Unfinished Portrait

The crate arrived at Emma's studio on Thursday, while she was on the phone with the institute, trying to explain why she needed a mass spectrometer slot and a lawyer, not necessarily in that order. No return address. Museum stamp, museum customs paperwork. Inside, packed to museum standard: a canvas. Not the woman in gray. A new painting. Unstretched, tacked loosely to a board the way working painters do it, the varnish still soft. It was a portrait of Emma. Her lamp. Her scalpel, mid-stroke, caught in the act of listening. Her face turned three-quarters to a canvas the viewer couldn't see, and on her painted face an expression Emma did not recognize until she crossed to the mirror to check it: grief wearing a coat of curiosity. She did not touch it for an hour. That was professional discipline, and also she could not feel her hands. There was a signature. Not under the varnish this time, but in it, painted wet-into-wet the way you'd sign if you didn't care who found it: V. ARNET, and then, in a hand she hadn't seen before tonight — a hand that matched the unsigned restoration log from the basement — the words: 1741, 2026, 2034. The third date had not happened yet. Emma called Ostrowski. It rang to a dead line, which it had done since morning; the department said he was on leave, which the department had not said yesterday. Then she called the museum and was told by a secretary's voicemail that the Marchetti was closed for the week for "conservation." Then she did what she should have done at 2 a.m. on Tuesday, and pulled the sample files from her own drawer, the ones she'd taken from under the varnish the night Lucia died. The blood fleck's file was empty. Not missing — emptied, the folder squared neatly back into place, the way a museum does it. Only the photocopy she'd left in her coat survived, and on its back, in pencil, in the same unhurried script from the restoration log: You clean beautifully. It has been a long time since anyone cleaned beautifully. Come to the museum at midnight and bring the sample, and I will show you how the collection was really built. — The museum is the only honest member of the family, Emma. I am the museum. Emma looked at the unfinished portrait of herself. Whoever painted it had gotten the hands right and left the face barely begun, as if the face was waiting for a decision she hadn't made yet. The woman in gray had been painted before her death, wearing the pose of her death, and the pose had been corrected after. Emma put on her coat. At 11:58 p.m., from the Marchetti's darkened portico, she texted one person the address, the phrase ask for Arnet, and the number 2034 — a message Ostrowski would find when his phone charged in a hospital drawer in the morning, from a number registered to a restorer whose studio, by then, would contain no crate, no canvas, and no evidence, except the smell of amber varnish, and fresh varnish dries fast, and everything in a museum is old, but Emma, tonight, was not.