Illicit Artifacts Read online

“I didn’t say that.”

  “No, you’re right. We shouldn’t be moving so fast. We should take a beat, maybe branch out a bit.”

  “Jess, I didn’t say I wanted to see other people.”

  “Well, it seems that you’re continually surprised to see me. Like you might like to have someone else standing in your doorway.”

  “Maybe I’m just not quite sure when to expect you. You know—if you can squeeze me into the double life you seem so comfortable living.”

  Jess blanched. “That’s not fair. You know this is new to me.”

  “Is it, though? You seem to have been lying to yourself and pretty much everyone around you for quite some time now. It’s a bit difficult to be the partner who has to hide in the bathroom in case she might be recognized.”

  “Jil, that’s not fair. You know it’s temporary.”

  Jil swallowed hard. She would not cry. “Yeah, sure,” she said softly.

  Jess grabbed her bag. “I’m sorry I can’t wave a flag, Jil. I thought you understood.”

  “Jess, c’mon.”

  But Jess had taken three more steps toward the door. “I agree. It’s not fair to you. I’m sorry. Let’s just leave it for a bit.”

  Chapter Ten

  For a moment after the door closed, Jil considered following her—to try explaining—but something held her back. She felt stuck in place, in every way. A serious relationship needed energy and time and commitment, and she lacked all three at the moment.

  Where Jess wanted to talk and comfort her, Jil wanted to scream and hit something until it screamed back. Jess was understanding, beautiful, complex, and Jil just couldn’t handle her right now.

  She also didn’t see how they could conceivably make a life together when Jess’s job made it impossible for them even to be seen in public. It was too risky, too complicated, and too delicate. What she wanted was a one-night stand. A series of one-night stands. She needed sex that made her feel alive and free and uninhibited, not roped in—gliding on eggshells—careful and slow and considerate. She wanted a good fuck that released her in every way and let her collapse, unconscious—something to make her forget.

  *

  Jess hurried into the parking lot and slid into her car. She slammed the door behind her, the tears still falling—hot, rapid streams that burned her cheeks and stung her eyes. What had just happened? She thought they’d moved past this point.

  Ever since Jil had confessed who she really was, they’d had a nice, swaying rhythm—long conversations, good meals, and late bedtimes. Getting to know each other as people instead of pushing against the roles they used to play.

  And now Jil was ducking for cover. Why?

  She blotted her eyes and wiped her nose before pulling out onto the main road. The tears were partially blinding her, but she made it home, not even remembering which lights were green and which were red. Then she moved slowly into the house, shut the door to her bedroom, and cried until her chest hurt.

  A cramp in her lower back woke her just before midnight.

  At home, alone in bed.

  With a quiet groan, she rolled over and got up. How long had she slept? Outside her suburban townhouse, the moon shone high and bright—a mocking beacon. She wrenched the curtains closed and limped to the bathroom.

  The door to Mitch’s side of the vanity always hung slightly off its hinge, and tonight it had opened a bit, revealing shaving cream and cologne—years old. Of course she should have thrown those things away, or at least boxed them up.

  But then what?

  Where would she put it all? In storage? Along with a key she’d hand him in the envelope with the divorce papers?

  A slim possibility remained that he’d wake up—and this house had belonged to them both.

  Which is why she’d practically moved in to Jil’s condo, even though it was smaller…

  A fresh surge of tears overwhelmed her, and she sat down, shaking, on the toilet seat. How could she have misread the signs so spectacularly—for a second time?

  And what business did she have being surprised and hurt that a relationship based on a fundamental lie could have ended badly?

  Her stomach clenched until she wanted to throw up. Had it ended? Was it over?

  She took a pain pill, limped back to bed, and lay awake for a long time, staring at the curtains covering the moon.

  *

  Jil dumped her duffel in her old bedroom and kicked off her shoes. One of them flew into the closet, but she didn’t bother to retrieve it. Something about being back here in this old life elicited a teenage sullenness she thought she’d outgrown. She grabbed a towel and stepped into the en suite bathroom, smiling as she remembered the first time she’d seen this place.

  In one day, she’d gone from sharing a single toilet with five kids to having a whole attached bathroom to herself.

  And the blessed silence that came with it.

  She stripped off and turned the shower onto its hottest setting. She wanted to strip away the horrible words she and Jess had exchanged. Of course she hadn’t meant half the things she’d said, but she’d never learned how to stop acting so irrational when she was hurt. Maybe a by-product of having spent so many of her childhood years among people who really didn’t care. The best thing to do was to hurt them first so they left you alone.

  And that strategy applied pretty much universally.

  She’d hurt Jess. Jess had left her alone.

  She leaned against the wall and let the water trickle down her face and over her shoulders. For a second, she wished Jess was standing there next to her, naked and soapy and…

  Like a black wave, an image flashed through her mind—not what she had expected.

  The unwelcome memory pricked at her.

  In the bathroom of her old foster home.

  She really didn’t want to go there. Cursing, she turned off the stream, hopped out, and made up her mind to focus on this case.

  *

  Jess pulled in to her parking space at six forty-five a.m. The lot was deserted, and she let go the breath she’d been holding. Every morning as she parked, the memory of Alyssa’s dead body sprawled out on the pavement flashed briefly, like a Polaroid behind her eyes.

  She’d blink and it would be gone.

  But every day, she wondered what sort of minefield she’d have to maneuver. Would she see more taggings? More violence? More secrets exposed? Of course, the network still had influence. Of course, they still held meetings somewhere.

  Even with help from the outside authorities intent on finding and disbanding the secret society that had operated at St. Marguerite’s for years, kids were still at risk of coercion, bullying…everything. And sometimes—no, often—she felt like a straw principal, set up to run the illusion of a school, but blind to the darker underground dealings that stirred directly beneath her office.

  “Morning, Jess.” Brian, the custodian, nodded as she came into the room.

  “Good morning.”

  “Weekly report is in your mail slot.”

  “Thank you.”

  Another change. The head custodian would normally have keys to every room in the school, including her office, but since the incident, she now had the only set of keys. No more reports left on her desk. Her office was hers and hers alone.

  Her hands shook a little as she opened the door. She resisted the urge to look over her shoulder. This was her school. She had to be in charge here.

  But so much had changed, and keeping track of all the moving parts was proving exhausting—a new vice principal, a new head of the religious department. The residence buildings overhauled, new dons appointed from outside the school. Today, an interim chaplain would arrive. Poor Maggie Reitman had been on stress leave since the incident. Buck had taken immediate retirement, of course. He could hardly come into the school, let alone hold a class.

  The thought of burning the place to the ground and starting over occurred to her, and not for the first time.

  She could transfer
out too. But what kind of mess would that leave for the next person? And how would she cope with a new school? She could barely walk into this one.

  God. What a fucking mess.

  The phone flashed red in the dim light from her desktop lamp. She yanked open the blinds and sat down for messages. Her stomach lurched. Could one be from Jil?

  Of course not. She shook her head. Why would she call her here?

  For the fifteenth time, she checked her mobile. Nothing.

  But as she took up a pen to scribble down notes from the messages, the breath she held began to strangle her. She was choking on the effort to keep it together. Despite her best efforts, tears leaked through her tightly squeezed eyes.

  She remembered Jil pushed up against this wall, kissing her, linked by invisible magnetic threads as her deft fingers undid her buttons.

  Stop. If she couldn’t stop thinking about her, she’d never make it through the day.

  She might not anyway.

  Because underneath all the rapid-fire thoughts of meetings, hirings, briefings, and schedulings, one persistent thought kept gnawing at the base of her brain.

  She squashed it down because she didn’t know what it meant. Because she wasn’t ready for the freefall that would come from acknowledging it.

  I don’t want to do this.

  Chapter Eleven

  Just as Jil and Zeus came in from their morning walk, she heard a car in the driveway. She glanced out the window to see Mr. Hollands alighting from a champagne-colored sedan.

  “Good morning.” She opened the door for him to come in. Zeus sniffed his hand and bunted under his arm, knocking the slight man off-balance.

  “Hello there.” Mr. Hollands chuckled and scratched Zeus behind the ears. Zeus leaned on him, and he stumbled against the door.

  “Go lie down, please.” Jil gave Zeus a shove.

  Zeus grumbled in the back of his throat but shuffled off to the living room to sleep off his minimal exercise.

  “Coffee?”

  “No, thank you. I have another appointment after this, and I can’t stay too long.”

  “Right then. Shall we leap straight in?”

  Mr. Hollands removed his black leather overshoes and doffed his hat and coat. “Certainly.”

  “I’m afraid I don’t know what exactly to show you. Would you just like to have a look around?”

  “Yes, I would.” He scanned the kitchen, his glance lighting on this small thing and that. “Do you have any objection to my moving things?”

  “No. I have to categorize it all anyway, either for insurance or to sell.”

  Mr. Hollands looked at her. “You know, in many cases, art collectors do have substantial insurance on their items. Elise would have had to provide the insurer with a list of the items and their value, as well as pictures.”

  Of course, that made sense. But Tamara hadn’t said anything about insurance on the collection. Only life insurance. “I have an inventory, if that helps you?”

  “Yes, it would. Thank you. That way I’ll be sure to see everything. But if I were you, I might contact the insurance company for those details.”

  Jil frowned. How did he know so much about this?

  “I see this all the time,” Mr. Hollands replied, as if reading her thoughts. “Usually, I’m called in to assess the value of items after a person has passed away. People generally aren’t very organized with their final affairs.”

  But Elise had been organized with her final affairs. Down to the final detail. So where was this policy—if it existed at all?

  “Thanks for letting me know. I’ll follow up.” The classic polite evasion.

  Mr. Hollands smiled. “Let’s go see your collection, then.”

  They followed the inventory like a treasure map, Jil leading the way around their home, and Mr. Hollands examining each piece in detail before discreetly assigning it a number value on the inventory itself.

  “Do you know the name of my predecessor?” he asked. He looked over his glasses. “Though I imagine she could have appraised it herself, if it was only for the estate.”

  Jil frowned, trying to remember if Elise had ever mentioned anything about an appraiser. Funny how the details of their separate lives had never seemed important. They kept track of the big things: holidays, birthdays, life decisions and partnerships and illnesses and transitions—but not appointments or appraisals.

  And now it seemed as if by not knowing these details, she was failing in the one thing Elise needed her to be: informed.

  “I’m afraid I don’t.”

  “Well, no matter.” Mr. Hollands smiled. “He or she has done a fairly accurate job. Most of these artifacts are genuine, and many of the paintings are originals. I would have loved to have gone along with her as she collected some of these. They are exquisite and very valuable.”

  Jil exhaled quietly. Like three and a half million dollars valuable?

  Jil led him up the staircase to the second floor. He climbed the steps carefully, slowly, like a man who didn’t want to put too much pressure on his joints.

  “At my age,” he joked, “you never know when things are about to give out.”

  Jil smiled back. “I’m especially curious about this one.”

  “This one?” Mr. Hollands crested the final stair and turned to look at the Monet.

  “Yes.” Jil switched on all the lights in the upstairs hall to give him a better look.

  He squinted at the painting. “My, my,” he breathed.

  Jil watched him. His eyes grew wide and his brows came up so high they almost disappeared into the washboard wrinkles on his forehead.

  “It can’t be the Evening River Seine,” he said in a hushed voice.

  “It’s not,” Jil said. “It’s a replica.”

  “It is indeed a replica,” Mr. Hollands said. “But a special replica.”

  “Why is that?”

  “Well, Monet’s painting style was very technical and would have been very difficult to copy. If ever anyone had the chance to do it. The original painting is a ghost.” Mr. Hollands fixed her with a troubled stare.

  “What do you mean, a ghost?”

  He removed his spectacles and cleaned them, as if he wanted to see the painting with the clearest eyes possible. “It’s a lost painting. One that was never documented or displayed. The rumor is that it belonged to a private collection until the estate was sold in 1975. It was set to arrive at the Louvre for display but was stolen before it ever got there. There are rumors of this painting and one faded photograph from the inventory sent to the Louvre with the remainder of the collection. I saw it in a book once. But I’ve never seen the actual thing.”

  Jil’s gut plummeted. It had disappeared from the Louvre? She heard echoes of her conversation with Jess in her mind.

  He stared past her, musing aloud. “I don’t think it’s even on the International Registry of Famous Stolen Paintings. It just vanished. But someone must have seen it.”

  “Why do you say that?”

  He turned to her. “Because to get the amount of precision that’s evidenced here, you’d have to be working with the real painting. Digital photographs are one thing, but to get the texture and nuance of a piece of art, you have to see it, touch it. To get a piece of this quality, the replicator would have had to be sitting in front of the original.”

  If this painting was a duplicate, could Jess have been right? Did Elise have the original here all along? Why would Elise have stolen artwork in her home? Did she even know it was real?

  Stupid question—of course she knew it was real. What kind of art history professor would she be if she couldn’t tell a real painting from a fake?

  But wait.

  Jil put her hand on the railing.

  This might explain why she didn’t have an insurance policy on her collection—because it was priceless. And stolen?

  Mr. Hollands stared at the replica. “Is there…is there anything else you want me to see?” he asked, at last tearing his eyes aw
ay.

  “One more room, please. The library downstairs.”

  He obliged her as she led the way to Elise’s downstairs sanctuary.

  Once inside, Mr. Hollands scanned the shelves of Elise’s library curiously. With a frown, he darted forward, then looked back. “May I?” he gestured to a book on the shelf.

  “Yes, please.”

  Mr. Hollands pulled the volume from the shelf and showed the cover to Jil. Illicit Artifacts from the 1900s. He flipped through it carefully, then handed the text to Jil.

  There, in full color, was the Evening River Seine. Her heart skipped a beat. She’d recognize that piece anywhere. It had hung in their upstairs hallway since the day she’d moved in.

  *

  After hesitating a few moments, Jil answered the ringing phone.

  “Hello, Detective Fraser—sorry, Nic.”

  “Hi, Jil. I was hoping I could stop by.”

  “Okay, sure. You know where I live.”

  He chuckled. “I’ve opened a case, just so you’re aware. And I have some information about the images you sent over.”

  Jil’s breath caught. “Do you know who she is?”

  “She doesn’t have a criminal record, as far as I can tell. She doesn’t appear in our database of known criminals.”

  “Which only really means she hasn’t been caught,” Jil finished.

  “That’s right. The fact that she’s got so many distinct appearances definitely raises some red flags, but for now, we have no ID.”

  She exhaled slowly. Another roadblock. Well, nothing new there.

  “You’re still going to try to track her down, aren’t you?” he said.

  Was that annoyance or admiration in his voice?

  She swallowed hard, determined not to reveal any more emotion. “You can come over tomorrow.”

  *

  Nic Fraser paced along her front step, chewing gum.

  Jil opened the back door of the Jeep to let Zeus jump down, then greeted the detective with a wry smile. “Didn’t expect you so soon.”

  He eyed Zeus a little warily. “I’m on my way home. Thought I’d drop by again and see if there were any new developments you’d like to discuss.” He made a move to pat Zeus’s head, but seemed to think twice. “He’s awfully large, isn’t he?”