Hide & Find (Mayfield Cozy Mystery Book 3) (4 page)

Loretta hopped off the counter in a remarkably agile move. We adult women locked eyes over the top of Emmie’s head and came to an immediate and silent consensus.

“I’ll take these back to the mansion,” I announced. Safe custody was paramount. I supposed there was a strong chance the boys would find a pinup calendar or two downstairs, and the odds were high it wouldn’t be their first time seeing such things, but in no way did I want to contribute to that kind of exploration.

Clarice whipped the painting off the bed and deftly curled it back into a tidy roll. “There’s something else you should see.” She tipped her head toward the corner kitchen.

Loretta scurried over and opened the cabinet door below the sink so I could peer inside. A smelly trash can. I wrinkled my nose.

Then she pulled open the drawers and other doors in rapid succession. All the basics — silverware, a few cups and plates, a can opener, paring knives, a spatula, cans of soup and tuna, cracker boxes, tea bags.

“Look at the labels,” Loretta whispered. “You know how packaging gets redesigned periodically? These look like what you can buy at any grocery store right now.”

“And the garbage is fresh — relatively,” I murmured. “No other personal effects — clothes, sleeping bag?” I darted a quick glance at Clarice.

She shook her head.

“Could be some of the boys,” I ventured.

“Walt would’ve known and put a stop to it — and made them clean up,” Clarice countered.

“Dwayne?”

“Too recent. Dwayne’s been eating us out of fridge and pantry for the past two weeks. He hasn’t had the mobility or the need to come cook up here by himself.”

“Another squatter,” I sighed. “Probably not uncommon. At least it looks like he’s conscientious and neat. I’ll let Walt know, although now that we’re interrupting his hideout, our guest will probably move on. Could you pack his food in a box and set it near the door outside? He’s probably hungry, and I don’t want to take away what he most needs.”

I made it out of the garage without garnering questions from any of the boys about the awkward bundle in my arms and set off on the trek to the mansion. It was crunchy and cold, and I didn’t have a free hand to wipe my dripping nose. I sniffed heartily and chuckled at a mixed flock of chickadees and juncos that fluttered ahead of me, keeping to the shrubby underbrush at the side of the rutted tracks and pecking at seed pods.

A beat-up blue pickup was parked next to my new beat-up brown one — beat-up pickups being the ubiquitous form of transportation in May County. I grinned and picked up my pace — I knew the owner of this particular beat-up truck.

Hank Gonzales slid out of the cab with a cell phone in his hand and a worried look on his face. “I’ve been trying to call you all day.”

My heart stopped beating for a terrible moment, and I nearly dropped the paintings.

My phones.

In all the excitement about the prospect of demolition, I’d left my array of phones in my tote bag in my bedroom. What if Skip’s kidnappers had finally called with a ransom demand?

CHAPTER 5

After a hurried scrambling and checking for messages — there were none, although my heart kept pounding at the possibility for several more minutes — I settled Hank at the kitchen table and put water on for coffee. We both needed the sustenance.

I didn’t have to explain my frantic behavior to Hank. He knew all about my missing husband and the enemies I’d made in trying to sort out Skip’s affairs. He’d even been shot by a local mob hireling as a scare tactic — a message for both of us that hadn’t been terribly effective. I mean the bullet had nearly killed Hank, but I was stubborn and kept on prying anyway.

Hank was looking better, less feeble, closer to his original vigor and wiry strength. The new gray hairs among his jet black ones were probably here to stay, but his skin had less of the ashy pallor he’d come home from the hospital with. More pink and tan, signs of the resilience of his heart in pumping his blood around.

Tears sprang to my eyes, and I leaned into the counter, fussing with the coffee bean grinder until they dissipated. Hank had a beautiful wife, a darling daughter, and infant twin sons. And I’d almost caused an incredible tragedy in their family.

“Your shipment came,” Hank said. “The one from Mumbai.”

I almost chuckled at the way he said it — as if there were others. I’d had my fingers crossed for one shipment — and one shipment only — for over a month now.

As it happened, through the wonderful legal system that allowed married couples without prenuptial agreements to share the ownership of all combined assets, I owned a freight terminal, courtesy of Skip. Hank was running it with great skill and patience for his newbie boss.

My shipment had arrived at the port of Seattle via ocean freighter, cozy in a consolidated cargo container until it cleared customs. Then Hank had arranged transport since my shipment, although small, was inordinately heavy, which required a truck line.

“Where is it?” I asked.

“On dock B-15, down at the end, by itself.”

“Are the boxes marked?”

“Crates,” Hank corrected. “Nope. They’re nicely generic. Paperwork’s in order, though.”

“Safe?” I slid a full mug in front of Hank and sat down opposite him.

Hank nodded. He knew what was in the crates. I’d had to tell him. “Shouldn’t leave them there too long though. Shipments move through the terminal quickly. Anything left sitting will draw attention. We don’t want one of the shift supervisors opening a crate out of curiosity, thinking he’s just doing his job.”

“I have a place. Tomorrow?”

Hank slurped, winced at the heat, and set his mug down. “How’s the suspension in your new truck?”

I screwed up my face, and Hank laughed — a miraculous sound, all things considered. “Maybe it’ll ride better with that weight in the back.”

oOo

The shipment changed a lot of things. Especially the potential funding of the boys’ camp expansion. And now I had things to do — a rapidly growing urgent mental checklist. I was bursting to tell Walt about the windfall but knew I couldn’t. It was a small victory I’d have to enjoy privately.

Instead I stuffed marshmallows, chocolate bars, and graham crackers into a bunch of sacks — everyone has an entire shelf in their pantry dedicated to such things, don’t they? Clarice made sure we did, because we live next door to nineteen boys between the ages of eight and eighteen.

Early January dusk was falling as I drove back to the garage, goodies in the truck bed. It was an appropriate warm-up run for the main task on my agenda for tomorrow.

Walt already had a bonfire going, and smoke billowed above the tree tops, an amorphous, shimmery veil against the growing darkness.

Several boys were posted like sentries around the perimeter, hoses in hand. More boys were milling around, and I couldn’t get a head count, but clearly the fire had replaced demolition as the day’s main attraction. Bright light from the flames flickered off their faces, their expressions alternating between awe at the size of the conflagration and glee at the same.

I found Dill, one of the older boys, and assigned him the task of starting a new, smaller fire made of only clean wood in a safe place. No old paint or other unidentifiable substances. I didn’t want the boys toasting their marshmallows in a cloud of carcinogens. Dill quickly had a flock of eager helpers, and I left them to it.

Walt was coordinating the addition of fuel to the bonfire — spacing out the chunks of old building materials the boys were tossing on it so the fire wouldn’t get out of hand. I murmured my plan in his ear, and his face split into a wide grin.

“You mean in lieu of a proper dinner?” he asked in mock disapproval.

“Just don’t tell my mother,” I shot back.

“Oh, you can count on that.”

It was a good end to a good day. The boys settled into groups, talking in low voices with the occasional guffaw — contentedly filthy, sticky, and tired. The beds from the loft had been arranged as spectator seating around the fire. Loretta and Clarice claimed one, and they made room for me. Emmie curled up on my lap. We occasionally rotated, to get the warmth from the fire on our backs instead of on our fronts. Smoke played peekaboo with the stars, drifting across constellations startling close in the cold air.

You know how movement catches your eye — just a flicker and your focus automatically homes in on the anomaly? That’s how I saw him.

A lean figure sidled along the garage, hurried and bent. He halted at the door, crouched, stuck out a skinny arm and poked through a box, hefted it, and disappeared around the corner. The food box.

I was shocked he’d come when there were so many people close by. He was so quick that I hardly had time to realize what I was seeing before he was gone. No time to utter an exclamation.

I glanced sidelong at Loretta and Clarice, but they seemed mesmerized by the flames. Exhausted, no doubt. Maybe I was the only witness. Just as well. I’d prefer to leave our former squatter in peace.

oOo

I’d completely forgotten about the paintings which I’d tossed on my bed in my hurry to get to my phones earlier. I’d showered the smoke smell out of my hair, cinched Skip’s thick robe tight, and dashed bare-footed to my room, dreading how long it would take for the cold sheets to warm up.

But I’d have to do something about the grimy canvas rolls before I could sleep. For half a second, I considered just shoving them under my bed. But a sense of ambiguous obligation forced me to pull on a pair of wool socks and take stock. Somebody had spent a considerable amount of time, if not talent, on them. I owed them a decent perusal.

The mechanic/painter must not have thought they were very good either, to stash them in such an awkward cubbyhole. But why keep them at all? If I found they were all equally terrible, then I could, with a clear conscience, find a place to dispose of them away from the prying eyes of impressionable young boys.

I picked one up and unrolled it. It had been on a stretcher at one point — the edges of the canvas were slightly raveled and small rusty holes punctuated the unpainted strips at the sides, top, and bottom where nails had pierced the fabric.

This one was definitely a nude, no question about it — even I could tell. Female again. Because — well, I could figure out why. She still wasn’t symmetrical. I began to wonder if the mechanic had been cross-eyed.

I squinted and tipped my head to the side. No improvement. I could have sat for this guy with my funny lopsided smile and scar on my upper lip from the eleven surgeries it took to repair my cleft lip and palate. Frankly, I looked better in the mirror than his models did.

Next up was the painting I’d seen earlier. I quickly moved on to the third roll. A landscape — actually a harbor scene. I exhaled. Now here was a painting I could deal with. Boats docked in slips in the distance, sparkling turquoise water, blindingly white block houses built on top of each other up the side of a steep hill — probably somewhere in the Mediterranean. Simple shapes, but I could tell exactly what they were supposed to be.

The fourth roll was a landscape too, but completely different from the other. Softer, furry brush strokes, muted colors, as though a layer of Los Angeles’s famous smog engulfed what could have been a pleasant, if simplistic, rural scene. Depressing. Or maybe it was just really dirty.

I licked my finger and rubbed at a patch of shrubbery in the lower right corner. My fingertip turned grayish-brown and revealed the tail end of a black swoop.

I licked another finger and rubbed off more grime. Cursive letters — a long name. I kept up the saliva spot cleaning until all my fingers and thumbs were dirty and a famous Italian name was visible — Modigliani.

Good grief. My spit was on a Modigliani.

I scuttled down the hall in my slippery socks and returned from the bathroom with a damp washcloth. A few minutes of gentle scrubbing revealed another Modigliani — the recognizable female nude, a Picasso — the abstract female nude, and an H. Matisse — the bright harbor scene.

Barely breathing while a panicky feeling crept higher and higher in my chest, I dug for the packet of authentication papers and opened my laptop.

First, a quick Google search let me know just how frequently this trio of painters had works that were faked, forged and plain old copied. And how many forged works had fooled smart people for a long time.

Upon closer examination, the documents from the pouch Selma had harbored for me weren’t as definitive as I’d remembered. Informational — notations of points of contact along the paintings’ long journeys through the art world. But which paintings? The ones on my bed or the real ones? Or were they one and the same? Could authentication documents be forged too?

The problem was way over my head. I could read the signatures on the paintings like anyone else, but beyond that I had no knowledge of verification techniques. Or proper storage methods for preservation. I had to guess being rolled up in a cabinet in a mechanics’ garage was not ideal treatment, regardless of the paintings’ provenance.

And if they really were real, the last place I wanted them was under my bed like a giant beacon signal of my guilt to any nosy FBI agent. Try talking your way out of that one.

Maybe Skip’s safe deposit box held the answers, if I’d be allowed to access it. But tomorrow was Sunday, and I’d have to wait.

My to-do checklist grew by leagues as I stretched out with my back against the headboard and waited for morning. And not for the first time, I wondered exactly what my husband was up to.