Brush With Death Read Online Free Page B

ten-foot wall to spend a night in a cemetery would never have occurred to me, and not just because I was decidedly less athletic than my twenty-four-year-old assistant. I had spent a memorable, miserable seventeenth birthday in a Parisian jail, and most of my adult life had been focused on distancing myself from my grandfather Georges LeFleur’s world of felonious forgers. I was still recovering from an incident last Thanksgiving when, through almost no fault of my own, I had been busted for smuggling drugs. I gave the police a wide berth these days.
    â€œMary, the cemetery people don’t want strangers traipsing around the grounds at night. You never know what could happen.”
    â€œYou’re such a wuss, Annie.”
    â€œI am not a wuss!”
    â€œYes, you are. But that’s one of the things I love about you.”
    â€œMary, I’m serious—”
    â€œFear not, dear friend and employer,” she said, gathering the foil wrapper and napkins to sort for the recycling bin. “I’ll bring Dante with me.” Dante was Mary’s very large, very scary-looking boyfriend.
    â€œPromise?”
    â€œPromise.”
    â€œAll right. But for the record, I think it’s a bad idea.”
    â€œSo noted, Ms. Law-and-Order.”
    Now, that made me smile. “Be sure to bring a sleeping bag. It gets cold in Oakland at night.”
    â€œI’ll put it on the list, right after vino and smokes,” Mary said.
    â€œGarlic and a crucifix.”
    â€œA squirt gun filled with holy water.”
    â€œA revolver with silver bullets. And don’t forget the wooden stakes.”
    â€œWould a paintbrush work?”
    â€œJust don’t use the Russian sable. A hog’s hair brush ought to be good enough for your average ghoul.”
    We laughed and retraced our steps to the Chapel of the Madonna, picked up our palettes, and settled in to work.
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The half-moon “lunettes” we were restoring were painted in the manner of the early Renaissance, featuring a bevy of angels surrounding a flock of wooly lambs. In the background a da Vinci-style landscape with a curving river, a rise of sandy bluffs, and a faraway medieval town were crowned by an azure sky with wispy clouds and soaring birds.
    The murals had been painted on canvas and attached with strong wallpaper adhesive. Water leaking through the plaster had detached the canvas in spots, trapping the moisture and creating an ideal environment for mold and decay. Mary and I had begun by laboriously removing the canvas from the walls, taking care not to stretch the weave. We dug out the damaged plaster, applied a stucco patch, and sealed the area with a water-impermeable shellac primer. Next we removed the adhesive from the backs of the murals. This was the trickiest step, and I was relieved to discover that the lunettes had been applied with “milk glue,” which was not uncommon in old installations. The casein in milk curds is made into glue and used in many household paints. Although the milk glue rendered the canvas vulnerable to decay, it was easy to strip off with water and a mild soap.
    Parts of the canvas of both murals were unsalvageable, and so, using a sharp-edged razor, we had cut along the natural divisions of the painting so that when we patched the holes with new canvas and repainted, the seams would be invisible. In areas where the paint had bubbled up or flaked off but the canvas remained intact, we scraped off all shreds of the old paint. We next glued the lunettes back onto the walls, allowing the heavy-duty wallpaper paste to dry thoroughly. The prep work completed, Mary and I started applying the underpainting. Only then could we move on to the fun part: filling in the areas where the original paint and gold gilt were stained, faded, or had flaked off altogether.
    While we painted I told Mary the romantic legend of La Fornarina. She insisted on referring to the woman in the painting as