The Art of Inheriting Secrets(80)

When we were finished, panting, me leaning on the wall, he touched his forehead to mine. “I’ve lost my mind over you, Olivia.”

“Me too.” I kissed him again, ran my hands over his lower back.

We didn’t get to the lamb chops.

Later, we raided the kitchen for apples and cheese and opened beers. “You think your mother’s next clue will be among these paintings?” Samir asked, settling cross-legged on the floor. His feet were bare.

“Maybe. It’s my next best guess.”

“All right. Let’s take a look at what’s here. Then we can take them over to the space above Coriander until tomorrow.”

I nodded, worrying again about Grant coming back. “The earl warned me that people would be coming after a piece of the pie. I didn’t think one of them would be Grant.”

Samir said, “You don’t believe you have to worry about me, do you?”

I didn’t know what he was talking about at first. “Worry?”

“That I’m a fortune hunter.”

“Well, it would help if I had a fortune.” I wiped my fingers on a napkin. “I suppose I could be worried that you’re after my Starbucks card, but then again, you’d have to drive to London to use it.”

“Starbuck’s card?” He paused. “Is it a credit card?”

“Oh, honey, no. It’s a rewards card. You get stars every time you use it to pay or order or whatever. You preload it with money, and then it makes everything go faster.”

He tucked his lower lip under his upper. Raised a brow. “That’s a thing?”

“Yes,” I said very seriously and leaned close to whisper. “You can get free coffee.”

He shook his head. “Americans.”

I grinned. The paper on the painting was loose, and he made an exaggerated examination of his hands, then held one up. I nodded, and he tore the paper away.

We both sucked in our breath at the exact same instant. It was a small, exquisite painting rendered in oils, unmistakably Monet.

Samir said, “Do you think it’s real?”

My heart was pounding. I reached for the painting, holding it up. “I have no idea, but it’s brilliant, isn’t it?”

“Yes. We should see what else there is.”

I picked up the plate of cheese and apples. “Let’s wash our hands.”

“Good idea.”

In the end, most of the paintings were clearly important, but I didn’t recognize any others as priceless. One other kept nagging me. “This might be Constable,” I said. “That’s a Constable kind of sky, for sure.”

“I don’t know that leaving these with Pavi is the best idea,” Samir said. “She would take good care of them, but God, what if there was a fire or some such thing?”

“Right. It might be hard to tell the insurance company that we had a painting worth millions in the lot.” I stood up, looking at the paintings all in a line. “I don’t know what the clue in the bedroom was, though, unless the photos were the clue.”

“But why lead us to the paintings?”

I tapped my nose with my index finger, thinking. Looking at them all in a row. “Maybe just for the money they’d bring. Or she wanted them safeguarded.”

“So she left them wrapped up in a crumbling manor house for God knows how long?” He scowled. “That makes no sense at all.”

“I don’t think it was very long,” I said. “Maybe only a few months. I’m starting to think she might have had an illness she didn’t tell me about.” I shifted angles, looking at the assembled artwork from another position. “She smoked for fifty years. Her lungs were crap.”

“I’m sorry, Olivia.”

“Thank you.”

“But even if she was ill, why do it this way?”

“She loved treasure hunts.” I shrugged, picked up one painting, and traded it with another without much thought. My hands moved without my brain, until I’d rearranged all of them into a rainbow—which was perfectly filled out.

My throat closed with pain, with the severity of missing her, the sweetness of this gesture. The work it must have taken. “I used to do this in her studio when I was a little girl. Move the paintings into making the colors of a rainbow. It almost never works this perfectly.” I pointed: red, orange, yellow, green, blue, indigo, violet. “Roy G. Biv.” The red was another of the series from the pasha and the harem girl, and each painting moved through the spectrum in exactly the right hue. The Monet, real or copied, was the violet.

Samir started shooting photos. “There might be something in the artists’ names or the subjects.” He shot the entire line as a panorama, then each one in turn. “Do you know who all of the artists are?”

“No. We can probably run an image search on Google.”

He tucked the phone back in his pocket and stretched his legs out, hands behind him, studying the paintings. I captured the image of him in my memory—the beautiful hands, his long body, his grace. He was utterly comfortable with himself, something that was very rare. It was true of Pavi too—she was exactly herself. It must have been some aspect of the way they had been raised. Mother or father? I would be curious to see.

“They’re all exactly the same size,” Samir said slowly, “and exactly the right hue. There must have been a lot more paintings to choose from.”