“Though her biography says she still has a studio,” I said. “An atelier.”

Lisa got to her feet. “All right,” she said. “I think Oliver should call her, though. You need to keep painting. And Oliver, remember you’re a representative of this gallery.”

“Got it,” Oliver said, but he was looking at me where I sat with my paintbrush in hand, distressed that I’d just had the opportunity to speak with … Anna? Judith?… snatched away from me.

“You’re going to fix that corner of the mural, Morgan, aren’t you?” Lisa asked from behind me, and I fought the urge to roll my eyes. “You know Andrea Fuller will be here when we open in the morning to make sure my father’s conditions have been—”

“Don’t worry,” I said. “It’ll be finished by tomorrow morning, no problem.” How I was going to make that happen, I didn’t know.

Five minutes after Lisa left, I was sitting at Oliver’s table as he read a New York phone number aloud to me and I punched the numbers on my cell phone. “You should be the one to make the call, not me,” he’d told me once Lisa was gone. “She’s your artist.”

The number rang for a very long time, and I pictured Judith Shipley hobbling into her kitchen to pick up the receiver of an old-fashioned wall phone. Or maybe she used a wheelchair. Or maybe she was in a nursing home and no one was going to answer this call at all.

Finally, though, I heard a click, and a moment later a curt female voice—decidedly not elderly—said, “Shipley residence.”

“Hello!” I said, quickly putting my phone on speaker so Oliver could hear. “My name is Morgan Christopher. May I speak to Ms. Shipley?”

The woman didn’t respond and I had a terrible feeling that “Ms. Shipley” might be dead. Finally, she spoke.

“Ms. Shipley is unable to come to the phone,” she said.

“Oh, well, I’m calling from the new Jesse Jameson Williams gallery in Edenton, North Carolina, and we’d invited her to be an honored guest at our opening tomorrow, since we have a couple of her paintings here, but—”

“I already sent our regrets,” the woman said coolly.

“Yes, we received them but I was hoping I could change her mind. Could I talk to her, please?”

“Ms. Shipley no longer travels,” the woman said, and I heard the click as she hung up the phone.

I made a face at Oliver. “Did I screw that up?” I asked, wondering if Oliver should have made the call. If he might have had some magical way of getting a different answer.

Oliver shook his head. “There was no way that icicle of a woman was going to come around,” he said. “Maybe when we get a definitive answer from the authenticator, we can try writing to Judith personally.”