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all his pictures carefully to see how he did it.
    But Lucas isn’t as crazy about them as I am, and it wasn’t long before she seemed to be more interested in a man who was sitting on a stool with an easel, copying from a big painting called Belshazzar’s Feast, which takes up most of a whole wall at the end of the room. She was trailing along with me, but she kept turning around and looking over at him, obviously trying to see his work. He was sitting just a few inches away from his easel, blocking the view of what he was painting. I kept going around the room looking at one painting after the other and not paying much attention.
    It just so happened that we were standing in front of one of the paintings close to Belshazzar’s Feast and Lucas was still glancing at the guy painting at the easel when all of a sudden this bratty ten-year-old boy breaks away from the school group he’s with, comes up really close to the man, and tries to peek between him and the canvas he’s working on. Lucas says the painter actually reached out and shoved the kid away. My back was turned so I didn’t see it, but I heard what he said to the kid plain as day.
    You guessed it. He snarled, “Go a-way.”
    I turned around. In fact, I probably spun around. I could only see the side of the man’s head, but he must have been giving the boy the world’s dirtiest look, because the kid was moving backward across the room, his eyes huge, like he was scared.
    My heart was pounding about twice as fast as usual, and I felt like my face had turned bright red. For some reason I had the feeling that Lucas and I had to get out of there before the man turned around and recognized us from when he’d seen us in Minneapolis.
    I did almost the same thing I’d done when we’d been there with him in the Art Institute. Trying to seem as cool as I could, I walked over, grabbed tight on Lucas’s arm, and pulled until she started walking with me out of the room.
    Once out, Lucas wanted to stop, but I kept walking, holding on to her arm and almost dragging her until, halfway through the next room, she gave up and fell into step beside me.
    â€œWhat are you doing?” she said. “Where are you going?” But I didn’t answer her. I didn’t even look at her. I just walked fast, zigzagging through a bunch of rooms of paintings until I figured that if the guy left the Rembrandt room for any reason, there was no way he was going to find us. Then I dropped onto a bench in the middle of a very crowded and noisy gallery, and Lucas sat down beside me.
    â€œIt’s him,” I said.
    â€œHim who?” “Him who?”
    â€œHim the man we saw in the Art Institute painting the Lucretias. Remember? I went up to look at his easel and he said, ‘Go a-way,’ just like that guy just did. We called him Gallery Guy.”
    First Lucas looked blank, and then all of a sudden her face changed.
    â€œGallery Guy! I remember now,” she said. “He did sound the same. But he doesn’t look the same. Didn’t the man in the Art Institute have gray hair?”
    I nodded. “Back then he didn’t look anything like he does now. He had a gray ponytail. And I’m almost sure he didn’t wear glasses. And when he was in Minneapolis he was wearing something scruffy, like an old flannel shirt and jeans.” The guy we’d just seen had slicked-back dark hair, a dark beard, and a mustache. He wore a nice black shirt tucked into black trousers, loafers, and trendy glasses. The one thing the two men had in common was that they both had broad shoulders and looked like they’d be tall if they stood up.
    â€œIt must be a coincidence,” Lucas said.
    I looked at the gazillion people milling around near our bench and lowered my voice. “What do you think the chances are that two totally different men would be copying paintings by the same artist, and when someone went up to