Death of an Artist (14 page)

“I have a laptop and I know how to transfer files. Chief, thanks. For your time, your assistance. It's been helpful.” They were walking through the living room to the outside door.

“You think he did it?” Will asked as Tony opened the door.

“Just started asking a few questions, Chief. Let's give it a little time.”

Will nodded. “Fair enough. Anytime before noon tomorrow.” He held out his hand, and as they shook, he said, “See you in the morning, partner.”

Returning to the balcony, Tony remembered what Van had said about changing perceptions: the vases suddenly become two profiles. Will Comley had suddenly changed from a town gossip to an officer of the law, a colleague.

Tony grimaced as he stretched out again and raised his bottle. He wished he had made that drink he wanted while he was on his feet, but he didn't want to get up again to get it. The beer would do while he considered Chief Will Comley.

He was not the fool he appeared to be with that unruly hair falling onto his forehead, his roly-poly body, amiability, and talkativeness. He was shrewd and noticed things and remembered them. Tony would keep that in mind. But whether colleague or partner, he still wasn't certain how much Will would talk, what he would say, and to whom. As for the question he had asked on his way out, Tony answered under his breath. “Sure, the son of a bitch killed her.”

*   *   *

A
FTER
J
OSH
WAS
in bed that night, Marnie and Van talked about the next few days. It would take a little time, Marnie said, to determine the validity of the contract, and it might end up in court. Also, getting the autopsy would take a little time. The sheriff would not be in a rush about it.

Marnie had called Freddi and now outlined the steps she had advised them to take. First, rent the storage facility. A number of them were in the phone book. “I think some people like to store furnishings, valuables, for months at a time while properties are vacant over the winter months,” Marnie said when Van expressed surprise. “After we have the space, Freddi will send two young men, an art major and a practicing artist who always needs some extra money. They'll bring a truck and what she called spacers and some covers. After everything is secure and sorted, then the appraiser and insurance agent. She thinks it will take several days or maybe a week just to get things moved and arranged.”

“I'll go to Newport and take care of the storage unit right after I drop off Josh at day care,” Van said. “I think Tony wants to talk to you alone, so it will be a good time for that, too. He drained me dry today both going and coming back. I might have told him when I began to lose my baby teeth.”

“Did he say a word about himself?”

“Nope. Mr. Ziploc Mouth, that's him.”

Marnie smiled slightly. “I'm not surprised. He was limping pretty badly by the time you got here.”

“I know. A hip injury sometimes flares like that, especially when the patient drives a few hours. He didn't say a word about it.”

“Did he say what he wanted to look for tomorrow?” Tony had asked permission to come around and look over the houses, but Marnie suspected that Van was right. He also wanted to talk to her alone.

“Not a word,” Van said. “It's impossible to even guess what that man is thinking. He could decide we're a couple of nutcases that he'll humor for a while, just to keep Dave off his back. I'm glad you got Tommy Gannet to come help move stuff today. I was afraid you'd tackle it alone.”

“I no longer move furniture.” Tommy Gannet was an amiable young man who lived with his mother, and who did whatever odd job needed doing, from yard work to gutter cleaning, hauling, moving, minor repairs … His mother had had a card printed for him that said
NO JOB TOO ODD
. That day he had shifted a few things from one house to the other. Now the paintings of the navy ships and the maps were on the wall in the rear house, and nearby was Marnie's favorite reading chair and lamp. Her bookcase was there, also. In her old bedroom, long used by Stef and whomever she was paired with at any given time, Marnie now had Ed's beat-up desk and her own bedspread and another chair she favored.

Although the rear house looked more like her home again, for days she'd had a persistent feeling of Stef's presence somewhere out of sight. A rustling sound, her running footsteps, a door opening, closing. Marnie had long been used to that feeling concerning Ed. She could not even guess how many times she had looked up from a book, started to share something she had read. Or felt him near her in bed. Never visible, never more than a feeling of his presence. Now there were two ghosts.

If Tony was thinking nutcases, she thought, at least he was right about one of them.

That night when Marnie went to her bedroom, she ran her fingers over the old rolltop desk. It had belonged to Ed's uncle, and Ed had kept it after Oscar died. He said it suited him just fine, just his style and period. Marnie got out her key chain with a key for the one drawer with a lock. For many years that drawer had not been opened, but that day, to move the desk, she had opened the drawer and removed the handgun in it. Now she put it back, but stood looking at it for a time.

Ed had picked it up somewhere and kept it with him. “A good old, simple six-shooter,” he had said. “If you can't take someone down with six bullets, you might as well give it up and wave the white flag.”

She closed her eyes remembering that day when he had shown her the gun. He had insisted on going up into the hills behind Newport, to an isolated, remote logging camp long since abandoned, where he had made certain she knew how to load the gun, knew about the safety, how to use it. Then he had been incredulous at her marksmanship. “I was driving a tractor by the time I was twelve,” she had said. “Remember? Farm girl. And Dad taught us how to use guns. I'm better with a rifle, and okay with a shotgun. Dad was a gun freak.”

Ed kept the gun in a bedside drawer until Stef began to toddle about and get into everything, and then it had gone into the locked drawer. He had carefully cleaned it, stored the bullets in a pouch, and wrapped the gun in an oiled cloth. The gun and the bag of ammunition were in a pale chamois pouch. It had not been taken out again until they moved the desk first to the rear house, then again to the front house, and now once more when the desk was moved back. The gun had never been registered, had no known history, and no one else in the family even knew it was there.

Marnie touched the pouch lightly, then sat on the side of her bed. It had been a shock to see it again so soon after the question posed by Ed's voice in her dream. He was within her, parts of him would always be with her, she thought then, but whose answer had it been? Her own or his? Was the gun her or his answer to the question?

She wanted Dale dead, never able to seize any of Stef's work for any purpose. She felt as if part of her daughter remained in everything she'd painted, that throughout her life her only means of communicating any of the things that had tormented and driven her had been through art. Each piece of her art contained something of Stef. For Dale to take it and exploit it for personal gain was an abomination. He had destroyed her physically, and by possessing and using her art he would destroy whatever was left if not of her soul, then something akin to a soul.

Was the gun the answer? She came back to the question and finally shook her head and stood. Not now, she thought, gazing at the gun for a moment before closing the drawer and locking it once more. She couldn't decide now. She would wait until the paintings were safe and secure, until Tony had a chance to do his work, but eventually she would decide, and if the gun was the only answer she had, she would use it.

 

11

A
FTER
V
AN
LEFT
with Josh the next morning, Marnie went to the spare room that held the overflow of art. She knew what she was looking for, and although paintings were jumbled together, leaning one against another, filling the room to capacity with barely enough space for a path among them, she felt almost certain she knew where to look for the pair of paintings she was seeking. They would be close to a wall with others placed in front of them. Stef had treated some of her work that way, stopped working on it, then, as if it was too painful or too something, she hid it among the many paintings in the downstairs room. The painting with the broken frame was close to the hall door, and it seemed fitting that it was broken. The picture was of a wind-sculpted Sitka spruce, nature's bonsai, twisted as if in arthritic pain, with scant, miniaturized needles, but the size of the trunk indicated a great age. The spruce was growing on such a rocky ledge there seemed too little soil to anchor the roots. The painting was titled
Endurance.

She passed it by and began to move other works. Few of the paintings in here were framed, and they were all sizes, small canvases eclipsed by large ones, in no order whatsoever. Few were dated, many untitled.

She found the pair she sought and pulled them out to the front, into the light. Gazing at one of them, she drew in her breath and nodded. The special beach that Stef had loved most of all. In the painting was a small beach enclosed by black basalt cliffs, higher and more forbidding in the painting than in real life, the way they must have appeared to a child. By each of the tide pools was a little girl, spectral, indistinct, surreal in the midst of stark realism. The tide pools were as finely wrought as a photograph, the glint of light on shiny rocks, sand caught in crevices, a bit of seaweed so real it might have been touched, felt wet. The little girl was translucent, impressionistic. Kneeling at one tide pool, squatting at another, sitting cross-legged, upright … All different, the same child in five different stances. Stef as memory, as ghost child, recalled by Stef the adult artist, then hidden away.

The beach was the beach of Marnie's nightmare. The child was Stef of the nightmare. Marnie shuddered, gazing at the painting. It had the quality of prescience, ghost child eternally racing from tide pool to tide pool.

Searching forever, she thought, a futile, endless search, never satisfied. The companion piece was titled
Treasures,
but she felt now that it had been done in an effort to answer the question
What are you searching for?
It was beautifully done, a bottomless treasure of tide-pool life, but it didn't answer the question, and the ghost child would spend eternity searching.

Marnie stood, transfixed by the painting of her dream child, her nightmare child, until she became aware of the sound of the doorbell. She jerked as if from a dream, backed out of the room, and closed the door.

Tony had arrived.

“Good morning, Tony,” she said, admitting him to the house.

“Good morning, Ms. Markov.”

She held up her hand. “Please, just Marnie. We're not used to such formality around here. What can I do to help you?” As she spoke, Tipper sniffed him, then wagged his tail in a belated greeting.

“I'd like to wander about a few minutes, if that's all right. Get the feel of the house, see the storage room with the rest of her paintings, just look around and then ask a few questions. I don't want to take up too much of your time.”

“Time's not a problem,” she said with a shrug. “Take as long as you like. I'll give you the key to the studio outside door, and when you finish wandering, we'll have coffee. Go wherever you want.” She handed him the key. “Stay, Tipper,” she ordered, and the little dog sat at her feet.

“Thanks.” Tony started with the upstairs of the house, looked into the two bedrooms without entering, glanced inside the bathroom and smiled slightly at the array of ducks and boats lined up on the edge of the tub. The door on the opposite side of the wall was to a closet for storage. It was crammed with art supplies, framing material, canvases … He closed the door and went on to the studio. The floor was vinyl, as he had known, paint-spattered and stained, but clean and dustless.
Ladies in Waiting
was still on the easel, apparently untouched since he had last seen it. He continued on through the room to the outside door and out to the passage. The floor was painted with heavy green deck paint, as were the steps down. The treads were fairly wide and it wasn't as steep as Will Comley had made it sound. Railings and newels were the same green. Looking out toward Dave's house, he could see only the uppermost part, visible through the greenery of shrubs and trees. Unless Harriet McAdams had been on the roof, nothing that happened here could have been seen by her.

He started down the stairs, stopped to examine a few chipped spots on the rail close to the top of the stairs. From there, looking down, it appeared that the stairs had been an afterthought, ending on a concrete walkway a little too close to the door of the house. He continued down and at the bottom looked at the door, a raised doorstep, the end of the stairs. A large redwood tub of plants was to the right of the door, but not enough room had been available for a matching tub on the left.

Her body, twisted and broken, must have been visible from the house door when it was opened. And the cell phone was dropped. Visualizing the scene, he saw Dale opening the door, seeing his wife's body, dropping the phone. Why then hadn't it been fully visible? Why off to a side far enough not to be noticeable at once? The only way it could have ended up by the tub, nearly three feet from the door, was if it had been thrown there. He shrugged and went around the stairs to where, from the chipped railing above, it appeared that the painting had gone over the side. More concrete, but nothing to indicate now that anything had ever fallen there. If there had been paint chips, they had been blown away or swept away.

He returned up the stairs, back to the studio, locked the door behind him, and went down into the house. He saw that Marnie had gone out to the deck, and he continued into the hall, to a big master bedroom, Marnie's room now, he guessed, and did not enter, but did enter the room across the hall.