Crystal Vision

by Patricia Rice

  “But they may have passed information to their children,” Mariah said. “Teddy and Harvey’s parents and grandparents left them crystals. How many others might have done the same?”

  Susannah looked alarmed. “I thought all the crystals had been buried!”

  “Don’t be ridiculous, Suz.” Val strode behind the counter. “They’re just stones. These idiots up on the wall ground glass, stones, and anything that occurred to them into their so-called natural paints for texture and iridescence. Just because you preferred watercolors doesn’t mean others gave up searching for the perfect formula. I think this is Daisy here on the end. She always had a fey look to her. The coffee urn concealed her before. I hadn’t noticed.”

  Mariah sat on a stool at the end of the counter near Keegan. “She talks. She walks. Amazing.”

  Keegan assumed she referred to the operatic diva. “It’s hard to be a death goddess around a sister who saw you playing in mud puddles.” He studied the Daisy portrait. She’d been a plain girl with long brown hair, a vague look on her round face, and a tattoo of a rose on her cheek. “Did Daisy have a tattoo?”

  “They used ink and henna,” Susannah said, overhearing. “It’s not permanent, so don’t rely on identifying markers like that. But that is probably Daisy. She was always around somewhere, so I vaguely remember her. Apparently, she’s the only one who stayed in Hillvale. I don’t think she had anywhere to go.”

  “Walker says the sheriff has been looking for her family, but they haven’t found anyone,” Sam said with sorrow in her voice. “If she had children or siblings, we’ve not heard of them.”

  Val wrinkled her nose. “When we were little, she often had commune kids around her, but I don’t remember any one in particular and few stayed for long.”

  Mariah climbed down to touch Daisy’s portrait in the dark corner where it had been hidden all these years. Keegan thought her dark eyes might be shimmering with tears, but she expressed no emotion as she returned the discussion to the mural. “If Teddy and Harvey had grandparents in the commune, would they be in this portrait?”

  “We’d remember the children more than the parents. I don’t know your Teddy and Harvey well enough to see facial similarities.” Susannah gave up and returned to her mug.

  “Did all of them have red eyes when you and Thalia fixed the mural?” Mariah asked while Sam studied the faces with more care than her mother had.

  The interaction between the women fascinated Keegan. He watched as Susannah Menendez sighed and shook her head. The woman was hiding far more than she admitted.

  “Our parents’ eyes were the reason I took on the project. That was maybe twenty years after it was painted. Several of the others were degrading but as far as I remember, Daisy was fine. We just applied the acrylic formula to everyone to prevent further corrosion.”

  “How did you know to use acrylic?” Sam asked, picking at the varnish over Daisy’s eyes with her fingernail.

  “That old journal of Lucinda’s. Thalia found a description in it with Lucinda’s notes in the margins. The original description of garnets was centuries old, but Lucinda’s more modern notes suggested an acrylic formula as a means of controlling the substance. We had to varnish the entire project to hold it together later, but Lucinda’s suggestion worked.”

  “Did you use the formula on those oils?” Mariah asked, nodding at the old paintings Susannah had brought with her.

  Susannah shrugged. “I did it as a preventive to corrosion.”

  So, she didn’t know if the people in the portraits had red eyes. Keegan turned his attention back to the mural.

  “The paintings Daisy collected were all ones using crystals that turned red.” Sam scraped off a piece of dark brown paint on Daisy’s portrait, revealing a more faded brown beneath. “Daisy’s eyes didn’t corrode.”

  Beside him, Mariah inhaled sharply. Keegan covered her hands with his, recognizing the itch to scratch out eyes. “We could ruin it,” he murmured.

  She balled her fingers into fists but nodded. He enjoyed a woman who understood without him having to explain. He liked it even better that she didn’t jerk her hands away. They weren’t manicured hands, but soft, unlike his, as if she regularly used lotion. That was unexpected of a woman who hid her sexuality beneath shapeless shirts and vests.

  “I don’t suppose you have any idea where Thalia kept Lucinda’s journal?” Keegan asked, finally interrupting when they reached the point of his concern.

  “Thalia was a lazy slut,” Susannah said dismissively. “She left the book sitting around. I was just a kid and knew it was supposed to be valuable. So I peeked in it to see if there was anything I could use. But it was in ancient handwriting, and I couldn’t read most of it. She only did the mural because Dad paid her.”

  “The varnish is pretty thick, so it’s hard to get at the acrylic,” Sam reported, peeling at another set of eyes, this time in the man next to Daisy. “This thing must have been really eerie when it was first done, if all the eyes were crystalline.”

  Now that he’d intruded, Keegan followed through by going around the counter to test the molecular structure of the painting. The women watched him with curiosity, but he felt oddly safe in their company. Had the Kennedys or any of the others they referred to as Nulls been here, he would have thought twice before performing this trick.

  “Yes, the same crystal dust was used here as in the oils. It’s not as thick,” he reported.

  “Tempera is a weak paint and probably wouldn’t support it,” Susannah said, sounding more interested. “So the eyes on this early attempt may not have been as distinctive as their later experiments with oil.”

  “If they were testing the use of natural substances like egg tempera, they would have used plant materials and not chemicals. And sapphires would have seemed natural.” Sam picked at another figure, one where the finish seemed to be peeling.

  “Who on earth grinds sapphires into paint?” Mariah asked in disgust. “They could have earned more money selling them.”

  “Not sapphires,” Keegan corrected. “These blues are azurite, a much softer mineral. They did not use particularly precious gems, which adds to the curiosity. Why would so many different kinds of rocks be gathered in this one place?”

  “I thought you said they used garnets and that’s why the eyes turned red?”

  “There are many types of garnet. The transparent red ones used in jewelry are the ones most people know. These appear to be the more opaque stones, the ones we use in the industry as abrasives. The structures are similar enough that it’s difficult to say once they’re ground to dust and in trace amounts, so I cannot be positive.”

  Dinah finally emerged from her kitchen to swat at Sam’s hand with a wooden spoon. “I don’t want that pretty picture ruined!”

  She was a second too late. The paint beneath Sam’s fingernails popped off, revealing red eyes beneath.

  “We really need to identify these people,” Sam told the room at large. “One of them could be a killer.”

  Eleven

  July 9: Monday, lunch

  The lunch customers began to arrive as Sam scratched eyes, and Dinah scolded and wrung her gnarled hands. Knee aching, Mariah didn’t get up. She hoped Sam’s mother would repair the mural, but at the moment, Susannah was protesting the destruction along with Dinah. Val joined in the scratching.

  The painting was so smoke-and grease-coated that the subjects were barely distinguishable. It needed a good repair and cleaning anyway.

  “That’s not helping identify them,” Mariah complained so only Keegan could hear. “And all those hippies have to be in their seventies by now. How many seventy-year-old archers are still able to bring down big game?”

  He finished off his coffee while apparently considering her question. She thought they worked well as a team—because he actually listened. She winced as she realized she was enjoying Keegan’s company. That didn’t mean she could trust him not to expose her.

  “Daisy was an easy tar
get,” Keegan said, leaving open the possibility of seventy-year-old assassins. “But if we’re assuming it is a descendant of these people who is hunting the crystals, we would then have to ask if evil or greed or whatever is inherited from the parent. I fear this is a dead end. We need the book.”

  Damn, but it was hard to keep someone of his formidable concentration at a distance. If he would just once poke fun at her friends, she might be able to wipe him out of her head. But he was taking them as seriously as she presumed he might one of his own projects.

  “Find the book, or the crystals,” she reminded him. “Have you asked to examine Teddy’s and Harvey’s stones? If we knew why someone might want crystals, we might know who wants them.”

  As if conjured by her suggestion, Kurt Kennedy and Teddy entered together. Both stopped to gawk at the wanton destruction of the mural. Mariah used her staff to nudge Teddy’s arm. “I’ll bring you one of Dinah’s creations later if you’ll take Keegan over to examine your stones. And bonus points if you can persuade Harvey to reveal his.”

  “What is going on here?” Kurt asked before Teddy could agree.

  “Family feud. You should know all about those. I have to get Dinah back into the kitchen before one of the Ingerssons goes ballistic. I can feel the power building as we stand here.” Mariah dragged herself up, leaving Keegan to his bewilderment. She just couldn’t manage the entire world at once. She’d already learned that lesson.

  “They’ll fix it,” Mariah promised, going behind the counter to wrap her arm around the diminutive chef. “Cook something special, raise your prices, and call it a party.”

  Dinah frowned as expressively as any woman Mariah had ever known. “Only because you’re asking,” she said. “I’m trusting you, girl.”

  “That’s a slippery slope. Trust Sam. The mural will be better than new when she’s done.”

  Dinah shook her head. “There’s a cloud forming in here. Wave your wand and make it go away.” She trotted back to her kitchen, probably plotting a banquet.

  Mariah watched wistfully as Keegan escorted the lovers out. She’d never found a man interesting enough to consider for more than sex, but she was feeling just the tiniest bit jealous that Teddy and Sam now had men who understood them. She was feeling left out, she supposed, which was why she’d been enjoying Keegan’s company too much.

  “I’ll pop eyeballs if you’ll start delivering water,” Mariah whispered to Sam. “You’re attracting attention.”

  Sam glanced over her shoulder at the lunch customers filling the counter and watching in fascination. “Damn.”

  With efficient haste, Sam ushered Val back to the booth with Susannah. Left studying peeling eyeballs, Mariah felt the first hint of unease. Did she really want the glare of evil staring back at her from all these young, smiling faces? Did she even want to know their fate? They’d been potters and artists and maybe even a musician or writer or two. The commune had attracted the lost and dispossessed, just as Hillvale still did.

  Maybe only the rich and famous became infused with greed and evil. She could hope the rest escaped it. She looked at her thick fingernails. She kept them neat so they didn’t snag on her weaving. A knife would work better. It was concrete masonry behind the paint, so she couldn’t gouge canvas—just eyeballs.

  With a sigh, she began attacking Dinah’s prized mural with cheap silverware. Absorbed in the task, she ignored the gossipy guessing going on at the counter. She’d worked in the café long enough to let the voices go by without mentally processing. Not until a loud thump hit the counter did she jerk her attention from her task to glare over her shoulder.

  Aaron stood there with an encyclopedic volume, flipping pages. “Josiah Peterson, born 1947,” he stated solemnly. “Famous for multi-colored ceramics developed during his stay in the Ingersson commune in the late 60s and early 70s.”

  “That’s him,” Amber cried excitedly, looking from the page to the murky mural. “Can we label him?” Her bracelets jangled on her plump arms as she pointed to the figure in question.

  Mariah swiveled on the aluminum counter she was using as stool and examined the book the antique dealer held up. The photo was later in Peterson’s life, after time had sculpted long wrinkles down the sides of his angular jaw and thinned his mousy brown hair. But the image was immediately recognizable. She rummaged in a drawer beneath the counter, found the markers they’d used when labeling photos of the town, and wrote Josiah Peterson on a sticky pad page.

  When she pinned it to the man sitting next to Lars Ingersson in the mural, a cheer went up around the room.

  The town had found a new game to play.

  With a sigh of regret, Mariah reached up to the famous potter’s eyes and dug in her knife. The crowd waited expectantly. She only needed to flip one eyeball. Red.

  “Damn,” Aaron said. “We have two really good examples of his work in Teddy’s collection.”

  Mariah’s fingers itched for her keyboard. She could find out so much more if she could just slither down the interwebs. . .

  Books. Aaron had found answers in books. That seemed almost medieval.

  If she could find Peterson’s descendants. . . “Does your book give date of death?”

  Aaron flipped pages. “The book is twenty years old. He was still alive then. There are more ceramic artists in here. Peterson and Simmons are the only ones mentioned who I recognize from the commune. Simmons was younger, born 1955. I’m guessing he wouldn’t have been here at the time the mural was painted. That’s the original gang on the wall.”

  Mariah looked at the page he showed her, then up at the mural. “Nope, not seeing him.”

  Beside him, Amber tugged on the book. “Let me see. Are you picking up vibrations from these photos? Maybe if we had an astrologer, she could work charts based on their birthdates?”

  Mariah wanted to shout that wouldn’t find a killer, but this crowd thought they were playing a game. They might clam up if she mentioned their real purpose in identifying the figures. “A good chart takes too long. Maybe we should have a contest.”

  The things that came out of her mouth. . . She bit her tongue, but it was too late. The idea was out there and growing faster than a snowball rolling downhill in January.

  By the time Sam had served lunches all around and Mariah was back at the cash register, the town had made the mural contest part of their weekend art walk extravaganza. People were snapping pictures to upload once they got off the mountain. Aaron passed around his book so they could snap pictures of Peterson the Potter.

  Mariah had a very bad feeling about all of it. She didn’t need more strangers snooping around.

  She was relieved when Keegan returned with Harvey in tow. They looked around at the excited residents mapping out poster boards promising prizes no one had approved, then up at Tullah, who had taken to popping eyes in Mariah’s place. As tall as Mariah, the thrift shop owner moved with lazy grace, as if popping out real eyeballs was an art she’d practiced. Sam wiped up behind her as Tullah progressed across the wall.

  “Man, we can’t leave you alone for a second, can we?” Harvey slung a leg over a stool.

  Keegan narrowed his eyes and studied the results. “Only one of the women other than Mrs. Ingersson has a hint of red, but there are only three women out of the thirteen figures. The original founders of the commune were not very diverse in culture, were they?”

  “Wealthy white men,” Mariah agreed.

  “It became more diverse over time,” Susannah Menendez explained from her booth. She and Val hadn’t stirred from the table while they watched the destruction of their father’s work. “The original founders were just our father’s friends from the university. The artists weren’t wealthy at that point. As their reputation grew, they attracted all sorts. He never turned anyone away.”

  “So basically, we’re barely scratching the surface here,” Mariah said in discouragement.

  Others hooted at the pun. She rolled her eyes at the warped humor and continued, “We�
�d have to bring out all Daisy’s paintings and identify them.”

  That suggestion didn’t stir the imaginations of people already wrapped up in their current project. Since they had no notion of the broader picture, they didn’t have her incentive to do more.

  Keegan understood however. The big engineer frowned. “It might be easier to identify arrows. Has your chief started hunting for local archers yet?”

  Sam boxed up an enormous chef’s salad and a stack of sandwiches. “He has his own investigators working on it. Hillvale is costing him a lot of money. His company doesn’t come cheap.”

  Police Chief Walker owned a corporate investigation and security firm in Los Angeles. Hillvale didn’t have the cash to pay for their services. Mariah knew Walker and Monty had worked out some kind of trade of favor deals—the only economy the town knew. But she figured Walker was coming out on the short end of that stick.

  “Why don’t you and Kurt take these up to Walker and the mayor at city hall?” Sam handed the box to Keegan. “You can talk archery over lunch. While you’re at it, ask when the sheriff will release the crystals from Teddy’s attic. I need to monitor mural mutilation as long as my family is here.” Sam nodded at the women now surrounded by other Lucys.

  “I’ll show you my crystals when Teddy shows you hers,” Harvey promised as Keegan frowned. “This evening?”

  They were treating an Oxford scholar, a doctor of engineering, and quite possibly some sort of Scots nobility as an errand boy. He had a right to frown. Mariah kept a straight face at Keegan’s hesitation. Then he marched out, evidently deciding he’d get more information out of Nulls than the Lucys. Urged on by Teddy and Sam, Kurt reluctantly followed. The resort owner had a right to be suspicious, since his jeweler girlfriend was teaching him that all was not as it seemed in this town.

  “Now,” Harvey murmured, focusing his attention on Tullah’s destroyed eyeballs. “Beneath the crud and the villainous mustache, doesn’t that one beside Mrs. Ingersson resemble our fine Scot?”