A Fatal Frame of Mind (11 page)

“And you think they’re so powerful they’ve infiltrated the Santa Barbara Police Department?” Gus said.

“It’s impossible to know their reach,” Kitteredge said.

“Wait a minute,” Shawn said. “I thought you said they found the sword.”

“I believe Morris and Rossetti did,” Kitteredge said. “And then they hid it again, rather than turn it over to the Cabal. I believe that is why Rossetti made sure his last painting stayed hidden for all these years. Because it contains clues to Excalibur’s hiding place.”

“But why kill Filkins?” Gus said.

“I can’t say for sure,” Kitteredge said solemnly. “But I believe they were sending me a message: Stay away from this picture—stay away from the sword.”

“Wouldn’t the message have been clearer if the sword had been poking through
your
chest?” Shawn said.

For a moment, all the animation left Kitteredge’s face. Gus realized suddenly that the professor was much older than he’d assumed, close to sixty at least. But usually there was so much energy flowing through the man it was impossible to think of him as aging, let alone aged. Now, however, Gus could see all his years weighing on him.

“It should have been me,” Kitteredge said. “I would accept death for myself before seeing an innocent killed because of my work. But I wasn’t given a choice in the matter. So all I can do now is work to avenge his death. The only way I know to do that is to find the sword and make sure it never falls into the hands of the Cabal.”

The three of them stood in silence for a long moment. Then Shawn nodded his acceptance.

“Okay, so my plan,” he said. “How we get into that gallery.”

Kitteredge looked like he was about to throw his arms around Shawn in one of his bearlike embraces. “Yes?”

Shawn walked over to the Plexiglas box housing the fertility sculpture and gave it a shove. The pedestal rocked slightly, and Shawn shoved it again. This time it tipped over and crashed to the ground.

All around them, alarm bells started ringing.

I
f Shawn had been disappointed that steel doors didn’t slam down on all the galleries once the alarm went off, he didn’t show it. Maybe that was because he was too busy running.

That course of action made sense for the three of them. They needed to get out of the Oceanic gallery before a squad of security guards arrived to protect the fertility figure.

But it didn’t make a lot of sense for any of the hundreds of museum visitors who were also running as fast as they could for the museum exits. After all, it wasn’t a fire alarm that had gone off, just the theft protection system. But while whoever had designed the museum’s security had installed alarms with substantially different sounds for various kinds of disasters, he’d neglected to include a way to alert the public to the distinction. To an untrained ear the bells ringing throughout the museum might be signaling a raging inferno in the nearest gallery.

And of course, even if that thought had not occurred to them individually, the sight of two young men in tuxedos shouting “Fire!” and racing toward the emergency exits certainly would have put it in many heads. Following their directions, the tourists blasted through doors wired to set off further alarms when opened.

Moving as swiftly and efficiently as any male salmon who hasn’t gotten the memo that the way upstream has been blocked by a new dam, Shawn and Gus led Kitteredge back through the centuries of European paintings until they arrived at the vestibule of the special-exhibitions gallery where
The Defence of Guenevere
had been installed. The entrance was blocked off by yellow-and-black crime scene tape, but there was no one standing in front of the door.

“Let’s go,” Gus said. “We’ve got to get in and out fast.”

“Fast?” Kitteredge said. “I’m going to need some time with the painting.”

“How much time?” Gus said.

“Ideally a couple of decades,” Kitteredge said. “We’re talking about the solution to a puzzle that has gone unanswered for more than a hundred years.”

“The only way you’re getting decades is if they agree to hang the picture in your cell,” Shawn said. “You’ve got three minutes, tops.”

“Three minutes!” Kitteredge said. “That’s almost worse than nothing.”

“Then we might as well leave now,” Shawn said. “Because it’s not going to take much more than three minutes to clear everyone out of this place. Then they’re going to lock it down and start going room by room to make sure nothing is missing. And since you are technically missing, you really don’t want anyone to find you here.”

Kitteredge looked helplessly to Gus, as if hoping the higher court would overturn the verdict. “If Jean-Francois Champollion had only been able to study the Rosetta Stone for three minutes, he never would have been able to work out the translations between demotic and hieroglyphics.”

“If his choice had been between looking at the stone and spending the rest of his life breaking rocks, I think we both know which way he would have gone,” Gus said.

“But we have something that Champ guy never dreamed of,” Shawn said. He dug in the roomy pocket of his rental pants and pulled out his cell phone. “As the new counter girl at Burger Town said to Gus, take a picture; it will last longer.”

Kitteredge’s face lit up in joy, and Gus was so pleased that Shawn had found a way to answer everyone’s needs that he was willing to ignore the fact that the counter girl had actually been talking to Shawn, and that she had appended an extra word to the end of her sentence that had rendered her photographic suggestion even less friendly.

With Kitteredge clutching the cell phone, they started across the vestibule, heading straight for the crime scene tape. Shawn was just reaching out to push open the glass door when a gruff voice called out from behind them.

“Hey!” the voice said. “You can’t go that way.”

The voice belonged to the uniformed police officer who had been standing guard at the gallery door. And he was marching up to them.

N
ow what
? Gus thought desperately.There was no way the cop was going to let them in to see the painting. They’d be lucky if he didn’t arrest them just for trying. And if he got any kind of look at Kitteredge’s face, the professor would be in prison awaiting trial for murder, and they’d be sharing a cell for aiding and abetting.

“We’re just trying to get out, Officer,” Shawn said in the same voice he’d been using to feign innocence when caught red-handed since he was spotted dumping a jar of green tempera powder on Suki Stern in kindergarten.

“There’s no exit through that door,” the officer said.

“Well, thank God you came along to let us know that in time,” Shawn said, an extra coating of sugar on his tone. “If we’d gone in there, we might have been broiled alive.”

As opposed to simply getting the lethal injection,
Gus thought.
Which is what we’ll be facing once that cop recognizes Professor Kitteredge
.

“No danger of that,” the officer said. “There’s no fire. But we are evacuating the building. Follow me and I’ll show you the way to the exit.”

“Thank you again, Officer,” Shawn said.

“That is, if your friend feels like getting off the phone,” the officer said.

Gus turned to see that Kitteredge was holding Shawn’s phone to his left ear with his right hand, allowing him to cover most of his face with forearm and elbow.

“That’s Uncle Leroy for you,” Shawn said. “Anything interesting happens, he’s got to tell Aunt Mabel about it right away. Come on, Uncle Leroy.”

Kitteredge seemed to recognize his cue. “Don’t worry about me, Mabel. You’ve got to see to those chickens,” he said into the phone. “And when you’re done, the cows are going to need milking. And the hay needs to be baled. Plus there are those pies to bake.”

Shawn took Kitteredge’s free elbow and started to guide him toward the cop. “That’s plenty of rustic charm, Uncle Leroy,” he said. “I’m sure Aunt Mabel remembers what to do.”

“I’m glad somebody does,” the cop said, turning and headed toward the main lobby. He was expecting them to follow, and if they didn’t he’d come back fast to find out why. And the first place he’d look would be
Guenevere
’s gallery. Forget about three minutes with the painting; they’d be lucky to get three seconds.

Shawn was shuffling his feet, moving as slowly as possible while still maintaining a defensible level of forward momentum in case the cop glanced back, when there was a shout from behind them.

“Police! Help!” a man’s voice shouted.

Gus turned to see the long-haul trucker from the café rushing past them to reach the officer, trailing his two small children behind him.

“What’s the problem?” the cop said.

“It’s my wife,” the trucker said. “She’s stuck in Chinese porcelain. You’ve got to help her.”

“Is she hurt?” the cop said.

“Her feelings are,” the trucker said. “And believe me, that’s bad enough. She saw you helping that pregnant woman out a couple of minutes ago.”

“So?” the officer said.

“She says she’s entitled to the same level of service as anyone else,” the trucker said. “And if assistance is being offered, she wants some, too.”

The cop stared at him, dumbfounded. “Are you serious?”

“I wish I wasn’t,” the trucker said. “She’s sitting on the floor and won’t get up until she gets everything she deserves. Even if that means burning up in an inferno and leaving our poor children motherless.”

The cop looked down at the children, who stared back up at him seriously. Then he muttered something under his breath and turned back to Shawn. “Exit’s that way,” he said pointing in the direction he’d been heading. “Follow the crowd and you can’t miss it. Don’t be here when I get back.”

The trucker led the officer back in the direction he’d come from. Gus let out a sigh of relief as the three of them crept back to the gallery entrance and pushed the door open. They bolted through and let the door shut behind them.

As Gus looked around the deserted gallery he marveled that less than twenty hours had passed since he’d been here. Since then the entire world had changed. The man he respected most in the world was a wanted fugitive, and Gus was helping him escape the police. He might have expected the gallery to have changed in that time to reflect the new situation, for the lights to be lower or the walls to be closing in or the floor split by a jagged fissure through which they could fall straight into hell.

But nothing looked any different than it had the night before. Sure, there were gray smudges on the walls where crime scene techs had brushed for fingerprints, and there was some dried blood etched in the grout between the marble tiles of the floor. But if you didn’t know what you were looking for, you’d never know this had been the scene of such a terrible crime. You couldn’t even see the tape outline of Filkins’ body on the ground, as the red velvet drape had been closed over the painting again.

“Okay, Professor,” Shawn said. “You’ve got three minutes.”

Gus looked back to see that Kitteredge was frozen by the gallery door. “Professor Kitteredge?” he said.

Kitteredge seemed to shake off the spell. “Sorry,” he said. “This picture has haunted me for so long, it’s hard to believe that it’s actually behind that curtain, even though I saw it last night.”

“And we know how well that turned out,” Shawn said. “We’ve got to move fast. If you start staring moonily at that picture, or start lecturing us about it, we’ll all be caught and you’ll never see it again. Get up close, take the pictures, and get out. Okay?”

“I understand,” Kitteredge said. “I’ll try to hold off my emotional reaction until the proper moment.”

“Here’s a hint,” Shawn said. “You’ll know that the proper moment has arrived when I’m not around.”

Kitteredge nodded absently at him, and Gus went to the draped wall. He tried to move the curtain along its rings, but it wouldn’t budge.

“It’s stuck,” Gus said, feeling a new sense of panic rising in him. “We’re going to have to pull it down.”

“Or we could just do what Lassie did and use the control thingy.” Shawn stepped past Gus, reached into the folds of the curtain, and came up with the device. He pushed the button.

Above their heads, the small motors whirred and whined, and the red curtain began to move across the wall.

“This is exciting,” Shawn said. “I’m so glad we didn’t do what I wanted to do last night. Because we’d never see anything like a red velvet curtain if we went to the Bijoux Theatre. Oh, except for the one in front of the screen.”

“If C. Thomas Howell is in jail because someone framed him for murder, then I’ll consider the possibility that we went to the wrong event,” Gus said.

“I’m sure C. Thomas Howell is perfectly capable of ending up in jail without the help of someone framing him for murder,” Shawn said. “And then he could solve the crime from inside his cell with the help of the beautiful young warden’s daughter, who just happens to stroll around the prison yard topless. In fact, I think that one is playing at the festival.”

“Well, if we clear Professor Kitteredge’s name before eight o’clock tonight, we can still make it in time for night three of the festival,” Gus said. “Meanwhile, maybe we should focus on this case.”

Shawn shrugged. Gus turned to make sure that Professor Kitteredge had started taking pictures instead of staring in awe at the painting.

But Kitteredge wasn’t taking pictures. He was staring straight ahead, a look of despair on his face.

“Professor, we need to get moving,” Gus said.

“We’re too late,” Kitteredge said. He raised a hand and pointed at the wall the curtain had just revealed.

Gus turned to see what he was pointing at, and his heart sank. On the wall, the ornate frame was hanging just as it had the night before. But inside the frame there was nothing but blank wall.