Sweet Masterpiece

by Connie Shelton

  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.

  “Can you handle it on your own?” he asked. He sounded genuinely concerned. “I could come out there later, if you want me to.”

  Now she really felt dumb. Nothing like being such a girl that she had to have the big old deputy sheriff with her before she could face down a dead snake. “No, that’s okay. I was just startled. I can do it.”

  She put the phone back in her pocket and noticed that the rain had already slowed. I can do it, I can do it. She kept saying it as she walked back inside, convincing herself as much as anyone.

  Sunlight broke through the clouds, giving a whole new perspective to the house, as she walked through the living room. The rooms she’d cleaned were nice and bright, and the main bedroom felt quite benign now that Bertha’s personal belongings were gone. With a square of late-afternoon sun on the floor, even the red room showed itself to be what Beau had described, a dusty collection of old things. Sam took up a broom and swept the white stones and bundled herbs into a harmless pile. The stiff snake went into a garbage bag. It was a little creepy, picking it up, but she handled it just fine. She dropped the black candles—so dusty that they were nearly gray, in the clear light of day—into the same bag with the snake. All of it went out to the bed of the pickup.

  A stack of books in one corner showed titles pertaining to native American symbolism and beliefs, herbal treatments and such. Two of them specifically addressed witchcraft but even they didn’t seem nearly as ominous now. She whipped the dust off of them with a cloth and carried the stack out to join the other books in her truck. There. All done. Alive to tell about it.

  Alive and hungry. She locked up and headed off to meet her destiny at KFC.

  Zoe stopped by around seven. Sam had showered off her coating of dust and whipped up the batter for her special lighter-than-air white cake. With raspberry and truffle cream filling, and her secret fresh-coconut frosting, the triple layer torte would be the highlight of the ladies luncheon for the Taos Heritage Foundation tomorrow. The th
ree layers went into the oven and she sat at the kitchen table tallying her hours for the two properties she’d cleaned this week. It would add up to a decent amount and she hoped to bank at least half of it in her special account for the opening of Sweet’s Sweets.

  “Hey there! Knock-knock.” Zoe called through the screen door and opened it at the same time. “Any more weird things happen today?”

  Which? The artist’s sketchbook hidden in the wall at the Anderson place, or the witchy room at Bertha Martinez’s? Sam started to give the condensed version when Zoe spotted the carved wooden box at the other end of the table. Life had been nothing but weird this week.

  “Oh, is this it?” Her eyes grew wide and she reached for the box.

  “Careful. That thing is . . .” Sam wasn’t sure quite how to describe it.

  “Possessed?” Zoe joked.

  “I don’t know. It’s got something.”

  She turned it over in her hands but didn’t open it.

  “I brought you some more strange stuff. I’ll get it out of the truck in a minute.” Sam hadn’t bothered to deliver any of the collected junk from today’s haul. “Some antique bottles with herbal whatever in them, some books on herbs and even a volume or two on witchcraft.”

  Zoe set the box down as if it was suddenly too hot to hold.

  “Sam . . . do you really think that old woman was a bruja?”

  “Never thought about it until I came across that red room at her house. I don’t . . . I don’t know much about any of that stuff, but aren’t the brujas of Spanish tradition more . . . um . . .”

  “They were often consulted for their healing powers.” She raised a foot and wiggled her toes.

  “No. Forget it,” Sam protested. She did not get hexed somehow by that old lady.

  “The stories go every direction,” Zoe said. “A lot of them seem to combine tales from all sorts of tradition—shamanism, Catholicism, voodoo. Many people believe brujas are shape-shifters. They can become an animal like a coyote or an owl.”

  “Or a snake?”

  Chapter 9

  The oven timer went off just then and Sam jumped up to check her cake layers. By the time she pulled them out and turned off the oven, Zoe was antsy to go. She’d left Darryl with the impression that she was bringing home ice cream and she still had to deliver on that promise. Sam poured her a little jar of fresh raspberry filling to use as a topping and they walked out to the driveway together. Sam retrieved the boxes of books and medicine bottles from the back seat of her truck and Zoe headed off, happy with her new treasures.

  Sam watched her taillights retreat down the quiet lane, thinking how glad she would be to offload the rest of Bertha Martinez’s stuff, with stops at the thrift shop and the county landfill. Her glance slid sideways to the trash bag that held the stuffed snake. Shape-shifter indeed.

  Cake layers occupied her mind for a few more minutes, as she removed them from the pans and laid them out on cooling racks. While they cooled she blended the truffle cream filling for one of the layers, and cooked the raspberry syrup down until it was thick and spreadable for the other layer. The best thing about baking was that little tasks like grating fresh coconut were the perfect way to relax and escape all of the day’s other stresses. Before she knew it, she had more than double what she needed for the coconut frosting. Into the fridge, it would be there for something else.

  While the layers cooled completely, Sam brought her laptop computer to the table and did a little research on the artist, Pierre Cantone. A search brought up at least a dozen websites devoted to his work and she knew this was more than she could absorb that night. She bookmarked the ones that seemed most interesting and turned back to assembling the torte before exhaustion overtook her.

  Sam woke up early, probably because she’d completely crashed around nine o’clock. Today would be a busy one and that, too, contributed to the fact that she was staring wide-eyed at a clock which said it was 5:38.

  Over coffee she took up her research on Pierre Cantone where she’d left off last night. The artist, born in 1937, raised in Provence, was best known for the amazing quality of light and shadow that he brought to an otherwise-fuzzy impressionistic style. He’d come onto the art scene when Picasso was grabbing all the attention with cubism, just a young wannabe when tastes were moving away from the style so popular a generation earlier. But Cantone ploughed onward and garnered, if not critical praise, popular attention. The elite called him a hack but buyers flocked to him. By the time Picasso died in 1973, Cantone was at the top of his game. Then tragedy struck.

  His lovely wife Adele and their two children died in a train derailment, the only three fatalities when hundreds of other passengers escaped nearly unscathed. It crushed Cantone. Ranting against the world for the gross unfairness of it, he took to drinking heavily and he stopped painting. A corrupt business manager may have raided the successful artist’s life savings—no one seemed to know. The man disappeared, leaving Cantone living alone in a squalid New York tenement, in poverty.

  At some point the Frenchman met a woman, another artist who raved about the art scene in New Mexico. Georgia O’Keefe was living there. Perhaps Cantone would be newly inspired if he were to meet the great lady artist. The record was never clear on whether this woman was a lover or simply a friend with Cantone’s best interests at heart, but she did carry enough influence to convince him to give New Mexico a try. He moved to Santa Fe and lived in the guesthouse of a patron. But, sadly, his work was never the same and he barely produced enough to live on. Then he vanished.

  Sam followed other links in the search but everything written about Cantone seemed to agree. No one knew where the artist went after a dozen or so years in Santa Fe. He’d either died ignominiously or simply dropped out of public life. Since then, of course, his remaining known works had skyrocketed in value, with several of them bringing high six-figures at auction. She studied photos of the paintings and felt her pulse quicken. The little mural they’d found was certainly in the same style, and yet it was not a duplicate of any of Cantone’s known works. Had she found Cantone’s mysterious hiding place? And where was he now?

  She would probably never know the answers, but she’d drained two cups of coffee by this time and was antsy to get on with the day. By nine a.m. she was on her way to the landfill with the bags of trash from the Martinez place (never so glad to see something thrown away as when she tossed the snake bag over the edge). The few useful items went to the thrift shop on her way back into town and she popped back by her house to pick up the raspberry torte and deliver it to the Taos Heritage place just as the women were beginning to arrive for their luncheon.

  Declining a half-hearted invitation to stay for their lunch and presentation (really, did they want her here fresh from the landfill?), she picked up a sack of tacos at Taco Bell and headed back home. They were going to the soggy side by the time she finished unloading the truck—no sense in cleaning herself up twice. She washed her hands of the dust and carefully placed Pierre Cantone’s sketchbook out of harm’s way on the kitchen table. Beside Bertha’s old wooden box, the two items looked like a pair of artifacts from another era.

  Sam downed three tacos without blinking and chided herself for not being a more conscious eater. How was she ever going to lose the spare pounds? She crushed the paper sack with the two remaining tacos and threw them in the trash, like that would make any real difference before tonight’s dinner with Beau Cardwell. But as long as she was feeling a little bit virtuous she also poured out the soda she’d bought and drew a glass of fresh water from the tap.

  The phone rang and she flinched. Zoe would be happy to lecture her on the evils of fast food and too much sugar, eating habits being the one source of contention between them, but a glance at the caller ID told her it was Rupert instead. Now there was a man who would never give you a hard time about calories. In his mind butter is one of the essential food groups.

  “Hey Rupert, what’s up?”

  “Honey, I got t
wenty-three pages written today, which is a real miracle because I can hardly concentrate on work. Esteban sent some photos of the mural to New York and they are very excited. I mean, very. He’s crating up the painting today and shipping it out for authentication. If we have a real Cantone here, it’s going to be such a boost for Taos. I mean, that’s proof positive that he lived here, right here in our little town.”

  Considering that several famous artists and writers lived here over the years, it’s not like this one thing would put Taos on the map. But it would still be exciting news.

  “I read up a little, this morning, but Cantone’s history gets blurry at the end. No one seems to know where he went or what he did. If he’s still alive, he should get the mural back, or get the money when it sells. And if he’s not living, I wonder if there are relatives. Maybe there’s a will.” Sam had to pause for a breath. “Do you know of any way to find out?”

  “I’ll ask around in the art community. If Cantone lived here for awhile, maybe someone in town knew him.”

  Sam hung up, feeling a little guilty that she’d not told Rupert about the sketchbook. It was certainly a treasure and further evidence that the mural was genuine. But somehow she didn’t want to talk about it quite yet. Meanwhile, she was still curious about the body buried on the property. Was it Anderson, the homeowner, or was it the younger man who’d lived with him? And how did he die? She shook off the thoughts. It might have been someone else entirely, and even though the grave looked fresh to Sam maybe it wasn’t; maybe the burial happened years ago.