Chapter 7
Chapter Seven
Nantucket Island
When the news of the mural had initially broken, she’d called Lucia Colombo immediately, eager to hear how she wanted to cover her tracks on this.
But Lucia didn’t answer. Julia called her hotel and even drove over there with Charlie, only to be told that Lucia had checked out earlier that evening.
It was by then too late to call her lawyer, Susan Sheridan, but Nicole was wide awake and on high alert, saying exactly what Julia was thinking—that this was proof they could sue Lucia and get some of their money back.
But they had to find Lucia first. They didn’t want to admit that this seemed harder than it should be.
When Julia finally got up the nerve to head home for the night, supposedly to get some rest, Alana and Ella scooped her into a big hug and told her everything would be fine.
“Hold on tight,” Ella said. “It’s going to be uphill from here.”
“But we’ll be with you every step of the way,” Alana reminded her.
“And me,” Charlie said, smiling as he opened the door for her, ready to drive her home.
Julia slept fitfully that night, tossing and turning until she got up and researched more about the brand-new CAT mural in Paris.
It was located just a few blocks from where the original CAT mural still stood, and it overwhelmed so many imaginations around the world.
Articles were being published everywhere, speculating.
Headlines read: Proof that the Real CAT Doesn’t Approve of the Fake Memoir?
Why Has CAT Been Quiet for Three Years? Where is CAT?
Is CAT Ready to Come Forward? Numerous outlets were offering CAT hundreds of thousands to reveal her true self and tell her side of the story.
But there wasn’t a peep out of CAT herself, wherever she was.
Was she still in Paris? Did she always take off after painting a mural?
When it hit eight in the morning, Susan Sheridan called Julia instead of the other way around. Julia’s adrenaline spiked. She rubbed the sleep from her eyes and answered.
“What a night you had,” Susan said, her voice bright but intellectual, ready for anything.
“I don’t even know how to start something like this,” Julia admitted.
“This other CAT, this Lucia Colombo,” Susan began, “do you know where she is?”
“She checked out of her hotel. She might be off the island. I don’t know.”
“But it’s her real name, isn’t it? You have that on her at least,” Susan said. “It means she can’t get too far if she tries to travel.”
“How do I find someone like this? A private detective? What?” Julia’s thoughts ran in circles.
“She committed a crime,” Susan reminded her.
“I mean, she wrote a book. It isn’t illegal to write a book,” Julia said, standing up and pacing the kitchen. She could feel Charlie’s eyes on her from the corner, where he nursed a cup of coffee and read the same news she’d been up all night burning through.
“But she advertised that book as non-fiction. She impersonated someone and tried to capitalize on it,” Susan said.
“But CAT isn’t a real person, per se. Is she?” Julia took a breath. “I can’t help but feel stupid. Like, I didn’t check all my boxes. Like I got too excited and ran with something.”
“I checked up on her, too, remember?” Susan said. “Whoever Lucia Colombo is, she’s smart. She knew how to create a story with very few and very small holes.”
Susan told Julia not to feel stupid and to hang on tight. But Julia couldn’t help but feel out of her mind with grief, watching as more and more preorders were canceled and her publishing house was demonized. This wasn’t how she’d imagined her career going.
Due to the chaos of the book launch and her inability to make any big moves, Julia went back to The Copperfield House that afternoon to be with family.
Her son, Henry, was there, drinking iced tea with Greta on the back porch, while his girlfriend, Madeline, played piano on Bernard’s grand.
It was a pleasant and dreamy sound that brought tears to Julia’s eyes.
Greta tried to force her to eat lunch, but chewing felt laborious.
Julia felt she was nursing a broken heart.
It reminded her of that time three years ago, when her husband had left her to take a job in China and she’d fled to Nantucket. She thought her grief was over.
Henry and Madeline had many ideas about what she should do next. Because they were in their twenties, every option seemed valid and almost exciting, for them at least.
“You should go to Paris and find her,” Madeline said.
“Or Positano,” Henry suggested, eating a slice of toast. “You should ask around about Lucia and see if anyone knows who the real CAT might be.”
“Yeah!” Madeline cried. “Maybe she’s still there. Perhaps Lucia is her enemy or something. Maybe she painted another mural to teach Lucia a lesson in the midst of her ‘big reveal’?”
“So much drama.” Greta put her hands on her hips.
“Italians are dramatic.” Madeline giggled.
“But that drama’s why we’ve gotten so much of the world’s greatest art,” Henry pointed out. “Da Vinci. The Godfather !”
“Those are your two great examples?” Madeline teased.
Henry shrugged. “I’m a screenwriter! I’m supposed to love The Godfather .”
Eventually, Julia found herself where she felt most comfortable in her father’s study, watching as he smoked a cigar out the window and toward the pink clouds of sunset.
Somehow, an entire day had passed. She was telling her father that she’d reported her interest in Lucia Colombo to the police, but they’d told her that Lucia hadn’t yet left the island, at least not through any available ferries.
That didn’t mean she hadn’t left via a private sailboat.
“I feel hopeless, Dad,” she told him, slumping over in her chair.
Bernard arched a white eyebrow and puffed his cigar. “You have to remember your other writers, your other clients,” he said. “You have to keep going for them. They’re relying on you.”
What Julia couldn’t tell her father (another of her clients) was that if she had to return every single preorder for A Journey into the Night , the publishing house might not recover.
“Keep hustling,” her father said. “Find a few new clients this week. Don’t let yourself grovel. It’s all we Copperfields can do. Remember?”
But at that moment, there was a knock on the door, forcing Julia from her downtrodden reverie. Bernard called, “Come in!” and Henry and Madeline burst through the door, waving their phones.
“She’s singing karaoke at The Rusty Nail!” Madeline cried.
“It went live fifteen minutes ago,” Henry said. “People are posting it, saying it’s Lucia Colombo. It’s her, isn’t it?”
Julia leaped up and checked to see that, yes, in fact, the woman howling Coldplay’s “Fix You” on The Rusty Nail’s stage was in fact Lucia Colombo, who seemed too drunk to know that so many people were filming her and reporting her status online.
It meant that Julia had to hurry before Lucia got the hint and fled.
Charlie was busy, working long hours at the woodworking studio, which meant that Henry and Madeline were Julia’s partners in crime this time.
Julia drove them away from The Copperfield House and all the way to the bar near the port, where cars were parked at odd angles.
Finally, she found a spot on the outskirts of the lot.
Her heartbeat was like a bird in her neck.
They scrambled out of the car and headed for the bar.
But when they entered, a middle-aged woman in a dark red dress was on stage, singing Billy Joel. Her voice was like a car alarm.
“Let’s split up,” Henry suggested.
“It’s too dangerous,” Julia said, although she did not indicate that Lucia was violent. She scanned the bar, searching, then bolted to the bartender to ask about her. “A woman was singing Coldplay about twenty minutes ago. People were filming her?”
The bartender shook a cocktail and nodded. “She went out the side. She wanted to smoke, I think.”
Julia thanked him and hurried into the dark beside the bar, feeling Henry and Madeline behind her.
She suddenly regretted having brought them.
Never in her life had she put her son in a situation like this.
Then again, he was in his twenties, living part-time in Los Angeles and working in the movie business, so he’d probably seen crazier things.
When she reached the doorway, she stopped short to see Lucia Colombo in conversation with three very tall and powerful-looking men. Henry tried to skirt past her, but something about those men, how they hulked over Lucia, made Julia force him back. “Hold it,” she muttered under her breath.
Although the men and Lucia were about fifteen feet away, Julia could just barely make out the fact that they weren’t speaking English.
Nor were they speaking Italian. There was something fishy about their conversation, something about the way the men spoke to Lucia that made Julia think that they were in control of her.
Julia wanted to run over and ask Lucia if she was all right, but she also didn’t want to call attention to herself.
Suddenly, one of the guys grabbed Lucia’s shoulder and tugged her toward the road. Julia flinched forward, reaching for her phone to call the cops. But that gave Henry the opportunity to run forward and call out, “Hey, Lucia! Stop!” The three men and Lucia turned and gazed at them, frightened.
“Henry!” Julia cried out. “Stop!”
But Henry was brash and confident and too young to care. He bolted up to Lucia and the men and said, “Hey, we know you’re not the real CAT. You need to explain yourself. You need to say why you took advantage of Julia Copperfield’s publishing house!”
Julia realized that he was filming the entire thing on his phone. Genius , she thought.
But that was when one of the guys reared his fist back and punched Henry in the face. Julia was stricken, racing toward Henry to tend to him. It gave the guys and Lucia enough time to race along the street and disappear in a dark car.
When Julia and Madeline reached Henry, he was laughing. Julia’s face was painted with tears. “Henry, are you all right?”
But Henry was already back on his feet. “I got them on camera, Mom,” he said, showing the video. “I got all four of them. We’re going to find them.”
They listened to the squeal of the black SUV’s tires as it whipped away from the bar and out of sight.
En route to the police station, Henry, Madeline, and Julia tried to speculate about why the men had taken Lucia away in that manner.
“It looked like they were angry with her about something,” Madeline observed. “Maybe they saw the karaoke video and couldn’t believe she’d revealed herself like that?”
Julia thought that was fascinating. “Do you think Lucia is a puppet?”
“Maybe!” Henry cried, snapping his fingers. “They realized she fit the bill, that she was from the same place as the real CAT and had a similar backstory.”
“I still think Lucia might know the real CAT,” Madeline said, her voice filled with suspicion.
At the station, they talked with a cop named Jeff Magnum.
He appreciated the video but didn’t recognize any of the people involved, save for Lucia Colombo, who, by now, everyone knew.
He attempted to use an online service to pair the faces of the men with others in their system, but he had no success.
“The system isn’t always foolproof,” he explained, “especially when it comes to men and facial hair and dark shadows and so on.”
“But they’re still on the island. I mean, they have to be?” Julia said hopefully.
The cop looked at her. “People can get off and on this island in countless ways. It’s imperfect. But we can hope.”
The cop sent out images of the four people to every hotel in Nantucket, as well as to every police officer stationed around the island. At first, he told them that they were four Italians, but Henry corrected him. “They weren’t speaking Italian,” he said. “I think it was Russian.”
“Are you sure about that?” the cop asked.
“It was definitely an Eastern European language,” Henry said, his face suddenly filled with doubt. “But it definitely wasn’t Italian.”
Julia bit her tongue to keep from asking, Do you only know what Italian sounds like because of The Godfather ? That kind of mindset wouldn’t help anyone right now.