Brett had not taken his eyes off the painting behind me, and I knew then that I had been right. I turned the last page face up and laid it on the table beside the empty wine glasses. It was a report, eight pages, stapled, on the letterhead of a private investigator in Albuquerque, and it was dated three weeks before Julian passed. I did not find it in a drawer. I found it two months ago, when I took the last painting of Julian off the easel to frame it for the show. Taped to the back of the canvas, under a layer of brown paper, was this report, and a letter in the hand of my husband.
I read the first line aloud to two hundred people. Brett Hollis, of Scottsdale, was born Brett Kessler. In 2011 he had been convicted in Maricopa County of fraud in the sale of forged paintings, and he served twenty two months. He had changed his name in 2014 and married my daughter in 2016. Julian had paid the investigator in the spring of 2021, after a bad feeling about the man at Thanksgiving dinner. He had said nothing, because he had no proof that Brett was still doing it, and he did not want to break the heart of Celeste. So he hid the report where only I would find it, in the last thing he ever made.
Then I read the letter of Julian. “Marguerite, my love. If you are reading this, then Brett has done what I feared, and I am sorry that I could not save you from it. Do not be ashamed that you trusted him. You are the most generous woman in New Mexico. Call Tomás. Call the lawyer. Then hang my last painting where everyone can see it, and let the light fall on it.” The gallery was so quiet that I heard the mariachi trio stop playing in the courtyard. Celeste had a hand pressed against her mouth. Brett was staring at the floor.
A last painting hung in a gallery gave one widow the evening to bring her daughter back to the truth in Santa Fe.
I gave my terms standing in front of the last painting of my husband, with the lamps of the gallery on my face. “Brett, you will walk out of this room with Detective Salazar, who has been standing in the courtyard all evening, and you will answer for every check and every painting. Celeste, you will not be left alone tonight, and you will not be asked to choose. The gallery stays open. The retrospective runs for six weeks as planned. And every patron here is invited to come back tomorrow, because Julian Delacroix deserves a full house.”
Celeste dropped into a chair and stared at her husband as if she were seeing a stranger. “Brett Kessler,” she whispered. “Is that your name?” She turned to me with a face I had not seen since she was seven and the family dog was hit on Canyon Road. “Mama, Daddy knew. He knew the whole time and he never told me. He kissed me goodbye with that paper behind his painting.” She began to cry in great gulping sobs. “I defended him. I called you confused. I said Daddy would have wanted us to take over. I am so sorry.”
Brett heard the word detective and something cracked in his charming face. He lunged at the painting, grabbing for the report and the frame, as if destroying them might change what had been said. He got both hands on the gilded edge. Then Tomás was there, seventy eight years old and six feet tall, with the shoulders of a sculptor, standing between Brett and the canvas with his arms spread wide. “You will not touch it,” said Tomás, in a voice like a stone door. “Not that one. Never that one.” Four guests took Brett by the arms.
Detective Salazar walked in from the courtyard with two officers, and the guests parted for them like water. Brett did not resist. He looked once at Celeste, and then at the painting, and then he looked away. When the door closed behind him, the gallery began to breathe again. I crossed the room, took the hands of my daughter, and drew her up from the chair and into my arms. We stood together under the last painting of her father, and the mesas on the canvas glowed pink in the lamplight.
The money consequences were clear. Brett was charged with forgery, fraud and the sale of stolen art, and the chain of paintings he had sold in Scottsdale was traced and recovered. The hotel group from Denver honored its agreement and let the gallery stay open. The forty one checks and the one hundred sixty six thousand dollars were returned to the account by the bank, which had approved the forgeries without a second look. The seven million, three hundred thousand dollars from the building stayed in an account in my name alone, and the painting sold in Scottsdale for eighty thousand dollars came home.
In the name of Julian, who passed in 2021, I started the Julian Delacroix Fund. It pays for paint, canvas, studio rent and gallery space for emerging painters in Santa Fe, Rio Arriba and Taos counties. In the first year we supported thirty four artists. One was a young woman of twenty three from Espanola who painted the mesas on the lids of cigar boxes, because she could not afford canvas. When she saw her first full canvas on an easel, she put her hand flat against it as if feeling a pulse.
Celeste stayed with me on Canyon Road. She did not talk much that winter. In the spring, one morning, I found her in the gallery before opening, standing in front of the last painting of her father with a cup of coffee. She had put her hair up. She said she wanted to learn the business, from the bottom, if I would teach her. I handed her a feather duster. She laughed, for the first time in a year, and set to work on the frames, while the sun climbed over the Sangre de Cristo and lit the whole street pink.
