Харлан Кобен - Win

But it’s not really who I am.

The sound of tires crunching on the gravel awakens me.

I’d fallen asleep on the couch, which is a surprise. Exhaustion alas trumped keyed-up. I wouldn’t have guessed. I am still lying on the couch when the front door opens and Cousin Patricia walks in carrying a bag of groceries.

The first thing she sees is me on the couch.

“Win? What the hell?”

I stretch and check my watch. It’s 7:15 p.m.

“How did you get in? I locked the doors and set the alarm.”

“Oh yes,” I say with all the droll I can muster. “It’s really impossible for me to get past a Medeco lock and an ADT alarm system.”

When Patricia looks past me, when her gaze reaches the dining room table, she stumbles a step back. I wait. She doesn’t speak. She just stares. I slowly stand, still stretching.

“Cat got your tongue, Cousin?” I ask.

“You broke into my home.”

“Nice deflection,” I say. “But if we must go there, yes.” Then I point to the dining room table and mimicking her voice, I add, “You stole my Picasso.”

It’s not my Picasso, of course. But I liked the repetitiveness of the phrasing.

“I expected a more arduous search for it,” I tell her. “I can’t believe you just hung it in your bedroom.”

Cousin Patricia gives a small shrug. “I don’t let anyone go in there.”

“And that’s where it’s been this whole time?”

“Pretty much.”

“Ballsy,” I say.

She shrugs. “Not really. If anyone asked, I would say it was a replica.”

I nod. “People would buy that.”

She starts toward the dining room table. “Why did you screw off the back?”

“You know why,” I reply. “What did you do with the negatives?”

“How do you know about them?”

“Our art authenticator found a set in the back of the Vermeer. The negatives were square shaped — six centimeters by six — unusual by today’s standards. It didn’t take long to realize that they were very likely to have come from an old camera” — I glance at the shelf — “like your father’s Rolleiflex. Anyway, I figured that if your father had hidden some in the Vermeer, maybe he also hid some in the family’s only other masterpiece — the Picasso.”

Patricia stands over the painting now. “So you checked?”

“Yes.”

“And you didn’t find anything.”

I sigh. “Do we have to play this game, dear Cousin? Yes, the negatives are gone. You removed them. I did, however, notice a certain stickiness on the stretcher — from Scotch tape perhaps. In the Vermeer, the negatives were taped to the stretcher. It would stand to reason that the same applies to the Picasso.”

She closes her eyes and tilts her head back. I see her swallow and I wonder whether tears will follow. This is probably a time to offer a word or two of comfort, but I don’t think that will play here.

“Can we skip the denials, Patricia?”

Her eyes blink open. “So what do you want, Win?”

“You could tell me what really happened.”

“The whole story?” She shakes her head. “I wouldn’t know where to start.”

“Perhaps,” I say, “with your father befriending Ry Strauss in New York City.”

“You know about that?”

“I do. I also know about the Jane Street Six.”

“Wow,” she says. “I’m impressed.”

I wait.

“This is years after that night though,” she continues. “He would visit us from New York City. Ry, I mean. Dad introduced him as Uncle Ryker. He said Uncle Ryker was CIA, so I couldn’t tell anyone about him. I think I first met him when I was fifteen. He took an interest in me, but, I mean, yes, he was very good-looking and almost supernaturally charismatic. But I was fifteen. Nothing happened. It was never like that. I realized later that Ry was periodically coming to my father for money or a place to crash...”

She stops and shakes her head. “I don’t know where to go with this.”

“Jump ahead,” I tell her.

“To?”

“To when you and Ry Strauss decided to steal the paintings.”

Patricia almost smiles at that. “Okay, why not? So this is after Ashley Wright. Your father had already thrown my father out of the family, but my dad would still sneak into Lockwood to see Grandmama. She was, after all, his mother. She could never say no to him. One day, my father comes back furious and frantic because the family — your father — had agreed to loan the two paintings to Haverford for an upcoming exhibit. I couldn’t figure out why he was so angry about this. When I asked him, he started ranting about how your father had cut him off and taken what was rightfully his. A lie, of course. I’m now sure it was about the negatives. Anyway, I was a senior in high school. We were in this small house while you all lived it up in the grand Lockwood Manor. I was looked down upon at school, the subject of whispers and innuendo. You know how it was. A few days later, Uncle Ryker came to visit again. I’ll be honest. I wanted him. I really did. I think we would have, but once he heard me talk about the paintings, he hatched the plan.” She looks up at me, baffled. “How did you figure it out?”

“Ian Cornwell.”

“Ah. Poor sweet Ian.”

“You seduced him,” I say. “Slept with him to gain his trust.”

“Don’t be a sexist, Win. If you were eighteen and needed to sleep with a female guard to pull off a heist, you wouldn’t have given it a second thought.”

“Fair point,” I agree. “More than fair, actually. I assume that Ry Strauss was the man with the ski mask.”

“Yes.”

“He saw you once years later. Ian Cornwell, I mean. You were on The Today Show promoting the Abeona Shelter.”

“I had long hair when I was with him,” she says. “Dyed it blonde for those three months. After the robbery, I cut it and never let it grow back again.”

“Cornwell claims that he still wasn’t certain you were his Belinda — but even if he was, what could he prove?”

“Exactly.”

“And you didn’t tell Aldrich about the robbery?”

“No. By then, I knew Ryker was really Ry Strauss. He confided in me. We grew close. We even got the tattoos together.”

She turns to the side and pulls down on the back of her top, revealing a tattoo — the same Tisiphone abeona butterfly that I’d seen on the photographs of Ry Strauss’s corpse.

“What’s the significance of that butterfly?” I ask.

“Beats me. That was all Ry. He ranted about the goddess Abeona, of rescuing the young, I don’t know. Ry was always full of such passion. When you’re young, you don’t realize how thin the line is between colorful and crazy. But the planning and execution of the heist was” — her face breaks into a wide grin — “it was such a high, Win. Think about it. We got away with stealing two masterpieces. It was the best thing I’d ever done in my life.”

“Until,” I say, arching an eyebrow for effect, “it turned into the worst.”

“You’re such a drama queen sometimes, Win.”

“Again: Fair. When did you find the negatives?”

“Six, seven months later. I dropped the Picasso in the basement, believe it or not. The back of the frame broke. When I tried to fix it...”

“You found them,” I finish for her.

Patricia nods slowly.

When I ask my next question, I hear the catch in my throat. “Did you shoot Aldrich or did Aline?”

“I did,” she says. “My mother wasn’t home. That part was true. I sent her out. I wanted to confront him alone. I still hoped for an explanation. But he just snapped. I had never seen him like that. It was like... I had a friend with a really bad drinking problem. It wasn’t just that she would fly into a rage — it was that she would look straight at me and not know who I was.”