Cordelia “the museum curator”'s Arc

Chapter 2 of 8

In the morning Cordelia fed the cat and carried the painting from the entry hall to her office. The black door with the crooked sign shut behind her. She set the canvas on the iron easel at the center of the room and stepped back until her desk pressed her hip. The carousel horse was black with gold trim. A little girl in a dark dress reached up to touch its bridle. Cordelia had stood in front of this office a hundred times. She had never stood in front of this painting before, and she needed to know what it wanted from her. She pulled her portfolio from the bottom drawer. It was already too full. She unsnapped the clasp and turned to the back, where she kept the entries for pieces with no paper trail. She wrote the date. She wrote oil on canvas, roughly twenty by sixteen inches. She wrote left at front door, no note, no witness. Then she stopped, because the next line was always provenance, and provenance was the thing she did not have. She worked the way she had taught herself to work alone. She lifted the painting off the easel and turned it over. No gallery sticker. No auction lot. No customs stamp. The stretcher bars were old pine, dark at the corners where someone had handled them often. She found a single mark in pencil on the top bar, three letters she could not read and a number that might have been 1908 or 1968. She wrote both down. She photographed the back. She set the canvas on the easel again and sat down to look at the front. The horse was the one in her basement. She had not let herself say it until now. When she bought the building the previous owner had left a single carousel horse downstairs, black lacquer, gold bridle, copper pole. She had cleaned it herself. She kept it on its stand near the back stair. The painted horse had the same chipped place on the left foreleg. The same star tooled into the saddle. Someone had stood in her basement long enough to paint it, or had known the horse before she did. She carried the portfolio down the stairs. The carousel horse waited on its copper stand where she had left it. She held the painting up beside it. The match was exact, down to the small gold tassel at the throat. She looked at the little girl in the painting again. Dark hair pulled back. A dress her mother had owned. Her own face, or close enough that the difference did not matter. She went back upstairs and wrote one line under the entry. Painter knew this horse before I did. Painter knew me. She closed the portfolio. The painting was not a clue and it was not a warning. It was an answer to a question she had not asked yet, and now she had to find the person who already knew it.