The Mistaken Masterpiece (32 page)

Malcolm, who is doing most of the talking for Father Julian, comes right to the point. “Here’s my concern: you have all but admitted that seven years ago, you forged, or had someone who works for you forge, this painting—twice. Why should we believe that you’re handing over the real thing and not another fake?”

“A fair question,” says Senior. “I give you my word that it’s the original.”

“Would that be the same word you gave to my uncle Phillip when you handed him a forgery in place of the real painting?” Father Julian asks.

Ouch! Father Julian clearly draws first blood.

“We have concerns of our own,” Junior says. “For instance, the
way
that you seem to have acquired the painting you want to exchange. Strange that it is
not
the same painting you brought to the gallery for an appraisal a few weeks ago. I wonder if your aunt is even aware that she has been the victim of a crime.”

“Gentlemen, please,” Elizabeth interrupts. “Since everyone at this table lives in a glass house, I think perhaps we
all
stop throwing stones. You each have something the other wants. I suggest you make the agreed-upon exchange. Now let’s see both paintings—up here on the table. I am quite qualified to judge the authenticity of works of art.”

Arthur junior sets the painting on the table and
carefully peels back the tape on one end so he can remove the paper it’s wrapped in. He then hands the painting to Elizabeth, who uses a loupe to examine the signature, a few places on the painting itself, the bare canvas on the back, and the stretcher frame before passing it on to Father Julian.

Across the table, Malcolm carefully unwraps the painting from Prunella’s wall—the painted-over Werkman—and hands it to Arthur senior. He ignores the painting itself, focusing instead on a series of pencil marks on the bottom of the stretcher frame. Junior leans in to look over his shoulder.

“That’s it,” he says. “The one we saw in the old woman’s apartment. Amazing.”

“Everybody satisfied?” Elizabeth asks.

“I’m happy,” Father Julian says.

Arthur junior smiles. “We’re good.”

“Excellent.” Elizabeth raises her glass in a toast. “One question, though. How did it happen? The Werkman, I mean. How does someone just paint over something like that?”

I realize that we haven’t shared with Elizabeth what we learned from Gus on Saturday, and I strain my ears to hear how the Svindahls are going to answer her.

Junior leans back in his chair until he’s almost touching our table. “Not as hard as you might think.”

Senior tells the rest of their version of the story, which pretty much confirms what we already knew. “The young man we had hired to, um, well, to do some
painting for us was—is—a gifted painter, but is completely clueless when it comes to anything abstract. Werkman sent us a grouping of four canvases, all with a white-on-white theme, something he’s famous for. Very subtle, but quite profound in their own way. Well, our gifted young painter was looking for a canvas
this
size, and he found one. After we discovered what had happened, he said that to him it just looked like a prepared canvas.”

“And by then it was gone,” Junior adds. “We didn’t know which one went to Phillip and which to the other house, so we were stuck. It definitely created some problems for us with Werkman. He was
not
happy.”

He rewraps the painting in the brown kraft paper and sets it on the ground, next to his chair.

And that, my friends, is
my
cue.

As soon as Arthur junior sets the package by his chair, I quietly slide
my
identically wrapped parcel next to his, hit the send button on my phone, and prepare for yet another inspired-but-certain-to-be-ignored-by-the-Academy performance.

“Well, I’ve gotta get going,” I say to Margaret. “I’ve got a ton of homework tonight and my parents are gonna kill me if I don’t get my grades up. Call me, okay? Give her a kiss, Tillie. Good girl!” I give Margaret a hug and make my grand exit. Instead of taking my package, though, absentminded little me “accidentally” picks up the one next to Arthur junior and walks off with it.

Oops.

As Tillie and I make our way out of the little café area and to the sidewalk around the edge of the pond, my phone vibrates in my hand. I grin when I read the new message:
GO!
Then I quickly call Margaret so I can
hear what’s going on at the table (and get a heads-up if something goes wrong at her end).

It’s all going perfectly, though, and when I hit my mark, as we (ahem)
actors
like to say, Margaret interrupts the conversation at the other table.

“Hey, mister, I’m sorry, but I think my friend took your package by mistake.” She shows him the little sticker from a frame shop on mine, and I can hear the panic in his voice over the phone.

“Where did she go? Which way? What is she wearing?” He and Arthur senior are on their feet immediately, scanning the park in all directions for a girl in a red blazer with a dog and a package wrapped in brown paper.

“There she is!” Junior shouts, pointing across the pond at me as I continue on my merry way.

“Junior’s on his way,” Margaret says quietly into her phone. “Hurry.”

“No problem.”

I step off the path as I hear Junior shouting at me; he’s only a few seconds away from intercepting me when I step behind an enormous oak tree and stop.

“Hey, hold on a second!” Junior yells. “Wait! You’ve got my package!”

He puts his hand on the shoulder of a girl in a red blazer. She’s blond, walking a black dog,
and
carrying a package wrapped in brown paper.

Livvy Klack spins around with her best how-dare-you-touch-me
face. “What is your problem?” she says, sneering. (She was
born
to say that line.)

“I’m sorry, but you took my package,” he says. “Yours is back at the café. We were sitting next to each other, and when you left, you must have picked up mine.”

“Are you sure? This looks like mine.”

“Open it up—you’ll see.”

With a dramatic roll of her eyes, she pulls away enough of the paper to reveal that it is definitely not her print of the Chrysler Building. Junior sighs with relief when he sees the bold colors of the Pommeroy peeking out from the paper.

“Sorry,” he says. “I didn’t mean to scare you, but this is pretty important to me. Come on, I’ll buy you and your friend a couple of sodas. Your package is safe; my dad’s watching it.”

As they walk back to the café, I talk to Margaret by phone. “How did it look from there?”

“It was a thing of beauty. Seamless. Perfection. For a second, I actually thought Livvy didn’t show. You should have seen the look on Malcolm’s and Elizabeth’s faces when he reached out and
Livvy
turned around. You’d better get out of there, just in case they take a closer look at things before they leave. I’m taking off right now.”

“Okay, I’ll see you at Perkatory at five.”

Phase one of Operation STS is complete.

• • •

Perkatory is crowded for a Wednesday afternoon, so Margaret and I push two tables together and wait for everyone else to show up. It just about kills me that I missed what went down at the Svindahl Gallery while we were busy faking out the Arthurs in Central Park, but luckily, Becca and Leigh Ann were there to witness the whole crazy episode.

When they arrive, we pounce on them with questions.

“You’re just going to have to wait,” Becca says. “We promised not to tell the story until everyone was here.”

Malcolm and Elizabeth are next, with Father Julian right on their heels. We’re about to place our order for coffees and sodas and snacks when the door opens and Livvy comes in.

This is her first time officially meeting the grown-ups, so it’s up to me to make proper introductions.

“This is Olivia Klack—but everybody calls her Livvy. She’s the girl who broke my nose,” I say with a grin at her. “We’ve been through a lot the past few weeks—a lot of ups and downs. But I think you’ll all agree that she was brilliant today.”

Father Julian scratches his head. “I’m sorry, but I’m really confused right now. I suppose it serves me right for not wanting to know the plan ahead of time, but
where
did she come from today? Sophie, I watched
you
walk away from the table carrying that package. But when you turned around, you weren’t you anymore. You were … her.”

“Smoke and mirrors,” I say.

“Not quite,” Margaret says. “Something a little more solid, like an oak tree. When Junior was chasing Sophie, she waited until he got pretty close, and then she turned off the path, taking a shortcut behind a big tree.”

“Where Livvy and her Tillie were waiting,” I add. “They stepped out the second I disappeared behind the tree. From Junior’s point of view, there was no gap, no pause, nothing. It was perfect.”

“But … why?” Father Julian asks. “What I mean is, he still got the painting, right?”

We all look at each other. “Do you really want us to answer that?”

“Oh no,” he says. “What did you girls do? You might as well tell me now.”

“It was all Rebecca’s idea,” Leigh Ann says. “She said that the Svindahls needed a taste of their own medicine. So we gave them one.”

“Right about now, they’re admiring my work,” Becca says.

“And going bonkers trying to figure out how we scammed them,” I say.

Father Julian lays his forehead on the table.

“Remember the third package?” Margaret asks. “Well, that was yet
another
copy of the Pommeroy, courtesy of our very own Rebecca Chen. And
that’s
what the Svindahls took with them today.”

“B-but I saw them identify Prunella’s copy. They were positive.”

“Oh, that’s what they looked at, all right,” Margaret says. “But Livvy was waiting behind the tree with Becca’s copy.”

“And he took only a very quick look inside the package,” Father Julian says, finally understanding the whole scheme.

“Because he had absolutely no reason to suspect anything,” says a thoroughly impressed Malcolm.

“And meanwhile, I walked away with
this
,” I say, taking the painted-over Werkman from behind the bar and setting it on the table with a waggle of my eyebrows.

Meanwhile, Malcolm holds up the original Pommeroy for Father Julian to see.

“Do you really believe that’s the original?” Father Julian asks.

“Unless the Svindahls did to us what we did to them,” Margaret answers. “Which is always a possibility. We won’t know until we have it X-rayed.”

“I’m willing to bet it’s the real thing,” Elizabeth says. “It’s definitely much older than the others.”

Becca cackles mischievously. “Speaking of X-rays, boy, are they in for a surprise when they take a look at that thing.”

“Oh no. Becca, what did you do?” I demand.

“A simple underpainting, kind of like
this.
” She holds up a drawing of four blazer-wearing paper dolls.

“In red,” she adds.

“So much for being
subtle
,” Leigh Ann says.

I check my watch. “I wonder what happened to Nate—”

His name is still hanging in midair when the door bursts open and Nate makes his usual impressive entrance.

We cheer wildly, and he bows as deeply as if he’s on a Broadway stage.

“
Now
can you tell us what happened down there?” I beg of Leigh Ann and Becca. “We’re all here.”

“Almost all of us,” says Nate. “But that’s okay. Tell the story, girls.”

Becca starts: “Believe it or not, Nate was actually on time! And just like he promised, Paul Werkman shows up a few minutes later.”

“He’s a really funny guy,” says Leigh Ann. “Not what I was expecting—at all.”

“Yeah, well, when I first talked to him the other day, he was also very surprised to learn that he was ‘after’ some guy named Cale,” Nate says. “Even after I reminded him about the painting, it still took him a while to remember that he had lost it on the guy who mistook his masterpiece for a blank canvas.”

“He seemed really embarrassed,” Becca adds. “He said he used to have some ‘anger management issues,’ but he’s all better now. When we told him the rest—how the Svindahls were
still
using that whole screaming thing to keep poor Gus, er, Cale, painting away in their studio, totally for
their
benefit, he was like, ‘I have to meet this guy.’ ”

“So we did!” Leigh Ann says.

“You mean you just walked in the front door of the gallery and said, ‘Here we are’?” I say.

“Not exactly,” says Becca. “I took them around to the back window, and I went in first, then Leigh Ann. Gus was in a pretty good mood—not too nervous—so I figured it was now or never, and I told him that we had talked to Paul Werkman.”

“That freaked him out a little,” says Leigh Ann. “Well, a
lot
, actually. He was worried that we told Werkman where to find him.”

“And all this time, Werkman and Nate are right outside the window?” Margaret marvels.

“Yep. And Gus is pacing around the room, checking the lock on the door about ten times, until we finally calm him down,” Becca says.