“Like a secret language?”
“I know what she wants by her sounds. And her laugh. She has a wicked sense of humor, and gets the joke. She always, always gets the joke. When our mum came home from shopping one day and didn’t know she’d left a lone pink foam roller hanging off the back of her head, Polly practically fell off her chair. As did I, we were laughing so hard.”
“I’ve always wished I had a brother or sister, to be able to share inside jokes like that,” said Joshua. “Is Polly older or younger than you?”
“We’re twins.” They were silent for a moment, but it was an encouraging type of silence, like he was giving her room to formulate her thoughts, decide what to share. “Polly doesn’t make eye contact, but she sees everything that’s going on. Unfortunately, most people avoid her completely. She scares them. She lived with us until a few months ago, when my mum insisted that she move to a home so we both could work. I hate to think of her there, surrounded by people who don’t understand her.”
“What about your dad?”
“He used to drive the night shift, as a cabbie, and one morning I came out and found him asleep in his cab, which wasn’t unusual. He hated to come in late and wake us all up. But he wasn’t asleep. He’d had a heart attack.”
“I’m so sorry. That’s a terrible thing to have to go through.”
She pushed the image of him sitting behind the wheel, chin to chest, out of her mind. “I suppose the good news is I’ll be seeing Polly sooner than expected.”
“Why is that?”
“The photo shoot was supposed to last a week. The next stop was the Breakers, in Newport, but I made a mess of things.”
“How do you mean?”
“The photographer was yelling at one of the girls, being really rude. I told him to stop.”
“Sounds heroic.”
“Certainly, the other models didn’t seem to think so. Then they all left without me. Probably thought that I’d quit and walked out. I should’ve.”
“Then we wouldn’t have found the clues or the secret compartments.”
“That was kind of fun.”
“I agree.”
“I suppose that’s your job, really,” she said. “Nosing about. Discovering lost secrets.”
They lay in silence for a moment. Veronica thought that Joshua might have fallen asleep, but then he spoke again. “Maybe Polly will enjoy it once she’s settled in.”
She sat up on one elbow. Her eyes had gotten used to the dark, and she could just make out his features. “How could you say that? She’s miserable.”
“So was my grandmother when she had to move into a nursing home. She was falling, it was dangerous, and my father hated to do it. But now she’s happy as can be, made lots of friends. I swear, her social calendar is so full she’s too busy to see us.”
“My mother said the same thing, and she’s wrong. You’re wrong. This isn’t like that.”
“Okay, sorry.”
She heard him settle back down. She hadn’t meant to snap at him, but he had no idea what her family situation was like. Polly shouldn’t be in an institution—Veronica was certain of that.
And now she had the means to change everything sitting right there in her pocket. A thin river of hope had spread through her ever since she’d first held the diamond up to the light. It’d been missing for so long, no one was actively looking for it anymore; no one would miss it. Mr. Frick probably would have done the same, she told herself, stealing whatever he could get his hands on to crawl his way up in the world. Much better that the diamond go to someone who needed it rather than an institution that already dripped with riches.
She felt bad for her knee-jerk reaction, though. “How old are you, Joshua?” she asked.
“Twenty-one.” he said. “How about you?”
“Eighteen. Have you always known what you wanted to do, career-wise?” Something about the dark and the quiet made her unafraid to pry. His life was so different from her own, in a myriad of ways.
“My parents took me to museums and galleries ever since I was a kid. But I don’t think working in a place like this is in my future. I have other ideas.”
“Like what?”
“My dream would be to mount a show of art brut.”
“What does that mean?”
“It’s French for ‘rough art’ or ‘raw art.’ It refers to artists without formal training, who aren’t part of the mainstream art world, like Joshua Johnson. Or Bill Traylor, who was born into slavery and died in the late forties. I bet if I go to the South and travel around, I’ll find even more artists who are undiscovered.”