“Do you want to go into business with them?” she says. “Ravi could help you.”
“Actually, Colin has taken a few to show to his uncle.”
Kiran eats a green bean, then stares at her fork. “I don’t know why I’m dating him,” she says.
She’s voiced Jane’s own question, but Jane isn’t sure how to respond.
“I mean,” Kiran says, “he seems like a fine person and all. Doesn’t he?”
“Uh-huh,” Jane says, “most of the time.”
“Ravi likes him.”
“But, do you like him?”
“I like having sex with him,” she says.
“Really?” Jane says, then, realizing how she sounds, flushes with embarrassment.
Kiran laughs. “He probably doesn’t seem the type, huh? Let’s just say there are benefits to him feeling like he needs to be an expert on everything.”
Jane once kissed a boy from her high school at a party, and a girl in her dorm who was pretty drunk. And she thinks about sex. But she hasn’t even come close. Not really.
“I feel like I should like him,” Kiran says.
“Aunt Magnolia used to tell me to be careful not to should all over myself,” Jane says, which makes Kiran glance at her in surprise, then chuckle.
“But, really,” Kiran says, with a strange, stubborn kind of earnestness. “I should like him. The funny things he says should make me laugh. The conversations we have should interest me. He’s smart, he’s educated, he never does anything objectively wrong. And yet I can’t relax around him, and I can’t tell whether it’s actually something about him, or if it’s just that I can’t relax anywhere, about anything.” She blinks fast, looking away from Jane.
“Oh, Kiran.”
“It sucks,” she says. “And trying to figure it out makes me really tired.”
“Is Patrick part of it too?” Jane asks.
Kiran makes a hopeless, impatient noise. “No. He doesn’t get to be part of it. At least Colin is an open book.”
“Well,” Jane says, feeling distinctly useless. “I wish I knew how to help. I don’t have much experience. Mainly what I know how to do is drop out of college and make umbrellas.”
A smile touches the corner of Kiran’s mouth. “What would your aunt tell me to do?”
Jane takes a careful breath. “She’d probably tell you to breathe like a jellyfish.”
“Do jellyfish breathe?”
“I mean, imagine your lungs are moving the way a jellyfish moves,” Jane says. “Breathe deliberately, deep and slow, into your belly.”
“Okay,” Kiran says, focusing on her next breath. “And this will solve my problems?”
Now Jane is smiling. “It will, if your problems relate to breathing.”
“Aunt Magnolia was a wise woman.”
Yes, Jane thinks. She was.
* * *
That night, Jane’s rooms feel cavernous and dark, the ceilings too high, the air too chilly. In her morning room, the darkness presses in. So she works, moving her hands steadily across the skeleton of her umbrella, trying to be patient with all the questions that don’t have answers.
There’s a stage in umbrella-making when the umbrella is little more than a rod and eight ribs. If Jane opens and closes it, it moves like a jellyfish made of wires, like an undersea creature in the world’s creepiest ocean.
Since she’s using ribs of different lengths for this umbrella, the frame makes a particularly strange and unbalanced jellyfish. It’s hard to know if this will have the effect she’s going for. She’ll have to wait and see. But she thinks she might want this umbrella to be like a secret. When other people look at it, they’ll see something broken-looking and weird. Only Jane will know that it’s the blue splotch in Aunt Magnolia’s iris.
* * *
Once again, the groaning house wakes her before dawn, this time from a dream about Ivy stealing a fish. The dream becomes a voice—a house voice—with moaning walls and rattling windows that tell Jane to look outside, and before she’s entirely awake, she’s stumbled out of bed and pressed herself against the glass in the morning room. The night is clear, the moon is just rising, and the garden is knit like black lace.
Jasper blunders into the room from the bedroom and stands beside her at the window. He presses his nose to the glass.
Beyond the garden, movement. A dark shape. No—two dark shapes. One of the shapes switches on a flashlight. The other person is illuminated briefly, not enough to make out any features, but enough to show that this person is carrying a flat, rectangular package. They cross the lawn and disappear into the trees.
Patrick and Ivy, Jane thinks, struck by a certainty she can’t justify. Her heart begins to beat in her throat. “Jasper?” she says. “Does that package seem the right size for the Vermeer?”
Jasper sneezes.
“Yeah,” Jane says. “So, what do we do?”
Jasper sets his paw on Jane’s foot. It’s a gesture Jane isn’t certain how to interpret. Is he trying to keep her here, or is he expressing team solidarity in the face of adventure?
Or maybe he’s a dog, Jane says to herself, he doesn’t understand language, and he likes how your foot feels.
“Well, Jasper,” says Jane. “I guess we need a flashlight. An ally would be nice too.”
Finding her hoodie and socks and slipping into her big black boots, checking the time—it’s not even 5:15 yet—Jane goes out into the corridor. After considering things for a split second, she knocks on Ravi’s door. Jasper leans on her ankles. When there’s no answer, she knocks harder, and when there’s still no answer, she takes a conscious risk of discovering him having sex with someone and barges right in. It’s not like he hasn’t barged in on her, and there’s no time to waste here.
Ravi’s bed is palatial, and empty.
Interesting. She tries to conjure up the mental image of the two figures entering the forest again, to see if she can turn one of them into Ravi, but it’s really no use; she didn’t see enough.
“I wish I knew which room is Lucy’s,” she says to Jasper as they proceed down the corridor. “I wish—” She trips over Captain Polepants. “Ack! I wish I knew who to trust.” Where is she likely to find a flashlight? The kitchen? The servants’ quarters?
Jane has a sudden vision of the two long, powerful flashlights propped on Ivy’s computer desk.
If Ivy’s in the forest now, there’s nothing to stop Jane from going into her room and “borrowing” a flashlight. And if it turns out that Ivy is in her room . . .
Jane heads toward the servants’ quarters. As she and Jasper round the courtyard, she hears music in the house somewhere. A Beatles recording, which strikes her as odd at this hour.
In the servants’ wing, she starts to lose her nerve. If Ivy’s in her room, then Jane’s appearance at five-something in the morning is going to be pretty unexpected. And Ivy hasn’t been too friendly lately. She stops outside Ivy’s door.
“Jasper?” she whispers. “What do I do?”
Jasper looks back at her with a blank expression appropriate to a dog.
With one big breath, Jane knocks.
After the briefest pause, Ivy’s door swings back sharply, Ivy’s face alert and interested behind it, her glasses in place. Behind her, one of her computers is on, fans whirring and lights flashing like a little spaceship in the darkness. “What do you want?” she demands in alarm, glancing past Jane into the corridor. “Why are you here?”
She’s still wearing the ratty blue sweater and black leggings from yesterday and her dark hair is unbound, falling down her shoulders messily to the middle of her back. And she looks so unhappy to see Jane that Jane is stung.
“I need a flashlight,” Jane says.
“What for?”
“I just need one.”
“Tell me what for.”
/>
“Why should I?”
Ivy speaks roughly. “Because if you need a flashlight, that tells me you’re going outside, and it could be dangerous.”
“You mean because of the Panzavecchias,” Jane says, “and Philip Okada sneaking around with a gun?”
Ivy seems stunned into silence.
“Are you going to give me a flashlight or not?” says Jane. When Ivy still doesn’t respond, she turns on her heel and stalks out into the corridor.
“Wait,” Ivy calls after her. “Janie, wait.”
Jane doesn’t wait. When she turns down the corridor toward the center of the house, Jasper, behind her, yips and whines, then emits one short bark that finally gets Jane’s attention. She turns back to him impatiently. “What!”
Jasper is backing down the corridor toward the big plank door with the iron latch at the far end, the door that leads to the west attics. He’s whining as he moves, clearly begging her to follow.
With a frustrating sense of futility, Jane gives in. “Goddammit, Jasper,” she says, turning to follow. “You’re lucky I’ve watched so many dog movies.”
Jasper leads her through the wide plank door, then straight ahead to a sliding metal door that Jane realizes must be the freight elevator, and the fastest route to the outside. She presses the button. When the door slides open, she and Jasper step in.
As it slides closed, a hand reaches in and stops the door.
Jane is hyperventilating as Ivy pushes herself through the crack. She’s dressed in tight black from head to toe and she’s wearing a backpack and checking the light on her flashlight, which is big enough to bludgeon someone with. It shines like a beacon. Briefly, it illuminates the bulge of a gun holster under Ivy’s hoodie, below her left breast. The elevator doors slide shut.
“Ivy?” Jane says, her voice cracking.
“I’m going to stick to you like shit on your shoe,” says Ivy, “until you tell me where you’re going.”
Jane figures that if she’s stuck in an elevator with Ivy and a gun, there’s no point in holding back what Ivy’s going to learn eventually anyway. “I saw two people outside with a flashlight and a Vermeer-sized package,” she says. “They crossed the lawn and went into the trees.”
“Got it,” says Ivy.
“I assumed it was you and Patrick,” Jane adds nastily.
Ivy’s face is expressionless. “We have nothing to do with the Vermeer.”
“No, just the broken Brancusi,” Jane says. “And the bank robbery, and the kidnapping of children.”
Saying nothing, Ivy fishes a dark balaclava out of a pocket and pulls it down across her face, over her glasses. The contrast between her and Jane, who’s still in her hoodie and Doctor Who pajamas, borders on the absurd. The elevator screams as it descends, then lets them out into a blasting wind and the sudden noise of the sea far below.
Ivy grips Jane’s wrist, hard.
“Let go,” Jane says. “You’re hurting me.”
Ivy says, “We have to move fast,” then begins to pull Jane across the lawn. Jane scrambles along beside her, still hurting, amazed at how strong Ivy is and how fast she’s moving.
“Where are you taking me?”
“There’s a bay in the ramble,” Ivy says. “A hidden one, on the island’s northeast edge. A great place for sneaking art off the island.”
“You would know,” Jane says, then focuses on being dragged toward the trees without falling.
The ramble is a steep, rocky, hillocky forest of scrub pines. There are no trails and Jasper is pushing himself to his limits to keep up with the downhill sliding and jumping Ivy and Jane are doing. He disappears occasionally, then reappears, presumably finding alternate, more basset-hound-friendly routes of passage. The rattling wind covers whatever noise he’s making. Ivy continues to move with assurance, familiar with the forest. Daybreak is coming on fast.
Ivy grips Jane higher on her arm and jerks her to a stop.
“What—” Jane begins, then shuts her mouth as she sees what Ivy’s seeing. A man sits on a rock with his back to them, not ten feet away, surrounded by trees. His hair is clipped close and his body is hefty, sturdy; he has a red beard. His pants legs are soaked through, as if he’s been wading through water. Beside him on the rock is a small pile of orange slices. He reaches to the pile and eats one occasionally. A gun sticks out of the back waistband of his jeans.
Ivy pulls Jane away.
“Let’s go back to the house,” Jane whispers as Ivy tugs her down the slope, out of range of the man. “Please, Ivy, stop. Let me go.” But Ivy suddenly pulls her down behind a shrub and puts an arm around her, whispering Shhhh urgently in her ear, and Jane freezes, no idea what’s happening. Where’s Jasper? Jane begins to panic about Jasper. What if the horrible man sees—
Jasper presses against Jane’s leg on the side opposite Ivy. Pushing away from Ivy, Jane buries her face in his neck, breathing into his fur. “Oh, Jasper.”
But Jasper’s attention seems fixed on a point through a hole in the shrubbery. Ivy is holding some of the branches back and staring out into the growing light.
Jane moves some branches aside and looks where they’re looking.
It’s the bay of which Ivy spoke, some twenty yards away, a place where the forest gives way and the land slopes down to a small, crescent-shaped inlet of dark sand. Lucy St. George stands on the shore in all black, holding a gun. She’s pointing it at a very tall white man in a speedboat moored to a single wooden post in the water.
“Lucy,” Jane whispers. “Lucy! What is she doing?”
What Lucy seems to be doing is arguing with the man. He’s at the motor, one hand grabbing it as if he’s ready to take off at any moment. He keeps waving his other hand around and yelling things at Lucy that Jane can’t hear. His words have the tone of angry, passionate questions.
“Whatever,” Jane hears Lucy shout back in a derisive voice. “I’m not doing it anymore. It’s a waste of my talents. Yours too, J.R.”
J.R. reaches into his coat and Jane is frightened; she thinks, from the expression on his face, that he’s reaching for a gun. Instead he pulls out a whistle. He blows into it with a shrill blast. He’s the tallest man Jane has ever seen, thin as a reed.
A moment later, branches crack and leaves rustle and the red-bearded man who’s been eating oranges comes through the brush onto shore. Without even a sidelong glance at Lucy or her gun, he wades directly into the water, unmoors the boat, and climbs in. J.R. brings the boat to life like the waking of a thousand bees. Then the boat zips away, J.R. looking back at Lucy balefully.
“Who were they?” Jane whispers to Ivy. “Where’s the painting? Why did she let them go? Is it an undercover sting?”
“No,” says Ivy grimly, pulling off her balaclava. “I’m not getting ‘undercover sting’ from this.”
“Do you mean—”
“Shh!”
Still on shore, Lucy wraps her arms tight about herself, one hand still clutching her gun. Then she turns abruptly to scan the trees. Is she waiting for something? Someone? Finally, she makes a small, impatient gesture, sticks her gun inside her jacket, and begins to walk away from shore, directing herself not precisely toward the spot where Jane and Ivy are hiding, but near to it. She wears a fuzzy black knit hat that makes her look big-eyed and young. She seems very alone to Jane somehow, as if Jane is looking into a View-Master at the only woman in the world. As Lucy approaches, she wipes her cheeks with the back of her hand and Jane sees that she’s crying.
Ivy reaches under her hoodie toward the gun holster and makes a move to stand up.
“What the hell are you doing?” Jane whispers fiercely, grabbing on to Ivy’s arm and yanking her back down.
“I’m going to stop her!” says Ivy, struggling to break free of Jane’s grip.
“Stop her doing what?” Jane says. “We still don’t
know what’s going on!”
“Don’t be so naïve!” says Ivy. “She’s an art thief!”
“Fine, but I won’t let you shoot her!”
“What?” says Ivy, staring at Jane with an incredulous expression. “I’m not going to shoot her!”
“Then why do you have a gun?”
“Okay,” says Lucy’s voice, rising, cold and careful, from a place very near. “Who’s there? I can hear voices. Come out slowly.”
Ivy is so startled that she drops back down, gasping, eyes wild. She reaches under her hoodie. “Stay hidden,” she whispers. “Let me handle this, please.”
Before Jane can even begin to try to figure out what to do, Jasper barrels around the shrubbery toward Lucy. Jane stands up, crying out, and watches the dog ram into Lucy. Unprepared, Lucy topples, cursing, struggling with her gun. The dog climbs on top of her and closes his mouth on her gun, growling, flailing to and fro. Everything is happening so fast. Jane runs to them, terrified that the gun will go off in Jasper’s mouth. Lucy struggles, her fingers bleeding and trapped; she understands too.
“Stop him,” Lucy sobs. “Stop him. Pull him away. He’ll blow my head off!”
“Jasper,” Jane says, wrapping arms around his middle and trying to pull. “She’s not going to shoot us!”
“I’m not,” Lucy gasps. “Of course I’m not going to shoot you. I swear!”
Jasper’s grip slips. The sudden release sends Jane falling down sideways with the dog in her arms. She and Jasper struggle and roll, then she finds her feet and rights herself.
When she stands, Lucy is on her feet again too. Lucy holds her gun, trained on Jane.
“Lucy,” Jane says, confused.
Lucy’s eyes are steady and hard behind the barrel of the gun. Blood runs down her hands. “So,” she says. “You’re charmingly trusting, aren’t you?”
Not really, no, Jane thinks, her thoughts taking sluggish steps, but there’s a world of difference between not trusting someone and believing they’re actually capable of shooting you. This is my fault, Jane thinks. Ivy is here. Jasper is here. I brought them here and put them in danger. “Jasper,” she says to the dog, who’s emitting a low growl beside her that terrifies her because of how Lucy might react. “Be quiet, and still.”