Chapter 10: White Roses

Francesca didn't call the front desk.

She didn't call the police.

She shut the door, put the chain on, and knelt in front of the portrait.

The knife had gone through both layers of canvas in one long stroke.

It started at her father's left temple and ended at the bottom right corner, past Francesca's small scowling face.

She touched the edge of the cut.

Clean.

No paint lost along the line, just the fibers parted.

She could close it.

It would take a week of tiny stitches and glue and patience, but she could close it.

Whoever did this didn't know that.

They'd only wanted her to see it.

She photographed the room from every corner.

She photographed the card.

Then she picked up every spatula and every swab from the rug and laid them back in her kit, one by one, in order.

She didn't sleep.

At nine on Friday morning, she took a taxi to Milton.

The house was busy.

A florist's van was parked by the kitchen door.

Two men were carrying folding chairs out of a truck for tomorrow's lunch.

Nobody stopped her at the door this time.

She walked straight through the house and out the back, down the brick path to the greenhouse.

Her mother was inside, in gardening gloves and an apron over her silk blouse.

She was cutting white roses.

There were dozens of them already, laid in long rows across the potting bench.

The gardener was filling buckets at the tap.

The Quincy captain's wife was stripping thorns at the end of the bench, a pile of leaves at her elbow.

They both looked up when Francesca came in.

Her mother didn't.

"If you've come to apologize to your sister, she's upstairs resting," her mother said, and clipped another stem.

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