When the Flood Falls. J.E. Barnard

up there for a week.”

      “Those are new ones, by local artists.” If this woman couldn’t tell the difference between a pot fired yesterday and a hundred-year-old painting by a Canadian master, she had no business working in an art museum.

      Dee frowned at the plans. “Round-the-clock security will run into big bucks.”

      “Rent-a-cops make that much?” Lacey leaned forward. “Maybe I should try that after all.”

      “The companies that rent them out make a bundle,” Dee corrected. “The guards don’t. We’d need two shifts per night, two guards per shift, say ten thousand for a week. Hell on the budget. And someone has to set up their routines and check up on them and so on, costing more valuable time. Three days to the opening gala and now this.”

      Jan abandoned the struggle to sit still. She paced to the fireplace and around the sofas over there, shaking her fingers, her words coming almost faster than her brain could keep up with.

      “If we can harden the gallery sufficiently, Rob will need half a day at the storage vault to personally verify each painting’s accession number and make sure it gets onto the truck. Leaving it up to the storage folks risks getting a wrong picture, one that won’t fit in the wall layout or whatever. We can do it. I can help him.”

      Dee looked at her funny but only said, “So what can we do to the gallery? Cameras inside as well as on the doors?”

      “Not enough.” Jan made a second, faster lap of the living room.

      “Cameras and motion sensors?”

      “Nope. Those are the same thing, they record what’s going on but don’t do anything to stop it. There’s gotta be a way. Gotta be a way.”

      “Jan! Sit down. You’re making me dizzy.”

      “Oh, sorry. Wired.” Jan’s voice came out too high, too fast, and she wound it down with an effort. The security woman had that bad-smell look again. “Better call Terry. Get him to take me home.”

      “But we don’t have a gallery plan yet,” Dee pointed out. “Look, sit down and drink your tea. That will calm you.”

      “Calm me. Yes.” Jan sat and sipped her tea, but her brain was still zooming around. Around and around and around. Too bad it couldn’t fly to the top of the hill and back. Maybe a quick pass over the Wyman estate would tire it out. Wyman. Jerking forward, she slopped her tea. “Jake Wyman! He has live wireless monitoring 24-7. How hard would it be to tie in the gallery cameras to his monitoring system for a week?”

      Dee wiped up the spilled tea with a napkin before it reached the building plans. “Lacey?”

      “I don’t know.” Lacey put down her teacup. “I’m too new to this work. But if it could be done, why would he let the museum piggyback on his security system?”

      Jan giggled. “He would do more than that if Dee asked him.”

      Dee gave her a look. “He’s only being friendly. It’s because we’re both newly divorced in this community of couples.”

      “Whatever.” Jan found herself looking right at Lacey for pretty much the first time all night. “Anyway, he will because he has a lot invested in seeing the museum succeed. It’s got two million dollars of his money in it already. Plus he convinced some of his oil buddies to cough up artworks out of their personal collections. Modern hockey art mostly, but there’s a huge Joe Cadot canvas to anchor the north wall, that’s being brought over from some horsey place near Spruce Meadows.” She was talking too fast again. She took another big swallow of tea, wondering if Lacey had ever heard of the self-taught Métis painter who some critics called the prairies’ answer to the whole Group of Seven. Her mind skittered off on a tangent, totting up other prairie painters she’d include in a mythical group. William Kurelek? The Regina Five? But they were abstract artists, not landscape. W.L. Stevenson from Calgary. Who was that other Métis painter? The other Joe … Her mind had stopped answering. She looked up to find that the conversation had moved on without her.

      “Jake is a retired oilman,” Dee was telling Lacey, “and a major hockey fan.”

      “With poor taste in wives.” Jan giggled. “At least the last one. She was board president before Dee, and she got him to donate to the museum to get it started. Then she ran off with a pro hockey player. From a team Jake owned, too, just to rub it in. She and Camille Hardy were best pals, pease in porridge.” There was something wrong with that comparison, but she couldn’t figure it out. “That log monstrosity on the corner down there? That’s Camille’s.” She gave an exaggerated shudder, grinning at Dee. “Dee just loves being on the board with Camille.”

      Dee made a face. “Camille thinks her ideas ought to carry as much weight with me as they did with our esteemed ex-president. I pity her husband. He and Jake both got played by hot, young blondes. But this gossip isn’t getting the gallery sorted.”

      Lacey topped up her teacup. “What will the overnight security be after the museum is operational? They won’t move all the paintings back to the vault every night, will they?”

      Dee groaned. “My god, you’re right. The overnight electronic monitoring of the galleries is scheduled to start Thursday. We can just add a few nights to that contract instead. Why didn’t I think of that?”

      Because I came down here in a tizzy, Jan thought, feeling suddenly deflated. Rob had not intended her to get all fired up. She should have stayed home and rested, so she could help him out by going to Calgary to make sure the storage place packed up the right artworks. That would have been much better for all concerned. She stood up slowly, feeling the familiar tremors creeping down her thighs. The pill’s illusion of strength was wearing off.

      Dee drove her the two hundred feet up the road that she had walked down with relative vigour only an hour before. The sunset was more beautiful, the bird calls softer, the evening breeze sweeter still, and she was falling fast back into the abyss from which the magic pill had yanked her this afternoon. Jan tried to apologize for getting wound up, to explain how the pill and the desire to feel competent again had pushed her. But the old disconnect was back between her brain and her mouth, and the sentence she planned vanished in the middle of a word. Dee knew this kind of thing happened, had accepted it as part of Jan. But now she had a choice of friends. Why would she choose to hang around with someone who couldn’t even finish a sentence without being jacked up on Adderall?

      Jan said goodnight and crept into her house feeling even more stupid, more a waste of space than she had this afternoon. There was nothing left to do but retreat to the sunroom, cuddle into her afghan, and try to rest until Terry came home. He’d be eager to tell her about his evening. At least she could act like a good wife for a few minutes, if she could stay alert that long. From peak performance to a dead crawl in the last twenty minutes. The pill gave a spiteful twitch to her spine, and she sat up with a gasp.

      “Take only half the pill next time,” she said out loud, and leaned back down with a faint smile.

      Chapter Six

      Later that evening, squinting against the sunlight from her bedroom window, Lacey tossed her second knapsack’s worth of work clothes into drawers. After stashing her small toiletry kit in the nearest bathroom, she checked the other rooms on the top floor more thoroughly than she had the night before. Two more bedrooms, a lounge area overlooking the vast living room, and the huge master suite at the other end, overlooking the garage. The best view down onto the deck was from Dee’s ensuite, a room larger than Lacey’s kitchen in B.C. It wasn’t ideal, but if the lights came on, they could see anyone escaping up to the trail. Lacey’s room looked down the driveway. She was pretty sure the tangled underbrush around the spruce trees would keep anyone from running off that way, although they might dive into it to avoid the lights and creep away later.

      With the sightlines established, she went downstairs to find tea waiting and Dee on her phone, sitting through a long rant from that Camille woman they’d mentioned earlier. Shameless eavesdropping revealed that Camille