Deceptive

by Sara Rosett

  “Along with a screwdriver?”

  “That, too.”

  The minutes ticked by. Zoe counted each one of them. She couldn’t help checking her watch. She’d never been good at waiting, and this was killing her.

  Nothing stirred at the villa.

  A few hikers trudged by them returning to the village from the beach, but Zoe and Jack were well back from the path and lower down on the sloping side. They held themselves motionless and none of the hikers looked their way.

  The light shifted as the sun glided lower, and the skinny shafts of light filtering through the leaves inched across the ground. After an hour, Jack had slipped away and moved as close to the villa as he dared, but with only a few rows of olive trees in the front, he couldn’t get close. “Can’t see a thing.” He dropped down beside her, his back propped against the tree trunk. “I hope they’re not in for the night. I’d rather not explore the house with them sleeping in it.”

  “He’ll have to go back to work. This is just the siesta.” Zoe fanned herself with her hat. They were in the shade, but there was no breeze.

  “He could be off for the day.”

  “Don’t say that. We’ve got to find out if the painting is in there.” Zoe glanced at her watch and again counted off the days in her mind. Had it really only been two days since Oscar showed up and turned her life upside down? She had until tomorrow. “The painting has to be there. If it’s not...I don’t know what I’ll do.”

  “One step at a time.” Jack had been twirling the stem of a leaf between his thumb and index finger, but he tossed it aside and reached for her hand. He slid his fingers slowly along her palm then laced his fingers through hers. There was something deliberate and intense in his motions as if her hand were something delicate and precious. How could holding hands feel so...intimate? His thumb traced lightly over the back of her hand, sending out little sparks that traveled up her arm and made her feel shivery despite the hot day.

  Zoe pulled her hand away. “Jack, you’ve got to stop this.”

  His hand hung suspended in the air a moment, then he dropped it to his lap. He tilted his head and watched her from the corner of his eye. “Why?”

  Zoe swallowed. Her throat felt thick. She wasn’t choking up, was she? No, she wasn’t. She couldn’t let this go on. It wasn’t fair to Jack. “It’s not going to happen. You and me. Again. It’s not,” she said as emphatically but as gently as she could.

  His expression shifted, and he turned his head away, gazing out over the villa. “All right, if that’s what you want.” He looked back and his gaze was shuttered and distant.

  “It’s not you,” she said in a rush. “You’re great. Now that we’ve got all that secret life stuff out of the way, you’d be wonderful. It’s me. You know how useless I am. I’m impulsive and flighty. I’d be a terrible wife. I was a terrible wife. You know that. You know what happened last time.”

  “That’s a lie,” he said, his voice quiet, but firm. “You’re afraid.”

  It took her a second to process his words. Afraid? Her? She was never afraid. “That’s absurd. I told you. I’m not good...wife material. You were there last time. You know what—”

  “You’re scared to trust me. That’s what it all comes down to.” He looked away, down at the dirt at their feet as he spoke. “You’ve never really trusted anyone.”

  “That’s crazy...and...wrong,” Zoe sputtered, feeling a white-hot twist of fury surge through her. It wasn’t only the words, it was the way he’d said them—clinical and detached. “What about Helen? I trust her.”

  “But you don’t, do you? Not really.” He looked at her out of the corner of his eye, his gaze assessing, almost daring her to contradict him.

  “I wanted to call her and tell her about Oscar before we left, but you convinced me not to.”

  “You only wanted to call her because you were backed into a corner and worried about her safety. You didn’t tell her about Lucinda’s body going missing. And I know you didn’t tell her what happened in Italy. Sure, you told her eventually, but only when it was all going to come out anyway.”

  “I didn’t want to lie to her.”

  “But by not telling her, you were lying to her. At least, that’s how you saw it with me and my past. What did you call it? Lying by omission, I think.”

  “I can’t believe you’re saying this.”

  “I can’t either, but I think I understand you now,” he continued in that subdued, rational voice. “This free spirit bohemian thing you’ve got going...that lets you keep everyone at arm’s length. You don’t have to trust anyone. You can’t get hurt that way. I understand part of it is the way you grew up. Your mom is something else, and she’s warped you, taught you that the only person you can depend on is you.”

  “So this is—” Zoe realized her voice was loud and kind of screechy. She forced herself to breathe and start over. “This is my mother’s fault?”

  “No. She set you on a course. You’re following it all on your own now.” A note of sadness mixed in with his measured tone cut her more deeply than if he’d yelled. She felt as if his words had slashed across her, leaving raw and painful gashes.

  Zoe blinked to clear her wavy vision. “You’re just saying all this because I hurt you.”

  Jack rubbed a hand over his face, leaned back against the tree trunk, and tilted his gaze up to the leaves overhead. “You’re right that I’m hurt. I took a risk. That’s what happens when you get close to people. You open yourself up.” He blew out a sigh. “Zoe, you think you’re all about being carefree and living on the edge, but you’re fooling yourself. It’s all an illusion. You’re playing it safe.”

  Zoe opened her mouth to fling back a retort, but a sound came from the villa. Anna clacked across the flagstones, still in her heels and dress, a trail of cigarette smoke wafting behind her. “Giorgio,” she called impatiently, her voice floating distinctly up to them. She stood with her arms crossed, staring at the view, one hand moving the cigarette to her mouth with each drag. The young man appeared, a cell phone at his ear. She tossed the cigarette away and they went back through the house, up the gravel path to the gate, and back along the dirt trail toward the village.

  Chapter Sixteen

  ––––––––

  ZOE and Jack waited a few beats after Anna and Giorgio disappeared down the trail. Jack stood. “Let’s go.” His voice was steady, matter-of-fact.

  Zoe was boiling for a fight. She wanted to rebut everything he said, but she forced those surging thoughts, her stinging arguments, down. Later. She would deal with him later. Right now, it had to be about the painting. “Right.”

  They dropped down directly through the slope into the garden area with the olive trees. No fence enclosed the sides of the villa, just the one along the trail. Jack gave her a hand down a steep portion. His touch was impersonal, almost clinical as if he were a doctor, checking her pulse. Later, Zoe reminded herself. She’d eviscerate him later. They circled around the back and approached the villa across the flagstone terrace.

  A set of double doors stood wide open, and Zoe and Jack passed into a living area. The exterior of the villa was old, the small windows and irregular lines of the building gave away its age, but inside the whole thing had been gutted and updated in a contemporary style. The furniture was squared off and done in shades of white, cream, and beige. A fireplace made of the same white rocks that lined the trail took up one wall. The kitchen, jammed with stainless steel, granite, and every modern convenience, filled one corner of the room. The art on the walls was contemporary and abstract, mostly gray with a few streaks of color.

  “Who would want to live in a place with furniture the color of oatmeal?” Zoe muttered to herself. She walked a quick circuit of the room. “No painting here.”

  “Not in plain sight, no.” Jack moved to a sleek storage cupboard on a wall near the fireplace.

  “I’ll check the other rooms.” Zoe headed down a short hallway. The first room was a bedroom with
an attached bath. It was decorated in exactly the same style as the living area. Zoe zipped around the room, but except for the pink suitcase flung open on the floor and a mass of clothes, handbags, and shoes popping out of a closet, there was nothing interesting. She dropped to her knees to check under the bed, but it was the type of bedframe that sat directly on the floor. She examined the lone piece of art on the walls, an unframed canvas painted gunmetal gray with a single, off-center neon green handprint. Nothing behind it on the wall or tucked into the back of the canvas, which was a single layer, stretched taunt.

  Zoe glanced at a hall bathroom—nothing special except the plushness of the putty-colored towels. The last door was closed. The knob turned easily in her hand. The door swung open, and the smell of turpentine wafted over her. She stopped on the threshold, blinking. “Jack.”

  It was an artist’s studio. Canvases ranged around the room, some on easels, others stacked against the walls. A jumble of art supplies—paint, brushes, and rags—covered a flimsy card table in one corner. More glassed double doors led to the flagstone terrace with the view of the sea, but these doors were closed.

  All the paintings on the easels were angled away from the door to the room and toward the double doors, probably to get the best light, Zoe thought as she hurried into the room, a feeling of elation buoying through her. It’s here. It’s got to be here. It’s going to be okay. I’ll get the painting, and we’ll—

  Her thoughts jerked to a stop as she saw the front of the paintings.

  They were all the Monet painting. Every painting in the room, she realized as she turned and scanned the canvases propped against the walls, was Marine. The curve of the blue sea enclosed with a sweep of brown land was repeated over and over again. Some of the paintings were on canvases stretched over wooden frames; others didn’t have a frame and were clipped to large pieces of cardboard.

  Jack stopped in the doorway, a look of relief washing over his face, as he saw the canvases, but then the truth hit him, too, as he moved into the room.

  “It’s kind of a good news, bad news situation.” Zoe squinted at one painting.

  “I’ll say.” Jack rubbed his hand over his mouth as his gaze flickered over the room. “There’s got to be thirty, maybe fifty paintings in here.”

  An anomaly, a canvas without the brown beach and blue water, caught Zoe’s eye. It was propped against one of the walls with other paintings almost covering it. Only the edge, which was covered with short, bold strokes, was visible. “What’s this?” Zoe pulled it out. Monet’s signature was repeated over and over across the surface. She spun to show Jack. “He was practicing.”

  Jack looked over his shoulder. He had squatted down and was flipping through a stack of canvases.

  “You think the man—Giorgio—is the painter, not Anna?”

  “I don’t know. I suppose Anna could be a painter. Although, it seems kind of a messy hobby.” Zoe scanned the heap of art supplies. “She seems to wear only designer clothes. I don’t see a smock or painting clothes in here, and I didn’t see any paint-streaked clothes in the bedroom.”

  “Any men’s clothes at all?”

  “I didn’t notice any, but I wasn’t looking for that. I was concentrating on the painting.”

  He leaned the canvases against the wall. “I think most of these are practice runs, too.”

  “Warm-ups?” Zoe put the canvas back and looked at several of the paintings lining the floor. She tilted her head as she moved along the line, trying to match up what she was seeing with her memory of the photograph Masard had of the original Monet painting. It only took a few seconds of studying them for the errors to jump out at her. “You’re right. This one, the curve of the bay is wrong—too U-shaped. This one, the colors are off—too muddy...or something.” She tilted her head as she switched to study one of the paintings on an easel. “He’s getting better. This one is very close. In fact,” her heartbeat began to pound, “this might be the real Monet.”

  Jack stood to the side, his arms crossed, frowning at the painting. He leaned forward, touched a corner, and his fingertip came away with a daub of brown paint. “Don’t think so.” He crossed to the card table and wiped his hand on a rag. “I think that means you’re right. Giorgio is the painter. Anna has been gone for at least twenty-four hours. That paint is fresh. With heat like this, if Anna had painted it before she left, the paint wouldn’t be slick to the touch. It might be tacky, but not wet.”

  Zoe nodded. There was no air conditioning, no vents or individual cooling units for the room. The old thick walls would keep the villa somewhat cool, but once the heat of the day hit, the villa would heat up. It was probably why Anna and Giorgio had left the doors open when they left, to catch the cooler evening breeze.

  Zoe leaned in, touched the corner, experimentally. “But why would he paint another Marine? Masard let her think he’d fooled her. She thinks she’s sold the fake.” Zoe paced to the double doors. “Maybe she knows Masard wasn’t taken in? But then again, she certainly didn’t act like a woman who had been found out. She seemed relaxed. She lingered at the bar and had food and drinks.”

  “Champagne.”

  “Really? I missed that.”

  “They toasted each other, too. It was when we were talking with the other couple, the one from the cruise ship.”

  Zoe walked back to the easel. “Bubbly. Toasts. New painting,” she murmured to herself, then turned slowly to Jack. She could see the same thought had struck him, too. “It’s a scam.”

  He nodded. “Dubai. Their goal isn’t just to sell a Monet and get the money. It’s to sell the Monet over and over again.”

  “I suppose it could work if the various buyers don’t get wind of the other sales.” Zoe was examining the paintings on the other easels. “This one is wet, too. And what are the buyers going to do, if they find out they’ve been scammed? It’s not like they can go to the police.”

  A husky laugh floated through the air. Zoe was bent over another canvas, her finger poised to touch the paint, but she froze. “That’s Anna.”

  Jack had already moved to the small window set in the wall facing the gate. “I should have followed them, made sure they got in the car. They’re almost to the gate.”

  Zoe looked over his shoulder. Anna and Giorgio ambled along the trail. Anna was smoking again. Giorgio held a pizza box. “They went out for pizza? Couldn’t they have gone to a fancy dinner? That takes hours in Italy.”

  “I’ll delay them. You find the real painting. Meet me at the tree where we waited earlier.”

  Jack was gone before she could stop him. “Find the real Monet,” she muttered as she turned back to the room. It was impossible. There were too many, and she was no expert. She needed Masard. She swallowed as she glanced out the window. Jack was hunched over, moving through the olive trees to the gate. Giorgio’s phone rang, and he stopped about twenty feet away from the gate. He handed Anna the pizza box then pulled out his phone.

  Zoe turned away from the window. Okay. Think. She had less than a minute to figure it out before she had to get out of the villa. She hurried to the front of the room.

  There were so many. Too many. She let out a shuttering breath, her hands pressed to her cheeks. It couldn’t be one with wet paint. It probably wasn’t propped up along the wall. Surely, if you had an original Monet painting you wouldn’t put it on the floor.

  An original. The words seemed to reverberate in her head as a movie played in her mind of Masard flipping the fake painting over. Zoe surged to one of the canvases with dry paint and turned it over. Nothing. Blank. She moved to the next one, her hands shaking.

  She heard a rattle and a curse. Out the small window, she could see the top of Giorgio’s head above the gate. The wooden panels of the gate flexed under pressure, but a flat rock wedged into the crevice at the bottom of the gate held it shut. Zoe caught a flicker of movement at the corner of the yard as Jack slipped through the olive trees and scrambled into the cover of the forest on the opposite side of
the yard from where they’d waited earlier.

  Don’t watch, she muttered to herself. Focus. She lifted a canvas clipped to a piece of cardboard on the easel positioned in the center of the room and saw markings, stamps, and a tiny curling sticker. She dropped the canvas as if it had burned her. This was Marine, a genuine Impressionist painting by Claude Monet.

  The wood on the gate groaned, then the whole fence shook as Giorgio banged on the gate.

  Zoe grabbed the painting, replaced it with another version that wasn’t on a wooden stretcher, but clipped to a piece of cardboard.

  She was almost to the door when a thought struck her. They needed one of the fakes, too. If they were going to make accusations, they needed to be able to show what Anna and Giorgio were doing. She put the painting down at the glass door and scurried back to grab one of the fakes. She went for another one that was clipped to a piece of cardboard. She checked the paint. It was dry. Next, she flicked it up and saw that the back was blank.

  As she turned back to the double doors, she caught a glimpse of Giorgio climbing over the fence. She didn’t linger to watch. She would have liked something to put the paintings in, a bag or something, but there wasn’t anything handy, and she didn’t have time to go back through the house.

  Gingerly holding the paintings, she slipped out the double doors, closing them softly behind her, and crossed the patio. She peeked around the corner and saw Giorgio pulling at the rock wedged below the gate. Anna must have been standing directly behind the gate because Zoe couldn’t see her. While Giorgio’s back was to her, she shot through the olive trees and scrambled up the slope, trying to keep the paintings up and away from the dirt, all the while expecting to hear a shout aimed at her.

  She crested the rise and slipped into the trees. The sun was much lower now and the area under the trees was gloomy. She tripped on a root and caught herself, keeping the paintings tucked into her side. She reached the tree where they’d waited, but Jack wasn’t there. “Jack,” she whispered, her eyes narrowing as she studied the various shades of darkness.