Arts and Thefts Read online

  “That little—I’m going to—” Case looked like he was going to explode.

  “Do nothing. You’re innocent. Act like it. Focus on the contest and I’ll stop in whenever I can.”

  Case kicked the table leg. “This is great. The snitch had to find you today, of all days. I don’t need this.”

  I hit the table with both hands, making Case jump. “That’s it. What in the world is going on? I can’t remember seeing so many kids this freaked out, especially when the prizes are same-old, same-old.”

  “Same-old? What about Best Overall?” Case said, his eyes wild.

  “What about it? I don’t get it. You’ve been talking about this competition for months. Hack and I know everything about it, from the contest theme—”

  “To the layout of the park,” Hack added.

  “To the kind of canvas the competitors use—”

  “Down to the thread count—”

  “Point made,” Case snapped. “So?”

  “So nowhere in any of that did you mention that the Best Overall prize is worth freaking out over.”

  “Yeah. A picture in the local paper, some art supplies, and a year of display in the museum, right?” Hack said. “Artists sure care a lot about publicity.”

  Case shook his head. “I forgot. You weren’t there. You didn’t hear the announcement.”

  “So fill us in now.” I leaned across the table. “What is up with Best Overall this year, and why is everyone acting like an asteroid is going to hit the town?”

  Case took a deep breath. “It may as well be an asteroid. The judges came in this morning to talk to the competitors before the guests arrived. They’ve changed the prizes this year.”

  “Changed how?” I asked.

  “I guess they had more donors than they expected, and then the Harris Art Academy got involved at the last minute.” Case took the pen out from behind his ear, twirled it, and put it back.

  “Calm down,” Hack said. “How does any of this matter?”

  “We thought the winner of Best Overall Art in any of the three categories would get the picture and some art supplies, like the winners in each division, with the added distinction of having their art displayed for a year in the art museum. This year the winners of each division get the art supplies and picture, but Best Overall gets those things, a place in the museum for a year, and a check for five hundred dollars plus a scholarship for a summer art camp at the Harris Art Academy.”

  The news smashed into Hack and me like Rick during football season. Five hundred dollars?

  “Five hundred dollars?” Hack gasped. “Why have I never listened to you when you told me I should take up art?”

  “Because you never listen to me, ever.”

  “I do. Ask me anything.”

  “Fine. Who is considered the father of Cubism?”

  “Anything but that.”

  While Hack and Case bantered, I rested my elbow on the table and grappled with Case’s news. The judges were weighting the Best Overall heavily this year instead of divvying the prizes more evenly among the three divisions. That made Best Overall a seriously desirable win, far above those of the three divisions.

  Did I believe in Becca’s sabotage theory? Did I think these art geeks would have the guts to commit heinous acts against their fellow artists for just a prayer of studying at HAA, even if just at a summer camp? You bet I did. The five hundred dollars was enough on its own to tempt sabotage, but the Harris Art Academy was the most prestigious art school in the area.

  That was motive. Five hundred dollars. Holy cow.

  I looked around the room. So much fear, so much anxiety. How many people could potentially become saboteurs with that kind of pressure? And who might have known about the change of plans early enough to steal Heather’s brushes?

  Hack followed my gaze. “Wow, is that girl over there cosplaying as something?”

  I turned around and saw Becca talking to a girl who looked seconds from bursting into tears (though if she was that upset when Becca found her, I’d never know). Hah. Well, it was nice to know the disguises worked. Cosplaying. I wished I could rub her face in that one later. “Who knows?”

  “She’s probably one of those artists,” Case said darkly. “Don’t pay any attention to her; that’s what she wants.”

  “Wait. What do you mean by those artists?” I thought about what Aaron had said. “Are there some artists that aren’t as accepted as others?”

  “Some artists don’t take their work seriously,” Case said. “They try to pass all kinds of things as serious art, which takes focus away from the rest of us who actually try. Dressing in bizarre costumes? Please. That doesn’t take much effort. But just watch. She’ll win Best Overall instead of someone who deserves it.”

  I kicked his chair. “That’s it. Get out of the tent. The despair in here is bringing you down. Go out into the sunlight. Look around. Get a snow cone . . .” I trailed off as my gaze landed on the bow tie–wearing boy that I’d seen earlier. He leaned back in his chair and sipped a cup of lemonade while other contestants picked at their food, and his movements were smooth, not a shudder or a twitch in sight. Odd in this anxious crowd.

  “Why isn’t that guy panicking?”

  Hack narrowed his eyes at me. “You sure you’re not on a job?”

  “As sure as I can be.” What? It’s not a lie. “But I don’t shut down just because I’m not working.”

  Hack raised a finger. “That’s technically the definition—”

  “I’m not a computer, Hack.” I shook my head. “Look. Case is a mess—”

  “May you look this good when you’re a mess,” Case interjected.

  “—and so is everyone else because of this surprise Best Overall award thing. Why not Bow Tie Guy?” I stood. “Be right back.”

  My motivations for going over to talk to the confident kid were twofold: on the one hand, I wanted to help Case feel more confident, and if this guy had a Zen way of staying calm, I wanted to know what it was. On the other hand, confidence raised all kinds of alarms for me. As someone who had worn self-assurance as a facade and had dealt with many, many people who radiated it because they thought they’d gotten away with theft, I knew confidence could be a cover story.

  It could be that I was about to talk to the most well-adjusted kid in the tent. Or I was about to interview a thief who had something to hide.

  “Hey,” I said, sliding into a chair next to Bow Tie Guy. “Mind if I sit here?”

  “Go ahead.” Bow Tie Guy looked me over. “You a contestant?”

  “A friend of one. I’m Jeremy.”

  “Explains the outfit. Lee Moffat.” He held out a hand and I shook it. “This is my friend Ethan,” he said, motioning at a boy with shaggy hair hanging in his eyes, sitting next to him. I hadn’t realized they were together. “So, what does your friend do?” Lee asked.

  “He paints.”

  Lee sniffed and straightened his gray vest, which was buttoned tightly. “So he’s not a real artist, then.”

  There it was again, the idea that some people were “real artists” and some weren’t.

  I smiled a little. “I’d say painting is just as valid an art form as . . . whatever it is you do.”

  Lee laughed. “You would think that, wouldn’t you?” His eyes stuck a little too long on my borrowed baseball cap. Snobbish, much?

  “I’m a sculptor,” Lee told me. That explained the just-washed hands feeling; he probably took as much care of his hands as Case did. “My art requires a gentle touch and a firm hand, knowledge of the composition of my materials, a perfect balance of wet and crumbly, hard and soft. It goes far beyond dabbing blots of premixed dye on a blank sheet of paper.”

  “Actually, it’s canvas at this skill level,” I muttered. Say what you will about first impressions, but I didn’t like Lee.

  Ethan pulled out a marker. He put his foot up on the table and started drawing on his shoe.

  I watched Ethan go at it as Lee shrugged. �
�Paper, canvas, doesn’t matter. Sculpting has nuances that painting or, worse, photography, could never match. Not that I don’t use paint on my sculptures. I’m a well-rounded artist, and the sculpting medium best displays my skills. I’d say I have a sporting chance at winning Best Overall.” Lee leaned in, smiling like he knew his chance was better than sporting. “You’re no artist, so you don’t know the difference between someone born with a talent and a hack.”

  “I think I’m learning.”

  Ethan snorted. Lee glared at him.

  “Sorry, man,” Ethan said. “It’s just—”

  “Shut up,” Lee said, and Ethan frowned and added another whorl on his toe.

  Wow. What a jerk. I wouldn’t feel bad at all about manipulating this guy into a confession.

  Not an artist, am I? They don’t call people like me con artists for nothing. Watch me work my magic.

  I looked around the room. Becca had moved on to another girl, one of the contestants who was chatting happily earlier. This one wore a light blue dress and had long, fair hair that reminded me of melted caramel. She looked sort of familiar, though I couldn’t place her. From the smile on the girl’s face, it looked like not even Becca could sour her attitude. I hoped it stayed that way.

  “Is that why you’re so confident?” I asked Lee. He looked surprised, and I gestured to all the sick-looking contestants. “You don’t think all these painters, with their brushes and paints, could steal the prize from you?”

  Trigger words, emphasized to draw a guilty mind to its guilt, namely, the theft of Heather’s supplies. I wanted to see how Lee reacted when he heard them.

  Nothing. Just more arrogance. “They don’t have a chance. Not against a sculptor. Three-dimensional art will always beat two-dimensional, hands down.”

  Lee grinned, and I knew that kind of smile: over-confidence from knowing something (or thinking you know something) no one else knows. The hints hadn’t worked; I needed a new strategy. If Becca were in my place, she’d be threatening Lee, saying, “I know you did it. Just confess and maybe I won’t hit you over the head with your own sculpture!” On second thought, that might be a little violent, even for her. On third thought, whether or not that level of rage was Becca’s style, it wasn’t anything I wanted to emulate.

  So, let’s see if I could shake his foundations. I smiled. “You’re probably right,” I said. “I mean, I’m not an artist, so I wouldn’t know. Maybe you can help me. Are the judges the ones with the big gold ribbons stuck to their shirts?”

  “Yeah, why?”

  I shook my head. “Nothing, I’m sure. I just heard them talking about their favorites, and the name Lee Moffat—that’s your name, right?—never came up.” I shrugged. “Maybe the judges aren’t as into three-D art as you are.”

  “Once they see my sculpture, they’ll have found their Best Overall, and that’s for sure. You must have heard wrong,” Lee said.

  “Maybe I did. After all,” I said, “a sculpture must be pretty solid compared to a painting or photograph. Easier to keep in its original form, I mean. Less of a chance of it getting smeared or damaged in some accident.”

  There. I’d thrown sabotage on the table. See how he likes that.

  Lee’s fingers twitched.

  Ethan smiled, ready to join the conversation again. “Not necessarily. In some cases, sculptures might actually be more vulnerable than other kinds of artwork. If you have any kind of paintwork on your sculpture, that can be smeared just as easily as a painting, and they can also be shattered if dropped.”

  “Oh,” I said to Ethan. “Are you an artist too?”

  “Not really. My dad’s one of the officials, though.”

  “Ethan,” Lee growled. “No one cares. Seriously. Can’t you just shut up for a few minutes?”

  Ethan froze. His mouth hardened, and he snapped the lid on the marker and put it away. “Fine. I’ll go check out the food.” He stood and left.

  Lee was quiet and for a moment I thought he’d call his friend back, but he just rolled his eyes and shook his head.

  I clenched my jaw to keep it from dropping. Lee clearly didn’t place a lot of value in Ethan’s friendship. I got the feeling Lee didn’t value anything but himself. “That was rude.”

  Lee smirked at me. “Ethan’s just a moron sometimes. I try not to hold it against him, but it gets hard.”

  Right. “Are your parents working here too?”

  He shook his head. “I’m the only art aficionado in the family. Which is why I know that what Ethan said is garbage. Sculpture is the more resilient art form. It will always beat painting.”

  “But paper still beats rock,” I said. “Isn’t it a funny world?”

  This whole conversation proved to me that Lee was up to nothing good. Sure, I disliked the guy, and that could be coloring my perceptions, but come on. That finger twitch? After his motions had been so smooth, so controlled? And snapping at Ethan after being so conversational? Why did talk about sabotage make him suddenly as nervous as the rest of the contestants when he apparently had no worries about doing well in the contest, the thing that had everyone else shaking in their shoes?

  And seriously, any innocent person would start to worry about their placement with the judges after I threw doubt their way. A guilty person with a hidden ace would still trust his devious methods to give him the win. I didn’t like how much ease I saw in him.

  Lee was just like every thief or bully I’d ever retrieved from, glowing with “I got away with it and you can’t stop me” light. Even Mark had had it, before Becca and I had taken him down. I didn’t have much proof beyond my own instincts, but I knew Lee was a crook.

  Still, he might not have been the thief who stole the brushes. The trigger words hadn’t even fazed him. I had never considered that we might not be looking for a saboteur, but saboteurs.

  “Do you have any other friends here?” I asked Lee.

  “I’ve got Ethan,” he said.

  “I mean other than him.” I kept my eyes focused on Lee. As I watched, his eyes and then his face turned to the side. I turned too, looking where he had. Lee snapped back, trying to erase what he’d done, what he’d given away, but it was too late. I’d looked, and I’d seen.

  Becca and that girl. The girl who had been smiling and laughing when no one else was. Still with Becca, the girl stood with her back straight, arms at her side, feet apart but not too wide. A confident stance, not a shrinking, worried one matched with nervous movements (like touching her hair) or a defensive pose.

  Another surprisingly confident person. Could she and Lee be in cahoots? I’d have to talk to her next.

  “She’s cute,” I said, and Lee’s face turned spaghettisauce red.

  “I’m guessing she’s a special friend,” I added, smiling at Lee.

  “Of course she is,” Lee said, but for a split second, that grin slipped. Just a moment, but it was enough.

  “Is she here to see you?”

  Lee scoffed. “She’s not here to see rejects like you.”

  I was done. The wall was back up; I wasn’t going to get any more out of talking to Lee. I slapped both hands against the table and used them to push myself to standing as Ethan came back with a plate of lemon bars. “Well, thanks for the conversation. I’d better go.” I couldn’t take another minute with this punk.

  After talking to Lee, I had a feeling the saboteur was a confident person, not a nervous wreck.

  Why? Because criminals give themselves away by not acting like everyone else. They’re nervous when they should be confident, and vice versa. In this sea of anxiety a lighthouse of confidence stuck out. And that was very, very suspicious.

  I headed back to Case and Hack’s table. I wanted to report on Lee and ask them some questions about the confident girl Becca was talking to. Maybe they knew something. And, as long as Becca was otherwise engaged, maybe I could get in a couple of games of paper football.

  But when I got back, it seemed they’d given my seat away. A girl with freckl
es and reddish-gold hair was sitting there.

  “Nice, guys,” I said as I sat down on the other side of the girl. “Real nice.”

  “What? We thought you’d seen Becca and run off,” Case said. “This is Larissa Eccles. Her sister’s in the competition.” Case gave me a look that said eloquently, This girl is a dream in the middle of a nightmare. Don’t ruin this for me.

  “Then where are my manners?” I turned to the girl and smiled. “You’re welcome to take my spot anytime.”

  Larissa returned my smile. “And you are?” she asked.

  “Jeremy. Friend of a painter.”

  “Sister of one.”

  I should have guessed. Larissa looked a year or two younger than me, slightly too young to enter the contest. Also, she was wearing capri pants and a blouse, not the dressier attire of a contestant.

  “Which one’s your sister?” I asked.

  Larissa looked around for a moment and pointed. “That’s her. Quinn.”

  I looked and felt my skin crackle with serendipity. It was the confident girl, the one who’d been talking to Becca. Oh, the fates were smiling on me.

  “Whew,” I said, getting my game face on. “It’s bad enough being the friend of someone caught up in this panic fest. I can’t imagine having to deal with an emotionally wrecked sister.”

  “J, watch it,” Case growled as Larissa closed her eyes and shook her head.

  “It’s not that bad,” she said, tracing figure eights on the table with her finger. “Quinn’s handling it well. I mean, I’m sure she’s nervous—who wouldn’t be with all the pressure—but she keeps saying it’s her first year in the contest, so if she doesn’t win, she’ll have next year. I think she believes it.”

  “Sure.” It didn’t seem to be helping the other kids around here.

  “Larissa’s a painter too,” Case blurted out, probably afraid I’d make him look bad again.

  “Really? So you and Case should have a lot to talk about.” I glanced down at Larissa’s hands. Flecks of paint clung to her hangnails.

  “She’s starting sixth grade this fall,” Case added. “At Scottsville.”

  I turned to Larissa. “So, does that mean your sister is Quinn Eccles?” That explained why I didn’t immediately recognize Quinn. I’d heard her name, sure; she was in my grade. Even seen her passing in the halls, though we never shared a class. But the quiet girl in the halls didn’t seem like the kind of person who’d stand out as overly confident at an art show. I’d never retrieved either for her or from her. She wasn’t the kind of person who made waves.