Free The Shadow of Venus by Judith Van Gieson

it is and paint that image. If I ask the homeless how they want to be portrayed, I get mumbles and blank stares or sometimes the name of a celebrity. If s better just to talk to them for a while and see where that leads. Or else I show them other portraits I’ve done and an idea comes out of that. Chris said you were interested in the portrait I did of Maia?”
    â€œYes.”
    Lisa squeezed her hands together. “I was shocked by her death. It seemed like she had the potential to get it together, if any of my students did. She was smarter than most of them. She came in here with a clear idea of how she wanted to be portrayed. She saw herself as dancing in a circle with other girls.”
    â€œDo you still have the painting?” Claire asked.
    â€œNo. It has been sold. Every year the Downtown Gallery on Central has an exhibit to benefit Chris’s shelter. They put Maia’s portrait in the window. Somebody saw it there, fell in love with it, and bought it for twenty-five hundred dollars, the best price we’ve ever gotten for a painting.” Lisa had a proud glow and rightfully so, Claire thought.
    â€œDo you know who bought it?” she asked.
    â€œNo. The shelter wanted to get the buyer’s name, of course. A person that generous is worth keeping in touch with, but it was a cash deal and the buyer never gave the gallery a name or address.”
    â€œSomeone walked in off Central with twenty-five hundred dollars in cash? Who walks around with that kind of money?” Claire asked.
    â€œIt wasn’t a drug dealer, if that’s what you’re thinking,” Lisa said. “Even if it was, Chris probably would have sold the painting. The money all goes to a good cause. I don’t get any of it. As far as my mother is concerned, I’m a grad student, not an artist.”
    â€œHow do you know the buyer wasn’t a dealer?” Claire asked. “Maia died of a heroin overdose. She must have gotten it from a dealer.”
    â€œThe gallery owner told me the buyer was a conservatively dressed woman who said she saw the painting in the window and fell in love with it. People react strongly to my paintings.”
    â€œOf course they do. You do exceptional work.”
    â€œThank you,” Lisa turned away from the compliment and walked across the room to her computer. “I photograph all my paintings and store the images on my computer. Would you like to see Maia’s?”
    â€œI would.”
    Lisa tapped a few keys and brought up an image of girls in long white dresses dancing in a circle. Most of their faces were turned away, hidden by swirling hair or blurred in the motion of the dance. But one face was perfectly clear—Maia as she might have appeared in her early teens or even younger. She had the same high cheekbones and brown hair but this face had vitality, youthful optimism, and color.
    â€œIt’s lovely,” Claire said.
    â€œI call it Summertime. That’s Maia, of course,” Lisa said. “Maybe you noticed that there is only one clear face in each of my paintings. I like to give the homeless a moment in the sun, one moment they don’t have to share with anyone else. It makes them feel important, if only for a little while.”
    â€œDid Maia say how many girls she wanted in the painting?”
    â€œShe wanted a total of seven.”
    â€œDid she tell you how old she wanted to be?”
    â€œTwelve. I had to imagine what Maia would have looked like at twelve. She seemed to think I got it right.”
    Lisa’s computer had a large screen with high resolution. Claire could clearly see New Mexico in the background of the painting. “The adobe wall, the mountains in the background, the hollyhocks in bloom—were those her idea?”
    â€œNot exactly. She wanted a New Mexican setting and that was my interpretation.”
    â€œDid that make you think that she was raised in New Mexico?”
    â€œMaybe, or