“You’re quick, Miss Thrash,” he says. “You might like detective work. You’re right, it’s not illegal. But guess what else?”
“You want to play a guessing game?” Kiran asks mildly.
Investigator Edwards smiles a dazzling smile. “Guess,” he says. “It’s about one of the guys, the tall, skinny one called J.R. Turns out the J is short for Johannes.”
“Johannes?” says Kiran. “Is that really his name? Like Johannes Vermeer?”
“Johannes Vermeer Rutkoski is his name,” says Investigator Edwards. “His parents hoped he would aim high.”
“He’s the forger?”
“Yup.”
“Here’s his workshop,” Investigator Edwards says, then shows Kiran and Jane a big, glossy photo of an easel in a cluttered room. On the easel is an unfinished painting. Jane has seen it before, in the west attics of Tu Reviens, where Mrs. Vanders is cleaning it.
“That’s our Rembrandt self-portrait,” Kiran says. “Or, it’s going to be!” She clutches her temples. “Octavian has never done a thing about security,” she says. “No alarms, no cameras. Ever since Charlotte disappeared, he doesn’t even lock the doors. He can’t bear to.”
“Well, it is an island,” the investigator says. “But that doesn’t make it inaccessible, and you do have all those parties.”
Inspector Edwards shows Kiran and Jane one more big photo: a whole row of canvases, leaning against a dirty wall, all painted to look like the Vermeer picture Lady Writing a Letter with Her Frog. “His practice attempts,” says the inspector.
“Johannes Vermeer Rutkoski is a prodigious talent,” says Kiran tiredly. “Makes me think there should be a museum somewhere of all the finest forgeries.”
By the time Jane and Kiran get to the Thrash family apartment, Jane is so exhausted that she collapses onto the proffered bed without even removing her clothes. It seems impossible that her scramble through the forest was only this morning.
Kiran comes to her doorway. “Good night, sweetie,” she says.
“Kiran?” says Jane. It’s the first time they’ve been alone all day. “Are you okay?”
“I’ve been better,” she says. “But I’ve been worse. Don’t worry about me, just get some sleep. You’re the hero of the day, after all . . .”
Jane falls asleep before she can hear Kiran’s reflections on heroes.
Her dreams are deep and wild. Ivy is running through a forest dressed in black. She’s in danger. She’s running away from Jane, vanishing behind tall, dark, slender trees. No. She’s turned. She’s running back toward Jane. As Ivy nears Jane, she slows, reaches out, hands Jane something. It’s an umbrella, and Jane realizes she’s not Ivy. She’s Aunt Magnolia, in the purple coat with the silver-and-gold lining.
The umbrella Aunt Magnolia hands Jane is the one she’s been working on, the one that looks lopsided and uneven, like the blue splotch in Aunt Magnolia’s eye. “It’s broken, darling,” she says, pressing it into Jane’s hands. “But it can still keep you safe.”
Jane wakes with a fuzzy-feeling mouth from not brushing her teeth the night before, and pins and needles in her legs from sleeping in jeans. The dream feels very near. She tries to hold on to it.
She emerges from her bedroom to find Kiran staring over Central Park through the glass walls of the penthouse, a coffee cup in her hands. When Jane joins her, the two of them witness a rare New York frogstorm. More of a drizzle, really, but enough to muck up the traffic and give the surface of the park the appearance of water, moving with hopping specks and waves of blue.
“How did you sleep?” asks Kiran.
“I had a wonderful dream,” says Jane.
* * *
It’s strange to step back into the receiving hall of Tu Reviens having missed the gala. It’s empty, stale; no musicians, caterers, or cleaners. No buzz of activity. The lilacs in the vases look, and smell, bruised somehow.
Kiran goes off to find Ravi and give him the news that the Vermeer is still well and truly gone.
Upstairs, Jasper lies outside Jane’s door with his nose to the crack. Seeing her, he leaps to his feet and comes running at her, lopsided and bandaged. As Jane kneels to receive his ecstatic, slobbery greetings, she has a startling sense of coming home. “Ow!” she cries as he scrambles into her lap, his claws digging into her thighs. “Jasper! You’re not small!”
In her rooms, she waits for a few moments, looking around, not sure what she’s waiting for. Then she sets off to find Ivy.
But when she encounters Mrs. Vanders in the kitchen, Mrs. Vanders tells her that Ivy’s gone away.
“Gone away!” says Jane. “Where? Is she coming back?”
Mrs. Vanders is tapping the keys on a laptop at one of the kitchen tables. Patrick stands at the stove sautéing garlic. “Of course she’s coming back!” says Mrs. Vanders. “Good god, girl. Don’t look so forlorn.”
“She didn’t tell me she was going.”
“Nor should she have,” says Mrs. Vanders crisply. “I strictly forbade it.”
“She was sorry to leave without explaining,” Patrick adds, glancing at Jane over his shoulder.
“This reminds me,” says Jane, in increasing annoyance. “I want to know about my aunt Magnolia.”
“Ivy asked me if she could be the one to tell you everything,” says Mrs. Vanders. “I said yes. It seemed important to her. So you’ll just have to wait.”
“Well, when’s she coming back?”
“In a few days,” says Mrs. Vanders.
For a couple of seconds, Patrick goes very still, staring at the wooden spoon in his hands. Then he lays the spoon on the stovetop carefully, switches the burner off, and says to Mrs. Vanders, “I’m done lying to Kiran.” He walks into the back of the kitchen and disappears through a door.
“Oh, god help us,” Mrs. Vanders says in alarm, springing up from the table, rushing off to follow him, then coming back, glaring in Jane’s general direction, slapping her laptop closed, and rushing off again.
“Jasper,” says Jane, focusing on the canine at her feet, who gazes up at her with his tongue hanging out. “I literally give up. None of them will ever make any sense. Well. As long as we’re waiting for Ivy, we should finish up the umbrella, don’t you think?”
* * *
The Aunt Magnolia umbrella is waiting for Jane, sitting in the middle of Ivy’s worktable, washed in the fading light of the morning room windows.
As her fingers move along its parts, fitting the uneven canopy against the mismatched ribs of the frame, Jane is thinking about broken things. She’s proud of herself, for stumbling and making mistakes but still, in the end, putting together the broken pieces of the mystery.
She wonders if she could fit the pieces of her life back together too.
Aunt Magnolia?
When the canopy is attached to the frame with that particular balance of not-too-loose, not-too-tight, Jane slides the runner up and props the umbrella open, then places it on Ivy’s worktable. She stands back. It’s crooked and inelegant, just as she meant it to be. It looks like one of those umbrellas you see sticking out of trash bins on rainy days. Except that its crookedness, if you look close, has a kind of balance that Jane has achieved with careful deliberateness, and it’s a good umbrella, an unusual umbrella that will protect her from rain. It’s also Jane’s secret, because when she looks at it in her peripheral vision, it becomes the spiky, spoky, foggy blue splotch of Aunt Magnolia’s eye.
I’ll never sell this umbrella, Jane thinks. This one’s for me.
“Jasper?” she says. “Want to go look at Aunt Magnolia’s photo?”
* * *
There’s some activity in the west wing of the second story. As Jane and Jasper walk down the corridor inspecting the art, Patrick comes out of a bedroom with a pile of sheets and blankets and dumps them on the floor. Mrs. Vanders follows with a
vacuum cleaner.
“We’re clearing out the bedrooms that were used for the gala,” Patrick says, in response to Jane’s questioning glance. “This was Lucy St. George’s room, actually.”
Jane only manages a half-interested grunt, because she’s just discovered Aunt Magnolia’s photo on the wall across from Lucy’s room. It’s a big print. Backing away to get a better vantage point, Jane breathes it in.
A tiny yellow fish—that’s a goby—peeks out from inside the cavernous, sharp-toothed maw of some great gray fish with a bulbous nose. Jane remembers this photo; Aunt Magnolia took it in the waters near Japan. It’s always left Jane wondering. Has the big fish captured the small fish as food? Or, is the small, bright fish hiding inside the mouth of the big fish?
Jane is bursting with heartache and pride.
Then her perspective shifts and she notices a problem with the matting behind the photo. Something is creating an uneven bulge, as if the framer carelessly placed a thick rectangle of cardboard behind the print.
A framing mistake like that will ruin the print, and Aunt Magnolia’s photos deserve better care. “Mrs. Vanders?” Jane begins with mild indignation, and then, understanding, goes rigid and electric, like a bolt of lightning.
Jane reaches for the screwdriver in her pocket. Wordlessly, she lifts the frame from the wall. Laying it on the floor with the back facing up, she works at the screws that hold the frame in place.
“What on earth do you think you’re doing?” says Mrs. Vanders in an outraged voice, appearing beside her. “Just because that’s your aunt’s photo doesn’t give you license to take it apart! That’s an expensive frame!”
With trembling fingers, Jane removes the backing of the frame. Protective tissue-like paper lies under it, and through the tissue, Jane can see the outlines of what she knew she would find. Carefully, she takes hold of the edges of the thin paper and pulls it away.
Jane and Mrs. Vanders are looking down, astonished, at Lady Writing a Letter with Her Frog. Jane studies it. There’s something quieting, even awesome, about the fine web of cracks across the canvas, and its clean, soft light. It’s as if the lady, intent on her writing while sitting in a bath of light, is made of soft marble. As if marble can be a warm, living thing.
“Hold it up to the ceiling lamps!” says Mrs. Vanders.
Ever so carefully, Jane lifts the canvas by the edges and holds it up to the light. The lady’s eye glows like a tiny star.
“How on earth did you know?” says Mrs. Vanders.
Jane’s eyes are full of tears. Frightened she’ll drip on Vermeer’s masterpiece, she hands the canvas to Mrs. Vanders and says, “Aunt Magnolia led me to it.”
* * *
A week and a half after the gala, they finally get word from Investigator Edwards. Kiran tells Jane over a game of chess in the winter garden. “Turns out Buckley St. George has some interesting offshore accounts, and some irregular financials that possibly link him to a New Jersey heroin cartel.”
“Really?”
“The police raided the cartel and found a Delacroix that belongs to some friends of Ravi’s.” Kiran tilts her head to indicate Ravi, who’s sprawled in a nearby armchair, pretending to read an art magazine with a Rembrandt seascape on the cover.
“Delacroix?” says Jane.
“French painter,” offers Ravi in a grouchy voice, not looking up from his magazine. “Nineteenth-century Romantic. Influenced the Impressionists. I could take him or leave him.”
“Oh, stop it,” says Kiran. “You love Delacroix.”
“Nothing compares to the theft of a Vermeer.”
“It’s all over now, Ravi,” says Kiran. “Janie found your Vermeer. You can stop acting like you, personally, were the target of an outrageous conspiracy.”
“I’ll put it on my to-do list for the day after tomorrow,” says Ravi grumpily.
Kiran half grins at Jane. “Anyway,” she says, “Ravi’s friends didn’t even know the Delacroix was missing. They’ve had a forgery hanging on their wall, and they had no idea. Ravi introduced Colin to those friends.”
“That self-righteous shithead,” offers Ravi.
Kiran chuckles.
Raindrops ping like pebbles against the windows. Jane moves one of her rooks back and forth, idly. Kiran is a better chess player than she is.
“Did Colin really think that was going to work,” Jane says, “lying about my umbrellas? Out of spite? How much money could he possibly have made from them?”
“You humiliated him,” says Kiran. “He struck out to make you small again.”
“It’s kind of pathetic.”
“Yeah, well,” says Kiran. “It was stupid too, given what was at risk. I don’t think he’s the master manipulator he thinks he is. I’m really glad I broke up with him before we figured out he’s an art thief. Thanks for your help with that.”
“I helped too!” says Ravi.
“How did you help, exactly?”
“General moral support!” he says. “Through our psychic twin link!”
“Right,” says Kiran. “How could I forget.”
Their teasing is like the rain—gentle, and washing Jane with a kind of comfort, and a wistfulness too. Ravi pretends to be a child because it makes Kiran smile, which in turn gives Ravi the look of someone who’s made his favorite person happy.
“And you,” says Ravi, clapping his dark eyes upon her. “I have some ideas about you and your umbrellas.”
“Okay,” says Jane. “Anything specific?”
Jane has started a new umbrella, and Ravi knows all about it. It’s something to do with a house of mystery and intrigue. Jane hasn’t worked out the details yet, but she thinks this new umbrella might have windows made of clear plastic and doors that open and close, and art on the walls, and a freight elevator, and a basset hound. Ravi has taken to visiting her from time to time while she’s working on it. He asks questions about fabric tension and the placement of springs and inspects Jane’s inventory. He’s held her Aunt Magnolia umbrella out at arm’s length, trying to get some distance from it in order to understand it better. This hasn’t seemed to work for him.
“It’s the color of a frogstorm,” Jane has told him, not telling him all the rest.
He’s scrunched up his face, then put the lopsided umbrella back on the floor, muttering, “I guess every artist goes through a Frog Period.”
“You really think I’m an artist?” Jane has responded. But Jane is coming to know the answer to that question on her own. She’s seeing her umbrellas differently now. People other than she might love those umbrellas someday, probably not for Jane’s reasons, but for their own reasons—reasons Jane won’t know or understand. Jane is beginning to appreciate this wonderful, surreal fact about the creative process.
“You could start a business,” Ravi says now, stretching his legs out before him in the armchair and regarding Jane balefully. “I could help.”
“That’s not very specific,” Jane says.
“You’re young,” Ravi says. “You’ve got all the time in the world to establish yourself. And I bet we could get some millionaire designer to send you to college.”
“College?” Jane says. “Is there a college where I could make umbrellas?”
“Probably,” Ravi says, shrugging. “There’s a college for everything. How about a shop someday? I’ve been to an umbrella shop in Paris where each umbrella is different, and designed by the owner. Your umbrellas will be good enough for that.”
“Paris?”
“Or wherever,” he says. “The world is your rainstorm.”
He juts his chin at the windows and Jane smiles, because it’s pouring now, just like the day she arrived. Water streams down the glass and makes her feel safe, contained in a bubble. It’s a lot to think about. College, Paris, shops. Aunt Magnolia? Is this why you made me promise to come here? So
the world would be my rainstorm?
“Do you think someday, when I’m rich and famous, my umbrellas will be used in the drug world as currency?” Jane says.
Ravi flashes her a grin. “Did you know that drug dealers who use art as currency are considered classy?”
“Classy? Seriously? How do you know that?”
“Lucy told me, of course.”
“If she’s the one who told you, how do you know it’s true?”
“I guess I don’t,” Ravi says. “But I expect most of what she told me was true. Really, there were only a few details she needed to lie about.”
The police are saying that Buckley St. George placed his daughter not just in the path of the Thrashes to steal, but straight into the drug underworld, where it was her job to pretend to be an undercover investigator pretending to be a crook. It’s difficult for Jane to wrap her head around. All that pretending and manipulating seems an odd direction to focus one’s passions.
“I wonder if she enjoyed it,” Ravi says. “It must feel amazing to get away with a theft like that.” He adds, with some bitterness, “And to fool people.”
“I’m not sure she enjoyed fooling you, Ravi,” Jane says. “I think she cared about you.”
“Don’t defend her to me,” Ravi says heatedly. “No one who cared about me and knew me at all would steal my art.”
“That’s true,” says Jane, “but I think she was surprised, and upset, by how much it hurt you.”
The charges against Lucy now include the theft of the Rubens she “lost,” although apparently Lucy blames that theft on pressure from Buckley, just as she blames the Brancusi incident on Colin. Lucy seems to have entered some sort of delayed adolescent rebellion. When the police put her in the same room with her father, she began to scream at him for pressuring her about whom to date.
In another part of the house, the Brancusi is back. It appeared, complete and undamaged, in its usual spot on a side table in the receiving hall, six days after the gala. No one in the house can explain it to Ravi, who’s alternately elated and furious. Mrs. Vanders had been keeping the pedestal in the west attics, storing it safely until the fish was found, and one day, when she’d gone up there, it—the pedestal—was gone. Then she’d found it, to her amazement, in the receiving hall, the fish perched atop the pedestal once again, complete and as it should be, or so she says.