Hemlock Bay

plot. She asked, “Why didn’t you just offer me money?”
    “I knew you would turn me down, as would your siblings. You were the most vulnerable, particularly after your divorce from Jack Crane, and so I selected you.”
    “That’s crazy. You invent this convoluted plan just to bilk me out of my grandmother’s paintings?”
    “Sarah’s paintings belong with me, for I am the only one who can really appreciate them, know them beyond their visual message and impact, because I knew her, you see, knew her to her soul. She would talk to me about her work, what each one meant to her, what she was thinking when she was painting each one. I fed her opium, and we talked for hours. I never tired of watching her paint, of listening to her voice. She was the only woman I ever wanted in my life, the only one.” He paused for a moment, frowning, and she saw pain etched into the deep wrinkles in his face. From the loss of her grandmother or from illness?
    He said, his voice once again brisk, “Yes, Lily, I selected you because you were the most vulnerable, the most easily manipulated. Most important, you were alone. When you moved to Hemlock Bay, I had Ian approach the Frasiers. Tell them, Ian.”
    “I played matchmaker,” Ian Jorgenson said and laughed. “It was infinitely satisfying when it all came together. I bought the Frasiers—simple as that. You married Tennyson, just as we planned, and his parents told him to convince you to have your Sarah Elliott paintings moved from Chicago to the Eureka Art Museum. And there our greedy Mr. Monk quickly fell in with our plans.”
    Simon said to the old man, “You managed to have four of them forged before I got wind of it.”
    Those brilliant blue eyes swung to Simon, but he sensed that the old man couldn’t see him all that clearly. “You meddled, Mr. Russo. You were the one who brought us down. You found out through your sources, all that valuable information sold to them by an expatriate friend of mine who betrayed me, and then it was sold to you. But that is not your concern. If she had not betrayed me, then I would have all your paintings now, and you, Lily, would be dead. I am not certain that would have been best.”
    “But now you’ll never get the other four,” Lily said. “They’re out of your reach. You won’t be hanging onto those you do have very long. Surely you know that.”
    “You think not, my dear?” The old man laughed, then said, still wheezing, “Come, I have something to show you.”
    Three long corridors and five minutes later, Lily and Simon stood motionless in a climate-controlled room, staring at fourteen-foot-high walls that were covered with Sarah Elliott paintings. The collection held at least a hundred fifty paintings, maybe more.
    Simon said as he stared at the paintings, slowly taking in their magnificence, “You couldn’t have bought this many Sarah Elliott paintings legally. You must have looted the museums of the world.”
    “When necessary. Not all that difficult, most of them. Imagination and perseverance. It’s taken me years, but I am a patient man. Just look at the results.”
    “And money,” Simon said.
    “Naturally,” Ian Jorgenson said.
    “But you can’t see them,” Lily said as she turned to look at Olaf Jorgenson. “You stole them because you have some sort of obsession with my grandmother, and you can’t even see them!”
    “I could see them all very well until about five years ago. Even now, though, I can see the graceful sweeps of her brush, shadows and sprays of color, the movement in the air itself. Her gift is unparalleled. I know each one as if I had painted it myself. I know how the subjects feel, the texture of the expressions on their faces. I can touch my fingers to a sky and feel the warmth of the sun and the wind caressing my hand. I know all of them. They are old friends. I live inside them; I am a part of them and they of me. I have been collecting them for some thirty years now. Since I want all of them before I die, it was time to turn to you, Lily. If I’d only known at the beginning that you were so like my Sarah, I wouldn’t have allowed those fools to try to kill you. Because you are resourceful, you saved yourself. I am grateful for that.”
    Lily looked down at the old man sitting in his wheelchair, a beautiful hand-knitted blue blanket covering his legs. He looked like a harmless old gentleman, in his pale blue cashmere sweater over a white silk shirt with a darker blue tie.