“Uh, yeah.” Frowning, he picked his way between shelves and racks of items that his great-aunt called “dust catchers.”
“Here they are,” Susa said, gesturing with graceful fingers at the eleven paintings.
Lacey followed Ian and stood at his side while he stared at the car-wreck paintings.
“What are you looking for?” she asked finally.
“Don’t know.”
“Well, that makes it easier.”
A smile flickered over his mouth. “I feel like I’ve seen these before, or something like them.”
“It’s possible,” Lacey said.
“It is?”
“Yeah. Assuming Grandpa only painted fourteen—an assumption I can’t prove—there are three missing.”
Susa and Ian stared at Lacey.
“How do you know?” he asked.
“I’d like to say I’m psychic, and open my own woo-woo shop and sell vitamins,” Lacey said, “but my knowledge is more ordinary than that. The paintings are numbered along the stretchers on the back. Two is the lowest. Fourteen is the highest number. There’s no guarantee there weren’t paintings numbered higher than fourteen. I only know I don’t have any.”
Ian began checking the back of each car-wreck painting. “One, seven, and twelve are missing.”
“It’s the same for each, uh, topic.” What a genteel way to describe three separate takes on death and murder. Mom would be so proud of me. “A broken sequence of numbers.”
“What’s the other number written on the opposite side?” he asked.
“I can’t be sure, but I think it’s the total number of the Death Suite.”
“The what?” Susa asked.
“It’s my name for the dark paintings, not Grandpa’s. I don’t know if he separated them from the rest of his work in his own mind.”
“But you do,” Susa said.
“Wouldn’t you?” Lacey asked.
Susa looked thoughtful. “Yes, of course. Are the other works numbered in any way at all?”
“You mean the landscapes?” Lacey asked.
“Yes.”
“Not that I’ve found. No numbers. No dates. Only the dark ones are numbered and dated, or maybe dated—hard to tell. Two.six, four.six, and nine.two aren’t exactly the same as April eighth, nineteen-ninety. It could have been the numbers of attempts he made before he got one he liked, or it could have been a code as private as the vision he was painting. The paintings lend themselves to a more, um, ritual than rational explanation.”
“Tactfully put,” Ian said, his voice sardonic. “Rituals could be another name for psychoses, right?”
Lacey compressed her lips and shut up. Seeing the paintings through the eyes of people who hadn’t grown up with them gave the art a new dimension. It wasn’t a happy one.
Grandpa, did you imagine these or…?
She refused to finish the thought. Rubbing away the goose bumps that prickled coldly over her arms, she stepped back into the shadows and let Ian and Susa absorb the paintings.
Ian paced silently from the drowning pool to the fire to the wreck. Each time he stopped in front of the wreck and studied the paintings as though he was trying to squeeze something out of them.
“If those are dates,” he said, “there are only three of them. One for each way of dying. That’s a lot of painting in one day.”
“Impressive but not impossible,” Susa said. “If an artist is seized by a theme, he or she might paint nonstop in a frenzy of creation. Ten paintings, twenty, thirty. As long as the body can take it.”
Ian grunted. “Frenzy about covers it.”
“Not pleasant,” Susa said, looking from painting to painting, death echoing. “Not cozy. Brilliant the way a sword is brilliant. It’s the steely essence of intelligence and tradition. It’s also a punishing reminder of man’s spotted soul.”
With an impatient sound, Ian picked up one of the car-wreck paintings and shifted it slowly, letting light play over its dark surface. Night and hills and eucalyptus lifting like black torches to the moon-bright sky. The suggestion of parallel lines, perhaps tire tracks, rushing down a steep slope, straddling fire. The landscape shuddering as though at a blow. Every ripple of force came from and led back to the car.
Except one line. As though the wind touched only a single tree, it bent like a finger pointing to the top of the slope, where something stood and watched. Caught within the shadows that might have been chaparral or a man, a single glow came from what might have been the ember of a match.
Ian shifted the painting slowly, then shifted it again. The tiny glow winked in some lights like a firefly; in others, the glow was barely visible.
Saying nothing, he set aside the painting and picked up one of the canvases that depicted a fire raging in a cottage. Again, fire and moon were the only illumination. The moon wasn’t quite full in this one, but the fire more than made up for it. The little cottage burned like a torch, an explosion frozen in time.
Once he got past the sheer violence of the flames, he could see nuances that had escaped him before. The shadow outline of a burning figure. The deeper shadow of a fleeing figure with one foot off the canvas and something dark and bulky under his arm. Or hers. They could have been women. They could have been demons. They could have been nightmares.
“Jesus, Joseph, and Mary,” Ian muttered. “If it was any more real, you’d smell it.”
“As I said, brilliant.” Susa picked up one of the water paintings. “Nothing defined, everything suggested. Limitless, and all the more horrifying because of it.” Still holding the painting, she turned to face Lacey. “Having seen these, I feel more strongly than ever that they should be exhibited.”
“But they’re forgeries!”
Susa shrugged. “No matter. They’re brilliant. Since the originals are probably lost to us, it’s better to have something brilliantly copied than nothing at all of Marten’s work.”
“Then list me as the painter,” Lacey said.
Susa’s skin rippled in a primal wave of uneasiness that she neither understood nor questioned. “I don’t think that’s a good idea.”
Ian glanced at Susa. “Why?”
“Your grandfather’s dead. If these are forgeries, it won’t matter to him, will it?”
Lacey hesitated.
“Do you think it will be easier on your father to have his living daughter flogged as a forger rather than his dead father?” Ian asked.
“No,” Lacey said unhappily. “Besides, he’s going to retire instead of being a judge. I’m just not thrilled about blackening my grandfather’s name.”
“You aren’t doing one damn thing,” Ian said. “Any trash that gets passed around because of this is his fault, not yours.”
“I won’t put these forward as your paintings,” Susa said. “Your career is too valuable to destroy over this. The world has lived without many of Marten’s paintings so far. I suppose it can bump along without him until you change your mind or die.”
“Oh, hell,” Lacey said, throwing up her hands. “Do it. I’ll live with my whiny inner child.”
Susa grinned. “You sure?”
Lacey blew out a hard breath. “Yeah. But let’s keep it to a handful for now. After seeing your reaction to the dark ones, I’d just as soon not dump them all out in public at once.”
“How about if we just sort of replace the three paintings that were stolen?” Ian suggested.
“Good idea,” Susa said. “That way we’ll stay within the spirit of the original event.”
“No more than three paintings per patron, please,” Lacey muttered, remembering. “I went through it once already. This time you do the selecting.”
“Sold,” Susa said quickly. Her glance skimmed through the aptly named Death Suite. “I agree with your original selection of the drowning,” she said. “The woman is an immediate emotional focus for people unaccustomed to art. By the time they figure out what the canvas is depicting, they’ll already be trapped in its power.”
“This is good?” Ian asked.
Susa and Lacey ignored him.
“This one,” Susa said, selecting one of the drowning pool paintings, “has the desperate clarity of the scream you can’t hear.”
Ian blinked and kept his mouth shut. He didn’t want to get into the Zen thing right now.
Lacey pulled the painting out of the lineup and waited while Susa, muttering, paced up and down the narrow walkways between the racks where she had left her favorites of the landscapes jutting out into the aisles.
“Just two,” Susa said. “Dear Lord. How can I choose?”
Ian sighed. Sometimes Zen was quicker than anything else. “Close your eyes.”
“What?” Susa asked.
“Close your eyes and see better. The Zen thing.”
She gave him a sideways look. “Out of the mouths of babes…”
“Hey, I’m fully grown.”
“That’s what makes you a babe.”
Laughing, shaking his head, Ian crowded past Susa and took the first two paintings that were sticking out into the aisle. “Here,” he said. “Now let’s go back to the hotel and get some sleep. Tomorrow will be a long day.”
Susa took the first painting. It was a study of the desert east of the San Jacinto Mountains. The smoke tree growing out of the sandy wash was essentially feminine, grace and endurance in a deceptively fragile-looking body. Behind the tree, the mountains loomed in angles and shadows softened by the rose-colored glasses of dawn. But the brutal coming of the sun was implicit in the sparse plant life and the cryptic tracks left in the sand by animals that chose to live in the seamless night rather than in the searing light of day.
“Fascinating,” Susa said. “The oil is so thinly applied that it’s almost transparent on the canvas, yet the result has the kind of depth most artists achieve only with palette knives and gobs of paint.”
Gently Ian pried the painting from her hands and gave it to Lacey. “Glad you like it. Let’s go.”
“Show me the other one,” Susa said to Ian.
“Light’s better at the hotel.”
She raised her eyebrows and waited.
He gave her the second painting. He no longer wondered how such a delicate little flower had held her own with the Donovan men. In fact, he was wondering how they’d held their own with her.
“Perfect,” Susa said. “Not the same angle we painted, but the same place.”
For the first time Ian looked at the painting. “Cross Country Canyon,” he said, recognizing the lines of the land even though the trees were in slightly different places. Then he frowned. “Hold it for a minute. I want to compare something.” He went to the Death Suite, selected one of the car wrecks, and came back to Susa.
“What is it?” Lacey asked.
“Can’t be sure, but…” Ian compared the two paintings. “What do you think? Same place or not?”
Susa and Lacey compared the trees and the lines of the land.
“My vote is yes,” Lacey said. “But the daylight view came first. Otherwise you’d see scars from the fire.”
“I agree,” Susa said. She looked at the intensity of Ian’s eyes and the brackets around his mouth. “Why does it matter?”
“While you two were painting, I picked up a license plate at the bottom of the ravine,” Ian said. “Just thought it was curious, that’s all. Can’t have been too many wrecks there.”
Goose bumps rippled as Susa felt the familiar but never comfortable sensation of time’s cool sigh through her core. She looked at the Death Suite lined up in horrifying celebration and wondered all over again where genius ended and madness began.
Savoy Ranch
Late Saturday morning
42
In the imposing drawing room of the ranch house, Angelique White sat on a butter-colored brocade couch and stroked Honey Bear’s soft ears. He watched her with complete adoration shining in his round, dark eyes. The fact that she was nibbling on crackers and savory country pâté didn’t hurt the dog’s focus one bit.
“Honey Bear, move your lazy butt,” Ward said, giving the retriever a hard nudge with his boot. “You’re crowding the lady.”
The dog leaned harder against Angelique’s knee.
Savoy grabbed Honey Bear’s collar and pulled him back.
“Really, I don’t mind,” Angelique said. “He’s so beautiful.”
“Tell me that after he drools all over your designer dress,” Savoy said dryly, gesturing toward the ecru silk she wore. “At least it isn’t black. Honey Bear just loves shedding on dark fabric.”
Angelique smiled and made cooing sounds at Honey Bear. He sniffed her fingers hopefully. She slipped him a bite of pâté. The dog licked it up and drooled on the papers lined up across the coffee table.
Savoy bit back all the things he wanted to say about ill-behaved, spoiled pets. It was a good thing the ink on the deal was waterproof. He hadn’t come this far just to have a golden retriever screw up everything.
“Champagne?” Ward asked.
“No, thank you,” Angelique said, refusing the drink again. “I have to drive.”
“Some fruit, then?” Savoy asked, passing her an artfully arranged platter of fresh fruit. “Coffee?”
“Coffee, please,” she said. She reached toward the table. To Honey Bear’s dismay, she picked up a handful of paper rather than pâté. “If you’ll give me a moment, I’ll just flip through this.”
“Take your time,” Ward said while Savoy poured coffee all around.
Ward watched his son and Angelique from the corner of his eye. No leaning toward each other. No brush of hand over hand. No press of leg against leg. No private meeting of eyes. Silently Ward gave up the hope that his son would charm Angelique into a compromising position in time to do any good on the ultimate agreement. Nor had Rory come up with anything useful. The deal, such as it was, would stand—not all that Ward had hoped for, but a hell of a lot better than watching his empire nibbled to death by civic ducks.
Angelique read through the papers with the speed and precision of the top executive she was; then she initialed the bottom of each page next to Savoy’s mark. Only two changes had been made. Neither was important to her. After she read the last page, she signed on the line above Savoy’s signature, wrote in the date, and smiled at him.
“I can’t tell you how pleased I am about this,” she said. “It’s precisely the forward-looking, community-and family-oriented enterprise that I envisioned for New Horizons.”
“We’re pleased, too,” Savoy said. “There were times we wondered if there was a deal to be made.”
Angelique’s smile widened. “That’s what makes business so interesting, don’t you think? The uncertainty.”
Ward smiled through his teeth. He had to hand it to her—she was one hard-nosed negotiator. But it was all wrapped up now. Finally. Everything he had worked and schemed for during his lifetime was secure. The name and accomplishments of Warden Garner Forrest would echo through the history of southern California.
Forrest, not Savoy.
Always assuming nothing else went wrong before the final deal was signed, of course.
Nothing will go wrong, Ward promised himself. I’ve spent a lifetime of eating Savoy shit for this, and so did my father. It will happen
Angelique quickly dealt with the remaining copies, stacked them neatly, and put all but one in the sleek leather briefcase that she’d brought. “I believe I’ll have a sip of champagne after all. This is a day worth celebrating. A historic collaboration of land and vision, plus dinner tonight with a great artist.” She smiled at Ward and Savoy equally. “Isn’t it wonderful that some of the missing paintings have been found?”
Ward sat up straight. “What?”
“Well, not found exactly. Not the exact same paintings, from what Susa said when I met her in the hallway,” Angelique explained, accepting the champagne flute that Savoy handed to her. “The young woman—Lacey, I believe—who brought the paintings Susa was so ex
cited about apparently has a whole stash of them. So between that and Susa’s painting while she was here, the auction will proceed as expected. With all the publicity after the theft, it should be a complete sellout.”
“Are you telling me that the Lacey woman has more paintings?” Ward demanded.
“Yes. Isn’t it wonderful?”
“Where?” he said curtly.
Angelique hesitated, surprised by Ward’s intensity. “Where does she store the paintings? I haven’t any idea.”
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