Die in Plain Sight (22 page)

Corona del Mar

Friday night

H
ands on hips, Susa stood back and looked at the various paintings. So did Lacey. It reminded her of what a hard time she’d had picking just three canvases for Susa to view.

“You’ve selected as many as you’ve rejected,” Ian said.

“More, actually,” she said.

“I was trying to be tactful,” he muttered.

“Don’t strain anything.” But she smiled at him to take the bite out of her words. “Truth is, I’m having a hell of a time choosing. Each painting pretty much looks better than the others. He must have been ruthless when he culled his work through the years.”

“No originals?” Ian asked.

Susa shrugged. “Nothing that leaped out at me. Would Rarities rather have a handful to work with or a whole bunch?”

“I don’t know.” He looked at his watch. By now, Dana and Niall would probably be kicking back over garden catalogues, arguing about
what to plant next spring. Niall would be looking for new varieties of peonies or violets. Dana would be back in the herb section of the seed magazines, licking her lips over the culinary possibilities and wondering how to sneak
those bloody weeds
into Niall’s gardens. “Want me to call and ask?”

“No,” Susa said. “If they need more from me, I’ll handle it after the auction tomorrow.”

“You’re leaving tomorrow,” Ian said.

She shrugged. “I’ll stay an extra day or two if Dana wants it.”

“I take it the Donovan is still in Uzbekistan?” Ian asked, trying not to smile.

“Eating mystery meat from communal pots,” she agreed. “Everything that was once the eastern reaches of the USSR is rediscovering—or reinventing—tribal rituals to sanctify daily life of all kinds. It would be amusing if they had a sense of humor about it.”

“The newer the state, the greater the need to be taken seriously,” Ian said.

Susa sighed. “What do you think, Lacey?”

“About global politics?” she asked, startled.

“About my choices,” Susa said, gesturing toward the various paintings.

“Don’t look at me for help. It took me weeks to pick the paintings I brought to you.”

“Well, I’ve done all I can until I know what Rarities needs.”

“Uh, there are more,” Lacey said.

“Paintings?” Susa asked. “Where?”

“In the cupboard. Shayla hates them so much I hide them so she doesn’t have to trip over them when we’re getting new stuff for the shop.”

Susa’s eyebrows lifted. “Everyone’s a critic. Have you heard from her yet?”

“No. I don’t expect to until she gets out of the back country of Peru and into a place where there’s cell phone coverage. That could be ten days.” Lacey headed for the far wall, picking her way through paintings. “Besides, she couldn’t do anything I haven’t already done, except maybe help me kick butt at the insurance company.”

“A worthy cause,” Ian said. “If you need backup, I’ve got size thirteen boots at your disposal.”

She looked over her shoulder and smiled slowly. “Save them for kicking the deputies who are looking for Susa’s paintings.” Lacey opened the first cupboard and began pulling out the Death Suite. “Help me pass these out to Susa, will you?”

“Sure.” He walked with surprising delicacy through the mess, considering the size thirteen boots he wore.

The light in the storage unit wasn’t great, but it was plenty bright enough for Ian to see the subject of the paintings as he handed them along to Susa.

“Man, your grandfather must have been a cheerful bastard,” Ian said as he looked at the fifth version of the drowning woman.

“He had his moments,” Lacey mumbled.

Susa didn’t say anything. She just took each dark painting and propped the canvas against whatever she could so that she was able to compare them at the same time. There were eleven of the water.

The twelfth painting was different.

“New topic,” Ian said. “Finally.” He shifted the painting Lacey had just handed to him and whistled through his teeth. “This time he’s burning ’em to death.”

“There isn’t a human figure in his fire canvases,” Lacey said.

“That’s your story,” he said. “From here, it looks like a cremation.” And it reminded him far too much of the fire last night.

Susa glanced at the painting, frowned, and began stacking it in a new area, away from the first eleven.

Silently Lacey handed out six more paintings of a house or a cottage or something burning down. Despite her defense of her grandfather’s works to Ian, she was all too certain that the heaped shadows in the background of each canvas had once been human.

Shaking his head, Ian passed the paintings along to Susa, who kept her silence.

“Last batch,” Lacey said.

“For these small favors, Lord, we give thanks,” Ian said under his breath. He’d seen violent death in his time, yet somehow the painter had managed to capture and vividly enhance the suffering, the rage, and the finality of the act of murder. “He might have been a forger,” Ian said, looking at a car wreck where what could have been a slack white hand dangled against the crumpled, sprung door. A trail of fire led down the
slope to the car, marking the leakage from the ruined gas tank. Flames and a full moon leered down at the scene, competing to give ghastly illumination to death. “But he was damn good at it.”

“Talk about small favors,” Lacey said under her breath.

Ian kept staring at the painting, tantalized by the sense of something not quite seen. Something…familiar.

“Hello?” Lacey said, holding out another canvas to him.

“Huh?” He looked up. “Oh, sorry. Something about this…”

“Pass it along,” Susa said. “The light’s better out here.”

“And there are ten more of them to look at,” Lacey said.

Ian handed the painting over, and the ten that followed it. When he was finished, he was more certain than ever that the paintings were somehow familiar.

Yet he was positive he’d never seen them before in his life.

“Ian? You want to see the pictures in better light?” Susa asked.

“Uh, yeah.” Frowning, he picked his way between shelves and racks of items that his great-aunt called “dust catchers.”

“Here they are,” Susa said, gesturing with graceful fingers at the eleven paintings.

Lacey followed Ian and stood at his side while he stared at the car-wreck paintings.

“What are you looking for?” she asked finally.

“Don’t know.”

“Well, that makes it easier.”

A smile flickered over his mouth. “I feel like I’ve seen these before, or something like them.”

“It’s possible,” Lacey said.

“It is?”

“Yeah. Assuming Grandpa only painted fourteen—an assumption I can’t prove—there are three missing.”

Susa and Ian stared at Lacey.

“How do you know?” he asked.

“I’d like to say I’m psychic, and open my own woo-woo shop and sell vitamins,” Lacey said, “but my knowledge is more ordinary than that. The paintings are numbered along the stretchers on the back. Two is the lowest. Fourteen is the highest number. There’s no guarantee there
weren’t paintings numbered higher than fourteen. I only know I don’t have any.”

Ian began checking the back of each car-wreck painting. “One, seven, and twelve are missing.”

“It’s the same for each, uh, topic.”
What a genteel way to describe three separate takes on death and murder. Mom would be so proud of me
. “A broken sequence of numbers.”

“What’s the other number written on the opposite side?” he asked.

“I can’t be sure, but I think it’s the total number of the Death Suite.”

“The
what
?” Susa asked.

“It’s my name for the dark paintings, not Grandpa’s. I don’t know if he separated them from the rest of his work in his own mind.”

“But you do,” Susa said.

“Wouldn’t you?” Lacey asked.

Susa looked thoughtful. “Yes, of course. Are the other works numbered in any way at all?”

“You mean the landscapes?” Lacey asked.

“Yes.”

“Not that I’ve found. No numbers. No dates. Only the dark ones are numbered and dated, or maybe dated—hard to tell. Two.six, four.six, and nine.two aren’t exactly the same as April eighth, nineteen-ninety. It could have been the numbers of attempts he made before he got one he liked, or it could have been a code as private as the vision he was painting. The paintings lend themselves to a more, um, ritual than rational explanation.”

“Tactfully put,” Ian said, his voice sardonic. “Rituals could be another name for psychoses, right?”

Lacey compressed her lips and shut up. Seeing the paintings through the eyes of people who hadn’t grown up with them gave the art a new dimension. It wasn’t a happy one.

Grandpa, did you imagine these or…?

She refused to finish the thought. Rubbing away the goose bumps that prickled coldly over her arms, she stepped back into the shadows and let Ian and Susa absorb the paintings.

Ian paced silently from the drowning pool to the fire to the wreck. Each time he stopped in front of the wreck and studied the paintings as though he was trying to squeeze something out of them.

“If those are dates,” he said, “there are only three of them. One for each way of dying. That’s a lot of painting in one day.”

“Impressive but not impossible,” Susa said. “If an artist is seized by a theme, he or she might paint nonstop in a frenzy of creation. Ten paintings, twenty, thirty. As long as the body can take it.”

Ian grunted. “Frenzy about covers it.”

“Not pleasant,” Susa said, looking from painting to painting, death echoing. “Not cozy. Brilliant the way a sword is brilliant. It’s the steely essence of intelligence and tradition. It’s also a punishing reminder of man’s spotted soul.”

With an impatient sound, Ian picked up one of the car-wreck paintings and shifted it slowly, letting light play over its dark surface. Night and hills and eucalyptus lifting like black torches to the moon-bright sky. The suggestion of parallel lines, perhaps tire tracks, rushing down a steep slope, straddling fire. The landscape shuddering as though at a blow. Every ripple of force came from and led back to the car.

Except one line. As though the wind touched only a single tree, it bent like a finger pointing to the top of the slope, where something stood and watched. Caught within the shadows that might have been chaparral or a man, a single glow came from what might have been the ember of a match.

Ian shifted the painting slowly, then shifted it again. The tiny glow winked in some lights like a firefly; in others, the glow was barely visible.

Saying nothing, he set aside the painting and picked up one of the canvases that depicted a fire raging in a cottage. Again, fire and moon were the only illumination. The moon wasn’t quite full in this one, but the fire more than made up for it. The little cottage burned like a torch, an explosion frozen in time.

Once he got past the sheer violence of the flames, he could see nuances that had escaped him before. The shadow outline of a burning figure. The deeper shadow of a fleeing figure with one foot off the canvas and something dark and bulky under his arm. Or hers. They could have been women. They could have been demons. They could have been nightmares.

“Jesus, Joseph, and Mary,” Ian muttered. “If it was any more real, you’d smell it.”

“As I said, brilliant.” Susa picked up one of the water paintings.
“Nothing defined, everything suggested. Limitless, and all the more horrifying because of it.” Still holding the painting, she turned to face Lacey. “Having seen these, I feel more strongly than ever that they should be exhibited.”

“But they’re forgeries!”

Susa shrugged. “No matter. They’re brilliant. Since the originals are probably lost to us, it’s better to have something brilliantly copied than nothing at all of Marten’s work.”

“Then list me as the painter,” Lacey said.

Susa’s skin rippled in a primal wave of uneasiness that she neither understood nor questioned. “I don’t think that’s a good idea.”

Ian glanced at Susa. “Why?”

“Your grandfather’s dead. If these are forgeries, it won’t matter to him, will it?”

Lacey hesitated.

“Do you think it will be easier on your father to have his living daughter flogged as a forger rather than his dead father?” Ian asked.

“No,” Lacey said unhappily. “Besides, he’s going to retire instead of being a judge. I’m just not thrilled about blackening my grandfather’s name.”

“You aren’t doing one damn thing,” Ian said. “Any trash that gets passed around because of this is his fault, not yours.”

“I won’t put these forward as your paintings,” Susa said. “Your career is too valuable to destroy over this. The world has lived without many of Marten’s paintings so far. I suppose it can bump along without him until you change your mind or die.”

“Oh, hell,” Lacey said, throwing up her hands. “Do it. I’ll live with my whiny inner child.”

Susa grinned. “You sure?”

Lacey blew out a hard breath. “Yeah. But let’s keep it to a handful for now. After seeing your reaction to the dark ones, I’d just as soon not dump them all out in public at once.”

“How about if we just sort of replace the three paintings that were stolen?” Ian suggested.

“Good idea,” Susa said. “That way we’ll stay within the spirit of the original event.”

“No more than three paintings per patron, please,” Lacey muttered,
remembering. “I went through it once already. This time
you
do the selecting.”

“Sold,” Susa said quickly. Her glance skimmed through the aptly named Death Suite. “I agree with your original selection of the drowning,” she said. “The woman is an immediate emotional focus for people unaccustomed to art. By the time they figure out what the canvas is depicting, they’ll already be trapped in its power.”

“This is good?” Ian asked.

Susa and Lacey ignored him.

“This one,” Susa said, selecting one of the drowning pool paintings, “has the desperate clarity of the scream you can’t hear.”

Ian blinked and kept his mouth shut. He didn’t want to get into the Zen thing right now.

Lacey pulled the painting out of the lineup and waited while Susa, muttering, paced up and down the narrow walkways between the racks where she had left her favorites of the landscapes jutting out into the aisles.