Feint of Art: by Hailey Lind Read Free Book Online Page B

Naomi and I had first met as freshmen in college, where we were both art majors. Our strained friendship took a turn for the worse our senior year, when I discovered that Naomi had fished through my studio scraps and included some of them in the portfolio she submitted to win a coveted slot as an intern at the Brock Museum. When I saw my sketches among hers during the celebratory art department reception, I debated raising a stink but ultimately decided against it. One of the many things my grandfather had taught me was to stockpile such information for future leverage.
    “Naomi! It’s Annie!” My voice rang with false cheer and bonhomie. “Annie Kincaid!”
    Silence.
    “Naomi? You there?”
    “Hullo, Ann,” Naomi replied stiffly.
    My given name was Anna, though I preferred Annie. Either would do. Ann would not.
    Naomi knew this.
    “This is probably an odd question,” I babbled on, as if Naomi weren’t sending subliminal “drop dead” messages through the telephone line. “Or maybe not, considering what’s going on there. And listen, about that, I don’t really know, but it’s bothering me, which is why I’m calling.”
    Hmm. Maybe I should have thought this out better before dialing.
    “What do you want, Ann?” Naomi asked curtly. True to form, she was not going to make anything easy for me.
    “I heard Stan Dupont was killed last night at the museum,” I replied. I winced at my bluntness. Poor Stan.
    “We’ve been asked not to discuss the matter with the public,” she said frostily.
    “I’m not ‘the public,’ Naomi. I’m your old friend. Remember, Nancy Fancy Pants?”
    That should get her. “Nancy Fancy Pants” was Naomi’s freshman-year dorm nickname. The students on our floor had bestowed it upon her because while everybody else wore patched jeans and faded T-shirts from Goodwill, Naomi wore matching separates from Burberry and Ann Taylor. The woman had an unhealthy relationship with monograms.
    To be fair, Naomi was not singled out for this treatment. Everyone in our dorm had a nickname. Mine was “Kinky Pinky Kincaid,” thanks to a brief and largely regrettable flirtation with fuchsia hair dye. But whereas everybody else outgrew their nicknames, Naomi’s had stuck.
    “You most certainly are the public, Miss Hoity Nose,” she replied hotly.
    It was my theory that Naomi had never forgiven me for being a better artist than she. I wasn’t sure where the “Miss Hoity Nose” came from.
    “Just tell me what happened,” I said, remembering another pertinent fact about Naomi: she couldn’t resist gossip.
    “Well . . .” she said dramatically, “as long as you promise not to tell anyone . . .”
    She was cracking. I checked the clock on my truck’s dashboard. It had taken less than three minutes.
    Naomi’s voice fell to a whisper. “It was last night, after closing. The interns were gone by about ten, so it must have been after that. The museum was as silent as a tomb,” she said, piling on the melodrama.
    “And . . . ?”
    “I’m trying to tell you, if you’d just listen,” she whined.
    “So tell me already.”
    “You don’t have to be so rude, Ann.”
    I took a deep breath and counted to ten.
    “It was Stanley Dupont, one of the janitors. He was shot. Murdered most foul.”
    “Was it a robbery? Was anything taken?”
    “That’s the weird thing,” she replied. “The security tapes should have shown something, but they’re missing. Apparently the alarms were shut down for a while just before midnight, and someone opened a side door. You know Stanley had been with the Brock forever —he had access to almost everything. Carlos in Security told Debbie in Accounting that he heard that Stanley had brought in a woman, but nobody knows for sure. It’s hard to imagine him sneaking a woman in for a secret rendezvous. I mean, ick.”
    “Mmm?” I replied, distracted by the image of myself as Mystery Woman.
    “The really odd part is, Stanley was found near the main vault,