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hadn’t contemplated this before in detail. He’d always imagined her drinking poison quietly in bed. “She might have jumped from a window.”
    “She’d make a better ghost if she wore white,” Case offered.
    Miriam stood up with her dustpan and looked at the painting. “She’s got me fully convinced.”

9
    T hey were all back in the solarium with coffee, windows open, hot night air rolling through. Hidalgo slept on his back. Zee wanted to be home and asleep, but she forced herself to smile at Miriam. “I’ve peeked at your new project,” she said. “I hope you’ll hang some of your pieces around the coach house.”
    “Anything that doesn’t sell.”
    Zee wondered if Miriam had ever sold a piece in her life. The new one was an atrocious swirl of orange with blue and brown things sticking out.
    “Tell me, what inspired that orange piece?”
    “Oh, it’s a fractal! It’s basically math, so don’t ask me to explain! You can just see they’re amazing, the colors and symmetry.” Zee wanted to shake her. It was her greatest fear for her female students, that they’d end up giggling and apologizing at everything.
    Case grinned. “You know what I call those? The barf pictures. It’s the barf series.” He’d been drunk for a while.
    “I’m starting a new bunch, though. Unloved dresses. I’m butchering them and doing tessellation around the forms. If you have any old prom dresses or anything . . . And I have to say, I’ve never worked better in my life than I have the past few days. This place must have a magic spring under it.”
    Gracie patted her knees and sat forward. “Miriam, we’ve gotthe perfect little consulting job for you. There’s a painting I want to rotate out of storage, and Bruce hates it. The signature is unreadable, so we have just no idea. It’s raw, but I think it’s sweet.”
    Bruce loped behind the far couch and returned with a gilt frame, the farmhouse and pasture inside all awkward angles and illogical sunlight. Like the product of an art therapy class at a nursing home. Bruce said, “We should be paying for her opinion. She’s an expert, you know.”
    “We’ll pay her with old dresses!” Gracie said. “She can take Zilla’s cotillion dress. It’s still up in the closet. Remember the yellow one, with the shoulder pads? Oh, it was ghastly! I told you at the time.”
    Something came to a boil inside Zee’s head, some irrational sibling rivalry she’d never had to develop skills for dealing with. She did not need a yellow silk dress from an arcane ritual she’d been forced through at age fifteen, even if Greg Stiefler had kissed her in that same dress on the lawn of the Chippeway Club. “You can’t give away my dress,” she said.
    Bruce said, “I thought you were for the redistribution of goods to the proletariat!”
    “Where did you get this?” Miriam asked. She rested the frame on her lap, squinting down at the corner, running a finger over the paint. She pulled her curls back.
    Gracie said, “I believe it’s left from the colony. There you go, Doug! Something from the colony!”
    “It could be . . .” Miriam said. It obviously pained her to be critical. “This person might have had some natural skill, but no training. The perspective is off.”
    Case squinted over her shoulder. “Isn’t that what the modernists did?”
    “Well, not like this . I’m just saying it’s not likely from the colony.”
    Gracie flushed and took the painting off Miriam’s lap. “Oh,don’t worry, dear. We value your opinion. It’s funny, though. George, Zee’s father, seemed awfully fond of it. And he was an art critic! He must have seen something there. I wouldn’t know one way or the other. Sofia!” Sofia was clearing the sugar and cream. “Can you run to the northwest bedroom, the flowered one, and see if Zilla’s old yellow formal dress is still in the closet?”
    “Oh, please don’t—” Miriam started, but she swallowed her words. Sofia was already