A Widow's Curse

by Phillip DePoy

  Not only do I understand, I thought triumphantly, but I already guessed something like that before I was told. I might actually have something of a talent for prescience.

  “Now, in the matter of this…I’m not certain what you’re referring to,” he stammered, “when you say something about a phone call.”

  “The telephone call you received yesterday from my houseguest,” I said patiently, “who was in such a panic that we left immediately after his call.”

  Taylor made his way to the desk at a deliberately glacial pace. He was dressed in a charcoal suit of raw silk—seemed Italian in design. The shirt was blinding-white and starched; the tie was the color of dark blood.

  “No.” He gave the appearance of trying to think. “A desperate phone call? I think I’d remember something like that.”

  “You came to get us out of the conference room.” I stood directly in front of his desk, under the ominous chandelier. “When I got to the phone, it was dead.”

  “Dr. Devilin.” He sat. “I have no idea what you’re talking about.”

  As I stood trying to fathom his reasons for denying the event, I felt the ice of an empty cave in my stomach.

  He was going to tell the police that I was lying about Shultz’s call.

  What felt like five minutes passed in silence.

  My mind was racing from one supposition to another. In a flash of desperation, I took a sip of breath and called out.

  “Becky?” I glanced at Taylor. “That’s her name?”

  “It is.” He had pasted an amused smile across his lips.

  I heard Becky appear in the doorway behind me and turned to look her in the eye.

  “When Dr. Andrews, the cute one with the English accent, and I were in the conference room yesterday, didn’t Mr. Taylor here interrupt our calm examination of the documents with an emergency phone call?”

  Her face flushed so suddenly that I thought she might be having some sort of attack, and her eyes shot to Taylor.

  “Not that I recall.” She sounded like a tiny doll. She wouldn’t look me in the eye.

  “I see.” I turned back to Taylor. “Well, we both know the truth of the matter. All I have to do is find out why you’re lying, tell the right people what you’ve done, and then decide whether to tear down this house or turn it into a nice little bed-and-breakfast.”

  Taylor adjusted some papers in front of him so that they would line up exactly perpendicular to the back edge of his desk.

  “I’d be careful about taking on a small-town lawyer with a hundred years’ worth of community ties. Sometimes a man like that can be surprisingly—what’s the word I want?—vengeful.”

  “You don’t know the first thing about revenge,” I snarled. “So I’ll give you a short lesson. You come from English stock, a group of men and women who found financial gain and religious independence in a new world. I come from Scots-Irish heraldry. Most of us came to these mountains to escape execution for murder. I’m sure your hypothetical small-town lawyer, the one with an inadequate education and an unconscious death wish, would understand the difference.”

  As I had hoped, Taylor was momentarily at a loss. I was almost certain I could read in his face what I had suspected: He knew Conner’s history; understood the reference I had made. It was enough to keep him stymied just long enough for me to turn back to Becky.

  She wouldn’t look up from the floor.

  “It’s all right, Becky.” I didn’t know what else to say.

  She nodded for a second, then vanished with almost supernatural speed.

  “As it happens,” I said calmly, returning my attention to Taylor, “the sheriff of my little hamlet is a friend of mine—in fact, my best friend. His primary case at the moment concerns the murder of a man at my house yesterday—although I feel you already know that, somehow. But I’m absolutely certain he’ll be looking into your affairs, strictly in the line of duty, you understand. If every single little thing in your world isn’t as perfectly straight as the papers on your desk, you’ll need a lawyer of your own. And if you find yourself in a snarl with my family business, you may want an undertaker handy.”

  He coughed up what passed for a laugh.

  “I’m sure that kind of talk intimidates the feebleminded in your tiny world, but as it happens, I was just in the courthouse this morning, where I ate a small-town sheriff for breakfast. With grits and gravy. Now are we done here? I have actual work to do.”

  Good. Arrogance was the perfect foible for Mr. Taylor. It’s easy to erode and it produces a very satisfying loud crash.

  Out on the front porch of Taylor’s offices, trying to figure out how I was going to get my truck out of the driveway if he didn’t move his black BMW, I wrestled with a more pertinent psychological issue. Why, exactly, had I threatened Mr. Taylor in such an uncharacteristically lowbrow fashion?

  It was true enough that Taylor’s kind had played a large hand in ruining the mountains where I lived. Shady real estate developments and systematically abusive contortions of the local judiciary had made his family rich. A sociopathic lack of responsibility or anything remotely resembling a conscience had kept them that way. But why had I displayed such a visceral response, coming as close to threatening his life as I could without being arrested?

  Before an iota of light could be shed on the question, I heard the front door open behind me.

  Becky breezed past me without a word before I could even turn to see her coming across the porch. She all but sprinted to Taylor’s car, keys jangling like a sleigh harness in her right hand, and got into the BMW with lightning speed.

  She started it up and backed it out into the street with a single jolt, then sat there, idling.

  I realized after a second that she was waiting for me to get into my truck and leave.

  I took my time, hoping that Taylor was listening or even peering through the curtains out the window. I wanted him to see how calm I was.

  I made it to the truck, fired it, and pulled out slowly. I tried to catch Becky’s eye, but she was looking at her feet, her face ashen.

  Luck made me take a last glance at the house before I took off, and I saw the curtains in the window next to the front door snap shut.

  Taylor had been watching me from his waiting room.

  Ten

  I was hoping to see Andrews standing in front of the library, maybe pacing impatiently, but he was nowhere in sight. I pulled the truck into the parking lot, still scanning for him. Mine was the only vehicle in the lot.

  I was still in something of a muddle as I got out of the truck and made my way along the boring boxwood hedge toward the front door.

  What was Taylor doing? What could possibly motivate him even to bother with me, let alone direct such aggressive malice in my direction?

  The glass door to the library was cool to the touch, sighed open. The library seemed dark compared to the light outside. It was also quiet as a tomb and nearly as empty. The lone librarian, a young man who appeared to be in his teens, kept his eyes glued to a computer screen, took no notice of my entrance.

  The place wasn’t huge, but it took me several minutes of wandering, examining cubicles, before I found Andrews by himself at a long table in a back corner of the library.

  “Well.” I presented myself.

  “Uh-huh.” He didn’t even look up.

  He had at least twelve books spread out around him, and his hand was moving so fast taking notes on a tiny pad that the motion was actually a little blurred.

  “How close are you to being finished?” I leaned against the table. “I’m anxious to leave Pine City; we might be wanted by the police.”

  He looked up slowly.

  “I told you we shouldn’t have left your house this morning,” he told me, heavy-lidded.

  I shook my head.

  “It’s not that. Our problem is going to be that Taylor says he doesn’t remember getting Shultz’s phone call yesterday.”

  “Doesn’t remember…” It only took anothe
r second for Andrews to realize the implications of that single concept.

  “Feel like a bite of lunch?” I shoved my hands into my jacket pockets.

  “I guess I’m done here.” Andrews stood, closed up his pad, tossed the pencil onto the table with the open books, and headed for the door.

  I followed behind, eyeing the librarian. He didn’t look up from his computer.

  Andrews shoved through the glass door and into the light.

  “What do you think is Taylor’s game?” He saw my truck and made his way toward it without looking back at me.

  “I’m worrying about that,” I admitted. “But I’m also concerned about my reaction to him. I might have threatened his life, just a little.”

  Andrews stopped in his tracks, spun around.

  “You what?” He seemed more amused that I would have thought, less incredulous.

  “It was all very carefully worded.” I stopped, too.

  “That goes without saying—it’s the way you talk.”

  “But I might have implied mayhem.”

  “Why did you do it?”

  “That’s what I’m saying.” I fished the keys to the truck out of my pocket and started moving again. “I don’t know what I was thinking. I don’t know why I had that reaction.”

  “Well, it’s not that hard to suss out. Taylor’s clearly a bastard. I knew that the second I walked into his office.”

  Andrews fell in beside me.

  “Still, I regret doing it.” I sighed. “I don’t much care for losing my temper.”

  “You lost your temper?”

  “I mean, I didn’t yell at him or anything,” I hedged, “but I could certainly feel a flood of adrenaline, and I’m a little hot and dizzy now.”

  “You’re such a girl.”

  I hadn’t locked the truck. I hadn’t locked much of anything since I’d been back in the mountains. But Andrews stood at the passenger door waiting for me to unlock it—the product of an urban life.

  “It’s open,” I mumbled, climbing into the driver’s seat.

  “Oh.” He pulled open his door. “Look, Taylor notwithstanding, I’ve got some news about this painter Cotman that you’re not going to believe. I think, if the portrait was actually painted by him, it was probably worth a lot more than you might think.”

  The engine roared and I pulled out into the street, turned toward home.

  “As a matter of fact,” I responded, “I found a document at Taylor’s that said it sold for two hundred and fifty thousand dollars. Can that be right?”

  “It can,” he confirmed. “And let me tell you why.”

  He pulled out his notepad as I stepped on the gas.

  Andrews delighted in sharing his research. I felt it gave him the illusion of momentary superiority, and I did not disabuse him of his folly.

  “John Sell Cotman,” he began, narrating the PBS special that was so obviously in his head, “lived from 1782 until 1842. He was a landscape painter, leader of the so-called Norwich School.”

  “And that is?”

  For some unknown reason, I was suddenly enjoying the drive. The air was glass, the sky was polished, and I’d had a fine moment of blood boiling to invigorate me. The road wound easily around plunging blue vistas, through soaring evergreens.

  “Well.” Andrews was absolutely reveling in his role as expert. “Cotman’s early paintings, before 1804, were very Romantic, with a capital R. Read dark and stormy. The style was a bit of an imitation of the Norwich painter John Crome. One of his paintings from this period—didn’t write down the title—was notable because he reversed the normal direction of light you would usually have found in paintings of the day. The sun is behind the artist, rather than below the horizon. He used a gray underpainting.”

  “I think one of the documents I just read may have mentioned that.”

  “It made the color all thick and brushy. Most people at the time didn’t care for it.”

  “Brushy is an accepted art term?”

  “It cast a dull pall over the painting, rather than letting the light shine through.” Andrews was ignoring me. “This muddy style was deemed absolutely appropriate to Cotman’s rather grim interpretation of rural life. And that, in very simple terms, is the Norwich School.”

  “Ah.”

  “I saw some of these, actually.” He sat back and set his spiral pad in his lap. “I mean I saw them in real life, these paintings, when I was a kid—a fairly large collection, in fact.”

  “Where?”

  “There’s a place called the Castle Museum in Norwich that has—I don’t know—lots of them. I thought they were kind of boring. All sort of orange and brown, nothing happening—not the sort of thing a boy of my ilk would have cared for.”

  “You liked…,” I encouraged.

  “Van Gogh. You’ve got a choice between a tedious painting of a bridge or a self-portrait of a man who cut off his own ear. Which one do you go for? Not to mention the way van Gogh’s paint seems to be moving, actually crawling across the canvas.”

  “Good, good, you liked Van Gogh,” I interrupted. “For me it was the Towers of London by Monet that I saw in the High Museum in Atlanta when I was younger. But we digress.”

  “You asked.”

  “About Cotman,” I insisted.

  “I did find it impressive,” Andrews said, picking up his pad, “that Cotman was a drawing instructor in a London school where Rossetti was a pupil.”

  “Really.” I was impressed, as well.

  “Then,” he went on, a bit more mysteriously, “around 1804, something seems to have happened to our boy Cotman. His style went through a complete transformation. Suddenly, he’s all filled with light and, it says here, ‘serene planes of transparent color.’ The new, improved technique is made up of three parts. First, he started working without the gray underpainting and went more to a sort of wash—all on watercolor paper. Second was his arrangement of light and dark—sometimes putting the lightest and the darkest things in the painting right next to each other, side by side. Very dramatic. And finally, he achieved a greater sophistication in his work with these contrasting combinations against a sort of interlocking approach to his images. Apparently, it’s also important to note that he had a keen control of his edges.”

  “Pardon?”

  “His edges are very precise, something about the way he handled the white paint.”

  “Any idea what happened to him that made such a big change in his work?”

  “No one knows.”

  “That’s interesting.”

  “But as it happens,” Andrews went on slyly, “around that time he seems to have traveled a good bit, including tours of Normandy and, perhaps, Wales.”

  “No kidding.”

  “Small world,” Andrews agreed. “Anyway, the guy ended up with a huge output, including architectural drawings, which are supposed to be quite good, too. He had very strong drawing skills.”

  “And taught Rossetti,” I repeated.

  Andrews flipped a few pages in his pad.

  “He was married in 1809,” he droned, less interested in the rest of the man’s private history, “came home to Norwich, and assumed a career as drawing master. Ended up a bit broke, somehow, and was dogged by his creditors. He didn’t handle the family thing well and began a fairly significant battle with depression. He died in complete obscurity. His work wasn’t appreciated, really, until the late Victorian era. Since then, an appreciation of his watercolors and etchings has grown. Hence the museum to which I was forced to go as a child.”

  He flipped his pad closed, a job well done.

  “Wait.” I slowed the truck a bit. “No mention of portraits.”

  “Correct.” He slapped the dashboard for emphasis. “Cotman didn’t paint any portraits.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “I really looked. Cotman never painted portraits. Not a single mention of anything like that in any one of the dozens of books at my disposal.”

  “Well.” />
  “Exactly,” he agreed. “Now we see why the painting sold for so much money. If it was really by Cotman, it was undiscovered, and most likely unique.”

  I found myself slowing down even more. Trying to concentrate on driving and on what Andrews was telling me began to prove more than I could accomplish.

  “Conner was smart,” I began, “but I’d be willing to bet a million dollars that he didn’t know this much about the painters of England.”

  “Better just bet two hundred and fifty thousand,” Andrews told me. “Apparently, you’re good for that amount.”

  “I mean, what the hell did Conner know about that portrait?”

  “I know. That’s the question.”

  Andrews suddenly reached out and honked the horn of the truck.

  “You’re driving, like, five miles per hour,” he complained. “You’re a menace on a mountain road. Speed up.”

  “Oh.” I stepped on the accelerator and we lunged forward.

  “Any way we could check on the painting a bit more,” he suggested, “like find out who bought it or—hang on. How did you know it was worth two hundred and fifty thousand? You saw something in one of the folders at Taylor’s office.”

  “A London gallery sent an appraisal letter, but they said it wasn’t worth much. If I could just remember the name of the gallery, we might be able to get in touch with them.”

  “If they’re still in business. It was quite some time—”

  “Wait a second!” I almost ran the truck off the road.

  “What? Jesus, watch where you’re driving! You may have a death wish, but I have things to do later this month.”

  I was inadvertently giving Andrews a bit more of a “scenic overlook” than he could accept at the moment: The truck veered dangerously close to the edge of the road. There was no shoulder, only a hundred-foot plunge into blue oblivion.

  “Sorry.” I righted the truck. “I just remembered something. The painting was of someone called Lady Eloise Barnsley, and it was completed circa 1804.”

  “That’s something.” Andrews leaned forward. “You think it might have been an encounter with her that changed his style, you mean? Cherchez la femme?”