Paint by Magic (14 page)

The room was very quiet, but inside my head the pounding was deafening.
Find out, find out, find out,
thundered my heartbeat. Find out what the connection was between this long-ago woman and my mom. Find out because if I didn't, Mom would never, ever be safe. I don't know how I knew this, but the thought was there.
There is a connection, and Mom is in danger, and I have to figure it out.

I could feel Fitzgerald Cotton watching me closely as I slowly turned the page.

In black-and-white or tinted with color, the photos of the old paintings seemed to glow; they were like Fitzgerald Cotton had described: luminous. Something about the way the artists painted light. Pretty cool, if you like paintings—which I wasn't sure I did anymore, to tell you the truth.

Fitzgerald Cotton sat down next to me on the couch. I moved away from him so that our arms weren't touching or anything.

He reached over and took the book. He flipped through some more pages and pointed out paintings done in the same style, bragging about the originals he had seen in Rome and Venice, and droning on about how amazing the true colors were. I just stared dully down at them, my mind searching for answers. Lots of people had the same last name, I reminded myself. Rigoletti might be a really common name in Italy, for all I knew. And lots of people look like other people. Maybe there were loads of people in Italy who looked sort of like Mom....

Fitzgerald Cotton tapped his finger on one of the pages. "Look here," he ordered, and I did, trying to concentrate. More portraits, but this time they were all faces of men with beards and funny caps with feathers. "The Magi School artists," Fitzgerald Cotton said reverently. "They painted one another's portraits for posterity."

Again, one portrait stood out. But this time it wasn't because the guy looked familiar—not exactly. But there was ... something.

"Who was this person?" I asked, pointing to the portrait of a wild-looking man, younger than the others, with especially unnerving eyes. They were piercing and narrowed and seemed to have a fire in the pupils. But it was the smile that really got me. A creepy, cold little quirk of the lips. A smile that held nothing happy or funny in it—only nastiness. And secrets.

I had a bad feeling about that guy.

Fitzgerald Cotton stroked the pages with one long finger. "Ah, yes,
that
man."

The studio door opened and Betty stepped in. We both looked up, startled out of the tension that had settled over us as we looked at the book. "
There
you are!" Betty said to me, sounding exasperated. "Didn't you hear the lunch bell?"

I shook my head. But I was glad to see Betty. It was as if some of the evil I felt in the studio was banished when she opened the door.

"Excuse me, Uncle Fitz. But Gramma has been looking for Connor." Betty came over to us and stood by the couch. "What are you two looking at?" She peered down at the book. "Who's that creepy fellow?"

Fitzgerald Cotton shifted on the couch next to me. "Sit down a moment, Betty, girl, and get an education. I was just telling Connor about an ancestor of mine. Yours, too, dear girl. This fellow was the black sheep of the Magi Painters. He was Lorenzo da Padova—some people say he was a madman if ever there was one. Murdered his own brothers, it was said at the time, so he might inherit his family's fortune uncontested. No one ever proved anything against him, but people knew, just the same. People tried to stay out of his way—and yet his paintings were the best of the bunch."

"How horrid!" Betty exclaimed. "How perfectly terrible to have somebody like that on our family tree!"

"Nonsense, dear child," said her uncle. "We should feel honored. He was a genius, and an artist of the highest caliber. True—some said an
evil
genius. Dabbled in poisons, some said. Others said black magic. However, you don't judge art by its creators, children. The work transcends everything. It's much more than the sum of its parts, do you understand me?"

Betty shook her head. "You mean that the paint and the canvas and the subject matter and even the artist himself all come together to form something great—and it doesn't matter what sort of person puts it all together? Like, even if the artist is really nasty, the painting can be beautiful?"

Fitzgerald Cotton beamed up at her. "Well said. That's exactly what I mean. The artist is the facilitator. Art happens
through
him. The painting is a thing separate from him, even though he painted it."

Sort of as if the painting becomes its own self, I guessed he was saying. Sort of like how you can really enjoy a film, even if you hear that the actors are total dorks in real life, or conceited or bad-tempered. The film can be winning awards and stuff, even if the actors are thrown in jail on drug charges or whatever. Art stands alone.

It sounded like a good slogan, but I didn't like the look of that da Padova guy. Not one bit.

"Well, I still wish he'd been a nice person," Betty said staunchly.

"Nice?" Fitzgerald Cotton laughed. "
Nice
is next to nothing. Anybody can be nice. But only a very special person could mix paints that would hold their colors so well over time. And could use those paints to express the essence of his genius so well." His eyes grew bright and feverish. "And now some of those same pigments the Magi Painters used to paint these paintings reside right here in my very own studio," Fitzgerald Cotton exulted. He closed the big book reverently and gave it a pat. "I own a piece of history. A piece of immortality. It's my way of making magic, of being one of the Magi. And with their pigments I try to make magic of my own. It was working beautifully for a while. I was inspired. Now—well, now it's all gone..."

He stood up and took the book over to the cluttered table. I could hear the shouts of Homer and Chester out in the backyard. "I suppose you both must go down to lunch now."

"Yes," I said. And you'd think I'd be running out of there like a prisoner set free. But instead I just stood there.

The big art book lay on the table. Fitzgerald Cotton's paintings were on canvases all over the room. The woman in the portrait in the book was named Francesca Rigoletti. The woman in the portrait on the big canvas was my mom. And her name was Pamela Rigoletti.

There had to be a connection—or why else was I here?

The dizziness I had fought off when I'd first landed here in the past swept over me now. Facts were swirling around in my head, fluttering like moths, impossible to pin down. Francesca Rigoletti looked like Pamela Rigoletti—my mom. Mom had been swept back here to this house, to this studio. Fitzgerald Cotton painted her using paints that once belonged to the Magi Painters.... And now that he was painting her from memory, the paintings all turned out to be fearful portraits of a woman in pain.

How did all these pieces fit together? Arid what part could Lorenzo da Padova, Cotton's evil ancestor, have in this strange puzzle? My head ached with trying to make sense of it all, and I knew now that my quest in this time—my mission, if I chose to accept it—was no longer just to find that sketch and blow myself safely home again. Now I needed to find out what was going on with my mom.

And save her.

"May I borrow the big book, Uncle Fitzy?"

I looked at Betty, startled. She gave me a little smile and asked again. "Please? I think Connor and I would both like to look at the paintings by the Magi artists some more."

"I suppose." Fitzgerald Cotton sounded distracted. He moved back to stand in front of the portrait of Mom. "Just don't spill your soup on it."

"We will be very careful," Betty promised. "Now, aren't you coming down to lunch with us? Gramma said I was to tell you to come."

Her uncle shook his shaggy head. "You go. I must paint." And it was as if he were already off in another world. He opened the wardrobe and pulled put the old wooden box. He opened the box, and we watched as he started mixing colors. First he selected an egg from the bowl on the table in the center of the room, and broke it deftly, sliding the yolk into a cup and letting the runny white and the shell drop into the sink. He sifted in some of the colored powder—red—and added a drop of water from the tap. Furiously he stirred the mixture, then tested the shade on his palette, lost in his own weird world. "Trouble, trouble," he said mournfully. "Always just one trouble piling upon the next. And now no muse. The final blow." He spoke quietly, as if to himself, as if he'd forgotten we were there.

"Oh, heavens!" cried Betty, seeing Mom's portrait on the big easel for the first time. "That's awful! Why are you making Pammie look like that?"

"I'm not
trying
to, my girl," he replied grimly. "This is what comes out."

"You won't get the real Pammie back by painting her, Uncle Fitz," Betty said, watching him stroke colors onto the canvas. It was almost as if she'd read my mind. She shuddered. "And why you'd want to preserve her looking so hideous—like
that
—I can't imagine."

"But I
must
paint her!" he shouted suddenly, whirling on us. "Don't you see? I
must
paint her. I shall always paint her—to the end of my days. Even though the blasted paints don't work properly anymore! Could be the old pigments are breaking down with age, turning sour. I've heard it happens..." His voice trailed off, and he turned back to the canvas.

My mind started ticking. I struggled up off the couch, my gaze fixed on Fitzgerald Cotton as he painted frantically at his easel. I felt I was so close to understanding something—something important. Something vitally important to me, and to Mom.

But the glimmer faded. I thought I could hear Mom urging me to help, but her voice was only the merest whisper in my head.

"Come on," Betty said to me softly, lifting the heavy book off the table and holding it like a shield across her chest.

Reluctantly I stood up and left the crazy painter to his awful work. I followed Betty out of the studio, down the attic stairs, with Mom's anguished whisper wafting after me:
Come back, Connor. Come back.

Back home? Or back up to the studio? Either way, it was time to make a plan.

Still in my daze I followed Betty out of the studio and down the stairs. She carried the big art book and stopped off to drop it on the dresser in her bedroom. "Gramma's got lunch waiting," she told me. "We can look at the book after.
If
you come clean with me."

That brought me out of the daze. "I don't know what you mean."

"You know. You know where Pammie went; I'm sure you do. I was sure from the second I met you. And you must know more'—like why that lady in Uncle Fitz's art book looks so much like her." She stomped down the next flight of stairs ahead of me, and went out onto the porch, where Mrs. Cotton was serving our lunch.

The whole time we were eating tomato soup and cheese sandwiches, and drinking freshly made lemonade, Homer and Chester chattered about their fort. Elsie begged Joanna to take her to the toy store in town. Betty kept giving me mean looks. I kept thinking of how I had to get into that studio alone and search it. Find the sketch.
Make things happen.
I liked the unfamiliar sound of that. I wondered if I could ask Betty to help me. She seemed like the kind of girl who got things done, who didn't take no for an answer.

Fitzgerald Cotton never came down for his meals. He probably even slept up there, on the couch. So how was I ever going to get into the studio without him seeing me? Maybe he would creep down to use the bathroom—I mean, the guy had to pee sometime, didn't he? I could keep a sharp eye on him and sneak into the studio while he was downstairs.

Maybe he came down other times, too, like in the dead of night—to raid the refrigerator or something. Except there wasn't a refrigerator to raid—just something that
looked
like a fridge, called an icebox. It had shelves inside, and a big, deep sort of place at the bottom for a humongous chunk of ice. The ice kept things cool until it melted. Yesterday at dinnertime I'd seen Mrs. Cotton emptying a pan of water, and she explained to me that the iceman would deliver a new block of ice the next morning.

Sure enough, while we were eating lunch on the porch, a horse-and-cart came down the road. The cart was closed in at the back like a little truck, and the words painted on the side said:

MASON'S—WE BRING THE NORTH POLE
TO YOUR ICEBOX

"Look!" I called out in excitement. It was totally cool to have this big shaggy horse clopping right down the street and stopping at the Cottons' gate. It even took my mind off my worries and plans for the moment. But everyone just looked at me like
duh.
Like if a kid looked out at
my
street and said, "Look, a car!"

Then I felt a little sly smile twitch my mouth. "Hey, Betty!" I said to her. "Hey, look!"

"Hay is for horses," Betty replied primly.

"And there's the very horse, at your service." I laughed, pointing. "Right, Homeboy?"

Homer cracked up. He was all right, really. Elsie laughed and repeated what I'd said, over and over: "Hay is for horses—and here comes the very horse! Hay is for horses—and here comes the ice horse!"

Chester called out to the driver, "
Hey,
Mr. Riley, need some
hay
for your horse?"

And then the horse threw back its big shaggy head, shook its mane, and neighed loud and long. Even Betty had to giggle at that.

But she stopped giggling when Mr. Riley tipped his cap at us and jumped down from his seat high up on the wagon.

"Here comes trouble," she muttered.

"Who is he?" I whispered.

But Betty didn't answer—just crossed her eyes at me.

I watched this Mr. Riley guy. He went around to the back of the wagon to open the door. He dragged out a burlap sack with the gigantic block of ice inside. The ice was packed in straw. You could see bits sticking out all over the place.