The Masterpiecers (Masterful #1) (12 page)

“Christos Natter began wood-carving at six.” Herrick’s voice is trembling a little. “He began at six in his family’s shed using slabs of wood his father, a carpenter, would discard. He soon entered his creations into fairs and competitions. Which brought him to the attention of Mister Delancey—”

A round of applause drowns out Herrick’s voice and the camera sweeps across the room toward a seated man whose skin is shiny ebony. He gives a curt nod, which surprisingly doesn’t dislodge the monocle set over his right eye that makes him look like he’s snuck off the page of a nineteenth-century British novel. After another round of applause, the camera shoots back to Herrick.

“Th-the lot consists of six chairs,” he stammers. The gavel in his hand trembles. “They’re all one-of-a-kind pieces. The auction will begin at twenty thousand dollars.” He darts a glance at the judges’ bench. Brook takes an exaggerated gulp of air, probably to remind Herrick to breathe. Herrick’s jaw unclenches. He guzzles in some air and begins again.

The room goes completely quiet.

Herrick’s voice explodes out of his microphone. “Twenty. Do I hear twenty? Twenty-one. Twenty-two. Gentlemen’s bid at twenty-three.”

And up and up he goes, attaining numbers that seem downright preposterous for a bunch of chairs.

“Thirty nine, anyone? Come on, people, have a little—We’ve got thirty-nine in the back.” Herrick’s confidence is tangible. “That’s more like it. Do I hear fo—forty in the corner!”

The sound of percussion vibrates across the vaulted room. It’s a reminder that he’s reached half the value.

“Forty-five. Fifty to the lady in the back. Fifty-five…”

One of the neon strips on the ceiling fizzles and sputters out, casting a shadow over our half of the windowless dayroom.

“He’s up to eighty-five thousand now,” Gill says. “
No
, ninety! Shit…” she whispers, her eyes glowing in the darkness from the reflection of the monitor.

I yank my gaze back to the screen, just in time to hear Herrick say, “Going once, going twice, sold to the lady in the back!” As he slams his gavel, the black wave of suspended hair crashes against his forehead. He rakes it back and grins.

“Who the fuck has ninety thousand dollars to spend on a buncha chairs?” a skinny woman with a hairnet asks. I think she’s the cook. Seeing how skinny she is, I bet she doesn’t eat her own food.

“They’re sculptures,” Gill says. “The buyer probably won’t even sit on them.”

“I bet they’d crack if I sat in them,” Cheyenne says.

“Canteen benches barely hold your fat ass up,” the cook says.

Cheyenne shifts around on the couch. “You got a bone to pick with my ass, because I got a bunch of bones to pick with your cookin’?”

“You don’t look like you got a problem with it.”

“Are you insultin’ me?” Cheyenne jumps to her feet, surprisingly lithely considering the mass of cellulite she needs to haul up.

The cook springs up too. Cheyenne gets in a punch and the cook’s face snaps backward. Something cracks. I pray it’s not her neck. It isn’t. It’s her nose. Blood squirts out. She starts screeching and claws at Cheyenne’s face. I look around, wondering when a guard will rush in. When nobody comes, I shoot Gill a look. She’s smiling, her crooked teeth overlapping her lower lip. At some point, she moves, but it isn’t to break up the fight. She scoots her legs onto the couch so they’re not in the way.

The cook’s on the floor and Cheyenne’s on top of her now.

“She’s turning blue. She can’t breathe,” I yell.

Still no one does anything. I race to the digital box by the door and press on the call button. Seconds later, two guards vault into the room. They each grab one of Cheyenne’s flabby arms and hoist her up. The cook’s coughing and choking, but her face is returning to its original color.

As they take Cheyenne out of the room, kicking and screaming, the cook yells, “I put you on a diet, bitch!” She’s rubbing the red patches on her throat where Cheyenne’s fingers had been only seconds earlier. She takes her seat on the couch. “Crazy fat bitch,” she mutters. She stares around the room. Her deep-set eyes land on me. “You the one who called security?”

I’m not sure if I should nod or deny it. Will I be considered a rat if I admit to it?

“Yeah. She’s the one,” Gill says. She pats my hand.

“I owe you then. What you like to eat?”

I want to say tasty food, but obviously I don’t.

“What you like? What you miss in here?” she repeats.

“Chocolate. I miss chocolate.”

She nods. “Hope you’re not too picky on the color.”

“No. I’m not picky.” My stomach rumbles at the prospect.

“I see what I can get.”

Gill’s still patting my hand. It’s weird now, so I yank it out of her reach. “Thanks.”

“The name’s Miss Chacha. ’Cause I’m hot like Sriracha.”

Hot as in spicy, because she’s definitely not pretty. “Thanks, Miss Chacha.”

“Just Chacha.” Still rubbing her neck, she settles back in the couch and turns her attention to the TV.

The show.
Shit!
Maxine’s on stage now. The banner on the bottom of the screen shows she’s on her last lot, the spider web podium. Maxine walks around it, mic in hand, puking out detail after detail on the refined metal design and intricate netting and the polishing technique. She took Dominic way too literally on his factual poetry. Finally, she begins the auction.

As the price goes up, I ask, “How did Herrick do?” I’m hoping someone was paying attention.

“He got $405,000 in total. Apparently all the lots are valued at $500,000, so I think that’s pretty good.” It’s a girl leaning against the back wall who answers me. She’s so pale she’s virtually translucent.

I turn back to the screen just as Maxine pounds her gavel. Her cheeks are all rosy and she’s smiling. As she skips off the stage that is being readied for my sister, the commentators launch into a detailed discussion of her performance. “She reached the price on four pieces—the Donaski podium and the gelatin print—but had some trouble with the…”

I let their voices trail off as I read her score: $435,000. Despite my mixed feelings for Ivy, I hope she’ll do better than Maxine. I see her walk up on stage. She looks so beautiful in her black satin dress. And her hair is fabulous. I can’t help but run my fingers through mine that is clumpy and dry like hay. Instead of chocolate, I should have asked for conditioner, but I’m reminded that I have no one to look nice for here. Might as well eat chocolate to forget.

“She your older sister?” Chacha asks me.

“She’s my twin.”

“Seriously?”

“Yeah.”

“You don’t look alike.”

I’m tempted to press down on those red spots she’s still nursing, but I refrain because I don’t want to end up on a “diet.”

“Like real
real
twins?” she asks.

“Yeah, Chacha, like real twins,” Gill says. She’s turned to gaze at me. The intensity in her eyes is really disconcerting. “I see it.”

“I don’t,” Chacha says, squinting to make out my features.

Even though she discusses my resemblance with some other inmates, I zone out. Ivy’s on the screen, gavel in hand. She isn’t smiling, which makes me anxious. And then I understand why when the first piece she has to auction off is brought up on stage.

Chapter Sixteen

Ivy

“This piece is very dear to me, because, as some of you might know, it’s one of mine. What you don’t know, because it’s not written anywhere except in here”—I tap two fingers against my heart—“is that I created it for someone I loved right before they passed away.”

I pivot toward the quilt that’s twice my height and strung up to an invisible clothing line hooked between two wooden beams. It resembles
The Kiss
from Klimt—at least that was my intention when I made it. The patches of gleaming gold, burgundy velvets, emerald silks, and Indian mirror work are shaped into the interlocked bodies of lovers.

“I gave it to her in the morning, and that evening, she was gone. She didn’t have long with it—just a few hours, but at least she got to see it, to touch it…” I let my voice trail off and stare into the camera poised on my face, hoping that Josh is on the other side, listening in. “It’s listed as ‘Untitled’ but it does have a name: ‘Love.’”

I stroke the fabric and my nail snags on a thread. I peer at the spot more closely and realize there’s a tear in the seam. Did it get damaged in the mail?

Dominic clears his throat, so I return to the podium. “I will start the auction at fifteen hundred dollars.”

From fifteen hundred to thirty-five, it’s a breeze. People are bidding one after the other. Thirty-five hundred to fifty-five takes longer. And then I hit a standstill at seventy-five hundred. I try to drag out the auction a little, but no one bids. “Seventy-five hundred.” I wait. Still no one raises a gold paddle. The room is oppressively silent. Even though it’s a lot more money than I got for it the first time around, I’m nowhere near the price Josephine fixed. “Seventy-five hundred going once, going twice, sold.” I slam the gavel against the podium. I think of the commission I just earned—three hundred and seventy-five dollars—to avoid thinking of how I undersold it.

Before it’s carried off the stage, I turn back toward it, toward the gaping seam that sticks out like an ink stain on a blank page. It hits me that, if it had been damaged in transit, the tear would probably not have been along the seam where the binding is sturdiest.

The wooden beams are grabbed and lifted away. As the quilt fades through one of the arches, I still can’t make sense of the tear. Dominic clears his throat again. The next piece I must auction off has already been set. I gape at the copper statue. It takes me a second to remember anything about it.

Focus, Ivy.
I press the image of my quilt as far away from my mind as possible and begin. Zara Mach’s work goes for $260,000. I don’t feel much pride at having exceeded the set price. If anything, it brings me further down. By the last lot, my voice has become robotic and I don’t even try to enchant the audience. Someone buys the Gauguin for $120,000—a bargain. I undersold it, I undersold the bowls, and I undersold my quilt.

I slam the gavel for the last time, unwrap my fingers from the wooden handle, and slowly descend the stairs. On my way to my seat, I pass Chase who I know will crush this test. His confidence vibrates off of his skin, as dense as his sickening, grassy scent. I don’t look at him as he begins, don’t observe how comfortable he is behind the podium. Maxine and Herrick keep praising his demeanor, his poise. It drives me insane.

“Five hundred and twenty-five thousand dollars,” Herrick whispers loudly. “He got more than what he was supposed to.”

“I heard,” I hiss.

“What’s eating you?” he asks.

“I’m tired. And I have to give a freaking press conference in a few hours. I need to get out of here.” I stand up, approach Dominic who’s sitting at the end of our row, and tell him that my head is spinning.

The room has gone quiet around me as everyone’s desperately trying to listen in.

“Let me signal your assistant,” Dominic says. “She can help—”

I shake my head. “It’s a short walk. I’ll be okay.”

“Assistants have to accompany contestants everywhere. Show rules, sweetheart.”

People stare as I stride down the aisle. I bet the cameras are getting a lens full of my inelegant escape. Chase is probably snickering, reasoning that his success vexed me. I don’t care though. The only thing I care about is finding out how the hell my quilt got on the show. Even though I don’t want to be disqualified, returning to Kokomo to unravel this mess would do me a lot of good.

As Cara escorts me back to the third floor, I reminisce on my one and only encounter with Troy Mann the morning he rang my doorbell not long after Aster left for her day job at the ad agency. At first, I hadn’t been too keen on letting him in. I’d left the chain on the door as I spoke to him. But then he told me how he’d seen my work on TV, in that feature the Masterpiecers had run on its contestants, and I’d let him in, flattered that he’d even taken an interest in me. Little did I know he was a wanted criminal, embroiled with the mob. Had I known, I wouldn’t have let him in. I wouldn’t have sold him a single thing. I wouldn’t have accepted his roll of hundred dollar bills that was surely tainted and illegal.

The night Troy died, I phoned Josh and asked him to retrieve the quilt before the police could. I didn’t want to get in trouble for having sold something to a mobster. Unfortunately, Josh hadn’t found it; fortunately, neither had the police. But an anonymous tip came in on their hotline about my sister having a blanket on her lap.
Could it have been my quilt?
If it was, then that would mean she sent it to the show. But why? So that I would get in trouble? So that I would get locked up right alongside her? Could my sister be crazy enough to do such a thing?

I shiver. Yes, she could.

The second I step inside my room, I kick off my heels, drop my clothes on the floor, and turn the shower on. I make it hot and slip in, sidling along the mosaic wall until I’m sitting with my knees tucked underneath my chin.

Time goes by—a lot of time—and I’m still underneath the shower. I’m convinced it’s Aster now, and my confusion and shock has turned to anger. Suddenly, the water stops and a towel is thrown on top of me.

“Get out,” Leila snaps. “The press conference starts in an hour and you look like a drowned rat.”

I glare up at her, but stand. Slowly, still sizzling, I settle on the bench by my bed next to a pair of beige pants and a white silk shirt—probably my press conference outfit. As she works on me, everything becomes blurry outside like everything is blurry inside.

“What’s going on with you?” she asks, which is weird because Leila isn’t the concerned type.

“Nothing that concerns you,” I tell her.

She stops what she’s doing and let her hands fall against the black apron in which she stores all of her brushes. She has a ring on each finger. On her middle finger, she has two—a simple band at the base and a more ornate piece on her knuckle.

“If I didn’t value my job, I would quit on you,” she says, plucking the pins out of my waterlogged hair.