for Theo, you probably know that he’s taking care of the Callinas estate now. I think Hal’s hoping he’ll find a couple more prints up there.”
“Fingers crossed,” Kate said. She nodded at the Threshold print. “How much is this one worth?”
“This? Well, it’s from the second run, and it’s actually damaged on one corner. You can’t see that right now because of the frame. But this particular photo always sells well. We don’t have a set price on things like this, but I think it will probably go for around four hundred thousand.”
“Jesus.”
“I know. Just think how I feel. I have to handle them!”
Kate smiled, a little awkwardly, and moved on to the next work.
“That’s Jake’s,” Samantha said, following her. “Fishing.”
The painting was about three feet tall and five feet wide, done in geometric shapes and shades of greenish yellow. The paint was flat, exact, no brushstrokes visible, every line smooth. In it, a boy was standing on a pile of rocks, his arm upraised, holding a wriggling fish aloft in one fist. The angles were off somehow, making the whole picture a little warped, so that the longer you looked at it, the crueler the picture became and the sicker you felt. The more you felt like the fish itself, struggling for air.
Kate realized with a start that the boy was around eight years old: the age Theo had been in the story he told her the other night. Only in his story, he hadn’t touched the fish, and it had survived.
“The perspective is supposed to be like that,” Samantha explained, misreading her expression. “Jake liked to put the viewer off-kilter, confuse them a little. I think this is one of his more successful works. Supposedly the boy is modeled on Theo.”
So much had happened in the last two days that Kate had half-forgotten about Miranda’s diary, but now, as she studied the painting, she remembered the last entry she had read, the fight about Jake painting Nangussett. Art is supposed to make you feel afraid.
She asked, “Is Jake’s value still increasing, too?”
Samantha seemed to choose her words carefully. “Well, I think most critics would agree that Miranda was the bigger force in the couple. But we at Eggers really love all of Jake’s work. I think it’s just a matter of waiting for his viewpoint to come back into style.”
Kate was about to ask Samantha another question when someone exclaimed from behind her, “Kate Aitken!”
An egg-shaped man with very thin legs, Hal rushed to Kate like she was an old friend. His suit was beige linen; his tie and his glasses were both neon blue.
“Hello, hello, hello,” he chirped. “Ms. Aitken. So good to see you. I see you’ve met one of our lovely assistants?” (Obviously not remembering Samantha’s name.) “Delighted to welcome you to Eggers Gallery.”
He talked quickly but with long vowels, like a Kennedy on speed. He mopped his perspiring brow with a monogrammed handkerchief, then took her hands and circled around her. Beneath the performance of bonhomie, his eyes were like bullets.
“Now,” he said, “how can I help this lovely young woman?”
Kate thought he was talking to her, but she wasn’t sure why he was using the third person. She carefully pried her hands out of his.
“I wanted to talk to you about some of Miranda’s work,” she said. “Could we go to your office?”
“Of course, of course. Do you take espresso?”
“Uh, sure.”
“Perfect. Darling”—this to Samantha, whose name he apparently still hadn’t remembered—“could you bring us two espressos?”
His office was at the back of the gallery, overlooking a courtyard filled with lemon trees. Priceless artworks covered the walls. Kate spied the telltale sheen of Klein Blue in the corner before she returned her attention to Hal. He directed her to sit in one low-slung leather chair, and he took the other, crossing one leg comfortably over the other.
“So, Ms. Aitken. You want to talk about Miranda’s work.”
“And her life,” Kate said. “Theo hired me to help him turn over the Callinas house. I’m going through old papers. Trying to trace names and so on.”
“Yes, of course. Theo told me he had hired someone. I can imagine it’s very tedious. Miranda was always a bit of a hoarder. So? What have you found?”
A subtle, avaricious glint in his eye. Kate opened her mouth, then was interrupted by a faint knock at the door. Samantha glided in with two minuscule gold-leaf cups on matching gold-leaf saucers and placed them on the table.