The Onion Girl by Charles De Lint Read Free Book Online Page B

traveled the length of the room. “All these beautiful paintings …”
    â€œI don’t know how we’re going to tell her,” Sophie said.
    â€œOr who’s going to tell her.”
    Sophie nodded glumly. She rose to her feet and dumped the handful of mug fragments into the big plastic cooking oil container that Jilly used as a garbage bin. When she glanced back at Mona, it was to find the other woman still gazing at the paintings.
    â€œThis is weird,” Mona said, finally looking over at Sophie.
    â€œWhat is?”
    â€œThe paintings that are destroyed. They’re all Jilly’s faerie paintings. The landscapes and city scenes—none of them were touched.” She crossed
the room and laid one of the damaged paintings on the floor, arranging the torn strips so that its subject could be seen. “You see? This has got a couple of those gemmin of hers in it. That one’s of a dandelion sprite.”
    Sophie joined Mona and looked down. The painting Mona had roughly reconstructed was one of Babe and Emmie—a couple of faerie that Jilly claimed she had met in the Tombs, that junked-out part of the city north of Grasso Street that looked like it had been bombed. Sophie lifted her gaze and regarded the other paintings with a new eye. It was true. Whoever had done this really hadn’t cared for the faerie art, destroying it, while leaving the rest untouched.
    â€œSo what are we supposed to think?” she said. “That it was some critic?”
    â€œI can’t imagine that,” Mona told her. “But then I can’t imagine anybody doing this kind of thing in the first place, so what do I know.”
    Sophie sighed. “I can. All you have to do is open the newspaper and you get a daily dose of all the horrible things people can do to one another.”
    Mona laid the ruined painting on top of another.
    â€œWhat are we going to do with them?” she asked.
    â€œGod, I just don’t know. But we have to do something. I don’t want them to be the first thing Jilly sees when she gets back.”
    If she got back. It might be a long time before Jilly was able to navigate the stairs leading up to her loft. Maybe never. The professor had already offered his house for her convalescence, though how well Jilly and Goon, the professor’s cantankerous housekeeper, would get along was anyone’s guess. Goon was impossible at the best of times.
    â€œIs there room in that closet?” Sophie added.
    Mona went to look and gave a start when she opened the door.
    â€œWhat?” Sophie began, then saw that it was only the life-size fabric mâché self-portrait Jilly had made in art school that had startled Mona.
    Mona gave her an embarrassed grin. “I forgot about the mâché clone.”
    â€œIs there room in there for the paintings?”
    â€œNot really. What about the storage area in the basement?”
    â€œWe can only go check,” Sophie said. “Let’s finish cleaning this stuff up first.”

    â€œWhy hasn’t she ever moved?” Mona asked as they folded away the last of Jilly’s clothes.
    The smell of turps still hung in the air, but the air circulation had helped, and it didn’t seem any stronger than it usually did when Jilly was working on a painting. The floor was cleaned and mopped, all the broken glass put away. Jackets and Jilly’s few dresses hung in the closet, books restacked on their shelves in as much order as Jilly ever kept them in, which was none. Knickknacks were back in their usual places, or at least as well as either Sophie or Mona could remember.
    â€œSurely she could afford a bigger place by now,” Mona went on.
    â€œFor the same reason she works”—Sophie refused to say “worked”—“at Kathryn’s—she doesn’t like change. For all her spontaneity and love of the strange and unusual, there’s something comforting for her when