A Drunkard's Path (25 page)

“We need to finish Carrie’s quilt,” she said. “I’ll bail Rich out. He’s a good boy. Just a little exuberant.”

“Well, if he keeps this up, Susanne, he’ll be exuberantly doing five to ten,” Jesse said. He pointed the way toward the jail cells and winked at me, which I took as my signal to go.

“I’ll call you later,” I said. “Both of you.” But they ignored me, already immersed in the latest crime wave to hit Archers Rest.

I walked out into an early February day that was cold but with a bright sun that felt almost hot on my face. When even the weather couldn’t be clearly defined, why should anything else start to make sense?

 

 

 

 

T
hat evening Eleanor went to Bernie’s for dinner as planned. She and Oliver, she said, had no reason to cancel any engagements. They were not criminals, despite what that Chief Powell might think. Kennette and I nodded each time she told us. I was afraid to even mention that Powell must have something on Oliver or else he wouldn’t have moved forward the way he did.

What especially interested me was that Powell wanted to get into Oliver’s house. He must have felt there was something in there that would prove Oliver guilty of at least one murder. And if Oliver was innocent, wouldn’t he have preferred to let Powell in than to spend the night in a police station?

I knew I had to get into that house. Eleanor had written Oliver’s phone number on a piece of paper she’d left in the kitchen, so I looked up his address by using a reverse-phone Web site. I told Kennette I’d be working on the mural for Carrie’s shop and jumped into my car.

In less than half an hour I was standing outside Oliver’s small house. It was like an English cottage, down to the roses planted in the front yard. The house looked sweet and innocent, but it had to be hiding something. I knew Oliver would be at Bernie’s for several hours, so I would have time to find out what that secret was.

I checked his front door, and then the back. Both were locked. I checked each window. They were all locked. I tried each window again and looked for any way I might get in. No luck. Climbing onto a fire escape to get into Sandra’s was, in retrospect, pretty easy.

I walked around to the back, where there was a converted two-car garage he used as his art studio. Instead of a roll-up garage door, there were two large swinging doors, like you would see on a barn. But unlike on a barn, these doors were padlocked. Even the small windows on either side of the building were locked. When I pulled myself up to look in the windows, all I saw was darkness.

“This is useless,” I said to no one.

I was about to head home when I had an idea. I grabbed my cell phone and dialed.

“Natalie,” I said. “I need your help.”

In another forty-five minutes Natalie pulled up behind my car. She jumped out with a big smile on her face.

“This is going to be so fun,” she said. “We’re actually sleuthing.”

“First we have to get inside,” I pointed out.

We both looked toward the backseat of the car, where Rich was still sitting. Natalie waved at him and he reluctantly got out.

“I’m not going back to jail,” he said.

“You won’t,” I promised. “Just get us in and then you can take my car for the evening. Natalie will drive me home.”

He sighed and walked toward the house. Like me, he tried the front door and then started making his way around the side of the house. We followed, uncertain of what to do.

“I tried the windows,” I told Rich.

“Uh-huh,” he grunted.

He stopped in front of a window at the back of the house and pulled out a metal nail file. He moved the nail file along the window frame. Then for several minutes he moved the file in and out around the lock, while Natalie and I stood a few feet away, watching.

“Is your mom babysitting?” I asked Natalie.

“Yeah. She loves it. She was at my house in five minutes.”

“Where did you say you were going?”

“I told her you needed Rich to break into Oliver’s house.”

“And she was okay with that?” I asked. It had been only a few hours since Susanne put up Rich’s bail.

“She said he would probably be getting into trouble anyway. This way at least it’s for a good cause.”

Rich looked up from the back window he’d been working on. “Do you mind? This isn’t a tea party. It’s a felony. If you could keep the conversation to a minimum.”

“It isn’t a felony until we actually get in,” I pointed out.

Rich shook his head and jiggled the window slightly, then he gave it a push and it opened. “Now you’re in. I’m out of here.”

I handed Rich the keys to my car, the price I had to pay for his expertise, and warned him repeatedly about drinking and driving. But he was on his way before I’d finished my speech.

“Stay here,” I told Natalie. “I’ll climb in the window and open the back door for you.”

“Pregnant women don’t get to have any fun,” she said.

“Maybe you’ll get lucky and the police will find us. I hear prison is fun.”

I pushed my way up onto the windowsill and climbed in headfirst. Unfortunately it meant that I had to fall headfirst onto a hardwood floor.

“Are you okay?” Natalie called out when she heard the thump as I hit the floor.

“Shh.” I got up and looked out the window. “Back door,” I whispered.

I found my way in the dark to Oliver’s back door and let Natalie in. We stood in Oliver’s kitchen for several moments.

“What are we looking for?” Natalie asked.

“Something that links Oliver with Lily.”

“But we didn’t know Lily, so how will we know when we’ve found a link?”

“I don’t know. We’ll just have to figure it out.”

While Natalie opened the kitchen cabinets, I looked through the drawers. Everything was simple and sparse. Even the refrigerator held only a few items. There was nothing that seemed even remotely suspect. Of course it would have helped if I knew what we were looking for.

I looked up at Natalie. “How about the living room?”

We moved from room to room, finding more of the same—simple decor but nothing unusual. The layout of the place was very basic. At the front was a small living room. It led into a hallway. On either side were two bedrooms, with a small bathroom on the right side and several closets on the left. At the back of the house there was a kitchen with a small dining area.

“Notice anything weird?” I asked.

“Nothing except the bare walls,” Natalie said. “Don’t you think he’d put up his own paintings somewhere?”

“Or at least a friend’s painting or something,” I agreed.

“It seems so uncreative.”

I nodded. “The whole place is like a monk’s quarters.”

“I expected a bachelor pad.” Natalie sounded disappointed. “You know, with all the talk about his having an affair with Sandra.”

“Do you think Powell found evidence he had a relationship with Lily?”

“We should check and see if she was an artist or artist’s model,” Natalie said.

“That would give them a reason to meet,” I agreed.

“But what about the photos?” Natalie asked. “I just don’t see Oliver dropping a photo by his murder victims like some kind of serial killer’s calling card.”

“I suppose he wouldn’t,” I agreed. “Still, there has to be a connection between Oliver and both Lily and Sandra, or Powell wouldn’t have dragged Oliver into the station.”

Natalie looked at her watch. “Bernie will be serving dessert about now.”

“Maybe she can stretch it,” I said. “She can talk for hours.”

But one phone call to Bernie’s and we found that my grandmother and Oliver had already left, and Bernie had “lots to tell.”

It took me a minute to explain that Natalie and I were still in the middle of committing a crime so her news would have to wait. If we were going to get out without getting caught, we only had a little time, and there was one place left to check.

We left the back door open and walked to the garage studio. We had found a key hanging by the door in the kitchen, and I hoped it would open the padlock on the studio doors. I put the key in the lock and prayed. It worked. I opened the lock and pushed one of the doors just a crack so Natalie and I could get inside.

At first the studio seemed just as ordinary as the rest of the house. There were paints everywhere, with rolled-up sketches, blank canvases, and half-finished, clearly abandoned paintings piled up against the wall. There was a chair sitting on an ornate rug, and it looked as though Oliver had recently posed a model there.

It was just as an artist’s studio should look. I spent a minute imagining myself painting there, surrounded by oils and acrylics, and in my case, fabrics. But it was no time to get lost in fantasy.

I flipped through the paintings, most of them incomplete. Quilters often talk about their UFOs—quilts that are left unfinished mainly because the quilter has run out of interest or decided the idea wouldn’t work. Looking through Oliver’s studio, I realized that painters had them too. At the back of one pile was a piece that was completely different from anything else in the room. It was a bright collage of fabrics, found objects, and words on canvas. It was startlingly emotional and quite beautiful. I knew at once that the artist was Julie, the model for Oliver’s
Nobody
painting.

I turned to show it to Natalie but she was leaning over, pulling at something heavy. I put the painting down and walked over to her.

“What’s this?” Natalie asked as she pulled a covered painting from behind a desk. We uncovered it and stepped back. It was a large unfinished oil painting of a nude woman.

I knelt down to examine it. Something seemed strange to me, but I couldn’t quite figure out why.

“You know who it looks like, don’t you?” Natalie said.

I got up and looked at the painting from a distance. It hit me. Perhaps there was a little artistic license, but there was no mistaking the model in the painting.

And now nothing made sense.

 

 

 

 

“A
re you sure?” Carrie asked me.

“As sure as I can be,” I said.

“Why?” Susanne seemed as bewildered as the rest of us.

The day after our trip to Oliver’s, Natalie related our adventures to the rest of the group. I was supposed to be painting the mural at Carrie’s shop, but I hadn’t gotten much painting done because the questions our discovery raised were relentless.

“Did you have any idea that was going on?” Maggie asked me a second time.

“None,” I admitted. “Not from his end anyway.”

Bernie shook her head. “Kennette posing nude for Oliver? It just doesn’t make any sense.”

“She likes him,” I said. “She makes no secret of that.”

“But he likes Eleanor,” Susanne pointed out. “And Kennette likes Eleanor. She wouldn’t do that to her.”

“It’s quite tasteful,” Natalie offered. “It doesn’t really show anything, you know, private.”

“But she’s still nude whether it shows anything or not,” I pointed out.

Maggie shook her head. “Don’t be such prudes. He’s an artist. He uses models. He probably thinks of Kennette as just another model, whatever she may or may not feel about him.”

“So why keep it a secret?” Natalie asked.

We all sat silently, trying to come up with an explanation.

“Kennette is private,” Susanne finally said. “Maggie and I tried everything we could think of to get information out of her the other night. We couldn’t find out a thing.”

“Maybe there’s nothing to tell,” Maggie suggested. “She’s a young girl. She’s full of hope and ideas and plans, but what kind of a past could she have? A high school boyfriend or a fight with her mother? We’re all struggling to crack her like she’s some great big mystery, but maybe there’s nothing there.”

“Except that she’s posing naked for Oliver,” Bernie said.

“What aspiring artist wouldn’t pose for a famous man like Oliver?” Maggie asked. “Think of what you might learn.”

Everyone looked at me. “If he weren’t dating my grandmother, I guess I would too,” I admitted. “And I might be shy about it, just like Kennette.”

“That might explain why Kennette isn’t mentioning it, but it doesn’t explain everything. Natalie found the painting covered up and behind a desk,” Carrie pointed out.

“Why would Oliver hide the painting,” Maggie picked up her thought, “unless he wanted to keep it from Eleanor, who was supposed to come to his house the other night? And if he’s hiding it from Eleanor, then Kennette’s more than just a model.”

More silence.

“Well we’re not learning anything about Kennette, and I’ve been looking,” Natalie jumped in.

“At least Oliver isn’t shy about his past,” Bernie added. “He was telling all kinds of stories last night.”