Brush With Death Read Online Free

magic.
    â€”Philip Guston (1913-1980), Canadian painter
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If art is but illusion, why is art forgery a crime?
    â€”Georges LeFleur
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“Did you get lost again ?”
    Perched on ten-foot scaffolding in front of a half-circular lunette mural, my assistant Mary Grae held three paintbrushes in one hand and a smeared paint palette in the other, and cradled a cell phone to her ear with her shoulder. She interrupted her phone conversation to shout at me as I walked through the Chapel of the Madonna’s carved stone Gothic archway.
    â€œYou said you’d be right back! I was totally freaking out!”
    â€œKeep it down, Mare,” I said, cringing as her voice bounced off the tiled floor and stained glass ceiling. For some reason—I’m sure a physicist could explain it, though I’d probably get bored halfway through—sound was magnified within the columbarium’s alcoves but became lost or distorted around corners. Thus the tinkling of the garden fountains could be heard throughout the cloisters, but Mary and I had once gotten separated and couldn’t find each other even though it turned out we were in chambers only a few yards apart.
    Mary snapped her cell phone shut, set down her paint and brushes, and scampered down the scaffolding, landing light as a cat. “You left me here surrounded by dead people!”
    â€œThey’re not dead people,” I corrected. “They’re ashes. A bone fragment or two at the most.”
    â€œEeeeew. But they used to be people, right? And they’re dead now, right?”
    Busted on a technicality. The rooms of the columbarium were lined with thousands of small compartments that, to an apartment-dweller like me, resembled nothing so much as glass-fronted mailboxes. Each compartment held urns or decorative containers—some were ornamented ceramic vases, others were bronze cast in the shape of a book, as in “the story of one’s life”—that stored the cremains. Here and there larger and more richly decorated “feature niches,” glassed in on two sides, created windows between the alcoves.
    The labyrinthine floor plan of the Chapel of the Chimes Columbarium had been designed to create a series of intimate spaces, each unique and elaborately adorned, to allow family and friends to visit their lost loved ones and reminisce in solitude. Alcoves and passageways branched off into more alcoves and passageways, some opening onto cloistered hallways or courtyard gardens, others leading to dead ends. When I first started working here I spent twenty minutes at the beginning of each painting session wandering around, turning this way and that, ducking down one blind alley after another until stumbling, seemingly at random, upon the Chapel of the Madonna, where Mary and I were restoring two water-damaged lunettes. I now had the route memorized, and only took a wrong turn when distracted.
    â€œThis place is creepy,” Mary said, pawing through her backpack until she found a foil-wrapped burrito.
    â€œThis place is beautiful. It’s also a great commission. And you shouldn’t eat in here.”
    â€œThat manager guy, Troy Whoozits, said I could.”
    â€œHis name’s Roy, not Troy, and he only said that because he thinks you’re cute.”
    She shrugged. “He’s kinda creepy too.”
    â€œNo, he’s not,” I said, wondering why I was arguing. The columbarium’s manager, Roy Cogswell, was kind of creepy. “Let’s take your burrito into the garden, okay?”
    Our footsteps tapped down the tiled halls until we reached a courtyard garden complete with a gurgling fountain, miniature palm trees, and a birdcage with two sleeping canaries. Three stories above us stars twinkled through the retractable glass roof. On nice days you could sit by the fountain, listen to the birds sing, enjoy a pleasant breeze from above, and imagine yourself in a sunny courtyard in the