At five thirty I was helping the servers carry the last of the trays out to their van when a limousine pulled into the parking lot, the late summer sun glinting off its shiny black finish. I watched the driver get out of the car and reach for the handle of one of the rear doors, but the door flung open before he’d even touched it, and a woman nearly sprang from the car. She was about sixty, maybe older, and her gray hair was chopped short. Ignoring the driver, she walked around the front of the limo and opened the other rear door. My heart began to pound. Somehow, I knew who was in that backseat. I knew it, and I handed the tray I was carrying to one of the servers and walked toward the limousine. By then, the gray-haired woman was helping a much older woman from the limo. The old woman, who was about my height but whose ramrod-straight posture made her appear taller, didn’t look much like the ancient newspaper photographs of Anna Dale, yet I knew without a doubt that was who she was. Her white, chin-length hair was thin, the texture of cotton candy, and she wore small, sparkly pink-and-purple glasses. Her face was full of sharp angles—her chin, her slender nose, her high cheekbones. She wore pink lipstick that looked freshly applied.

“We’re very late, I know!” she called to me in a surprisingly strong voice as I approached her. “We had quite the flight, and the drive from the airport took forever. But”—she motioned toward the gallery—“I didn’t want to miss this!”

Chapter 66

Chapter 66

I reached the old woman where she stood next to the limousine. Her right hand rested on the top of a turquoise wooden cane, so she reached for me with her left hand, which I took in mine. I squeezed her hand gently, surprised to realize that I was fighting back tears.

“Judith Shipley?” I asked, just to be certain my emotions weren’t clouding my thinking.

“That’s right,” she said. “And this is my overprotective assistant, Gloria Hite.”

Gloria Hite and I nodded at each other. I seemed unable to find my voice.

“I found the invitation to Jesse’s gallery opening in a stack of papers on my desk early this morning,” Judith said, cutting a glance at her assistant. “Gloria knows I don’t like traveling anymore, so she took the liberty of making the decision for me not to attend. Had I known about it before this morning, we would have been here on time.” She gave Gloria a look of mock annoyance.

Gloria ignored the dig. “Let’s get you out of this heat,” she said.

“We are too late, aren’t we?” Judith said as we moved at a snail’s pace toward the gallery entrance.