Wild Ride: A Changing Gears Novel

by Warren, Nancy

  Once she’d moved permanently to Swiftcurrent, her grandpa had hired her to help him on weekends and in the summer. In his poky, dusty antiques and art shop, she’d learned more about art than she’d ever learned touring the greatest galleries of the world. She’d inherited her grandfather’s passion. Not that she could paint or draw, as he did, but her organizational skills were superb. She cataloged, recorded, and filed. It was in working for her grandfather’s store that she discovered her true calling. She was a born librarian.

  She pulled on a black hoodie and ran lightly down the stairs and out the back door of her apartment building to the parking lot.

  Soon she was driving through the quiet roads to her grandparent’s house. As she drove past the central municipal building, she shuddered, thinking of the body now resting in a steel cubicle in the morgue.

  As she headed out of the downtown core, she quickly hit leafy side streets named for presidents. She pulled into the gravel drive of the two-story shingled house on Lincoln Street, its original yellow paint faded to pale butter, moss clinging to the roof edge like bushy eyebrows. She felt the familiar pang of loss. It had been almost two months—when would she grow accustomed to her grandfather’s death?

  In a gesture of self-comfort, she rubbed the gold necklace he’d given her for her twenty-first birthday. It was in the shape of a key. The key to your heart, he’d said, and she always wore it on a chain exactly long enough so it did rest near her heart. How she missed him. Of course, at ninety-two death shouldn’t have been a shock, but they’d talked so often of his one hundredth birthday party, she’d begun to believe he’d live that long.

  Sighing, she stepped out of the car. She and Gillian, his two beneficiaries, were going to have to make some decisions about what to sell and what to keep.

  Strangers would soon be living in this wonderful house where all her best memories were stored. The house cried out for a family, for kids to climb the apple and cherry trees, a dog and laughter and backyard barbecues—not something a spinster librarian or a chemical-dependent, recently separated woman could provide. Besides, Alex would be leaving Swiftcurrent soon.

  Her feet crunched on gravel as she approached the quiet house.

  6

  If there was one thing Duncan hated it was being made a fool of, and somebody was doing a fine job. What the hell was going on? This backwater might look like Mayberry RFD but it had the undercurrents of a Stephen King novel.

  He drove slowly through the unfamiliar, barely paved roads, squinting at street signs as they were briefly illuminated by the headlights of his tan midsize rental car. The town didn’t seem to have a map and he couldn’t ask for directions to the deceased Franklin Forrest’s home. Not when his purpose in going there was to engage in some quiet breaking and entering.

  Everyone who’d questioned Alexandra Forrest today had wanted to know if she recognized the dead man. To each of them, including him, she’d denied ever seeing the stiff before.

  Perkins had asked if he’d known the man, not if he recognized him, which had saved him from having to lie to the cops. He knew what the stolid sergeant would soon discover.

  The stiff, Jerzy Plotnik, was a small-time drug dealer, thief and fence. He wouldn’t have come to Duncan’s attention except that he sometimes worked for an on-the-surface-reputable art dealer in L.A. who also dealt, far more lucratively, in high-level, black-market art. The kind of deals Mendes brokered were never heard of at Sotheby’s or Christie’s, and the treasures that changed hands usually ended up in a secret vault.

  It couldn’t be coincidence that Duncan Forbes and Jerzy Plotnik had both ended up in Swiftcurrent, Oregon, at the same time. It had to be the Van Gogh.

  But why was Plotnik dead? A guy who’d hung on the fringes of organized crime, Jerzy was a small eel swimming with piranhas, but as long as he was useful, there was no reason to get rid of him.

  Jerzy had either tried to double-cross his boss, Hector Mendes, or he’d screwed up.

  Duncan wished he could buy into Alex’s theory that the murder was a random act of violence, and the placing of the body in Swiftcurrent’s library a coincidence. But Duncan believed Jerzy Plotnik’s corpse had been planted in Alexandra Forrest’s path for a reason.

  If Duncan’s Uncle Simon had heard the rumor about the Van Gogh, it was likely Mendes had heard the same whispers.

  That could explain how Plotnik ended up in Swiftcurrent, but not how he ended up dead, who killed him, or how Alex fit into all this.

  He had a feeling the librarian in sex kitten’s clothing was playing him for a fool and he didn’t like it.

  Beneath his anger, excitement bubbled. His left foot was doing a kind of tap dance against the floor as he drove. For it occurred to Duncan that maybe more than a rumor was hidden in this seemingly tranquil backwater.

  What if the painting itself was here?

  Grandpa wouldn’t take a priceless Van Gogh to the grave with him. If he’d managed to acquire the painting and had plans to sell it, he’d have had an accomplice, and who better than the lovely granddaughter?

  Shit, but she’d played him, with her lush body and prissy attitude. As his headlights cut tunnels of light through the darkness, his eyes narrowed on a sign in dire need of repainting. Madison Lane crossed Harding Drive. Duncan was no historian, but he had a feeling Jefferson Avenue, where Franklin Forrest had lived, must be close.

  It was a long shot that the painting would be hanging on the living room wall in the house, but in his career Duncan had seen crooks do stupider things. Even if the painting wasn’t there, he could get the lay of the land. See if there were any clues.

  He didn’t think Alex could be on to him, at least not yet. She believed him to be exactly what he was—a professor working on a book. He’d made no secret that his attraction to her was sexual. At first he’d hoped she might remember some of her grandfather’s stories from the war. Perhaps through those he could piece together where Forrest’s good friend Louis Vendome had hidden the painting.

  He, like most art historians, had imagined the painting still safely hidden from the Nazis, the young man who’d hidden it killed before he could reveal its hiding place. That was the best-case scenario. Seventy years on, treasures were still discovered in mine shafts and disused cellars, the owners having no way of reclaiming their property.

  There was also the possibility that the painting, one of Van Gogh’s last, had been accidentally destroyed, lost, or looted. He’d hoped maybe Franklin would have left a diary or a journal, letters home, something that would lead Duncan another small step on his journey to solve the mystery of the missing Van Gogh. The family who’d owned it had contacted him almost a decade ago when he’d had his fifteen minutes in the sunshine of celebrity for a big find.

  He’d tracked an old master “purchased” by the Nazis in the late 1930s, when they’d forced wealthy Jewish families to sell their treasures for ridiculous prices. He’d finally found the Rubens tucked away in an obscure American gallery. He’d helped prove its provenance and then returned the painting to the industrialist’s descendants. Duncan wasn’t much of a crusader, but there was a certain satisfaction in righting the wrongs of history.

  His arrangement with such clients was that he’d take a fee if he found the art. Some quests were successful, but many weren’t, and often it took years of patient investigation, dealing with uncooperative governments, criminals of one sort and another and galleries who turned a blind eye to shady dealings in the war years.

  He also helped solve more recent thefts, such as the Van Dyke portrait he’d restored last year to the English marquis from whose ancestral home it had been lifted.

  Solving puzzles—that was partly what drew him to his work. He also loved the cloak-and-dagger intrigue, and the occasional heart-pounding danger. And he didn’t mind the fat fees he collected.

  Duncan’s own family connections to crime had advantages. He might walk on the right side of the law, but he used the skills passed on by his l
arcenous forbears. He’d broken into the secret vault in Bermuda where the pilfered Van Dyke was hidden and stolen it back.

  He shifted a little, as the remembered adventure caused a twinge in his thigh. He’d been shot on his way out of the villa at a dead run, the canvas tucked under his arm.

  Was the Van Gogh landscape going to be as easy to return to its rightful owners? After ten years of blank walls and dead ends, instinct told him he was closing in on Olive Trees with Farmhouse.

  There was a solution that no one connected with the story had ever considered. Franklin, the American art student and friend of Louis Vendome, had stolen the painting for himself and brought it home as though it were a worthless print from the Louvre gift shop.

  Duncan had a black-and-white photo of the piece, painted in the last year of Van Gogh’s life, when he’d created masterpiece after masterpiece with manic frenzy, as though he’d known his days were numbered.

  The photograph, taken before color photography was invented, was vague with age, the blacks shifting to gray. The very grayness of the indistinct photo spurred him on. He itched to see the original in all its colorful, summer-in-the-south-of-France glory.

  Depending on its condition, that painting would be worth tens of millions.

  He sighed as he discovered Washington Place was a dead end and made a U-turn. He was going to have to stay close to Alex, not only in hopes of finding out what she knew about the Van Gogh, but to protect her as best he could from whoever had killed Jerzy Plotnik.

  Sex was the quickest and most pleasurable path to get close to her. He’d have preferred it if she were innocent, but he wasn’t going to fool himself. He’d sleep with that woman because she turned him inside out.

  When he held her in his arms, tasted her mouth, and felt the promise of ecstasy in her willing body, he didn’t care how entangled she was in stolen goods. In fact, he thought with a wry twist of his mouth, a larcenous looker was exactly the kind of woman his family would most approve.

  Jefferson Avenue turned out to be missing its street sign, but fortunately someone had commissioned a painted metal plaque and the address: 273 Jefferson Avenue. A couple of houses over, and there was 245.

  Duncan drove slowly past, but the big old Victorian had that uninhabited look that all the lawn services and timer lights in the world couldn’t disguise.

  No cars in the gravel drive. One light burning in the upstairs hall, no doubt on a timer. A newsprint flyer had suffered rain and wind damage. Its damp sheets clung, with a few wet leaves, to the front steps.

  He drove around a couple of streets, found a lane that let him see into the back. Open drapes. Nothing stirring. On either side the neighbors were safely ensconced behind closed blinds and drawn drapes, most likely watching TV.

  He parked a couple of blocks over under a spreading, leafy tree and made his way back. He wore black Levis, hooded sweatshirt, and sneakers. Having learned from the best, he didn’t skulk around the back but walked boldly up the front path and knocked on the door. No one answered. No one challenged him and the lock didn’t remotely test his lock-picking skills. He wasn’t further tested by an alarm system, since there wasn’t one.

  Feeling vaguely disappointed that his B&E skills hadn’t been stretched, he shut the front door quietly behind him and stood still for a moment, listening.

  The house was silent. It smelled shut up: of stale air, dust, and a little bit of old man.

  “Where did you put the Van Gogh, you sly old bastard?” Duncan muttered.

  But only silence as dense as the grave answered him.

  From within his black jacket he pulled out a penlight. As he played the tiny beam around him, he found he was in a hall so dark and somber he suspected the decor was original Victorian.

  He turned to his right and started with the parlor, checking the pictures on the walls first. For all he knew, Franklin Forrest had displayed an original Van Gogh in his front room. A smile tugged at Duncan’s mouth. He had reluctant respect for a thief with that kind of balls.

  But a quick tour showed him the art consisted of a few good Victorian prints and several works by artists who’d become very collectible. Forrest might be a thief, but he had an eye for art. Duncan would give him that.

  A nice Edward Hopper boating scene held pride of place over the mantel. Duncan suspected Forrest’s wife had a different artistic aesthetic than her husband. An embroidered sampler with a schmaltzy saying surrounded by twining hearts hung over an overstuffed, high-back chair with an embroidered footstool placed in front of it. He noticed a few needle worked cushions placed on blue velvet arm chairs that appeared to be from the same hand.

  Rapidly he checked behind the frames for a wall safe. Nothing. Shielding the light, he crept to the dining room. A decent still life—early-to-mid-eighteenth century—hung over a burled walnut buffet. No Impressionists. No wall safe.

  He headed for the back of the main floor and discovered a TV room, a big old kitchen that looked like a set for a fifties family sitcom, and a den/library/gentleman’s study that smelled of pipe tobacco.

  Duncan’s knee twitched. Here was where the old guy had spent most of his time. The room felt warmer, more lived in and less rigidly tidy.

  He stepped inside and wished he dared turn on a light but knew he couldn’t risk it. This wasn’t a big city where nobody knew his neighbor’s name, much less cared if there was an unauthorized stranger in the house; this was Hicksville.

  After a quick inspection of the walls and more decent art, but not the kind that would fetch millions – he headed for the big oak desk and slid open the top drawer. He heard a car crunch over the gravel drive and flicked off the penlight, muttering a curse.

  Maybe it was someone turning around or something, but as he waited, backing stealthily to the wall, he heard a car door slam. By the time he heard a key scrape in the front door lock, he’d run out of time to leave. He dove behind an ancient leather couch, curious to discover who else was spending time in Franklin Forrest’s house.

  Alex shut the door to her grandfather’s house and sadness joined her like

  a pensive ghost. She didn’t shudder. She felt no fear. Her grandfather had died here in the house he’d loved exactly as he would have wanted.

  She wished she could see her grandpa’s ghost. She’d love to see him one more time, to indulge in one of their rambling discussions, and she’d love his advice on what to do—about this house, her future, the mess of Gillian’s marriage. Though she couldn’t do that, of course, even if he were here. She, Gill, and Eric had all agreed to keep the marriage disaster from him. Eric was the son Franklin Forrest never had and he’d been so proud of him, it would have broken his heart to know Eric and his troubled granddaughter were no longer together. He would have worried about Gillian.

  Now that was another legacy that had fallen to Alex—worrying about her wayward cousin. Although she wasn’t as soft as her grandfather. She was firmly in the pull-yourself-together camp of human psychology.

  Even as she drew in a breath of stale air, she imagined the presence of a living, breathing man and, flipping on the hall light, went straight to her grandfather’s study, where she felt close to him and could work on his legacy.

  She opened the desk drawer where the tapes were neatly stacked in chronological order. Franklin Forrest had dictated his memoirs onto tape and it was her job to transcribe the notes to computer. He’d only made it to the late 2000s in the story of his life, but by then, most of the significant events had already happened.

  In the last month, in the sporadic hours she’d spent transcribing, she’d managed to get two tapes done—his account of his childhood and early years in Oregon. She reached automatically for the third, the next in line chronologically, and realized she didn’t have to be quite so rigid. She almost blinked at her own audacity, but she could rearrange computer files to her heart’s content. She decided to skip to the tape after the war years, knowing it contained his account of meeting and marrying her grandmothe
r.

  She slipped the cassette into the player and pushed “Play.” The creaky old man’s voice filled the room and a wave of grief hit her so suddenly she had to grab a tissue. It was silly. He’d lived a good long time and he hadn’t endured a lingering illness. He was probably enjoying an afternoon rest when he’d suffered a heart attack right here in this room. She should be so lucky.

  But then she wasn’t crying for him, she realized with a sniffle. She was crying for herself. Because she missed him.

  Tossing the tissue in the trash, she got to work and let her grandfather’s voice lull her as he talked of seeing the woman he would marry. “She was my heart,” he said gently, “and my greatest treasure.”

  Alex grabbed another tissue and then her fingers had to race to catch up with his next words. She loved listening to his stories of courtship and marriage—they sounded so safe and happy on this day when she’d faced violence and death.

  And passion. She licked her lips recalling, and then swiftly banishing, Duncan Forbes’s kiss.

  She was typing up the details of her grandmother and grandfather’s early marriage. The decorating of the house that was already old, even then; their first car, a Ford Packard. She could almost see her grandmother through her young husband’s eyes as she sat contentedly rocking on the front porch, her needlework in her hands. Their grandmother’s work adorned samplers, footstools, cushions, household linens and they still used the communion cloth she’d done in crewel-work at the Swiftcurrent Presbyterian church.

  Alex started when her cell phone rang, pulling her sharply forward half a century.

  She scrambled in her bag for it and answered. Pausing the tape.

  “Hey, Alex. How are you holding up?”

  “I’m okay, Tom. Thanks for calling me back.”

  “No problem. I guess you’re wondering about when you can open the library. We’re going to need another day. You can open the day after tomorrow. Okay by you?”

  “Yes. That’s fine.”