“She hated my father. She didn’t want me, but she didn’t want him to have me, either.”
“I’ve seen her picture. She is beautiful, Gabe.”
“Now you’re patronizing me, Agent Sharpe.”
Sister Cecilia stirred but not enough for Gabe to notice. The swelling where he’d hit her on the back of the head had worsened but not alarmingly so. He hadn’t wanted to kill her, Emma realized. He’d wanted to torture her—for his own sense of power and amusement, and for information.
Emma focused on the man in front of her. “Having The Garden Gallery must have made all the difference in your efforts to re-create this room. Your mother had no money to commission Jack d’Auberville to paint it. Did she trade something?”
“If you’re thinking they had an affair—”
“I’m not, no. My guess is she got him interested in Vikings. My brother left me a message as I arrived here. Her grandfather—your great-grandfather, Gordon Peck—came into some Viking pieces, probably from a hoard discovered in a farmer’s field in England in the 1890s.”
Emma didn’t mention that the tenth-century treasure, which was in private hands, had a rocky history of thefts, illicit copies and fraud. Tracing previous owners wasn’t always possible, or wanted, by current or new owners.
Gabe, who seemed tireless, was thoughtful. “There’s a Viking cup in Jack’s studio. Ainsley doesn’t think it’s real.”
“It very likely could be. We have better methods now than we did forty years ago to authenticate—”
“I know. Ainsley will be thrilled, but an authentic Viking cup is a lot for my mother to have paid for a Jack d’Auberville painting. If he’s another one who used her—well, I won’t let that stand.”
“He’s been dead for thirty years, Gabe. He did a good job on the mechanics of her painting of Saint Sunniva, but the original has a spark that he could never capture.” Emma could smell roses and ocean salt on a the cool breeze, the French doors still open to the garden. “I mean that. Your mother had real talent.”
“Her grace and spirit are there in her rendition of Saint Sunniva.” Gabe glanced at the painting next to him. “If she’d lived, she’d have become a famous artist herself. She was far more talented than Jack d’Auberville.”
“She gave her Saint Sunniva painting to my grandfather shortly before the fire. She wanted him to have it. He’d been good to her, but I think she believed that she’d do many more paintings.”
Gabe took a step toward her. “Did the sister move? If she tries to escape—”
“Sister Cecilia is in rough shape. She’s not going anywhere until you want her to. You’ve been very busy, working up to this moment—re-creating your family home and art collection.”
“I didn’t mean to kill anyone, you know, but if someone gets in my way—”
“You meant to kill Sister Joan.”
His grip on the gun didn’t waver, but his look was cool, his anger under control. “It’s Ainsley’s fault. She shouldn’t have taken The Garden Gallery to Sister Joan. I could have cleaned it myself. I know how.”
“Your mother brought several valuable works of art to Maine. You were piecing together everything her family—your family—had owned, as well as what they hadn’t sold off and she had here. You had a feeling those last pieces of the Peck collection didn’t burn in the fire.” Emma shifted her position, careful not to disturb Sister Cecilia. “The Garden Gallery helped you pinpoint exactly what she’d brought East with her. Did you already know about the Rembrandt?”
Gabe ignored her and, with his free hand, fingered the frame of his mother’s painting of Saint Sunniva. “She’s beautiful. She’s sleeping.”
“Her body is incorrupt, Gabe. Check out the bones next to her. Those are the remains of her companions. The painting tells a jumbled story. The Viking warship on the horizon arrived to deal with the Christian intruders. King Olaf didn’t show up to investigate the light from the cave for another forty years, and he was Christian himself.”
“You’re trying to get me to believe that my mother was deranged.”
“I’m not trying to get you to believe anything. She was depressed after the deaths of her parents and her family’s financial collapse. She was in an unhappy marriage. She had a small child.” Emma debated a moment, then added, “She found solace taking painting lessons from Mother Linden and learning about convent life. Imagining what it’d be like.”
He stepped away from the painting. “She didn’t commit suicide, and my father, for all his faults, didn’t kill her. Her death was what the police said it was. An accident.”
“Who’re you trying to convince, Gabe?”
“My mother gave away and sold the last of her family’s art collection because she didn’t want my father to have it, whether she was alive or dead. I don’t blame her.” He turned away from the painting of Saint Sunniva. “You’ve discovered my passion, Emma. I have quietly begun to re-create my family’s art collection—valuable artwork as well as Sunniva here, what you would describe as junk.”
“I would never describe your mother’s work as junk.”
“My mother’s life was destroyed by the greed and corruption of the man she married.”
And in destroying her life, Gabe believed his father had destroyed his son’s life. “You haven’t limited yourself to stealing works that your family owned,” Emma said. “You saw you were pretty good at stealing. No one would suspect you, the happy housepainter.”
He didn’t respond at first, but she could tell he was losing interest in talking. Finally he waved his Glock at her. “All right. Where’s the Rembrandt?”
Emma looked at the d’Auberville painting. In the lower left corner was a painting reminiscent, as she and Lucas had suspected, of Rembrandt’s Saint Matthew and the Angel. Sister Joan would have recognized it right away. Had Jack d’Auberville? Had he even considered it might be authentic? Would anyone ever know what had been on his mind when he’d painted the garden gallery of beautiful, eccentric
