Faking It d-2 Read online

  “Classic con,” Davy said. “As long as the mark is crooked, he can’t go to the cops. Come over here and discuss this with me.”

  “And if he’s crooked, he deserved to be taken,” Tilda said. “I know this part. My dad used to drill it into me.” She went over to the last of the cabinets and pulled out another painting.

  “What if they buy it because they like it?” Davy said, wishing she’d come back to him.

  “Then they’re getting what they paid for, aren’t they?” Tilda said, turning the painting so he could see it. It was of a woman with protruding eyes hovering over a well-fed mother and her disturbing-looking baby. “This is our prize, a Durer Saint Anne,” she said. “A Goodnight Durer, of course, but still.”

  “Okay,” Davy said.

  “Antonio painted it in 1553,” Tilda said. “But it wasn’t his usual good work, so the family kept it. For four hundred years. If it was good and we sold this as a Durer, analysis of the paint and canvas would show that it was real. It would go for millions at auction, and nobody would ever catch on.”

  “But it’s bad?” Davy said, tilting his head to look at it. “It looks okay to me. Old.”

  “It’s not bad,” Tilda said, “but it’s not good enough. There are half a dozen paintings down here, any one of which would solve all our problems if we could sell it. But we can’t.”

  “Your morals do you justice,” Davy said. “Give them a vacation and come upstairs with me.”

  “It’s not my morals,” Tilda said. “We can’t afford to get caught. Nobody has ever tied the Goodnights to fraud, if you don’t count Great-uncle Paolo. If a fake turns up, everybody starts looking at everything they’ve ever bought from us. And we can’t afford to give decades of dissatisfied customers their money back.” She put the Durer back. “And I’m not good enough to stonewall them on it. I’m just not the wheeler-dealer my dad was. The guilt…” She shook her head. “I get upset. So this stuff stays down here, and it drives me crazy. I’d burn it all if I could, I really would, but I can’t. My family made these.” She picked up another canvas to put it back. “And a lot of them are good. They’re not good forgeries, but they’re good paintings. They should be on people’s walls.”

  “Sell them as fakes.”

  “Right,” Tilda said. “Nobody will notice that.” She bent over to slide another painting away.

  “You have a great butt,” Davy said.

  She straightened, and he waited for her to snap at him.

  “Thank you,” she said, and picked up another painting. “But I also have this problem here.”

  “Sell them,” Davy said again, waiting for her to bend over again. “Publicize the sale as all the paintings that Goodnights bought thinking they were real and then couldn’t sell when they found out they were fakes. That’s why there are so many of them, because the Goodnights are such honest dealers.” He looked around at the riot of color.

  “Yeah,” Tilda said. “I could bring that off. Because honesty is so easy to fake.”

  She looked down at the forgeries, so much pain on her face that Davy forgot he wanted her. “Okay, there’s something else going on here. This is the thing that got you last night, isn’t it? I’m not getting why this is so awful, or how the Scarlets fit into it.”

  “What?” Tilda looked up from the Durer. “Oh. They don’t. I wasn’t trained to paint the Scarlets, I was trained for this.”

  Davy shook his head. “I don’t get it.”

  “My dad trained me as a classical painter,” Tilda said. “The same way his dad trained him and his dad before that. But then one day Dad showed up with a Homer Hodge and said, ‘Paint like this,’ and they were so simple that-” She broke off. “I painted six of them and left.” She shrugged. “No big deal.”

  “Why did you leave?” Davy said.

  Tilda bit her lip. “It was a bad time,” she said offhand, but her voice shook a little. “I was a kid. It doesn’t matter. Long time ago, all over now.” She started to put the paintings away.

  “How old a kid?”

  “Seventeen.”

  Davy straightened. “What the hell happened?”

  “You know, it really isn’t-”

  “Tilda, stop lying and tell me.”

  Tilda pressed her lips together in a caricature of a smile. “I wasn’t lying. It doesn’t matter. Eve and Andrew found out they were pregnant, that’s all. He was my best friend, we were the way Nadine and Ethan are now, but he was Eve’s friend, too, and she was so beautiful, and he took her to the prom, and…” She waved her hand. “No big deal.”

  “That’s why you left?” Davy said back. “No. It’s something else. What happened with your dad?”

  Tilda turned her back on him and put another painting in the cabinet.

  “We’re not going upstairs until you tell me,” Davy said. “Spill it.”

  “It wasn’t anything,” Tilda said. “We found out Nadine was on the way, and I came down here to work on the last Scarlet.” She forged a smile for him. “The one you scammed from Colby. The dancers.”

  “The lovers,” Davy said.

  Her smile disappeared and she nodded. “I was working on it, down here, crying, and Dad came in and said…” She swallowed. “He said, ‘When will you learn you were born to paint and not to love?’”

  “I hate your father,” Davy said, rage slicing through him.

  “No,” Tilda said. “He was trying to… make me see my destiny. And, really, he was pretty much right. I mean, I’ve been loved. Scott loved me.”

  Davy felt that spurt of jealousy again.

  “But Dad was right,” Tilda went on, trying to smile. “I was happier painting than I was with people. I loved painting the furniture and the Scarlets, even the forgeries I was doing were more interesting than people. I just…” She sighed. “I just really loved Andrew. And I loved Eve. There weren’t any bad guys. It just didn’t work out for me, I’m just not… But I didn’t want to hear it then.”

  She gave Davy a wobbly smile. “My dad had really bad timing.”

  “He was an exploitive son of a bitch,” Davy said.

  Tilda took a deep breath. “So I scrubbed the paintbrush through the faces in the painting and threw it at him and walked out. I took the bus to Cincinnati, and found a job waitressing there and let Eve know, and she told Gwennie, and Gwennie sent money, every week, and never told Dad where I was, and it turned out okay. I’d graduated from high school the year before because he’d had me test out of a bunch of stuff so I could paint, and that meant I could work if I lied about my age. Eventually he found out and called and yelled and disowned me, but by then, the scary part of being on my own was over.” Tilda’s face eased a little. “And one day, the guy who owned the restaurant was talking about fixing up the place, and I said, ‘I can paint a mural for you,’ and I did, and one of the people who came into the restaurant saw it and wanted one, and the mural business just sort of evolved. And there I was, painting forgeries for a living just like all the other Goodnights.” She looked down at the paintings at her feet “Just like my dad said I would. He was right.”

  “He was wrong,” Davy said grimly.

  “The bad thing,” Tilda swallowed. “The bad thing was that the Scarlets… were… the way…” She swallowed again. “The way I really paint. So when he sold them, I couldn’t paint that way anymore unless I was Scarlet for him, so I couldn’t paint.”

  “How could he do that?” Davy said. “He was an artist. He knew what that meant. How could he do that to his own kid?”

  Tilda took a deep breath. “He wasn’t an artist.”

  “What?”

  “He was a terrible painter.” She leaned against the cabinets and slid down until she was sitting on the carpet, collapsing there like a rag doll in her pretty, silky dress, looking so tired Davy ached for her. “You can learn all the craft you want,” she said. “But if you’re not born with a sense of light and color and line and mass, you cannot paint. And he couldn’t paint. He was a