Cherry Scones & Broken Bones

by Darci Hannah

When Silvia had occupied this room, it was in a state of perpetual turmoil. Furniture had been pushed aside to make room for paintings and supplies, easels and blank canvases, clothing, wine bottles and luggage. Thanks to the crime scene unit, it appeared to have been raked over with a fine-tooth comb. The array of food trays, wine bottles, and used glasses that had accumulated over the past few days had all been removed, as had the sheets on the bed and any clothing that had been strewn across the floor. Most of the luggage Erik had hauled to her room when she arrived had also been removed. There were still some clothes hanging in the closet, but that was about it. The first thing we noticed upon crossing the yellow crime scene tape was the quiet stillness of the room, and the fact that there weren’t any obvious signs of a struggle. No wine splatters on the hardwood floor. No scone crumbs on the table. No battered paintings, broken glass or scattered art supplies. Everything looked as it should for an elderly woman who collected unfinished paintings.

  It was the paintings that drew us in, scattered haphazardly around the room in various phases of completion. “These are some of her new commissions,” Peter offered, highlighting one with a flip of his hand.

  “She liked to work on them at night,” he added. “Too many distractions during the day, or so she always said. I think it was the wine. She drank a lot of it at night. It, like, loosened her up; got the creative juices flowing. She’d call me in at around eleven or so to set up her easel and mix the paints for the painting she wanted to work on.”

  “Were you in here last night?” I asked him, remembering my first talk with Erik. He had told me that he thought there was someone in Silvia’s room last night when he delivered her tray of scones. Peter shook his head.

  “Nope. I was mad at her. Told her that if she needed me to set her up, she’d have to let me know by ten. There was a little pushback on her end about that. She called me the usual names, ‘useless bohemian drug-monkey’ being my favorite.” He smiled wanly. “But when she started in on Hannah, I, like, told her to stuff it. She found out that we, ya know, hang together. Silvia was weirdly possessive of my time, and I told her I’d had enough of it. She knew we were all supposed to be going to the Renaissance fair today, just as she knew I’d planned to spend the night with m’lady.”

  Giff, studying one of the unfinished paintings, was pulled back to the matter at hand by the archaic phrase. “Was your other m’lady perhaps jealous?” he asked, using a theatric voice. “Word on the streets is that she was quite the cougar.”

  “Dude, like, that thought right there? That’s disgusting.”

  “So you and Silvia weren’t …?”

  Peter, looking remarkably sober, paled and shook his head. “She used to try when she first took me on. That’s when I went full hippie on her. I stopped bathing, using deodorant, combing my hair, washing my clothes, and I started eating a lot of Doritos. In just weeks I totally repulsed her.” He grinned. “After that we came to an agreement.”

  Giff, studying the paintings, turned. “Smart man,” he said, then stilled. “Whitney, come take a look at this.”

  He’d found our family portrait. Although Silvia had just started it, I was amazed by the progress she’d made. And, quite frankly, I was awed to silence by what I saw. Her original sketch had been in charcoal pencil. But the strokes, the subtle lines capturing my father’s thoughtful gaze, my mother’s unfettered cheerfulness, my gran’s wry demeanor and ageless grace were the marks of a genius. But it was the look of pure desire on Tate’s face as he peered down on me that stopped my heart for a beat or two. There was nothing brotherly about that look, and I felt no artist could capture such an emotion if it wasn’t real. As for me, again she’d been dead on. Although I smiled, she’d managed to tap into the micro-emotions behind it—a hint of worry in the creases of my eyes, a dimple of confliction marring the smooth surface of my chin, and a smile that was more forced than felt. It was nothing like looking into a mirror. A mirror is a reflection, changing and shifting with the movements of the observer. What Silvia had created was the truth. And sometimes the truth is hard to acknowledge.

  “Dear Lord,” I uttered. “I now understand why there’s a shrine taking over our front porch. Maybe I was too quick to judge her.”

  “This is what I was talking about.” Giff turned to me with a pointed look. “I told you that her talent is legend in Chicago. Just because you couldn’t get along with her, cupcake, didn’t mean you had to deprive me of the opportunity to observe this virtuoso.”

  “Dude,” Peter said. “Cupcake did you a favor. It’s better to view the art than to feel the sting of the artist. Besides, she would have liked you, bro … I mean, really liked you. Your clothes look costly. You’ve got sweet blond highlights in your dark hair. And, like, don’t read into this, but you’re a total dude. Whatever scent you’re wearing is, like, dangerous. Sexually dangerous.” This was punctuated with a cautionary look.

  “Acqua Di Giò,” Giff replied. “Giorgio Armani. My signature scent. And don’t worry about me. I know how to fend off the ladies. Ask cupcake. She’ll tell you.”

  “Yeah. I thought I did too, bro,” Peter said, oblivious to what Giff was hinting at. “It was the flattery that undid me. Silvia told me that she liked my paintings and talked me into working for her. I thought I had scored big. Working for a painter like Silvia is an up-and-coming artist’s dream. However, once she had me under her thumb I saw her for what she really was, a soul-sucking vampire. You put up with it, I suppose, because of moments like this.” He gestured to the painting.

  “It is remarkable. Whitney,” Giff said, turning to me. There was a brightness in his eyes I didn’t trust, and with good reason. “A small observation,” he continued. “It appears Mr. Vander-licious has been elevated to god status by the hand of the recently deceased. That is art. You should really consider apologizing to the man.”

  I was speechless. That’s when Peter chimed in. “But, like, aren’t you and that police dude a thing? That’s what Hannah told me.”

  Dammit if my heart didn’t give a blood-draining lurch at the mention of Jack. I had mucked that one up good, and I doubted if Tate would ever talk to me again. “Nope,” I said. “I’m quite single.” I then turned my eye-daggers on Giff. “What you’re witnessing, Gifford McGrady, is purely artistic interpretation. Tate was a stand-in for my brother. Silvia was supposed to switch out the face but obviously hadn’t gotten that far.” Before he could add a snappy reply, I changed the subject.

  “Did I ever tell you what happened earlier this week? Silvia was really beginning to get under my skin. I was seething mad at the woman and of half a mind to toss her out of the inn when one of her admirers from the arts council approached me. Alexa Livingstone,” I said to Peter, knowing he was familiar with the name. “She was so taken with Silvia’s talent that she actually cautioned me against lashing out at her. She feared Silvia would leave Cherry Cove if she was offended. Ms. Livingstone instructed me to give Silvia a pass on her bad behavior—that her talent demanded it. I thought the woman was nuts. I thought they were all nuts. But now I think I understand.”

  “That’s the effect she had on people,” Peter replied with a nonchalant shrug. “Fawning and vicious by turns. It messes you up. I started smoking weed to cope with it.”

  “These paintings,” I said, suddenly struck with a thought. Truthfully, I didn’t know what I was looking for in the room. I was hoping something would jump out at me, but the only thing that had was Silvia’s pile of unfinished paintings and an artful rendition of Tate. “What if one of these paintings holds the clue to Silvia’s murder?”

  “Okay,” Giff said. “So what are we looking for?”

  “I don’t know. Anything odd, I suppose. Hopefully we’ll know it when we see it.”

  We went through the ten paintings Silvia had been working on in her room, but there was nothing out of the ordinary about any one of them as far as we could tell. They were
all unfinished portraits or landscapes she’d been working on. When we were done inspecting them, I turned to Peter.

  “I thought Silvia sold twelve sittings, not counting the portrait she was painting for our family. There are only seven portraits here, along with three landscapes.”

  “Right,” Peter replied. “That’s because she hadn’t scheduled all her appointed sittings. She liked to spread them out over the summer.”

  “Could the person owed one of those sittings have gotten mad she was taking so long?”

  Peter shrugged.

  “Or maybe she was rude to one of these couples,” I offered, “or a family member?”

  “Could have been,” he added. “You could call and ask. I have all the names. I keep all Silvia’s records.”

  Giff and I looked at one another. We were thinking the same thing, a habit from our old ad days. “You have all Silvia’s records?” Giff asked. “Does Jack MacLaren know?”

  Peter shook his head. “He never asked. I didn’t really think of it until now.”

  Filling with excitement, I looked at Peter. “Where do you keep them? Are they here? In this room?”

  “Dudes, like, Silvia never kept her records in here. They were private; her secrets. And the woman would never hide her secrets in a hotel room.”

  “Where then?” Giff asked. “Your room?”

  Peter shook his head, then reached into the pocket of his baggy pants. “The Lade,” he said, triumphantly dangling the car keys. “Or, more correctly, the trailer behind the Lade.”

  Twenty-Five

  After making a real effort to leave Silvia’s room the way we had found it, the three of us quietly left the inn to walk across the dimly lit, eerily vacant parking lot. The behemoth of a trailer was still connected to the Escalade, and both were parked at the edge of the pavement near a row of tall pines. I thought the trailer had been disconnected from the SUV when Silvia arrived, but Peter confirmed that it hadn’t been.

  “I’m gonna be honest,” he began, his loose flip-flops making muffled slapping sounds on the asphalt as he walked. “Like, I didn’t realize the extent of Silvia’s money problems. I mean, the woman was always cheap, and, like, never paid for anything she could get for free, my services included. But I thought it was just another one of her nasty ways. I probably shoulda realized she was in trouble before we left Chicago. The day before we left she hired a couple of movers to pack up all her paintings and some of her furniture, mostly the heavy antique stuff. I thought she was being eccentric, ya know, like, she couldn’t be creative unless she was surrounded by all her stuff? Kinda in the same way that tormenting the young and promising, like Hannah, Erik, you, and me, made her feel superior and important. But packing up the old paintings and antiques, that’s different. Silvia was in real trouble.”

  As he stood before the trailer, a flash of sorrow or possibly remorse crossed his face and disappeared. “Anyhow,” he continued, brightening a measure, “Silvia insisted we take the white beast with us wherever we went.”

  As Peter went for the lock with his ring of keys, Giff and I pulled out our phones and engaged our flashlight apps to assist him. Although the back of the trailer was bathed in warm light, Peter’s fine motor skills were still suffering the effects of his recent bender. It took close to a minute before he put the correct key into the lock.

  “Okay,” he finally said, throwing the double doors wide. “The records are in here.”

  Giff and I stood a moment in silent amazement. There were far more than just records staring back at us in the packed, cavernous space lovingly referred to as the white beast. Back in Chicago, after I had lost my job in advertising, I attempted to drown my sorrows in wine and sketchy reality TV. I had seen my share of compelling, unsolvable mysteries about ghostly encounters, Sasquatch sightings, the Loch Ness Monster, aliens, and angels. I had watched them all with suspended disbelief. It was what I lovingly referred to as my “dark period.” Since moving back home to Cherry Cove I’d been so busy working at the inn that I didn’t even have a social life, let alone time to watch any TV, reality or otherwise. However, peering into Silvia’s trailer with the help of two smartphone flashlights, I felt like I had walked onto the set of one of those unsolvable mysteries, only this one was about the dead and the secrets that surrounded them. The thought sent a ripple of excited fear coursing through me.

  “So, um, it’s a bit crowded aboard the white beast,” Peter warned in his languid hippie tone, utterly breaking the spell I’d been under. “I’ve made an aisle on the right for easier access, so, like, follow me.” He stepped up into the trailer. Giff jumped up next and gave me his hand.

  The moment I was aboard, Giff whispered “Get a load of this” and ran his phone light over the contents of the white beast. A jumble of folded easels sat near the entrance along with an old wooden chest containing a variety of high-end paintbrushes. Just behind this was a long rack filled with rows and rows of paint tubes in every color under the sun. Next to the paints and easels sat a stack of blank canvases in a myriad of sizes, and directly next to these were what appeared to be framed paintings, although each one was covered by a heavy black cloth.

  “Dudes. The record book’s down this way.” As Peter talked, he continued down the darkened aisle. Clearly he wanted us to follow, or, at the very least, he wanted our light. But Giff and I stayed where we were, our lights trained on a stack of covered paintings.

  “Are these all Silvia’s paintings?” I asked his retreating form.

  Peter stopped and poked his head around an antique floor-length mirror. “Um, nope. Damn,” he uttered. “I like almost forgot about those.”

  “Short term memory loss,” Giff whispered to me, his dark eyes twinkling with mischief. “Classic symptom of habitual self-medicating.”

  “Dude,” Peter hissed, overhearing him. “I’m gonna stop. Okay? And, like, I know what those are. They’re what’s left of last year’s commissions, only I forgot that someone’s going to have to deliver them now that Silvia’s gone.”

  “These are the paintings Silvia hadn’t gotten around to unveiling?” I asked aloud, staring at the vertical stack of covered rectangles that ranged in size from four feet high to a manageable two-foot by two-foot square. I focused my phone light on the first in the row. As I ran my hand over the black cloth covering the painting, I felt like an archaeologist who’d just discovered the burial chamber of an ancient queen. This metallic cavern on wheels housed the painter’s last remaining possessions, a somber thought for a woman who’d spent a lifetime devoted to her art. Noticing that Giff was growing impatient, I peeled back the cloth and inhaled sharply.

  Giff’s reaction was just as violent. He jumped back a step while crying out like a wounded animal. “What the heck am I looking at?” Although he was horrified, his eyes were glued to the painting before him. “Is it just me or is that man ghosting himself on the pottery wheel?”

  “Ghosting?” I questioned, looking at my friend.

  “Yeah. Ghosting. It’s a term used for those who find it humorous to recreate the iconic pottery wheel scene from the movie Ghost. Fred’s a potter, so the impulse is there, but he’s far from being a Patrick Swayze look-alike. And that’s not Demi Moore he’s got clenched between his thighs. Correct me if I’m wrong, but that looks like a younger version of Fred.” It was then that Giff let out a long, pent-up hoot. Still chuckling, he asked, “What was the woman thinking, painting a portrait like this?”

  “It’s farcical,” I added. “Mocking even.” And it really was, because the portrait we were staring at clearly depicted a present-day Fred making a ghostly visit to his younger self on the pottery wheel, teaching his younger self his perfected technique. The subject was oddly disturbing, and yet no one could deny that it was beautifully executed. “It’s astonishing,” I uttered. “I’m not quite sure what to make of it.”

  “Hey, dudes. Can one of you throw s
ome light over here?” Peter was still rooting around in the back looking for the record book.

  Giff stood and held up his phone.

  “Peter, we’re looking at a painting of Fred Beauchamp,” I said. “I didn’t know Fred commissioned a painting.”

  “Yeah. Last summer. He’s not rich or anything.” Peter poked his head above a richly upholstered chair with a gilded frame. “I think he did it to impress her. Anyhow, his unveiling was scheduled for next Saturday. It’s all here in the ledger.” He held up a leather-bound book and wiggled it. “I keep it in the drawer of the big desk,” he explained, walking back toward us. He opened the book, revealing a bookmarked page. “These are her new commissions. Pricing’s over here, and on this page is the order of the unveilings. People pay a lot of money for her work. She liked to draw out the ordeal for dramatic effect. Those,” he said, pointing to the row of covered paintings, “are in order.”

  “So Fred hasn’t seen this yet?” I pointed my phone light back on the painting.

  “Whoa!” Peter cried upon seeing it. “Dudes! Is it just me, or is old Fred ghosting a young Fred?”

  “Is this the first time you’re seeing this?” For some reason this intrigued me.

  Peter, still staring at the portrait, started to giggle. A short while later he pulled himself together and replied, “Yeah. I mean, I’d totally remember this one if I’d seen it before. Silvia painted in her room at night. She always made sure I attend the sittings. After that I’d, like, catch glimpses of all her commissions in various stages of completion. But after Silvia worked on a painting she liked to cover it. She didn’t want anyone looking at her work until she held the unveiling. It was just her way.” Peter looked at the painting again and let out another wave of giggles. Giff, unable to help himself, erupted in laughter as well. “I was at Fred’s sitting,” Peter offered, stifling his laughter. “It was totally normal. This,” he added, pointing to the painting, “is totally messed up.”