The Body in the Moonlight (22 page)

“As if I'd forget—or she'd ever let me.”

“But it's true—this is swift even for us. The culprit is none other than Janice herself. She called Helen Henry, the PTA president, after you left last night and resigned as secretary. Apparently, she was pretty incoherent, but Helen pieced the story together. Plus, there are only two lawyers in town, and one of them pulled up to Janice's house this morning after Missy left for school.”

“We should have had the whole town in on the case from the beginning.”

“In a way, they always are,” Pix said.

But here was Tom, standing in the kitchen. Faith said good-bye to Pix and hung up the phone.

“Is everything okay?” she asked.

“I was having trouble concentrating. God only knows why,” Tom said sarcastically.

“Sit down and I'll get you something to eat,” Faith offered.

Tom shook his head. “I don't have time and I'm not hungry.”

There it was again. The man was wasting away.

“Do you think Janice killed Gwen and Jared?” Tom asked. “I've been turning it over and over in my mind ever since last night. It makes sense. People get pushed to extreme limits when they think their children are in jeopardy.” He ran his hand through his hair, causing a tuft to stick straight up in the back. Faith smoothed it down.

“No, it doesn't feel right to me, yet I don't know who else to suspect.” She did, but Tom had recently
spent a great deal of quality time with Nick Gabriel, and she didn't want an explosion like the one that had greeted her suggestion of Gwen as a possible suicide. She continued speaking. “Janice has certainly not been behaving normally—the phone calls—and she had ready access to cyanide. She was on the scene. And I've been convinced from the beginning that it had to be someone who was right there at the table. Too chancy otherwise. But there's simply no motive. That's been the problem with all this from the beginning. No rhyme nor reason. At the moment, Janice is the most likely suspect. Gwen must have switched desserts with Jared. I do that all the time with you.”

“You do?”

“Except if it's something I really, really like. And even then, I might. It's a female thing.”

“I never noticed.”

“You aren't meant to—and Jared wouldn't have, either, or anybody else at the table. Maybe Paula, and when she comes back, I'll ask her. But you'd have to have seen Janice last night and heard the way she's been talking. Jared was keeping her daughter from a singing career, and she may have believed he was molesting her. The same with George.”

“But she didn't kill George.”

“No, she was going to let the community do that.”

“Maybe she'll confess. I ought to see her, in any case.”

“Yes, you should go see her. She needs you. And maybe she has confessed already.”

She looked at Tom and saw her own doubt reflected in his eyes.

“Or maybe not.”

 

Faith wasn't quite sure why she didn't tell Tom she was going to New York City for lunch. It wasn't as if she was keeping it a big secret. She told Pix, but then Pix was going to keep the kids until Faith got back late in the afternoon. Thursday was the day Tom spent at the VA hospital and he never got home until after six. She'd be home by then, and if it came up in the conversation, then it would come up.

As soon as everyone left the house, she drove to Logan, listening to the BBC
News Hour
on WBUR with deliberation, eager to keep all other thoughts out of her mind. There was a problem with the five-hundred-foot Ferris wheel, the London Eye, that was being erected on the South Bank, overlooking the Thames, to mark the millennium, and the organizers were afraid it might not be ready in time. She wished she had such simple problems.

At 10:30, she was landing at La Guardia. She hopped in a cab and had almost a whole hour at Bergdorf's before she walked over to the restaurant. It felt more like spring than fall—sunny, breezy, and warm enough to make her wish she'd worn lighter clothes.

Andy was waiting.

He kissed her on both cheeks and took her coat, handing it to the woman in the checkroom. “Always a
sight for sore eyes. Come, let's eat, and you can tell me all about it.”

Faith had lingered a little longer over her toilette this morning and she was aware that the Jill Sander wool skirt and soft ivory silk blouse she'd picked were both flattering and up to New York City standards. She tucked a strand of her honey-colored hair behind her ear. Impulsively, she'd just purchased new earrings at Bergdorf's—deep turquoise enamel disks edged in gold.

Andy. Andy, Andy. They'd met in high school, dated long enough to discover they'd never be in love, and had stayed friends. He was a few years older than she was and had spent some years in Europe before returning to the States to open a gallery in SoHo. He came by it naturally. His mother was an art critic and his father had a gallery on Madison. His brother was a painter and his sister sculpted wood. Faith usually saw Andy whenever she was in the city, but he had only met Tom at the wedding. Andy never traveled to Boston. “Not really a destination, do you think?” he'd commented when she'd told him of her impending move and marriage. And on Tom's infrequent forays into the city, somehow there was never an occasion to see Andy. Faith knew herself well enough to admit that she liked it this way. The two men had little in common and it was so much more pleasant when worlds did not collide. Andy was the past—the life she'd had growing up and as a single woman in the Big Apple. The life she'd given up.

One of the things about Andy she'd always treasured was his disregard for conventions. He wasn't rude—or mean—but he cut to the chase. The fact that he didn't ask about her children—or her husband—didn't mean he didn't care, but he knew that wasn't why she was there, and so did she.

Faith gave him a quick rundown of the events in Aleford, which did cause him to say she'd be much better off moving back to the city, safer by far. It took them through their appetizers. Andy had the smorgasbord—tastes of herring, gravlax, and other Nordic delicacies beautifully arranged on a large glass plate. Faith was more than happy with her autumnal choice—mushroom soup with chestnut dumplings. They were seated by the fire, which was crackling merrily in the tall stone fireplace, and it was easy to imagine that they would be stepping out of the Scandinavian Adirondack interior into a pine forest rather than into New York traffic. New York traffic. Faith took a sip of the white Burgundy Andy had ordered—a 1997 Pouilly-Fuissé Champsroux. She heard a very faint horn. New York traffic was lovely. There was so much of it. Just like New York people. You were anonymous here. She could walk from one tip of the island to the other and not see a single soul she knew, unlike Aleford, where she couldn't take prints to be developed at Aleford Photo without passing half a dozen familiar faces. She felt suspended in time. A plane had plucked her from her everyday life and, for a brief moment, dropped her into another one altogether. It was
exhilarating to know that the Fendi bag she was carrying did not contain a single crayon or granola bar.

“So, you don't think the loony mom did it?” Andy asked.

“She might have, but murders are usually about gain, aren't they? Tangible things, like money, or intangibles, like revenge.”

Their conversation was reminding her of the ones she'd had with the mystery writers.

“I don't know that there is a formula, yet that has always been my impression, yes. If I were to kill, it would most assuredly have to be for something. This
is
what you're implying?”

Faith laughed. “Yes, and doing it badly. It's just that Janice's ‘something' doesn't seem as clear-cut as Nick Gabriel's.”

“I agree. And, by the way, I have found out a bit about your boy, although I don't know how useful it is. Seems to have been successful almost from the beginning. He hit a snag over the John Drewe business, but so did a lot of other people—very reputable people.”

“I don't know about this. What was the John Drewe business?”

“Forgery. Fakes. But with a provenance. Ah, our salmon is here. You'll like this.” Andy actually rubbed his hands together and did so without looking affected.

The waiter cautioned them about the heat and set steaming oak boards with their planked salmon in front of them. The smell of the fish, wood, and accompanying sweet potatoes with bacon and warm vegetable
slaw was so delectable that Faith momentarily lost her concentration and became a foodie, pure and simple. After a mouthful confirming the evidence of her senses, she was back.

“How was Nick involved?”

“First of all, Nick Gabriel was not directly involved—or not that I know of. What he did was buy some prints that later turned out not to be by Giacometti and others as signed, but by some poor sap working away in the English countryside who couldn't make it as an artist under his own name but who turned out to be quite good at doing it under someone else's. Drewe was the mastermind, though.”

Faith realized she was eating too quickly. She wanted to savor her food.

“This is fascinating. Even if it doesn't have anything to do with Nick.”

“I didn't say that.” Andy smiled. He had gone silver-gray very early, when he was in college, and instead of making him look older, it had the reverse effect. He was wearing a royal blue collarless shirt and a dark chocolate brown suit. It went well with the decor of the room, and Faith was sure that was no accident.

“Anyway, the difference in this art scheme, as opposed to others throughout the ages, was Drewe's diabolical faking of provenances. He cannibalized catalogs in the Victoria and Albert, the Tate, and other places, inserting his fakes and thus created detailed ‘verifiable' records of ownership. You know, with all this new technology, the wonder is that someone didn't beat him to
it—duplicating fonts, changing dates, then making photocopies that look like originals. He'd take a catalog apart, insert his information—owners who never existed and so forth—then stitch the binding back together, return it, and, voilà, he now had a genuine Ben Nicholson. It's a terrific mess. This all broke over three years ago and it will be many years before the records are cleaned up—if ever. And many of his wares will float around on the market for the rest of time—fake Braques, Matisses, Dubuffets.”

Faith had cleaned her plate and now took a sip of wine. She was thinking about the conversations Sandy Hoffmann had reported. Gwen would have known all about the fakes. The news would have broken when she first started working at the gallery. What if more had come Undique's way from other sources? What if Nick Gabriel was still making some of his tidy profits from selling false merchandise to his customers?

She thought of a problem. “But you couldn't sell fakes without the provenance scheme, so it would be hard to sell a fake now, right? Isn't that what you're saying?”

“Lord no! The figure generally quoted is that ten to forty percent of art currently being offered for sale is phony—or so overrestored, it amounts to the same thing. There are all sorts of ways to fake artwork. An artist can even forge himself. Over the course of many years, Dalí signed thousands of blank sheets of paper, which were then used for what were reproductions, not actual prints. While the signature was gen
uine, the prints weren't. The market was flooded with these.”

Andy was warming to the subject. The waiter cleared, crumbed, and asked if they cared for dessert and coffee.

“Of course we do. Both. Have the apple leaf, Faith. It's served warm with vanilla ice cream and caramel. I'll have the lingonberry sorbet—and lots of those good little cookies you make.”

Faith sighed. She couldn't remember the last time she'd had a meal this good that she hadn't had to cook herself. Rialto in Cambridge last summer with Tom. Jody Adams had done something fabulous with lobster.

“I'm sure cavemen were forging the drawings of the Mastodon Master or whomever in their caves. It's an art as old as Art. Roman practitioners used to churn out lovely pieces by Phidias and Praxiteles—Greeks. More recently, one of my personal favorites is Eric Hebborn, who successfully copied Corot, Augustus John, as well as old masters, and wrote a very entertaining memoir called
Drawn to Trouble
. It's his assertion that there is no such thing as fake art, only false labeling, and it's a point well taken. At his trial for forgery in the late forties, Hans van Meegeren spoke about one of his ‘Vermeers,' noting that one day the painting was worth millions of guilders and experts and art lovers came in droves to see it. The next, it was worth nothing and nobody came. Yet the picture hadn't changed. ‘What had?' he asked the court.”

Faith made a note to get Hebborn's book. “We hang reproductions on our walls. I suppose hanging an original Corot by Eric Hebborn is no different, so long as Hebborn's name is on it, too. But no one would buy that piece of art at Corot prices.”

“Exactly. And now, try this on. Your Gwendolyn Lord may have been one of those individuals with an eye. That is a rather rare ability to distinguish between something fine and something ordinary, whether it be a painting, a garment, or a piece of furniture. It also means the individual is adept at spotting fakes. He or she has a sort of internal alarm system that goes off in the presence of a fraud. They know something's wrong. Bernard Berenson had it. He would actually feel an unpleasant sensation in his stomach. Or get slightly dizzy. Say Gwen spots the fake or fakes, confronts Nick, and is persuaded to keep her mouth shut. Then he gets tired of paying out and it's good-bye. His cousin finds out, so he has to go, too.”

This was roughly the scenario Faith had been running through her mind. “She was trying to get together enough capital to start her own gallery, and she left a surprisingly large estate.”