The Face of Deceit. Ramona Richards

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СКАЧАТЬ he muttered. “If this is Your path for us, You have a lot of work to do.”

      Mason opened the door to the deck and approached Karen quietly, waiting until she raised her head again and turned toward him. Her eyes glistened, and she licked tears off her lower lip.

      His heart twisted. “Praying for Luke Knowles?”

      She wiped her eyes, smearing her mascara. “And his family. And for guidance.”

      “Guidance?”

      She nodded. “I suspect we’re going to need all the help we can get.”

      “We?”

      Karen’s eyebrows arched. “You don’t think we’re going to sit here and do nothing?”

      A grin slowly crossed his face. “You? I can’t see you sitting still for much of anything.”

      She waved a hand and marched past him. “Then come with me.”

      Mason’s curiosity took over. “Where are you going?”

      She kept walking, but pointed at the floor. “Down.” She headed for the far corner of her living room, away from the kitchen, where an elegant spiral staircase circled down to her pottery studio. Since he usually entered the studio from the outside, he took each of the narrow steps carefully, especially avoiding the coffee cup she’d left on a step about halfway down. The custom-built steps were barely deep enough for his size tens, and he arrived at the bottom long after Karen had disappeared from view.

      Mason paused, looking around. The studio, which took up the entire basement, was Karen’s sanctuary, and she kept it pristinely clean. The house was set deep into a solid granite hillside, and three walls of the basement had been framed directly against the stone, which still protruded through the Sheetrock in places. Shelves lined almost every inch, clustered with baskets of paints, clays, glazes, molds, texturing tools and the round, flat bats for the three potter’s wheels that stood in a line in the center of the room. Every shelf was labeled and each basket neatly organized. At one end of the room stood an extruding table, where Karen pulled thin plates of clay for hand building. Next to the table stood a worktable stained with years of glaze, paint and old bits of clay. At the other end sat two kilns, one for her larger projects and one that wasn’t much bigger than a toaster oven, in which she made the smaller gifts and beads for local jewelry artists. The glass wall that overlooked the hill was spotless and dotted with sun catchers.

      The potter, however, could not be seen. “Where are you?”

      “Back here.” Her head seemed to appear suddenly out of a space of granite. Puzzled, Mason crossed the room to discover that there was a thin doorway in the rock, disguised by the gray stone directly behind it and revealed only by a yellow light now coming from the left.

      Karen stepped out.

      “A baffle?”

      She nodded. “When the house was built, the owner wanted a darkroom, and the builder tried to carve this Z in the rock as a rough sort of light baffle. Rumor has it that it drove two of his workers completely crazy. Unfortunately, it was all for naught. The owner died before the house was complete. I like it.” She grinned. “When the light’s off, you can’t even tell there’s a room here.” She stepped back and Mason trailed her around the tight corner of the thin, Z-shaped baffle into a room of granite walls with high shelves along one side.

      He looked up and around, his eyes widening. “This is amazing! Like a catacomb.” The cavelike room was barely four feet wide and extended back into the stone about eight feet. A bare bulb hung from a hook driven into the stone ceiling, small, but casting enough light that he could read the labels on the neat, clearly marked metal boxes that covered the shelves.

      Karen’s smile broadened. “My secret hiding place.” She turned suddenly and pulled a file box from one of the middle shelves. “But this is what I came for.”

      He took it from her, and a slightly surprised look crossed her face. “What’s wrong, chère?” he asked.

      She blinked. “Guess I’m not used to having anyone help me.” She shrugged, then motioned for him to leave. “Let’s take it back out there.”

      They exited the room, and she snapped off the light behind them, letting her private storage room disappear into the wall again. He set the box on her worktable and she flipped the lid up and back, letting it bang against the tabletop. Inside were stacks of small, five-by-seven photo albums. “That was the Wilhelms auction, right?”

      When he nodded, her lips pursed. “The four in that catalog were old, earlier versions. I stopped using orange last year, went solely to streaks of green and red…and I don’t remember selling to a Wil…” Her voice faded a moment as her eyes closed. “A set of four. Not a private sale, must have been through one of the galleries. Haven’t sold four at once except…” another pause, then her eyes flew open and she attacked the box, digging through the albums “…2005. A dealer, but not in New York. Boston. Told me he’d sold four as a gift. A woman was giving them to her mother. She bargained him down to about a hundred dollars per.”

      “She got a good deal.”

      Karen clutched a red binder and pulled it out, plopping it down on the table. She opened it, pausing briefly at the first page, her fingers resting lightly on the first picture.

      Mason peered at the yellowed photo. “What is it?”

      Her childlike smile reminded him of a young girl caught in an embarrassing moment. “I’d forgotten this was here. These are the first four vases I sold.”

      Mason gently pulled her hand back to reveal a shot of four vases in deep blues and vibrant emerald greens. No faces, yet the elegance of their simple lines enchanted the eye. “They’re beautiful.”

      She sighed. “I adored them. Almost wish I had them back, but if I hadn’t sold them, I wouldn’t have known I could do this for a living. They were my breakthrough pieces.”

      “Who bought them?”

      “A dealer on New York’s Lower East Side.” She looked at the far wall of the studio, thoughtful, her gaze distant. “Tiny place. Brand-new. We were both trying to give each other a hand up. He bought them for thirty-five dollars, sold them for fifty dollars.”

      Karen sighed as if she were savoring a favorite memory, and Mason touched her hand. “Do you know who purchased them from the dealer?”

      She turned to him, her smile sad. “No. I wish I did. It would be like finding out what had happened to an old fri—” Her words faded, and as they continued to look at each other a few moments, Mason felt as if whatever it was between them had gently escalated. Mason felt her tremble, and the urge to kiss her, to hold her, washed over him. He leaned forward, his lips close to hers, but Karen suddenly tensed.

      Karen cleared her throat and looked away, turning the album page quickly.

      Heat shot into Mason’s cheeks and he released her hand. “Chère, I’m sorry.”

      Karen stared at the photos. “No, don’t be. I mean…it’s okay. I just…” She glanced quickly at him, then back at the table. “Not the right time, with Luke Knowles and all.” She patted the photos. “We need to do this.” She faced him again, worry clouding СКАЧАТЬ