Paint by Magic by Kathryn Reiss

Author:Kathryn Reiss [Reiss, Kathryn]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

Chapter 9

An Evil Smile

The room was very quiet, but inside my head the pounding was deafening. Find out, find out, find out, thundered my heartbeat. Find out what the connection was between this long-ago woman and my mom. Find out because if I didn't, Mom would never, ever be safe. I don't know how I knew this, but the thought was there. There is a connection, and Mom is in danger, and I have to figure it out.

I could feel Fitzgerald Cotton watching me closely as I slowly turned the page.

In black-and-white or tinted with color, the photos of the old paintings seemed to glow; they were like Fitzgerald Cotton had described: luminous. Something about the way the artists painted light. Pretty cool, if you like paintings—which I wasn't sure I did anymore, to tell you the truth.

Fitzgerald Cotton sat down next to me on the couch. I moved away from him so that our arms weren't touching or anything.

He reached over and took the book. He flipped through some more pages and pointed out paintings done in the same style, bragging about the originals he had seen in Rome and Venice, and droning on about how amazing the true colors were. I just stared dully down at them, my mind searching for answers. Lots of people had the same last name, I reminded myself. Rigoletti might be a really common name in Italy, for all I knew. And lots of people look like other people. Maybe there were loads of people in Italy who looked sort of like Mom....

Fitzgerald Cotton tapped his finger on one of the pages. "Look here," he ordered, and I did, trying to concentrate. More portraits, but this time they were all faces of men with beards and funny caps with feathers. "The Magi School artists," Fitzgerald Cotton said reverently. "They painted one another's portraits for posterity."

Again, one portrait stood out. But this time it wasn't because the guy looked familiar—not exactly. But there was ... something.

"Who was this person?" I asked, pointing to the portrait of a wild-looking man, younger than the others, with especially unnerving eyes. They were piercing and narrowed and seemed to have a fire in the pupils. But it was the smile that really got me. A creepy, cold little quirk of the lips. A smile that held nothing happy or funny in it—only nastiness. And secrets.

I had a bad feeling about that guy.

Fitzgerald Cotton stroked the pages with one long finger. "Ah, yes, that man."

The studio door opened and Betty stepped in. We both looked up, startled out of the tension that had settled over us as we looked at the book. "There you are!" Betty said to me, sounding exasperated. "Didn't you hear the lunch bell?"

I shook my head. But I was glad to see Betty. It was as if some of the evil I felt in the studio was banished when she opened the door.

"Excuse me, Uncle Fitz. But Gramma has been looking for Connor." Betty came over to us and stood by the couch.

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