A Final Canvas

It is May, 1930. Skeen rushes Dilys, his wife, to the hospital after she has fainted and fallen in her studio. She has damaged the area where a thug had sapped her with a pistol two months earlier when she and Skeen were ambushed in Huntington Park. The doctor at North Bay Hospital says that Dilys needs surgery to remove the tiny bone fragment, jarred loose by the fall, from her brain. It will be a simple but delicate operation. If successful, it may affect her ability to paint again. But if the operation is not successful, she may die.