“Not now,” Sophie mumbled. “We’re closed!”
The man gave a sad, pleading look at Sophie and gestured toward the object he was holding. It was familiar to her. She knew it was a sculpture he was in the process of making and he wanted her to look at it. Critique it.
“Come back later,” she said, then looked at Carter.
But he’d gone to the door and was unlocking it.
“I’m—” the gray-haired man said, but Carter cut him off.
“Sophie, this is Henry,” Carter said.
There was a split second when the older man looked surprised, and he gave Carter a hard look, as though trying to remember him, but then he recovered his equilibrium and looked back at Sophie.
“Henry,” Sophie said, her voice angry, “now is not the time for this. I’ll look at what you’ve made later.”
Carter took the platform from the man and set it on a table. “Should I .
. . ?”
“Sure,” Henry said, looking from him to Sophie and back again. “I’m sorry to interrupt, but the pastor said you were here and that you’d know what to do with this. It’s not quite right, but I can’t figure out what’s wrong with it.”
Carter unwrapped the plastic to expose a foot-tall clay sculpture of a Revolutionary soldier. He was leaning on his rifle and looking as weary as a man at war would be.
“That’s great,” Carter said enthusiastically. “Really wonderful. You are a man of enormous talent, and your technique is beyond anything—”
“Stop it!” Sophie snapped. “Really, Carter, just stop talking about things you know nothing about. This figure is out of proportion. If he were real he’d be five feet on the bottom and six feet on the top.” She was so angry at Carter that she didn’t think about what she was doing but grabbed the legs of the clay man and squeezed until she was almost down to the steel armature underneath.
“This is what you always do, isn’t it, Carter? You look at something—or someone—and think it’s absolutely perfect. You’re fascinated with it. But then when you spend time around it, you begin to see that she isn’t what you thought. Get me an ice pick.”
“What?”
“Get her an ice pick,” Henry barked, and Carter ran to search through drawers until he found one.
Sophie dug the pick into the clay to make an adhesive surface. She glanced pointedly at Henry who was watching her with an intensity usually reserved for brain surgery. “Is that bag empty?”
Quickly, he set it on the table, opened it, and pulled out a lump of plastic-wrapped clay, and unrolled a canvas carrier full of plastic and metal sculpting tools. She grabbed the clay, pulled off the wrap, and began to knead it into the legs. Her hands worked with lightning speed as she rearranged the clay. She was greatly hindered by the steel structure underneath but she was able to add a half inch length onto the man’s legs.
“What did young Treeborne do to you?” Henry asked.
“He told me I wasn’t the kind of woman a man married,” Sophie answered. “To bed, yes. Wed, no.”
Henry gave Carter a look that said he was an idiot.
“He thinks because his family’s rich and mine isn’t that we’re different classes. He thinks that I wouldn’t know how to act in the Treeborne mansion. I guess I’d hang the laundry in the front hallway.”
“Like Mrs. Adams,” Henry said, and Carter and Sophie looked at him. “When she moved into the White House it kept raining so she hung the laundry in the East Room.”
Sophie didn’t know what that had to do with anything. She took a plastic tool out of the roll and began carving away at the upper body of the clay soldier.
“Why’d you say such a stupid thing?” Henry asked Carter.
His face turned red. “My father . . . ” Carter glanced at Sophie.
“The Palmer deal,” Henry said.
Carter nodded.
Sophie looked from one man to the other. “Oh great. I have two of you from the same world. This is my lucky day.”