Brush With Death

by Lind, Hailey

  “Manny, did Miss Ivy say if the woman told her anything ? Left a note, maybe?”

  “Nope. I assumed you were expecting it. I thought maybe it was an artist thing.”

  “An artist thing?”

  “I’m a CPA, Annie. What do I know from artistic temperament?” Manny shrugged his well-padded shoulders, locked up his files, and left me alone with the mysterious black suitcase.

  Chapter 7

  I often think that the night is more alive and more richly colored than the day.

  —Vincent van Gogh (1853-1890), Dutch painter

  Van Gogh had a unique talent. And, apparently, unique vision.

  —Georges LeFleur

  I stared at the ordinary suitcase from across the small room as though it were a poisonous snake. Had a resentful Dr. Gossen spent the afternoon thumbing through his tattered copy of The Anarchist’s Cookbook? Would a tug on the zipper rocket me into the fourth dimension? This’ll teach an artist to mess with an anthropologist, I imagined him cackling as he stuffed fertilizer and diesel fuel into the bag and rigged it with a timer.

  Get a grip, I scolded myself. Dr. Gossen was a respectable college professor.

  This line of thinking failed to reassure me. My father was also a respectable college professor, and some of his colleagues were downright certifiable.

  Was that a ticking sound I heard?

  Okay, Annie, calm down. Manny said a woman left the suitcase. It couldn’t have been Mary; Miss Ivy would have recognized her. Maybe Evangeline dropped off a few things for the night in the cemetery. But surely she would have called first to tell me. I pulled my cell phone out of my overalls pocket. Recently I had made a vow to keep the gadget charged and on my person, figuring that as a communications device it might work better that way than when it had a dead battery and was stuffed in my sock drawer.

  It was fully charged. There were no messages.

  The only other woman who might associate me with the columbarium was Cindy Tanaka. With a sense of urgency I crossed the room, knelt, and held my breath as I unzipped the suitcase.

  No bang, no explosion, no homemade bomb. Only a leather camera bag and a bundle wrapped in a bright orange towel with Garfield the Cat’s grinning face. Inside the camera bag was the dismantled camera Cindy had used the other night along with several murky snapshots of La Fornarina.

  Sitting back on my heels, I listened for the sound of anyone lingering outside Manny’s office. All was quiet. Slowly I unwrapped the Garfield bundle. Inside was the metal box from Louis Spencer’s sepulcher. The old lock was in place and looked untouched.

  I checked the suitcase’s side pockets for a note or a letter—anything that would provide a hint as to what was going on here. I knew that suicidal people often made a point of tying up loose ends before making their final departure, and Cindy had struck me as the type to get her affairs in order. But why would she leave all this for me? Why hadn’t she turned in the metal box to the cemetery office, as we had agreed? Did she want me to take care of it?

  Another wave of sadness washed over me, and I struggled to push aside the memory of finding Cindy’s body.

  Minutes passed as I debated my next step. I repacked the suitcase, zipped it shut, and eased Manny’s door open. All was quiet, so I pulled the black bag, its plastic wheels clacking loudly, out of the office, along the hallways, and up and down the short flights of stairs to the Chapel of the Madonna. Mary was on the scaffolding, touching up the paint of the blue sky as she grooved to her iPod.

  “Swear to God, Annie,” she said, peeved. Evangeline had left a message this morning that Mary was in a rotten mood because she had chickened out of last night’s graveyard slumber party. Tonight they were set to try again. “That Roy dude? Hung out trying to talk to me, like, for-ever. If you leave me alone here one more time, I’m gonna . . .” She glanced down at me. “You okay?”

  “Sure,” I said. “Just a little tired.” Not wanting to relive this afternoon’s gruesome discovery, I decided not to mention it to Mary.

  “What’s with the suitcase?”

  “I need to hide it.”

  “Where?”

  One of the many things I loved about Mary was that when I showed up trailing a suitcase to hide, she asked “where” rather than “why.”

  “Somewhere in the columbarium. I don’t want to be seen leaving with it,” I said, thinking of Russell, the observant cemetery savant. I had no idea why Cindy had left the suitcase for me, but she must have had a reason. The least I could do for her was to find out what it was.

  “Do you need to hide the whole thing?” Mary asked, clambering down from the squeaky scaffolding. “Or can we unpack it? It’d be easier to hide smaller objects.”

  “Good point.” Ex-drug-user teenage runaways made by far the best assistants when it came to skullduggery. I unzipped the suitcase and removed the camera bag and the towel-shrouded box.

  “Can we lose Garfield?”

  “Sure,” I replied, unwrapping the metal container.

  “What’s in the box?” Mary said, grabbing and shaking it.

  “Hey!” I said, snatching it back. “Be careful with that.”

  “Why? Is it gonna explode?”

  “Hard to say.”

  “What’s in it?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Then how do you know you need to hide it?”

  “I’d just feel better if it disappeared for a while. Long story.”

  “Sure you don’t want to see what’s inside? I can never wait to open packages. One Christmas my kid sister and I opened all our presents in the middle of the night. It was a real drag on Christmas morning, though.”

  “It’s . . . private.”

  “Whatever you say, boss.” Mary shrugged. “It’s so old and cruddy it should fit right in around here. Why don’t we put it in one of the niches?”

  I investigated the nearest glass-fronted compartment. “It’s locked. Can you open it?”

  “These old locks are tougher than they look,” Mary said, examining the lock. She rattled it, banged on it, and shook her head. “I could probably pick it, but my tools are in the City.”

  “You have lock-picking tools? You never told me that.”

  “I didn’t want to worry you. Remember my ex, Paul, the locksmith? Locksmiths have great tools.”

  “So says the bumper sticker.”

  “Don’t you think it’s weird that all locksmiths aren’t burglars? I mean, it’d be easy, right?”

  “I guess most folks are honest. Rich people give us the keys and security codes to their houses all the time so we can do our work. But we don’t steal from them.”

  “Hmm . . .”

  “Mary, don’t even think it.”

  “Oh, all right. I still say it’s weird, though. Anyway, there must be a master key that opens all these boxes. We could search the office.”

  I tried to imagine riffling through Miss Ivy’s desk, and conjured instead a visual of a cop shining his flashlight through the window and catching us red-handed, which I was fairly sure would get us bounced from the columbarium.

  “I think we need an alternate plan,” I said.

  “We could bury it in one of the courtyard gardens.”

  “The gardeners are always fussing over those. One of them would probably dig it up.”

  “There was an interment in the mausoleum yesterday. We could unseal the stone and put it in there.”

  “There’s a fresh body in there, Mare.”

  “Eeewww.”

  What to do, what to do . . . I recalled learning in my sophomore-year evolutionary biology class that humans rarely looked up because our ancient ancestors had almost never been attacked from above. Artists and architects, though, often located the most interesting details up high, out of harm’s way. Craning my neck upward, I scanned the alcove’s curved ceiling. The subtle up-lighting illuminating the room emanated from behind the wide cornice molding.

  The molding. Of course.

&nbs
p; But not here, I thought. The box would be safer in another alcove.

  “Help me move the scaffolding.”

  We unlocked the wheels and dragged the creaky contraption out of the Chapel of the Madonna, down the hall past two alcoves, and into the Chapel of the Lullabies. Locking the scaffolding in place, I climbed up and peered over the edge of the cornice. A thick rope light snaked its way through the space behind the molding, but there was just enough room for the metal box.

  Mary handed me the box and I set it in carefully. “How does that look?”

  “It casts a shadow,” Mary replied. “A rectangular shadow. It’s kind of obvious.”

  “Hold on.” Standing on tiptoe, I rearranged the rope light so that it went around the box rather than beneath it. “Better?”

  “It’ll do.”

  I hopped down and checked for myself. The light was irregular in that one spot, but from the floor the difference wasn’t very noticeable.

  We pushed the scaffolding back to the job site, where I unpacked the camera while Mary snagged a scraping tool and started fiddling with one of the niches. She hooted in triumph when the glass door swung open, and I tucked the camera pieces behind the funeral urn inside. I sent a silent apology to the niche’s resident, Mr. Salvatore DeFazio, hoping he didn’t mind the illegal sublet.

  “What the heck are these supposed to be?” Mary demanded, fanning the air with the photographs.

  “Let me see.” We squinted at the photos.

  “Is that Fornie?” Mary asked. “Whoever took these is a lousy photographer.”

  It was always difficult to study paintings thirdhand, through photos, but this much was obvious: the painting in the photo was not the cheap computer reproduction I had seen in the Chapel of the Allegories. The frame was different and the gloss was duller than the highly varnished copy. Whether or not it was a genuine Raphael was impossible to tell from the shadowy snapshot.

  I put the photos in a brown paper bag left over from the other night’s takeout, rolled the top closed, and placed it in the red plastic tub of art supplies. Mary and I returned the empty suitcase and camera bag to Manny’s office and settled in to restore the lunettes.

  After tonight’s touch-up painting, we would let everything dry for a week before applying a nonyellowing polyurethane sealant. The last step could be completed using a ladder, so tomorrow the maintenance crew would disassemble the cumbersome scaffolding. The week of drying time might also allow me to figure out what the hell was going on with La Fornarina and to decide what to do with the metal box from Louis Spencer’s crypt. I would retrieve the box when we returned to seal the painting.

  Quiet reigned, and I lost myself in the sensuous pleasure of touching supple brush to creamy paint, of melding the hues of the wet pigments to create new tones. Oil paints allowed the underpaint to shine through, which was why the work of lazy forgers, who only painted the topmost layers, was so easy to spot.

  “I wonder what’s in that box,” Mary mused as we floated clouds in the still-wet azure sky. Last week I had taught her how to feather the whites, grays, and violets into the pliable blue paint so that the clouds appeared ethereal rather than cottony. “I saw a movie once, where this guy? He found a mysterious box that turned out to contain the mummified hand of his lover, complete with diamond engagement ring.”

  “I’m pretty sure this box doesn’t have a mummified hand inside.”

  We painted in silence for a while.

  “I saw this other movie?” Mary continued. “Where a fortune was hidden in a box like that. Only it wasn’t regular money, it was Confederate money, like from the Civil War?”

  “Confederate bills aren’t valuable, are they?”

  “No. I mean, I guess collectors want them but I don’t think they’re worth much. But the bad guy didn’t know that, so he killed a lot of people trying to get it.”

  “What a moron.”

  “Yeah. He was pretty cute, though.”

  “You watch a lot of crappy movies, Mary.”

  Mary snorted. “Like you don’t?”

  “At least they don’t involve mummified hands or adorable psychopaths.”

  “Maybe you should get out more. And why are you in such a bad mood?”

  “Sorry, Mare.” I still couldn’t bring myself to talk about Cindy. “Things have been a little nuts.”

  She nodded and painted some more. “I also read this story one time . . .”

  By the time midnight rolled around, I was ready to risk a curse from beyond and break into the metal box myself just to put a halt to Mary’s speculation on its contents and endless plot summaries. I ushered my assistant out of the columbarium, wishing her luck facing her fears in the graveyard tonight and instructing her to call if anything went wrong. Then I locked the door and returned to put the finishing touches on the angels’ wings. My arms and shoulders felt the strain of working overhead on the wobbly scaffolding, but I was determined to complete this phase of the restoration.

  Suddenly I heard a noise. I could not be sure of its origin because of the incessant creaking of the scaffolding, so I held still for a minute.

  Nothing.

  I resumed painting, my hands busy but my mind free to wander. Why did Cindy leave the suitcase with me? Why hadn’t she turned the box over to the cemetery? Was I supposed to return it to Louis’ crypt? Had she been so absorbed in her own misery that—

  I heard it again: something between a bump and a scrape.

  Heart pounding, I glanced around. Nothing. The noise had seemed far away, but it was impossible to judge sound accurately in this place. Could it be Michael? Generally I didn’t hear him until he wanted me to.

  I set my palette on the scaffolding’s wood planks, dropped my brush in the jar of mineral spirits, and climbed down. Padding softly to the alcove’s arched opening, I stood stock-still and strained to listen.

  Silence.

  Probably my imagination running amok. It tended to do that. Still . . . I riffled through my tote bag until I found the travel-sized can of aerosol hair spray that an SFPD homicide investigator—who used to be my friend until the drug trafficking incident last fall—suggested I carry in lieu of mace. It was cheap, she had told me, legal, and effective when sprayed in an attacker’s eyes. Unable to stand the suspense and emboldened by the thought that any miscreant would receive a snootful of Lady Clairol Extra-Firm Hold, I decided to investigate the source of the noise.

  I stuck my head out the Gothic arch and peered up and down the hall. I saw only long banks of glass-fronted compartments holding bronze urns and boxes. No lovesick Roy Cogswell, no after-hours cleaning personnel. Nothing out of the ordinary.

  My old sneakers were silent as I crept down the main hallway, through the Chapels of Peace and Rest, veering off through the Gardens of Prayer and Supplication and through the Chapels of Mercy and Resignation until I stumbled upon the Chapel of the Allegories, where the Raphael copy hung. La Fornarina seemed to smirk at my overactive imagination. Hussy.

  I must have taken a wrong turn. The Chapel of the Allegories was a dead end.

  There was the sound again, closer this time, and rhythmic.

  Footsteps. Heading my way.

  I was trapped.

  I considered hunkering down and praying that whoever was approaching would walk past, but given the sins of my youth I thought it unwise to rely on the power of prayer alone. The Chapel’s floor was made of stone, the walls were solid metal-and-glass compartments. Unless I was struck by lightning and reduced to a smoking pile of ash I didn’t have a chance of joining the current residents.

  That left the ceiling.

  I glanced up. The compartments stopped about twelve inches from the nine-foot arched ceiling, creating a narrow shelf along three sides of the alcove. I might be able to squeeze myself in and hang on long enough for whoever was approaching to leave, as long as they didn’t think to look over their heads.

  Now all I had to do was get up there.

  I scanned the wall for a
foothold. The compartment doors were set flush with each other with no toehold between them. A better bet seemed to be the projecting metal prongs that studded the walls to the left of each compartment, a few of which held cone-shaped vases, their flowers drooping. I grasped the prongs of an empty vase holder with my right hand, and reached up to grab another with my left. My right foot stepped gingerly on one about a foot from the floor. I steadied myself, tried not to fall backward, and lifted my left foot, hoping to scale the wall like Spider-Man.

  I was about three feet off the floor when the metal hoops began to bend under my weight. My fingers and toes scrambled for purchase, but the pesky law of gravity tugged me backward. I made one last effort, pushing hard against the prongs beneath my feet to boost myself within reach of the next row of vase holders.

  The sound of my not-inconsiderable derriere landing with a thud on the hard stone floor reverberated through the alcove. The approaching footsteps halted for a moment, then sped up. Adrenaline shot through me, my butt smarted fiercely, and my breathing was labored. I tried to breathe through my nose, but the snorting was even noisier than the panting. I leapt to my feet and flattened myself against the wall to the left of the arched alcove doorway, the can of hair spray in my right hand. Checking to be sure the can’s nozzle was pointed in the proper direction so that I didn’t inadvertently blind myself, I held my breath and waited.

  A figure rushed through the doorway. I screamed, leapt out, and unleashed a barrage of Lady Clairol at a ghoulish green face. The masked figure yelled, and gloved hands flew to its eyes. Adrenaline pumping through me, I lowered my head and drove my shoulder into its solar plexus, ramming the figure against a bank of niches. It yelped as the vase prongs dug into its back. My knee slammed into the ghoul’s groin, and he collapsed on the floor. The ghoul clutched at my legs as I darted toward the doorway, but I kicked out, hard, and shook him off.

  Down the hallway I sprinted, past row upon row of alcoves, up the stairs, down another hallway, and up yet another set of stairs. I heard swearing and grunting from somewhere behind me, and the sound of footsteps slapping on the floor as the ghoul took up the chase.