He bent to the reopened laptop.
Frannie moved deeper into the familiar shop and scanned its pegboard walls. She invariably checked the paintings first.
Over in the far corner. That, she thought. That looked new.
But from here, she couldn’t really see what it was. It might be just a reproduction. She thought she liked the frame, though. Kind of voluptuous. Darkened old gold with … too many chips for Stanley to let her live with? She picked her way through rocking chairs and side tables.
Close up, she could see it now, and it definitely looked like an old oil painting. Unusually dark, though, with a great many trees and several figures – really a lot of figures! And the whole thing was obscured by a uniform, caramel-like crust, so that even the parts that were obviously flesh were dense with a murky brown. But that had to be a good sign, Frannie thought, trying to edge closer. It had been hung above a squat china cabinet. Too high for her. Were they biblical characters? Gods? She looked around for a stool, found an old metal thing and placed it in front of the cabinet. Carefully, she stepped up.
Now she could make it out.
They weren’t gods at all, she was pretty sure. They were people, but only a few of them, half-seen through the bushes and trees, appeared to be dressed. In classical garments. Most of the figures, now she squinted, most of the figures were naked. Even the men. Moistening her index finger while covertly watching the boy at the desk, she swiped it across one large male figure. She was right. They were naked. And dancing. Some were – could they be drunk? And those four or five squatting men were, what? Rolling dice? But mostly, leaning away a bit, she could suddenly see, mostly they were making love. Having intercourse. Right out there in the open. And strangely, for a second or two, the scores of intertwined legs and arms and bodies actually seemed to be moving. Doing impossible, fascinating things.
Wait. Wait! She gripped the cabinet’s marble top. She had to be imagining this. She’d been doing a lot of that lately: reading sex into things when really nothing was happening at all. She felt mildly aroused now, though.
Stupid old woman.
Frannie fumbled in her handbag, found her glasses and stood on tiptoe for a better look. Buttocks and breasts and oh, yes, here … here was a couple wound together on the grass, and over there … another, halfway behind that tree! They weren’t moving anymore. She must have imagined it.
But all of a sudden, something in Aunt Teeks felt very wrong. Unnatural and wrong. Frannie yanked the glasses from her nose and stared around her. She was alone. No one else here but the boy, and he was lost in his machine. She felt faintly cold, however, and the light in the shop had somehow dimmed. Queer. And was it snowing outside? She peered through the windows. No. But March was a little late for snow, wasn’t it? Uneasy, she turned once again to the picture.
But now there was something about it that reminded her of … of what? Of something she’d seen once at school? Because it was really beautifully painted, she thought. Or at least, all of the hands were well done, and she remembered once reading – though it was probably untrue – that carefully rendered hands were one of the ways you could spot the work of a genuine artist. Each face was quite different from every other, too. That had to mean something. It was really well done, Frannie thought, smiling to herself, because it was lovely to find her art history alive and intact after so many years.
All of a sudden, she knew she had to own it. But as she began to reach for the price tag, she very distinctly felt that the young man at the desk was looking. And no doubt laughing at the old gal falling all over herself to check out the sex. She wouldn’t turn his way to see, but, stepping cautiously off the stool, Frannie smoothed the front of her good navy coat, adjusted its belt and moved a few feet off to devote a minute or more to a neighboring landscape. Narrowing her eyes and tilting her head from side to side, she scrutinized the canvas as she thought an art expert might. In case he was looking.
Could the naked picnic be an Old Master?
Weren’t all the good ones in museums?
But what did Frannie Turner know about art, actually?
Also, why would a genuine Old Master be in a Clayton antiques shop? Would a painting this good, this old, actually show up here, in this shopping mall? And what’s more, if it was really an Old Master, why hadn’t someone already bought it? Like Sally. Sally was the kind of dealer who prided herself on knowing everything about everything she sold. So if this thing was genuine, why hadn’t Sally already sold it or taken it home for herself?
Abandoning the depressing landscape, Frannie stepped up on the stool once again and reached for the yellow tag dangling from the frame. Leaning sideways, a little, she squinted to see: $3,500.00.
Well! That was why!
Ruefully, she left the stool, pushed it aside, removed a green glass vase from a nearby table and held it up to the light. She wasn’t looking at the vase, of course. She was thinking. If Sally hadn’t claimed that painting for herself, it was probably a reproduction of some kind. A photograph or a print of a genuine painting, most likely, fitted into this handsome old frame.
She was just deciding to go back and feel the surface to see if it felt smooth, like a print, or three-dimensional, like an oil, when her coat sleeve fell back and she caught the time.
She was going to be late.
Hurriedly, she stepped back on the footstool and ran her fingertips across its surface.
The painting felt rough.
So it hung in her mind as she pushed open the scarlet-framed glass door of The Hair House. Unhappily, she wasn’t moving fast enough to avoid her own reflection in the glass. Matronly, she realized. And tense, somehow. Really tense. Which seemed odd, considering how much she was looking forward to this.
Directed to a shiny pink bench by, yes, a twelve-year-old receptionist, Frannie tried to seem interested in last-week’s tattered People.
But at 2:35, as she was beginning to rehearse a courteously worded complaint, the receptionist trilled, “Mrs. Lerner? Randi’s ready for you? Just follow Ashley to the back?”
“Turner,” Frannie corrected softly, as, from nowhere, one of the several blonde girls appeared. This one was swinging a plastic water bottle in one hand and clutching a small sparkly phone in the other. She led Frannie to a curtained alcove.
“You can take your things off and leave them in there, Madame.” The girl sucked deeply on her bottle, looking neither at Fannie or ‘there.’ When you’re ready,” she added, daintily replacing its screw-top, “Randi will see you over here.” With one black-and-yellow-patterned fingernail, she indicated a closed velvet curtain just down the hall.
Frannie ducked into the cubicle and emerged in minutes, still tying the fastenings of the gown into the square knot she’d learned from Stanley’s sailing phase. With her pocketbook firmly on her arm, she crossed the hall and, still a little nervous – for no reason she could think of – she parted the heavy curtains.
The booth was considerably bigger than she’d expected it to be. Really spacious, in fact. With unusually patterned pink wallpaper (animals of some sort?) but far too many glaring lights. At its approximate center, an adjustable pink-leather chair on a pedestal faced a handsome Rococo mirror, beneath which were several French cabinets, all painted pink, and leaning against these cabinets, her scissors in hand, was Randi.
She wasn’t what Frannie had expected, either.
Randi was breathtaking.
All of six-and-a-half feet tall, she somehow seemed even taller. That’s what “majestic” must mean, Frannie thought.
She was thirty-ish, maybe, or younger. Or older. A widow’s peak punctuated a classic, heart-shaped face with wide-set, cat-green eyes, high-bridged nose, pillowy lips turning down ever so slightly at the corners – à la Hepburn – and not a trace of lipstick. None at all.
Frannie