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  “Hence the reason you’re trying to gift her with shooting lessons, which don’t appear to have taken hold, by the way.”

  “I noticed.”

  “Also, I’d be wary of any other neighbors who might suddenly appear in your empty summertime hood.” Shel had thought of it enough to suspect everyone, everywhere. Milford continued, “This is quite a job you’ve undertaken.”

  “I am thinking of a plan, but it’s risky.”

  “Oh, it’s only now risky?” Milford shook her head. “Sister, you’re into risk up to your eyeballs. How much riskier could it get?”

  “I need Fortier to confess.” Shel was too deep in thought to absorb her remark. Rob crossed in front of them, again returning to the counter. In the background he waved bottles of designer water at them. Both shook their heads. Shel continued, “If we can get a solid confession on the record about how he forced her to forge the art, maybe she can get a deal.”

  “You’d need everything to get her off the hook at this point—I’m talking mentions of people he screwed over—the works.”

  In minutes Addison had emptied another magazine still without putting a single hole in the clean target that sailed toward her on the line. Shel and Milford exchanged glances. Removing her headgear, Addison came toward them, looking frustrated.

  “My arms are tired and my head hurts. I’m awful at this.” Addison laid down the gun and headgear. “I don’t think I could hit anything if I wanted to.”

  “The good news is you could probably hit anything you didn’t want to.” Milford’s comment inspired silence and a sarcastic look from Shel. The cop shrugged and headed toward the counter to return her borrowed weapon.

  “The good news is that you were on the other side of the gun for a change,” Shel quietly told her. While she’d hoped that Addison would be a better shot than she’d proven to be, Shel also hoped the experience would boost her confidence. “A gun doesn’t make you powerful. Being able to confront the things that scare you, now that’s the stuff that makes you powerful. Small steps, that’s what we’re doing here.”

  Rob crossed in front of them, heading toward the door.

  “My lady awaits me.” He wriggled his eyebrows in the women’s direction. “You can find your way out, right?”

  “Thanks, Rob,” Shel told him. When he was gone, Shel again thanked the attendant before heading for the closed door. Just as she’d heard Rob say, she repeated, “Open.”

  The door slid open with a quick swish like something on Star Trek. The trio proceeded down the seemingly endless marble hallway and Shel verbally commanded the elevator to whisk them to the first floor.

  “Shotgun, no pun intended,” Milford said when they were outside. She slipped into the front passenger’s side. Addison didn’t protest the call and simply got into the backseat. They buckled up and headed toward the gate, waiting for it to allow them exit to the main road. She chuckled. “What kind of action you suppose that boy gives these women? You mean to tell me all that money can’t buy their husbands Viagra?”

  “Oh, I’m sure. But God knows where the husbands are employing their Viagra-super powers. Doubt it’s at home.”

  “Tit for tat.” Milford shook her head. “What an arrangement.”

  They rode in silence. Shel dreaded leaving Addison at the gallery, or anyplace for that matter that she would be open, exposed. She parked a few spots down from the gallery, turned and told Milford, “I’ll walk her to the door.”

  As they walked down the street, Shel could feel Addison’s anxiety building as the woman cast glances over her shoulder at the waiting cop.

  “She really doesn’t like me, does she?” Addison finally asked. The cop had the window down watching them, a neutral expression on her face. Nonetheless, she made a curt wave. Addison looked back at Shel, whispered, “She thinks I’m here to cause problems.”

  “If she thought that, trust me, she wouldn’t have gone with us today.” Shel took hold of Addison’s hands, looked into her eyes. “Milford and I are working on a good, solid plan, so I don’t want you to worry.”

  “What kind of plan?”

  “We’re still working out the details,” Shel lied. “At the risk of making you paranoid, I want you to watch your back. We can’t be too careful about anyone, just in case.”

  Addison nodded. Shel smiled and kissed her forehead.

  “I’ll talk to you about it more after work and we’ll go from there.”

  When she’d gone inside the gallery, Shel motioned to Milford who joined her on the sidewalk. Together they strolled toward the docks and a row of wooden benches running along the water. They selected the one farthest away from anyone and sat.

  “So what’s your great big plan, hotshot?” Milford arched an eyebrow and moved to preempt what would be an unnecessary question-and-answer session. “I heard you.”

  “We need a confession out of Fortier, as I said earlier. Something official, on the record.”

  “Well, that would be ideal.” Milford seemed too tired to be sarcastic. They gazed at the boat slips, watching oversized cruisers and sailboats bob to the rhythm of the gentle tide. “It’s national—probably international—art fraud. The Feds would want to get involved.”

  Shel was biting her lip, already thinking along the same lines. “It’d be helpful to know someone in the Bureau. We turn this over without the assistance of someone sympathetic to our cause and all bets are off. Addison would go to jail and Harper in foster care before nightfall.”

  Milford turned to face her. “But if this woman willingly goes to the Feds, her child in tow, armed with this woeful tale and her evidence, she might stand a good chance.”

  “What evidence?” Shel cut her off.

  “Kathleen Fortier’s paintings still exist. That’s where you started, remember?” Milford smirked. “People will be inclined to believe a woman who goes from making several thousand to a few hundred bucks on her work. It says she’s scared and she wants away. She walked away from a mansion, you said. Left everything material behind—this ain’t rocket science. Give people some credit.”

  “That argument will last five minutes in court. If that’s all she’s got, it’s not enough to bank on.” Shel stared off, looking intense. “Then there’s a matter of parental kidnapping. And just maybe Fortier will luck into a real, live doctor by the time it all hits the fan. One with legit papers.”

  “Calm down,” Milford firmly told her.

  “Add that to an expensive attorney and they’ll reduce her integrity to crackpot status. She may go to jail; she may go to some kind of asylum.” Shel lowered her gaze, studied her sneakers. “As for the underground, they won’t testify for her. It’s one of the conditions of their help. It’s how they protect the group and the women they help.”

  “Calm down, I said. They don’t wash their hands of ’em if they get subpoenaed.” Milford shook her head, looked half-crazed. “It’s hard to believe you were ever a cop. Besides, this isn’t a normal case. Someone here is helping her transition and they let her in with a kid which isn’t normal, as you also pointed out. Not something these groups normally do. Those people believe her and they will testify if called.”

  “I hate losing so much control,” Shel whispered. “There’s got to be another way.”

  “I’m all ears if you’ve got a better plan.”

  “Back to the idea of a confession,” Shel said, leaning back against the bench. Her eyes reflected an inkling of an idea. “What if we send her in wearing a mic, have her throw herself at his feet, say and do anything it takes to get a confession out of him? We have cops standing by.”

  “That’s a tremendous leap of faith for cops to make. Cops that—by the way—may or may not have been bought off by Fortier.” Milford punched her first holes in the idea. “Next?”

  “We could contact the Feds, but not until a good plan is in place. What if we tell them what’s going down with the art scams, but only right before we send her in?” She was slowly coming to life
. “Could this work? Who do you know, Milford?”

  “Let’s take a moment to consider that if Fortier’s so smart, he’s not going to tell her anything she might record. And why else would she show back up on his doorstep?” Milford squinted at her. “You going to just send her in there—nervous as hell—and expect that he will just spill? He’s furious. She stole his money. This isn’t going to be a joyous homecoming.”

  “But if she really sells it—”

  “And you trust she’ll put on that brand of Academy Award-winning performance?” Milford scoffed. “If she’d have kept that money it would have helped her case.”

  “If she’d have been the type to keep the money, she would have been the kind to stay with him,” Shel flatly told her. “You and I would not know each other or be having this conversation.”

  “Understood. But it’s going to be hard to get Fortier to give up any meaningful information without something in exchange.” Milford gazed off in the distance. “She needs to take him some kind of show of good faith. Doesn’t sound like the prospect of getting his only daughter back is going to do the trick. You need material leverage.”

  “I know,” Shel quietly said. “Too bad she couldn’t forge pictures of Benjamin Franklin.”

  Shel felt less than hopeful about the situation. Addison’s state of mind was fragile at best, and her fear of her ex was tremendous. Enter the Feds and Shel gauged their chances at success very low. Her head and chest felt heavy.

  “Makes me want to take them and run,” Shel quietly said. “If I thought I could get her on a plane without getting snagged by authorities, we’d be gone by morning.”

  “It wouldn’t be right, but I can’t say I blame you.” Milford rose up and stretched, signifying their meeting was finished.

  She started toward the car, Shel slowly following along behind. The drive to the station was made in silence. Milford opened the door to get out, but lingered.

  “Whatever your plan, don’t let it percolate for too long. I got a sneaking hunch she doesn’t have much time.” The cop sighed, looked at the station. “We’ll put our pointy heads together—figure it out.”

  Shel nodded without looking at her friend as she exited the car. She dreaded going home to an empty house where she would be forced to be alone with her thoughts. Her head was again getting noisy, her internal voice of reason easily losing to the sound of her own guilt and selfishness; both seemed to bellow nonstop. She rolled down the windows and let the wind hit her face as she drove aimlessly in the car rented with Fortier’s credit card. She knew she should have returned it, but then she’d have no car. He probably already knew where they were anyway. Perhaps he was watching her now.

  Shel drove around until after five. At that time, she returned to the dock and parked far enough away from the gallery she could safely watch for Silvia Frances to deliver Harper to her mother to protect yet another web of lies she’d spun. She wondered if Addison and her child would be much better off if they stayed put in their anonymous lives and instead Shel left. If she could believe for one minute that Fortier’s reign of terror could truly end that easily—that he wouldn’t find her in Naples, Florida—she’d put the car in drive until I-75 ran out of road.

  When Silvia Frances was out of sight, Shel got out of the car and slowly walked toward the gallery. She took deep breaths hoping the salty air would do something to revitalize her. Instead she felt even wearier, her lungs drowned in humidity by the time she arrived at the front door. She pushed it open, jangling the doorbell, announcing her arrival. Addison looked up and smiled genuinely, welcomingly, giving Shel her first clear breath. She went to Addison and hugged her close as if it had been days, not hours, since they’d last seen each other.

  Shel leaned back, toyed with the bleach blond pixie haircut that was starting to show undertones of a true color, beginning with the tiny river of auburn at her part. Shel etched every bit of her beautiful image in her mind for safekeeping.

  “What’s gotten into you?” Addison smiled impishly and her eyes sparkled, a move that put her shyness and charm on full display. Shel captured her hand midair and kissed it. At last Addison gently wriggled out of her hold, locked the front door before grasping Shel’s hand and tugged her into the gallery’s back room. She chuckled. “Come on. I just don’t want Harper painting anything she shouldn’t.”

  The rustic back room spoke to the true age of the building. Its old exposed beams were partially plastered with old art festival flyers. Paintings that would never make it into the showroom adorned the walls and yards of clothesline dangled above their heads boasting an endless array of watercolors, some obviously belonging to Harper. Shel smiled.

  She forced her gaze lower to a paint-spattered picnic table where the toddler sat on her knees, wielding a paintbrush across her intended paper canvas and sometimes the battered tabletop. She watched the child stroke various shades of blue and yellow onto the paper, each time drawing her brush back with dramatic flourish. She would stop every few seconds and seem to analyze her work. The blue colors blended well hinting at some natural talent, but Shel couldn’t decipher her subject.

  “What are you painting, Harper?” Shel quietly asked.

  “Elephant,” the child announced, again studying her work. She continued painting childish, dramatic strokes of color. Suddenly, Shel could make out the barest hint of ears and a trunk.

  “Harper is an impressionist,” Addison explained with a smile. She collected a few books and a sweater and pressed them into her bag. She paused to roll two drawings together before sliding them into a cardboard tube.

  Shel moved to stop her from capping the cylinder. “Is that something you did?”

  “These? No.” Addison dumped the pair of drawings back out of the tube and laid them out on the end of the picnic table. She smoothed her hand over them. “Someone brought these to my boss for an appraisal. The gentleman had purchased them in Paris a few years back believing them to be authentic Salvador Dali.”

  Shel took a step closer, noted the disjointed figures of animals that seemed to be floating in no sensible order. “I take it they’re not?”

  “No, but it was a close call on the signature.” Addison held it up to the light streaming in the low window panes. “An old rumor says that Dali signed his name on many slips of paper to enable his printing company to add the signature to his prints. The printing company rejects the notion, but who can say?”

  Shel’s interest was piqued. “Why wouldn’t he just sign the actual works?”

  “He was often between Paris and New York, so sometimes he wasn’t where his drawings were going to press. He thought it would be easier.” Addison smoothed her hands over the rough edges. “In later years, the press added a watermark to the paper he used so that no one would be confused. Still, there’s a matter of his etchings, again with and without signatures.”

  “Sounds like this guy enjoyed yanking everybody’s chain.” Shel chuckled. “What’s an etching?”

  “Sort of a warm-up shot before he did a serious work. Dali was known to give many of his etchings as tips to the staff at his favorite hotel in Paris. There are actually quite a number of them floating around out there, so it’s no wonder that’s what our customer thought that’s what he had. These are close, so it’s reasonable.”

  “You’re good at this art business,” Shel said, admiringly.

  Addison studied the drawings. “The strokes are too abrupt, for lack of a better way to describe it. Too bad, the guy brought us quite a few of them. He was getting them appraised for his will, but when they proved valueless, he just left them all.”

  “There are more?”

  “Yes, these were just my favorites.” Addison tightly rerolled the drawings and slipped them back into the tube before going to a large wooden disposal barrel at the back of the room. She pulled half a dozen more of the same off the top, returned to the table and laid them out flat. They all boasted the same odd subjects, anatomical parts, and floating animals. �
��They’re nice surreal works, but alas, they are not Dali.”

  The wheels were turning as Shel stood and leaned over the drawings, flipping through the stack. “You ever fixed a Dali?”

  Addison looked thoughtful before selecting one work. She clipped it to a nearby easel and studied it for a bit. She finally picked up a charcoal pencil, speaking quietly as she made a few soft lines. “I don’t do much drawing, but I studied him quite extensively in school.” She stopped mid-story, shot Shel a sly smile. “I’ve been known to perfect a signature or two if the work is believable.” Her smile faded. “That’s a bad bragging point.”

  “No, I get it.”

  Addison was again looking at the drawings. “This one requires some…work.”

  After a pause, Addison selected another one of the drawings, crossed the room and clipped it to an easel. She stared at it for a bit. For several minutes the room was quiet, only the sound of a child’s swishing paintbrush and the scratch of Addison’s pencil. Seated at the picnic table, Shel was enthralled. Had Addison not been at work forging a famous work of art, the balance of the scene would have been quite peaceful. After a bit, Addison turned around and stepped aside.

  Shel rose up from the bench and moved toward the drawing, which now had harsher lines in parts, counterbalanced by droopier simple subjects.

  “I’m not sure what I’m looking at here,” Shel slowly said. “But I like it.”

  “There’s more to be done, but it’s the humble beginnings of what could be a fair representation of his work, speaking solely about etchings.”

  “What would one of these go for?”

  “The real deal signed and authenticated would go for anything from a few hundred to a few thousand.”

  Shel cupped her fingertips around her mouth. “You could bring this to a passable level?”

  At that moment the jolly-looking gallery owner appeared in the doorway, sufficiently startling everyone. They seemed to let out a collective breath, causing him to grin and apologize.

  “Sorry ladies—left my hat.” He walked to the sidewall and looked over a row of three hats hanging on hooks. He selected a straw one and placed it on his head, giving it a pat for good measure. He noticed all eyes on him and gave a small laugh. “Everything okay here?”