Framed by Nikki Andrews Page B

She agreed to take some photos before, during, and after cleaning off the red stuff. Sue already had done photos before and during the cleaning, as a matter of course. It was often stunning to see the differences between a soiled piece of art and the cleaned one. Customers liked to keep a copy of the “before” picture for themselves.
    After admiring the cleaning job Sue had done, Elsie kept thinking she had seen the painting before. That was impossible, of course. Ginny’s research proved it had hung in a bar on Cape Cod for years. Elsie seldom went to the Cape and wouldn’t have gone to a bar if she did. And even if she’d gone to a bar, she wouldn’t have paid much attention to a nude since she didn’t care for them.
    The rest of the day was taken up with the normal tasks of the business. Elsie worked on the newspaper framing and got caught up in the old headlines. Her own memories of the Nixon’s resignation in 1974 were rather vague. She’d been busy raising a family back then and didn’t have much interest in politics. Even now her natural reserve meant she seldom expressed her opinions about what was going on in the world, although she knew she held very different views from Sue’s. One of the underpinnings of their relationship was not needing to discuss their differences in the political arena.
    She and Sue speculated a little bit about the Berger as they worked. They had no more doubts as to its authorship, so they ruminated on its value. They wondered how much the Rudolphs had paid for it at auction, and if they would permit prints to be made of it. Sue claimed she wanted a print to commemorate their part in its recovery.
    “I wonder if it has a name?” Elsie mused.
    They toyed with that idea for a while, proposing titles from the somber to the silly. Woodsy Woman? Abby’s Ass? Dame au Naturel? Frog Pond? Pink Lady on the Rocks? Cap’n Billy’s Broad? In the end, they accepted that the heirs, Jerry’s brother and sister, would claim naming rights, although they might take suggestions from Jenna and Bob Rudolph. Still, it was fun to think about.
    ****
    “I wonder why Jemmie had such a reaction to the painting,” Sue said later, as she was pinning a piece of counted cross stitch.
    “Didn’t he say she was a customer of his?”
    “Yeah, and Ginny said Mike was, too. He started buying Abby’s jewelry from Jemmie, and then she came over here, and came into Brush & Bevel. That’s how she met Jerry. Did you know him, Elsie?”
    Elsie stored the newspaper project in the bin where they kept matted items until their frames come in. She wrote the frame moulding number and the dimensions on the order form for the proper vendor while she thought about Sue’s question. “Not very well. I only started working here, oh, about a year before he died. He was nice enough. Ginny liked him a lot. He was kind of a flirt.”
    “Really? Did he flirt with you?”
    “Oh, a little. Not really a flirt, just a guy who liked to talk. Once you got him started on his work, you couldn’t shut him up. He’d go on all day about it. One time he and Bert Boucher were here at the same time, and you should have heard them! Bert’s an artist, too, you know, and they just went on and on about different kinds of paint, and they argued about giclées. They were just coming out back then, and the ink wasn’t very stable, but the colors were so good a lot of artists put up with it for the sake of the color.”
    “Funny how things work. Now they’re telling us giclées are good for at least two hundred years. And they sure do look good.”
    Elsie agreed. “Now if they can just figure out how to make digital photos with a stable finish, that would be great.”
    “There was a guy in yesterday who said he knows of a giclée printer that can print up to two feet by three feet. I almost asked him about the finish, but he’s a new customer and I didn’t want to overwhelm him. If he ever brings a piece in—” Sue broke off,