Saturday, 10:05 a.m.
Meredith made a very good income replicating artwork.
She’d copied the works of many of the early-twentieth-century masters, but her specialty was the Cubist paintings of Picasso. There was something that appealed to her about how Picasso deconstructed an object and reassembled those fragments into something less literal.
She found it especially exhilarating to break apart people. A copy of Picasso’s Seated Nude, a figure in nearly monochromatic shapes, almost indistinguishable from the background, hung above Meredith’s bed. It was the only one of her replicated paintings she’d ever kept for herself.
In her line of work, the trick was sticking to the rules:
Always use the right materials.
Always pick a painting held in a private collection—although that was important only to her shadier clients, of course, the ones who wanted to pass off her work as the real thing. For them, it made no sense to re-create Picasso’s Accordionist when a simple online search turned up the original hanging in the Guggenheim.
And always take care with the canvas. Oil paintings could take months to dry, and weeks of work could be destroyed in minutes through careless transport or storage.
Meredith was meticulous, but perfection was impossible. She would never know, for instance, the precise ratio of medium to pigment the artists used or the type of animal hair their brushes were made of.
There were techniques for aging a canvas; the process she used involved bleach, thinner, and brown paint, though she’d also experimented with soaked cigarette butts and tea bags. If the commission was generous enough, she could sometimes find a painting from the same period, strip the canvas, and reproduce a masterpiece in its place. Picasso was a favorite not only of hers but of her buyers—he was prolific and often left his works unsigned. One of her works had convinced an authenticator that a lost Picasso had been found. She’d been proud of that one, even if the client had skirted the law.
What Meredith created was an illusion of sameness, getting as close to the original as the resources and her talent allowed. Fortunately for her bank account, she was damn good at creating that illusion.
If the price was right, Meredith would paint anything. If someone wanted to pay her fifty thousand dollars to paint Dogs Playing Poker, she would take the deposit and get straight to work. After all, she wasn’t the one taking the risk; she wasn’t the one at the mercy of ever-evolving technology that made forgeries easier to detect. She sold her paintings as replicas—she signed the back of most pieces and had contracts acknowledging that fact, though some asked her to forgo this step. Some clients owned the original paintings that she reproduced but hung her replicas and stored the authentic works in free ports to avoid taxation and customs rules or to keep them safe. Some wanted to impress their friends with artwork they couldn’t otherwise afford. And some—well, legally, she wasn’t responsible for what her buyers did with her work, even if she knew just how important it was to them that she get every brushstroke exactly right.
But the painting she’d hidden from Leyna earlier wasn’t for a client. Meredith knew her daughter believed she’d been working on a commission. She could’ve corrected the misunderstanding, shown her the canvas, but she didn’t feel the need to explain herself—she took great pride in her reputation in the field. And Meredith didn’t want to deal with the inevitable questions.
Sometimes she just needed to imagine what Grace might look like.
Over the years, Meredith had painted many such portraits, always in the summer. Grace would’ve turned thirty-three in a couple of weeks.
Will turn, she corrected herself. The morning Olivia came to the Clarke home demanding to see Adam, Meredith had told her he’d run off with Grace. Meredith liked to believe what she’d said that day was true.
Grace’s gone, Meredith had said. Adam too. You know how impulsive young couples in love can be.
Meredith liked to pretend it had really ended that way: Her daughter and Olivia’s son out there somewhere, together. Happy. Sometimes she considered putting Adam in one of her paintings of Grace, just to see what that might look like. Once, she’d gotten as far as the shadow of his jaw before she’d decided the canvas was ruined and slashed it with a palette knife.
For her Grace series, Meredith always chose a linen canvas. Expensive, but the finer weave produced smoother skin, and Grace’s skin had been flawless. Was it still? Or had time and experience marred it? She couldn’t imagine that Grace had been leading an easy life.
While waiting for Leyna to return, Meredith tried to find her way back into the painting, but thoughts of the missing Sacramento girl intruded. Ellie Byrd. Her case so much like Grace’s.
Meredith picked up a brush, dipped it into a small pot of paint thinner, then dabbed the tip on a towel. She studied the painting, hoping inspiration might strike again. When using oil paint, she built dark to light, fat over lean, with the initial layers containing less oil, the final strokes thick with unadulterated paint. This year, inspiration was slower to come. Usually, she’d be working on the eyes by now—a delicate blending of phthalo blue and titanium white that had taken years to get right—but Meredith was still laying down the first thinner, darker layers. Even then, she was pretty sure the painting was crap.
Lately, it had grown more difficult to paint. Whenever she picked up a brush, her fingers would inevitably tense into rigid claws, her stroke lacking its usual ease. She’d ruined more canvases since April than in the five years before.
Now, with Grace’s birthday looming and everyone obsessed with Ellie Byrd’s disappearance, she was even more stuck. She was behind schedule on her latest commission, which was likely the reason her broker had already phoned twice that morning.
Movement outside drew her attention. Richard made his way down his driveway. Her spine stiffened.
That dumbass.
Richard held a tool—thin pole, orange handle, black blade. A trimmer. He was headed toward his yard with a damn trimmer.
While the sun baked and the wind howled.
Meredith tore off her painting smock and headed outside to suggest to Richard a better use for his power tool.