Sweet Masterpiece - The First Samantha Sweet Mystery (6 page)

“He thinks it’s real?”

The appraiser stepped out of the bedroom. “Is
early to say.” He had some kind of Spanish/French euro-accent,
which seemed completely affected. “I must run tests.”

Rupert was practically twitching with
anticipation, while Esteban played it cool, ruffling the pages of a
magazine that Sam had left lying on the coffee table.

She shrugged. “My supervisor said that it was
okay to remove it.”

Rupert nearly drooled.

“I’ll need to get a receipt. It belongs to
the estate of the home owner.”

Esteban reached into an inner pocket in his
jacket and pulled out a small book. He might look like a cool
customer but he’d come prepared. While he filled out a receipt and
signed it, Sam went out to her truck and brought in the tools.

Neither of the men looked eager to get
drywall dust on their clothes so Sam drilled four corner holes,
inserted the wallboard saw and started taking out a section about
twelve inches larger all around than the actual painting. They
wrapped their treasure in a blanket that Esteban had conveniently
remembered to bring and drove away in Rupert’s Mini Cooper, both
looking happy as clams.

Sam watched the plume of dust settle on the
road and walked back to her truck to get the sheet of drywall she’d
brought along to repair the gaping hole in the wall. About the time
she’d measured the hole, brought the saw back outside, and cut a
replacement piece she realized that she had company. A woman
wearing pink capris and a loose, floral-patterned T-shirt was
coming up the drive. Sam guessed her to be in her seventies, with
peach-tinted hair almost covered by a pink floppy hat.

“I saw your truck here yesterday, too,” the
lady said by way of greeting.

Sam gave the quick explanation of her role as
caretaker. She still found it amazing how often she spent days at a
place, carted away half the furniture and no one even raised an
eyebrow.

The woman stuck out her hand. “Betty
McDonald. My husband and I live at the next place over.” She waved
vaguely toward the west. Sam spotted another simple wood frame
house about a hundred yards away. “Been here since before Riley
bought his place five years ago. Way before his
friend
moved
in, the young one.” Her eyebrows formed a pair of golden
arches.

“Oh, were you
friends
with Mr.
Anderson too?” Sam knew what she was hinting at when she said
friend
, and couldn’t resist the little dig back at her.

Betty ignored it. “The sheriff’s deputy came
around yesterday, asking me about them. I told him what little I
knew. Riley Anderson wasn’t all that neighborly. In fact, Leonard
Trujillo had to get nasty with him. See that fence over there?” She
pointed to the property on the opposite side of Anderson’s place
from her own. “Riley put that up and it was on Leonard’s land.
Leonard threatened to sue him.”

Sam didn’t mention that she already knew this
little tidbit.

“Most of the other neighbors wouldn’t even
talk to him, but I’d stop in now and then, just to check on him.
I’d see him puttering around the yard. He seemed to like working in
the flower beds. But after the other one moved in, Riley didn’t
show his face much.”

Sam recalled the haphazard mess in the second
bedroom, clothes strewn about, the unmade mattress on the floor. He
might have been a slob but there was no evidence that Betty’s sly
insinuation was true. “How long did the other guy live here?”

Betty rolled her eyes upward, remembering.
“I’d say he moved in around the beginning of the spring. Four or
five months maybe? No. You know when it was? St. Patrick’s Day.
March 17. I remember because I was heading into town to meet some
other Irish friends for a traditional dinner. Corned beef—um, I
love that stuff. That’s when the strange blue car showed up.”

Of course. The perfect busybody neighbor who
watched everyone’s comings and goings.

Betty went on. “I only saw Riley a few times
after that. He didn’t look so good. I stopped in once with some
muffins I’d baked and he said he’d been sick a lot. I gave him the
name of my doctor in town but he wouldn’t go, told me he didn’t
believe in doctors. After that, I would see the blue car come and
go, not very often though. They mostly stayed around the house.
Then Bill and I went on vacation the first week of June. When we
came back, Riley’s old pickup and the other guy’s car were both
gone. Place looked empty. Never saw either one of them again.”

When Betty started repeating things, Sam knew
she was out of information so she started rummaging through her
tool box, hinting that she still had work to do.

“Well, I need to get on with my walk,” Betty
said. “Can’t be standing around here gabbing all day.”

As if it were Sam’s fault. Strange woman, she
thought, as Betty walked back to the road and headed west.

Sam carried her rectangle of drywall back
into the front bedroom and set it down, went back for the tape and
joint compound. The studs behind the cut-out section might need
some additional bracing. She tugged at the edges of the hole to see
how sturdy it was. And then she noticed something odd.

Her sawing job had caused some of the old
tape to split and a section of the old wall board now swung
outward, as if a mini door had once been built into the wall. She
pulled at it and a section about two feet tall came toward her. She
reached for the flashlight they’d used earlier to look closely at
the painting and shone it into the space behind the wall.

A couple of items seemed to be jammed in
there. She reached in. Out came a leather-bound book, about
fourteen inches tall and less than an inch thick. Along with it was
a small pencil box made of wood. She wiped them against the carpet
to take away some of the dust. The box was filled with art pencils,
many of which were honed to fine points; obviously they’d been
sharpened and resharpened many times. She ruffled the pages of the
book. They were filled with sketches—a few human forms, but mostly
botanical and architectural. There were European cathedrals,
castles on hillsides, and even the soft adobe shapes of the Taos
Pueblo. Then came pages and pages of plants—flowers and trees,
mainly. She turned to the front of the book. Neatly lettered on the
flyleaf were the words: Property of Pierre Cantone.

Her heart did a little flutter.

The world famous artist had held this book,
had made these sketches.

Sam backed out of the closet and sat heavily
on the edge of the bed. My god, she thought.

Cantone must have visited or lived in this
house at some point. But why would he leave his sketchbook behind?
And who had painted over the mural?

Chapter 8

Sam locked the house and took the sketchbook
with her, wishing she knew more about the life of the artist,
Pierre Cantone.

However, more pressing duties awaited. A
quick call to Beau Cardwell got her the go-ahead to go back to
Bertha Martinez’s place and finish the cleanup there. His
investigators were unable to locate any next-of-kin for the old
woman, he said. It took Sam about twenty minutes to get past the
crush of tourists meandering around the plaza. Taos’s little town
center really was pretty in the summer and autumn months, with lots
of shady trees and hanging pots of bright flowers accenting adobe
walls and freshly painted blue doors.

Too bad Sam couldn’t say the same for
Bertha’s home. At one time the yard must have been nice, with a
large cottonwood behind the house and a pair of matching blue
spruce on either side of the front door, set off by beds of
colorful flowers. But the old woman’s declining health meant less
time spent outdoors. Sam didn’t have the time or the budget to
replant and tend the place back to its former state, but at least
she could trim and haul away last season’s brown stalks and get rid
of weeds that now sprouted in the driveway. She filled seven trash
bags, and that was before she’d even unlocked the door.

Stale air rushed past her as she entered.
Thank goodness she’d been able to get the authorities out here
right when Bertha died. She couldn’t even imagine what the place
would be like, days later, if her body were still in here in the
heat. She pushed that thought out of her head.

Bertha certainly had not been a housekeeper.
But then, who is when they are old and ill? Sam started at the
front door and worked her way toward the back. The living and
dining areas were basically just messy. Books, magazines and papers
everywhere. She grabbed a box from her truck and stacked the books
inside—mostly non-fiction, they would be great items for the thrift
shop. Newspapers and junk mail went into trash bags along with the
dusty old candles and bundled herbs; she put a few envelopes
containing utility bills into a stack to be turned over to Delbert
Crow. A dust cloth and vacuum cleaner, some straightening of the
furniture, and these rooms were in good shape. The kitchen and bath
were a little more intensive, but the bagging and scrubbing went
routinely. She knew that she was stalling about going into Bertha’s
bedroom but couldn’t avoid it forever. Finally, she strode in there
and whipped open the dark, cumbersome drapes and opened the windows
to the warm September day.

Everything was just as she’d seen it on her
previous trip, minus the dying woman in the bed. Beau said that the
authorities had removed everything they wanted, so Sam approached
the room with an exterminator’s vengeance. None of the clothing was
in decent shape for resale; the old woman probably hadn’t bought a
new item in twenty-five years. Into bags it went; the local
quilting group might salvage some of the cloth that wasn’t
threadbare.

The medicine bottles weren’t the kind from
the pharmacy. A tentative sniff into one of them suggested herbal
remedies, probably homemade. She wondered if Zoe might know
anything about them. The idea of actually dipping in and taking any
of the smelly concoctions gave her the creeps. But she put the few
colored bottles into a small box to take with her.

By four o’clock she had to admit that she was
dragging, wishing for another shot of yesterday’s limitless energy.
No lunch, a pickup truck full of bagged and boxed junk—that
probably accounted for it. Other than a quick peek, she hadn’t done
anything with the second bedroom yet. Heavy drapes covered the
room’s single window so she had little sense of what awaited in
there. And she really wanted to finish the place today so she could
submit her billing and get on with other things.

She scrounged two granola bars from the glove
box in her truck and consumed them with water in one of the freshly
washed glasses in the kitchen. It helped some but, truthfully, she
began to fantasize about the drive-through at Kentucky Fried
Chicken on her way home. The image gave her enough umph to face the
unopened second bedroom so she marched in there and flipped the
light switch.

The overhead fixture held a red bulb, which
gave the room the odd glow of a darkroom and she knew that wasn’t
going to be good enough to clean by. The heavy drapes were stuck in
place with duct tape and it took her a couple of minutes to rip it
away and pull them aside. Heavy clouds were again building outside
and she heard a very distant rumble. Ominous. But nothing compared
to the sight when she turned around.

There in the middle of the dark wood floor
was a pentagram, laid out in white stones. Black candles, bundled
herbs, a lot of animal symbols painted in white on red walls. Sam
thought of the rumors of Bertha Martinez’s involvement in
witchcraft. Whoa—it looked like they were true.

Goosebumps tickled her scalp and she edged
toward the open doorway. Her foot hit something and she spun
around. A snake.

She shrieked and dashed for the door.
Something clattered and she stared again at the reptile. It wasn’t
alive. The snake was a taxidermied one, posed in a wavy curl, as if
he were slithering along the desert sand, except that his head was
raised a few inches off the floor, teeth showing and tongue darting
out. She stared at it, hugging the doorjamb, heart beating a
thousand beats a second. She blew out a pent-up breath and realized
some of the noise was coming from thunder, much closer now.

A flash of lightning lit every window,
putting her in the middle of a strobe-filled maze of rooms. Her
heart rate ratcheted up again. This can’t be healthy, she told
herself. She dashed for the front door and straight out to her
truck, soaked by the downpour in the few seconds it took. She
reached for the ignition before remembering that she’d left her
keys on a table in the living room. She would have to go back in
there.

Okay, Sam, calm down
. She breathed
slowly.
What’s scaring you about this place anyway?
Well . .
. symbols and witchy things and a snake . . . Okay, the snake
wasn’t dangerous and neither was the other stuff, was it? Really,
some stones on the floor and some painted figures on the walls. Red
walls. Pentagrams. Who does that?

Dammit, Beau, why didn’t you warn me about
this room?
She pulled her cell phone out of her pocket and
dialed his direct number.

“Ah, the Martinez place.”

“Yes, dammit. The one filled with a bunch of
scary shit. How could you have forgotten to mention it?”

“Calm down, Sam. I didn’t actually see it.
One of the other deputies went in there, said he didn’t find
anything related to the woman’s death. He just described it as a
weird room. Lot of old dusty stuff in there he said. I pictured
something like an attic full of junk. Got another call and left.
I’m sorry I didn’t think to tell you about it.”

Sam felt a little stupid. It really was just
a room full of dusty old junk, when you thought about it.