Color Me Dead

by Mary Bowers

  Curiouser and curiouser, I thought. The kid was paying rent? To her own mother? She couldn’t have an apartment of her own yet; she couldn’t be more than twenty years old.

  “How old is Carmen?” I asked.

  “Twenty-eight.”

  Maida saw my surprise. With an artless flourish, she said, “Oh, I had Carmen when I was barely seventeen. It was a difficult birth, and I wasn’t able to have more children, so she was our only child.”

  I tried to cover my surprise. Pregnant at seventeen? She’d said “barely,” so she must have conceived when she was sixteen. By an older man – really older. Before I could sort this out, Carmen arrived.

  I found myself taking to her right away. There was a reality about her that I was beginning to realize was missing from her mother.

  Carmen was brusque, even a bit earthy. She seemed to have set about making herself as different from her mother as possible. Her hair was limply wavy and brunette, and I suspected she was in the habit of cutting it herself. She could have made herself pretty if she’d tried. She had her mother’s bones, and they were what had given Maida’s face such beautiful planes. Carmen even had that pixie chin, but on Carmen, you didn’t notice it. Her face was dominated by her large, brown eyes, which she must have inherited from her father.

  She was dressed in an old tee shirt and yoga pants, was wearing no make-up, and spent the first few minutes examining short, gritty fingernails while she talked to us and skimmed the menu. She had the curious habit of gazing idly around the diner and then suddenly focusing in on something and staring’. Then she’d go back to the chalky fingernails.

  When she noticed me watching, she spread her fingers in the air and said, “Clay. I was working in my studio this morning.”

  “Oh. I thought you were a painter.”

  “Did Maida tell you that?” She gave me a wry grin and turned to her mother. “I’m doing mixed media now. I told you that.”

  “You keep changing mediums. I simply can’t keep up.”

  “I could never make up my mind. That’s why I’m using more than one now. You have to come out to my studio sometime and see what I’m doing, now that we live in the same town. I’ve already been over to see your new house, and you haven’t been to mine since I first moved in.”

  “Of course I’ll come to see you when I’m settled, but moving is turning out to be so much more work than I imagined, and without your father to help me . . . .”

  “Grant was never any help with practical things. You know that. I think the house you bought is adorable. Somebody put a lot of love into it.”

  “It has marvelous possibilities, of course, but . . . well, you’ve seen the living room. Even my new suite of furniture can’t seem to pick it up. It just looks tired. That awful wallpaper in the kitchen – and the front yard! I don’t know what I’m going to do with it, and the quote-unquote-landscapers in this area have souls that rise no higher than cutting the lawn and shoving an invoice under the door.”

  Not having known the people who lived next-door to Florence, I’d never paid any particular attention to the house they were talking about, but I didn’t remember any eyesores in the neighborhood.

  “Take it from me, Maida,” I said, “owning your own home is always going to be a work in progress. There’s always something: a leak in the roof, a dead tree in the yard, or even worse, you fall madly in love with the cool Scandinavian look you see in a magazine but your whole house is contemporary rec room with plush recliners. You don’t even know where to begin, so you never begin.”

  “You see?” Carmen said. “Leave the unpacking and drop in on me sometime. My work has changed a lot since I moved into my studio.”

  I wanted to see it, too, but I decided I’d better not be pushy. My eyes must have gotten big and round, though, because Carmen immediately said, “Come on over any time, Taylor. Being the only child of a genius, I’m used to people wanting to see what I can do. Everybody but my own mother, of course. But brace yourself – it’s just a shack over at the beach, just outside of town.”

  “I actually moved here to be closer to Carmen,” Maida told me.

  “You actually moved here,” Carmen said drily, “to be closer to Grant’s studio. More and more he was just spending the night there instead of making the drive home in the dark when he was tired.”

  Maida turned sad. “We bought the new house together, and then he didn’t live to make the move with me. For whatever reason, something was calling him home, and he finally stopped trying to fight it.”

  There was an uneasy pause, and then Maida went on: “We had been living in the historic district of St. Augustine, and of course, my husband’s studio was along A1A in the Hammock area. The studio is much closer to Tropical Breeze than our St. Augustine house was, so I was really making the move for his sake. At his age, I didn’t want him sleeping on a camp bed. The studio isn’t really livable.”

  Carmen shrugged and lowered her voice. “Grant used to think it was livable. I think he preferred it to the house in town. It’s got a little bedroom and a half-kitchen. I was kind of hoping you’d let me have it now. It has everything I need.”

  “Your father’s final projects are still there, and until the estate is settled, even I can’t touch anything in it, let alone allow somebody to live there.”

  “I know, but after . . . .”

  “We’ll discuss it when the time comes. I’m too emotional to even think about it now.” Then, changing her tone, she said, “Perhaps you should go to the ladies’ room and wash your hands before you eat.”

  “Yeah, I guess so.” Carmen awkwardly struggled out of the booth. “I scrubbed up at the studio, but the clay gets into every crack. I’ve probably got it in my hair, too. Be right back. Get me a Coke, will ya?”

  “As I said,” Maida told me when Carmen was gone, “she takes after her father. If only she’d been a boy.”

  “I think she’s terrific,” I said, and I meant it. “It’s always fun meeting a real artist.”

  “Oh, don’t think of Carmen that way,” Maida said with a little chuckle. “She goes in phases, but creative artwork will never be anything but hobby for her. She’s working nights as a waitress at Thirty-Nine, right next door.”

  “I love that place,” I said. “It’s where we celebrate all our special occasions. She’ll make good money there.”

  About that time, Carmen was coming back to the table and the floor waitress, DeAnn, was coming over for our orders. Carmen quickly asked for a burger and fries with grilled onions, and I just said, “The usual.” I introduced Maida and Carmen, and DeAnn smiled at them demurely. Don’s Diner was information central in Tropical Breeze, and I could only imagine what the town gossips had been making out of the tragic beauty who’d just moved in on Palmetto Street. The very first thing they would have analyzed was the math on Carmen’s gestation vs. the respective ages of her parents at the time. Throw a suicide into the mix and the gossips must have been delirious.

  After DeAnn walked away, Maida turned to her daughter, who was sitting next to her in the booth. “You really have to start watching your diet, dear,” she said. “After all, you’re not a teenager anymore.”

  Maida had ordered a salad with grilled chicken, hold the dressing.

  “I’m not a teenager either,” I said, “but I love the way Don puts a crisp on the grilled cheese sandwich. He’s even moved with the times and started putting apricot chutney in it. Besides, I only eat here once a week.”

  Maida held herself in, saying only, “You’re lucky you can keep your figure, eating like that, even if it is only once a week.”

  “I work it off the kennel,” I said, and we left it at that.

  Carmen didn’t seem troubled or interested in the motherly advice, and ate her burger with gusto.

  * * *

  We were finishing up and getting ready to leave the booth when a tall, elderly man came into the diner and started looking all around. When she saw him, Carmen let out a gasp. Before
he could look our way, she called out, “Well, of all the Jersey jamokes to be dropping out of the sky. Over here, Uncle Hank.”

  Maida, very startled, turned her head and stared. Then, instead of greeting her brother-in-law, she sat up straighter and gazed blindly at the back wall of the diner, past my head.

  The elderly man came to our table and took the only open seat in the booth, next to me.

  “Well, hello there,” I said, after scooting over fast before I could get a hip bump. He had ignored the fact that I was there, staring all the time at Carmen and Maida. When he finally looked at me, I stared back.

  “You’re that Taylor woman they were telling me about across the street,” he informed me. Before I could say anything, he switched back to Maida, forgetting me again. “I asked where you were over at your house and they told me you went downtown with your neighbor-lady. Downtown, as in over on the next block, here,” he added, as if Tropical Breeze were the least significant flyspeck he’d ever seen. “So I went over and found the neighbor-lady, and she said you were here.”

  “Hello, Hank,” Maida said. She had recovered herself from whatever had come over her at the sight of him. “I didn’t realize you were coming to Florida. You should have called. I would have had the guest bedroom ready, but as it is, half my things are still in moving boxes – ”

  “I wouldn’t stay in the same house with a woman like you if it was the last remaining shelter from the Great Flood,” he said. He jabbed a thumb at his niece, who was taking it all in and looking faintly amused. “I’m staying with her, thank you very much.” He did a doubletake at Carmen and said, “You look more like a vagabond than ever. Why don’t you have your hair done or something?”

  “And a big hello to you, too, Hank,” she said, not a bit offended. “And may I say you’re looking more like something out of the Old Testament than ever? Nice to see you. You don’t come down off the mountain much anymore.”

  He snorked at her and I braced myself for fireworks, but somehow her smart remark provoked a grin instead of any kind of a comeback. This was the side of the family, it seemed, where Carmen managed to fit in.

  Carmen settled with her elbows on the table and looked at her uncle affectionately. “You might reconsider staying with me when you see my humble abode, dude. Maida has an actual house. I’ve got a shack with a studio across the breezeway.” She thought it over for a moment or two, then said, “Actually, you could just call it two shacks.”

  “Don’t you mind about me,” he said, sending a flaming shot at Maida from below his eyebrows before looking back at his niece. “I’ll sleep outside on the ground if it comes to that. You only got one bedroom?”

  “Two, but I’ve got a roommate.” Carmen was completely unperturbed. “You can sleep on the sofa-bed. We’ve got plenty of aspirin for that backache.”

  “I don’t have a backache.”

  “You will after sleeping on the sofa-bed.”

  He harrumphed, but didn’t back down.

  Maida turned to her daughter and said, “You didn’t tell me you had a roommate. Who is he?”

  Carmen laughed. “It’s not a he. It’s Joy Hardy, who is most definitely a she.”

  “Joy?”

  “You remember Joy. Grant’s prize pupil? The rich kid who dabbles in art and expects us all to take her seriously?”

  “I know who she is,” Maida snapped. “What I don’t know is what she’s doing staying with you.”

  “She’s got a contract for an installation at the Daytona mall, and she needed room to work. Obviously, Grant’s studio isn’t available to her anymore. I’m not much into welding, myself, but I’ve got plenty of room and a place to lock up the tools at night, and she said that was all she needed.”

  There was an uncomfortable pause, and then Maida said, “I never realized that you and Joy were close.”

  Carmen shrugged. “She’s okay. I always liked her. Not as much as Grant did, of course.”

  “What do you mean, as much as Grant did?” Maida demanded, so loudly that two men sitting at the soda fountain turned around, then quickly faced the other way again. Don looked in from the pass window in case there was trouble in the dining room and I gave him a nod that said everything was okay. He paused, then disappeared into the kitchen again.

  Carmen seemed pleased with the reaction she’d gotten. “Relax, Maida. I never caught them in flagrante or anything.”

  “Don’t be crude. I didn’t raise you to talk like this, and your father would never have tolerated it.”

  Carmen laughed outright. “My father tolerated a lot, but to be fair, he could dish it out, too.”

  “My brother was a genius,” Hank said in a very controlled voice. I thought he was angry with the way Carmen was talking, but he definitely directed his next remarks to Maida. “He didn’t deserve what you did to him. You were no more than a kid when you got your hooks into him, and you were already a tramp, even then. Far as I can tell, you never got any better.”

  “Don’t be an ass,” Maida shot back at him, and the change in her took my breath away. She was herself again in a split-second, or at least she managed to replace the mask. She was once again the eager volunteer I’d met four hours earlier, but I wasn’t about to forget what I’d seen in that split-second.

  Somehow, I’d been expecting it.

  Chapter 3 – The New Shopkeeper

  With all the drama swirling around Maida, I’d almost forgotten about the new shopkeeper I wanted to meet. I only remembered when we all came out of the diner together and I saw Carmen looking across the street at something. When I glanced over in the same direction, I saw that the front door of the new shop was open, even though it wasn’t ready for business yet. There was no sign up, and the display windows on either side of the shop door were papered over so nobody could see inside.

  Maida had said she was going home to do some unpacking and marched her little self off. I’m nearly six feet tall, and next to me she seemed tiny.

  Carmen and Hank watched her go, smirking and glowering, respectively, and then they went off in their respective rides: hers a nearly broken-down jalopy of a pick-up truck and Hank’s a shimmering new Audi, an odd couple if I’d ever seen one. He was going to follow her out to her house to see if it was really unlivable for a man of about 70. Carmen had offered her own bed, after she’d had her little joke, but Hank said he’d take the sofa-bed or just check into a hotel.

  I wasn’t sorry to say, “Have a nice day,” and get away from the Rosewoods. Why Hank was visiting the new hometown of a sister-in-law he obviously hated was beyond me. He and Carmen seemed chummy enough, with the kind of shared sense of humor you see in families. But it was obvious he wasn’t visiting her; she hadn’t even known he was coming. In fact, he hadn’t said exactly why he was in town at all. It was mentioned that he lived in New Jersey, so he hadn’t just been passing by.

  I crossed the street and went to the open doorway of the new shop. I didn’t see anybody inside, so I knocked on the jamb. “Hello in there,” I called. “Anybody around?”

  A man in his late thirties came forward with a smile on his face. He was trim and good-looking in a plain-vanilla way, with thinning blond hair and mild blue eyes. His face had a natural congeniality, as if he pretty much smiled all the time.

  “Hi there,” he said. “Thanks for stopping in. As you can see, we’re not really open yet.” He gestured around at the wilderness of boxes, canvas covers and wooden crates. The walls had been refinished with a matte surface in a medium neutral, and new oyster-colored carpeting was covered with plastic. The shop had the smell of new paint and green wood.

  “I know. I just stopped in to say hi. I’m Taylor Verone. Girlfriend’s is my resale shop, on the other side of Perks. Just come on by and let us know if there’s anything we can do to help.”

  He took my hand in a warm, soft grip and told me his name. “Adam Cody. How nice of you to drop in, Taylor. I’ve heard all about you.”

  “You have?”

&nb
sp; “The lady with the animal shelter? You’re a local hero. And also, I’m told, something of a character. I’ve really been looking forward to meeting you.”

  “Oh, puh-shaw,” I said, because I never quite know how to react to flattery. “Most of the time I’m up to my elbows in dog chow.”

  “You’re up at the old Cadbury Estate, aren’t you?”

  “That’s right. We rent the house and grounds from the Cadbury family. They don’t want to use the place anymore, but they don’t want to sell it either. We look after the family cemetery and keep the grounds in good shape, and they let us run the shelter out of the old barn and live in the mansion. It’s a great place to have open-houses and fundraisers.”

  “Sounds like a win-win,” he said. I was beginning to see what a good salesman Adam was. He was very likeable and positive. “Look, let me give you one of my business cards. I just got them in today. Allow me to present you with the very first one.” He took one out of a small white box that was sitting on top of a low crate and presented it to me with a dash of gallantry.

  I thanked him and gave him one of mine. Looking down at his card, I read aloud, “’Artwerks. Adventures in Stone, Metal and Paint.’ So the rumor-mill was right, you’re opening an art gallery. Sounds like just what Tropical Breeze needs. Is it fine art or whimsical things?”

  “Oh, fine art, but we’ll have a few lower-priced items for the casual tourist looking for mementoes. I’m hoping to have my grand opening a week from Friday, and I hope you’ll come. And I hear you have a significant other?”

  I nodded. “Michael Utley. He lives with me, out at the estate.”

  “Bring him along.”

  “Thanks, I will. A week from Friday?”

  He fanned my card gently. “I’ll send an invitation.”

  “I’ll look forward to it.” Suddenly putting two and two together, I said, “Are you familiar with the work of Grant Rosewood?”