Instead I stuffed marshmallows, chocolate bars, and graham crackers into a bunch of sacks — everyone has an entire shelf in their pantry dedicated to such things, don’t they? Clarice made sure we did, because we live next door to nineteen boys between the ages of eight and eighteen.
Early January dusk was falling as I drove back to the garage, goodies in the truck bed. It was an appropriate warm-up run for the main task on my agenda for tomorrow.
Walt already had a bonfire going, and smoke billowed above the tree tops, an amorphous, shimmery veil against the growing darkness.
Several boys were posted like sentries around the perimeter, hoses in hand. More boys were milling around, and I couldn’t get a head count, but clearly the fire had replaced demolition as the day’s main attraction. Bright light from the flames flickered off their faces, their expressions alternating between awe at the size of the conflagration and glee at the same.
I found Dill, one of the older boys, and assigned him the task of starting a new, smaller fire made of only clean wood in a safe place. No old paint or other unidentifiable substances. I didn’t want the boys toasting their marshmallows in a cloud of carcinogens. Dill quickly had a flock of eager helpers, and I left them to it.
Walt was coordinating the addition of fuel to the bonfire — spacing out the chunks of old building materials the boys were tossing on it so the fire wouldn’t get out of hand. I murmured my plan in his ear, and his face split into a wide grin.
“You mean in lieu of a proper dinner?” he asked in mock disapproval.
“Just don’t tell my mother,” I shot back.
“Oh, you can count on that.”
It was a good end to a good day. The boys settled into groups, talking in low voices with the occasional guffaw — contentedly filthy, sticky, and tired. The beds from the loft had been arranged as spectator seating around the fire. Loretta and Clarice claimed one, and they made room for me. Emmie curled up on my lap. We occasionally rotated, to get the warmth from the fire on our backs instead of on our fronts. Smoke played peekaboo with the stars, drifting across constellations startling close in the cold air.
You know how movement catches your eye — just a flicker and your focus automatically homes in on the anomaly? That’s how I saw him.
A lean figure sidled along the garage, hurried and bent. He halted at the door, crouched, stuck out a skinny arm and poked through a box, hefted it, and disappeared around the corner. The food box.
I was shocked he’d come when there were so many people close by. He was so quick that I hardly had time to realize what I was seeing before he was gone. No time to utter an exclamation.
I glanced sidelong at Loretta and Clarice, but they seemed mesmerized by the flames. Exhausted, no doubt. Maybe I was the only witness. Just as well. I’d prefer to leave our former squatter in peace.
oOo
I’d completely forgotten about the paintings which I’d tossed on my bed in my hurry to get to my phones earlier. I’d showered the smoke smell out of my hair, cinched Skip’s thick robe tight, and dashed bare-footed to my room, dreading how long it would take for the cold sheets to warm up.
But I’d have to do something about the grimy canvas rolls before I could sleep. For half a second, I considered just shoving them under my bed. But a sense of ambiguous obligation forced me to pull on a pair of wool socks and take stock. Somebody had spent a considerable amount of time, if not talent, on them. I owed them a decent perusal.
The mechanic/painter must not have thought they were very good either, to stash them in such an awkward cubbyhole. But why keep them at all? If I found they were all equally terrible, then I could, with a clear conscience, find a place to dispose of them away from the prying eyes of impressionable young boys.
I picked one up and unrolled it. It had been on a stretcher at one point — the edges of the canvas were slightly raveled and small rusty holes punctuated the unpainted strips at the sides, top, and bottom where nails had pierced the fabric.
This one was definitely a nude, no question about it — even I could tell. Female again. Because — well, I could figure out why. She still wasn’t symmetrical. I began to wonder if the mechanic had been cross-eyed.
I squinted and tipped my head to the side. No improvement. I could have sat for this guy with my funny lopsided smile and scar on my upper lip from the eleven surgeries it took to repair my cleft lip and palate. Frankly, I looked better in the mirror than his models did.
Next up was the painting I’d seen earlier. I quickly moved on to the third roll. A landscape — actually a harbor scene. I exhaled. Now here was a painting I could deal with. Boats docked in slips in the distance, sparkling turquoise water, blindingly white block houses built on top of each other up the side of a steep hill — probably somewhere in the Mediterranean. Simple shapes, but I could tell exactly what they were supposed to be.
The fourth roll was a landscape too, but completely different from the other. Softer, furry brush strokes, muted colors, as though a layer of Los Angeles’s famous smog engulfed what could have been a pleasant, if simplistic, rural scene. Depressing. Or maybe it was just really dirty.
I licked my finger and rubbed at a patch of shrubbery in the lower right corner. My fingertip turned grayish-brown and revealed the tail end of a black swoop.
I licked another finger and rubbed off more grime. Cursive letters — a long name. I kept up the saliva spot cleaning until all my fingers and thumbs were dirty and a famous Italian name was visible — Modigliani.
Good grief. My spit was on a Modigliani.
I scuttled down the hall in my slippery socks and returned from the bathroom with a damp washcloth. A few minutes of gentle scrubbing revealed another Modigliani — the recognizable female nude, a Picasso — the abstract female nude, and an H. Matisse — the bright harbor scene.
Barely breathing while a panicky feeling crept higher and higher in my chest, I dug for the packet of authentication papers and opened my laptop.
First, a quick Google search let me know just how frequently this trio of painters had works that were faked, forged and plain old copied. And how many forged works had fooled smart people for a long time.
Upon closer examination, the documents from the pouch Selma had harbored for me weren’t as definitive as I’d remembered. Informational — notations of points of contact along the paintings’ long journeys through the art world. But which paintings? The ones on my bed or the real ones? Or were they one and the same? Could authentication documents be forged too?
The problem was way over my head. I could read the signatures on the paintings like anyone else, but beyond that I had no knowledge of verification techniques. Or proper storage methods for preservation. I had to guess being rolled up in a cabinet in a mechanics’ garage was not ideal treatment, regardless of the paintings’ provenance.
And if they really were real, the last place I wanted them was under my bed like a giant beacon signal of my guilt to any nosy FBI agent. Try talking your way out of that one.
Maybe Skip’s safe deposit box held the answers, if I’d be allowed to access it. But tomorrow was Sunday, and I’d have to wait.
My to-do checklist grew by leagues as I stretched out with my back against the headboard and waited for morning. And not for the first time, I wondered exactly what my husband was up to.
CHAPTER 6
The next morning, the four of us wedged onto Lentil’s bench seat. I’d tried to persuade Loretta to take the day off, to recuperate from her exertion yesterday. She had to be sore after the bout of hard manual labor since she’d just spent two months at a luxury spa rehab facility where her most challenging physical activities were soaking in the hot tub and getting pedicures.
“The world’s a tuxedo, and I’m just a brown shoe,” she’d replied in a perky tone. “Bring it on.”
I didn’t know how to argue with that. Or even what it meant, exactly. Except that she was determined to be helpful. And equally determined not to be left ou
t. I wondered how much the desire for a drink was haunting her. Maybe she needed constant distractions.
Clarice had rolled her eyes but kept her objections to herself. In fact, she’d turned notably quiet since Loretta’s arrival. I didn’t expect them to become close confidantes, but silent irritation wasn’t going to help. Another worry to add to my list.
We dropped Emmie off at the Gonzales house for a play date with CeCe. Sidonie waved when she opened the front door, beaming and svelte and stunningly beautiful. Her extra maternity weight had melted off in record time. Could have something to do with the fact that her husband had been shot, almost killed, and hospitalized shortly after the twins were born. A diet of institutional food, anxiety, and nursing infants will do that to a person. She herded the two excited little girls inside the house with a final wave.
So now I was down to only two witnesses. One knew exactly what she was getting into (Clarice), and one I hoped to shelter in blissful oblivion (Loretta). Still, it felt like I was trying to manage a three-ring circus with a less-than-shoestring budget and blind elephants.
At the very least, though, this task was giving me road time in Lentil. I shifted through the gears, learning where the transmission was sloppy and where it was stubborn, listened to her engine growl, played with the pedals until I could feel their sweet spots of engagement. Her hood ornament stuck up like a gun sight, the ram’s head reminding me of the Terminator, Mayfield’s resident, omnivorous, omni-ravenous goat.
I backed Lentil up to dock B-15 which was clearly marked in large, painted characters over the last giant roll-up door. Before we had untangled ourselves from the seatbelts and climbed out of the cab, Hank had the door open.
Using a rear tire as a boost, I crawled over the side into the truck bed. Hank grabbed my hand and helped me up the two-foot jump to dock level.
Inside the long warehouse, men and machines moved quickly, beeping, hard tires squeaking on the polished concrete floor. Interstate commerce didn’t take weekends off.
“Here it is.” Hank pulled a dirty, quilted blanket off a small mound to reveal wood crates cross-stacked two-deep. He motioned me over. In a low voice, he said, “I took the liberty,” and he scooted the loose lid of one of the crates to the side so I could see inside.
My jaw dropped. “Why’s it so big?” The bar sported an imprinted logo of a pouring crucible above the words RAND REFINERY.
Hank pulled a sheaf of folded papers from a pocket and spread them out so I could read the fine print. “The bill of lading calls them Good Delivery bars. Eleven kilograms each.”
I did quick math in my head. “Three hundred and eighty-some ounces per bar,” I groaned. “Single kilos would be hard enough to shift. What am I going to do with eleven at a pop?”
But Hank didn’t have an answer for me. The look on his face showed he was extremely glad that it wasn’t his problem. Although he would never complain, I expect he was eager to get the crates off his dock.
Normally, shipments like this one come with armed guards and bulletproof-plated trucks providing vault to vault service. But I hadn’t wanted to draw attention and instead chose the most innocuous, albeit least secure, method — bulk cargo. I’d run the risk of losing the shipment, but then it wasn’t exactly mine to start with.
Clarice and Loretta were standing in the pickup bed watching us, stomping their feet to keep warm while their breath rose in steam clouds over their heads.
“Seal it up.” I took a deep breath. “No going back now.”
There were only a dozen crates. Hank and I carried them one at a time, handing them off to Clarice and Loretta who lined them up over the truck’s rear axle. Almost three hundred pounds of precious metal. Clarice strapped the quilted blanket over the crates.
When we were finished, Loretta thrust her hand Hank’s direction and introduced herself. I grimaced. My manners had gone the way of weekly manicures and stiletto pumps.
One of Hank’s brows pitched up, but otherwise he retained his stoical composure while responding to her greeting. “Pleased to meet you. I guess you made the connection that my wife and I are your next-door neighbors then, since Emmie’s playing with CeCe today. Let us know if you ever need anything.”
“Will do,” she chirped.
We piled into the cab. I slid Lentil into first with no mishaps, and we pulled away, riding noticeably lower in the back.
Maybe it was a subconscious thing — my forgetting to introduce Loretta to my friends. I didn’t know what to do with her myself — how much I should tell her, how much I could trust her, where her loyalties lay, her emotional strength and stamina — nothing. So how could I explain her to others? I was trying hard not to consider her a burden — a restricting, if cheerful, tagalong.
As we approached Woodland, Loretta started recognizing her surroundings. “Ooo,” she squealed, “there are the gigantic piles of logs. My goodness, what would anyone do with so many logs?”
“Paper,” Clarice grunted.
“Who writes anymore?” Loretta giggled.
Clarice dug her Day-Timer out of her capacious tote bag, clicked her pen and emphatically scrawled a note on a blank page in her large, looping handwriting. “Unit 236,” she growled and jabbed the pen to the right.
I slammed on the brakes and made a tight turn into the driveway for Six Shooter Storage Solutions. The sign featured a two-foot-tall revolver, and the words were arranged as though they were spraying out of the muzzle like bullets.
“Classy establishment,” I said as I pulled through the open chain link gate topped with razor wire.
“Car carrier,” Loretta said. “That’s what Jorge was driving. Lexuses. Can you imagine? He had eight cars worth over $50,000 each. That’s why the sides of his trailer had curtains, so people couldn’t see the cars and be tempted to steal them.”
“The only establishment lax on certain documents,” Clarice muttered. “You want class, you have to drive another hundred miles — maybe two.”
“And Jorge picked you up? In a Lexus car carrier.” I was struggling with clarity.
“In Vancouver by the fairgrounds. I figured I could trust that brand,” Loretta trilled. “They have an excellent reputation. He used to drive for Wayer — Waverhouse — or something, so he had theories about the log piles.”
“Weyerhaeuser,” I corrected. Wow, I was getting acclimated. I now knew the names of the big regional lumber companies. However, comprehension in the current conversation was proving elusive. “Theories?” I repeated.
“236,” Clarice shouted.
Good thing we were wearing our seatbelts. Loretta’s hitchhiker-picking-up truck driver friend’s speculative ideas about ecological management were going to have to wait. They probably involved aliens, speckled mushrooms, and body snatching anyway. A consequence of all those late nights on the road with only talk radio to keep him company.
Clarice popped her door open and slid out of the truck. She marched over to the unit she’d rented on Friday while I was bonding with Selma, jammed a key in the padlock, and wrenched it open. The roll-up door required grunting and heaving from the deadlift position, but she managed.
The storage facility was bigger than I would have expected for a town the size of Woodland. Maybe the developer was ambitious, or land was cheap. Or maybe the locals were really good at accumulating excess junk just like everyone else in the United States. Regardless, our unit had a lovely slab of bare concrete for the floor with flimsy metal walls and looked just like the other three hundred units arranged in long rows on the property. Anonymity. It would do.
I backed into the opening until Lentil’s nose was just inside. Clarice hauled on the looped chain, bringing the door crashing down. Privacy. Well worth the seventy-five-bucks-a-month, one-year lease she’d scratched an illegible signature on.
A single bulb burned brightly overhead, casting weird shadows.
“I don’t suppose I can ask what’s in the crates?” Loretta chirped, her brows pitched up to a point in the cent
er of her forehead. “Why they’re so heavy?”
I opened my mouth to apologize for all the secrecy, but Clarice blurted, “Nope,” through my open window before I had a chance.
“Get your scrawny self out here and help,” Clarice added and went to the back of the truck to release the tailgate.
Loretta leaned near my ear and whispered, “Is she always like that?”
I nodded. “I’m sorry. We talked about this before, when your suspicious friend Marco showed up at the spa — how Skip’s in trouble, is involved in something—”
“Darling, you don’t have to explain,” Loretta interrupted, patting my thigh. “Not one bit. I often wondered if Skip wasn’t too smart for his own good.” She sighed. “Call it a mother’s intuition. But he brought me you — the sweetest daughter-in-law I could have ever hoped for.” She accompanied the last remark with a little squeeze. “Let’s go help before old Crabby Face chews our heads off.”
Loretta bounced out of the cab, chattering the whole way. “So what is there to do around here? I can’t join a Moose Lodge or an Elks Lodge or anything like that now because I’m an alcoholic. I counted five taverns on our way here. But these people must have other hobbies. Maybe church groups? Like a ladies’ auxiliary or something?” She flashed an expectant smile back and forth between Clarice and me.
“We haven’t exactly been civic-minded lately,” Clarice growled, dropping a crate in the corner of the storage unit with a heavy thud, “unless you count going to dinner with the sheriff.”
“Ooo.” Loretta struggled to slide a crate off the tailgate. “Sounds exciting. Is he handsome?”
Clarice snorted. “Wouldn’t be my place to say.” She cast a meaningful glare my direction. “I wasn’t invited.”
“It was just friendly. That’s all.” My voice squeaked with defensiveness.
“The sheriff is sweet on you?” Loretta had to rest against the back wall with a crate cradled in her arms to consider this idea. “Well, of course, he is,” she added matter-of-factly. “When’s the next date?”
Hide & Find (Mayfield Cozy Mystery Book 3) Page 4
