Oops! (Alo Nudger Book 10) by Lutz John

Author:Lutz, John [Lutz, John]
Language: eng
Format: azw3
ISBN: 9781628155389
Publisher: Speaking Volumes
Published: 2016-10-15T16:00:00+00:00

Chapter Twenty-Two

As Nudger climbed the concrete steps to the Art Museum’s main entrance, he had to admit that one reason he’d come here was to make sure Claudia wasn’t with Biff Archway. Archway, the soccer coach and sex education teacher at the all-female high school where Claudia taught English, was tenacious in his attempts to win Claudia. Handsome, muscular, accomplished, Archway was the sort of man women fell for like dominoes. Nudger hated Biff Archway.

Nudger left the marbled, sculpture-strewn main hall of the museum and began roaming its spacious rooms and corridors displaying paintings. He lingered in a gallery of impressionists’ works, staring with yearning at a colorful, dreamy world he wished existed, then walked quickly past a Picasso that more accurately reflected his world. Eventually he left the paintings and became lost among displays of furniture from various historical periods. In a roped-off, Art Deco model office of the thirties was a wooden desk that looked disturbingly like his own, and the typewriter was an easily recognizable ancestor of his Smith-Corona. Soon, he thought with some alarm, he would be a man of the past century. He swallowed.

Near an Edwardian bedroom with a fantastic fringed canopy bed, he became more determined to find Claudia. He asked a security guard directions to the Dorothea Lange photograph exhibit.

Five minutes later he was within sight of Claudia. He was relieved to see that she wasn’t with Archway, but with a woman he’d met last year, another teacher at Stowe High School, a middle-aged, kindly looking gray-haired woman whose name Nudger thought was Nancy.

Relieved, he stayed well away from the two women so neither would notice him. When they wandered from one room to the next, he remained in the previous room, but in a position where he could see them if they left by the far exit, which led them either to another display of Lange photographs or was the end of the exhibit.

Lange’s stark black-and-white depression-era photos fascinated Nudger. Some of them were in fact galvanizing. So engrossed did he become in a shot of a farmer driving a tractor in an endless field of parallel plowed furrows, that Claudia and Nancy somehow moved on without him noticing.

In a mild panic, he quickly but cautiously left the exhibit and made his way from one set of exhibitions to the next. He was furious with himself. This was basic detective work, tailing two unsuspecting people indoors in a public place, and he had muffed it.

At last, in the vast main hall of the museum, he saw Nancy’s coiffed gray hair. Claudia was next to her. They were moving with several other people toward the exit.

He followed and saw them get into Claudia’s car where it was parked in front of the museum, near Art Hill. Nudger hurried around to the tree-shaded parking lot behind the museum and climbed into the Granada, but by the time he wound his way back to the front of the building, Claudia’s little blue Chevy was nowhere in sight.

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