“Your picture,” she said.
“What?” asked Victor.
“Look. It’s not straight,” Betty clarified.
Victor tilted his head slightly. “Oh yeah, now I see it.”
He stood up from the reclining chair in the corner and moved to the other side of the room to fix the problem.
The picture wasn’t anything special. Victor had picked it up years ago, at school. It had sentimental value. Betty thought it was an atrocious, gaudy monstrosity. She mentioned it every time she came over.
Victor smiled a little bit every time she did. It amused him that it annoyed her so much. Betty knew it, too, but couldn’t stop herself. The painting was just that bad.
Victor adjusted it slightly to the left. “Better?” he asked.
Betty covered her eyes. “No. A little more,” she forced out. At least it could be proper and terrible.
“Now?”
She covered her eyes with her hand and peeked through. “Sure.”
Victor took a step back to admire a job well-done. “That looks good,” he said, just to rub it in.
“Whatever,” she said, and half-heartedly punched at him. She missed and he laughed. “Let’s go get some food,” she told him. “Grab your stuff.”
He left the room while she sat back down on the couch to wait for him. She looked back at the ugly, awful picture.
“Hey,” she called to the other room.
“Yeah?” Victor yelled back.
“Your picture’s crooked again.”
Victor came back around the corner from the hall. “Serious?”
“There,” she said, pointing at the evidence. “Is it doing that just to mock me?” she asked.
Victor chuckled and took the picture off the wall to examine it. He looked at the frame, then the string on the back, then the nail in the wall. He shook his head slightly and tried to wiggle the nail. He turned the painting over again and rocked it back and forth in his hands.
“What are you doing?”
He didn’t look at her. “Shh. Testing something.”
He slowly shook picture up and down. “Do you hear that?”
Betty listened closely. “Nope.”
“I think there’s something in behind here. Sounds like it’s shifting around.”
Victor set the artwork down on the couch and probed the edges on the back. “That’s why it’s not staying level,” he explained.
Betty leaned forward for a closer look. Victor found an irregularity and slowly picked at it until he could lift up the entire sheet of paper that covered the rear of the canvas.
A small folded piece of paper dropped out.
“What is it?” said Betty.
“Give me a sec,” said Victor.
He placed the picture on the floor and picked up the new paper. Except that he could tell it was old paper, far older than the picture that had sheltered it. He thought back to the thrift shop where he’d purchased the piece. He wondered who had dropped it off. He slowly unfolded the find.
Betty saw it before he did. “Is that an X?” she pointed out.
“I think it is,” whispered Victor.
They both looked at each other.
“Do you know what this means?” he asked her excitedly.
“Yup,” she said, “It means that every time I hassled you about that dead-eyed matador, I should probably have stopped talking already and just slashed him to bits. We would have found that map a lot faster.”
Then she winked at him.
Victor pretended not to hear her sarcasm. “You still hungry?”
“No, not anymore.”
“Then let’s get out there and start looking for whatever spot that X marks.”
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