Topaz Dreams

by Patricia Rice

  “Along with all the cobwebs and spiders,” Teddy added cheerfully.

  “Have you tested that stuff yet?” Kurt demanded. He didn’t want to consider that he and Teddy had fallen into lust because of magic stones. That was too Disney to believe.

  “Sheriff’s department could take weeks if they know you’re not all dropping dead up here. I sent some to my company’s lab. Should have something in a day or two if it’s not too exotic.” Walker was out of uniform and in jeans today. He sat on the edge of the attic opening and watched as Kurt crouched beside Teddy and jimmied at the loose plywood with his pocket knife. “You need a pry bar.”

  “We need a hardware store,” Kurt said. “I’ll have to send up to the lodge for tools.”

  “Screwdriver, gentlemen.” Teddy sat back. “I don’t want to damage that wood. There’s something weird about it.”

  “Screwdriver, I can do.” Walker disappeared down the stairs again.

  “Define weird.” Kurt examined the four by eight sheet nailed to the rafters. “Someone just used cheap plywood to cover the rafters instead of the old planking. It may cover the wires to your father’s stereo system.” Reminded of that, he ran the light over the ceiling, locating wires along the front of the house. They dangled uselessly—with no sound system attached.

  Teddy wrinkled her pert nose. “I guess weird means not right, peculiar, out of place, odd. . . But in this case, I’m feeling crystal energy. Want to run and hide now?” She glared at him defiantly.

  “No, I want crystal energy defined. Crystals are rocks. Unless they’re magnetic or radioactive or something, they’re not particularly energetic.” He crouched and ran the beam over the plywood, looking for missing nails.

  “Do you feel gravity?” she demanded. “Can you dig down and find the forces that control gravity?”

  He grimaced, grasping her point. “But scientists have proved the existence of gravity. There is no visible evidence that rocks have any supernatural power.”

  Walker reappeared before they could continue the argument. Kurt sat back, fighting the urge to put a protective arm in front of Teddy as the deputy pried at the odd board. Dauntless, she bent forward to see better. He knew she wasn’t helpless, but she seemed so small and breakable that instinct drove him to shield her with his body. He didn’t know what he expected to happen, but after yesterday’s adventures, he was prepared to shove her out of danger.

  Walker handed him a second screwdriver. Supplied with a right to do so, Kurt gave Teddy the flashlight. Then he eased in front of her to pry at one side of the board while Walker took the other.

  “Be careful,” Teddy warned. “That plywood could be important.”

  Neither of them replied but continued jimmying the old nails. Kurt derived satisfaction in the physical labor of thrusting, shoving, and pounding, but it still didn’t distract him from Teddy’s jasmine-scented presence. He ought to leave before she messed with his head any more, but now his curiosity had been aroused.

  And he couldn’t quit thinking in sexual terms.

  With a sigh of relief, he removed the last nail from the side he’d taken while Walker edged up the final corner. With care, they lifted the old board and set it to one side.

  “Oh crap,” Teddy muttered.

  Kurt thought a much harsher word.

  The light beam caught the sparkle of crystal and the dull gray of bones.

  Eleven

  June 27: mid-day

  * * *

  “I’ll have to call the sheriff and bring up the homicide team.” Walker reached for the plywood.

  Teddy stared at the skeleton in dismay. There were a number of solid crystals between those rafters, but none of the ground ones they’d encountered yesterday. She needed a better look, but she was too horrified to go closer.

  Sydony could end up like that someday. Sick to her stomach, she sat down and tried to jar that horrid thought out of her head. She had to hope and pray that her sister was smarter than whoever this was in her attic.

  When Kurt and Walker lifted the plywood, she had to look away. In doing so, she caught a glimpse of colors and shapes on the backside of the panel. She grabbed Kurt’s arm, grateful for any reason not to look at the remains. “No, wait a minute. Lift that plywood and shine the light on it.”

  Walker released the panel so Kurt could hold it up. Teddy flashed the light over it. “It’s a painting, not oil but not watercolor either,” she said as they gaped at the faded colors and figures.

  “It’s evidence,” Walker warned. “We need to leave it up here.”

  “It has our fingerprints all over it. We’ve already smudged it beyond repair. The Lucys really need to see the artwork. It could be what the ghost is trying to tell us about.” Teddy leaned over the attic opening and called down. “Anyone know where we can get a roll of packing wrap?”

  “Aaron will have something,” Sam shouted back up. “What did you find?”

  “I’ll get the wrap,” Walker said in resignation. “Lay that thing down and don’t touch it until I return. Not that I expect anyone to listen to me,” he finished with sarcasm.

  “I’ll keep out the curious and sit on Teddy,” Kurt suggested.

  “For pity’s sake, it’s a piece of plywood and not about to talk to either of you.” Not wanting to generate too much excitement by mentioning a skeleton, Teddy diverted her attention and the Lucys. “Have someone fetch enough wrap to cover two sides of a four by eight piece of plywood, please. I make no promises, but we may have a clue.”

  Walker sighed. Kurt groaned. Teddy ignored them and returned the light beam to the plywood. Below, the Lucys began tramping upward—the reason for Walker and Kurt’s complaint.

  “The spirit insists she was murdered,” Cass called. “We can’t get anything more forthcoming. She’s too furious to be sensible.”

  “Her ectoplasmic energy is bound in emotion,” Mariah called from a distance. “I’ll be back with the packing wrap.”

  When Teddy left the stairway to examine the plywood, Walker planted himself in her place, blocking any access from below. She was fine with that. Whoever lay in that dry grave deserved a little more respect than becoming a spectator sport.

  Rather than focus on who might have died in her attic, she tried to grasp the details of the paint on the plywood, but it was old and faded and the light was poor. If this was all the evidence they had, they were in a world of hurt.

  “Shine the light along the edge there.” She pointed to a dull red that stood out more than the rest—she hoped it wasn’t blood. “Doesn’t it look as if that’s part of a skirt? Where is the rest of it? And look, above it, that’s only part of a building. I don’t think we have it all.”

  “The spirit mentioned a triptych,” Sam called up, apparently listening in. “Can you see any similar pieces up there?”

  “Not a one,” Kurt replied in a masculine growl that raised all the hairs on the back of Teddy’s neck. The man was seriously unhappy. “This looks like a center piece from a mural of the town. I recognize the café, but it’s apparently before the lettering went on the window.”

  Teddy’s eyes widened as she detected familiar structures behind the people. Her house would be approximately where the painter stood—on the missing left panel with the rest of the red skirt. The town hall would be on a right panel.

  “Dinah added the gold lettering to the window a few years after she moved here, maybe eight or nine years ago,” Cass said from below, also listening in.

  Teddy tried to shake her cold chills with rationality. “So this means the panel could have been painted while my parents lived here? We moved out over twenty years ago.”

  Kurt beamed the light on the wiring running over the rafters. “Those brown cords are the old knob-and-tube wiring that would have been the originals used before the sixties.” He ran the beam to white cables. “There are the new insulated power lines your father probably installed for his sound system. They’re running through these rafters.” He indicated
the skeleton. “And I’m guessing this is where he installed the hardware for the system. It was bulky before Wi-Fi and Bluetooth.”

  “She was put there after the cable lines were run and my father removed the hardware,” Teddy concluded, not exactly feeling relief. Her mother’s cousin had moved in twenty years ago. She couldn’t remember the date on the letter saying she was moving out. “It’s just, the paint and the plywood look so old! Would my father have used plywood to cover his sound system?”

  “Not to cover it. The system probably rested on top of the plywood so the wires could run beneath. The whole mess might have crashed through the plaster into the bedrooms otherwise.” Kurt diverted the beam back to the artwork and away from their gruesome discovery.

  “Can’t you bring the painting down here?” Cass asked impatiently. “We can see it better in daylight.”

  “Evidence,” Walker barked from his seat at the top of the stairs. He’d been quiet while they talked. Teddy suspected that’s what the lawman did—listened and built up a case inside his head.

  “Mariah’s running up the street with a roll of the packing wrap Aaron uses when he ships his antiques,” Sam called from somewhere below. “But we won’t be able to see anything once it’s wrapped! And look, I think that’s Elaine climbing out of the Mercedes that just arrived. I need to greet her. She’d be the one to judge whether it’s part of a triptych.”

  “The art dealer Sam called about the mural,” Walker explained at Kurt and Teddy’s questioning silence.

  “How much evidence can you get from an old piece of wood? We really need to see the details.” Teddy crouched over the unusual piece, trying to make out faces, but the paint was just too old.

  Mariah climbed the bottom steps and pushed the long roll of wrap up for Walker to take. “Someone owes Aaron for this. It’s not me.”

  “I think I can swing the cost,” Kurt said dryly. “After all, it’s my attic.” He shot Teddy a taunting look.

  Did she really want a house with a skeleton in it? You bet your baby booties, she did. She glared and helped Walker unroll the wrap. “You can just do one sheet, can’t you? So the art dealer can see it? After we have some pictures or whatever, then you can wrap it up to your heart’s content.”

  “You could hurt the paint,” Cass said worriedly from below. “Don’t do anything until Sam returns. We should have a professional opinion.”

  “Now she tells us. We’re not going to get this thing down unwrapped, are we?” Walker asked with a sigh.

  “Gloves,” Kurt shouted. “Find me some gloves, and I’ll just cart the piece down.”

  “What, you have me running all over town for nothing when I could be working?” Mariah asked in a huff. “Someone else can hunt the damned gloves.”

  “In the trunk of my car,” Walker ordered. “In one more minute, I’m moving back to LA if you don’t all back off and let me do my job.”

  Eventually, they wrangled the awkward piece to the second floor. Kurt set it up against the wall. Walker raised the attic stairs and stood guard beneath them.

  Sam arrived with a delicate woman in her mid-forties, immaculately garbed in a slim designer dress, carrying a Gucci handbag, and wearing one of Teddy’s crystal bracelets. Interesting. Sam introduced her as Elaine Lee, the owner of the gallery that sold her late parents’ work.

  Elaine looked Walker over first and nodded approvingly. “Samantha says you are from LA and know nothing of Ling Fai, that you are not one of us. That is good.”

  Teddy processed that weird statement through her knowledge of San Francisco, widened her eyes, and kept her mouth shut. All Chinese in California were not related to each other, she told herself. Just because both Elaine Lee and Chen Ling Walker had Chinese ancestry did not mean they were related to the Ling Fai she knew, who also happened to have come from China—and possessed weird abilities like hers.

  Teddy knew that because Ling Fai had been the one to point out the powers of her crystal before she knew it herself. People with weird gifts found each other, one way or another. Did Elaine Lee suggest that she had powers by the use of the word us? Interesting.

  With the impatience of a practical lawman, Walker went straight for the facts and gestured at the piece of plywood leaning against the wall. “I need to take this into forensics. Before I do, if you could just look at it and make these ladies happy. . .”

  Elaine lifted her painted eyebrows and turned to examine the filthy piece of wood. Her face stiffened. Her hand went to her mouth. She crouched and pulled a white glove from her Gucci bag so she could touch—caress—the aging wood.

  Teddy’s stomach tightened. She had a really bad feeling about—the art dealer? She opened her Inner Monitor and picked up only joy and fear and shock from Elaine.

  “It can’t be,” the dealer whispered. “Lucinda died in the 70s. She was in her 90s then and hadn’t had the strength to paint anything large for years. So this has to be over half a century old. But look at the detail! That car—that’s not a 1960s car.”

  Beside her, Kurt whispered a curse. “That’s my mother’s Cadillac DTS. They didn’t start selling them until around 2006, which is about when she bought it, I think. I don’t remember how long she kept it.”

  “You’re saying this could be by Lucinda Malcolm?” Sam asked in excitement.

  Even Teddy knew who Lucinda Malcolm was. Apparently, so did everyone else—except maybe Kurt, who was focused on the details of the painting.

  “Those aren’t her bones up there, are they?” Teddy asked in horror.

  Kurt squeezed her arm and shook his head. Right. The famous artist had died in the 1970s, and the skeleton in the attic had only been left there after her parents moved out.

  Elaine looked up, her eyes glazed with shock. “Where is the rest of the triptych? This could be worth a fortune. It’s one of her fortune-telling masterpieces!”

  While the Lucys exclaimed and took photos of the plywood painting, and Walker stewed and threatened them with plastic, Kurt wandered over to the bedroom overlooking the main street. He tried to remember the years his mother had owned the Cadillac sedan. Dragged from the city, he’d been in a black humor back then, saddled with the resort business, and denied the career he’d chosen. He had no idea who’d lived in town at the time and hadn’t cared.

  He only knew for certain that it hadn’t been Lucinda Malcolm because she’d died before he was born. The art dealer had to be wrong about the painting’s origin. So who had painted his mother’s car and why? His uncle Lance was an artist. . . But Lance only drew portraits, nothing as elaborate as this.

  Futuristic paintings were one step into weird he couldn’t take.

  Standing in one of the upstairs windows, he saw two ponies shuffling down the road. The only ponies around here belonged to the resort stable. What the damnation were they doing in town?

  Below, the dog began to howl, and his memory kicked in—Teddy’s Goth kids, Thing One and Thing Two. Wasn’t that what she called them?

  They couldn’t even be old enough for school! He marched out of the bedroom, grabbed Teddy by the elbow, and led her toward the stairs down. “Your Baby Goths have escaped their cages.”

  “Mia and Jeb? They’re outside?” Looking alarmed, she raced down.

  Taking one last, puzzled glance at the triptych piece, Kurt followed her. He really needed to be at the office, harassing lawyers into proving his ownership of this house.

  But somehow, he couldn’t force himself to get in his car and leave. He despised unanswered questions. Outside, he cast a glance back at the second story of the empty shop, but no spooks lingered in the window. He wondered if the ghost was happy now and would leave Teddy alone—and couldn’t believe he was thinking like that.

  The sheriff’s car pulled into the parking lot, so Kurt guessed if a phantom wasn’t occupying the shop, the police would be.

  “What are you doing here?” Teddy asked the kids while attempting to lift the younger one from the saddle.

 
Jeb was a sturdy brat. Kurt grabbed the reins of both ponies and tied them to one of the boardwalk posts. It might be a tossup as to which had the least strength—the ponies or the post. He reached past Teddy, pulled the boy off, and handed him over. Then he turned to the girl, who wore a mutinous pout.

  “Stealing ponies is a hanging offense,” he told her.

  The bottom lip stuck out even further. Oh well, might as well get kicked and charged with child molestation or something equally entertaining. He grabbed the girl by the waist and hauled her down. She collapsed in a heap on the boardwalk.

  “I want to go home,” she announced.

  “I’m not cut out to be a mother,” Teddy said in dismay, holding the heavy boy. “I just wanted to make jewelry in peace.”

  “This is Hillvale. Give up any notion of peace right now.” Kurt held out his hand to the girl. “Hamburger or milkshake?”

  She frowned as if she was thinking about it. “Cake,” she decided. “Chocolate.”

  “Not unless I get a very good explanation of why you left the stable!” Teddy contradicted him.

  The girl took his hand and glared at her aunt. “They don’t like us there.”

  That earned Kurt a glare from Teddy. Oh well, this day had gone to hell anyway. “C’mon, chocolate cake and you can tell us all about it.”

  “Encouraging bad behavior is not a bright idea,” Teddy informed him, dropping Jeb to the walk and dragging him along in their wake.

  “They’re not my kids,” he retorted, maliciously living up to his reputation. “I just want to know why my staff is mean to them.”

  “Maybe they’re infected with evil, just like you,” she snapped. “I should leave them with you when they’re all hyper and bouncing off walls.”

  “You just want to see what’s going on back at the shop. The way I see it, taking care of kids should come first.” How had they gone from arguing over rental contracts to raising kids?

  Figuring he deserved gold medals for this, Kurt led them into Dinah’s and seated them in a booth—making sure he sat next to Teddy. He was pretty certain their sniping was a byproduct of sexual frustration. He might as well push the boundaries.