Sweet Masterpiece: The First Samantha Sweet Mystery ssm-1

by Connie Shelton

  He chuckled. “Sam, it’s only been three hours since I was there.”

  Really? She glanced at her watch. Holy cow. She’d blazed her way through the house in record time. The kitchen alone would have normally taken longer than that. And she didn’t even feel tired.

  True to his word, Rupert showed up minutes later. They sat in front of the closet door, staring at the mural. He’d run his hands lovingly over the paint, verifying that it wasn’t just some kind of decal or trick of decoupage or something. No, it truly was an original, painted right there. But was it a Cantone?

  “A skillful artist who loves Cantone’s style could have copied it, couldn’t he?” Sam asked, pointing out the box of paints and brushes she’d found. “Maybe Mr. Anderson just wanted to experiment—test his own talent?”

  “An expert would have to authenticate it, of course,” Rupert said. “But the strange thing is that this scene is unknown. What would the other artist have copied from?”

  “So, he made it up? Copied Cantone’s style and signature?”

  He made a little grimacing move with his mouth. “Maybe. But why put it here? Someone wants to copy a famous artist they’re usually trying to make some money. And someone this good, sweetie, I can tell you. This guy could be making good money even if he admitted his work was a fake. Passing it off as real—he’d have a chance of pulling it off, selling to some rich dude who didn’t bother to verify, for a couple hundred thou.”

  Whoa. Sam had no idea Cantone’s work was worth that.

  She showed Rupert the digital photos she’d taken and he shot a couple more, zooming in on the signature and a few details.

  “I’ll get these to an appraiser I know in Santa Fe,” he said. “If he thinks there’s a chance this is real, he’ll probably want to come out and see it.”

  Sam cautioned him about trying to remove the painting, that the sheriff still considered the property a crime scene, which led to a whole explanation about finding the grave in the backyard.

  After Rupert left she finished tidying up the bedroom and looked around. She’d never finished a cleanup job this quickly. A little more work out in the yard, which at this rate she could easily finish this afternoon, and the place would be ready to list for sale. Sam debated. She really needed the money, and to get paid she’d have to submit her report and allow access to the house by others. On the other hand, it would kill her to let someone come in here and paint over a potentially valuable work of art. The first Realtor in the door would probably want to do that. For now, she would hold off awhile.

  The county landfill was on her way home so Sam stopped there and dumped off the bags of trash and the stained old mattress. Next stop was at the thrift shop on Paseo del Pueblo Norte, where she left the clothing she’d collected and a couple boxes of stuff that might have some value to them—books, a damaged lamp that might be repaired, some kitchen utensils. She wanted to get the book on plants to Zoe so, after she’d parked her truck and trailer at home, she walked over to the B&B.

  Zoe was pouring herself a glass of wine when Sam walked into her kitchen and she accepted one too. Exclaiming over the book Zoe carried it with her as they went out to the shady patio to relax.

  “You finished an entire property in one day?” she asked, groaning as she sank into a wicker chair. “I barely got my flower beds weeded and I’m aching all over.”

  Sam murmured something about being a little bundle of energy today.

  “Hey, this is a great book,” Zoe said, flipping through the pages. “Interesting . . . here’s a whole section on deadly stuff.”

  “Ha—you’ll be known as the queen of mushrooms.”

  Sam’s cell phone vibrated in her pocket just then, making her jump. Rupert.

  “Hey, girl. I heard from that appraiser? He wants to come out and see the mural. Tomorrow?”

  “That was fast.”

  “Beauty of email,” he said. “So, you think it will be okay for us to come up?”

  “Just to take a look, sure. I can’t let you take it away until the sheriff’s department gives the okay, though.”

  “Okay then. I’ll send a positive vibe out to the universe that this is the real thing and that we get to bring it back.”

  She thought about that as he hung up. If it truly was a valuable painting, the proceeds belonged to the owner’s estate. If Anderson turned out to be the dead guy, by rights the lien holder on the property could claim up to the value of their unpaid balance against it. Seemed a shame but she really should report the find to Delbert Crow. That prospect deflated her. She stuck the phone back in her pocket and took a big swig of her wine.

  Zoe’s husband Darryl came out the back door, carrying a bottled beer. “Hey, I wondered where you were. Hey, Sam.”

  “Just taking a break. My dogs were killing me,” Zoe said, wiggling her bare toes. She’d kicked off her sandals and put her feet up on a small wicker stool.

  “Here,” he said, “let me give them a little TLC.” He set his beer on the side table and rubbed his hands together briskly before reaching for one of her feet. Darryl is a teddy bear of a guy, burly, with gray hair that hangs below his shoulders and a full white beard. He’s a plumbing contractor and Sam had seen him at construction sites, hollering at his crew to hurry it up. Then he came home and absolutely doted on Zoe, like now, rubbing her feet when she was tired or volunteering to make dinner at the end of a long day. He was a prize.

  Zoe leaned back in the chair and let him start a massage on her toes.

  “I’ll take the other one,” Sam said. “We’ll just pamper you a little.”

  She set her glass down and knelt near the footstool. When Sam touched Zoe’s bare foot she jerked it back.

  “Sorry. Cold hands?”

  “No,” she said. “Go ahead. It just startled me.”

  This time she reacted to the touch but didn’t pull away. Sam felt warmth flow from her hands to her friend’s foot.

  Zoe sat up straight. “What is that?”

  “I don’t know.” She was momentarily speechless. Some energizing force had gone down her arms, out her fingertips, and into Zoe’s foot. Without thinking, she drew both hands from the back of Zoe’s heel, along the sides of her foot, out the length of her toes. As she let go of the foot, Zoe let out a pent-up breath. Darryl stopped and stared at her.

  Sam stood up quickly and shook out her hands. “That was weird.”

  “Very weird.” Zoe stood on the tile patio, shifting her weight from one foot to the other.

  “My left foot feels tingly and not at all achy. The right one is about the same as it was before. Sorry, honey. No offense to your massage skills.” She took a few steps that turned into a little jig. “I cannot believe how much better it feels. The aches and pains are completely gone.”

  Whoa. Did this go along with the fact that Sam had just cleaned a whole house and yard, with energy to spare?

  Darryl shook his head. “I can’t believe this.”

  Zoe was exuberant. “Do the other one, Sam. Start at my knee and do my leg as well.”

  She had no idea what to think but followed her friend’s instruction. One stroke from knee to toes and Zoe was practically dancing. She grabbed Sam in a big hug. But Sam noticed that Darryl looked at her differently, suspiciously.

  “I wouldn’t go around advertising this,” he said.

  Somehow, she knew he was right.

  Chapter 7

  Sam called Beau Cardwell when she got home, explained Rupert’s interest in the mural and suggested that he would probably want to get there before the art appraiser arrived. Then she phoned Delbert Crow, interrupting his dinner, and told him in vague terms that she’d found an item that was physically attached to the house that should be removed before the home was listed for sale. He didn’t seem to mind that they cut a hole in the wall, as long as Sam patched it with fresh wallboard; he was more disgruntled at her recommendation that the entire interior be repainted. Probably ninety-percent of the reclaimed homes warran
ted a fresh coat of paint before resale but Crow said to let it go; a buyer at a foreclosure sale would expect to repaint the place himself. Fine.

  Sam gathered tools and a spare piece of drywall that she knew she’d stashed out in the garage somewhere. Luckily she’d helped her dad with enough construction projects when she was a kid that she knew what to do. This wouldn’t be that big a repair.

  Everything went into the truck. She microwaved a frozen dinner and ate it in front of the TV. She studiously avoided handling the wooden box that still sat on her kitchen table, or thinking too much about the strange experience at Zoe’s house that afternoon.

  By eight the next morning Sam was on the familiar-feeling route to the Anderson place. Beau was waiting in the driveway and she remembered that she had not left a key or lockbox yet.

  “Place is looking good,” he commented as they walked through the living room.

  “The painting is back here.” She showed him the small mural hidden in the closet.

  “Hold this tape measure up for reference,” he said, pulling out a camera. He snapped a few shots. “I guess that’s all we would need. Can’t think of any way this is going to change our investigation. We don’t even know yet if there’s anything suspicious about this death.”

  Sam handed back the tape and his fingers touched hers. The closet felt suddenly intimate, with the two of them crowded in there. Beau leaned toward her, ever so slightly, as if he wanted to say something. Sam bumped into the wall behind her.

  Heavy footfalls on the porch and a knock at the door interrupted.

  Beau sent her a searching look, which she tried to ignore.

  “Hellloooo . . . “ Rupert’s voice echoed through the house.

  She slipped past Beau and peered out the bedroom door. “In here,” she called.

  Rupert tended to float into a room, his trademark purple scarves and full-sleeved tunic shirts billowing, the gestures and number of scarves increasing in correlation to the size of his audience. Considering that he was nearly six feet tall and weighed over two hundred pounds, he was pretty hard to miss in a crowd. He preceded the appraiser who introduced himself as Esteban, a thin, dark-haired man in a business suit, that Sam guessed to be in his mid-twenties.

  She introduced Beau to the other two but it was apparent that Rupert couldn’t wait to show off the mural, and Beau seemed eager to get on the road. While the two art hounds crowded in near the painting, she saw Beau out to the front porch.

  He got to the bottom step and turned. “I started to ask if you would have dinner with me. Tomorrow night?”

  Sam almost blurted out, why?, but stopped herself at the last second. Guys like Beau Cardwell—tall, calendar material—did not date women like Samantha Sweet—average, chunky, with strands of gray in their hair. It just did not happen.

  “A date?” she asked. It had been way too many years.

  “Why not? You’re a beautiful lady.” He actually sounded sincere.

  “Beautiful? You’ve only seen me in jeans that are coated in dust,” she countered. “Besides, I don’t really date much.”

  “Okay, we’ll call it dinner for two friends who want to get to know each other better.” This time, he really sounded sincere.

  She debated.

  To question why a guy wants to share a meal with you isn’t polite. And if there’s one thing she’d learned growing up in west Texas, it’s that a lady is always polite. She accepted.

  She watched him climb into the department SUV and drive away. Well. This would be interesting.

  Excited voices inside the house caught her attention. She walked into the living room where Rupert met her in a flurry.

  “Sam—” He was nearly breathless. “Esteban is very encouraged.”

  “He thinks it’s real?”

  The appraiser stepped out of the bedroom. “Is early to say.” He had some kind of Spanish/French euro-accent, which seemed completely affected. “I must run tests.”

  Rupert was practically twitching with anticipation, while Esteban played it cool, ruffling the pages of a magazine that Sam had left lying on the coffee table.

  She shrugged. “My supervisor said that it was okay to remove it.”

  Rupert nearly drooled.

  “I’ll need to get a receipt. It belongs to the estate of the home owner.”

  Esteban reached into an inner pocket in his jacket and pulled out a small book. He might look like a cool customer but he’d come prepared. While he filled out a receipt and signed it, Sam went out to her truck and brought in the tools.

  Neither of the men looked eager to get drywall dust on their clothes so Sam drilled four corner holes, inserted the wallboard saw and started taking out a section about twelve inches larger all around than the actual painting. They wrapped their treasure in a blanket that Esteban had conveniently remembered to bring and drove away in Rupert’s Mini Cooper, both looking happy as clams.

  Sam watched the plume of dust settle on the road and walked back to her truck to get the sheet of drywall she’d brought along to repair the gaping hole in the wall. About the time she’d measured the hole, brought the saw back outside, and cut a replacement piece she realized that she had company. A woman wearing pink capris and a loose, floral-patterned T-shirt was coming up the drive. Sam guessed her to be in her seventies, with peach-tinted hair almost covered by a pink floppy hat.

  “I saw your truck here yesterday, too,” the lady said by way of greeting.

  Sam gave the quick explanation of her role as caretaker. She still found it amazing how often she spent days at a place, carted away half the furniture and no one even raised an eyebrow.

  The woman stuck out her hand. “Betty McDonald. My husband and I live at the next place over.” She waved vaguely toward the west. Sam spotted another simple wood frame house about a hundred yards away. “Been here since before Riley bought his place five years ago. Way before his friend moved in, the young one.” Her eyebrows formed a pair of golden arches.

  “Oh, were you friends with Mr. Anderson too?” Sam knew what she was hinting at when she said friend, and couldn’t resist the little dig back at her.

  Betty ignored it. “The sheriff’s deputy came around yesterday, asking me about them. I told him what little I knew. Riley Anderson wasn’t all that neighborly. In fact, Leonard Trujillo had to get nasty with him. See that fence over there?” She pointed to the property on the opposite side of Anderson’s place from her own. “Riley put that up and it was on Leonard’s land. Leonard threatened to sue him.”

  Sam didn’t mention that she already knew this little tidbit.

  “Most of the other neighbors wouldn’t even talk to him, but I’d stop in now and then, just to check on him. I’d see him puttering around the yard. He seemed to like working in the flower beds. But after the other one moved in, Riley didn’t show his face much.”

  Sam recalled the haphazard mess in the second bedroom, clothes strewn about, the unmade mattress on the floor. He might have been a slob but there was no evidence that Betty’s sly insinuation was true. “How long did the other guy live here?”

  Betty rolled her eyes upward, remembering. “I’d say he moved in around the beginning of the spring. Four or five months maybe? No. You know when it was? St. Patrick’s Day. March 17. I remember because I was heading into town to meet some other Irish friends for a traditional dinner. Corned beef—um, I love that stuff. That’s when the strange blue car showed up.”

  Of course. The perfect busybody neighbor who watched everyone’s comings and goings.

  Betty went on. “I only saw Riley a few times after that. He didn’t look so good. I stopped in once with some muffins I’d baked and he said he’d been sick a lot. I gave him the name of my doctor in town but he wouldn’t go, told me he didn’t believe in doctors. After that, I would see the blue car come and go, not very often though. They mostly stayed around the house. Then Bill and I went on vacation the first week of June. When we came back, Riley’s old pickup and the other guy’s ca
r were both gone. Place looked empty. Never saw either one of them again.”

  When Betty started repeating things, Sam knew she was out of information so she started rummaging through her tool box, hinting that she still had work to do.

  “Well, I need to get on with my walk,” Betty said. “Can’t be standing around here gabbing all day.”

  As if it were Sam’s fault. Strange woman, she thought, as Betty walked back to the road and headed west.

  Sam carried her rectangle of drywall back into the front bedroom and set it down, went back for the tape and joint compound. The studs behind the cut-out section might need some additional bracing. She tugged at the edges of the hole to see how sturdy it was. And then she noticed something odd.

  Her sawing job had caused some of the old tape to split and a section of the old wall board now swung outward, as if a mini door had once been built into the wall. She pulled at it and a section about two feet tall came toward her. She reached for the flashlight they’d used earlier to look closely at the painting and shone it into the space behind the wall.

  A couple of items seemed to be jammed in there. She reached in. Out came a leather-bound book, about fourteen inches tall and less than an inch thick. Along with it was a small pencil box made of wood. She wiped them against the carpet to take away some of the dust. The box was filled with art pencils, many of which were honed to fine points; obviously they’d been sharpened and resharpened many times. She ruffled the pages of the book. They were filled with sketches—a few human forms, but mostly botanical and architectural. There were European cathedrals, castles on hillsides, and even the soft adobe shapes of the Taos Pueblo. Then came pages and pages of plants—flowers and trees, mainly. She turned to the front of the book. Neatly lettered on the flyleaf were the words: Property of Pierre Cantone.

  Her heart did a little flutter.

  The world famous artist had held this book, had made these sketches.

  Sam backed out of the closet and sat heavily on the edge of the bed. My god, she thought.

  Cantone must have visited or lived in this house at some point. But why would he leave his sketchbook behind? And who had painted over the mural?