Finding the Forger (24 page)

“Let me talk to Connie.” When he hesitated, I continued, laying on the table precisely what I knew he didn’t want to hear. “You put her on the phone by the time I count to ten or I’m going to get off this phone and dial the police. I know people there, Bertie. I won’t have to go through some screening process. I say the word and someone’s at your place in a flash. One, two . . .”

“Bianca?” When Connie’s voice came on the phone, I could have cried with relief. She sounded nervous, but not too afraid. She even sounded a little amused. She was probably trying to figure out just what kind of game I was playing.

“Are you all right, Con?”

“Yeah, fine.”

I didn’t want to say too much because I was afraid Witherspoon would be able to hear. No telling what kind of gizmos he was capable of hooking up. For all I knew, he had an earphone set plugged into the phone and was listening in on every word we said.

“Neville’s here,” I lied. I knew Connie would know it was a lie. “We’re having a party.” If she didn’t know I was lying before, she
would surely know now. “He just showed up on our doorstep. Didn’t go away after all.” Now I was hoping Witherspoon
was
listening.

“I told you he didn’t,” she said smugly. I could have punched her for trying to sound like she knew more than me.

In reality, I could have hugged her for being so self-confident around a maniac.

“I told you he liked you too much,” she continued. Through the noise and confusion in the car, I could hear Witherspoon’s breath. As I’d suspected, he was on the line. “He told me that the day of the reception.”

The day of the reception? Connie had been nowhere near Neville that day. Besides, Neville and I had just met—hardly enough time to form a Krazy-glue bond.

Witherspoon spoke up. “All right, listen up,” he said with more confidence. “We’ll make a deal. You bring Neville to Martin’s Airfield. You know where that is?”

“Yes,” I lied. Someone would know where it was. Plus, I wasn’t sure that’s where they were anyway.

“I’ll have your sister there, and we’ll just exchange her for Neville.”

My heart, which had calmed down to a mid-Indy 500 pace, was now zooming at finish-line speed. Something wasn’t right. I couldn’t trust him. But I let him keep talking.

“You come around to the back of the airport and tell the guard you’re with me. A private jet will be there waiting. I’ll let your sister out as soon as I see Neville is safe. And if you bring anyone else with you, the deal is off.” He clicked off the phone.

As I closed the flip phone, Doug turned the radio down and my friends stopped their noisy chatter. My party-in-a-car stopped
while the car itself moved steadily forward.

“What’s going on?” Doug asked almost at the same time Kerrie asked, “What are we going to do?”

“Your dad is getting the police to go to his house, right?” I said, half to myself and half to Kerrie and the rest of them.

“Yup.”

“That’s where he started, but he said to meet him at Martin’s Airfield,” I said slowly.

“You don’t sound like you believe him,” Sarah interjected.

“Doug, you want me to drive?” Hector asked. “I know where Martin’s is.”

Although Doug was going faster than his usual turtle’s pace, he was still being careful not to speed.

Doug shook his head no.

“Witherspoon’s voice sounded strange—echoey,” I said, peering out the window, feeling scared silly. “Someone call the police. Tell them to head to Martin’s.”

“The lobby of his office building—maybe he was there,” Sarah offered. She leaned forward and grabbed the back of Doug’s seat. Kerrie got on her phone.

“No, not enough time to get from his home to his office in between the first and second call,” I said. Wherever he was, we had to figure it out soon. “Connie was trying to tell me something.”

“What did she say?” Hector asked.

“She said Neville told her he liked me at the reception.”

“The exhibit opening reception?” Sarah asked. “Maybe he’s got her somewhere Japanese. It was a Japanese print exhibit. Or a print shop! Does he own a print shop?”

“The museum,” Doug said and deftly turned the car onto Charles Street to head in that direction. “That’s where he is.”

“Yes! That’s it!” I could have jumped up and down. “It was echoey, like the museum. And Connie was trying to tell me that’s where they were because the reception was there and . . .”

“And it’s only a few minutes from his house!” Kerrie said. She pulled out her cell phone again and I knew she was going to dial the police one more time.

“No, don’t!” I told her and leaned back to put my hand on the phone so she wouldn’t punch in the numbers. “I don’t want to alert him to the fact that we know.”

I looked at Sarah and Hector. “Tell me where he could be in the museum. Where would he take her?”

Now it was Hector’s turn to lean forward. “He’s probably going to put her in the storage room in the old wing and lock her there. No one checks that room. She’d be there all weekend.”

“Do you have a key?” I asked.

With a huge grin, he pulled out his key ring, which was full of keys. “He’ll leave her there, then call you when he’s safely away,” Hector continued.

We were now turning into the Hopkins campus onto the drive that led to the museum. It loomed behind trees in the dark and I felt like I was going to be sick.

“Bianca,” Hector said softly as if afraid Witherspoon could hear us. “You must call the police and tell them. You can’t do this on your own. We can’t do it on our own.”

Slowly, I nodded my head and punched in the number while Kerrie called her dad. By the time the explanations were over, Doug had pulled the car into a parking spot a block from the museum. We all sat silently in the car for a few minutes, nobody saying anything as we waited.

“I can’t stand this!” I said at last. “What if he hurts her? We’re
all assuming he won’t, but he’s a desperate man! What if Neville calls him while we’re waiting here and Witherspoon finds out we’ve been lying? He’d do something . . .” I choked up and Doug put his arm around me.

So we got out of the car and crept up to the museum. Hector used his key to let us in. As soon as we crossed the threshold, I felt a chill. It was spooky in there. With only the security lights on, creepy shadows made fearful images on the walls and floor. We stood silently, waiting to hear something.

And it didn’t take long. From upstairs, far away, we heard the dull thud of a door closing.

“Come on,” Hector whispered and we all followed him up the stairs on our tiptoes. But once we got up there, the need for speed got the better of me and I ended up rushing through the sculpture gallery at such a pace that my heels made a muted clip-clop on the marble floor.

Suddenly, a voice called out from the darkness up ahead.

“Who’s that?” It was Bertrand Witherspoon, and he sounded even more desperate than before.

I turned to Hector, Doug, and the rest. “You guys hide,” I whispered. “Let me take care of this.”

“No way,” said Doug, and my heart melted again. But I was too intense for too much sentiment, so I shook my head.

“Uh-uh. He was talking with me on the phone. I’ll deal with him. You guys stand behind those pillars until I give you a signal or something.”

Without a word, they disappeared.

“It’s me, Bianca!” I called out into the blackness. “I came to get Connie.”

“Where’s Neville?”

“He’s in the car.”

“I told you to take him to the airfield.”

“Hey, I might not be the class valedictorian, Bertie, but I’m no dummy. I knew you weren’t there.”

“All right, then. Go get him.”

“Not so fast, buster. I want to see my sister.”

There was a pause, and I knew either one of two things was going on. He either didn’t have her—had locked her in a closet as Hector had speculated—or he was wondering whether bringing her out would be a good move. I held my breath, only letting it out when he spoke again.

“I want to see Neville first.” But I heard a soft sneeze coming from his direction. Connie’s sneeze. Good ol’ Connie.

“Look, Bertie. The jig is up. Soon, a hundred different cops are going to be swarming all over this place. Either they take you or they take Neville. Which is it going to be?”

“You lied to me!”

“C’mon, Bertie. They’re gonna be here any second now. They see Neville sitting alone in that parking lot, and they’re all over him like white on rice. Give up Connie and you can go grab Neville before they arrive. You’re wasting time, Bertie. You could be on your way . . .”

I heard a soft grunt and a splat like someone falling, and for a second my heart jumped into my stomach because I thought maybe he’d—I don’t even want to say what I thought. But before I could go too far down that heartbreak road, I saw Connie running toward me from out of the shadows.

Toward me and right into me, to be precise. We both toppled to the floor in a painful heap.

“Hey!” I said.

“I couldn’t see you in the dark!” she said.

It didn’t matter. I was so glad to see her, even her shadow, that I could have hugged her. But I restrained myself. In the distance, we heard Witherspoon’s footsteps.

“Let’s follow him!” I said to Connie after we’d righted ourselves.

“Bianca! What’s going on?” Sarah whispered from behind a pillar.

“It’s okay! Connie’s safe. You can come out!” In a second, the whole crew was out and I was leading the charge toward where Bertrand Witherspoon had disappeared.

“He parked near the dumpster!” Connie said.

“But he’ll head to the parking lot—he thinks Neville is there,” I said.

We clomped and clicked our way downstairs. It’s amazing the noise even the softest shoe makes in an echoey museum with marble floors and walls. As we sprinted toward the doors, it sounded like the racetrack at Pimlico.

Too late. Bertrand Witherspoon was outside, looking bewilderingly at an array of flashing blue and red lights. For a second, I almost felt sorry for him. He’d been looking forward to seeing his son, and instead he was met by a sea of cops. My sympathy lasted about an eighth of a second, though. Bertrand Witherspoon was a jerk of the first order.

I learned something that night—I love my sister. Imagine that!

Actually, I learned more than that. Remember how I said this was a story about false assumptions? Boy, was it ever! First, everyone
assumed Hector was the culprit because of his background and, let’s face it, his ethnicity, which was probably a factor, too. Even I thought he was a good suspect from the get-go without so much as a smidgeon of solid supporting evidence.

And then, when Hector was cleared, and Neville was cornered, we all nodded our heads sagely. Of course it was him, we all smugly thought. If not the poor Latino with a record, then surely the obnoxious Brit with an attitude problem. Who would have thought it was his father—upstanding, no record, congenial, well-liked? Yet, underneath it all, he was a roiling sea of resentment, and, according to Kerrie, with money problems to boot.

He had Neville’s upcoming college bills to pay, and his bank account had been cleaned out because of some poor investments. But no one knew, least of all his family. He was “keeping up appearances,” fooling everyone, including himself.

He’d tried to sell off some of his art and found out it wasn’t worth much. And at a meeting of the museum board, some folks got to talking about how publicity, good or bad, really jacks up the price of pieces by these new artists—just as Hector had explained to Sarah. So Witherspoon had hatched an idea—steal a painting by one of the artists whose paintings he already owned, and create a public controversy. The papers and TV get the story, and voila! The artist’s a hot item. And he can get some good cash for his own little painting. As a private joke, he’d hung, at the museum, a fake painting in place of the one he’d stolen. He thought it would add to the story.

He had a pretty good technique, too. Grab the painting, stick up the fake one, then take the real one to the janitor’s bin and throw it in. All he had to do then was grab the painting from the dumpster after the museum trash was dumped in. And, so no one
notices, switch the security tapes—security tapes he had access to because he’d stolen Fawn Dexter’s keys.

The only time he came close to slipping up was the night of the reception—he’d nabbed a Bargenstahler, replaced it with a fake, and was almost caught when the dumpster was overflowing, and he had no choice but throw the painting into Sarah’s trunk. He hadn’t known it was Sarah’s car, of course—he’d spent a frantic evening trying to figure out whose car it was when he lit on the idea of calling Fawn Dexter to complain about the “old wreck” he’d seen parked by the dumpster at the museum and to ask her if they should have it towed. Fawn revealed its owner, and from there Witherspoon tracked down Sarah to get the painting back.

Poor Witherspoon—he hadn’t counted on the fact that the museum wouldn’t notice right away that paintings were being replaced. Or on the fact that they’d want to keep the thefts hushed up for awhile. He was the one who ended up “leaking” the story to the press to get attention for the artist.

And poor Neville—he’s the one I feel most sorry for. He was just a lonely guy to begin with. Now, he’s a lonely guy with a creep for a father. Kerrie and Sarah both told me they’d heard from him, and he still plans on attending Hopkins now that he’s been cleared of the crime. But he’s pretty shaken up by the whole mess.