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MATILDA GOODNIGHT STEPPED BACK from her latest mural and realized that of all the crimes she’d committed in her thirty-four years, painting the floor-to-ceiling reproduction of van Gogh’s sunflowers on Clarissa Donnelly’s dining room wall was the one that was going to send her to hell. God might forgive her the Botticelli Venus she’d painted in the bathroom in Iowa, the Uccello battle scene she’d done for the boardroom in New Jersey, even the Bosch orgy she’d painted in the bedroom in Utah, but these giant, glaring sunflowers were going to be His Last Straw. “I gave you a nice talent,” He was going to say to her on Judgment Day, “and this is what you did with it. ”

Tilda felt her lungs tighten and stuck her hand in her pocket to make sure she had her inhaler.

Beside her, Clarissa wrapped her thin little arms around her size-two chenille sweater and squinted at the brownish-yellow flowers. “It’s just like his, isn’t it?”

“Yes,” Tilda said with regret and handed her the museum print of the original.

“The flowers look so… angry,” Clarissa said.

“Well. ” Tilda closed her paint box. “He was nuts. ”

Clarissa nodded. “I heard about that. The ear. ”

“Yeah, that got a lot of press. ” Tilda shrugged off her paint shirt. “So I’ll take my completion check-”

“Did you sign it?” Clarissa said. “You need to sign it. I want everybody to know it’s a real Matilda Veronica mural. ”

“I signed it. ” Tilda pointed the toe of her paint-stained canvas shoe at the bottom where she’d scrawled “Matilda Veronica. ”

“Right there.

“You didn’t sign it ‘van Gogh,’ did you?” Clarissa bent down. “Wouldn’t that be forgery?”

“Not unless he had a Kentucky mural period we don’t know about. ” Tilda tried to take a deep breath. “So I’ll take that check-”

“Write your name bigger,” Clarissa said, straightening. “I want everybody to know you painted this. I’m going to keep the magazine right here, too. So they know that it’s a real Matilda Veronica-”

Clarissa’s enthusiasm for her as a brand name had lost its appeal many days before, so Tilda changed the subject. “Well, Spot was certainly a champ about the whole thing. ” She nodded at Clarissa’s elongated little dog on the theory that people were always pleased when you talked about their animals.

“His tail is almost hiding your name,” Clarissa said.

Tilda let her glasses slide down her nose a little and looked over the rims at Spot, quivering at her feet. She’d done some dog face-lifting in the mural since Spot’s beady eyes almost met over his long knife-edged nose. She’d softened the gray that streaked his dark, shaggy coat, too, so he didn’t look so much like a very small, mutant wolf.

“You have to sign it again,” Clarissa said. “Sign it up at the top. Bigger. ”

“No,” Tilda said. “Everyone will see it because they’ll be comparing Spot to the painting. People always do that, look at the dog and then look at the painting-”