The Black Painting

by Neil Olson

  “Well,” Freddie muttered. “Let’s go inside.”

  “Yeah,” she agreed, popping her door and stepping into the autumn chill.

  The season had advanced dramatically in a few days. October was here, and leaves were yellowing. Her eyes strayed to the pines across the lawn, and she halted. Had a figure stepped back into the trees? Not a branch swayed; nothing was visible. Don’t do this, she told herself. Do not give in to this, you don’t have time. And you don’t want poor Freddie to have to lock you in the cellar.

  “What is it?” Fred asked. Teresa noted that his suspicious gaze was aimed not at her but the tree line.

  “Nothing,” she said. “Those pines always creep me out.”

  “Christ, you spent enough time in them,” Fred grumbled, continuing toward the house. “I guess kids like to be scared.”

  “Am I still a kid?”

  “You are to me.”

  The job would take days. She started in the attic and worked her way down. Match the painting with the inventory list. Make sure it was the correct work—subject, style, dimensions. Check the condition. Warping, holes, nicks in the frame, those were easy. Harder was determining residue buildup on the surface, discoloration, the degree of craquelure. Especially with her lack of training and the poor light. Some pieces had been photographed at the time of purchase, some had not. Several were by major artists, but none were famous, so the records were spotty. Teresa knew she should not overworry it. Institutions to which works were promised would soon send their own appraisers. Her focus should be on the lesser pieces whose fate had not been decided. But the bigger works interested her more, and overworrying is what she did.

  On a wall of the second-floor corridor, the face of Anton Raphael Mengs gazed out from a dark and unfinished background. Teresa leaned in with her flashlight and magnifying glass. There were wide, curved cracks in the “French” pattern, but no obvious paint loss. It was in good shape. If it was a real Mengs, not a student or copy, it might fetch forty or fifty thousand. She straightened up and looked again at the broad forehead and black eyes. She remembered a self-portrait of Mengs she had seen in Europe. Open gold jacket and brown hair to his shoulders, haughty and beautiful. Not here. The flesh had begun to loosen, troubled eyes were sunken in shadow. It was a more handsome face to Teresa, weary and revealing. He would die at fifty, impoverished and with too many children.

  Something in the expression made her think of Dave Webster. Not a comparison he would welcome, perhaps, but her mind needed little excuse to fix on him. What was he doing now? Had Philip dismissed him or was he still on the case? If so, why had he not contacted Teresa? She had been at the house during the theft; she had found the body. She knew more about the artist than any of them, and her father had been a suspect. She could help him. They could help each other. Had he been told to stay away? By Philip, or Audrey? The idea made her angry. Then the anger made her smile. Which was good. This was not about her. He did not owe her an audience. She did not even know what he was investigating, but if it was for Philip it was surely about money and property. Not a missing Goya.

  Teresa looked to the window and saw the light fading. Enough for today, she would check on her uncle and dinner. The kitchen was empty, but a pot simmered on the stove, and she heard noises. She went to the door of the mudroom and there was Fred. In stained jeans and a denim shirt, cleaning the shotgun. A glass of scotch sat on the windowsill beside him.

  “Isn’t this a picture.”

  “If you say so,” he replied, laying down a long brush and wiping his hands on a rag.

  “Whisky and weapons, so American. Anything you need? Crackers? Cocaine? A hand grenade?”

  “You could check on that stew,” he said.

  Teresa stirred the pot and turned down the heat. A shadow passed the window, but she did not look. She had been seeing movement at the edge of her vision all day, and ignoring it. She could not take the pills and be sharp enough to work. So she must be calm and disciplined. But she was not working now, and there was the Balvenie on the counter. Teresa poured a generous glass and returned to the mudroom. Fred occupied one bench, and she shoved coats aside to sit on the other. The room smelled of oil, metal and earth. She liked it.

  “Didn’t figure you for a scotch drinker,” Freddie said.

  “Just being sociable.”

  “As long as you appreciate it. How goes the work?”

  “Well. To the extent I have any idea what I’m doing,” she qualified. “I’m suited to it.”

  “Then I guess you made the right choice. About school.”

  “Only took me three years to figure it out.”

  “Three years is no big deal,” he said dismissively. Staring down the steel barrel for any recalcitrant bits of grime. “Not at your age. With both your dad and grandfather pushing you that way, it’s no wonder you’d resist.”

  This thoughtful Fred was new to Teresa. She remembered the fun-loving goof who made her laugh. Not as tall or handsome as the other Morse men, but more charismatic. And she had seen flashes of the tyrant who beat his daughter and terrorized his son. Audrey forgave the beatings, which she claimed to have earned, but hated him for the endless business trips and slow emotional withdrawal. James feared him, though Teresa was sure there was love mixed up in it. Fred had been kind to Ilsa during the funeral, the only one of the children to show any warmth. People were never as simple as you wanted them to be.

  “Where’s Laurena?”

  “In the city. We’re thinking of selling the apartment. She likes California, and I’m in Asia most of the time now, so it makes sense.”

  “How’s your own work going?” Teresa asked.

  “My work,” Freddie echoed disdainfully. He put the gun down with care and picked up his scotch. “What I do can’t exactly be called work. Closer to gambling.”

  “Isn’t that why you like it?”

  “Hah,” he said, then took a big swallow. “Oh, that’s smooth.”

  “Grandpa had good taste.”

  “Too smooth for me, I prefer a little edge. I like it when it’s going well. I like winning. Nobody likes losing millions of dollars, least of all my investors.”

  “You were counting on money from the estate,” she said, the whisky loosening her tongue. Fred did not look offended.

  “I haven’t counted on anything from the old man in years,” he said, running a hand through his thinning hair. “And there isn’t enough money to really change things. But it would have helped. Kept the wolves at bay.”

  “Couldn’t you say that to Ilsa?”

  “Say what? I’m not going to beg that battle-axe for a handout.”

  “Not beg,” Teresa said. “Appeal to her on a human level. You’ve been kind to her, she likes you.”

  “She doesn’t like any of us,” Freddie said sourly. “She might hold me in the least contempt, but she totally absorbed Dad’s disgust. More than absorbed it, she...well, no use talking about that.”

  She what? Teresa wondered. Abetted it? Caused it?

  “Why is everyone so hostile in this family?” she asked. Not expecting an answer.

  “It always comes from the top, right?” Fred replied. “I don’t know why Dad had children. It’s what you do, I guess. Carry on the line. But he had absolutely no use for us, and he wouldn’t pretend. The art was all he cared about, if he even cared about that. Big hole in the center of that man. Sometimes I pity him.”

  “What about Grandma?”

  “She tried to be good to us, but she wasn’t equipped. She liked nice clothes and parties and that stuff. Like her daughter, and granddaughter. Sorry, I shouldn’t—”

  “It’s all right,” Teresa said.

  “She cared about making Dad happy. She did try there, but it was hopeless. We were raised by nannies and housekeepers. Ilsa was the last, and the toughest. She had to be. We were teenager
s. Heck, Phil was in college. Mean, calculating, self-centered monsters. She wouldn’t have survived a month if she didn’t find a way to control us, or at least protect herself.”

  “And how did she do that?”

  Freddie looked mournfully at his empty scotch glass.

  “By learning our secrets.”

  “Yeah? What secrets?”

  “Kid stuff, at first. Then worse stuff. I can’t speak for Phil or your mother. That was the thing. She knew us better than we knew each other.”

  “And she told your father?”

  “When it served her purposes. Or just threatened, to make us behave.”

  Could Ilsa be behind it? Not the shocked recipient of unexpected wealth she portrayed, but a skilled manipulator who poisoned Alfred’s mind against his children. Teresa found it hard to accept, but then why? She knew Ilsa even less well than she knew the others.

  “She was good to me,” Teresa said, stupidly. She put the glass down and stumbled on. “Not warm, that’s not her nature. But kind, attentive. Fair.”

  “I think she does like you,” Fred said, without rancor. “You don’t make trouble. Then there was your dad.”

  “What about him?”

  He looked at her closely. As if trying to see if she were pulling his leg, and Teresa felt suddenly nervous.

  “I guess you were pretty young,” he said, breaking eye contact.

  “Come on, Fred, don’t mess with me. Why would Ilsa like my dad?”

  “Well, my father loved him,” he replied reasonably, “so she may have responded to that.”

  “That isn’t what you meant.”

  “Talk to your mother about it.”

  “I’m talking to you,” Teresa said.

  “Don’t take that tone with me,” he growled. A momentary wave of unease passed over her. She was alone in the house with this guy. Who was known to be a mean drunk.

  “I’m sorry,” she said. Because it was just good old Fred, after all, and her tone had been too sharp. He sighed and toyed with his empty glass. Teresa handed hers over, and he quickly downed what was left.

  “Ilsa had a thing for your father. I thought everyone knew that.”

  “What? No, she was, she was older.” Which meant what? Teresa asked herself. And it was not even true. Her father was forty-two when he married Miranda, forty-three when Teresa was born, only two or three years younger than Ilsa.

  “I didn’t say he had a thing for her. Or that anything happened, I don’t know about that.”

  “She was in love with Grandpa, I thought.”

  “Hard to picture her in love with anyone,” Fred replied with distaste. “But yeah, that was understood. He’d stopped paying her attention by then. I mean that kind of attention. She had his ear until the end. Look, all women had a crush on your dad. My wife certainly did.”

  Teresa was stroking the sleeve of an old coat hard enough to burn her hand. You asked for it, honey. Would her mother confirm this? Could she bring herself to ask?

  “Anyway, it’s not a case of her liking kids,” Fred went on. “She hates mine.”

  “Audrey made her life difficult,” Teresa said numbly.

  “Christ, she made all our lives difficult. Drove her mother around the bend.” He quickly realized what he had said. “I don’t mean it like that.”

  “I didn’t take it—”

  “It was an aneurysm. Anything else you’ve heard is bullshit.”

  “Okay,” Teresa agreed, watching him wrestle with himself. That same fury that was in Kenny and Audrey. Was it in Philip and Miranda, as well? And if so, how had she and James avoided it?

  “It’s not just Audrey,” he finally said. “And it’s less that she hates them than, well, she’s afraid of them.”

  “Afraid? Why?”

  “I don’t know, because they’re nuts?”

  “I was recently informed that we’re all nuts.”

  “What, the whole family?”

  “Yup.”

  That got a small smile from him.

  “I won’t deny it. They aren’t terrible kids,” he said sadly. “Just a bit off. I wasn’t a very good father. Too rough on them, or not around enough. Ah, you don’t need to hear this.”

  Teresa was trying to think of something comforting to say, or if she wanted to be comforting at all, when two things happened. First, she noticed that the sleeve she was mauling belonged to an old coat that had lived in this room forever. Everyone used it. Audrey had it on one morning last week. Worn canvas, faded green. The same exact shade as Pete Mulhane’s army jacket, or the coat that the man in the woods had worn.

  Next, a shadow fell across the floor. A figure stood in the window right behind Fred. Inches away through the glass. Don’t look, Teresa. You’ve been doing so well today. It will vanish if you ignore it. Do not look. But she couldn’t help herself.

  Freddie was up and facing the window before Teresa even realized she had screamed.

  “What?” he demanded. “What is it?”

  “Someone,” she gasped. No face. But an unmistakably human form beneath a speckled gray shroud. There for a moment and then gone. “Someone was right behind you.”

  “Who?”

  “I couldn’t tell.”

  He grabbed at the shotgun, dropped it, then picked it up and went to the outside door.

  “Don’t take that,” Teresa said, not knowing why.

  “It’s not even loaded,” Fred replied in exasperation. He turned back to point a stained finger at her. “Stay here. You stay right here.”

  Then he went out, closing the door behind him. Teresa could do nothing at first, only take deep breaths and try to blink away the afterimage of that figure. So still and so sinister. Well, of course it was sinister, she berated herself. What kind of creep peers in windows with a cloth over his head? That did not make it something, something...unnatural.

  Freddie passed by the window, looking left and right. Clearly he had not spotted anyone. As he turned toward the trees she saw him halt abruptly, squinting at something outside Teresa’s line of sight. Then he broke into a run. She took one more deep breath to steady herself, jumped up and rushed out onto the lawn.

  Her uncle was halfway down the slope, looping around the angel statue. Teresa followed as fast as she could, losing ground. He had vanished into the pines well before she reached them. She pulled up before the wall of green, the adrenaline rush abandoning her. Don’t be a girl, go in there, she commanded herself. Go. But where? What direction? She listened closely, waiting for the shotgun blast, despite knowing it was not loaded. For no good reason she drifted to the nearly invisible entry point that led to the tree house, pulled a branch aside and went in.

  She could not see beyond the next pine, and with every step she imagined a shrouded figure suddenly appearing. Now, or now. Panic rose up, but she controlled it. In under a minute she caught sight of the old oak, and Fred standing beneath it. The shotgun pointed at the ground. He glanced at her quickly as she approached, but did not turn.

  “I told you to stay put.”

  “Where is he?” Teresa asked, trying to follow where his eyes looked. But he was not looking at anything. Instead he seemed lost in thought. “What did you see?”

  “Not sure,” he murmured, shaking his head.

  “But you saw something,” she said desperately. Her tone brought him out of his reverie, and he looked at her.

  “Yeah. Didn’t get a clear look. I lost him right about here.”

  “So you didn’t notice anything, like, strange?”

  “Such as?” he asked. She had heard that tone before. The sane and reasonable speaking to the mad. After a few moments Freddie continued, “Let’s go. You were right about this place being creepy.”

  “I couldn’t see him because he had something over his face,” Teresa made herself say.
“Like a cloth, draped over his head.”

  She had Fred’s full attention now.

  “That’s what you saw?” His tone did not sound patronizing, but uneasy.

  “Did you see it, too?” she asked. Hoping. Needing someone else to be with her in this.

  “Not me,” he answered. “But that’s exactly what Ilsa reported to the police. A figure with something draped over his head, wandering through the house on the night your grandfather died.”

  16

  He was tired and annoyed, and the F train took its usual eternity to deliver him to this borderland of Carroll Gardens and Red Hook, where he had lived the last six years. On top of which he was being followed.

  Dave had been stood up for a coffee date in Manhattan. There was relief mixed with his irritation, but it had wasted two hours and allowed him too much time to meditate on frustrations. Ilsa Graff was still not talking. He had identified sixteen Jenny Mulhanes in the Tri-State region, and ruled out nine based on age or circumstance. He would need to contact the others, assuming they would speak and assuming that was all the Jenny Mulhanes there were from New Jersey to Connecticut, which he doubted. An old friend in Corrections had passed along some info on Pete Mulhane’s prison time, but Pete himself was not to be found. The meeting with DeGross had been intriguing, but added no new avenues for inquiry. Except pointing him straight back at Philip Morse. Just as talking to Pete had done. Philip, who had paid Dave enough to repair his car and cover a month’s rent, and would not return calls now. It was possible that Dave worked for no one at the moment. Which would hardly be a new experience.

  He hit the liquor store on the corner of Third Place to buy a bottle of vodka, though he had not drunk the stuff in years. Then he crossed Court and went into Caputo’s, picking up a few things he did not need while keeping an eye on the street. There. Lingering by the grocer’s across the way, back turned to him. By the time he emerged from the narrow shop of fine Italian foods, his stalker was no longer in sight. It did not matter. Dave had gotten a good look, and he relaxed a bit.

  Past Saint Mary Star of the Sea, under the rumbling shadow of the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway, he turned right and went halfway down the block to a brick town house. Then he sat on the concrete steps and waited. In less than a minute his stalker sauntered down the street and stopped in front of him. Black today. Black boots, jeans, jacket, sunglasses. Dark red lipstick. Right hip shot out like a Greek statue. She looked good. Good enough to push up against that car behind her and—