A Fit of Tempera

by Mary Daheim

  There was also the hostility which had arisen between the Mortons and the Dixons. Kennedy Morton told Dewitt Dixon that if he and his fancy-pants wife hadn’t left their keys in the car, the youngsters wouldn’t have been tempted to go for a spin. Erica Dixon shrieked at Carrie Mae Morton that her passel of brats had no respect for other people’s property and were damned near as dumb as their parents. Meanwhile, the would-be auto thieves had crawled out of the Mercedes and were playing in the middle of the highway. Nella Lablatt hurried from her yard, where she had been weeding, and shooed the foursome back to their own property just as a school bus lumbered along and chugged to a stop to discharge more Mortons.

  Iris Takisaki had also joined the group, which was turning into a crowd. “What happened?” she asked, looking startled.

  The cousins explained. Iris stared at the Dixons, who were still engaged in verbal combat with the Mortons. Erica’s piping voice had risen to a squeak; Carrie Mae was growing hoarse. Iris marched up to Dewitt, who was nose to nose with Kennedy Morton.

  “Hold it!” she cried, wedging herself between the two men. “Dewitt, open that trunk!”

  Shocked, Dewitt took three steps backward. “What are you talking about? Our car is ruined! We’ll have to get a tow truck!”

  But Iris didn’t budge. “The side of the car may be damaged, yes, but you can still open the trunk. Do it, or I’ll call the sheriff instead of AAA.”

  Again Dewitt refused. Iris’s diversion had created a calming effect on the others. Erica watched her husband curiously; Carrie Mae hugged some of her children; Kennedy Morton stalked off toward the filling station, where a black Corvette had just pulled in; the other Morton offspring were dancing around the Mercedes.

  Iris proved to be just as stubborn as Dewitt. Finally, it was Erica who gave in. She opened the driver’s side of the Mercedes and removed the keys from the ignition. But Iris was wrong: The trunk had been jammed by the accident.

  “Have you got a crowbar?” Iris shouted the question at Kennedy Morton, but he either didn’t hear her or chose to ignore the request. Instead, he fawned over the Corvette and its owner, a suntanned young man who looked as if he’d just come in from the beach at Malibu.

  Iris whirled on Dewitt. “You say you haven’t received a painting from Clive! I say otherwise! I don’t know how you got it, but you did! Don’t you dare threaten me! I’ll countersue for defamation of character!”

  Angrily, Iris started back across the road. Nella trotted after her. Carrie Mae had a parting shot:

  “I got an axe, Iris, honey! It’s the one I use on the chickens when I get tired of wringing their necks.”

  But Iris paid no heed. With Nella at her side, she disappeared among the young cottonwoods that lined the other side of the highway.

  All seven Morton children went to the shoulder of the road, standing a few feet from the battered car, which lay in the ditch like a beached whale. “Sweet-Stix!” they cried. “Sweet-Stix! Give us Sweet-Stix now!”

  “I’ll give them something,” Renie muttered while Dewitt called from the phone booth for a tow truck and Erica extracted insurance information from Carrie Mae. “And I thought raising three kids was a pain in the backside!”

  Judith, however, wasn’t in the mood to discuss child-rearing. “Do you think Iris wanted to see if the painting Riley gave me was in the Dixons’ trunk?” she murmured.

  Renie shrugged. “Could be. But we know better. I think.”

  “Right,” Judith replied, still in a low voice. “At least we know where Lark’s version is. But Riley’s canvas could be in the trunk.”

  Renie gave Judith a curious look. “Wouldn’t Erica have seen it?”

  “I don’t know.” Judith spoke out of the side of her mouth as Erica approached the cousins. “I’m wondering if he’s got anything in there—and that’s why he wouldn’t open the trunk.”

  Still puzzled, Renie couldn’t press Judith further: Erica Dixon was upon them, flushed with anger, blond hair disheveled.

  “Now we couldn’t leave this horrible place if we wanted to,” she said with regret. “Dewitt felt we should wait until after the funeral, but I said it was pointless. What’s so hard about an hour’s ride from town to Glacier Falls?” She snorted and stared at the disabled Mercedes. “Well, he got his way. Now we’re stuck.”

  “It’s not exactly Dewitt’s fault that the Morton kids wrecked your car,” Judith pointed out in a reasonable tone.

  With a heavy sigh, Erica brushed at her unruly hair and resettled her sunglasses on her thin nose. “It was his keys they stole. The little wretches took them right out of our room. They’ve been in and out of there like so many mice. I did not leave my keys in the car.” She glared at Dewitt, who had bolted from the phone booth and was looking frazzled. “Excuse me, I have to call my lawyer.”

  “You’re suing the Mortons?” Judith was surprised, though she realized she shouldn’t be. It seemed to her that rich people rarely had any compunction about wringing money from poor people.

  But Erica’s thin eyebrows shot up. “The Mortons? What for? They do have insurance—they have to, they’re in business. I told you, I’m suing Clive Silvanus. The man’s a crook.” She dashed into the phone booth and shut the door.

  Dewitt Dixon, however, had other ideas. He had come charging back across the grass to the driveway, where he began shouting at his wife. “Stop that, Erica! You don’t know what you’re doing! You’re going to cause serious problems!”

  But Erica ignored him. Judith and Renie watched while Dewitt Dixon’s usual aplomb disintegrated. Erica, whose temper was already frayed, pounded on the telephone. It was obvious that she was having trouble making a connection. The Morton children wandered back from the road, looking as if they were plotting their next round of mischief.

  “Your car’s busted,” Thor announced to Dewitt Dixon. “You got another one?”

  Glaring at the youngsters, Dewitt turned on his heel and started back toward the rental unit. But his annoyance was exceeded by his distress. He wheeled around, then strode purposefully back to the phone booth. Erica was yanking on the receiver and swearing a blue streak.

  “Erica! Wait!” Dewitt wasn’t giving up.

  Neither was Erica. She gave the booth a swift kick, then must have gotten a dial tone. She had also put ideas into the Mortons’ curly red heads. They rushed the booth, practically knocking Dewitt over. Surrounding the glass and wooden structure, they, too, kicked, screamed, and pounded. Erica Dixon erupted from the booth, fists and hair flying.

  “You little monsters!” she raged. “Go away! Leave me alone! Stop that!”

  Dewitt started pulling Mortons off his wife. Or perhaps he was hauling Erica away from her attackers. The cousins found it hard to tell, but decided to intervene before somebody actually got hurt.

  Judith got hold of Giles and Velvet; Renie wrestled Skye and Rafe to the ground. The Dixons finally subdued Shanna, Thor and Jade just as Carrie Mae came back out of the Morton living quarters with a howling little Fabio in her arms.

  “Now you’ve done it!” Carrie Mae exclaimed angrily. “You woke up Fabio! We’ve got a right to throw you out of here for disturbing the peace!”

  Giles was trying to bite Judith’s arm. Velvet, however, had decided to cuddle. She wrapped herself around Judith’s knees and began to hum.

  Another argument ensued. Kennedy Morton was nowhere to be seen, and Judith didn’t much blame him. She thought it best to escape. Letting go of Giles, who was still gnawing away, she tried to loosen Velvet’s grip. But Velvet had taken a fancy to Judith.

  “I like you,” she cooed. “You’re nice.” Velvet tossed her head in Erica’s direction. “She’s mean. She won’t give us candy. If you give us some, we’ll like you even better. We treat people who give us candy real nice.”

  “Sorry, Velvet, I don’t have any,” Judith said, wincing at Giles’s persistent tooth attack. “Can you get this vampire off me?”

  Velvet giggled, but to Judith’s r
elief, managed to pry Giles loose. Renie, meanwhile, was sitting on Skye’s and Rafe’s legs.

  “Can we go now?” she asked plaintively.

  Putting the renewed brawl behind them, the cousins fled across the highway. Renie didn’t bother to ask why Judith headed not for the privacy of their own driveway, but up the road, toward the Green Mountain Inn. She did, however, have another question for Judith:

  “What was that crack you made about Dewitt’s trunk being empty?”

  “I was referring to luggage,” Judith replied as a county truck filled with sand lumbered past, “as in what Erica brought back from Europe. If she went in the first place.”

  Renie kicked at a pebble on the shoulder of the road. “Oh, that. You’re really hung up on Erica’s travel itinerary, aren’t you? I wish you’d just call Joe and be done with it.”

  Judith shook her head. “I don’t want to pester him. It’s after three o’clock, and he probably couldn’t get the information out of INS until tomorrow anyway. Besides, if Nella used a phony passport, the records would show that Erica did indeed go abroad. So what’s the point?”

  “There isn’t any, as far as I’m concerned,” Renie muttered. “Erica has no real motive. Nobody saw her the day Riley died, and with half the neighborhood running in and out of his studio, that seems odd.”

  “She might have been the prowler Iris saw,” Judith pointed out, raising her voice to be heard over a trio of motorcyclists. “Murderers are often risk-takers.”

  “So why are we going to talk to Clive Silvanus?” Renie stopped shouting as the cyclists slowed and turned in to the Green Mountain Inn. “Or am I assuming wrong about our stroll?”

  “Your assumption is correct,” Judith responded primly.

  At the front of the inn, the owner and operator was working under the hood of an out-of-state car. It took Gary Johanson a moment to focus on the cousins. Meanwhile, the bikers had already gone inside. The only other vehicle parked in the small lot was a black Infiniti. Judith hadn’t noticed it before, and wondered if it belonged to Clive.

  “That’s right,” Gary Johanson said, wiping his hands on a dirty rag. An angular man of forty, Gary had thinning brown hair and keen brown eyes. “Mr. Silvanus has been keeping it out back. We try to reserve the front for the restaurant and the grocery. I keep the cars I’m tinkering on over by the shed.”

  “He’s here, then,” said Judith.

  But Gary shook his head. “No, he went for a walk up to see Our Lady of the Stumps. He left about ten minutes ago. I guess he needed to cool down after that squabble he had with that guy from down the road. You want to wait? Dee’s got cherry pie this afternoon.”

  Judith’s ears had pricked up at the mention of a squabble. “Who do you mean? Dewitt Dixon?”

  Gary shook his head. “I don’t know the guy’s name, just that he’s staying at the Woodchuck. He was here yesterday, too, having breakfast with Mr. Silvanus. Kind of smooth, or what do you call it? Suave?”

  “That’s Dewitt all over,” Judith murmured, though he’d been neither smooth nor suave during the latest debacle with the Mortons. “What were Dewitt and Clive fighting about?”

  Gary didn’t know. “It was more of an argument, out back.” He nodded toward the shed. “Dee was busting her brains, trying to think up an excuse to eavesdrop, but I told her to knock it off. How come women always have to know everything?” Gary seemed genuinely perplexed by the idea. “Now what about that pie?”

  The cousins debated briefly, then decided to make the short hike up to Our Lady of the Stumps in the hope of meeting Clive along the way. It had been a long time since they’d viewed the wood carving in the huge, burned-out cedar snag. Hansel Gruber had been part of the local art scene early in his career as a wood-carver, and Our Lady had been one of his first so-called “natural” works. In those days, Gruber had carved for carving’s sake, creating beauty out of trees, logs, and stumps wherever he found an appealing setting. In their youth, Judith and Renie had made several pilgrimages with their fathers to Our Lady of the Stumps. On the last trek, some thirty years earlier, they had all sat down on a log to admire the carving and discovered they were keeping company with a five-foot garter snake. Much to the amusement of Donald and Cliff Grover, the cousins had run shrieking and screaming all the way back to the highway.

  The Jimmy-Jump-Off Creek Road was a dirt track that took off just before a small bridge about fifty yards up from the Green Mountain Inn. It rose steadily through thick stands of ferns, vine maples, and devil’s club for almost a quarter of a mile. Then it branched off: On the left stood the ruins of a sawmill, and across a meadow, an ancient cabin that had been converted into a rambling, ramshackle house; to the right, the road narrowed down to a trail that led to the wood carving.

  At the fork, Renie nodded in the direction of the dilapidated house. Smoke trickled out of a tin chimney, but otherwise, there was no sign of life. “Hippies in mid-life crisis?” she asked.

  “Maybe,” Judith answered. “I wonder how much stuff they have in there that belongs to us.”

  The trail continued to rise, though the grade was easy. The greenery thickened, with large clumps of salmonberry, thimbleberry, and blackberry bushes. A stand of second-growth timber grew tall, blocking out the sun. The cousins could hear birds and unidentifiable forest animals chattering among the branches. The sound of the creek was distant, spilling down the mountainside out of sight. Judith and Renie walked for half a mile, but with no sign of Clive Silvanus.

  “Communing with Art or Nature doesn’t strike me as Clive’s style,” Judith noted. “You don’t suppose he plans on trying to get Hansel Gruber as a client, do you?”

  “He’ll have some problems,” Renie replied. “Gruber’s been dead for at least five years.”

  A simple sign made of cedar with the words “Our Lady of the Stumps” burned into it pointed the way to the carving. The remnant of the once-great tree stood some twenty feet off the main trail, in a grottolike setting among the new growth. The old-timers told how the cedar had been struck by lightning on the eve of the loggers’ first foray into the forest at Jimmy-Jump-Off Creek. The gods were angry, they liked to say, and sent the storm as a warning. Undaunted, the sawmill owner clear-cut the rest of the stand, but left the charred giant in peace. Years later, Hansel Gruber created his own memorial to the forest in the jagged, twenty-foot snag.

  Our Lady was larger than life, shown from the hip with the Babe at her breast, and one arm thrust over her head. Her facial features were crude yet poignant. The veil seemed to float around her, as if caught on a gentle wind. As ever, the cousins were awed.

  Renie was the first to break the silence. “You know how you remember most things as bigger than they really were. That’s not true with this carving. It’s even more overpowering now than it was when we were kids.”

  Judith agreed. They wandered around the stump, taking in the wood sculpture from different angles. Judith also cast her glance among the trees. She could see no sign of Clive Silvanus.

  “We couldn’t have missed him,” she said, trying in vain to make out fresh footprints in the ground by the cedar stump.

  “He must have changed his mind,” Renie said. “Maybe he walked up to the ranger station. It’s not that far.”

  “True.” After a final perusal and a silent prayer, the cousins started back to the main trail.

  “Gruber did the columns in the lobby of the First Northwest Bank Building downtown,” Renie noted. “They’re sort of like a totem pole, but less rigid artistically.”

  “I know. I’ve been there.” Judith pulled a face. “They were the ones who foreclosed on our first house. It’s too bad Gruber didn’t carve a picture of Dan putting the mortgage money on a ninety-to-one long shot at the track.”

  “There’s a Buddha about halfway up the one column,” Renie remarked. “He looks a lot like Dan when he sat around in his underwear, eating Ding-Dongs and watching the demolition derby.”

  “What underwear?” J
udith replied, then stopped at the fork in the road. Across the meadow by the sprawling shack, she could see three people; one of them resembled Clive Silvanus.

  Renie followed her cousin’s gaze. “Well. Do you suppose one of the hippies is an artist in residence?”

  The cousins pulled back just enough to avoid the trio’s direct line of sight. They waited in silence for several minutes before Clive started across the meadow. Shielding her eyes from the sun, Judith peered more closely at the grasses, which she recalled as once being crisscrossed by deer runs. Only a single trail remained, yet the meadow was curiously flat in the middle. Judith frowned as the hippies went back inside the house. Clive was whistling when he hit the road. He jumped when the cousins popped out from behind a stand of sword ferns.

  “My! You startled me! The woods are alive with the sound of city dwellers!” Clive had his beige sport coat slung over his shoulder. “You out enjoyin’ the fine spring weather?”

  Judith smiled thinly. “Yes, we are. And you?” She nodded at the hippie establishment. “I take it you’re getting reacquainted with the counterculture of the past?”

  Briefly, Clive looked unsettled. Then he beamed at the cousins. “Ah once considered becomin’ a hippie mahself. But mah daddy wouldn’t hear of such a thing, so Ah decided on bein’ a preacher instead. But that didn’t work out, so Ah got a job fetchin’ and haulin’ for the local art museum. One thing led to another, as they say, and here Ah am.” He looked very pleased with himself.

  The diversion in conversational tactics cut no ice with Judith. “So what did the hippies tell you? That they didn’t take ‘Spring River’?”

  Something flashed in Clive’s eyes even as his round face fell. “That’s what they say. What do you think?”

  Judith shrugged. “They may be right. Iris seems to think the Dixons have it.”

  Clive began to walk down the road. The cousins fell in step beside him. “Iris is wrong. She’s a smart lady, mind you, but this time Ah do believe grief has unsettled her brain. If Dewitt had that painting, his Little Woman wouldn’t be actin’ like a bear in a buzz saw.”