Alice Schirmer was the folk art curator at the Walker. She was tall and too thin with close-cropped dark hair and fashionable black-rimmed executive glasses. She wore a dark brown summer suit with a gold silk scarf as a kind of necktie. She said, “I had two of our workpersons bring it out; we've had it in storage.”
“Thank you.”
“You said there was a woman missing…?” Schirmer asked. She did a finger twiddle at a guy with a two-day stubble and a $400 haircut.
“Yeah. One of the heirs to the Armstrong fortune, in a way,” Lucas said. “Granddaughter of the woman who found them. That woman may also have been murdered.”
“Mrs. Coombs?”
“Yup.”
“Good God,” Schirmer said, touching her lips with three bony fingers. “They really do hold a curse. Like the tomb of Tutankhamen.”
“Maybe you could palm it off on another museum,” Lucas suggested. “Get a picture or a statue back.”
“I don't think… we'd get enough,” Schirmer said, reluctantly. She pointed: “Through here.”
They walked past a painting that looked like a summer salad. “Why wouldn't you get enough?”
“I'm afraid the value of the Armstrongs peaked a while ago. Like, the year we got it.”
“Really.”
“First the stock market had problems, and art in general cooled off, and then, you know, we began to get further and further from the idealism of the early feminists,” she said. “The cycle turns, women's folk art begins to slip in value. Here we go.”
They stepped past a sign that said gallery closed, installation in progress, into an empty, white-walled room. The quilt was stretched between naturally finished timber supports; it was a marvel of color: black, brown, red, blue, and yellow rectangles that seemed to shape and reshape themselves into three-dimensional triangles that swept diagonally across the fabric field.
“Canada Geese,” Schirmer said. “You can almost see them flapping, can't you?”
“You can,” Lucas agreed. He looked at it for a moment. He didn't know anything about art, but he knew what he liked, and he liked the quilt.
“This was donated by Ms. Bucher?” Lucas asked.
“Yes.”
“Where are the curses?” he asked.
“Here.” Schirmer's suit had an inside pocket, just like a man's, and she slipped out a mechanical pencil and a penlight. They stood close to the quilt and she pointed out the stitches with the tip of the pencil. “This is an M. See it? You read this way around the edge of the piece, 'Let the man who lies beneath this quilt Lucas followed the curse around the quilted pieces, the letters like hummingbird tracks across fallen autumn leaves. “Jesus,” he said after a moment. “She was really pissed, wasn't she?”
“She was,” Schirmer said. “We have documents from her life that indicate exactly why she was pissed. She had the right to be. Her husband was a maniac.”
“Huh.” A thread of scarlet caught Lucas's eye. He got closer, his nose six inches from the quilt. “Huh.”
Had to be bullshit. Then he thought, no it doesn't -as far as he could tell, the thread was exactly the same shade as the thread on the spool he'd found behind the stove at Marilyn Coombs's. But that thread had come from Arkansas…
He said, “Huh,” a third time, and Schirmer asked, “What?”
Lucas stepped back: “How do you authenticate something like this?”
“Possession is a big part of it. We know where Mrs. Coombs bought them, and we confirmed that with the auctioneer,” she said. “A couple of Mrs. Armstrong's friends verified that she'd once been a pretty busy quilter, and that she'd made these particular quilts. She signed them with a particular mark.”
She pointed at the lower-left-hand corner of the quilt. “See this thing, it looks like a grapevine? It's actually a script SA, for Sharon Armstrong. We know of several more of her quilts without the curses, but the same SA. She used to make them when she was working on the ore boats… You know about the ore boats?”
“Yeah, Gabriella… the missing woman… mentioned that Armstrong worked on the boats.”
“Yes. She apparently had a lot of free time, and not much to do, so she made more quilts. But that was after Frank was in the asylum, so there was no need for curses.”
“Huh.” Lucas poked a finger at the quilt. “Can you tell by the fabric, you know, that they're right? For the time? Or the style, or the cloth, or something?”
“We could, if there was any doubt,” she said.
Lucas looked at her. “What would I have to do,” he asked, “to get a little teeny snip of this red thread, right here?”
An Act of Congress, it turned out, or at least of a judge from the Hennepin County district court.
Schirmer escorted him to the elevator that went down to the parking garage. “If it had been up to me, I'd let you have the snip. But Joe thinks there's a principle involved.”
“Yeah, I know. The principle is, 'Don't help the cops,'“ Lucas said.
He said it pleasantly and she smiled: “I'm sure it won't be any trouble to get a piece of paper.”
“If I weren't looking for Gabriella Coombs…”
“You think the snip of thread would make a difference?” she asked.
“Maybe… hell, probably not,” Lucas admitted. “But I'd like a snip. I'll talk to a judge, send the paper.”
“Bring it yourself,” she said. “I'd be happy to show you around. I haven't seen you here before…”
“When I was in uniform, with the Minneapolis cops, I'd go over to the spoon-and-cherry…” He was talking about the Claes Oldenburg spoon bridge in the sculpture garden across the street. He smiled reflexively and then said, “Never mind.”
“You did not either!” she said, catching his sleeve. What she meant was, You did not either fuck in the spoon.
He shrugged, meaning to tell her that he'd chased people off the spoon a couple of times. Before he could, she leaned close and said, “So'd I.” She giggled in an uncuratorlike way. “If I'd been caught and fired, it still would have been worth it.”
“Jeez, you crazy art people,” Lucas said.
He said goodbye and went down to the car, rolled out of the ramp. A white van was just passing the exit; he cut after it, caught the Minnesota plates-wrong state-and then a sign on the side that said “DeWalt Tools.”
Getting psycho, he thought.
With nobody behind him, he paused at the intersection, fished through his notebook, and found a number for Landford and Margaret Booth, the Donaldson brother-in-law and sister. He dialed and got Margaret: “I need to know the details of how your sister acquired one of the Armstrong quilts, which she donated to the Milwaukee Art Museum.”
“Do you think it's something?” she asked.
“It could be.”
“I bet Amity Anderson is involved,” she said.
“No, no,” Lucas said. “This thing is branching off in an odd direction. If you could look through your sister's tax records, though, and let me know how she acquired it, and when she donated it, I'd appreciate it.”
“I will do that this evening; but we are going out, so could I call you back in the morning?”
“That'd be fine,” Lucas said.
He looked at his watch. Five o'clock. He called Lucy Coombs, and from the way the phone was snatched up after a partial ring, knew that Gabriella had not been found: “Any word at all?” he asked. “Nothing. We don't have anybody else to call,” Lucy Coombs sobbed. “Where is she? Oh, my God, where is she?”
Smith couldn't tell him. He did say the St. Paul cops were going door-to-door around Marilyn Coombs's neighborhood, looking for anything or anybody who could give them a hint. “And what about the van? Still no thoughts?”
“Not a thing, John. Honest to God, it's driving me nuts.”
He thought about going over to Bucher's, and looking at her tax records. But he knew the valuation and the date of the donation, and couldn't think of what else he might find there. With a sense
of guilt, he went home. Home to dinner, wondering where Gabriella Coombs might be; or her body.
After dinner, Weather said, “You're really messed up.”
“I know,” Lucas said. He was in the den, staring at a TV, but the TV was turned off.
“Gabriella Coombs is out there. I'm sitting here doing nothing.”
“That thread,” Weather said. Lucas had told her about the spool of thread at Marilyn Coombs's house, and the thread in the quilt. “If that's the same thread, you're suggesting that something is wrong with the quilts?”
“Yeah, but they all wound up in museums, and the woman who benefited is dead,” Lucas said. “It seems like some of the money is missing. She didn't get enough money. Maybe.
It's all so long ago. Maybe the Sotheby's guy could tell me about it tomorrow, but Gabriella's out there now… And what about the van?”
“You're going crazy sitting here,” Weather said. “Why don't you go over to Bucher's place, and see if she has anything on the quilt she donated to the Walker? You'll need to look sooner or later. Why not now? You'd be doing something…”
“Because it feels like the wrong thing to do. I feel like I ought to be out driving down alleys, looking for Gabriella.”
“You're not going to find her driving up and down alleys, Lucas.”
He stood up. “I'm going to eat some cheese and crackers.”
“Why don't you take them with you?”
He DID, a bowl of sliced cheese and water crackers on the passenger seat of the Porsche, munching through them as he wheeled down to Bucher's house. The mansion was brightly lit. Inside, he found the Bucher heirs, six people, four women and two men, dividing up the goodies.
Carol Ann Barker, the woman with the tiny nose, came to greet him. “The St. Paul people said we could begin some preliminary marking of the property,” she explained.
“People are getting ready to go back home, and we wanted to take this moment with the larger pieces.”
Lucas said, “Okay-I'll be in the office, looking at paper. Have you seen check registers anywhere? Stuff going back a few years? Or tax returns…? Anything to do with the buying and donation of the Armstrong quilt?”
“The Armstrong quilt?”
She didn't know what it was, and when Lucas explained, pursed her lips, and said, “She had an annual giving program. There are some records in her office, we looked to see if we could find anything about the Reckless painting. We didn't find anything, but there are documents on donations. Check registers are filed on the third floor, there's a room with several old wooden file cabinets… I don't know what years.”
Barker showed him the file: it was an inch thick, and while Barker went back to marking furniture, he thumbed through it, looking for the quilt donation. Not there. Looked through it again. Still found nothing.
He had the date of the quilt donation, and found donations of smaller items on dates on either side of it. Scratched his head. Rummaged through the files, looking for more on art, or donations. Finally, gave up and climbed the stairs to the third floor.
The file room was small and narrow and smelled of crumbling plaster; dust and small bits of plaster littered the tops of the eight file cabinets. The room was lit by a row of bare bulbs on the ceiling. Lucas began opening drawers, and in the end cabinets, the last ones he looked at, found a neat arrangement of check registers, filed by date. There was nothing of interest that he could see around the time of the quilt donation; but as he worked backward from the donation, he eventually found a check for $5,000 made out to Marilyn Coombs.
For the quilt? Or for something else Coombs had found? He looked in his notebooks for the date of the quilt auction in New York. The check to Coombs had been issued seven months earlier. Maybe not related; but why hadn't there been any other check to Coombs? In fact, the only large check he'd seen had been to a car dealer.
He was still stuck. Stuck in a small room, dust filtering down on his neck. He ought to be out looking for Gabriella…
The heirs were finishing up when Lucas came back down the stairs. Barker asked, “Find anything?”
“No. Listen, have you ever heard of a woman named Marilyn Coombs?”
Barker shook her head: “No… should I have?”
“She was an acquaintance of your aunt's, the person who originally found the Armstrong quilts,” Lucas said. “She was killed a few days ago… If you find anything with the name 'Coombs' on it, could you call me?”
“Sure. Right away. You don't think there's a danger to us?” The other heirs had stopped looking at furniture, and turned toward him.
“I don't think so,” he said. “We've got a complicated and confusing problem, we may have had a couple of murders and maybe a kidnapping. I just don't know.”
There was a babble of questions then, and he outlined the known deaths. One man asked anxiously, “Do you think it's just random? Or is there a purpose behind the killings? Other than money?”
“I don't know that, either,” Lucas said. “Part of this may be coincidence, but I'm starting to think not. If these killings are connected somehow, I would think it would have to do with some special knowledge that would give away the killers. In addition to the money angle, the robbery aspect.”
The man exhaled: “Then I'm good. I don't know nothin' about nothin'.”
Discouraged, Lucas went back to the car, making a mental list of things to do in the morning, calls to make. He didn't want to call Lucy Coombs, because he didn't want to talk to her again. Instead, he called John Smith, who was home watching television.
“Not a thing,” Smith said. “I'll get a call as soon as anybody finds anything. Finds a shoelace. So far, we haven't found a thing.”
Heading toward home, a fire truck, siren blasting away, went by on a cross street.
He could hear more sirens to the south, not far away, and halfway home, with the windows in the car run down, he could smell the distinctive odor of a burning house.
He'd never figured out what it was, exactly-insulation, or plaster, or old wood, or some combination-but he'd encountered it a dozen times in his career, and it never smelled good.
Back at home, he found Weather in the kitchen, sitting at the counter with a notepad.
She asked, “You have time to run to the store?”
“Yeah, I guess,” he said. Ought to be doing something.
“I'm making a list…”
He was waiting for the list when his cell phone rang. He looked at the caller ID: Flowers.
“Yeah?”
“I just got a call from Kathy Barth,” Flowers said. “Somebody just firebombed her house.”
The fire was out by the time Lucas got back. He'd driven right past it on the way home, but a block north, hadn't seen the smoke against the night sky, and the flames had been confined to the back side of the house.
Kathy and Jesse Barth were standing in the front yard talking to firemen when Lucas walked across the fire line. Jesse Barth saw him coming and pointed him out to her mother, who snapped something at her daughter, and then started toward Lucas.
“My house is burned down because of you assholes,” she shouted.
Lucas thought she was going to hit him, and put his hands up, palms out. “Wait, wait, wait… I just heard. Tell me what happened.”
“Somebody threw a firebomb through my back window, right in the kitchen, right through the window, everything's burned and screwed up and there's water…”
She suddenly went to her knees on the dirty wet grass, weeping. Jesse walked up to stand next to her, put her hand on her mother's shoulder. “Virgil said nothing would happen,” the kid said. “Virgil said you'd look out for us.”
Lucas shook his head: “We don't know what's going on here,” he said. “We can't find anybody who might have tried to pull you off the street, who killed Screw…”
“It's those fuckin' Klines, you fuckin' moron,” Kathy Barth shouted, trying to get back on her feet. The fireman caught her under one arm, and helped her
get up.
Lucas said, “Ah, Jesus, I'm sorry about this…”
“It's all my pictures, all of Jesse's things from when she was a kid, all of her school papers, my wedding dress…” She took a step toward the house, and the fireman said, “Whoa. Not yet.”
Lucas asked him, “How bad is it?”
“The kitchen's a mess. Miz Barth used a fire extinguisher on it, which was pretty brave, and that held it down some, and we got here pretty quick,” the fireman said.
“The actual fire damage is confined to the kitchen, but there's smoke damage, and foam. Some of the structure under the back of the house could be in trouble.”
Lucas asked Kathy Barth, “Do you have insurance?”
“Yes. Part of the mortgage.”
“Then you'll get it fixed. Better than it was,” Lucas said. “A new kitchen. If it's only smoke, you can save a lot of your stuff, but as soon as the fire guys let you, you've got to get in, and get your photo stuff out.”
She came back at him: “Why can't you stop those guys? They're crazy.” And to Jesse: “We should never have gotten involved with them. We should never have gone to the cops. Now our house… Oh, jeez, our house…”
“Tell me what happened,” Lucas said.
“We were watching television, and there was a crash in the kitchen-” Jesse began.
Kathy interrupted: “One minute before that I was in the kitchen getting Cheez-Its.
I would have been exploded and burned up.”
Jesse, continuing: “-and we heard this window crash, this glass, and boom, there was fire all over the kitchen and I was screaming-” “I ran and got the fire extinguisher from the closet-” Kathy said.
Jesse: “I called nine-one-one and got the fire department to come-” “I squirted the fire extinguisher but there was fire all over, I could smell the gasoline and it wouldn't go out, the whole kitchen was full of fire and we had to run,” Kathy said. She was looking anxiously at the house.
Jesse: “The fire department took forever to get here…”
“Six minutes from when the call came in,” the fireman said. “Fire was out in seven.”
Lucas found the fireman in charge in the backyard. He was talking with another fireman, pointing up at the roof, broke off when Lucas came up. Lucas flashed his ID: “These folks were part of an investigation we did at the BCA.”
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