I’m so pissed with Adam that Sunday evening, I’m standing out in front of the Rhodes Gallery. It’s just after closing, but there are lights on in the back, so I press the buzzer, hoping Florian’s still here.
He cracks open the door. “Oh, hello,” he says, and opens it wider. “It’s Sabine, isn’t it?”
He doesn’t invite me in, but I’m relieved he remembers me. “Yes, thank you for answering the door. I know you’re closed.”
“You seem upset.”
I didn’t think through what I was going to say on the drive over and now I fumble to explain why I’m here. “I wondered if you’d heard from Adam. He was supposed to meet me a few nights ago, but he didn’t show.”
Florian gives me a sympathetic smile. “He’s not answering his phone?”
“No, he’s not,” I answer, and I realize Florian sees me as the desperate girl who got dumped. “We’re working on a project together. I thought since you’re friends—”
“I wish I could help you, but I’m afraid I only met him that one time.”
“But you…I thought you knew him. He told you about me.”
“We’d corresponded online.”
“Oh.” I don’t know where to go with this.
The sun’s gone behind the hills, and the lights are coming on down the street. It’s disorienting: the shift in how the neighborhood looks in the artificial light.
Florian is still holding on to the door. The keys are in the lock, he’s probably exhausted after dealing with people all weekend, and I’m holding him up.
“Thanks for talking with me,” I say.
“My pleasure.”
I turn and start down the steps, and I sense Florian’s still watching. I look over my shoulder, and our eyes meet.
“I have a feeling you’ll hear from him soon,” Florian says. “Adam was very eager to impress you. I probably shouldn’t tell you this, but he offered to pay me to open the gallery so you could have a private showing. Of course, I couldn’t accept his money. . . .”
Whatever Florian says next I can’t hear over the whooshing in my ears. Somehow I manage to say good night and walk to my car.
Adam who has no money, Adam who should know how tacky it is to offer to pay a gallery owner for a showing…Adam did that?
The streetlights are cutting shadows into the buildings along the street, deepening the cracks in the sidewalk, sharpening the tips of poinsettia leaves.
I get into my car and start the engine. I drive past the restaurant where we ate and go one block more, then veer into a residential street. Cars line either side of the narrow street and I cruise along, looking for the hulking shape of an old RV in a driveway. I only get a few blocks before I realize how futile this is.
Adam will show up tomorrow at CALINVA. Right now I’m wasting time I could spend painting.
I barely sleep Sunday night, and the next morning I’m at CALINVA by half past eight. When I drove by the building on my way home from waitressing, my copy of Duncan was still hanging in the gallery, but now it’s gone.
Screw me.
I hit Adam’s number, and it rings twice, and then: “The number you have dialed is no longer in service.”
Nausea floods me, but I tell myself not to panic. The jerk probably didn’t pay his bill. He was hurting for cash.
Then why would Adam have offered to pay Florian for a private showing?
I can’t wait for Adam to show, so I run-walk to the back of the building and Secure Storage, even though I’m not exactly sure what I’m going to do when I get there.
The door’s shut but not locked, so I knock as I open it. “Hello?”
Two guys are examining a large abstract laid out on the huge worktable. From the look on their faces they don’t see a lot of students down here. “Can we help you?” one says.
“Mmmm,” I mumble, and stroll around the room, peeking into lockers and trying to buy time. My copy of Duncan isn’t propped against the wall like I’d prayed it would be, and the locker where we stored it is empty.
Helpless is my best strategy. “Um. Collin Krell’s my instructor and he told the class to study his painting this weekend, but my sister got sick, so I had to go home to Visalia, and now Krell’s going to ask us about it, so I was hoping you might let me see it?”
The guy shakes his head. “Sorry, it already left for Miami.”
The earth crumbles beneath me, but somehow I manage to get out, “Wow, okay.”
“Hope you don’t get in trouble.”
“Thanks, I’ll try asking my friends what it looks like.”
I walk out of the room but can’t hear my footsteps. What did I think was going to happen? That I’d open the locker, find Krell’s painting, then somehow magically switch the two?
Right now a painting known as Duncan, which is in all probability my copy, is in a crate halfway to LAX. And when it gets to Miami, it won’t be just a stupid, innocent copy anymore. No, once it’s hung at Art Basel Miami, the king of international art fairs, my copy will be a full-blown forgery.
I’m coming for you, Adam.
I’m jumpy as a cat in class, twisting and untwisting my pen cap, because Krell looks like he hasn’t slept in days. His eyes are sunken, and he hasn’t shaved, which is a first. Maybe he realized over the weekend that the Duncan at the party Friday night wasn’t his and he’s freaking out.
Taysha’s right next to me, and she’d know before anyone if a scandal was brewing on campus.
“Does Krell look okay to you?” I whisper.
“He looks like a wreck. Benny had an allergic reaction Friday night, and Krell and his wife spent the weekend in the emergency room.”
“Poor little guy.”
“Benny’s better, but the doctors are still trying to figure out what caused it.”
So Krell was preoccupied with Benny, but he had to have felt something was off when he saw my copy of Duncan.
As class drags on, I’m beginning to believe that as of this minute, no one, including Krell, suspects there are two Duncans. Those two guys in Secure Storage would not have acted so cool if I’d walked into the hottest story at CALINVA.
I scoot out of class as soon as it’s over.
No one answers when I knock on the door of Adam’s studio. The smashed robot taped to it grins mockingly at me.
Okay, Adam. It’s 11 a.m. Monday. Where are you?
He’s not in class, so he’s probably working somewhere in the building. I start my search on the loading dock and work through the support areas. There’s a set of stairs that lead to the basement, and as I start down them, I run into an older man I’ve noticed a few times around the building. He’s wearing the same coveralls Adam wears when he’s working.
“This level’s off-limits to students,” the guy says, and circles his finger in the air, ordering me to walk right back up the stairs I’m coming down.
“Sorry. I’m looking for Adam.”
The man screws up his face so his eyes almost disappear. “Adam?”
“He’s a grad student, but he works here part-time.”
“Don’t know the guy.”