Chapter 5

The shoebox was on the shelf above her bed, and it took Willa twenty minutes to find the courage to pull it down.

Inside were thirty years of children. Trip at six, drawing the shrimp boat he was going to own. Trip at nine, drawing the same boat bigger. June at four, five, six - houses, a dog, a sun with eyelashes, her grandmother's front porch, her father's cap.

And the folded paper from that morning, unopened.

Willa sat on the edge of the bed and unfolded it flat on her knees.

The paper was a sheet of construction paper, the good heavy kind, and June had drawn with real attention, the way she drew when she was serious. A dock, brown. Water, blue with white crayon waves. A boat, white with a blue stripe, tied at the pilings. A man on the dock - yellow shirt, ball cap, brown hair sticking out from under it. In his arms, a rectangle as tall as his chest, outlined in gold crayon and filled in with gold, with little rays coming off it like a sun.

On the side of the boat, in careful blue letters, June had written: MISS CORDELIA.

Under the whole picture, in wobbly blue letters, she had written: UNCLE TRIP'S SECRET.

And in the corner, in the hand of a second grader who had just learned to write dates: Oct 3.

Willa sat very still. Outside, the October light was going long and gold across the garden.

The painting had come off the stair wall the first week of October. The drawing was dated October third. The boat was named for the woman who had put garnets in her apron. And June Bell, who loved her father and loved boats and drew exactly what she saw, had put it all on paper three weeks ago and given it to Willa for the shoebox because she wanted Willa to have something pretty.

Willa took the tissue out of her sleeve and opened it. The fleck of gold leaf lay in the crease, bright as a coin.

Her phone rang at ten past two. Cordelia.

"I'll write it for eighty," Cordelia said, without hello. "Eighty thousand. You can leave today, you can go anywhere, you never have to press another tablecloth. Willa, I am asking you."

"Mrs. Prescott," Willa said, "where is the painting."

There was a silence with a lot in it.

"You put garnets in my pocket," Willa said. "In front of ninety people. To make me a woman nobody would listen to."

"I made you a woman who retires," Cordelia said, and her voice had gone thin and fast. "Do you know what they'll do to him? He's twenty-seven. It's a felony, Willa. It's two hundred and forty thousand dollars and it's a felony and my granddaughter will grow up visiting her father through glass. You think a drawing is worth that?"

"It isn't my drawing," Willa said.

"Don't." A breath. "Don't do that to a child. Don't drag June into this. They'll ask her questions. She's seven. Do you want them asking her questions?"

Willa closed her eyes. Then she said, quietly, "You don't put that baby in this. Not ever."

She hung up, folded the drawing along its creases, put it in her cardigan pocket with the tissue, and called Nadine Boykin at the museum.

"Mrs. Boykin," she said. "I need you at the tent at three o'clock. And bring the adjuster."