her eyes closed, legs sticking out stiffly, and pink tongue lolling out of the side of her mouth.

  My heart skips two full beats. I just killed Nate Etan’s dog! I can hear those fangirls beating down my door already, pitchforks and torches at the ready.

  “Tillie!” I shout, frantically trying to remember how to do CPR on a dog.

  She opens her eyes and leaps to her feet, licking my face. It was a trick!

  “What the … Tillie, you almost gave me a heart attack!”

  She nudges me with her cold, wet nose and then sets the soggy remains of the baseball on my lap.

  “Gee, thanks,” I say.

  And then, like a bucket of ice water over the head, it hits me: crazy as it sounds, I think Tillie is trying to tell me that the baseball is a clue!

  “Good girl!” I dig through the shoe box to find Malcolm’s loupe, so I can take a closer look at the photograph with the Yankees game on the TV. Two players are visible in the image, which appears to be from a camera behind home plate. The batter is definitely a Yankee player, and although the number is partially obscured, I’m sure it’s none other than number seven, Mickey Mantle himself. The pitcher is clearly number thirty, but it takes me a few minutes to be certain that the block letters across his chest read “Cincinnati.”

  Which is strange. After all, the Cincinnati Reds are a National League team. Why would Mickey Mantle be batting against a National League pitcher in October? There’s only one possible answer.

  “It’s the World Series!” I yell at Tillie as I hug her. She gives me a look that says, “Duh!” and lies back down.

  “Okay, Till, if you’re so smart,” I say, “what year did the Reds and the Yankees play in the World Series?”

  Tillie just tilts her head to the side and stares at me this time.

  “That’s what I thought. You’re not so smart. It was 1961. The Yankees won in five games. In thirty seconds I’ll tell you who the pitcher is, and the exact date of this picture.”

  She puts her head down, unimpressed.

  Okay, so it takes me sligh
tly longer than thirty seconds to establish that the pitcher is Joey Jay (who won the game for the Reds) and the date of the game was October 5, 1961—Aunt Cathy’s seventeenth birthday. But I still did it faster than Tillie could have.

  And the painting now has a date!

  Except it doesn’t. The painting! It’s not visible in the picture with the TV—or in the new one I found.

  I pound my forehead with the heel of my hand. “Oh man. There has to be a way to connect all these dots.”

  My phone rings, and when Nate Etan’s name lights up, I take a panicky look in the mirror to make sure my hair looks okay and that there are no big chunks of food stuck in my braces.

  “Hey, bonjour, Mademoiselle Sophie! Comment vas-tu?”

  For someone who supposedly spent so much time in France, his accent is truly atrocious.

  “Um, très bien, I guess. How are you? Where are you?”

  “Uh, yeah, that’s the raison for the call. I’m still in London, and now it looks like I’m going to have to fly to Japan for a few days to make a commercial. How are you and Tillie getting along? Food holding out? Any problems?”

  Tillie looks up at me, still chewing on the cover of “her” baseball.

  “No, not at all. We bought some more food. She’s great. In fact, she showed me a new trick today. You didn’t tell me she could play dead.”