Pretending to Be Erica Read Online Free Page B

sternly.
    I sigh. “Don’t do it, because families help each other without expecting gratitude.”
    Her smile comes back. “It’s just what mothers do.”
    That final sentence echoes in my head as I brush my teeth and then scrub my hair with the fancy shampoo and my body with the loofah that probably cost more than all the secondhand clothes I used to own. I don’t know what mothers do. My real mother, the one who’d birthed me, left me on the steps of a church. She was probably too young to have a kid. The priesthood turned me over to foster care, and Sal picked me up when I was five. I don’t know what
mother
really means. Sal loves me, I guess, but not so deeply, so desperately. I’ve seen movies and stuff, but that sense of longing hasn’t hit me until now. I’ve gotten a taste.
    My bed is cold. The dolls leer down at me from the shelves.
    The plan is simple. It’s not anything as complicated as a will, or having Mrs. Silverman allot me half of the estate. That would be too messy. I’d have to stick around for years to pull off that con, and possibly wait until she died.
    I mince downstairs in my pajamas to get a glass of water. I stop on the last step and stare into the dark library. Mrs. Silverman inherited a very old painting. Sal knew, like all Vegas con men, that Mrs. Silverman created a safe somewhere in the house to hide it. A Japanese collector has offered a huge sum to whoever “acquires” the painting. A buyer meant we wouldn’t have to navigate the black market for a willing fence, and with art, that’s important. A near-priceless original is a viable theft only if you can sell it quickly. We have a buyer. All that’s left is for me to steal the thing.
    It’s called
La Surprise
, an oil-on-wood painting done by Jean-Antoine Watteau in 1718. Sal said it’d been stolen during the French Revolution and then made its way down Mrs. Silverman’s family for years. Maybe her family was too scared to turn it in, or maybe they were waiting to get the maximum money for it. Whatever the case, when Mrs. Silverman inherited the painting, right before Erica was taken, she never documented it on tax papers or house revaluation forms. She wanted to keep its existence a secret.
    She failed.
    Every crook in Vegas knows Mrs. Silverman has the painting, but few know where she keeps it. Most speculate in a bank in Switzerland, or inside one of the heavily guarded vacation houses the Silvermans own. No one thought Mrs. Silverman would keep such a painting in her main house—but that was exactly why no one had found it. Sal, by a stroke of sheer luck, met the man who constructed a vault off the Silverman’s library. Sal bribed him for info. The library is fixed with four closed circuit cameras monitored by Mrs. Silverman’s security all the time. The vault’s encrypted with an eight-digit code comprised of letters and numbers. Only Mrs. Silverman knows the code. Mr. Silverman knows it, but his brain is too scrambled for any chance at reliable extraction. I only have one shot to try the library vault. If I hang around the vault, it’ll raise suspicions. Once is enough to blow my cover. I have to get the correct code beforehand and use it when I make the getaway. I haven’t actively started searching for the code. This code is something I’ll find by listening, not asking. Questions make people suspicious. I need to keep my mouth shut and ears open while I establish myself as the real Erica Silverman. Time is my ally. Just a little more time, and the people in Erica’s life will come to trust me, and with trust, the code will start to take shape.
    The microwave clock spills over into midnight, and the marionette girl walks up the stairs to sleep in her puppet bed in the puppet house, filled with not-puppet people.
    They are made of flesh and blood, and she is made of lies and wood.

3: Stage It
    The small space between my stomach and heart where I keep Violet chained is churning, blades mixing the concrete