“Karma’s sharpening her nails and finishing her drink. She’ll be with you shortly.”
From the T-shirt collection of Anna Collins
It hit me in the shower.
Actually, it ran me over like a delivery truck full of stolen TVs. I’d had sex with a man who— my brain screeched to a halt. I had made love. Full stop. I’d had sex, a fair amount of sex given my age and lack of relationship of any real duration. When I went diving, or mountain climbing, or bungee jumping, it was fairly normal to run into a group of guys who were doing the same thing, then find one of them cute enough to hook up with during the aftermath adrenaline rush that inevitably hit when one survived doing a thing that sometimes killed people.
But those were hook-ups – the kind of swipe-right sex people find through dating apps that is only slightly more or less satisfying than a good vibrator, depending on things like his hygiene and how much I’d been talking (i.e., how glazed his eyes were). But this hadn’t been swipe-right sex. Darius and I had connected because we’d been talking. Somehow, I hadn’t sent him running for the hills the first time my brain had disconnected from my mouth, or even the next, or the time after that.
And now I had a problem, because I was the thief who had broken through Darius’s security system. And I sucked at lying. Actually, I SUCKED at lying.
I knew his scent – there was no way I’d be able to keep lying to him. One doesn’t lie to people one can identify by scent. And his skin smelled so good. It was softer than any other man’s skin I’d ever known, and smelled like a combination of nutmeg, musk, and vanilla. I was getting all warm again just thinking about it. Yeah, lying was pretty much out of the question.
Which meant I had two choices: I could either tell him the truth, or I could stop seeing him.
I sat down on the floor of my shower and curled up under the spray. The water was hot, and tattooed my skin with dark, tribal patterns that felt heavy and significant, when what I really wanted was dancing butterflies with tiny wings to trip daintily all over me. I indulged my self-pity until I couldn’t stand to be in my own skin another minute.
Then I stood up, cranked off the hot water, and let the icy spray wash away the tattoos that had been beaten into my skin with ink and thorns. I was almost surprised to look in the mirror and discover that my only actual tattoo was the small fish hook I wore on the edge of my left hand below my thumb. Colette had a matching one on her right hand, and when we twined our fingers together, they made the shape of a heart. One heart for two people. Colette had always joked that I should wear it for both of us. I probably wouldn’t break it, she said, because of my tendency to bounce.
I wasn’t feeling very Tigger-like at the moment, and I stared at myself in the mirror for a long time. I was wrapped in the blue Turkish towel that I used instead of anything fluffy because it packed down to nothing and could double as a scarf in cold climates. My hair had already begun forming the springy curls that were its default, and would be a tangled mess if I didn’t run my fingers through it before it dried. I liked the squinting-in-the-sun lines at the corners of my eyes that I hoped would grow into proper laugh lines when I got older, but I didn’t like the look of uncertainty that I saw reflected back at me.
Our mother was a beautiful woman who laughed easily, could talk to anyone about anything, and seemed to attract women and men to her like bees to honey. When she’d turned fifty, she told us that she loved to flirt – it made her feel alive to pay a compliment or drop a teasing line and watch another person’s eyes light up with interest. And she’d loved to be flirted with – to feel attractive and interesting and desirable, whether or not she had any intention to act on the attraction.
She was also fifty when she learned the sister she hadn’t spoken to in nearly thirty years had died of a brain aneurysm. I was there when Aunt Alex’s trust attorneys had given our mother the letter that made her finally break down in tears. I didn’t read Alex’s words to her sister, but the lawyer had a letter for me and Colette too.
Alexandra told us how sorry she was that she had never met us, and that she hoped we were better sisters to each other than she had been to our mother. No one else will ever know how it was to grow up in your family, only your sister will, she’d written to us. Losing Sophia was the worst thing that ever happened to me, and there isn’t a day that goes by that I don’t wish I’d made different choices. Colette, you are the firstborn like me, so I give you my home. I’ve treasured the independence it has given me, and I have made a haven inside its walls. I hope you might one day feel the same sense of completeness and safety there too. And Anna, what little I know of your travels and of the adventures you’ve had leads me to believe we might be more alike than not. I’m leaving you my art studio to work in or live in as you see fit. It’s a strange and wonderful place, and I love its unusual angles and colorful surprises. I hope that you, too, delight in its oddities, find adventure in its secrets, and I wish you the peace of acceptance there.
That was six months ago. We were twenty-seven years old, holding the keys to an apartment and an art studio in a city neither of us had ever before visited, and that same day we’d gone out to get the fish hooks tattooed on our wrists.
I needed to talk to Colette.
I threw on jeans and a T-shirt that declared in black-on-black writing, “Feminist as f**k,” pulled a hooded sweater over my head, stuck my wallet and my phone in my back pockets, lip balm went in my front pocket, and then at the last minute, I dabbed a little bit of amber oil on my wrists on the non-existent chance I ran into Darius again. I knew that whatever this randomness was between us would end, but I could admit that I wanted him to be sorry about it, because I would be.
I paused by the fireplace, as I always did, to admire the tile with the heart carved in it. Colette and I had toured the studio right after I’d gotten the keys - and it was the one tile that we’d both remarked on. The shape of the heart was what had inspired the fish hooks, and since I’d moved into the building, I’d found several other tiles scattered throughout with the same design.
My unit was part of an arts complex called the Carl Street Studios built by Edgar Miller and Sol Kogen. It was one of thirteen condos converted from a Victorian home and coach house in 1927. The various artists who’d lived and worked there had embellished the building with mosaic and stained glass windows, Art Deco tiles, carved doors, frescoes, and carved and painted ceilings. My aunt had used the space as an art studio, but over the twenty-plus years she’d owned it, she had gradually turned it into a second home. She had modernized it without changing it, and if I hadn’t known there were no such things as grounded electricity and instant hot water heaters in the 1920s, I would never have been able to tell it had been altered at all.
I dialed Colette’s number on my way out of the building. She picked up on the first ring.
“Hey, do you have a minute?” I asked.
“Yeah, I was just going to call you. Come over.”
“I’ll be there in ten,” I said, then I clicked off my cell and slid it back into my pocket. It was actually an eight-minute walk between our places, but I kept two in reserve for climbing up the fire escape to her bedroom window.
I scanned the street for Darius’s Land Cruiser, half hopeful, half dreading the sight of it. I pulled my hood up and slouched into a guy’s walk, which was a trick I regularly used to blend into the shadows, even though the cars on the street were all the usual BMWs and Audis. The West Burton Place district was one of the first arts districts in Chicago, and had evolved into a vibrant gay scene, which very often came with double income, no kids. Colette’s neighborhood was close enough to mine to walk to, but swanky and leafy, while mine was the kind of place where shadows had dance parties on the walls to the snippets of piano tunes wafting from open windows, while cats serenaded the stars with glittering voices.
I turned down the alley. “Hey, Harry,” I said to my favorite orange-striped tomcat. He looked up from his tongue bath with a silent “hey” as I hopped up on the dumpster and jumped for the lowest rung of the fire escape ladder, which was rusted stuck at three-quarter extension. Honor, my D&D rogue, would have flipped up, hooked her legs on the bottom rung, then swung up to grab the higher rungs in a move worthy of a circus acrobat. I satisfied myself with a simple hand-over-hand haul until I was high enough to use my legs. Even if Colette hadn’t left the window unlatched, I had a way in. But she was expecting me, so the window was wide open.
“Hey, Sister,” I said as I dropped into her bedroom. She was sitting on her bed surrounded by fabric swatches trying different pairings in the evening light.
“What does this make you think of?” she asked, holding up a gold-colored swatch of velvet next to something mossy green.
“An Irish moss giant. If they nap long enough in the sun, they start to grow daffodils,” I answered.
“Of course they do,” she sighed.
I shrugged. “You asked.”
“Where were you today? You’re all pink-cheeked.” She studied my face.
“On the lake. I went boating.”
She raised an eyebrow. “With who?”
“A guy I met.” I’d gone there to talk about Darius, so I wasn’t sure why I was being cagey.
Her lips quirked up. “He’s what, a commercial diver, or maybe crew on a racing boat?”
I shook my head. “He designed the security system at Gray’s mansion.”
The smile that had been forming on her mouth disappeared. “Cipher Security did Gray’s system,” she said sharply.
“Yeah, well, I guess he works for Cipher.” I studied the fabric swatches on her bed, then started rearranging them so I didn’t have to meet her eyes.
“The job is done, Anna. Why were you on a boat with the Cipher guy?”
I paired a rich wine silk with a green the color of stuffed grape leaves, then added the deep silver brown of gnarled vines. “He asked me to.”
“And what else did he ask you?” Colette’s voice held the barely contained impatience she sometimes had when I went down rabbit holes of imagination.
“He asked me about Sterling.”
She exhaled. “So he saw the footage.”
I winced. I’d seen the footage too, and the idea of Darius Masoud thinking that I’d been with Sterling Gray made me crampy.
“It’s what we expected.” Colette sounded cautiously optimistic.
“It’s not what I expected,” I said dismally.
“Why not?”
“I didn’t expect to have sex with the security guy.” The words fell out of my mouth like toads, slippery and loud. They tasted sour because I didn’t want them to be toads. The words should have been cinnamon-flavored, like Mexican chocolate, but I didn’t get to savor them like they deserved to be – like I wanted to. So, toads.
Colette stared at me. “You had—”
“Yes!” I cut her off because the toads were making me nauseous. “I know it was a bad idea, okay, but, well, it also wasn’t.”
“A bad idea?” she asked tentatively.
“A bad anything,” I sighed.
“Oh.”
I looked up from the swatch vineyard I’d arranged on the bed to see my sister studying me.
“I’m sorry,” she said finally.
I nodded, dejected. “Yeah.”
“What are you going to do? That’s pretty by the way. It reminds me of Italy or France.” Colette indicated my grapevines.
“This would be Italy.” I added a burnt orange swatch. “And this makes it France.” A pale blue went onto the pile. She studied it thoughtfully.
“Maybe you got Mom and Alexandra’s artistic genes,” she said with an edge of something in her voice. I didn’t dig into it because I didn’t have the tolerance for much more pain at the moment, and things with edges were usually sharp. I just shrugged.
“Speaking of Mom and Alex, I have something to show you.” Colette hopped off the bed and pulled the portfolio out from under it. “While I was sizing The Sisters for their frame, the backing separated from behind the canvas. Except it wasn’t backing.” She pulled a painting out of the portfolio. “It was this.”
I stared at the older woman in a black satin dress, seated against a black background, looking back at me. Her expression was pinched and unhappy, as though she blamed me for uncovering her secrets, and I felt judged by her for it. She also looked familiar.
“Who is she?” I asked, looking away from the judgy gaze and back to Colette.
“Madame Auguste Manet,” she said flatly.
“Manet, as in Manet the French Impressionist?”
Colette nodded unhappily. “His mother.”
“What was she doing hiding behind The Sisters? Shouldn’t she be in a museum somewhere?” I couldn’t help looking back at Madame Auguste. I could just picture her creeping across the wall and slithering behind young Alex and Sophia, hoping they wouldn’t notice the shadow she cast.
“Apparently, the original is in Boston at the Isabella Stewart Gardner museum.” Colette’s voice was weirdly flat.
“Didn’t Mom and Aunt Alex intern there when they were in art school?”
“Yes.” The word came out choked.
“Why do you sound so strange?”
Colette met my eyes. Hers looked slightly panicked. “Because I’m not sure this is a copy.”
I stared at her as the nauseating little toads in my stomach grew to the size of Komodo dragons. “Why would you say that?”
“In design school they teach you to spot the fakes. This isn’t obviously fake.” She sounded supremely unhappy.
“But it was behind our mom’s painting,” I said, already cringing because I knew what came next.
“Wired with an alarm to the panic room wall in a multi-million-dollar mansion.”
Shit. “Did Alex know it was there, or did Gray just use our family’s painting to hide this one?” I asked, as the Komodo dragon started swinging its tale and knocking dread into my lungs
“That’s the ten-million-dollar question, isn’t it?” she said.
I exhaled sharply, my mind spinning with the attempt to see this from every angle. The obvious first step was that Colette’s twin had to disappear for a while, so there could be no connection between my sister and the missing painting. “I have a contract in Boston that I’ve been putting off. I’ll go see what I can find out about Madame Auguste while I’m there.”
She nodded. “Yeah, okay. It’s probably good for you to get out of town long enough for Mr. Cipher Security to forget about you anyway.”
Even though it’s what I intended to do, I didn’t like that she made it about Darius and me. I wanted her to say something like you’re unforgettable, or you should totally keep him. Not yeah, don’t let the door hit you on the way out.
The buzzer for the front door to the building sounded down the hall, and Colette got up off the bed. “That’s my client. Do you mind if I show her your color scheme for her living room?”
I started for the window, but turned to look back at the color swatches on the bed. “Don’t let her add any purple to that room. Bacchans would wreck the vines with their drunken orgies.”
She rolled her eyes dramatically, but her mouth was a thin line as she left the room.