As always in such cases, she turned to research. First, she accessed the museum loan database, once more turning to Russell Deveraux and again coming up empty before poring over archived internal flags.
Nothing.
Then she typed inLucia Rossi, and after a second of hesitation, she pressed enter, unsure if she was hoping for a blank or populated result page.
The cursor symbol flickered into a spinning ring.
“Naturally,” Penelope murmured, tapping her fingers on the desk.
One result.
She hovered the cursor over the listing, then snapped her finger down and clicked.
“Lucia Rossi…Petra Flack… Let’s see… Oh. Another donated piece, this one to the Tremaine Gallery in Charleston. All right. What’ve you got there?”
Digging deeper, she found the painting this Petra Flack had donated: a medium-sized piece attributed to Lorenzo Santini. Abeautiful rendering of a woman visible from behind, strolling along a beach at sunset.
The image wasn’t clear enough for her to get a good impression, but her stomach twisted. Anticipation?
She logged into the INTERMUSE database—a collaborative platform used by major institutions to house digital scans and provenance records—hoping she’d find the Santini there as well.
That day, luck was on her side.
Penelope cast the image to her big screen, a color-calibrated display that let her examine the painting in magnified, high-resolution detail.
The screen’s pale blue light filled her vision as she leaned closer.
She picked up her reading glasses, gliding her fingers near the edge of the screen, as if touching it would make it clearer.
Penelope took a step back and exhaled slowly. She closed her eyes, then opened them and allowed her mind, her vision, to float.
“Damn it,” she whispered after a short moment, her fingernails digging into her palms. “Who is painting all these pieces?” More importantly, what was their connection to Lucia? The more she looked, the more she wished she hadn’t. Everything pointed toward a conclusion she wasn’t ready to face.
Penelope shook her head and pivoted to check older communications and intake documents from the Flack donation, looking for a signature, a name, anything out of place.
She paused after a while to stretch and get a glass of water. Too often she forgot everything when buried in research, only to pay later with dizziness and a raging headache.
The cold tile floor stung her bare feet as she crossed the kitchen.
When she returned, she clicked into the intake form. “G. Emerson. Intake listed under Petra Flack. Huh. How are youconnected to this?” Another one of Lucia’s clients? Another donor? Maybe the forger? No. They’d not be out there like this. Or would they?
Maybe she needed to cast her net wider, after all, this could tie it all together.
Penelope searched forG. Emerson,art,painting, andAtlanta, only to stumble over a middle school art competition won by one Grace Emerson.
No pictures, just text.
Penelope groaned, rubbing her burning eyes. Her shoulders ached from hours hunched forward.
She adjusted the search terms toGrace Emerson, Atlanta, Georgia, and pressed enter.
A handful of results appeared, most useless: a real estate listing, a wedding registry, even an obituary for an elderly woman in Savannah. She cursed under her breath.
She clicked the registry anyway, scanning the page though she knew instantly it wasn’t her. Wrong age, wrong everything.
Why am I even doing this?
A saner person would have shut the laptop by now, told themselves it was coincidence.
