Roen shrugged. “It’s true.”
“Isn’t Delmonico’s in Manhattan?”
“It is, but I’ve never eaten there. Mostly I do my own cooking when I’m in the city, or if I’m having dinner with my family, well, there’s some trial and error involved there. A lot of experimentation with spices. My mother is as creative a cook as she is a painter, but the food is often more interesting than good.”
Ben hesitated as he raised his fork to his mouth. A small crease appeared in the space between his eyebrows. “Your mother’s a painter?”
“Hmm.”
“Shepard.” Ben repeated the name mostly to himself, rolled it over on his tongue. “Anne Shepard?”
“Yes. You know her work?” Roen hadn’t expected that. His mother was well known, even celebrated, in New York and Paris. But Frost Falls?
“I do. Jackson Brewer, the sheriff before me, took his wife to Paris a few years back and sent some postcards. One of them was of a painting that caught his eye in a museum he visited. He said he liked it especially because the artist was an American. His wife liked it because the artist was a woman. I still have it. Use it as a bookmark, if you want to see it.”
“No. I know which one it is.Children at Play.”
“I thought it was calledHide and Seek.”
“That’s the popular name for it. Mother simply titled itChildren at Play.”
“Huh.Hide and Seeksuits it better, if you don’t mind me saying.”
“I agree with you. So does my mother.”
“It’s a clever painting,” said Ben. “Admittedly I’ve only seen the postcard, but besides the obvious children running to their hiding places, I was able to spot two more hiding in tree branches.”
“There are five hiding. Even in the painting they are hard to see, but once found, you can’t unsee them.”
“Any of them you?”
“No,” Roen said. The lie was force of habit. He was in several of his mother’s paintings along with his brother, two sisters, and a cousin. She’d been interested in them as children but stopped painting each of them around the time they turned twelve. Since he was the youngest, he was last to disappear from her body of work.
“Do you paint?” asked Ben.
“Tried and failed. Too much detail and not enough imagination.” He marveled that he could say this as a statement of fact, without rancor. That hadn’t always been the case. “Good for practical applications like designing bridges but not for paint on a canvas.”
“I don’t know,” said Ben, looking doubtful. “Seems like designing a bridge would take plenty of imagination.”
Roen shrugged. “It’s mostly math.”
“Uh-huh. Right.” Ben buttered a slice of bread and resumed eating. “Clay’s pretty clever himself, but I guess you figured that out.”
“I did. He had a lot of questions on the way back to town.”
“He’s a good student. If he works for you, it can’t interfere with his schooling. His mother won’t approve it if it does.”
“I’m not surprised. Mrs. Springer spoke to me about her.”
Suspicious, Ben cheeked his bite of bread and asked, “She did?”
“She told me something about everyone. Cornered me in church the first time I attended.”
Ben swallowed. “Gossip is Amanda Springer’s specialty, best taken with more than a few grains of salt.”
“I used a shaker.”
“Good for you.” Ben folded his bread and used it to sop gravy from his plate. “She must have failed to pump you for information, otherwise I’d have already known about your mother.”
