Page 90 of The Christmas Spirits on Tradd Street
I found myself clenching my jaw and forced myself to relax. Ignoring the text, I said, “I was thinking that maybe you could convert the three patterns to the same dimensions and see if putting them together means something.”
“Great idea, Melanie. And I’ll absolutely do that. I’ll keep you posted—and do the same with whatever Nola’s discovered, too, all right?”
“Deal.” I hit the disconnect button, then found myself detouring my way back to Tradd Street, the short distance taking forever because of all the one-way streets not going the one way I needed to.
When I pulled into the driveway, I immediately texted the photo to Anthony, then raced inside the house. Nola met me in the foyer and began pulling me back toward the kitchen. “I thought we’d work on the dining room table, but Mrs. Houlihan said you’d probably blow a gasket if we messed up any of your table settings for the party.”
She dragged me through the kitchen door before I could defend myself, which was a good thing, since Mrs. Houlihan was probably right.
“Jack!” I said in surprise. He sat at the head of the table wearing his pajamas, robe, and slippers, with a thick blanket wrapped around him. A box of tissues sat near his right hand, a wadded tissue shoved in the collar of his pajamas. His hair looked like he’d been stuck in a wind tunnel, and he had three days of stubble on his chin, yet when he grinned at me, my heart beat a little faster and he was still the most devastatingly handsome man I had ever seen.
I raced over to his side of the table, but he held a hand up to block me. “Not too close, Mellie. You can’t get sick, too.”
I looked around the table and noticed how all the chairs were clustered at the other end. I greeted Cooper, then glanced around for Jayne and the children. I was a little addicted to two sets of pudgy arms around my neck and sloppy kisses on my cheeks when I came home each day. Even with the three dogs scurrying around my feet ingreeting, it just wasn’t the same. Still, I bent down to scratch behind each set of ears, spending longer on General Lee because he was the eldest.
“Jayne’s upstairs with the twins, but when they go down for their nap she’ll join us,” Jack said. Despite wanting to see JJ and Sarah, I felt a tiny twist of relief that Jayne wouldn’t be a part of this. I told myself that I would dissect my feelings later. When I had time.
Jack continued. “We were going to have the twins in the kitchen with us on their blanket with their toys and the dogs, but they kept wanting me to hold them. I don’t know who this quarantine is harder on—them or me.”
“It’s pretty hard for me, too,” I said, giving him a meaningful glance.
Nola sighed heavily. “Okay, you two. Can we focus, please?”
I moved to stand behind her while she opened the same art history textbook I recalled seeing her and her two friends with at the wreath workshop. Cooper pulled out a notebook and opened it to a blank page.
Nola began. “So, if you’ll recall, when Dad first gave me those four words to make some sense out of, Cooper and I sat down to try to categorize them, see what they had in common.” She looked around the table, meeting everyone’s gaze, the blue intensity in hers just like her father’s when figuring out a tangled mystery with obscure clues. It’s what he did best, and apparently, he’d passed it on to his older daughter. Maybe his younger daughter, and son, too, but it was too early to tell.
“Melanie?”
I realized Nola had turned around to look at me, while I’d been staring at Jack and thinking about our children. “Yes?”
“Are you with us?”
I nodded. “Of course. Go on.”
“So, Cooper and I made these columns and wrote down adjectives to describe each word and see if we could find any similarities. We did that for days, going over and over the columns, coming up with new words that I wouldn’t even know existed if I hadn’t used Google. Or had been working with someone besides Cooper.”
They shared a glance and Jack frowned. Either he was getting better or his radar where Nola was concerned wasn’t affected by the flu.
Nola continued. “The only thing we noticed was that three of them could be identified with a color—cognac is brown, goldfinch feathers are yellow, and Burgundy wine is often red. But that left us with the kitchen maid. Even back in the seventeen hundreds, they probably came in different colors. It made no sense, so Cooper and I just figured that we were pointed in the wrong direction.”
Dramatically, she picked up the book and held it open for everyone to see, splay backed like a book an elementary school teacher was reading to her students. I recognized the painting showing a woman with a white cloth hat and what appeared to be a clay pitcher pouring milk into a bowl. “This is a famous painting by the Dutch artist Johannes Vermeer. Its official name isThe Milkmaid. But”—she paused for dramatic effect—“perhaps because of what most people think a milkmaid should look like—a young woman out with the cows gathering milk, maybe—the painting is more commonly known as...”
She paused again, but instead of gritting his teeth, Jack smiled. “The Kitchen Maid.”
“Bingo!” Nola’s smile matched her father’s. “I felt really dumb because we’ve been studying Vermeer all semester, so I knew a lot about him, so this should have clicked a long time ago. What wasreallyinteresting and caught my attention finally was his color palette.”
Nola’s arms were drooping from the weight of the book, so Cooper stood and took it from her while I took his vacated seat at the table. “Thank you,” she said, and I hoped Jack couldn’t see the look on her face when she smiled at the young man.
Nola’s brows knitted. “Where was I?”
“Vermeer’s color palette,” Cooper said gently.
“Right. So each painter pretty much had their signature palette. During the seventeenth century, when Vermeer was painting, there were only about twenty pigments available to him, and he chose to work mostly with just seven.” Her smile broadened as she used her indexfinger to indicate the background inThe Milkmaid. “His palette was unusual because of the pigment he used to create shadows on whitewashed walls that were warmer than those created with black pigment used by other artists.”
“And that pigment was...” Cooper announced like a master of ceremonies, and I wondered if I should do a drumroll on the table.
Jack and I stared blankly at Nola and then Cooper, as if waiting for them to turn the page and reveal the answer, because apparently we had no idea.
