“Thank you for this,” she said, opening it to the first page.
I watched in fascination as she drew the front facade of the museum, complete with the tourists without reservations waiting in the standby line.
She turned her chair and turned the page, sketching another view from where we sat. Soon, she had five pages filled.
“May I see?”
“They’re just sketches,” she said but handed me the book anyway.
“What is this?” I asked, pointing to something I’d noticed she put at the top of each page. It looked like a gradient.
“It’s the balance of light to dark values.”
I nodded as though I understood what that meant and studied her drawings. “These alone are good, I can’t imagine how it will look when you paint it.”
“I’m not that good, Ben. You might want to lower your expectations.”
She took the book from my hands and filled several more pages. I almost didn’t want to tell her it was time for us to go into the museum.
18
Tara
I put the sketchbook back in my bag and stood to follow Ben to the entrance of the Accademia. I’d walked a few steps when the hair on the back of my neck stood up. I looked across the street, expecting to see Brand. I didn’t, but the person I saw instead was definitely watching me. Even when my eyes met his, he didn’t look away. Nor did he smile.
Like Ben, the man was very muscular, so much so that his clothes strained against his bulk. I reached for Ben’s arm and tucked mine through it.
Instead of looking at me, he looked across the cobbled road, perhaps sensing someone watching us like I had. He put his hand on my waist and moved me so I was walking on the other side of him, farther from the man whose gaze still had not wavered. Not only that, he began walking too, in the same direction we were.
Ben ducked me into the next shop door we came to. I peeked around him and saw that the man kept walking. He moved me to his side, and I watched him rest his hand on something.
“Is that a gun?” I whispered.
“Shh.” He looked over his shoulder, and I did the same. No one appeared to be paying any attention to us.
After a couple of minutes, we went back out and continued our walk toward the museum, only this time, he had me tucked against his side.
“Why do you have a gun?” I asked.
His eyes scanned our surroundings. “I told you the work I do is investigative.”
Not long after I’d been kidnapped, I thought about getting a permit to carry a gun, but had never followed through with it. Right now, I wished I had.
Yesterday, when we entered the Museo di San Marco, I hadn’t been paying attention to Ben when he stopped and talked with one of the security guards. Today I did.
“What did you show him?” I asked when he walked over to where I stood waiting.
“My carry permit.”
He led me over to the elevator and down to the first floor where the Giovanni da Milano and the late fourteenth century rooms were located. It wasn’t a place most visitors of the museum ever went. The focus here was on the techniques employed by artists like da Milano, Michaelangelo, and Cennino.
We spent almost three hours in the Accademia, both of us—or at least me—trying to fo
rget about the man we saw before we came in. There was something so sinister about him that I couldn’t shake the feeling that overcame me when my eyes met his.
While Ben had said the work he did was investigative, it wasn’t an explanation nor did it assuage my fear.
“How much of an inconvenience would it be if we returned to Valentini tonight?” I asked when we were nearing the museum’s exit. “I’d be more than willing to cover the cost of the room.”