A Fatal Frame of Mind

Chapter Seventeen

If Shawn had been disappointed that steel doors didn’t slam down on all the galleries once the alarm went off, he didn’t show it. Maybe that was because he was too busy running.

That course of action made sense for the three of them. They needed to get out of the Oceanic gallery before a squad of security guards arrived to protect the fertility figure.

But it didn’t make a lot of sense for any of the hundreds of museum visitors who were also running as fast as they could for the museum exits. After all, it wasn’t a fire alarm that had gone off, just the theft protection system. But while whoever had designed the museum’s security had installed alarms with substantially different sounds for various kinds of disasters, he’d neglected to include a way to alert the public to the distinction. To an untrained ear the bells ringing throughout the museum might be signaling a raging inferno in the nearest gallery.

And of course, even if that thought had not occurred to them individually, the sight of two young men in tuxedos shouting “Fire!” and racing toward the emergency exits certainly would have put it in many heads. Following their directions, the tourists blasted through doors wired to set off further alarms when opened.

Moving as swiftly and efficiently as any male salmon who hasn’t gotten the memo that the way upstream has been blocked by a new dam, Shawn and Gus led Kitteredge back through the centuries of European paintings until they arrived at the vestibule of the special-exhibitions gallery where The Defence of Guenevere had been installed. The entrance was blocked off by yellow-and-black crime scene tape, but there was no one standing in front of the door.

“Let’s go,” Gus said. “We’ve got to get in and out fast.”

“Fast?” Kitteredge said. “I’m going to need some time with the painting.”

“How much time?” Gus said.

“Ideally a couple of decades,” Kitteredge said. “We’re talking about the solution to a puzzle that has gone unanswered for more than a hundred years.”

“The only way you’re getting decades is if they agree to hang the picture in your cell,” Shawn said. “You’ve got three minutes, tops.”

“Three minutes!” Kitteredge said. “That’s almost worse than nothing.”

“Then we might as well leave now,” Shawn said. “Because it’s not going to take much more than three minutes to clear everyone out of this place. Then they’re going to lock it down and start going room by room to make sure nothing is missing. And since you are technically missing, you really don’t want anyone to find you here.”

Kitteredge looked helplessly to Gus, as if hoping the higher court would overturn the verdict. “If Jean-Francois Champollion had only been able to study the Rosetta Stone for three minutes, he never would have been able to work out the translations between demotic and hieroglyphics.”

“If his choice had been between looking at the stone and spending the rest of his life breaking rocks, I think we both know which way he would have gone,” Gus said.

“But we have something that Champ guy never dreamed of,” Shawn said. He dug in the roomy pocket of his rental pants and pulled out his cell phone. “As the new counter girl at Burger Town said to Gus, take a picture; it will last longer.”

Kitteredge’s face lit up in joy, and Gus was so pleased that Shawn had found a way to answer everyone’s needs that he was willing to ignore the fact that the counter girl had actually been talking to Shawn, and that she had appended an extra word to the end of her sentence that had rendered her photographic suggestion even less friendly.

With Kitteredge clutching the cell phone, they started across the vestibule, heading straight for the crime scene tape. Shawn was just reaching out to push open the glass door when a gruff voice called out from behind them.

“Hey!” the voice said. “You can’t go that way.”

The voice belonged to the uniformed police officer who had been standing guard at the gallery door. And he was marching up to them.