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her into another large room, the first yet without worktables. It was Rhys’s office. Along one wall shelves bent under the weight of art history books and massive tomes with titles such as
The Preservation of Santos
and
The Structural Conservation of Panel Paintings.
A pair of partners desks held computers and digital camera equipment, along with small bronze sculptures, terra-cotta forms and more whatnots than the eye could absorb in a glance. Behind the desks stood racks for paintings in various stages of restoration. Some of the paintings, I would learn later, were worth as much as fifty thousand dollars, while the value of others couldn’t buy you a corn dog for lunch. Antique vitrines held Rhys’s pottery collection, one devoted to rare Van Briggle pieces, a second to vintage Shearwater, a third to creations by contemporary New Orleans potters such as JoAnn Green-berg and Charles Bohn.
    There was much to see, and to take it all in one had to dodge a brass display easel standing in the middle of the floor bathed in light from a pair of strategically positioned photoflood lamps. A bedsheet, appropriately splattered with a rainbow of paints, covered the rectangular object on the stand.
    “I’m being unusually dramatic today,” Rhys said, “but the occasion calls for it. When will I have the opportunity to unveil an Asmore again? Patrick, say hello to your Aunt Dottie. Or
Beloved Dorothy
, as Levette Asmore called her.”
    The sheet came off and there it was suddenly, so different from the thing we’d seen on the floor at Patrick’s house. The portrait showed a young woman in a simple white dress holding a small book and a clutch of purple irises. Her brown hair was pulled back and held by a ribbon, and her eyes radiated a dark shade of blue that was nearly cobalt. It occurred to me that they were just like Patrick’s eyes. In the background Asmore had provided a Louisiana landscape with oak trees clotting the horizon and a red wash of sun reflecting off a winding river. But it was the subject of the painting that made the strongest impression. Dorothy Marion was so exquisitely beautiful that I felt an ache of sadness recalling Patrick’s story about how she had survived to be an old maid chasing garage-sale finds.
    How does it happen? I wondered. We are young without a notion of how we’ll end up, stupid to the truth of what will come. Had someone told this girl she was destined to live her life alone in a dusty house full of cats she would have laughed herself silly.
    Patrick’s hand went up. He reached to touch the painting.
    “Better not,” Rhys said. “The varnish needs more time to dry.” She pointed to the upper-left corner. “Asmore’s signature is there, clearly visible. Leland and I screamed when it turned up during the cleaning.”
    Both Patrick and I stepped closer, squinting to see it. Just beneath the name, Asmore had added the words “Beloved Dorothy,” and the date, “December 28, 1940.”
    You poor bastard, I thought. Dead in less than a year.
    “It’s very difficult for me to believe,” said Patrick. “I mean, Aunt Dottie? I knew this woman. She would sit at her kitchen table with her wig on backward, like how kids wear baseball caps. There’d be cats eating scraps from the dinner plates stacked in the sink. When she’d start on the old days I’d roll my eyes. She never even mentioned this Asmore character, but obviously they were a couple once. You look at this and it’s undeniable. She looks as if… okay, to put it bluntly, she looks as if he’s just had his way with her. They’ve made love, haven’t they?”
    “Have either of you noticed the river in the painting’s background?” Rhys said. “When that came up during the cleaning, Leland and I screamed a second time. You can’t overstate how significant that is to the value of this painting. It portends Asmore’s terrible destiny. It also echoes an experience of his childhood: his parents drowned in the great flood