The Masterpiecers (Masterful #1) (35 page)

This is it.
The last day. The last contest. The last chance to win a hundred thousand dollars and an entry into the school.

Too soon, we’re in the herringbone-planked gallery with the masterpieces. Dominic is standing before us and the cameras are circling us, while the audience presses up against the velvet ropes erected at each entrance. Only Josephine and the orchestra are missing.

“And now, I’d like you to meet our wonderful experts,” Dominic says, gesturing to two women. Both wear simple black pantsuits. The younger one sports a pair of glasses with thick purple frames and has her hair up in a bun, while the other wears it down to her shoulders. “Chase and Ivy, meet Genevieve and Larissa. Both have trained at the Masterpiecers and still consult for us. However, Genevieve now works for the Metropolitan as their art specialist and Larissa is the woman the auction houses call upon in case of doubt.”

Both women nod. Neither smiles.

“They will be assisting you today with each tool. They will, however, not be answering any questions. It will be up to you to figure out the results.” Dominic pauses to make the moment more dramatic. “Finalists, it is time to begin. Ready…set…go!”

Chase pounces toward the woman who works at the Metropolitan. Smart. As I watch him move to the table covered in appraisal tools, the other woman comes up to me and sticks out a manicured hand.

“Hi, Ivy,” she says as I shake it. “Shall we get started?”

When I release her hand, my fingers fall back against my thighs, cold and stiff. I nod.

“Let’s go to this side of the room.” She indicates the Washington painting since Chase is studying the Monet.

I walk on autopilot alongside her and stop in front of the monstrous oil painting. I read the small plaque on the wall, take in the year and the dimensions. The painting has been presented without its frame.

“Is there a measuring tape?” I ask.

Larissa smiles, which convinces me that my approach is smart. “I will get one right away.”

She returns with a coiled ruler, which she holds in place while I pull it the length of the canvas, then the width. All the dimensions check out, to the fraction of an inch. I decide it must be real.

“Let’s go to the next,” I say, clutching the measuring tape.

Her wide, bright red lips curve up. Does she smile because I’m right? Or is it mocking? Chase is still studying the Monet, using some tool that resembles a supermarket scanner. Maybe my assessment was too rushed.

“Can I touch the paintings?” I ask.

She nods. “Lightly, though.”

So I run the tips of my fingers over the subtle, sloping oil reliefs and close my eyes. If only paint could talk, tell me who brushed it atop the canvas.

“Is there another tool you’d like to use?” she asks me.

My lids snap up, and I find Chase handing back the scanner. “That,” I say, pointing to it.

“Let me get it.”

She crosses the room and takes it from Genevieve. Chase’s gaze lifts to mine, all at once intense and gentle, and my brain becomes fuzzy. I shake my head. I need to concentrate.

Larissa’s on her way back. “Here’s the Proscope,” she says, handing it to me.

“How…um…does it work?”

“You hold it up to the signature and it acts as a microscope. It’ll show you each pixel with a clarity the human eye cannot discern. Let me just plug it into this tablet for a visual.”

She holds the screen up to me as I take the small apparatus and hover it over the signature. I’m not sure what I’m looking for, but I move it over the word
Leutze
slowly. There’s a feathery quality to the second letter and a sort of break in the
t
that makes me study the letter more closely. I look up from the tablet screen. As Larissa said, I don’t spot any discrepancy with my naked eye. But I didn’t imagine it. On the screen, it’s there, unmistakable.

“Can I get a pen and paper?”

She frowns, but obliges.

I hand her the tablet and handheld microscope and take the pen and paper. I sign my name, and then take the device and run it over my autograph. I watch the screen, satisfied. There isn’t a single crack in my writing, which leads me to believe that whoever ratified the Delaware River painting is not Leutze.

Excitement bubbles through me, but I squelch it down as I walk over to the table laid out with all the tools. There’s some handheld electric torch that dispenses black light.

“What’s that used for?” I ask Larissa.

“Detecting lead in pigments.”

I can’t see the use of analyzing lead content.

“There was more lead in paints before the turn of the twentieth century,” she explains.

I seize the tool and bring it over to the Monet. I shine the black light inches away from the pretty paint smudges. I don’t see any variations and am about to let the torch fall to my side when the light touches a smear of white. The white turns blue and gray.

“Does that mean a high lead concentration?” I ask Larissa.

Her lips press together. “Yes.”

So it must be real
. Dominic mentioned spotting the fake. The Leutze is fake. On second thought, maybe it’s just hard to sign in paint. “Can you still buy lead-heavy paint today?” I find myself wondering out loud.

Her bottom lip drops in surprise. “Yes.”

So lead content isn’t going to help me age the painting. I check the dimensions on the plaque and pull out the measuring tape to size up the water lily canvas. They match. I’m racking my mind for other ways of telling if something is old. On humans, wrinkles or gray hair are a good sign. Billboards fade and book pages turn yellow. “Can we pull it off the wall?”

“We can’t,” Larissa says, and my hope plummets. “But
they
can.” She points to the guards stationed on either side of the wall. “We need help here,” she calls out.

As I turn, my forehead knocks into the large camera that’s been filming my every move since the day I arrived at the Metropolitan. Improbably, it’s become part of my landscape, and I usually don’t even notice it anymore, but I also usually don’t collide into it.

“Sorry,” the woman filming says. She gets a stern look from Jeb who’s handling the camera aimed on Chase.

The guards flip the canvas over. I look for a yellowing of the fibers. There is none. “Can canvas be bleached without it affecting the paint?” I ask Larissa.

She tips her head to the side and her shiny black hair brushes the sharp shoulders of her suit. “No.”

I catch Chase’s eyes, but too briefly to read anything. He shifts back to the ballerina, leaving me to ponder the Monet. Why in the world would someone spend time cleaning the back of a painting anyway?

Could the Leutze be real and the Monet be fake? I move on to the Van Gogh. I shine the black light on the swirly clouds. Like on the pale water lily pads, the white takes on hues of blue and gray indicating that the paint is from Van Gogh’s era.

I switch off the torch. “What other tools are available?”

“The Oculus Aperture. They’re x-ray binoculars that reveal the different layers of paint so you can see if the artist intended to put a mouse in the corner of his creation or if he changed the angle of a limb.”

That’s exactly what I need. I walk to the table in the middle of the room, where Chase is perusing what’s available. As I reach out for the pair of silver binoculars, our hands collide. I snap my fingers back to my side, while his continue their trajectory. He seizes the binoculars and I think I’ll have to wait, but he says, “Ladies first.”

Startled, I don’t take them from him, so he grasps my hand and unbolts my fingers, then places the instrument in my palm and presses my fingers closed.

“Bring them back to me when you’re done.”

I stare up at him, forgetting there’s anyone else in the room. As the deep brown of his irises eddy around his pupils, his hand slowly releases mine. I should swim against the tide sweeping me toward Chase. It’s too strong and too quick, flooding me with too many emotions.

I will drown if I’m not careful.

Chapter Fifty-One

Aster

Ivy is so beautiful in her red dress and sleek hairdo, whereas I’m so ugly. I long to yank out the dreads, but they’re as resilient as the rope Ivy and I tied to a tree branch one summer, to attach a castoff tire. How we would swing on that old piece of rubber!

The memory tugs on my fraying heartstrings.
Ivy and me
. There should have been a song written about us, one with a sweet, plucky melody. Two stick-thin girls with bushy curls swinging on a craggy tire, making forts out of branches and blue Ikea bags, and rolling in tall, tickling grass until their bellies hurt from laughing. But no one will ever write a song about us. They might compose one about Ivy, though, now that she’s a celebrity.

I’m propelled into the dayroom, staring at myself pulling on my ratty tresses. From inside the TV, Ivy sees me too. Her eyes are wide and expectant and scared. She needs me, but I can’t help her, I can’t leap through the screen. The dyed fibers of her dress tremble as her heart beats quicker. My pulse hastens in turn, making the stiff gray shroud that ensconces me vibrate too.

“Aster,” she whispers. “Aster…”

“I’m here, Ivy! Right here.” My voice sounds foreign to my ears, yet it’s my voice. It vibrates in my chest, making it ache. “Ouch,” I murmur as I shift. Paper crackles. I try to lift my wrists, but I can’t. “I can’t get to you. I can’t move.”

“No shit. You’re attached to a gurney, you fucking bitch.”

My lids snap up and light bounces into my eyes. Too much light and too much red. So much red, I squeeze them shut again. I pretend that I’m unconscious.

“Wakey, wakey,” Gill says, digging something into my palm.

I scream out in pain, but she stifles my scream with her hand.

Chapter Fifty-Two

Ivy

Larissa plucks the Oculus Aperture from my hand like a child reaching into a bucket of popcorn for their first handful. “It’s brand new technology,” she explains. “Before, you had to take x-rays like in the dentist’s office. But now, we have these! They’re amazing, aren’t they?” Her dark eyes glitter with excitement as she finally hands them back.

There are a few straps that go around the top of the head to stabilize them. Once they’re in place, all I have to do is press a button and the binoculars flood to life and self-adjust to my vision. I focus them on the Van Gogh.

After a long surveillance, I say, “I don’t see anything.”

“What do you mean?” Larissa asks. “Did you turn them on?”

“Of course I turned them on,” I tell her. “I just don’t see any layers. Is there something I’m not pressing on?”

Without glancing away from me, she says, “Don’t look for something that isn’t there.”

I make mistakes when I create quilts and often have to unstitch what I’ve sewn. But maybe Van Gogh doesn’t. Maybe he’s some genius who gets it right from the beginning.

With the Oculus still on, I walk to the Monet and scrutinize it through the computerized lenses. No layers. I stride over to the Leutze, stumbling into one of the guards. Large hands steady me and then I’m on my way again. I study the scene from top to bottom and side to side. There isn’t a single hesitation, no soldier out of place, no fishtail sticking out from the icy river, no musket covered by a new layer of paint. Could all three be fakes? With the interactive glasses still on, I circle the room, stopping in front of the small terracotta-hued Picasso. I almost zip past it when I spot something that makes me stop and stare: the shadow of another face, a woman’s face. I lift the binoculars. The woman’s face vanishes. I place them back on, and the rough sketch returns.

What the hell does it mean? That it’s real and the rest are fakes? I pull the Oculus off and cross the room toward Chase who’s studying the Van Gogh with the black light.

“Here,” I say.

He takes the binoculars from me. “You okay?”

“Just confused.”

He frowns.

Dominic’s arms are folded against his double-breasted navy suit, head tipped toward Brook in a quiet exchange. When they see me watching them, they fall silent. I return to Larissa who’s rearranging the gauging instruments on the table. Without a word, I grab the measuring tape and head to the Picasso. The width and length match up. I’m still convinced it’s real. I check the signature with the Proscope. I’m expecting solid letters, but most resemble thread ends unraveling. I turn the device off, my earlier conviction smashed to pulp. I add the Picasso to the list of fakes and move to the statues.

I start with the bronze and measure it. The dimensions check out. Degas’s signature is etched in the square base by the dancer’s feet. I wouldn’t know if it was real or fake though. The plaque says the skirt is made of cotton and satin hair ribbons. Delicately, I run the tips of my fingers through them. Although browned with age, I don’t feel the cool, filmy texture of satin.

Frowning, I move to the other statue—the white marble one. I need a chair to measure it and ask a guard for one. He returns with a stool and insists on helping me up and holding me as I reach past Medusa’s severed head to Perseus’s winged helmet. Just shy of eight feet tall, as it says on the plaque. As I descend from the stool, I lose my balance. Although the guard bares most of my weight, my hand flails out toward the statue. The second I touch it, I know it’s fake. Although veined like marble, it isn’t cold and silken like stone. It feels like plaster. I scramble back onto the stool and swipe my index finger in the hollow of Medusa’s head. A dusty white residue remains on my skin.

I take in the room from my vantage point and feel a sense of smugness and pleasure at not having been outsmarted by Dominic and Brook. I spot Chase in front of the Picasso, running his last tests. Has he come to the same conclusion?

Could we both win?

I hop down from the stool and amble toward Dominic. “I’m done.”

“Are you now? You still have plenty of time—”

“I don’t need more time.”

“Are you certain? There’s no revising your answer once you give it to us.”

My certainty momentarily flounders. I feel a presence behind me and don’t need to whirl around to know it’s Chase. I can smell the pine needles in the small space separating our bodies.