Sammy Keyes and the Art of Deception (27 page)

Just then Lance charges into the room, shouting, “How could you burn them?” And when he sees what's left of
Whispers
, his face completely pinches up and he looks like he's about to cry.
“Why?”

Diane's checking around for her missing contact lens and doesn't even look at him. So I say, “She burned them because she had negatives made for lithographs. They all say Diane, not Duane. And with the originals gone, no one could prove she wasn't the artist.”

“You heartless
leech.
These were our father's—”

Diane stops searching and faces him. “Don't you dare talk to me about our father or about being heartless.
Where were you when he died? Where were you when Mom died? And regardless of your banal accusations, the paintings were mine. I inherited them, not you. So don't tell me what I can and cannot do with what's mine.”

Lance stood there for a moment, his lips clamped together, air sucking in and out his nose. Finally he says, “Dad could never see you for what you are, but if there's any justice in this world, he knows now. All those years he paid for you to be in New York and Paris—the
fortune
he spent on you dilettantin' and gallivantin' all over the globe.” He squints at her. “Even in my darkest days, I've never stooped so low as you.”

“You think trying to bring beautiful art into the world is a
crime
? You think—”

“You'll never change, Lizzy. You talk a good game, but that's as far as it goes. You'd rather party than paint. You want the glory, but not the sweat. I'm sure you'll find a way to justify this—if only to yourself.”

Grams hobbles over to him and whispers, “Would you like us to call the police?”

He shakes his head. “He left them to her.” Then he grumbles, “My own fault for taking a lifetime to sober up.”

“Well, you need to talk to Jojo about the negatives,” I tell him. “She signed a contract with him for lithographs.”

“I will,” he says, then turns to his sister. “I'm through running, Lizzy. From my past, from my problems, and from you.” He pulls what's left of
Whispers
out of the frame, yanks it off the wood it's stretched over, then rolls it up.

And Diane did try to stop him, but he just shook her
off and told her to shut her two-faced yap. And when he tucked the ruined painting away in his fringed jacket, Diane collapsed onto the couch and started sobbing in her hands.

And that's how we left her. Trapped with herself. Surrounded by beautiful things that weren't hers and some pretty ugly statues that were.

When we got out to the drive, Lance said, “That's a mean limp, Rita. Did you twist your ankle?”

“She did it bringing down your sister,” I said. “Grams is the one who broke in and tackled her.”

He stopped putting on his helmet. “
You
did?”

Grams shrugged. “Someone had to.”

“Well, well,” he says with a grin.

“I'm just sorry I wasn't able to do it in time. They really were beautiful paintings.”

I started to tell her, Oh,
now
you admit it, but Lance cuts me off, saying, “Well, you managed to do more than I did.” He pats his jacket. “And thanks to the two of you, I do have proof.” Then he smiles at her and says, “So why don't you let me give you a lift home? It's the least I can do.”

Her eyes get all big and she says, “No! No, thank you!”

Now, my board's in the bushes, so getting home is no big deal for me. But really, I don't know how else to get Grams back to the highrise. Calling Hudson doesn't seem like the greatest idea, Mr. Moss probably doesn't own a
lawn
mower, let alone a car. And besides, standing there looking at Lance's Harley, it hits me that this is one pony Grams should have jumped back on years ago.

So I tell her, “Grams, you're going.”

“I am not!”

“Yes, you are. You can't walk on that foot, no buses come by here, we already know that a cab's
real
expensive, and he's staying right across from the apartment. Just get on that thing and go.”

She just stands there with big ol' owl eyes.

“Unless you want me to get Hudson to come to your rescue?”

“No!” she says, then turns to Lance. “
Promise
me you won't take chances with my life. I have a granddaughter I want to see get married someday, you know.”

He grins at me, then says to her, “You have my word, ma'am.”

He gives her his helmet, helps snap it in place, then kicks on the Harley,
brummm-bum-bum-bum-bum.

Then he flips down her foot pegs, and my grams—in her patent-leather pumps and A-line skirt—swings onto the back of the Harley and rolls down the driveway, showing leg like I've never seen.

I didn't race Grams and the Bandit home or anything. I needed to take a detour to break the news to the “Silver Knight” before he heard it from someone else. I was actually pretty worried about telling him. I mean, being as smart as Hudson and being fooled by a purple-eyed phony, well, it wasn't going to be easy for him to take.

I found him reading a book on his porch. “Hey, Hudson!” I called as I turned up his walkway.

“Sammy?” He put the book down. “I was afraid you might not visit for a while.”

I plopped down in the seat next to him. “Abandon my favorite place in the world?” I grinned at him. “Nah.”

He looked at me like he was noticing something new about me. Like you do when you've known someone your whole life and never really noticed they have freckles.

So I said, “I'm sorry I called you old. I didn't mean it like that and—”

“I overreacted, Sammy. And I've been feeling bad about it since. You were just trying to help, I know that.”

“Hudson?”

“Yes, my friend?”

I cringed a little. “I've got some bad news.”

He sat up a little. “Is Rita all right?”

“Yeah, she's fine. She busted a window, pinned a pretender, twisted her ankle, and broke her shoe. But other than that, she's fine.”

He sat up even straighter. “Sammy, what on earth are you talking about?”

“Hudson,” I said gently, “you're in love with an impostor.”

Very carefully, he says, “I never said I was in love.”

“You didn't have to.”

He could tell something serious had happened. So he sat there and listened as I told him the story. And when I broke it to him that all the paintings were destroyed, his chin quivered and he whispered, “No … !”

“I'm sorry, Hudson. I tried to save them, but they're gone.”

He was quiet for the longest time. Then finally he said, “How could I have been so blind?” He turned to me. “And how on earth did you manage to see?”

I shrugged. “Thank Tammy Finnial.”

“Come again?”

So I told him about picking up Tammy's still life by mistake and how my mind had wandered off about names and about what a big difference a single letter can make. But when I started in about Icky and all of that, he says, “Sammy? Sammy, please. What does Ichabod Regulski have to do with this?”

“Well, Ichabod changed his name when he started school. At least that's what everybody says. But he had a
reason
to change it then. So I started thinking about Diane. I mean, she was born Elizabeth, she went by Lizzy her whole life—why did she switch to Diane? At first I figured it was because she had a reputation as a rejected artist, but Reijden is such an unusual name, so what good would that really do?

“And then I started thinking about her. How she's so, you know, perfect. Her hands, her nails, her hair, her clothes. Remember on the day we went over there how she was wearing that pouffy white blouse with long ruffled cuffs?”

He nods, but then shakes his head. “I'm not making some connection, Sammy, forgive me.”

“She didn't have a spot on her! Anywhere! My art teacher gets paint
every
where—in her hair, under her nails, on her clothes—she's like, permanently stained. And then I started thinking about how Diane's house smelled like cinnamon and oranges. Every time I was there, that's what it smelled like. It didn't smell like paint or turpentine or linseed oil—even her studio didn't smell a thing like art class.

“But the big thing was the fence. And the tree.”

“What fence? What tree?” he asked.

“Do you remember in
Awakening
how there's a little tree beside a meadow of grass and tiny yellow flowers?”

“Of course.”

“And in the background, there's a little picket fence?”

“I suppose …”

“It's kinda subtle, because it was an olive green color and it blended with the grass. But the more I looked at
that painting, the more I started thinking it was the same fence that was in Diane's yard. So I went over there and scraped through the white paint—”

“And?”

“And it was yellow underneath.”

“But under that?”

“Was green.”

Very slowly, his head goes up and down. “So it was green a long, long time ago. Long enough that a sapling grew into a giant walnut tree.”

“Exactly. And I should have figured it out right then and there, but I didn't. I kept thinking that she must have been remembering her childhood. But the eyes of the girl in
Whispers
were brown, so that threw me. Then I thought maybe she had worked from a photograph, but she said she didn't
do
that, either. It wasn't until I picked up Tammy's paper that things started coming together.”

“The spark that finally lit the fuse, huh?”

I cringed, remembering the fire. “Man! Why didn't I put it together sooner? I could have saved the paintings, I could have—”

“Sammy, you did more than the rest of us. At least you managed to save some proof.”

I sighed. “Which will help Lance make sure they don't print up lithographs.”

“Hmmm.” He turned to me. “They can alter the negatives, you know.”

“Alter the … what good would that do?”

“They can change Diane back into Duane. They can do it pretty easily.”

“Really?”

He tried to smile. “Would you like a print of
Whispers
? I could see if I could get you one.”

I thought about it a minute, then shook my head. “It wouldn't be the same.”

He sighed, then nodded. “I know. It's not. But it would be something, at least.”

“No, Hudson, I don't want one. Diane—or I guess,
Elizabeth
—was right about one thing—I was better off not knowing. I mean, now that I've figured all this out, the painting's pretty much ruined for me.”

“It doesn't have to be.”

I gave a little shrug. “Well, it is. I mean, that's
her
in the painting.” A lump was suddenly gathering in my throat. Gathering hard and fast. “How could she do that to someone who loved her so much?”

He studied me as I tried to blink back the tears.

“You're thinking that her father must have loved her enormously, to capture her that way?”

I nodded and choked out, “What would that be like?” I slapped away some tears and sat up a little straighter. “Doesn't matter. I've got to focus on what I
do
have, not on what I'll never know.”

“Now, don't say that, Samantha. You can't predict what the future holds.”

I let out a choppy laugh. “Right.”

“You can't.” He looks out over the rooftops, thinking, then finally turns back to me and says, “Well, I'm sorry
Whispers
is ruined for you. The whole situation really is a tragedy.”

He looked tired. Older than I'd ever seen him look. So I said, “I'm sorry for you, too, Hudson. And I didn't come here to try and say I told you so or anything. I just didn't want you to hear about this from someone else.”

“I know, Sammy.”

“And I know you really believed that falling in love with the artist was a logical extension of falling in love with the art, but Grams was right—you fell for her looks.” I laughed. “I mean, if it
was
just the art, you'd have to be in love with an old dead guy right now.”

He gave me a wry look. “You're right on that count.”

“So now you have to decide—is she worth it?”

“Oh, no. If what you say is true—and I have no doubt that it is—then I want nothing more to do with the woman.”

He was staring straight ahead, looking sort of hurt, sort of angry, and very tired. So I tried to get him to talk about it. “Well, did you have a good time going out with her?”

He shook his head. “It was very odd, actually.”

“How so?”

“For one thing, she refused to talk about painting. Her work or anyone else's. She just moved around the room, being charming and gracious and, of course, beautiful. But it was all just chitchat.” He sighed. “It makes a lot more sense to me now.”

So we sat there, being quiet. Being friends. And inside I was feeling better again. Feeling happy. My favorite place in the whole wide world, with my favorite seventy-two-year-old, just being us, warts and all.

And then I heard the best sound I'd heard in days— Hudson's chuckle.

“What?” I asked him.

“She threw that statue through the window?”

I grinned. “Uh-huh.”

“She
tackled
her?”

I could feel my heart swell with pride. “She may not have Liz Taylor eyes,” I told him, “but there's no one like my grams.” Then I laughed. “You should have seen her, riding off on the back of that Harley.”