It was Lacey who answered. “If people were murdered, it’s a simple matter of justice. If there weren’t any murders, I want to know that. I want to know what Grandpa Rainbow was or wasn’t. I need to know.”
Dottie looked at her daughter’s stubborn chin and determined eyes. “And the devil with what the rest of us need.”
Lacey flinched but didn’t back down. “You hated him. What would it matter to you if he was a killer or a saint?”
“Not everyone is dying to have a murderer in their direct ancestry,” her mother shot back. “If he were still alive, I’d say go find the truth and then hang the son of a bitch from the highest tree you could find.”
Lacey’s eyes opened in shock. She’d never heard so much as hell from her mother.
“But he’s dead and the only ones who can be hurt are the living,” Dottie said. “If you don’t care about yourself, think of your sisters.”
“I think my sisters will do just fine,” Lacey said. “If their society friends dump them for what their grandfather did, then they weren’t much in the way of friends, were they? Besides, why can’t he be innocent and just a closet groupie of the rich and famous of Moreno County?”
“This is pointless.” Dottie stalked out of the room.
“Damn it,” Lacey said, smacking her hand on the coffee table. “It always ends up the same way.”
There was a long, unhappy silence.
Ian was just getting to his feet to leave when Dottie strode back into the living room carrying her portable computer under her arm. Without a word, she popped open the screen and pointed to the date listed on an elaborate professional calendar.
“David Quinn wasn’t here,” she said. “I know, because my mother’s funeral happened to be on that day.”
Lacey closed her eyes. She’d hoped her grandfather had been in Pasadena. She certainly hadn’t expected to be able to prove that he wasn’t so quickly, so definitely.
“What about the other two dates?” she asked painfully.
“That was before your father’s time,” Ian said. “And, apparently, before your grandfather’s.”
“What?”
“As far as I can find, David Quinn never existed in any official file until he married SaraBeth Courtney forty-eight years ago.”
Savoy Ranch
Sunday afternoon
54
Rory rubbed his face wearily, leaned back into the soft leather couch, and stared at the gas fire in the hearth. He hadn’t wanted to bring Bliss to the ranch to discuss old death with Ward and his two children, but she hadn’t been able to let go of it.
Defensively Bliss flipped through the nearly decade-old coroner’s report for the fifth time and dumped it on the coffee table in front of Savoy. “So she was alone in the spa, drinking vodka on the rocks and popping painkillers. So what? She did it all the time and she didn’t drown.”
Ward said something under his breath and shook his head.
Savoy picked up the old report and glanced through it. He didn’t find anything new. He didn’t expect to. He took a drink of his beer and set the bottle on a coaster on the coffee table.
“Well?” she challenged.
“Do you really think Mother was murdered?” Savoy asked.
Bliss’s mouth set in a stubborn line. Then she looked at her new husband, seeing the tension and fatigue in the line of his shoulders. She stopped pacing and went to sit next to him.
“No,” she said. “I guess not. It’s just…it was so shocking to see that bracelet.” She shivered. “And I keep wondering how the painter knew about it.”
“Intertwined hearts aren’t exactly a rare jewelry design,” Savoy pointed out.
“But the bracelet itself is unique,” she insisted. “It was commissioned for Grandmother’s engagement.”
Ward just shook his head. “Savvy’s right. Go into any jewelry store and you’ll find heart bracelets and rings and whatnot. Besides, the painting’s not photographic. Even if your bracelet had looked a lot different, you still could have seen it in the painting.”
She knew he was right and it pissed her off. “Don’t you care that Mother could have been murdered?”
Ward took a long swallow of beer, set the bottle down with extreme care, and gave his daughter a look that had her wishing she was still standing so she could back up.
“It would have been easier on me if she had been murdered,” Ward said. “Rory and I spent a lot of time and political favors keeping Gem’s suicide from dragging the Forrest name through every sleazy tabloid in the county, state, and nation.”
Bliss went white. “I heard whispers, but I never really believed she killed herself.”
Rory put his arm around Bliss. “Sugar, your mother took after her father, and he wasn’t real stable after he hit the bottle. Your dad and I worked hard to keep down the gossip about her. When she wasn’t drying out in one resort or another, she was drinking and partying hard. I threw the worst of her gigolos out of the county and paid off the rest of them.”
Bliss looked at her brother. “Savvy?”
He looked like he’d bitten into something sour. “When Mother was sober, she was a wonderful woman, laughing and witty and beautiful.”
Ward grunted. “You got a longer memory than mine, boy. All I remember is the drunk.” Then he waved his hand abruptly. “Oh, hell, Gem was all right when she wasn’t drinking, but she just didn’t spend much time sober and refused to pull herself out of the booze.”
Savoy didn’t argue. It was the unhappy truth.
Bliss gnawed on her thumb, looked at her bracelet, and gnawed some more.
Gently Rory tookher hand between his own. “I know it’s hard, but look at it this way,” he said to Bliss. “No one benefited from her death. There weren’t any jealous lovers who’d want to kill her, because they’d all been paid off and were happy to take the money. As for a jealous husband—”
Ward gave a crack of sardonic laughter. “I didn’t care who she screwed, as long as she didn’t fuck with the ranch.”
“Maybe she was just trying to get your attention with all her lovers and drinking,” Savoy said bitterly.
Ward gave him a hard glance. “Then she didn’t know me very well, did she?”
“Does anyone?” Savoy asked.
“The point,” Rory said before an argument could explode, “is that there wasn’t any motive for murdering her. No one was better off because Gem was dead. Not you, not Savvy, not even Ward. He already voted her shares in the business, because Gem just didn’t give a damn as long as there was plenty of money for expensive clothes, booze, pills, and younger men.”
Bliss winced. Her stomach clenched as she wondered if her mother had looked in the mirror one day, seen the ruins of beauty, and decided that living was more trouble than it was worth. Or maybe she’d simply killed herself a little at a time until there wasn’t anything left.
And the daughter couldn’t help wondering if she’d been on the way to doing the same.
“It’s so ugly,” Bliss said hoarsely.
“It’s over, sugar,” Rory said, kissing her hair.
“But why would anyone paint such a cruel image?” she asked.
“Ask your father,” Savoy said. “He collects the damn things.”
Bliss looked shocked. “What are you talking about?”
“The family’s private collection,” Savoy said. “We have a lot of death paintings by this artist.”
“You bet we do,” Ward said. “And that collection is the best proof of all that your mother wasn’t murdered.”
Bliss turned toward him. “I don’t understand.”
“Simple,” Ward said. “Your mother died nine years ago. The artist who painted the drowning woman has been dead for almost fifty years.”
Pasadena
Late Sunday afternoon
55
Lacey looked up from the stack of old photo albums. There were pictures of Grandpa Rainbow’s wedding and the baby boy who grew up to be her f
ather. She’d seen the first five or six Christmases and birthdays, and then the album photos gave way to people that Brody identified as his maternal grandparents or distant cousins. The rest of the stacked albums featured Dottie’s family and, after he moved in with his son, an older David Quinn.
Set to one side was a huge envelope of faded, brittle newspaper and magazine clippings going back fifty years or more. Each clipping dealt with the scandals and sorrows of the Savoy and Forrest families. None of the clippings pictured or mentioned anyone called David Quinn.
Quietly Lacey flipped the last page of the only album that had pictures of David Quinn. “Didn’t he have any photos of his own childhood and parents, like Mom’s parents did?”
Brody frowned. “I never thought about it, but…no.”
“Where was he born?” Ian asked.
“Weed.”
Ian didn’t even blink. “Northern California?”
Brody smiled. “Yes. Didn’t think you’d know it.”
“I’m a Central Valley boy. Did he travel a lot as a young man?”
There was a long pause while Brody searched his memories. “If he did, he didn’t talk about it. Just California. He often said, ‘Why go anywhere else? It’s all here, all the landscapes anyone needs.’”
“Did he ever talk about college?” Ian asked.
Brody shook his head.
Ian looked at Lacey.
“Not to me,” she said, “except to say it was a waste of time for anyone with talent.”
Dottie made a sound like a terrier sinking its teeth into a rat’s neck. Some of their worst battles had been over Lacey’s schooling.
“He had the typical contempt of the undereducated for higher education,” Brody said evenly. “To my knowledge, he never went beyond high school.”
“How about high school yearbooks, or even earlier school photos?” Ian asked.
Brody shook his head. “I have some of my mother’s, if that would help.”
“Only if they went to the same schools,” Ian said. “Did they?”
“No. They didn’t meet until he was forty.”
Lacey gave Ian an unhappy look, wondering if he was thinking what she was thinking. She didn’t ask. Her parents were upset enough as it was.
“So the oldest photo you have of your father,” Ian said to Brody, “is his wedding?”
Brody looked at his wife, who was the official keeper of the family history. She nodded.
“Okay,” Ian said. “Would you mind if I borrowed some pictures of him long enough to scan them into my computer?”
“Why?” Dottie asked bluntly.
“Lacey’s going to give me a list of plein air galleries that her grandfather might have visited,” Ian said. “Then I’m going to take a drive and see if any of them recognize his photos,” after I doctor them a bit, “or his paintings.”
Dottie looked at Ian’s computer. “I have a scanner, but it would be faster to use my computer setup and simply print out the photos here.”
“You can do that?” Ian asked.
“Yes.”
Lacey took a deep breath. “Do you still have that personal-style program?”
Her mother turned hopefully. “Of course. I’ll just take a photo of you and—”
“No, not me. Granddad.”
Ian gave her a startled look, then a slow, approving smile. Without a word he went back to creaming the family photos for the clearest ones of David Quinn.
“Why?” Brody asked his daughter.
“Because he might have looked different in his other life,” Lacey said, and waited for the explosion. She didn’t have to wait long.
“Other life!” Brody and Dottie said simultaneously. “What are you talking about?” Brody demanded.
“The life your father lived before he married SaraBeth Courtney,” Ian said without looking up from the albums.
“Just because he doesn’t have pictures of his childhood doesn’t mean he led some sort of double life,” Brody said. “He wasn’t a sentimental man. He could have just thrown the pictures away.”
“There are other things,” Lacey said reluctantly.
“Such as?” Brody challenged.
“Such as,” Ian said, “the fact that there’s no official record of anyone called David No-Middle-Name Quinn before the marriage certificate he signed when he married SaraBeth Courtney. No driver’s license in California, no birth certificate, no voting record, no property, no taxes, nothing.”
Brody opened his mouth. Then he closed it and pinched the bridge of his nose. It didn’t take a lawyer to figure out the most likely reason a man might take the trouble to switch to a new identity.
“So you think he was a felon,” Brody said.
“I think we need to know who and what he was before he became David Quinn,” Ian said carefully.
Brody grunted. “How many reasons can you think of for changing your identity?”
“Quite a few.”
“Any of them legal?” Brody retorted.
“One or two.”
His face paled except for twin slashes of red over his cheekbones. “You really think he was a murderer?”
Ian spoke before Lacey could. “I really don’t know. It could have been some scam related to art that caused him to change his name. Did your father always paint, or was that new along with his new life?”
“He painted,” Dottie said, frowning. “I can’t remember why, but I’m sure of it.”
“Even before he was David Quinn?” Ian asked.
Dottie looked at Brody.
“Yes…” he said slowly.
“You sure?” Ian asked.
“One of my earliest memories is of him saying variations on the theme of ‘When I was your age, I could paint trees that looked like trees. A chicken could crap a better painting than this. What’s wrong with you? Didn’t you get any of me except a pecker?’”
“Wretched, wretched creature,” Dottie muttered under her breath.
Brody shrugged. “I got used to it after a while. The point is that my father always painted.”
“Landscapes?” Ian asked.
“As far as I know.”
“What about fires?” Lacey asked. “Did you ever see him paint them?”
Brody gave his daughter a puzzled look. “Fires? Like fireplaces or campfires or candles?”
“Like burning cars or houses,” she said.
“Not that I remember. But keep in mind that you knew the artistic part of my father better than anyone else. After I was eight, he gave up on me. He never painted around me and never let me be around him when he painted. He never showed me his paintings. Never showed my mother. He completely locked us out of that part of his life.”
“The biggest part,” Lacey said, finally understanding why her father found the whole subject of art distasteful.
“You were the only one,” Brody said simply. “He took one look at the painting you did of the Christmas tree when you were three years old and fell in love. He let you into places and showed you pieces of himself that he didn’t share with anyone else.”
“Not all of it, apparently,” Ian said. Thank God. “Mrs. Quinn, I’ll take you up on the offer of your scanner.”
“Call me Dottie,” she said. Then added casually, “Everyone else in the family does.”
Lacey groaned. “Mom.”
Ian gave Lacey a quick, one-arm hug. “Bet your mother plans a mean wedding.”
“I sure do,” Dottie said. “And you’re about to see how I do it.” She took the photos from his hand, picked up her computer, and headed for her office, talking all the way. “First I photograph all the important participants and scan them into the style program. Then I decide clothing, hair, makeup, and shoe styles based on body type and coloring.”
“Yeah?” Ian asked intriguede picked up the fat envelope of clippings and followed her. “Sounds like a program I once used to predict how people would look younger or older or with different noses, ears, hair, teeth, that sort
of thing.”
“My program will do that. It’s a big hit when our hospital volunteers work with the antismoking clinic, showing people how smoking accelerates the aging process.” Dottie gave him a lookover her shoulder that reminded Ian of Lacey. “Should I ask what you were doing with the program?”
Die in Plain Sight Page 33
