“You’re sure?” Thalia’s face had paled.

“What’s wrong, hon?” Zoe asked as she gently touched Thalia’s shoulder.

Thalia took a moment to control her shallow ragged breathing, then said, “That one is mine.”

“Oh, no.” Zoe’s voice was low and dull. “Oh, no, no.”

Thalia nodded.

“How can that be?”

“I thought that since we had all these top collectors in here, that I could sell some of my father’s art as well. This was his prize piece.”

“I am so sorry.” Zoe felt the helpless inadequacy of her words thud painfully in her heart.

Thalia shook her head and leaned close to the painting. Then she stood back. After loosing a long low sigh, she turned to Zoe.

“You’re really sure?”

Zoe made a face. “I wish I weren’t,” she said.

“How? How can you tell? They both look like genuine Vermeers to me.”

Zoe nodded.

“I’m not sure at all how I really do it,” Zoe responded. “I look at a piece and it… affects me and I know almost immediately whether it’s a fake or not.”

“Affects your

Zoe hesitated.

“Seth is the only person alive who knows this,” Zoe said tentatively. Thalia looked expectantly up at her. “I owe my life to you,” Zoe said finally. “I—we’ve grown so like sisters. Surely I can trust you with this secret?”

Thalia nodded.

“I hear sounds when I look at paintings, at colors,” Zoe began slowly.

Thalia frowned as if she had misunderstood Zoe’s words. “Sounds?”

Zoe nodded. “Red is medium low like a cello; yellow very high like a piccolo.”

Astonishment painted Thalia’s face wide and round.

“I’ve always heard colors,” Zoe continued. “For as long as I can remember. I thought everyone did. The older I got, the more worried my folks were. My mother thought I was possessed by demons and had the whole church praying for me Sunday after Sunday.

“My dad, on the other hand, sneaked me off to a shrink we really couldn’t afford—that was the source of a running five-year quarrel. But the shrink immediately diagnosed me as having synaesthesia.”

Thalia looked concerned.

“I was so relieved that I wasn’t crazy.”

“Uh-huh,” Thalia said skeptically.

“Synaesthesia’s a harmless neural crossover—a bit like cross-talk on phone wires—where the senses get mixed up. Some synaesthetics taste shapes, others smell in color. Psychedelic drugs like LSD and peyote produce the same sorts of experience, but about one of 25,000 of us experience it naturally, probably because our brains hardwired themselves differently before we were born. Most synaesthetics are left-handed women—just like me—and the most common form is having sounds that trigger colors—just the opposite of me.”

“Amazing,” Thalia said softly. “But I thought that fakebusting today relied on science and not intuition, you know, carbon dating, spectrographic analysis—that sort of thing.”

Zoe smiled and shook her head. “For every scientific advance, the forgers just develop a way around it. Dishonesty somehow manages to keep pace with science—greed and ambition make sure that happens.

“Van Meergeren beat technology by taking mediocre seventeenth-century paintings, scraping off the picture down to the original ground—usually a beige wash and gesso—and then starting over with hand-ground paints using pigments identical to those in an original Vermeer. If you’re using a spectrograph to check for authentic pigments, it passes. Of course, the Bakelite and lilac oil base would be a giveaway, but then you’d have to know to test for these as well. The scientific window is very narrow and the forger’s palette is immense.”