House of Strangers (Harlequin Super Romance) (8 page)

“Why hide it?”

“If I guessed that Aunt Maribelle would sneak in, you can bet he knew, or at least suspected. He may have left one of those James Bond traps for her—you know, the matchstick in the doorjamb.”

“Wouldn’t he have confronted her after the first time he caught her?”

“You’re joking, or you come from a whole lot more functional family than most. I’ll bet it became a cat-and-mouse game with them. Both of them knew, and neither of them said anything. But he would have grown more and more secretive.”

“She wouldn’t have been able to actually search, would she?” Paul said. “Not until after his death.”

“Wouldn’t think so. One invasion she could blame on Esther’s wanting to clean up in here. Once he’d told her that he didn’t want anyone to clean up after him, she wouldn’t be able to get away with that.”

“And Esther was?”

“Housekeeper, cook, maid. After Aunt Maribelle died she moved in to look after Aunt Addy. Stayed with her until the end.”

“Is she still alive?”

“Lives on a pension about four houses down the street from your house.”

“Do you think she’d like visitors?”

Ann laughed. “Esther? She’d love to meet you. Probably sit you down with a glass of sweet tea and a plate of cookies and talk your ears off about the glory days.”

Perfect. Paul suspected that Esther knew a great deal more about the Delaneys than they knew about her. He
made a mental note to take her some flowers and some candy and pay a neighborly call. He realized Ann had said something. “What? Sorry, I was thinking about something else.”

“I said that somewhere there should be finished paintings.”

“Maybe he kept them in the house he built for his family.”

“I doubt it. If so, they may well be gone. His wife, my aunt Karen, hated the time he spent painting. Gram says she treated his painting like a mistress.”

“I can understand that if he refused to share what he was doing with her.” He grinned at Ann. “Women hate that.”

“Oh, we do, do we?” Ann turned around. “His work wouldn’t be worth anything, you know,” Ann said. “He was just an amateur. Nobody outside of Rossiter ever heard of him.”

“They’d have sentimental value, perhaps, to the family—his son, say, or even your grandmother. The rest of the family apparently did not resent the time he spent painting.”

“The rest of the family sure would like to have them. Gram’s got a sketch he did of her framed on the wall of her bedroom. Not a caricature—a real portrait. She loved his stuff.”

“Then if we start with the assumption that he left at least a few things here, where do we look?”

“Not the floor. There’s nothing under the floor but dirt.” Ann looked up. “Not the rafters, either. Too hard to get up and down and there’s no ladder in here. Baseboards maybe, or false backs to the cabinets.” She wandered over to stand in front of the two blank canvases. “What would you do if you didn’t want to throw some
thing away, but you didn’t much want anybody looking at it, either?”

“Disguise it some way,” Paul said.

“Mm-hmm.” She picked up a broad paintbrush from the cabinet nearest to the white canvases. “This brush is stiff as concrete. See all the white paint in the bristles?”

“He used it to size the canvases.”

“Or somebody did.” She picked up the can of white sizing paint. The lid was slightly askew. The contents had long since solidified with a skim of pure oil on top. “This is a pretty neat room for an artist’s studio, wouldn’t you say?”

“You said he was a neat freak.”

“Wash those boar’s-hair brushes of his out in a little warm water and soap, they’d be as good today as they ever were. He cleaned them and stored them properly. Same thing with his oil paints and even his charcoal and pencils. Amazing when he must have been falling-down drunk half the time he was in here. I can tell you the twist tops of my paints are never that clean. Neither is the top of my toothpaste tube. But those tops are pristine. No oozing paint at all. Arranged by color. Even his palettes are orderly.”

“But well used. So he must have actually painted at some point. There should be finished paintings here, or at least color sketches.”

“Either he had a premonition of his death, or someone—most likely Maribelle—could have painted over those two canvases at the same time she sheeted the furniture.”

“Why?”

“Maybe they were still wet. She may have thought that painting over them would destroy them. A lot of people think that.”

“And it’s not true?”

“Not usually. Not unless the paint was really runny. If we had an X-ray machine, we could see whether there was anything under that white layer.”

“But we don’t.”

She grinned at him. “There’s an easier way, if you’re willing to trust me.”

“You want a shot at cleaning them? Can you do that? Without ruining what’s underneath, I mean?”

“Easy. It’s not like this is Michelangelo’s stuff with four hundred years of grime embedded in the varnish. This is almost like whitewash. I can go at it with a towel and some alcohol. Should come right off. Do you want to see what’s under there?”

“If anything.”

“Sure, if anything. I’m dying to see, but they’re technically your property.”

“Have at it. Should I stay?”

She shook her head. “I’ll go after the little one first. Why don’t you run next door and get us a couple of burgers and some tea at the Wolf River? This is pretty boring stuff.”

“Right.” One part of him wanted to run from the little house and never return. The other part wanted to watch every flake of white paint come off that canvas. He didn’t dare let Ann see how passionately interested he was. He went to get lunch.

With the crowd already standing in line for tables at the café, it took him more than twenty minutes to get his take-out order. He’d found the gap in the overgrown hedge that allowed him access to his own backyard without going along the street, and he used it now to slip back into his own yard. He nodded to several workmen as he passed, but didn’t stop to speak.

He could see the light through the open door of the studio and heard Ann whistling what sounded like an Irish jig. Since his hands were full, he kicked the open door to let her know he was back.

“Hey!” she said happily. “No wonder Maribelle covered this up.”

He set the food on the nearest counter. Dante sat down at his feet and stared up at him balefully.

“Not for you, boy,” Ann said. “Wait a second before you look. I’m not through with the background, but I’ve got the center cleaned off. Maribelle would have definitely hated this.” She dropped her hand. “Okay, come look.”

His father had been a superb portraitist. The picture had the same insight he’d seen in Buddy’s caricature. This, however, was serious. Ann had managed to clean the figure completely. Some of the background had been brought to light, as well. He caught snatches of what must be cotton fields.

“Who is she?” he whispered.

“Maribelle.”

He’d seen a picture of her only in that grainy old newspaper print, but in another minute he’d have recognized her, although this showed a much different woman.

He’d seen the last series of portraits Rubens had done of Catherine de Medici. She must have hated them. In each one she grew older, fatter and meaner-looking. This woman was leaner than Catherine, almost masculine, with muscular arms ropey with age. She stood leaning on a saddle that sat on a rack beside her. Much of the saddle was still covered by the white paint, but enough was visible to discern what it was. She wore a short-sleeved red polo shirt open at the neck. The artist hadn’t backed away from the liver spots on her hands or the sun-damaged ostrichlike skin revealed at the neck of her shirt. Her
brown hair was pulled back tight and tied with a scarf. A theatrically placed streak of white arched from her left temple to disappear behind her head.

Paul could see that she must have been a great beauty as a young woman. In some ways she still was. Bones that perfect, a face that oval, eyes that wide would not fail her if she lived to be two hundred years old. Her eagle’s nose gave character to a face that might otherwise have been bland.

No—never bland. Abraham Lincoln once said any man over forty is responsible for his face. If the same held true for women, then this was the most formidable woman he had ever seen—she made Catherine de Medici look like Mary Poppins.

If Paul had been able to put words into her mouth, he thought they would be something like “I am entitled.” No hint of insecurity, of compassion, of empathy in those eyes and that full mouth. A woman capable of great passion, certainly, but love? Paul wasn’t so sure about that.

She would have acquired what she wanted and devil take the hindmost. His father had caught that quality in this portrait. He had painted her with vision, with talent, but without much love. He had seen her much too clearly for a loving son.

Wasn’t there a poem somewhere that said something like “look on me and be afraid?”

“Man.” Ann whispered. “Can you see Aunt Maribelle hanging that over the living-room fireplace?”

“Not if it’s a true likeness.”

“Too damned true. I’d love to have Gram take a look at this. Would you mind? After I’ve finished cleaning it, that is?”

“Not if I can be with you when you show it to her.”

“Sure. She loved talking to you at lunch the other day.
Get her started and she’ll regale you with tales of Rossiter for hours.”

He dragged his gaze from the face in the portrait. His grandmother. Maybe it was best his mother had never met her. He didn’t think Michelle Bouvet Delaney from Paris, France, would have been happily accepted by this Delaney doyenne. He turned to the larger canvas. “What about the other one?”

“Hey, give me time. Besides, I’m hungry.”

They sat on the steps of the little house and ate their burgers while Dante lay at their feet and sighed deeply every few minutes.

Even in its tangled state the garden was being forced into life by the coming of spring. Paul didn’t want to lose the wild spirit the garden had developed on its own. He didn’t think it should be straitjacketed into something formal, but it might be teased into something lovely.

After lunch, Ann picked up the trash, saw nothing to use as a garbage can and set the box in which their things had come on the counter. “We’ll take this stuff with us when we leave. No sense in leaving more goodies for the mice.”

Paul was champing at the bit to see what lay under the paint on the other canvas, but he couldn’t let his impatience show.

Ann stood in the center of the room with her hands on her hips and turned around in a slow circle. “There’s got to be more stuff here somewhere,” she said. “I can almost taste it.” She grinned at him. “It’s not psychic ability, although I wish to God I had some. Sometimes I just get a sense about bits and pieces hidden in old places.”

“You said maybe baseboards. Should we try to loosen them? Or tap the backs of the cupboards?”

“Guess we’ll have to. You don’t have to stick around
if you’ve got stuff to do and if you’ll give me leave to do things on my own. I may have to be destructive.”

“I’ll stay,” Paul said. As if he could have been driven away by a tank. “Shall I go get us a couple of crowbars?”

“In a minute. Buddy says this place will probably have to come down, but I’d rather not start destroying it right now if we can help it.” Ann folded her arms across her chest and frowned at the room. “I know where people hide stuff. I’ve done this for years. I ought to be able to figure it out.”

She hopped up on one of the counters that was free of painting gear. He leaned against the wall beside the door and simply watched her.

He enjoyed watching her under any circumstances. This, however, was different. It was like watching a football coach plan a touchdown drive, or a pilot plot cross-winds so that he didn’t land in the sea, instead of on the deck of his carrier. Paul knew better than to break her concentration.

She sat back against the wall and closed her eyes. She wrapped her arms around herself and began to swing her legs.

Suddenly she straightened and opened her eyes. “Oh, my.”

“What?”

“Look, I may be wrong. He would have wanted easy access, right? He needed to stash stuff where he could take it out again. He was probably too drunk half the time to unscrew baseboards or build hidey-holes in the backs of his cupboards. Even his sketch pads are fairly large and unwieldy.” She wiggled her eyebrows at him. “I’ve a good mind to tell you to go outside while I look so I can say ‘ta-da’ like a magician if I’m right and not get your hopes up if I’m wrong.”

“Not a chance.”

“Okay.” She hopped off the counter. “Hand me that palette knife, will you?”

He did.

She moved to the space heater, raised her hand and whacked the stove pipe. Instead of the metallic ring that should have come from the pipe, Paul heard only a thunk.

Ann turned around and bowed. “Ta-da. There
is
something in there. It may be rotten, it may have disintegrated, it may be the carcass of a possum long deceased, but something is definitely there.” She began to scrape the rust around the end cap with her palette knife. “Don’t get your hopes up.”

He moved her out of the way, wrapped his handkerchief around the metal cap, put both hands around it and twisted. He felt a tiny movement and heard an even tinier metallic squeal.

“Come on,” Ann said. She sounded excited.

He planted his feet and twisted harder, ignoring the pain in his shoulder. He felt the cap give a centimeter or two, then without warning, it simply twisted loose. He wasn’t expecting it and nearly fell over the space heater. She grabbed his arm.

Nothing had fallen out except a shower of soot. His lungs deflated.

The stove pipe was broader than the diameter of a hand—six or seven inches—and ran straight up the wall for a good four feet before it made a right-angle turn to cut through the wall.

Ann gave the pipe a couple of hard whacks with the palette knife. “Get rid of any varmints,” she said. Then she stuck her gloved hand up the pipe. “Damn!”

“Nothing?”

“No, there’s something. I can’t quite reach it.”