The Liberation of Alice Love(43)
Author: Abby McDonald

There were dozens of paintings stuffed into the portfolio. Who knew how long she’d been working on them?

“Alice? Is that you?” Flora’s voice echoed faintly from the back garden. Alice closed the folder and shoved it back in its hiding place, just as Flora arrived at the open French windows. She was wearing a candy-pink bikini top and a trailing, gypsy-style skirt, with oversized sunglasses pushed up on the top of her head.

“There you are.” She beamed at Alice. “I heard something, but I wasn’t sure if you were back yet…”

“I was just looking at…this!” Alice grabbed the nearest piece of paper. “The Nelson-Rhodes Fellowship,” she read from the printout, moving away from the portfolio. “That sounds fun. Are you going to apply?”

Flora shook her head, quickly taking the page from Alice’s hand. “No. It’s all the way in Florence, for three whole months.” She folded it several times and tossed it aside, before turning to Alice with a bright smile. “Anyway, they only take real artists!”

Her eyes drifted past Alice. “Oh, you’ve seen the mess then.” She gave an embarrassed grin. “I was looking for my favorite pencils. Searched everywhere!”

“Any sign of them?” Alice kept studying her, but there was no hint that anything was wrong.

“Not yet, but I’m sure they’ll turn up.” Flora shrugged. She linked her arm through Alice’s and steered her out into the garden again. “Do you want some lemonade? I just made a jug. And Stefan brought back these amazing truffles from Brussels. Truffles from Brussels,” she said in a singsong voice. “Ha!”

“Sounds good to me.” Alice followed, still thrown by her discovery.

“Yay! Oh, and I found the cutest little music box at this antiques shop. It plays ‘Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star’ just like one I had when I was younger. You have to see!”

Perhaps she was reading too much into it, Alice told herself, shaking off her unease. The paintings were probably old work from a brief era of teen angst, or just experimentation. Flora was an artist, after all, and who said she couldn’t try something other than wild roses and weeping willows from time to time? Watching her stepsister carefully as she poured their drinks, Alice told herself not to be so dramatic.

This was Flora, after all. It was nothing.

Chapter Fifteen

Sunday found Alice browsing in the gift shop at the National Gallery, surreptitiously assessing the staff for helpfulness—or, more often, the lack thereof. She’d learned by now that not all assistants had been created equal: some were counting down until the end of their shift, others sighed with impatience when asked to do anything more than blindly ring up an item, and some greeted her requests for information about “her” billing activities with suspicion and deferral to the manager.

As she watched from a strategic vantage point behind a table of Monet mugs, Alice quickly eliminated several candidates. The young woman with thick eyeliner was glaring at the pair of toddlers stationed nearby, and the older, balding man was constantly darting off to rearrange a perilous display of glass snow globes, depicting Rodin’s The Thinker in a flutter of glittering confetti, but the young man on the far desk with a tousled fringe and suntan marks?

He looked over, catching Alice’s gaze, and gave her a quick, friendly smile before turning back to the register. Perfect.

She waited until the stream of customers had thinned and then made her way over.

“Hi,” Alice began brightly. “I was wondering if you could help me.” She smiled up at him, tucking her hair behind her ears. She’d let it dry wavy for a change, and she still wasn’t quite used to it falling in her face, unconquered by hair grips or the blast of her blow-dryer.

The man—boy, really, since he must have still been a teenager—smiled back. “That’s what I’m here for.”

Alice laughed. “Of course. Right, see I’m trying to buy my friend a birthday present,” she began, pulling her notebook out of her bag. “I want to get her some big prints of her favorite paintings, but when I asked, she just jotted down the numbers—not the names themselves!”

“That shouldn’t be a problem.” The boy seemed happy that her request was so simple, unlike the Dutch tourists in front of Alice, whom she’d overheard asking if the Van Gogh prints were available “in less aggressive colors.” “Have you got the numbers there? I can just search in the system.”

“Wonderful. Thank you so much…Charles.” Alice glanced at his name tag, passing him the list of codes she’d taken from Ella’s debit statement. She purchased a large coffee-table art book here in March, along with five unidentified postcards. They’d cost only fifty pence each, and the location was clearly marked, so the transaction hadn’t ranked highly on her priority list for investigating. Now, however, Alice felt an urge to see which paintings it was that Ella had wanted to take with her.

After tapping away at his computer for a few seconds, Charles made a note next to the final code and passed it back to Alice. “There you go.”

“You’re a lifesaver.” Alice gave him a grateful beam.

“Did you need me to find the prints for you?” Charles asked, still eager to help.

“Oh, no. I think I’ll just take a browse first. Besides, I’ve taken up enough of your time.” Alice made a show of looking behind her at the queue. “Thanks again!”

***

Alice wandered the tall, echoing corridors of the gallery as if for the first time. She’d visited before, but today was different. She was viewing the world through Ella’s eyes, and as Alice picked a new path through the labyrinth of cavernous halls and small anterooms, she wondered, Had Ella taken this same route? What had caught her eye? Had she paused, on that very same leather seat one afternoon—to rest or eavesdrop on a passing conversation or take a moment longer to study one of the paintings?

Checking her map, Alice came to a stop in front of the first of Ella’s paintings, as she thought of them. A Velázquez, it showed a naked woman, reclining on a bed with her back to the viewer. A small cupid kneeled nearby, holding up a mirror, and it was in that small square that the woman’s face was visible; shadowed, but staring straight out of the frame.

Alice stepped back, studying it. She remembered seeing it before, but now she looked closely, trying to absorb every detail of the scene. The nude was lounging, her skin pale and luminous, yet the longer Alice looked, the more discomforting she found it. There was something strange about the composition and posing that made it almost provocative; the woman’s gaze so direct, yet separate from her lazing form, as if she were another person entirely.