The hidden painting chapter 8

As Cindy turns the last page of the final book by Arthur Waldron, having rented the fourth in the series from Angela, the librarian, she lets out a slow deep breath.

‘Exhilarating!’ she mumbles aloud.

She jumps as she hears a knock on the door, a knock that was unmistakably made by a coffee cup hitting the wood three times. She smiles to herself, satisfied with not only her work to date, but that her work is about to be acknowledged by Jasper when she hands him the finished novel.

She leaps off the comfortable couch and opens the door. She was right. There in front of her is Jasper holding two strong black coffees. As he hands her one, she hands him the book.

The look of surprise that crosses his face brings the satisfaction she was expecting.

‘I finished it!’ she boasts.

‘You are a really, really fast reader!’ Jasper notices, taking the book from her, looking at it in disbelief. ‘I haven’t even finished the first one yet!’ he admits.

‘I’m sorry!’ Cindy smiles with pleasure. ‘It’s just that the storyline that runs through the collection is exhilarating!’ she repeats and begins to ramble. ‘You are not going to believe the things the main character, Dane, gets up to in this last one! You see, in the other three he is the victor, but in this one,’ she points towards the book in Jasper’s hand, ‘in this one, he becomes the perpetrator. I wouldn’t have guessed the plot twists and continuity between the series if I tried!’ She stops for a breath and a sup of the beverage she has come to love. ‘You have to read them in order though!’ she advises, ‘to get the final feeling of betrayal his lover, Skyler, exhibits in just the last chapter alone…wow!’

Jasper looks at Cindy with a furrowed brow. ‘Dane and Skyler get together?’

Cindy drinks more coffee, the third cup she has consumed that morning. ‘Yup!’ she answers.

‘But I thought Dane hates Skyler!’ Jasper looks at Cindy in disbelief.

‘You have to read more pal!’ Cindy smiles. ‘I said to myself three quarters of the way through that Arthur was undoubtably going to write a fifth, that was until,’ she takes a big gulp of coffee this time, ‘not until the second last chapter!’

‘Do you think he wrote the ending after his diagnosis?’ Jasper asks, referring of course to the cancer that eventually killed Arthur.

‘Undoubtably!’ she answers and drains the cup.

‘How many of these have you had?’ Jasper asks, smiling at Cindys dedication, glad it was her he picked to be his assistant.

‘Three this morning, this being my third. Why?’

‘Did you have any last night?’ Jasper can’t take the goofy grin off of his face.

‘Oh, well, you know!’ Cindy shrugs. ‘I was halfway through the book and then something made me read another chapter when I knew I had to stick with it!’ she says in one breath. ‘Why?’ she asks again.

‘You are just all jittery is all!’ Jasper answers. ‘When was the last time you slept?’

Cindy swaps her empty coffee cup for the untouched one in Jasper’s hand and drinks it in one go.

‘Well, Mr, since you’re only on book one, and now I have this newfound energy, I’d better log it in the system to catch you up before you write your first draft of the biography!’

‘You do know it isn’t due for another two months?’ Jasper informs Cindy.

She stops dead, like a statue, and shakes her head emphatically. ‘That is new information to me, but the early bird catches the worm and all, so I’m going to summarise all four books for you, but I still think you are better off reading each and every one of them yourself!’

Cindy smiles a smile of relief. Had she known she had two months for the job, which was two more than she thought she had to find the painting, she tries to feel relieved, but the caffeine in her system won’t let her. ‘You are going to have one magnificent biography when we’re done!’ she smiles, a smile that quickly turns into a frown. She gives Jasper back the second cup and runs to the bathroom, making it just in time before her bladder bursts, as he’s left literally juggling cups.

Once back at the office, Jasper has disappeared so she sits herself down on the black, swivel chair, and turns on the computer. She finds herself able to distinguish not only the plot lines between the books from memory, but details that otherwise would have been overlooked.

As she was thinking back to her youth, she remembered how she was always asked if she had and eidetic memory as she could recall almost any of the information she read or heard from the teachers at school faster than any other student in her class. Her mother explained to her, when she was in the hospital, that when she was younger, her memory was tested. It turns out that Cindy does have an eidetic memory! She just didn’t know about it until a few weeks ago. She always wondered how she could hardly study and get excellent grades. That to her was a form of closure, and, as she sits at her desk, she intends to use her skill to write the best damned notes she can muster.

‘Jasper Ramirez is going to have a bestseller, even if I have to write it myself!’ she smiles as she begins to type.

 

As she finds herself losing her train of thought, Cindy goes to the kitchen for more coffee. She quickly see’s the pot is empty and begins to brew a fresh one. As the coffee maker does its thing, Cindy sits at the island and looks in awe at the high spec appliances.

‘This room alone has been fitted out magnificently!’ she says to herself.  

After studying the appliances in front of her, she turns in the bar stool and has to catch her jaw from dropping when she notices for the first time a big bunch of keys on the grand, mahogany dining table. She gets up slowly and stares in the direction of the door. She then listens out to try to see if she can hear Jasper in the labyrinth of hallways between his office and the kitchen.

When she hears his voice becoming louder, him obviously talking on the phone and making his way towards her, she turns her attention back to the coffee pot.

‘You said you’d give me three months!’ Jasper says on the phone when he enters the room. ‘Yes I am making headway, but I still don’t see how I can have a whole biography done in the remaining two months!’ he says waving his free hand.

Jasper nods towards Cindy. She notices that his eyes roll and he begins to make a motion of a mouth opening and closing with his free hand as he dances from foot to foot.

Cindy points towards the coffee machine and Jasper nods his head, mouthing the words, ‘thank you!’ She pours him a cup and hands it to him. He swallows the first sip and begins to argue down the phone with who, Cindy thought, to be his publisher.

As he walks away, Cindy quickly and stealthily takes the keys and puts them in her jean pocket. A pang of guilt hits her as she is officially breaking the trust Jasper offered her the day he handed her the Minnie Mouse keyring. She takes a deep breath in and closes her eyes, a picture of her dead mother in the coffin filling her head. She nods to herself and pours yet another coffee, repeating, ‘it was my mother’s dying wish!’ over and over again.

As she meanders through the halls to her childhood playroom, she enters the drastically changed decor and closes the door behind her, hearing the click that indicates it is now locked. She stands with her back to the door, and keeps repeating, ‘it was my mother’s dying wish!’

She begins to hyperventilate as she sits back down in front of the computer, but catches herself before it becomes unmanageable.

‘The least I can do is make this biography brilliant for him!’ she says, as her breathing regulates itself again, taking a sup of the caffeine filled beverage and types like the wind.

 

Three hours later, as she is still typing, but hasn’t posted any of her work so far. The computer ‘dings’. She didn’t know what the ‘ding’ meant until she got a little message in the bottom right hand corner telling her Jasper had posted some notes.

Cindy finishes the paragraph that she is working on and then saves the whole thing making the computer ‘ding’ again.

As she tries to find where the notes would be on the system, one which she still feels is a little overcomplicated, she just exits the whole thing and enters it freshly. From there she can see Jaspers notes. She notices its his summary of the first book, with ideas of what he is going to take from it in the adjacent margin.

She recognises that he made the connection she informed him about days before about the similarities between Wakerley and Summersbe. She smiles because that proves to her, she is an asset! She puts one hand in the air smiling, closes her eyes, and nods. To her this is a win!

Cindy can see from Jaspers notes that he was trolling Wikipedia again. The last sentence written in the margin is, ‘would it aid the biography to have a proper website?’ She, having little experience with computers begins to pray it didn’t mean she would have to learn how to code!

A knock wraps quickly on the door three times. Cindy gets up to let Jasper, who seems, as she must have earlier in the day, to be edgy.

‘Did you read it? What did you think? Be honest with me here!’ he blurts out without taking a breath.

‘You’re not asking me to learn how to make a website, are you?’ she answers with a grimace.

Jasper sits on the couch, the cushions still askew from that morning. ‘Not at all!’ he says emphatically. ‘I have a guy for that!’

‘Don’t you think that if there was a website where readers could find all the information they wanted on Arthur, that they wouldn’t buy the biography?’ Cindy wonders aloud.

Jasper puts a hand to his stubbly chin, and begins to caress the short, patchy hair. ‘I didn’t think of it like that!’ he says and grabs a cushion, holding it as you would a new-born.

‘Hey,’ he directs towards Cindy and asks, ‘are you hungry?’

‘Hungry?’ she asks thinking it to be eleven or twelve o’clock.

‘It is half three,’ he points out with a furrowed brow. ‘I can’t help but notice you are only running on coffee, and I think a bit of sustenance would jog both our braincells.’ He begins to smile, his dimple showing, ‘we could think of it as our first business meeting!’ He tilts his head to the side, resting it on the cushion.

‘I could eat!’ Cindy replies, returning his smile.

 

The first ever official, ‘meeting of the mind of Arthur Waldron!’, begins as the pair dig into a toasted ham and cheese sandwich. The chatter backwards and forwards is constant, the two of them fully invested in this biography now! For the first time, Cindy feels she could argue with Jasper over some of his ideas, agree with others, and offer her own. The ‘meeting’, turned out to last over an hour. They even make more sandwiches to feed their brains. It only begins to come to a close when Cindy yawns.

‘Sleep catching up with ya?’ Jasper asks before yawning himself.

‘I think so!’ Cindy admits.

Jasper surprises her by washing up, not allowing her to leave her seat. Whether he was trying to impress her, or it’s a regular occurrence for him, she doesn’t know, but full of gratitude nonetheless.

When the kitchen is so clean, you could lick it and taste disinfectant, Jasper pats down his pockets. Cindy can feel her face begin to get flush.

‘Hey,’ he says, ‘you haven’t seen a bunch of keys anywhere, have you?’

Cindy can do nothing but shake her head, her hand automatically going to her jeans pocket.

Jasper announces that he was leaving to interview someone, and Cindy announces she’s going to take a nap. ‘After all, what’s a pull out couch for if you don’t use it!’ she says with a friendly smile.

In Cindy’s head, she sees this to be an opportunity to open the attic hatch, but Jasper keeps frantically looking for the keys.

‘Can I help?’ Cindy offers.

‘I have a spare set in the garage!’ Jasper declares clicking his fingers as if it is a new thought.

He exits the kitchen through the garage, a new addition since Cindy lived there. She waits eagerly at the kitchen table, praying he would find them, and she would get the chance to try the ones that are burning a hole in her pocket.

‘Eureka!’ Jasper yells.

‘He must have found them so!’ Cindy thinks and smiles at the thought of granting her mother her dying wish. She is mentally ready to try every key on the large bunch as Jasper interviews this all-important person. She has no idea who they are or how the relate to Arthur Waldron, she just sees an opportunity!

Jasper re-enters the kitchen holding the keys up, and asks, ‘you ready?’

‘Ready?’ Cindy says, her stomach dropping like a ten-ton weight just hit it.

‘Yea,’ Jasper smiles with his perfect teeth, ‘you’re coming with me!’ he says enthusiastically.

‘I was going to take a nap!’ Cindy tries to get out of the offer.

‘But you’re my research assistant!’ Jasper points out. ‘I’d look like a fool to not have you there!’ he adds, ‘you know more about the man than I do and know the all-important questions to ask!’

Cindy groans unbeknownst to herself.

‘C’mon!’ Jasper says in an upbeat tone, ‘road trip!’ he flicks his head towards the car.

Cindy reluctantly says, ‘oh alright. I’m just going to brush my teeth first, is that ok?’

‘Of course,’ Jasper beams at her, ‘but we have to be there in an hour and its at least a forty-five-minute drive!’

Cindy hangs her head; her shoulders stooped and reluctantly gets up off the kitchen chair. As she is exiting the kitchen, she hears Jasper say, ‘go Arthur!’ from behind her. How could she be anything but humbled that he thinks she’s his greatest asset. He didn’t say that, but she heard it between the lines.

She opens the door to her office and hides the set of keys under the narrow space between the bookcase and the hard wood floor. Then she grabs a toothbrush she left on one of the shelves and brushes her teeth in the nearest bathroom, looking in the mirror as she makes sure the bristles hit each and every tooth. Excitement fills her as she realises she is going to interview someone who actually knew the real Arthur Waldron. It will make him a person and not just the author who typed on his laptop and produced a series of books. She has so many questions. As she wipes the rogue toothpaste from the corners of her mouth, she begins to pre-empt the questions she wants to ask.  This excitement overpowers that of finding the painting.

Five minutes later, she meets Jasper in the kitchen with a brand new notepad and pen in her hand. He can see her demeanour has changed because she announces that they are going to plan some of the questions she feels pertinent to the biography…along with some to do with the ending of his last book of course. Jasper is taken aback as she walks out the door with him chanting ‘road trip!’