“The minute you walk through that door you’re no longer a guest, so help yourself.”
Sophia Collins
I needed to find someplace else to sleep. I sat in my crappy rental car where I had parked it for both of the days I’d gone to the museum and searched up places to stay in Boston that don’t make you itch.
I disliked crying. I especially disliked doing it where anyone could see me. I was not a particularly tall person, but I was strong and athletic and could do enough things well that I rarely felt vulnerable – except when I cried.
Analyzing my distaste for tears was much easier than figuring out why I was upset, so I indulged in self-analysis while entering a new search for comfy beds for cheap in the greater Boston area.
Kids in America grew up with “cry like a girl” and “only babies and sissies cry” as the standard taunt for tears. The average girl could just shrug that off as par for the course. I am a girl, ergo I cry like one. Boys, tomboys, and girls who identified with the male gender generally had a tougher time with such teasing, as it was meant to belittle and hurt. I pretty much self-identified as a tomboy, mostly to counter my sister’s girly-girl status, and as such, I didn’t cry.
Except when I did.
I finally got a hit on bed and breakfasts that don’t break the bank in Massachusetts, except it wasn’t a Google search hit, it was a text.
Mom: Colette said you’re in Boston. Come home.
Me: Hi Mom. Thanks, I will.
See? A hit. Bed, breakfast, and about sixty minutes and a world away from Boston. Plus laundry facilities and a place to send the underwear I’d be buying online.
I thought about stopping at the police station to check on Junior on my way out of town, but it was already dark and I was tired, and the prospect of bribing my way past cops who should know better than to take my bribes was a little more than I could handle after a dinner with the principled Disney prince.
Sigh. Why couldn’t I have fallen for someone who saw the world with a few more shades of gray? Darius Masoud had the kind of principles that would never let him see what I’d done as anything other than the darkest black in a checkerboard world, and frankly, I felt as far away from the black queen as a player could get.
My phone paired with the rental car stereo, and as I drove out of downtown, it rang. I checked the number and hit the button that put me on speaker phone.
“Hey, Sister.”
“Hey,” she said. “How’s Boston?”
“Weird,” I said as I passed a cop who had pulled over a Chevy. I checked in with my conscience and it felt clean – no racing pulse or sweaty palms at the sight of the flashing lights.
“You’re weird,” she said automatically.
I smiled. “No, you.” It was a game we’d played since we were kids, and playing it with her reminded me that I had – and was – a sister.
It was an antidote to alone.
“What’d you find out about the Manet?” she asked. The room had a slight echo around her.
“Dude, what if someone else had been in the car with me? And p.s., are you on the toilet?”
I could practically hear the eye-roll in her voice. “You’re always by yourself, and I called you, which means I’m definitely not on the toilet. I’m doing my make-up.”
“But if I’d called you and you were on the toilet, you would have picked up?” I tried to ignore her comment about my aloneness, but it stung.
“Even mid-push. That’s how much I love you,” she said, with the open-mouth sound that meant she was putting on mascara.
I laughed and gave her a point for it.
“So? What’d you find out about Madame Auguste?” she prompted.
“Well, she’s not missing from the Gardner,” I said, but even I could hear the lack of easy confidence in my voice.
“But …?”
“But our Madame Auguste is pretty much a dead ringer for the one on the Blue Room wall.”
There was silence on the other end of the phone. I tried to picture my sister studying her reflection in the mirror as she thought about what I’d said, but all I could see was WTF written all over her expression in black Sharpie.
“So one of them is a forgery,” she said in a hushed voice.
“But which one?” I answered back as quietly.
“Dude.”
“Right?”
Single word sentences were also in our communication style guide. Translation: Are you freaking kidding me? How did we end up with a possible forged, or worse, real Manet painting? Answer: I know! I can’t stand this much longer. What the hell are we gonna do?
“Why would Mom and Alex stretch The Sisters over Madame Auguste – real or forged?” she finally said.
I hadn’t had a chance to talk my theories through out loud with anyone because, of course, Darius was the only other person who knew about Madame Auguste, and we were still talking in fairy tales around each other where the paintings were concerned. “Well, either they reused a frame and just wanted the Madame August to stiffen up the canvas on their own painting, or they did it to hide Madame Auguste. Or they didn’t do it.”
“You think it’s possible Markham Gray used The Sisters to hide a Manet?”
I shrugged as I pulled onto the expressway. “It was in his possession, and it was the only art hanging in his panic room.”
“But why— no, never mind. If he’s the one who hid Madame Auguste, it’s probably because she was stolen,” Colette finally said.
“And if Alex or Mom hid it, it’s because they shouldn’t have had it. The only explanation that doesn’t get people into trouble is that it was just a copy on a frame that they re-used.”
Colette was silent for so long that I thought the call had dropped. “You still there?” I asked.
“Yeah. I’m just wondering if I should ask Sterling about it.”
“What? Why would you do that?” I had to swerve to avoid a dead raccoon in the road. Not because I had any particular affinity for raccoons, because I definitely didn’t. They were trash pandas and chicken killers, and I sent a mental “That’s right” to the universe, as I did whenever I passed a dead one. But this one was recently dead, which meant it would likely squish under my wheels unpleasantly, and at the rate my luck was going, I’d get a flat and then have to pick through raccoon guts to change the tire.
“I’m seeing him tonight,” my sister said. Her voice sounded odd, or maybe it was just the words that sounded odd to my ears.
“I’m sorry, I was avoiding trash panda guts. Could you please repeat that?”
She sighed, and then sounded annoyed. “I’m going out with Sterling tonight. On a date. To a private gallery opening.”
“Wow, he’s actually taking you out in public?” You could have infected the whole state with the snottiness in my tone.
She hung up on me.
I counted to five and then the phone rang.
“Sorry, that was bitchy,” I said when I answered.
“It was.”
We stayed on the phone in silence for a long moment. I could hear her thinking. She could hear me grinding my teeth. It’s what we did when we didn’t want to say the thing that needed to be said, and it was also in our communication style guide. Finally, I took a breath and tried for calm.
“Do you have actual feelings for the guy? Because what you’re doing is really dangerous, Sister.”
“It’s only dangerous if you get caught,” she said. “And you won’t, because you’re smarter than they are. And besides, Sterling said they didn’t even call the cops.”
I thought about the grim expression on Darius’s face when he set up his meeting with Markham Gray. “Why wouldn’t they call in police?”
“I don’t know, except his dad has been freaking out on him since the painting went missing, and now he’s threatening to cut him completely off if he doesn’t get it back. Basically, turn him out of the house, his job, the company - everything.”
“Sterling’s job isn’t our problem.” I said. Neither was Darius’s job, I thought to myself, even as my conscience twinged.
“Are we sure Markham didn’t have a right to The Sisters?” she asked.
“Mom and Alex painted each other, worked on the painting together, and then it disappeared. The artists are the owners of their art until they sell it. Mom didn’t sell it, and Alex didn’t have the right to give it away without her permission, so no, it wasn’t Markham’s to keep. And honestly, if he’s that freaked out, it makes me think he’s the one who hid Madame Auguste. Because let’s face it, if our Madame Auguste is the real thing, she’s worth millions.”
Colette sighed the long-suffering sigh of the reasonable sister. “Well, maybe we should find a way to get Madame Auguste back to them if that’s the reason Sterling’s dad went psycho. Then the heat will be off.”
I barked a laugh. “How do you propose I give it back? Should I break back in and staple her back into the frame? Or are you going to drop her off behind a dumpster at the mansion next time you go to Sterling’s for a booty call?”
“Don’t be ugly,” she said.
“Don’t be stupid,” I snapped back.
“You’re stupid,” she snapped, but there was a hint of a reluctant smile sound in her voice.
“No, you,” I groused. And then, because I was seriously sick of arguing with her, I said, “I’m on my way to Mom and Dad’s.”
“Tell Mom to look for a package from me,” she said. “How long are you staying?”
“I don’t know. If the police aren’t looking, maybe I can come back to Chicago.”
“What about the Cipher guy?”
Yeah, what about him? I heard his quiet words in my head – let me help you. I didn’t need help; I was the strong one, I was the one who went on quests, the boy my dad never had. I didn’t cry because thieves don’t cry.
“The Cipher guy will do what he does, and I’ll stay out of his way,” I finally said.
“Well, give him a couple more days to forget about you,” my sister said.
I swallowed the hurt, and then swallowed again to make my voice work. “Yeah.” I let the sounds of the road fill my ears and numb my brain. “I’m going to do some more digging into Madame Auguste, maybe ask Mom for help. You know where to find me if you need me,” I finally said.
The old-fashioned doorbell sounded in the background. “Just think about what I said, please. If it goes back, it’s not our problem anymore.” Colette disconnected the call and there was silence.
“Bye,” I said to no one in particular, and the word tasted sour in my mouth.