Invisible Prey

end of a long phone line, and the woman he was talking to was paid to frustrate callers.
    “Thanks for your help,” he snarled, and rang off. Carton would have to wait overnight: he was obviously the guy to go to. In the meantime…
     
    A LICE S CHIRMER WAS the folk art curator at the Walker. She was tall and too thin with close-cropped dark hair and fashionable black-rimmed executive glasses. She wore a dark brown summer suit with a gold silk scarf as a kind of necktie. She said, “I had two of our workpersons bring it out; we’ve had it in storage.”
    “Thank you.”
    “You said there was a woman missing…?” Schirmer asked. She did a finger twiddle at a guy with a two-day stubble and a $400 haircut.
    “Yeah. One of the heirs to the Armstrong fortune, in a way,” Lucas said. “Granddaughter of the woman who found them. That woman may also have been murdered.”
    “Mrs. Coombs?”
    “Yup.”
    “Good God,” Schirmer said, touching her lips with three bony fingers. “They really do hold a curse. Like the tomb of Tutankhamen.”
    “Maybe you could palm it off on another museum,” Lucas suggested. “Get a picture or a statue back.”
    “I don’t think…we’d get enough,” Schirmer said, reluctantly. She pointed: “Through here.”
    They walked past a painting that looked like a summer salad. “Why wouldn’t you get enough?”
    “I’m afraid the value of the Armstrongs peaked a while ago. Like, the year we got it.”
    “Really.”
    “First the stock market had problems, and art in general cooled off, and then, you know, we began to get further and further from the idealism of the early feminists,” she said. “The cycle turns, women’s folk art begins to slip in value. Here we go.”
     
    T HEY STEPPED PAST a sign that said GALLERY CLOSED, INSTALLATION IN PROGRESS, into an empty, white-walled room. The quilt was stretched between naturally finished timber supports; it was a marvel of color: black, brown, red, blue, and yellow rectangles that seemed to shape and reshape themselves into three-dimensional triangles that swept diagonally across the fabric field.
    “Canada Geese,” Schirmer said. “You can almost see them flapping, can’t you?”
    “You can,” Lucas agreed. He looked at it for a moment. He didn’t know anything about art, but he knew what he liked, and he liked the quilt.
    “This was donated by Ms. Bucher?” Lucas asked.
    “Yes.”
    “Where are the curses?” he asked.
    “Here.” Schirmer’s suit had an inside pocket, just like a man’s, and she slipped out a mechanical pencil and a penlight. They stood close to the quilt and she pointed out the stitches with the tip of the pencil. “This is an M. See it? You read this way around the edge of the piece, ‘Let the man who lies beneath this quilt…’”
    Lucas followed the curse around the quilted pieces, the letters like hummingbird tracks across fallen autumn leaves. “Jesus,” he said after a moment. “She was really pissed, wasn’t she?”
    “She was,” Schirmer said. “We have documents from her life that indicate exactly why she was pissed. She had the right to be. Her husband was a maniac.”
    “Huh.” A thread of scarlet caught Lucas’s eye. He got closer, his nose six inches from the quilt. “Huh.”
    Had to be bullshit. Then he thought, no it doesn’t —as far as he could tell, the thread was exactly the same shade as the thread on the spool he’d found behind the stove at Marilyn Coombs’s. But that thread had come from Arkansas…
    He said, “Huh,” a third time, and Schirmer asked, “What?”
    Lucas stepped back: “How do you authenticate something like this?”
    “Possession is a big part of it. We know where Mrs. Coombs bought them, and we confirmed that with the auctioneer,” she said. “A couple of Mrs. Armstrong’s friends verified that she’d once been a pretty busy quilter, and that she’d made these particular quilts. She signed them with a particular mark.” She pointed at the lower-left-hand corner of the quilt. “See this thing, it looks like a grapevine? It’s actually a script SA, for Sharon Armstrong. We know of several more of her quilts without the curses, but the same SA. She used to make them when she was working on the ore boats…You know about the ore boats?”
    “Yeah, Gabriella…the missing woman…mentioned that Armstrong worked on the boats.”
    “Yes. She apparently had a lot of free time, and not much to do, so she made more quilts. But