Darlene Franklin - Dressed for Death 03 - Paint Me a Murder

by Darlene Franklin

  He had brought two extra masks, so he must have expected Jenna’s presence. Where was the fourth member of our party? No doubt she’d arrive any second, camera in hand to record our efforts for the Herald.

  “And I brought these.” Jenna flourished a couple pairs of black rubber boots. “They should fit you, Cici. Sorry, Audie, you’ll have to make do.”

  Shame on me. The supposed fearless leader of our team, I hadn’t thought about either precaution. I dangled my legs out the side of the car and let Audie tug the boots over my swollen feet. My comfortable slip-ons, they were not.

  The sky had darkened from yesterday’s sunshine to overcast and cloudy, an appropriate backdrop for the task ahead. Maybe the morning mist would prevent the ashes from stirring quite so much. Junior didn’t waste any time informing me that he didn’t appreciate all this bending and stooping. He sent a rippling wave across my abdomen and I grunted.

  Audie ran to my side. His expression would have made me laugh if I wasn’t so uncomfortable. “Cici?” He gave my name an entire world of meaning.

  “I’m okay.” Well, as okay as a woman in her last trimester of pregnancy was ever going to be. I bent over again and Junior immediately protested. “Maybe I will sit down for a minute.”

  I took a seat in the car, and Junior settled down. “So you just want to avoid work, is that it, fella?” Audie and Jenna continued poking and prodding in no clear pattern. I wrestled with finding a better approach to the problem. We hoped some remnant of old Larry’s journal had survived the conflagration. The question was, where had Brad kept his great-grandpa’s diary? Was there any chance it had survived? Think, Cici, think.

  When Brad had a question, he brought a copy of a journal page with him, never showing me the original volume. On a few occasions, I had come to the studio. I squeezed my eyes shut to remember what I had seen. He kept his supplies neat. That had surprised me. I guess I expected an artist to be disorganized—the whole right brain/left brain thing. He had tacked four panels of art paper to the wall, creating a four-by-six foot surface, a scale version of the mural. Details had been added and enlarged from the original, smaller proposal, incorporating scenes we had discussed. He had an uncanny ability to make pictures come to life. When I saw Bob Grace’s mad dash for the Gulch on his faithful horse Patches, I could almost hear hoof beats on the hard-packed earth and smell the dirt stirring in the air.

  I knew the scale version of the mural was gone without looking a second time. To my purely amateur eye, I would guess that the fire might have started there.

  Where was Brad? That question bugged me the most. He took a father’s pride in his creation; he wouldn’t treat its destruction lightly. He should have been here, mourning the loss. Except he wasn’t. Five days had passed since the studio, and the mural with it, had gone up in smoke, and no one had caught sight of the artist.

  I wiggled in my seat. Flight screamed guilt. No wonder the police wanted to talk with him. But I had given my sisters my word that I would seek out the truth. I prayed it wouldn’t lead straight to Brad’s—uh, missing—door.

  Jenna’s occasional murmurs and Audie’s louder comments let me know their search hadn’t produced anything.

  If Brad wasn’t the murderer, then where was he? Had something happened to him? Had he been threatened by someone else and gone into hiding for safety?

  That line of thinking wouldn’t help me find the journal. Concentrate. What else did you notice in the studio? What else had I seen besides the mural in progress? A sketchbook with small vignettes of Black Hawk, fighting against the removal of the Sac-Fox Nation from their original homeland in Wisconsin; Maisie Mallory working her claim in her bloomers; even my great-grandfather, Wallace Wilde, returning home from the First World War. I yanked my mind away from those memories as irrelevant to the journal. I lifted my inner eye to the space above his work table. Bookshelves. He had assembled a wide variety of volumes about the flora and fauna of our part of Oklahoma, as well as other research documents. Had I spotted a worn leather volume without a title among those books? Yes, I thought I had. Bingo.

  I opened my eyes. Even better, that part of the wall had received the least damage. I could see book-sized shapes along the wall. I scrambled to my feet and trudged around the perimeter to the remaining shelves. Careful, I warned myself. Water could well have finished what fire hadn’t destroyed.

  “Glad you decided to rejoin the work force.” Jenna’s white teeth gleamed in her soot-streaked face. Smile or grimace? I wasn’t sure until a tear slid down her cheek and made the mess worse.

  “Oh, Jenna.” I didn’t dare put my arms around her given the current state of our apparel.

  She rubbed at the offending tear with her hand, creating a dark spot by her eye. “Seeing it up close like this makes it more real. And it brings it all back. For years just the smell of turpentine or fresh paint reminded me of Brad. I thought I had gotten over all that.” She sniffed.

  Now I remembered why I hadn’t wanted Jenna along this morning. She hadn’t been there when Penn Hardy was shot or when we discovered Vic Spencer’s body in my store. I knew that seeing it made the truth all too real. I couldn’t imagine the impact when you cared about the victim.

  “Then after all these years, our paths crossed again.” Jenna’s eyes turned the smoky brown of singed wood. “Except I made a point of staying as far away from Brad as possible. And now I may never see him again.”

  Of all the words have ever been, the saddest were what might have been. Wasn’t that a famous quote? I shook it off. Jenna needed a pep talk.

  “You can’t think that way.” I found myself imitating Gilda’s best no-nonsense voice. “I’m sure he’ll show up and all this will be cleared away in no time. That’s why we’re here. And I have an idea.” I reached for the first book on the shelf—too tall and wide to be the journal—and the corner broke off in my hand. “Oops.” Junior got in the way when I attempted to lean closer.

  “What are you looking for?” Audie, taller than I was and without a baby in the way, extracted the book easily. “Flora and Fauna of North Central Oklahoma? What does that have to do with anything?”

  “Not that one. But I think the journal was on that shelf. It might have survived the fire.”

  “Of course!”

  “Wait a sec.” Jenna trudged over to where we stood. Her eyes had returned to their normal bright hazel color. She pulled a box of large baggies from her jacket pocket. “I thought these might come in handy.”

  “Have you found something?” A familiar voice asked. Dina had at last shown up, camera in hand.

  “Not yet.” I explained what we were looking for.

  Dina snapped pictures as Audie pulled out three more books. On the fifth try, brown leather appeared beneath the ash. “Careful.” I held my breath.

  A single page had fallen out of the binding. Jenna took the sheet between gloved fingers and dropped it into a baggie. Dina adjusted the camera to take a picture through the plastic without creating a gleam.

  I slipped a finger into the journal but stopped when I felt the pages ripping apart. “The pages need to dry out before we do anything further with it.” Foiled for the day.

  “I’ll work on that.” Jenna studied the soggy journal before placing it in another baggie. “It’s not too bad, shouldn’t take much more than a day or two to fix.” We turned our attention to what we had.

  “Why don’t we go to my office?” Jenna cocked her head in the direction of the nearby Center for the Arts. “We can examine it there.”

  As we walked across the street, I took in the aspects of the mural Brad had already completed. The ribbon of Route 66 streamed from the lower left to the upper right. The famous highway didn’t actually pass through Grace Gulch but it had affected our history. To the left, he had begun painting the Gulch as it appeared before settlement: lush, green, grassland nestled between two hills. The rest of the mural remained blank.

  Once inside, the four of us crowded around Jenna’s
drafting table. The powerful lights didn’t improve the legibility of the single page that had fallen out. One corner was singed, and water streaked through Black Sheep Larry’s already loopy handwriting.

  One remarkably clear word jumped out. The others noticed it the same time I did. Riches.

  Jenna leaned in first. “Ooh, he’s talking about treasure.”

  Dina pressed in beside her. “Piecrust?” She scrunched her face. “No, wait. That’s an ‘r,’ not an ‘i.’ Precust. . .”

  “There’s no ‘t’. Precious, maybe?” I suggested. I squinted at the words sideways. Junior kept me from approaching too closely. “But that doesn’t make much sense either. Not the word you expect a robber to use to describe the loot.”

  “Let’s keep our minds open,” Audie reminded us. “It looks like ‘precious’ to me too.”

  I itched to turn the page so I could see it better. “But what comes after ‘precious’? Uncle?” The letters looked like “u-n-c-l.” Maybe he couldn’t spell.

  “And, I think.” As soon as Audie mentioned the common word, I could see it. “The word that comes next has me stumped, though.”

  Jenna studied it. “F-l-i-u-r-u-s-h. Flourish? Flourishing might make sense, precious and flourishing riches, but. . .”

  “There’s no ‘ing.’ It looks like jelly tarts to me.” Dina grinned. “At least they’d go with the piecrust.”

  “That first letter.” I took a pen in hand and practiced consonants with loops below the line—f, g, j, p, q, z. “My guess is another ‘p.’ It’s like the first letter of precious.”

  “Mm, you’re right.” Jenna slipped into her curator voice. “And if we compare letters, we have a p, an e and an s.”

  “Make that pl.” Audie suggested “Ple. . .”

  “Pleasant!” My mind made the leap.

  “‘Precious and pleasant riches.’” I could almost hear quote marks in Dina’s voice.

  “Buried treasure.” Jenna and I spoke at the same time.

  12

  Magda Grace inherited the family penchant for the arts. After high school, she spread her wings in Chicago’s theater community. That led to heartache for the young woman, as she was seduced and gave birth to a child out of wedlock. Magda returned to Grace Gulch and married Matthew Mallory. The couple had one son, Gene.

  Over the years Magda Grace Mallory poured herself and her considerable resources into the arts. She refurbished the Orpheum that Mary Grace had built and renamed it the Magda Grace Mallory Theater, affectionately called the MGM. She also contributed widely to the musical education of the town’s youngsters and as her final bequest, planned for the Grace Gulch Center for the Arts.

  In the last years of Magda’s life, she was reunited with her long-lost child when her daughter, Suzanne Jay, accepted a position with the MGM.

  From A History of Grace Gulch

  Saturday, September 16

  “Do you think Brad accepted the mural commission because of the old robbery?” I mused out loud. “He could quote sentence and paragraph from that journal. Maybe he thought it held clues that would lead to the lost treasure.”

  “No,” Jenna and Audie said together. He gestured as if to say “you first.”

  “He talked to me about old Larry, back when we. . .you know.” She glanced aside for a moment. “A different version of the legend passed down on his side of the family. His great-grandmother never talked about it much, just insisted that Larry had done the right thing. If there ever was any treasure, they never saw a penny of it.”

  “All the more reason why he might want to find it.” I argued.

  “Even if he did, it wasn’t for personal reasons,” Audie insisted. “More than once, Brad told me he came to Grace Gulch to make restitution. And maybe to restore old Larry’s reputation. I know fanaticism when I see it—plenty of star-crossed actors qualify—and I can tell you, Brad wasn’t after gold.”

  “I hope that’s true.” Dina looked wistful.

  That’s right. The truth struck me. Since Brad was Dina’s father, she had descended from Larry Grace. His story was her story.

  “Do we need to tell the police what we found this morning?” Dina made more of an effort to do things “by the book” since she had become an official reporter. She said it helped keep the lines of communication open, not to mention it kept her out of trouble.

  “I don’t see why.” I shrugged. “There’s no indication that this treasure has anything to do with the fire or Finella’s death or Brad’s disappearance. We’re working on a hunch. If we find out anything concrete in the rest of the journal, we can let them know then.”

  “How long do you think it will be before we can view the rest of the journal?” Dina’s mind had followed a different track. We all turned our eyes on Jenna.

  “I won’t know until I examine the journal more closely. Monday, maybe Tuesday.”

  Jenna had already told us as much. Dina was fishing for something. “What do you have in mind?”

  “Nothing like buried treasure to snag the public’s attention.” Dina trusted her journalistic instincts. “Someone out there must know more than they’re letting on. If the Herald prints a story about buried treasure with an offer of a reward, maybe we’ll learn something useful.”

  “Now, wait a minute, I don’t want you bringing all of Grace Gulch into this.” Jenna switched into mother-mode.

  I could have told Jenna not to take that tactic with Dina. Like Paul in the seventh chapter of Romans, the more you told her not to do something, the more determined she became to try it. Forget Paul. She resembled her mother in that regard.

  “Well, why not? We need information. Tales of buried treasure and murder will pique the public’s interest.”

  “What kind of reward do you want to offer?” I inserted a bit of humor. “A share in the treasure?”

  “Another lifetime membership to the Center for the Arts?” Jenna chuckled.

  “Nothing big. But I’ve been saving up money for a car. I can sacrifice it for a reward,” Dina said.

  She’s serious.

  “In any case, I’m going to report what we found today. It’s news. So why not get something out of it?”

  Audie cleared his throat. “May I make one small suggestion?”

  We all looked at him, as if we had forgotten his presence in the room. Once the three of us wound up, we tended to shut out everything else.

  “Make the reward anonymous. Have the calls routed to a mail box at the newspaper, that kind of thing. No need to invite trouble.”

  We agreed to his suggestion.

  “I’ve just made myself a lot of work, haven’t I?” Dina knew every citizen in Grace Gulch would offer their opinion. None of us proposed a better idea. So she rushed off to the Herald office to write the story and advertise the reward in time for the Sunday edition.

  My mind still circulated theories on what treasure Larry meant when I made it to the store. Gilda had everything under control. Too bad her vintage look—her only look—seemed stuck in the ‘70s with polyester pantsuits.

  “How’s it been?” I flipped through the receipts Gilda had parked by the cash register. I noticed she had brought a pan of egg and sausage casserole—still nearly full. Oh, well. On Saturdays I always bought frosted sugar cookies from Jessie for any children who stopped by. At least Gilda was trying.

  A piece of paper stuck out from the edge of the pan and I moved it. I wouldn’t have read it except my eyes fell on the word “beer.” Liquor as the first item on a shopping list? Some Christians drank alcohol upon occasion, but both Audie and I were teetotalers. Gilda had struck me the same way. I could just imagine Pastor Waldberg’s reaction if he learned we had “demon rum” in our house.

  “Oh, don’t worry about that.” Gilda plucked the paper out of my hand. “I need to buy things for tomorrow’s family dinner.”

  “Sounds good.” I managed a weak smile. Gilda’s cooking would be the death of me one way or the other, between clogging my arteries and
ruining my reputation.

  Saturday raced by, and on Sunday morning I grabbed the Herald first. The editor gave Dina’s story a few inches on the front page above a photo of the page with spidery handwriting. The editor must have approved of the sidebar about the reward. She gave two inches to an announcement stating, “Anyone knowing anything about Brad Merriman’s disappearance … please contact …” Dina had taken Audie’s advice and kept the contact information neutral. But people would guess.

  What would the police think about the public request for information? They might not care. Brad’s disappearance wasn’t a crime, unless he murdered Finella. If we learned anything connected to the arson or murder, we’d tell them about it.

  Our entire congregation buzzed about the buried treasure story. The song leader had to start the first hymn twice before we settled down. Either God had given Pastor Waldberg a special revelation about our discovery, or he changed his message at the last minute. He invited us to turn to 1 Timothy 6, about “the love of money” being “a root of all kinds of evil,” and how true contentment comes from godliness, not worldly wealth. He preached in his typical fiery style, oratory designed to make you sell everything you owned and head to the mission field.

  He fell flat today, however. As soon as the last amen thundered from the pulpit, people surrounded me, asking questions about the journal and the mention of treasure. The same thing happened to Jenna and to Dina.

  Speaking of Dina, my sister had returned to her crazy-hair-color ways, coloring her hair neon blue throughout. She was taking Brad’s disappearance too much to heart. But how could I blame her? I couldn’t fathom being in her shoes.

  The questions repeated themselves. Was it true that we had found Larry Grace’s journal at the studio? Yes. Did it really mention the loot from the bank robbery? I repeated the quote several times, to no avail. Treasure fever had seized our friends.