“How the hell you figure that?” Hawk growled.
Campbell exhaled audibly. “They’re having tea.”
“There you are…honey…and lemon.”
Jane watched while Connie, who preferred milk in her tea, poured herself a generous dollop and returned the carton to the camp-size refrigerator that shared the limited space in her cluttered workroom with a working, 1930s-vintage gas stove. An equally old-fashioned teakettle sat on one of the stove’s burners beneath its tea cozy, comfortably steeping.
“Would you like a biscuit, dear?”
“Oh, no…thanks.” Jane stirred and sipped her tea. tasting nothing. Her mind, from the moment she’d entered Connie’s shop, had seemed capable of only one coherent thought: It can’t be true. It can’t be. This is Connie…my friend.
Thank goodness Connie had done most of the talking, as usual, telling her in great detail, as the kettle was coming to a boil, all about her newest customer, something about a fantastically wealthy businessman who apparently wanted her to decorate his villa in Miami Beach.
“He’s Iranian, I behove-seems to have pots of money and no taste whatsoever.” Connie’s eyes sparkled with avarice as she bit daintily into a cookie. “I do believe I may have already found a home for some of those dreadful paintings I bought at Arlington. Oh-and that reminds me, dear-” her eyes came to rest on Jane, causing her heart to give a painful bump “-what did you find out about that nice little one you bought? Was my friend in Georgetown able to have a look at it? What did he say?”
Jane took a sip of tea, which did nothing to dispel the feeling that she’d somehow gotten Connie’s cookie crumbs stuck in her throat. Finally, she coughed and said, “I never got around to it, actually. I told you-I had to cut the whole trip short, and anyway, by the next day getting it appraised began to seem, well, just sort of silly. I’m sure it’s not valuable, and I like it anyway, so why bother? It does look very nice over the piano, though, just like I thought it would.” She set down her teacup carefully, praying Connie wouldn’t notice the slight clatter as it met the saucer.
“Actually, that’s one of the reasons I’m here. I was, um, wondering, I still need something for that space between the windows in the breakfast nook, and now that I have the one painting in the living room, the wall above the TV looks awfully bare, so I was thinking I might like to take another look at those paintings-the ones you bought. I know you said you were thinking of taking them to Miami, but…maybe I could have first crack?”
“Uh-oh.”
“What?” Hawk barked, as the ominous syllables came through the open cellular phone connection in Campbell’s deep-throated cop’s mutter.
His anxiety level shot off the scale when the FBI agent next produced a vehement rendition of his own favorite swearword, followed by an outraged, “What the hell is she doing?”
“You mind letting me in on whatever the hell it is she’s doing?” Hawk almost bellowed, ignoring a blast from a trucker’s horn as he ran the stop sign and made a hard right at the junction with the main road into Cooper’s Mill.
The FBI agent’s reply was lost in the squeal of tires.
“Say again?”
“I said, she’s asking about the paintings. How much did you tell her, Hawkins? Does she know what she’s doing? Is she out of her mind?”
“No, she’s just got one of her own,” he said grimly, slowing reluctantly for the traffic light opposite a Burger King. “Where are you? I’m coming into town now.”
“Uh, white van, city engineer’s markings, on the square across from the courthouse. There’s a loading zone next to it, you can park there. And Hawkins-for God’s sake, keep a low profile,. The last thing we want to do-”
But the light had just turned green, and Hawk was already hanging up on him.
“I don’t know…I just can’t make up my mind.” Jane propped the two paintings-one a rather dark landscape of horses grazing in a meadow, the other a vase full of overblown roses, complete with fallen petals-side by side against Connie’s big leather-topped desk and stood back to study them. They weren’t noticeably improved by distance. “The floral would do for the living room-it could do with some brightening, I think-but for the kitchen nook…you know, what I was really looking for was…” What? What am I looking for, exactly? And will I know it when I see it? “Something…”
And then she saw it, half-hidden behind the desk, the painting of a sailing ship foundering in a sickly green sea. And it was as if someone had flicked a switch in her mind, illuminating a video screen. A memory. “Something with boats,” she cried, swooping upon the painting, snatching it up and whirling away with it in triumph. “Yes-like this one.”
Connie, who had been leaning against a dining-room table set with an enormous set of Franciscan dinnerware, idly clicking her little jeweled pen and watching Jane’s search over the tops of her half glasses, straightened suddenly. “That ugly thing? In a kitchen? No, Jane, realty-that’s not for you, dear.”
“Not for you, dear.” Connie had been holding this painting, Jane remembered, when she’d said those words at the auction. But-funny, she hadn’t thought anything about it at the time-she’d been holding it so that Jane could see it, facing out, as if it had been the back of the painting she’d been looking at. Staring at it, studying it intently, with her glasses perched on the end of her nose.
“Oh, but…don’t you see?” Jane said with almost desperate brightness. “Those windows in the breakfast nook look right out over the lake. Something with boats… water…” She was babbling again, but she couldn’t seem to stop. “This really isn’t that bad, you know that? The colors would go, kind of…I mean, my kitchen is blue and yellow, and blue and yellow do make green. And with all the plants…”
The words ceased as if she’d suddenly run out of air. She’d never seen Connie look like that before-eyes cold and hard as stone. She felt cold herself, just from their touch, as if something evil had brushed against her.
This is it, she thought. And then, Oh, God…it’s true.
Outside on the square, in a panel truck with city engineer’s markings, Hawk stared at the bluish gray images on the video monitor screen and felt himself go cold.
“My God,” he whispered, “that’s it.”
Campbell turned from the monitor long enough to throw him a glance over his shoulder. “That’s what?”
“That’s the one-Jarek Singh’s painting.” He broke off, swearing softly. “If only I hadn’t been late to that damn auction… if I’d seen it, I’d have known.”
“What the hell are you talking about? How could you? None of us had ever seen the damn thing.”
“Seascapes-damn.” He turned angrily, looking for pacing room in the confined space and finding none. “I should have known that’s what it would be. They were all over Singh’s place in Cairo. You live in the middle of a desert, you put pictures of water on your walls, right?” He jerked back to the monitor. “What’s she doing now?”
Campbell handed him a set of headphones. “Here-listen for yourself.”
Hawk grabbed them and pressed one side against his ear, never taking his eyes from the tiny, blue-gray figures on the screen…
“I’m so sorry, dear, I’m afraid I already have a buyer for that one.” Connie’s voice was as polite and impersonal as a shop clerk’s.
“A b-buyer?” Jane’s mind seemed to have short-cimuited; she couldn’t think what to do next, could only stand there with the painting clutched in her hands, foolishly stammering.
The air in the antiques shop seemed to have thickened, become a tangible substance that clogged her breathing and wrapped itself around her like spider’s silk. It seemed to shimmer as she watched Connie move through it, slowly, like someone wading through waist-deep water…to the front of the shop…watched her take a leisurely look through the front window.