Page 26 of Nantucket Reflections
Julia felt the man’s anger and pessimism, and it made her cocktail sour in her mouth.
Julia tried again. “When CAT first painted her mural, did people think it was Lucia Colombo who did it?”
“Lucia? No.” The server shook his head. “Well, something so brash and bold, we Italians always think a man does it. But that’s our culture.”
He said it so openly that it surprised Julia.
“But after that? When did people think CAT was a woman? What did people think then?”
“I did not think it was Lucia.” He shrugged. “She’d told me she was done with art. There was no money in it, and she was always into fancy things. Back when we were teenagers…” He grinned sheepishly. “I should not be saying this to you. You are a stranger.”
Julia’s heart lurched. “Tell me!” Was she finally going to learn something of value about Lucia Colombo, something she could actually use?
The server bent lower so that he could whisper what he knew. “When we were teenagers, she used to steal from tourists. She took pocketbooks from purses that hung from chairs. She conned tourist men into taking her for drives, and she’d tell them she was going to tell their wives they did more if they didn’t pay her. She always had a new scheme up her sleeve.”
Julia pressed her hand to her chest. Now this was what she’d come to Italy to learn. This fit the description of the Lucia Colombo she’d met back in Nantucket, the Lucia who’d spewed such arrogance on stage to Julia’s paying customers.
This version of Lucia felt like one who might have pretended to be someone else, if only to reap the rewards of CAT’s incredible career.
Although Julia had about a thousand more questions, it was clear that the server needed to run off and tend to other tables. Julia thanked him and left him an enormous tip. After that, she and Charlie hurried down the road, holding hands and laughing excitedly.
“I got the sense that he was proud of Lucia for stealing from tourists,” Julia said, bugging her eyes out as they waited for a table at the night’s chosen restaurant.
“Me too,” Charlie admitted.
“Growing up on Nantucket, did you ever consider taking advantage of the tourists?” she asked.
“Never,” he said. “Maybe we were too naive for that.”
“We weren’t forward-thinking enough,” Julia agreed.
As they sat down at their table covered with white linen and decorated with flickering candles, Julia remembered that Nantucket played its own game of taking advantage of tourists, with extra-expensive groceries, watermelon that cost ten dollars a pop, and burgers at fifty dollars plus. The prices dropped immediately after the tourist season cratered. But mostly during the summer months, the Copperfields knew not to dine out. If they did, they were usually given local prices, proof that there were two worlds in Nantucket, just as there were here.
After the bottle of wine arrived and they toasted their newfound information, Julia’s phone lit up with a message. It was from Gregor. Julia turned the phone around to show Charlie.
GREGOR: The styles are incredibly different, as you said. But honestly? I don’t see any similarities between CAT and the artist who painted these coastlines. Usually, you can find echoes of things. Like, if you see an early sketch of Van Gogh’s, you can chart a course to his later and more magnetic stuff. But there is no course between these coastlines and CAT. They were painted by different people.
Julia clapped her hands excitedly and drew back up her photographs of Lucia Colombo’s coastline paintings, all of which were signed: Lucia Colombo with the year they were painted directly beside. She wondered if this was enough proof that Lucia wasn’t who she said she was.
“It’s strange,” Charlie said then, interrupting Julia’s reverie. “I can’t help but feel that everyone in Positano knows more about CAT than they’re willing to say.”
Julia’s ears rang. “Why do you think that?”
“It’s just a feeling,” Charlie said. “It’s like how we usually know what’s going on in Nantucket. I think, after years of mural making, we would know exactly who had done it, even if they were trying to keep it a secret. Things like that slip through the cracks.”
Julia sniffed, realizing he was right. “And that server was pretty clear on the fact that Lucia was not CAT.”
“Which makes me think he probably knows who the real one is,” Charlie agreed.
Julia took a sip of wine. “Do you think that means we should stay in Positano longer? Pester everyone until they tell us who the real CAT is?”
Charlie sighed. “I know we’re both eager to get home.”
Julia knew he was talking about her grandchild, how ready she was to return to Anna, to hold her baby, to tend to the greater Copperfield family. But she had to save her publishing house, too.
Charlie continued, “We haven’t been abroad that long yet. I think we owe it to ourselves to keep digging. We could even go to London, maybe, where Lucia first studied art. Perhaps we’ll get a clue there?”
Julia shook her head, suddenly feeling a sense of sorrow. “Lucia went to school there more than ten years before the first CAT mural was ever made. And if she definitely isn’t CAT, I don’t see what good that would do.” Unless, perhaps, the real CAT had also attended school in London? But what were the chances of that?
