Framed (3 page)

The Silver Spoon was doing its usual brisk morning business as commuters stopped in to pick up coffee and maybe a sandwich for lunch. A constant flow of customers went in and out at lunchtime, too. The Chowdah Bowl was always full with midday diners, but it really came into its own at the supper hour. Locals came for a dinner out or a takeout order. And while they waited for a table or for their meals to be packaged, they would look in the windows of the gallery at the beautiful prints and originals hanging on the walls.

As Sue unlocked the door of the gallery, she nodded to the small, shy woman taking the first of her numerous cigarette breaks on the covered walk in front of the stores. The woman worked in one of the offices on the second floor of the building, which now boasted brand new elevators in addition to the wide, restored staircases.

Rather boring but necessary things went on upstairs: an insurance company, some sort of bank, and a medical-supply order center. The refurbish was not yet complete on the remaining three floors, but rumor had it there would be medical offices, a spa or gym, and perhaps even some residential condos. The people who worked in the offices ordered chowder or sandwiches now and then, but otherwise they kept to themselves, except for the cigarette woman. She smiled and waved as she paced back and forth before the windows, but she spoke little English and didn’t encourage conversation.

Sue slipped through the door and keyed in the alarm code. When she’d first begun working here and Ginny had given her a key, she’d walked in one morning and completely forgotten the code. Thirty seconds later, the sirens had blared, lights flashed, and within a minute, she was explaining herself to the police. Fortunately, Ginny vouched for her as soon as she arrived, but Sue had acquired a healthy respect for the security system and an abiding confidence in the local cops. A theft at Jemmie’s was handled with equal dispatch. All in all, Brush & Bevel was as well guarded as could be arranged, short of iron bars on the doors.

While the computer booted up, Sue flicked on the accent lighting and did the other routine things to get ready for the day: she started the CD player, checked the cash drawer, and turned off the answering machine after listening to the messages, which consisted of two hang-ups and a “Sorry, wrong number.” She fixed a pot of coffee and then pulled up the gallery’s website on the computer, clicking through to the information on Jerry Berger.

She scrolled through the thumbnails of his works:
Autumn Glory
—a blazing orange sugar maple,
Cape Cod Ladies
—old Victorian houses, and
Vermont Hillside
, all so familiar to her from the prints that still sold at regular intervals. She lingered over his earlier pieces, like
Fire and Ice
—an early snow on autumn leaves,
Birch Meadow
, and her favorite, the
One Year
series. This was an ensemble of four paintings of a toppled but not-yet-dead beech tree as it coped with the changing seasons. She often wondered where the tree was and if it still lived, or had been sawn up and carted away from its place on the edge of a meadow. Berger’s paintings of it traced the beech’s struggle to survive. She thought it significant the series began in the fall. Despite being blown over by a windstorm in late October and looking rather tattered through the snowdrifts of winter, the tree grew pale green leaves and catkins in the spring, and by summer, it sported a full head of glossy leaves. It looked healthy, even strong.

A painter who captured such a will to live so vividly would never commit suicide
.

Yesterday, Elsie had insisted Berger’s and Bingham’s deaths were murder, but then things got busy and they never got back to talking about it. Sue looked forward to a good chat with Ginny.

As she prepared to head to the workshop in the basement, a UPS truck pulled up in front of the gallery. A fresh-faced young fellow, not their regular driver, carried a long, heavy box into the shop and held out his pad for Sue to sign.

“I wasn’t sure where the delivery door is in this building,” he began, but Sue doubted that. There was a large sign directing trucks to the back of the building, where a service lane provided access to the receiving area. Some of the delivery people tried to avoid going back there, where they would have to actually carry packages a few steps.

“It’s downstairs and around back,” she said, ignoring the pad. “I’ll show you.” She gathered up her belongings and a framed piece so her hands were full, leaving the driver to carry the box.

He sighed, but followed her down the steps.

“The one drawback to working here is this dreary basement,” Sue commented. “On the other hand, we can open the doors and let the sun in on nice days. You can get to all the businesses through here. There’s a freight elevator over there at the left end. That will take you upstairs. This regular door is usually open by eight for the food deliveries. You can open the garage door if you need to. Just make sure you close it before you leave. Here, this is our workshop.” She unlocked a door marked with the gallery’s logo. “Please knock if the door is closed. There are three rooms in here and sometimes we might not hear you come in.”

“Why, you get scared?” he asked, just short of sneering.

“We’ve had an armed intruder,” Sue replied without fuss. “We don’t like to be surprised.” That should shake his attitude, she thought, and it seemed to do the job. He held out his pad again, and this time she signed it. Then she relented a bit and walked him to the big garage door. She opened it to the surprising view of a pretty little park and the river beyond it. “Some of the delivery people come here for their lunch breaks. There used to be another mill back there by the river, but it burned down a long time ago. The city razed it and put in the park.”

The driver’s face softened into a smile. “Thanks.” He held out his hand. “I’m Jason, by the way. I’m taking over this route.”

“Sue Bradley. Just make sure you’re not blocking the lane, and nobody will mind if you park back here. But make sure you close the door if you open it.”

Since his truck was parked out front, Jason went back up the stairs and through the gallery. After checking that he knew the way, Sue entered the workshop, listening for the doorbells that would tell her he’d left. She heard a clatter of footsteps in the stairwell and Yaneque’s cheerful hello as she made a delivery to the insurance company. Sue called back, but continued with her routine.

The tracking board on one wall of the shop indicated where each project stood in the timeline. Sue made a list of the frames that needed to be joined, and then pulled out the frame pieces for the week’s deliveries. Carefully, she unwrapped each set of legs from its foam package and scrutinized the cut mouldings for flaws. Once she was satisfied with the quality of the wood, she labeled each frame with the customer’s name and colored the cut ends so the raw wood would be hidden at the seam. There were only seven frames today. She should be able to get them done before lunch and spend the rest of the day doing the final assembly.

FedEx delivered two more boxes of frames, and the beverage truck dropped off several dollies of sodas for the Silver Spoon and the Chowdah Bowl. Just before ten, Sue sighed and went out to remind the trucker to close the double-wide garage door. Jemmie habitually arrived at ten. If the door was open, he would have a fit. Sue and Elsie would have liked to open that big door to let in fresh air and sunshine, but Jemmie had a horror of “critters.” Although the landlord had installed a screen that kept out the bugs, Jemmie insisted mice and chipmunks and frogs—he really had a thing about frogs—would get in somehow and chew on the door into his storage area. No one could convince him frogs were more likely to seek out the moist places in the woods than the bare cement of the basement, nor that any rodents that got in would head straight for the food storage areas. No, he insisted, the door had to remain closed. Whenever he heard the door mechanism working, he rushed downstairs to supervise the delivery and close the door as soon as it was done. Then he would inspect his storeroom for signs of frog chewing. His employees welcomed these daily absences from the jewelry showroom, but they were a major annoyance to everyone else.

The overhead door was still open when Sue went upstairs to unlock the gallery, but it was closed when she returned. Jemmie was in his storeroom, muttering about frogs. Sue ignored him and got on with her job.

****

Ginny arrived a short time later and called down on the intercom to announce her presence. “Come up when you have a minute,” she suggested. “We need to talk about the Berger painting.”

Sue didn’t exactly rush the joining of the frame she was working on, but it didn’t take her long to put it together. She grabbed her coffee mug and climbed the stairs again.

“Good morning,” she said with a cheerful smile. “I was hoping you’d say that!”

Ginny tidied up some papers on her desk and waved Sue into a chair. “I see you were looking at Jerry’s page on the website.”

Sue, who had left the page up on the monitor, nodded. “I couldn’t remember if you had any biography on him, or if it was all just his prints.”

“I just mention he died ten years ago. There was no reason to mention the circumstances.”

“Especially if it was murder.”

“It was suicide,” Ginny corrected her. “The police all said it was a murder/suicide. It’s best to leave it at that.”

Sue knew her boss pretty well by now, having worked with her for nine years and more. “That’s what the police say. Looking at his work I wouldn’t have guessed it, and Elsie said yesterday it was murder. What do you really think, Ginny?”

The older woman sighed. “I knew Jerry Berger for ten years. He was excited about life, happy in his work. Suicide is sometimes hard to predict, but I just don’t see it in Jerry’s case. But the police were so sure.”

“Did they find a note?”

“Not that I ever heard of.”

“Tell me what you remember,” Sue urged. “Tell me everything. When did you first hear about it?”

Ginny considered. “You know, I thought about it all last night, trying to get it straight in my head. I think the first thing I heard was that Abby was missing. It was in the papers, I know that, because she went missing the day of the big snowstorm that December. It was a nor’easter, we got about forty inches of snow on the coast and a lot more inland.” Ginny grinned at her exaggeration. “Well, okay, it was probably about ten inches on the coast and about sixteen inland, if I remember right. Mike Bingham was frantic, as you might imagine.”

“He’s the one who scared Elsie so much, sitting here in the dark with a gun in his lap,” Sue prompted.

“Yes. Well, that happened about two weeks later, I think. After they found Abby’s car at Jerry’s place. Nobody thought to look there at first, from what I remember. I mean, she wasn’t scheduled to go there for a sitting. They checked all the hospitals and police reports at first, thinking because of the storm maybe she was out someplace and got hurt. Then they checked with her relatives and friends, even though Mike insisted there was nothing wrong between them, to see if maybe she left him after a fight.”

“Had they been fighting?”

“Not according to Mike. According to him, everything was hunky-dory.”

“You sound doubtful.”

Ginny shook her finger at Sue. “Don’t you go putting words in my mouth,” she scolded, only half-serious. “I don’t know anything.”

“But you suspect something.”

Ginny sighed and her half-smile faded away. “You know how you get a feeling? Sometimes when Abby came in here, I thought something was wrong. She was sad a lot. But then I put it down to not having kids. She would’ve been a great mom.” Her eyes focused inward as she looked back in time. “One time she said something about adoption, but Mike didn’t want kids who weren’t his. I wish I could remember exactly. After that, she began taking on projects.”

“Like what?”

“Oh, she did a lot of things. She started the garden club in Westford, and then she got the elementary school to plant a garden. She worked on getting land set aside for conservation, sponsored a boy from the high school to go to a special leadership training course. Things like that. Things to improve the town, help people out. She was in the Big Sister program for a while.”

“But she and Mike never adopted.”

“No.”

They sat for a moment. Sue was about to ask another question when the door opened to admit a customer. Ginny sat up straighter and shot a quick glance at Sue. “Hello, Sunny!”

Though Sunny had been coming to Brush & Bevel since her teens and was now in her early thirties, her taste had not improved. She was a prolific spender, very friendly—and very high maintenance. She always needed special attention and tended to take days to make up her mind on a framing job, only to change it again a week later. Brush & Bevel had learned by bitter experience to hold off on ordering supplies for any of her framing pieces.

“Oh, good morning, Ginny,” she called out. “Hello, Sue, I’m glad you’re here today. Look what I’ve found!” She bustled up to the design table and began to unwrap a long narrow piece of art. “The frame is hideous, but I just fell in love with the image,” she gushed as the paper fell away. “Don’t you just love it?”

Sue could not meet Ginny’s eyes. To tell the truth, the driftwood frame was the only worthwhile part of the piece. The two mats were inexpensive ones, the wrong colors entirely. They already showed the telltale stains of unbuffered acidity, terribly damaging to artwork. The picture, a cheap print of an amateur painting, made Sue want to shudder: a languorous curve of sandy tropical beach, a rocky breakwater straight out of Bar Harbor, Maine, palm trees from the Caribbean, and four oversized sailboats with hideous bright sails. The palms and the sails were blowing in different directions. Ginny was biting her lip.

“It’s great, Sunny.” Sue rubbed her nose with a forefinger. “Where did you find it?”

While the woman rattled on about “this marvelous little shop in Newburyport,” Sue busied herself freeing the frame of its contents. It was an attractive bit of driftwood and never should have been asked to house the cheap, acidic mats already staining the paper of the print. Sue dropped the greasy, wavy glass into the trash and resigned herself to the fact that Sunny would want a cherry frame, even though cherry would clash with the improbable beach in the picture.