2 Pane of Death

by Sarah Atwell

  “Were you serious about that, or was it only a cover story?” I didn’t know if I felt relieved or disappointed.

  “I’m serious. It’s not a major commission, because I want to keep things focused on the panels, not tarted up with a lot of unnecessary accessories, but I envision harmonizing the interior lighting with the main panels. I want it to be unobtrusive but complementary. I have the awful feeling that Maddy would want to churn out mock Tiffany shades with themes to match the artwork.” He gave a theatrical shudder, then looked directly at me. “What are you thinking?”

  I took a second to figure out exactly what I did think. “For a start, I’m glad you told me. This whole thing didn’t make a lot of sense to me. Maddy was not a logical choice for this kind of project, and she doesn’t like me much, so bringing me in made the whole package even stranger. Now I can understand it, and thanks for laying it out. Did you tell Maddy I came with the package?”

  “Let’s say I suggested it strongly. Why don’t you get along?”

  “For the reasons you already pointed out: I think she’s a lightweight, and I care about what I’m doing. She thinks she’s an artist. I don’t buy it, not that I’d tell her to her face. We’re part of the same local community, so I don’t go looking for trouble. But I think I can say that working with her is not going to be a picnic. She’s already tried to shut me out—she didn’t want me coming back here again. She wants control of things.” I hesitated for a moment before adding, “And I think that’s one of my conditions. If you want me to stay on and babysit Maddy, I’ll need to have equal access to the pieces, if I’m supposed to come up with something harmonious.”

  “I wouldn’t expect anything less. Let me worry about Maddy. So you’ll stay?”

  Had he had any doubt? The siren song of the glass had lured me here—well, that and some ordinary curiosity about a man whose name appeared in headlines. So sue me, I’m human. But the glass was the deciding factor: I wanted to see those windows, not just once, but again and again, under different conditions. I wanted to know them, internalize them, learn from them, and see what I could take from them for my own art. “I will, under those conditions. You manage Maddy, and I’ll see that she doesn’t go overboard with cutesy.”

  “Thank you,” he said simply. We sat in silence for several beats, and then he stood up abruptly. “Do you want to see what else I’ve uncrated?”

  I stood too. “Absolutely.”

  As we walked back toward the front of the house, I asked, “You know, Maddy hasn’t filled me in on the scope of the project. How many rooms are you talking about? Which artists?”

  “Six rooms, all the ones overlooking the desert, on the ground floor. You’ve seen the Chagall already. I’ve got a magnificent French medieval panel, very rich colors. A Tiffany, of course. A Matisse, a William Morris, a Frank Lloyd Wright. Those are the major pieces. There are a number of smaller ones, but they’ll be easier to distribute, and I’m playing around with some display ideas.”

  We were walking slowly now. “And what were you thinking about placement?”

  “I’m still working that out. Chronological order seems rather trite, and I’m still getting used to the house, how the light falls. You know, several of these pieces I’ve seen only in dealers’ showrooms, by artificial light. I need to see them by natural light. Wouldn’t you agree?”

  “Completely. You can rationalize all you want, but there is still a visceral, emotional response to any work of art, and the windows incorporate a whole other dimension.”

  We had reached the doorway of yet another room. “Of course—light.” When we walked into the room, I came face-to-face with the medieval window, and it stopped me in my tracks.

  In college, and after, I had done the European grand tour thing and had ogled my share of cathedrals along the way. I know what an extraordinary effect medieval architects and glass artisans had achieved combining their solid stone with the ephemeral screens of colored glass. But finding one in front of me, illuminated by the intense Arizona sunlight, was an entirely different experience. I waited until my head had stopped spinning and tried to look at it dispassionately. It wasn’t easy.

  I barely heard Peter’s soft voice. “For bright is that which is brightly coupled with the bright/And which the new light pervades,/ Bright is the noble work.”

  “Abbot Suger,” I breathed. “Oh, lord, don’t tell me this came from St. Denis?”

  Peter smiled. “The first true marriage of form and philosophy, the divine light of God’s wisdom embodied in colored glass. Almost makes you want to believe, doesn’t it?”

  I crept closer, examining the individual pieces of glass, their color, their inherent flaws. There was so much I could learn here, so much I could use. . . . I realized neither of us had spoken for a few minutes, and reluctantly I pulled myself away. “I’m sorry, was I being rude?”

  “I don’t mind being upstaged by the glass. And I’d be disappointed if you didn’t feel that way about them.”

  I felt a stab of pure joy. I had been handed a great gift, unlooked for: the chance to work with these panels. Maddy and her petty jealousies faded to nothingness. “Are the others here?”

  “Pace yourself, Em. As I am doing. You know what I mean.”

  “I do. To look at them all at once would be sensory overload.” I drew a deep breath and let it out slowly. “So, where do we go from here?”

  We spent a half hour or so hammering out mundane details of compensation and scheduling. I almost felt guilty about taking money for this project, but I still needed to make a living, and Peter had money to spare. I managed to cut what I figured was a generous deal for myself, even knowing I could have asked for more. It didn’t matter.

  I drove away feeling drunk. Not from that single beer, hours earlier, but from the glory of the glass, and the pleasures it promised in the days and weeks to come.

  When I got home, Cam was gone, on his way back to San Diego, but he’d left me a note and a brief report, on the kitchen table where I couldn’t miss it. I took care of my doggie duties, managed to scrounge together a meal from leftovers, and sat down to see what Cam had found. I wasn’t sure what I was looking for, but I didn’t want to get involved in a sticky situation, whatever that might mean. Had Peter put together his collection with funds that he had amassed by stiffing his staff and colleagues? And how would I feel about that? I didn’t know. And what kind of a person was Peter Ferguson? I didn’t expect Cam to hand me a detailed psychological profile based on a couple of hours of Internet surfing, but I was curious about the public perception of the man. “Secretive genius” came through loud and clear, but was he honest? Was he a dilettante who would lose interest mid-project? These were things I had to know before I signed on. No matter how attractive the man himself was, or how much I yearned to be around the glass itself. I settled down to read.

  Half an hour later I had found nothing that changed my original impression of the man. There was no suggestion of illegal activity attached to his business, save from the disgruntled Andrew Foster, who had made some wild public claims and then subsided. Cam had included a few printouts about art sales, but clearly he hadn’t been sure what he was looking for, which made it hard for him to search. I could give him a few pointers about that, if I needed more details. Ian Gemberling, it turned out, owned an upscale gallery in Los Angeles, dealing in a variety of media. He was probably important enough that I should have heard of him, if I paid any attention to that kind of thing, which I didn’t.

  Not surprisingly, since he was a multimillionaire, Peter’s private life had also percolated into the media. Only one wife, and they had divorced about two years earlier. Two children, college age. I studied the lone photo of the former wife. Jennifer Ferguson—she’d kept Peter’s surname after the divorce. She was sleek and elegant, with well-cut blonde hair and wearing an outfit even I could recognize as a designer label. She looked tightly wound, almost anorexic, and I tried to match her up with the casual and relaxed Peter
whom I had met. They must have married before he hit it big, but why would they have split? Not your problem, Em, I reminded myself. You’re not going to date him, just work for him. Or for the glass, more likely. Peter so far was enigmatic, but the glass spoke to me, loud and clear.

  I stacked up Cam’s printouts and clipped them back together. No warning flags had popped up, and I could look forward to the unexpected and interesting new project that the gods had dropped into my lap.

  Chapter 7

  Much to my surprise, over the next few days Peter, Maddy, and I came up with a schedule that worked. Maddy did whatever she did, and I didn’t ask about the details. She and I went out together to see Peter a couple of times over the following week or two, to see the new pieces as they were uncrated and to present Peter with the concepts we had come up with. Maddy’s efforts were predictably trite, but I managed to steer her away from the worst of her ideas without ruffling her feathers too badly. I was proud of myself for my restraint.

  Peter and I carefully did not mention that I had been making my own trips out to his place so that I could spend quality time with the glass. These excursions had fallen into a pattern. Peter would disable his electronic watchdogs, let me in, and offer me something cold to drink. I would accept. We would then drift to whatever room he had assigned the newly revealed piece to. We would spend some time in rapt silence, absorbing the artwork. Then slowly I would begin to offer comments, make suggestions. Only once did I think he had chosen the wrong setting, for a delicate William Morris panel that was overwhelmed by the blazing Arizona sun. I thought it would benefit from more subtle lighting, and Peter agreed quickly, proposing a more sheltered position.

  We avoided talking about Maddy for the most part, which I took as tacit approval of how I had been handling our joint effort. In truth, there was little for Maddy to do, beyond installing the panels and working up a few designs for the minor windows in the room. This was clearly a charity gesture on Peter’s part. I in fact had much more to do. He could have opted for high-tech but unobtrusive halogen spotlighting, or gone with muted sconces that all but receded into the walls, but he gave me my head and let me play with forms and colors, trying to create pieces that harmonized with the windows without stealing any of their thunder. It was an interesting challenge—and our discussions were equally interesting.

  The single largest piece was to be a chandelier in what would become the dining room, eventually. Given the layout of the house, one saw the hanging fixture from the hallway before entering the room to confront the incredible Tiffany panel, a variation of The River of Life, that dominated the exterior wall. The fixture’s position would showcase my art, but I wanted to stay miles away from any kitschy pseudo Tiffany dome—there were far too many cheap knockoffs on the market these days. We spent a couple of hours one afternoon debating about alternatives.

  “I love the way you’re injecting some humor here—the image of water juxtaposed to the Arizona desert,” I said. “I’d like to play off that—the feeling of water. Cool, flowing, if you know what I mean, and I want to keep it simple, clean, but make sure that the colors in the glass are tied in with the ones in the window. Not easy.”

  “Because he used his own glass?”

  “That’s part of it.” Tiffany had experimented with techniques for glassmaking, and they weren’t always easy to recreate. “But what he did with the glass—heck, you know as well as I do—it’s practically three-dimensional sculpture.” I ran a reverent finger over a particular fragment in the window, whose surface irregularities mimicked rippling water. “And because of that, it’s too thick to use for a fixture with much lower light levels. If I’m not careful, it will look muddy and chunky. But I can’t just do it thinner, because then you lose the sculptural quality. So I’m playing with some ideas about layering the glass, to kind of fool the eye. As Tiffany did.”

  “Interesting approach,” he said, nodding. “What about supports? Do you plan to go with the traditional leading?”

  “I haven’t decided. The window is part of the wall, the structure of a space, so it’s appropriate that it be substantial, both visually and for strength. But the light fixture floats in space and has to be more ethereal. I don’t want it to look like a piece of Victoriana that just wandered in.”

  “What’s the alternative?”

  “Frankly, I don’t know yet. I’m still trying to get the glass part down, work out the curvature. It’s a little out of my comfort zone, but I’m learning.”

  “You aren’t going for anything showy? Like a Chihuly sea creature?”

  I had to check to see if he was making fun of me. He was. “You know very well how ridiculous that would be, in this context.”

  “Em, I have every faith that you’ll find a way to make this work.”

  “You know, there’s one thing that’s been troubling me: How do you plan to protect the glass?”

  He cocked his head at me. “Do you mean security? You’ve seen my alarm systems.”

  “Yes, I know, and I assume you’ve got that covered. But I mean, physically. You’re not from around here, right? I don’t know what gun laws are like where you come from, but around here, there’s not a lot of regulation, especially for rifles and shotguns.”

  “Where are you going with this, Em?”

  “There are plenty of guns around, and your place is pretty exposed. What’s to stop somebody with a grudge, or just a bellyful of tequila, from taking a few potshots at your windows?”

  “Ah,” he said, smiling. “I wouldn’t have expected you to think of that, but it has crossed my mind. I will be installing bulletproof glass on the exterior. And before you ask, this will be done as unobtrusively as possible, following the lines of the leading. And it will also be vented—I understand conditions can be rather extreme around here. Does that satisfy you?”

  “That’s perfect. It’s just that I’d hate to see anything bad happen to the pieces.”

  “I understand.”

  Our eyes met, and I wondered what I saw in his. He had always been professionally distant in our meetings, and our discussions had focused on practical issues. Save when he talked about his collection—then, I saw flashes of passion. But he was still an enigma. He never mentioned any other people, and there was no evidence of others in the house, apart from whoever had carried in the glass panels—too heavy for one person to manage. But there was a lurking sensuality in him that was intriguing, and I wondered more than once who was on the receiving end of that. Not me, nor did I invite it. I valued the careful friendship we had established, and we both respected the limits.

  And then it ended, in the most final way.

  He called a few days after our last meeting to say that the final panel had arrived, and would I like to see it? It was a Frank Lloyd Wright, one of his Saguaro series, which made it a particularly apt inside joke. But I had a busy week planned, and much as I wanted to dash straight out there to see the latest treasure, I had to put him off for a couple of days. We set a date for Thursday, two days in the future, in the afternoon when the sun would be low in the sky. I felt a mixture of excitement and sadness: excitement because now the ensemble would be complete, and I would know the full scope of what I was working with; sadness because this would be the last surprise, the last opportunity to walk into a room to something wonderful and to know that I would have the luxury of coming to know it intimately.

  When the day came, I made the now-familiar drive and arrived on time. By now I was used to passing through the exterior defenses without announcing myself, so I drove straight up the driveway and parked. When I walked to the door, it was closed, so I buzzed the intercom and got no response. That was odd—until now Peter had always been waiting for me. After trying again, I reached for the door handle, and to my surprise the door opened.

  My sensible inner voice told me to stop right there. Peter was absolutely scrupulous about security and had always been at least within earshot when I arrived, with or without Maddy. Maybe he was doi
ng something in another part of the house? I felt silly just standing there, fretting because the door was open and it made me nervous. I told the inner voice to shut up and stepped into the cool dark hallway, closing the door behind me. “Peter?” I called out. My voice echoed off the walls, but I could hear no one stirring. Even the air was still, as though no one had used it lately.

  I moved farther into the house, calling out again. “Peter? Where are you?” Nothing.

  I looked around me, and everything seemed normal. Of course, there was very little to disturb, since the house was still unfurnished. No lights on, but there was still plenty of daylight, so that didn’t mean anything. But the alarm system was not armed. . . . Now I really was getting nervous.

  I walked into what we had dubbed the Great Room, the largest one with the most spectacular views. And then I saw him.

  He lay on his back, surrounded by a pool of what had to be blood, though at the moment it was no more than a tarry stain. A lone fly buzzed around it. My knees went weak, and I sank to the floor. I didn’t need to go any closer, because there was no doubt in my mind that he was dead. That gray color didn’t belong on a living person. Besides, the cause of death was obvious: a large shard of glass protruding from his chest.

  This was my second . . . no, third dead body. How was it that I had made it through more than forty years without even a hint of violence in my life, and now within the space of a couple of months I had encountered three corpses? What had I done to deserve this?

  But at least I knew what I had to do now. I fished in my bag for my cell phone and punched the speed-dial for Matt. He answered on the second ring, sounding distant and official. “Chief Lundgren.”