The Painting Murders: A Paranormal Painting Mystery- The Beginning

by J. S. Donovan

  The cab driver, a short man with big head, big nose, and wooly worm eyebrows gave her a funny look in the rearview mirror. “I saw it on the news this morning. Girl was murdered there. I imagine it will be closed for a few days.”

  “Go anyway,” Ellie said.

  “Okay,” the driver mumbled and drove on.

  The cab ride was far slower than she would’ve wished. It took her through Main, under crosswalks with abstractly designed handrails before connecting to Bridge Street, and eventually crossing over the wide Connecticut River bordered by dense woods touched by the greens of spring.

  The cab pulled up to the front of the vase shop. It was a cute old brick building that stood up like a Jenga block. There was a wooden sign with the words Gatts Jannis Pottery and Antiquities painted in cursive across the front.

  She told the driver to wait while she got out. Looking both ways on the vacant sidewalk, she approached the front door striped with yellow police tape. Ellie cupped her hands and peered into the glass window. It was dark and dusty inside. Glass-faced cabinets lined the walls. They were full of all sorts of vases, urns, and similarly shaped items. Some were painted, others were bare, each was unique and influenced by a different culture and era. Ellie never been here. She couldn’t even recall a time when she passed by it, yet somehow, it was in her imagination. She took a step back and glanced at the second story. If that was the location of the storeroom, that’s where she needed to be. Trying to act casually, she walked around the side of the building. Glass crunched beneath her shoe. The circular window high on the building’s wall was shattered and covered with plastic sheeting. She recalled the painting, remembering that the window spilling moonlight on the crow was undamaged.

  The inconsistency gave her a glimmer of hope that the whole thing might’ve been chance creation out of mankind’s collective conscience that meant nothing and should probably be forgotten. Ellie would like that, but it seemed unlikely. She found herself scheming how she would access the storeroom. There were no ladders or stairs to access the room from the outside. Perhaps the police left the back door unlocked. She felt eyes on her.

  The cab driver stood outside of his vehicle and lit a cigarette. He wore a black and white checkered tee with curly chest hair peeking out of his unbuttoned collar. Ellie backed away from the building, imagining how suspicious she must look. She felt guilty too, though she’d done nothing wrong, not yet anyway. Like you’re capable of breaking and entering, she mocked herself. You can’t even pick up a penny off the sidewalk without feeling convicted. Still, finding any sort of explanation seemed worth the risk. Ellie walked to the cab, scared that she had such thoughts, and more scared that she might actually go through with them.

  “Where to?” the driver asked, mashing his cigarette on the heel of his shoe.

  “Good question,” Ellie replied. She slipped into the backseat and buckled up. Maybe she’d come back to the vase shop in the evening, have the cab driver drop her off a block or two away, and then try to get inside. There might be an alarm system though. That would complicate things. She needed to be smart, take as few risks as possible. All she needed was a quick look around the storeroom. If it was different than how her portrait portrayed it, case closed. If it was the same… Ellie didn’t have an answer to that.

  Someone tapped on her window.

  Ellie jumped and swiftly twisted to the gray-haired man glaring at her from the sidewalk. He had wide, drooping cheeks with white stubble and a thick mustache. His glasses rims were the shape of orange slices, and he had the appearance and fortitude of a husky walrus. The man’s unexpected arrival got Ellie’s blood pumping. She lowered the window a few inches, waiting for the stranger to speak first.

  A frown dropped his already drooping face. His eyes were small, dark, and scrutinizing. “Looking for something?”

  Ellie tried to think of a witty response but was at a loss for word and thought.

  “A vase? Lessons?” the man fished.

  “You work here?” Ellie asked, remember her mom’s advice. When you don’t know what to say, ask questions. Her mother was referring to dating, but Ellie found it applicable in many aspects of her life.

  The man didn’t speak for a moment, as if trying to garner insight about Ellie’s character. “It’s my shop. I’m the Gatts in Gatts Jannis.”

  The two of them looked at the building sign.

  “Ah,” Ellie said, putting on a sweet smile, but unsure how natural it looked. “Is it closed?”

  With pursed lips, the man nodded slowly. “Doors are. Shop’s not. I have the catalogue, if you’re interested in buying.”

  “I’d…” Ellie thought about her response. “I’d like that. May I see it?”

  “I’m in the process of updating the website. You make a list of what you’re looking for and email it to me. I’ll send pictures from the catalogue binder.”

  “Could I look over it now?” Ellie asked.

  “I was just on my way to lunch.”

  “Oh,” Ellie replied. Her palms became sweaty. Just ask questions, this is your chance. Mustering courage, she smiled softly at the man and asked. “Might I join you? I haven’t eaten anything today.” The request gave the man pause. Ellie could sense his suspicion. She corrected herself. “Unless you’d rather go some other time. Actually, that was rude of me to invite myself. I’m sure you have a lot on your plate right now. Just forget I ever asked.”

  Ellie directed her attention to the cab driver, who was listening in on the whole conversation.

  “Luna,” the old man said, taking the bait. “The teashop. That’s where I’m going to eat.”

  “I can be there in five minutes,” Ellie said, putting a lid on her excitement. “Thank you, Mr. Gatts.”

  The old man nodded. Leaning on his cane, he limped down the sidewalk.

  The conversation gave her a buzz. She didn’t know what she’d learn from him, and that made it more thrilling. She realized the cab wasn’t moving and said to the driver. “What are you waiting for?”

  “You knew the shop was closed,” the driver said. “Yet you asked him anyway.”

  “You want a fat tip?” Ellie asked.

  “I never turn down free money,” the driver grinned, showing off his golden front tooth.

  “Then drive,” Ellie barked.

  Ellie pulled up to the small teashop with bamboo blinds and red ribbons streaming down the exterior portion of the window. Stone Chinese pagoda lanterns flanked either side of the glass door, and a crescent moon carved out of white driftwood hung above it. Ellie stepped inside and found an empty table. She faced the entrance, thanked the barista, and reviewed the menu, at first for pretend, but some of the soups and teas were actually very appetizing. She held off on ordering. Five minutes dragged by. Then ten minutes. Ellie’s leg tapped under the table. Fifteen minutes.

  Gatts pushed the door open, clutching a binder under the pit of his arm that wasn’t holding his cane. He wore ash gray slacks, a tucked-in black button up, and suspenders with dancing vases. Ellie waved at him and smiled. He waddled over, obviously pained by his limp. Ellie pulled out his chair for him. He sank into it and said a breathless, “Thank you.”

  “My pleasure,” Ellie replied as she returned to her seat.

  “How long have I kept you waiting?” Gatts asked.

  “Two or three minutes,” Ellie replied.

  Gatts saw through her lie, but didn’t make mention of it. He slid the fat binder to her. It had color-coded tabs labeling different eras, cultures, and styles of vases and other pottery. Ellie flipped through the pages. One page would display a picture print-out of the object and the other page would have a flowery description along with a story behind its creation. “These are very good,” Ellie pointed at the passages. “You write them yourself?”

  “Kimberly did,” Gatts replied. “She had a knack for that type of thing. History, writing, pottery, too. Always creating. I didn’t add her name to the shop out of pity. She earned it.”

>   “She sounds like an amazing woman.”

  “She is. Was.” Gatts took in a deep breath. “Mind if I order?”

  “By all means.” Ellie leaned in and whispered. “I was actually feeling a little peckish myself.”

  Gatts cracked a smile for the first time, but it left quickly when his eyes turned to the menu. He ordered chai tea and a Gai Gra Pow chicken sandwich melt that made Ellie jealous when she compared it to her salad and cup of iced Hibiscus tea.

  “This place is really something special,” Ellie said, enjoying her meal.

  “Kim said the same thing when I brought her here.” Gatts took a sip from his mug and looked directly into Ellie’s eyes. “You’re not here to buy anything, are you?”

  His words cut into her. Before Ellie could fumble through another lie, Gatts leaned back in his chair. “You a friend of Kim’s?”

  “We share a connection,” Ellie said.

  “It’s more than that.” Gatts called her out. “You were lurking around my shop. Looking for something, Mrs… ”

  “Batter.” Ellie kept still, trying to keep her cool.

  “What are you after, Mrs. Batter?” His words sounded more like a statement than a question.

  “Answers,” Ellie replied, sounding more sheepish than she would like.

  “To Kimberly’s murder?”

  Ellie kept her mouth closed, not wanting say anything that would raise Gatts’s suspicion.

  The man tapped his finger on the tabletop, thinking and scrutinizing Ellie. Under the table, Ellie rubbed her damp palms on her thighs. She reminded herself that she hadn’t done anything wrong. Yet.

  Gatts’s face became very stern. He stopped tapping his fingers. His frown sank his heavy lips. “Maybe you can help me. I think we both know this wasn’t a burglary.”

  “What makes you so sure?” Ellie asked.

  “Nothing was stolen,” Gatts explained.

  “So who would want to hurt Kimberly?” Ellie asked, both nervous and intrigued.

  Gatts shook his head. “I can’t say, but she was distant these past couple of weeks. Hiding something. I could feel it.”

  Ellie ate up his words. She asked, “Was she prone to keeping secrets?”

  “She was never a talker, if that’s what you’re asking. I started mentoring her while she was in her twenties, and I’ve still never met her parents. She’s unmarried and doesn’t talk about her home life. She only has a few friends. Maybe one of them is involved.”

  “I would like to see where it happened. Where she… you know.”

  Gatts’s lips parted a little bit.

  Ellie knew she had overstepped her bounds. Gatts would surely suspect something now. He might even call the cops. Ellie wanted to bury her head in the sand.

  “Why?” Mr. Gatts asked.

  “The police may have missed something,” Ellie said. “We can talk all day about what happened to Kimberly, but we won’t know for sure until we see some solid proof.”

  Gatts scoffed and took a bite from his sandwich.

  “You agree though,” Ellie said. “I bet you’ve not been in that room since you found her.”

  “I went in after they cleaned her up.” Gatts suddenly lost his appetite. “They got everything but the blood. And the stink. That’s how I knew nothing was stolen.”

  “It can’t hurt to look again,” Ellie pleaded. She put her hand on his. “Please, for Kimberly’s sake.”

  Gatts slid out his hand from her touch. “What do you hope to get out of this?”

  “I don’t know,” Ellie said honestly. “If nothing else, peace of mind that I tried to understand the unexplainable.”

  Gatts gestured for the waitress and asked for a to-go box.

  The server with a pixie cut nodded and returned with the item requested.

  Ellie’s heart sank. “Where are you going?”

  “We are going to my shop. Lunch can wait.”

  Ellie drew out her credit card. “Let me.”

  Gatts didn’t stop her. After their meals were packed up, they were ready to return to the vase shop. Gatts drove, saving Ellie a few bucks on cab fare. With blues playing on the radio and windows cracked, the limping man drove Ellie in his rust-spotted Toyota truck. There were some candy wrappers and a soda bottle in the passenger seat foot well. “Pardon the mess. I went on a trip for a few days.”

  “Where to?”

  “New Hampshire to visit my brother. Cancer’s eating him.”

  “I’m sorry,” Ellie replied.

  “Me too.”

  The rest of the ride was silent. They didn’t actually say anything to each other until Gatts had unlocked the shop’s back door and directed Ellie to the stairs behind the counter. A potter’s wheel and appropriate supplies were set off in the corner of the room. A volcano-looking clump of clay had hardened on top of the turntable. More clay spattered and dried on the ground around it.

  “Kimberly was making something the night it happened.” Gatts toggled the light switch. “According to the police’s estimated time of death, she was attacked moments after I left.”

  “It’s not your fault,” Ellie said.

  Gatts closed the door behind her. “If I had stayed, she might still be alive.”

  “The killer stabbed her sixteen times,” Ellie reminded him. “You don’t just stop someone like that.”

  Mr. Gatts unlocked a drawer under the cash register and pulled out a dusty snub nose revolver. Ellie’s eyes went wide.

  Leaning on his cane, he popped out the cylinder, revealing the bullets within and then closing it up. “I keep the key to the drawer on my ring. I’d been meaning to get a spare made for Kimberly. If I had, well…” Gatts put the gun back in its place and shut the drawer.

  That made Ellie feel a lot better. Raised on a farm, she was familiar with firearms, but the city life had made her a little jumpier around firearms. Gatts stood beside the door to the stairs and let Ellie pass by. She crossed her arms over her chest and began the ascent to the storeroom. With each step, her heart raced faster. She was thankful she didn’t have to break in on her own. Nonetheless, she was nervous as to what she’d find. Let it be different. Let it be different, she chanted as she opened the red door.

  Bamboo shelves and waist-high vases flanked the walls, along with wooden crates filled with crumpled newspapers to cushion the precious cargo. Glass, clay, and ceramic shards had been swept into a pile on the side of the room. A small, dark red bloom stained the middle of the room where the crow had lain. At the back of the room, at the junction where the floor met the wall, was a much larger crimson puddle. More dry blood drizzled the wall and nearby shelving where the killer had furiously butchered thirty-eight-year-old Kimberly Jannis. Unlike the glossy red droplets from Ellie’s painting, the blood here had snaked down to the floor and hardened into burgundy strips along its teary trail. A few squares of blue tape held a foggy plastic sheet over the broken window. The sour stench of death lingered heavy in the air. Its potency turned Ellie’s stomach.

  She didn’t move. Didn’t breathe. The room felt like something out of the horror movies she never watched. It was both surreal and haunting, knowing that someone died here. That the blood that once pumped through a woman’s veins was spilled across the floor, walls, and shelf. Bile climbed up Ellie’s throat. She swallowed it back down. The room was exactly how she painted it. It was too easy to visualize the woman’s limp body propped against the wall.

  Leaning his weight on the cane, Gatts stood beside her. He furrowed his brows as he scanned the hardened blood. “Cleaners will come in a day.”

  Ellie didn’t hear his comment over her own racing mind. The painting. The murder. All of it was real.

  “What now?” Gatts asked gruffly, but with a sort of reverence for the hallow place.

  Ellie blinked. “I…” She didn’t know. “Did Kimberly ever paint?” Ellie asked, not wanting to step forward and not knowing why.

  “Vases,” Gatts replied.

  “Were the co
ntents ever disturbing, grizzly, violent?”

  “Never,” Mr. Gatts replied. “She favored flora design. Sometimes animals.”

  “Crows?”

  “Sparrows. Why does that matter?”

  “I guess it doesn’t,” Ellie said, suddenly lightheaded. The stench was intoxicating. “How long was she up here?”

  “Two nights,” Gatts replied and marched to nearby shelves to prop up a tipped vase. “Speaking of crows, apparently one broke in here the night of. It just dive-bombed through the window, cut itself on the glass, and bled out right there.” Using the rubber foot of his cane, he pointed at the smaller blood stain.

  “The police say the bird busted the window?” Ellie asked.

  Gatts nodded. “It took a vase or two out as it fell. Expensive stuff, too.”

  Ellie recalled the glass she stepped on outside. She wasn’t the greatest at physics, but if the bird flew in from the outside, the glass should’ve flown in with it. She knelt down and examined the swept pile of broken clay, ceramic, and clay shards. She sifted through the remnants with a finger. None of the shards were completely translucent like the window glass.

  “It was right,” Ellie thought aloud.

  “What was?”

  The painting, Ellie finished. She turned back to Gatts. “The bird didn’t break through the window.”

  “It was cut open.” Gatts’s replied. “I saw glass shards in its belly.”

  “Someone must’ve put them there.”

  Gatts turned to the window and then back at Ellie. He didn’t say anything, but Ellie knew he didn’t believe her. She paced around the room, looking for any more inconsistencies between the painting and its real-life counterpart. She pulled out her cellphone and snapped a few pictures of the shelves. Lopsided from his limp, Mr. Gatts eyed her every movement and kept a question locked behind closed, frowning lips.

  When Ellie had finished, she scanned the musty room a final time. “I should go.”

  “We didn’t find anything.”

  “Maybe you’ll have better luck,” Ellie replied, pulled up a blank electronic contact card on her smart phone. “What’s your number?”