Faking It Read online

  “And yet, the painting is not here,” Tilda said.

  “She kept offering and I kept saying no and when she got to a thousand I caved,” Nadine said. “Now will somebody tell me why that was bad?”

  “No.” Gwen sank down on the couch next to her granddaughter, looking much like Nadine was going to look in forty years, pale-eyed, graying, and gamine.

  “Where’s your mom?” Tilda asked Nadine. She turned to Gwen. “Why wasn’t Eve watching the gallery?”

  “She had a teachers’ meeting,” Gwen said. “Summer school. She’s aiding again. Look, this Lewis woman is not going to return it. And the more fuss we make, the more suspicious we look.”

  “Suspicious about what?” Nadine said. “Nobody tells me anything.” She reached down and scooped Spot off the faded rug, and his tremors picked up again. “If you don’t tell me stuff, you can’t blame me when I screw up.”

  She stuck her chin out at Tilda, defiant as she patted the dog, and Tilda thought, She’s right. She pulled out the ancient desk chair so it was facing Nadine and sat down, wincing as it creaked. “Okay, here it is.”

  “No,” Gwen said. “She’s sixteen.”

  “Yeah, and how old was I?” Tilda said. “I can’t remember a time I didn’t know.”

  “Hello?” Nadine waved. “I’m right here. Know what?”

  “Do you remember how successful the gallery used to be, when Grandpa ran it?” Tilda said.

  “No,” Nadine said. “I was a kid when he died. I wasn’t really into the gallery thing then.” She relaxed her hold on Spot, who struggled out of her lap, hit the rug with a splat, and recovered by putting his paws up on Tilda.

  “Well, one of the reasons we were successful was that Grandpa sometimes sold fakes,” Tilda said flatly.

  “Oh,” Nadine said.

  “That’s good,” Gwen said, her hands gripped together in her lap. “The more people who know that, the better.”

  “I won’t tell,” Nadine said.

  “Some of the paintings that were real were by a man named Homer Hodge,” Tilda plowed on, “and Grandpa made a lot of money off him legally. But then he and Homer had a fight, and Homer stopped sending him paintings, so your grandpa got the bright idea of inventing a daughter for Homer named Scarlet, and he sold five paintings by her, making a big deal out of the fact that she was a Hodge.”

  Gwen slumped back against the couch and stared at the ceiling, shaking her head.

  “Invented a daughter?” Nadine said. “Cool.”

  “No, not cool.” Tilda picked up Spot, needing something to hold on to for the next part, and Spot sighed and curled his long, furry body to fit her lap. “The painting you sold was the first Scarlet, a fake painting by a fake artist. And that’s fraud and we could go to jail. And people are going to realize it’s a fake because Homer was from a farm in southern Ohio, and the painting you sold is of this building.”

  “I thought it looked familiar,” Nadine said.

  “So once they figure out that one’s a fake, they’re going to come back to the gallery and ask questions.” Tilda felt her stomach twist again. “They might look at all the paintings Grandpa sold them for thousands of dollars and find out that some of them are fakes, and they’re going to want their money back, and we don’t have it. And we could go to jail for that, too, and lose the gallery and this whole building which means we’d all be out on the street.”

  “Wait a minute,” Nadine said, perking up, evidently undeterred by the news her grandpa was a crook and she might soon be living in the gutter. “I didn’t know it was a fake. The only person who knew it was a fake was Grandpa. So we’re off the hook. We can blame him. He’s dead!”

  “That’s been pretty much my plan for the past five years,” Gwen said, still staring at the ceiling.

  “Nice try, but no,” Tilda said, feeling sicker. “The gallery as a business is still liable. And there’s one other person who knew and could go to jail. The person who painted them.”

  “Oh.” Nadine grew still. “Who painted them?”

  “I did, of course,” Tilda said, and got out her inhaler again.

  IT HAD taken Davy Dempsey four days to track his ex-financial adviser from Miami, Florida, to Columbus, Ohio, and now he leaned in the doorway of a little diner and watched his prey pick up his water glass, survey the rim, and then wipe it with his napkin. Ronald Abbott,-aka Rabbit, was born to be the perfect mark: pale, semi-chinless, and so smug about his superiority in all things having to do with money, art, and life in general that he was a sure thing to con. Which made it doubly annoying that he had taken all of Davy’s money.

  Davy crossed the diner and slid into the booth, and Ronald looked up in mid-sip and then inhaled his water in one horrified gasp.

  “Hello, Rabbit,” Davy said, enjoying the gargle. “Where the hell is my three million dollars?”

  Ronald continued to choke, strangling on tap water, guilt, and terror.

  “You know, a life of crime is not for everybody,” Davy said, taking one of Ronald’s French fries. “You have to enjoy the risk. You’re not enjoying the risk, are you, Rabbit?”

  Ronald swallowed some air. “It’s your own fault.”

  “Because I shouldn’t have trusted you?” Davy nodded as he chewed. “Good point. I won’t do that again. But I want it back, Rabbit. The whole three million. And change.” He took another fry. The diner didn’t look like much, but the cook clearly knew his way around a potato.

  “It wasn’t your money. You stole it.” Ronald looked around, apprehensive. “Where’s Simon? Is he here?”

  “Simon is in Miami. I will be beating you up on my own. And you know it was my money, you saw me make it playing the same stocks you did—”

  “The million you started with wasn’t yours,” Ronald said, and Davy grew still, struck by the three-year-old memory of a beautiful, enraged blonde.

  “Clea.” Davy shook his head. “Did you have a good time, Rabbit?”

  “See, you don’t even deny it.” Ronald was virtuous in his indignation. “You stole that poor woman’s inheritance from her father—”

  Davy sighed and reached for the salt. If Rabbit had embezzled in the heat of Clea, it was going to be difficult to cool him down again. “That woman is not poor, she’s greedy. She inherited a chunk of change from her first husband and the last I heard she’d married some rich old guy in the Bahamas.”

  “You stole her money,” Ronald said, sticking to the high ground. “She’s innocent.”

  Davy pulled Ronald’s plate over to his side of the booth and reached for the ketchup. “Rabbit, I know she’s a great lay, but not even you could believe that.”

  Ronald drew himself up. “You’re talking about the woman I love.”

  “Clea is not the kind of woman you love,” Davy said grimly. “She’s the kind of woman you think you love, but then it turns out you were just renting her until somebody else came along with an option to buy.” He dumped ketchup on Ronald’s remaining fries.

  “I believe in her,” Ronald said.

  “You also believed the tech ride was going to last forever,” Davy said. “Like my daddy always says, if it seems too good to be true—”

  “We’re not talking about money,” Rabbit said. “She loves me.”

  “If you’re talking about Clea, you’re talking about money. It’s all she cares about.”

  “She cares about her art,” Ronald said.

  “Her art? That’s what she calls one cult movie and two porn flicks? Art?”

  “No,” Ronald said, looking confused. “Her art. That’s how I met her, at her family’s art museum when I was helping value her late husband’s collection.”

  “Late husband?” Davy laughed. “Imagine my surprise. Rabbit, her family doesn’t have an art museum, and she turned to you when she found out you had access to my accounts. What’d the last guy die of?” He held up a fry. “No, wait, let me guess. Heart attack.”

  “It was very sudden,” Ronald said.