Caramel Canvas

by Jessica Beck

  “No, your stepfather has been pretty vocal about pitching in, too. I don’t suppose there’s any chance you wouldn’t mention this to him, is there?”

  “Not a single one in the world,” I said. After offering a slight smile, I added, “Sorry about that, but family comes first.”

  “I get that,” Rick said as he headed for the door. “Bye, Suzanne.”

  “Call us if anything else happens,” Darby added.

  “You bet,” I said, thanking them for coming.

  “A fat lot of good that did,” Grace said. “I have half a mind to call Stephen and tell him to cut his convention short. We need him back here.”

  “Grace, we might not like it, but they were right. What could Chief Grant do that they haven’t already promised to do? Let’s just leave it alone and see what happens.”

  “Okay, but I want to go on record saying that I don’t like it.”

  “Duly noted,” I said with a smile.

  “You’re back home early,” Grace said after we settled down on the couch.

  “My friends and loyal customers bought me out,” I said. “The DeAngelis clan even came by in full force.”

  “Wow, that must have been something to see.”

  “Watching them walk out with five dozen donuts was the real sight. It was the best advertising I could have ever asked for,” I said.

  “I bet. So, how was it being back at the helm? Did you see any ghosts?”

  I knew what Grace meant, at least I think I did. She wasn’t literally talking about spirits from beyond but specters from my past, including the most recent one. “I had a few queasy moments, but in the end, it was just like being back home again,” I told her. “I desperately needed that.”

  “I bet you did. So, what would you like to do today? That is if you have enough energy to do anything.”

  “I thought I needed a nap before, but now I’m feeling pretty good. You don’t have to babysit me, you know.”

  “I understand that I don’t have to,” Grace said with a grin, “but I want to. As a matter of fact, I can’t think of a better way of spending some of my vacation time than hanging out with you.”

  “Then you are showing a severe lack of imagination,” I said with a grin. “But the truth is, that sounds great to me. First things first, though. Let’s see that painting.” I hadn’t been able to stop thinking about it all morning at my shop, and I knew that I was ready at last to see what Annabeth had painted for me. After Grace and I opened it, I was going to suggest we go see Alyssa to tell Annabeth’s mother just how much her daughter had meant to me.

  “I thought you’d never get around to it,” Grace said with a grin. “Do you want to get it, or should I?”

  “I’ll grab it,” I said. “You don’t know the combination.”

  “Are you telling me that there’s an actual lock on the door?” Grace asked as she followed me to the closet under the stairs.

  “Kind of,” I said as I retrieved the magnet that sprang the lock. After showing her how it was done, I stepped in and took out the painting. It was about the size of a coffee-table book but not nearly as thick. Even though it was wrapped in plain brown paper, I still took pains to open it gently. After all, I didn’t want to take a chance and damage the painting beneath it.

  Grace was more of a tear-your-way-in kind of gal. “Come on, Suzanne. It’s just plain old butcher’s paper.”

  “Patience is a virtue,” I told her as I stuck my tongue out at her.

  “Well, nobody in their right mind has ever accused me of being a virtuous woman,” she said with a grin.

  As I began to pull the paper off slowly, something fluttered to the floor. “I wonder what that is?” I asked as I bent down to pick it up.

  “I haven’t seen any of this before either, remember?” she asked me.

  The sheet had some scribbling on it, but no ordinary person would be able to make out the symbols.

  Then again, they hadn’t created a code in school like the three of us had a very long time ago.

  I grabbed the notebook I had used the night before and flipped it to the key code. “Grab a pad from the kitchen and write this down,” I told Grace.

  She did as I asked, and I started reading aloud as I matched up the symbols of our homemade code with the letters we’d attached them to so long ago.

  )$$%*&**(()++!!$#@^&&^$… and on and on.

  “What does it say?” I asked Grace as I flipped the sheet over to make sure there was nothing on the back.

  HELP ME, PLEASE! SOMEONE IS TRYING TO KILL ME!

  “That’s it? That’s all that it says?” I asked Grace.

  “You read me the symbols. All I did was write down what you told me.”

  “There’s got to be more to it than that,” I said. “Who would want to kill Annabeth? She was one of the sweetest people I knew.”

  “You’d be surprised. After all, we all manage to pick up a few enemies along the way, especially the more successful we get in life,” Grace said.

  “Thoughts like that make me happy I’m such a nobody,” I said in all sincerity.

  “You’re not a nobody to me,” she said. “What is the painting of, anyway?”

  “I never got that far. Let’s see,” I said as I finished unwrapping the paper. Grace was still staring at the urgent note Annabeth had left me in code when I said, “Come over here and check this out.”

  “What is it, a cow? I’d love to see her rendition of a farm animal. No, it’s probably some wild-looking donut, isn’t it?”

  “It’s not the painting I want you to see,” I said as I started to smooth out the wrinkled brown butcher’s paper. Inside, on the interior part that had faced the painting—which I still hadn’t seen—was a series of scrawls, notes, and more code, all in Annabeth’s all-too-familiar handwriting. “What do you make of it?”

  “Is it possible she lost her mind there toward the end?” Grace asked me gently. “Most of this is just pure nonsense.”

  “Grace, I spoke with her just before I left town, and she was perfectly sane then,” I said.

  “I know. It’s as though she’s put all of her scattered thoughts down on this paper, but why did she use it to wrap your gift?”

  “Don’t you see? These aren’t random at all. I’m willing to bet my life on it. Somewhere in this jumble, Annabeth was trying to tell us who wanted to kill her. Now it’s up to us to figure it out and bring her murderer to justice.”

  “She died from an accident, Suzanne. Remember?”

  “Was it, though? Really? How do we know it wasn’t staged to look that way? What if whoever killed her wanted the world to think that it was purely accidental?”

  “I don’t know,” Grace said, clearly troubled. “Everyone just assumed that she fell off the ladder and hit her head on the side of her work table. Stephen seemed to be sure of it.” It was clear that she didn’t want anything to reflect badly on her boyfriend, but we couldn’t ignore the facts. Still, I didn’t have to beat her over the head with it.

  “Grace, Stephen thought it was an accident because he didn’t have all of the facts we do. If Annabeth hadn’t left us this hodgepodge of information and a note to tell us what she suspected might happen to her, we would have accepted it, too.”

  “That’s true,” Grace said. “We need to figure out what she was trying to tell us and then see if we can find her killer ourselves.”

  “Should we tell Rick and Darby what we’ve discovered?” I asked, though it was the last thing I wanted to do. Annabeth had entrusted this to me, and I meant to see it through.

  “I don’t think there’s any reason to alert anyone just yet,” Grace said. “After all, we’re assuming that Annabeth was right and not just being paranoid. Let’s dig into this a little deeper, and then we can decide what we’re going to do about it.”

  I looked at
her steadily before I spoke again. “Is there any doubt in your mind that we’re going to try to find the person who killed our friend?” I asked her.

  “Not a chance in the world,” Grace said with stiff resolve.

  “Then grab that paper and let’s get started,” I said. Almost as an afterthought, I flipped the painting over and looked to see what she’d painted for me.

  The canvas was blank!

  It was clear that the message on the butcher paper was what was important, but I was still a little disappointed that I wouldn’t get one last painting from my late friend.

  Chapter 7

  “Why is it blank?” Grace asked as she looked over my shoulder.

  “It’s got to be a message to focus on the paper,” I said.

  “Wow, she really was worried about her life to send you a blank canvas just to share her worries with you.”

  I grabbed the blank canvas and stuck it back into Jake’s closet, since that seemed to be the handiest place for it.

  When I got back to the dining room, Grace was taking lots of photos of the wrapping paper or, more importantly, Annabeth’s random notes written on it. “I thought it might be helpful to have a record of this,” she said.

  “I’m all for it. Let’s take our photos, and then we can start digging into what she was trying to tell us,” I answered as I pulled my cell phone back out and began taking photos of my own.

  “If you don’t mind,” I said as I finished my last picture, “I’d like to leave the original out and work from that. When we’re ready to go, we can stuff it into Jake’s closet.”

  “I was about to suggest that very thing,” Grace said with a grin. “Once again, great minds think alike.”

  “And they don’t come any greater than ours,” I said, and a moment later, we both burst out laughing from the sheer lunacy of my joke. “I’m not even sure where to start,” I said in wonder as I stared at the jumbled mess. There were bubbles with names in them connected via a line network that would have made a cartographer proud.

  “What’s the difference between a bubble and a box?” Grace asked as she pointed to different parts of the sheet.

  “I’m not sure there is one, but we should probably take note of what is in what, just in case it’s significant. Are they bubbles or circles? Boxes or squares?”

  “I’m not sure what we call them is significant. Shall you decipher and I record our notes?” she asked.

  “If you don’t mind,” I said. “Let’s start at the top left-hand corner.”

  “Is there any reason in particular why?” she asked me.

  “I don’t know. It just seems as good a place as any,” I answered truthfully.

  “Hey, that works for me,” Grace said.

  The first bubble had Annabeth’s mother’s name inside it. “‘Alyssa Winchell,’” I announced, “is written inside a bubble.”

  “Surely you don’t think her mother killed her,” Grace said, clearly aghast at the very thought of it.

  “I’m not thinking anything just yet,” I said. “It’s way too soon to try to get into Annabeth’s head. I just want to see what we can come up with by breaking this down first.”

  “Okay, I can see that. Is her bubble connected to anything?”

  I traced the lines that came off the bubble and found two more bubbles, one that surprised me. “Max is on here,” I said.

  “Your Max?” Grace asked me curiously.

  “He hasn’t been ‘My Max’ for a very long time,” I said. “I suppose if he belongs to anyone these days, it’s Emily Hargraves.”

  “You know what I meant,” Grace said.

  “Yes, it’s Max, for sure. He’s in a bubble, so maybe that’s a good thing.”

  “Maybe,” Grace said as she took note of it. “Any other bubbles connected to Alyssa?”

  “Yes, but it’s a name I’m not familiar with. ‘Kerry Minter.’ Does that name ring any bells?”

  “No, but then again, Annabeth and I had drifted apart over the years.”

  “Well, we’ve stayed in touch,” I said, “and that name is news to me.”

  “Let’s put her on another list,” Grace said as she flipped the page and wrote down the name. “Are there any leads from Max’s bubble?”

  “Just one that says ‘Sarah Flowers.’ What could that mean?”

  “I haven’t a clue,” Grace said as she wrote it down. “Just out of curiosity, how many names are on that sheet?”

  I took a few moments to count them. “Five are in bubbles, four are in squares,” I said.

  “Let’s write all of the names down first, or will that wreck your system?” Grace asked.

  “No, it’s a good idea,” I said. “Get ready. Let’s start with bubbles and then move on to squares.”

  “I’m ready,” she said.

  “Okay, in the bubbles we’ve got Alyssa, Max, ‘Kerry Minter,’ ‘Sarah Albright,’ and mine.”

  The last one caught us both off guard. “You made the list, but I didn’t? At least tell me I made it into a box,” Grace asked.

  “Nope, you aren’t mentioned at all,” I said. “Grace, that’s not a bad thing. Why on earth did she put my name on this?”

  “Are there any lines coming out from your name?” Grace asked as she leaned over my shoulder.

  “It looks like a cracked windshield, there are so many of them,” I admitted.

  “Then it’s solved. You did it, Suzanne. Come on, confess.” She shook her head quickly. “That was in bad taste. Sorry, sometimes I go too far even for me. Maybe it means that you hold the answers to who killed her.”

  “If that was what she was counting on, I’m afraid she was wrong.”

  Grace touched my shoulder lightly. “Suzanne, it could mean that you were the only one she trusted enough to try to figure this out. That’s what I think. The lines mean that you need to talk to all of the people listed here. Shall we go on to the box people now?”

  “Is that what we’re calling them?” I asked.

  “It’s as good a designation as any,” she said.

  “Okay, I guess you’re right. The names in squares are ‘Martin Lancaster,’ ‘Galen’ (no last name), ‘Christopho Langer,’ and ‘Bonnie Small.’ I’ve never heard of any of these people.”

  “Me, either. Let’s ask my friend,” Grace said as she pulled out her phone.

  “You have a friend who might know all of the answers?” I asked, wondering just how far a reach my best friend had.

  “Sure. I bet you’ve heard of him. His name is Google.”

  I had to laugh. “Go on, see what you can find out.”

  After a few minutes, we had a rundown on all of the people we didn’t know. It was my turn to take notes as Grace announced brief bios on all of our names. “Martin Lancaster owns a new gallery in Maple Hollow called Marcast; Galen, who incidentally doesn’t use a last name, maybe she thinks she’s Cher or somebody, is an artist who has had some unkind things to say about Annabeth’s work; Christopho Langer is a fellow artist who seems to have nothing but praise for Annabeth’s art; and then there’s Bonnie Small. She represents all three artists and half a dozen others. According to this article, she’s some kind of Southern art detector. Evidently she specializes in pulling artists out of obscurity and making them famous, at least on a regional basis.”

  “That’s odd that all of the squares contain names from Annabeth’s art world, while all of the bubbles are people she knew personally, assuming Kerry Minter was a friend we just didn’t know about.”

  “That’s as good a theory as any, at least for now,” Grace said. “What does that leave us?”

  “Just these diamonds,” I said. “Man, she wrote really small here, didn’t she?”

  “Do you need glasses?” Grace joked with me.

  “No, I can see just fine, thank you very much.” I
n the diamonds, there were what appeared to be events and locales, though what they meant was beyond me. Still, there were three of them, so I relayed the information to Grace. “We have: ‘Marcast,’ the art gallery Lancaster owns; ‘Artie’s,’ the art supply warehouse in Union Square, and ‘Studio,’ which must be Annabeth’s place.”

  “Okay, those are the places. What were the events?” Grace asked me.

  “‘Ladder?’ is listed for her studio, ‘Boxes?’ is coupled with Artie’s, and ‘Car?’ is with Marcast,” I said. “What do you suppose they mean?”

  “Near misses, I’m guessing,” Grace said after studying the list.

  “How do you get that?” I asked her.

  “Well, let’s say Annabeth was right. Someone was trying to kill her, or at least that’s the way it felt to her. Her note didn’t leave much room for doubt, did it? It just follows that those events were attempts on her life, at least as far as she was concerned.”

  “That all makes sense, but these diamonds don’t have any lines radiating from them,” I said, pointing out the paper trails.

  “I never claimed to have all of the answers,” my best friend said.

  After a few moments of thought, I said, “Maybe she knew that the events were meant to kill her, but not who might be responsible for them.”

  “It makes sense to me. Is there anything else on the paper?” Grace asked me.

  “Just some random numbers and more code, but they aren’t associated with anything else.”

  “Decode the words and then we can figure out what they might mean,” Grace said.

  “Okay, here goes.” As I read off the code letters and what they corresponded to in our ancient code book, I started putting the words together as it all came back to me. “Real, Not Real, Who? Why? Why Now? Money-Greed, Anger, Jealousy, Betrayal.”

  “So, now she’s just listing random motives?” Grace asked. “Why did she feel the need to do that part of it in code?”

  “Maybe she was just being paranoid,” I said, remembering the painting she’d left me. “Look,” I said as I held my face at an angle low to the paper. “She’s erased some lines coming from these.”