by Mary Bowers
“Well, there’s nothing much else I can tell you then.”
“How did you meet Mrs. Rosewood?” he asked, sitting down and getting comfortable.
“Oh, that.” I described our first meeting, and then I tried to do a quick summary of the ghost hunt, but he stopped me and made me go over everything I remembered in detail.
When I was finished, he said, “Okay, I’ll talk to Dr. Darby-Deaver about that. So, whatever it was y’all did then, it seemed to satisfy her?”
“For a while, anyway. Then all of a sudden there was this phone call last night. I think she called me first because after watching me work with Ed, she thought I could read her mind. When I was no help, she called her daughter instead.”
“Ms. Carmen Rosewood.”
“Right. She’s an only child.”
“Okay, anybody else?”
I kept my eyes on him and lowered my head. “Anybody else, like who? What are you asking me?”
“Well, unless this is matricide, Mrs. Rosewood saw somebody else last night, after her daughter left.”
“Oh. Right. Well, she didn’t call me back, and other than that, I wouldn’t know what she did or who she called. I went back to bed.”
He watched me for a few moments more, as if something was going to hit me out of the blue, and I wondered if he was looking for me to be gripped by an inspiration from the cosmos. Maybe that was why we were in Maida’s house instead of Florence’s. I certainly hoped not, but as I’d been told before, detectives were willing to take any help they could get.
“You can look at her phone records, of course,” I prompted.
“Sure, we’ll do that. She was using a cell, and it doesn’t show any other calls, but we’ll double-check with her provider.”
He was still watching me with that expectant look.
“Detective Frane . . . what?” I finally said.
I could see him quickly make a decision. “Her girl, Carmen, said her mother liked to look nice all the time, even when nobody could to see her. She was particular, even about what she wore to bed. There’s a very nice, silky nightgown that looks like her favorite, but we found it hanging on a hook in the closet.”
“Oh. She was naked?”
“Not quite. She was wearing the kind of thing a lady puts on when she’s expecting company.”
He watched me, waiting for a comment, and I didn’t have any, except to ask, “Why are you telling me this?”
“To see what you think of it.”
“I have no idea what to think of it. You mean she was expecting company so she had on the usual daywear, or she was expecting company so she was wearing a little bit of lace and a garter belt?”
“The latter. This is not for the public yet. Don’t gossip about it. I just wondered who the boyfriend was. Any ideas about that? Anything she ever said that made you think she was seeing somebody?”
“She never mentioned a boyfriend – a lover – to me. She had something of a reputation, though. Her brother-in-law called her a tramp, right to her face. I heard the same kind of thing from somebody else, too.”
“Who?”
I took a deep breath. “A guy named Jesse Mantrell. I just met him for the first time yesterday. He’s in town scouting around for some show he does in Orlando. He told me he was staying at The Breakers Motel. Lily Parsons works with him.” He was writing it all down, so I added, “Lily is staying with me, at Cadbury House.”
“Uh huh. So she said. How come you didn’t invite Mr. Mantrell to your house? Didn’t you like him?”
“He doesn’t bed down in animal shelters.”
“Ah,” he said, grinning. “A man with standards.” Detective Frane’s pale, yellowish eyes kept him from ever looking really open and friendly, even when he was grinning, but I figured he couldn’t help the color of his eyes – or lack of it. I tried to grin back.
“Okay,” he said briskly, shutting his notebook and finishing the interview. “You’re set for a session with a hypnotist, Mark Williams, at the station in Bunnell at 3:00. Gonna be able to make it?”
“Sure. I’m always up for new experiences. After trailing around after Edson Darby-Deaver, it won’t even seem weird.”
He laughed.
* * *
Back at Florence’s house, I saw that things were about to break up, and two more people had been added to the mix. I only recognized one of them: Vivian Dear, one of my steadfast volunteers. She was hovering near Florence, and I was so glad to see her. She and Florence were good friends.
The other woman I didn’t recognize. This one was young and pretty, and she was standing next to Carmen. They were all in Florence’s living room, with Officer Jaylynn still observing, and all of them turned to me as I came in the door. I looked at the new woman.
“Hey, there, Taylor,” she said without waiting for somebody to introduce her. “I’m Carmen’s roommate, Joy Hardy. When I heard what happened, I came into town to see what I could do.” I told her hello, but she was done with me for the moment, it seemed. She turned to Carmen and suggested that they go back to the studio now. “There’s nothing else we can do here.”
Carmen seemed to have a sudden, dark inspiration. She said nothing to Joy, but turned to me and said, “You wanted to see my studio, right? See what kind of work I’m doing? Well, now’s your chance, if you want to come along with us.”
Lily was quietly trying to catch my eye, and without looking at her directly I saw her make a tiny, stiff nod. It clearly told me to accept the invitation, and also that Lily was coming along, whether invited or not.
“I’d love to,” I told Carmen. “I think I’ve got time; I have to be out in Bunnell at 3:00. But I’ll have to follow you in my car. It’s parked over behind Girlfriend’s.” There weren’t so many cars in front of Maida’s house anymore, and I figured I’d be able to drive down Palmetto now without any trouble, so I could get behind Carmen and Joy and follow them out to the studio. “We’ll be back in five minutes; it’s only a block-and-a-half away.”
I went to Florence, gave her a hug, and asked her if she was going to be all right. “Don’t go near Girlfriend’s today,” I told her. “You too, Vivian. Neither one of you needs to be in a situation where you’re answering a lot of questions. I’ll make a few calls while I’m walking back for my car, and if I can’t get any volunteers, Girlfriend’s can just stay closed for the day. Even for a few days. Everybody in town is going to know why.”
Outside again, I looked specifically at the cars at the curb and picked out the one that had to be Joy’s. Carmen’s heap was parked about halfway down the street, past where the Sheriff’s cars had been, and beyond it was a little turquoise Corvette with the top down.
“Joy’s a rich kid,” I remarked to Lily, gazing toward the mint-condition, vintage convertible.
“Must be nice.”
Along the way, I made the calls for volunteers, but I didn’t have any luck. It didn’t bother me a bit that Girlfriend’s wasn’t going to be open that day, and there was no need to worry about Wicked, the shop cat. He lived with Florence, though I hadn’t seen him in her house. Cats tend to distance themselves from human dramas. Once everybody cleared out of her house and it was just Florence and Vivian, Wicked would magically appear.
I put my phone away and told Lily what little I knew about Joy – that she’d been a student of Grant Rosewood’s, and she was working on some kind of big sculpture that involved welding, for a shopping mall. I didn’t go into the obvious thing about Joy, because Lily’s not an idiot. But it bothered me. A lot.
Joy Hardy was a virtual clone of Maida Rosewood, only she was couple of inches taller, a few dress sizes thinner – maybe the size Maida had been at her age – and over twenty years younger.
Chapter 10 – You Call That Art?
While we stood gazing upward, Joy informed us that it would be painted prison-jumpsuit orange when it was finished.
We nodded, speechless, and tried to picture it in a shopping mall. You know, with chi
ldren around.
After having everybody who mentioned Carmen’s studio-home call it a shack, (I think roaches were even mentioned), I was pleasantly surprised when we arrived at her house. It was one of those cinderblock bunkers that dot the roadside along the outskirts of town. It faced State Route A1A and had a view of the ocean across the street. Those houses didn’t look like much, but they were tough in the face of hurricanes and didn’t corrode in the salt air, except around the hinges and handles.
Land like the piece that the house was on used to be dirt-cheap not so very long ago – the subject of a whole generation of Florida land-swindle jokes – but anything with a view of the ocean now commanded a six or even seven figure price, and the houses already on them were referred to as tear-downs. I wondered if Carmen owned the land, and then remembered she’d mentioned paying rent. Too bad. She could have sold that little patch of sand and scrub for a fortune and built herself a primo galleria somewhere in the swamps west of there.
Adjacent to the house and connected by a lattice breezeway was a wooden structure that had to be the studio. It was like a medium-sized barn, big enough for several tractors or a combine, or generous workspace for an artist or two.
As we all got out of our cars, Lily and I looked the property over.
“Did you pick the color of the house?” she asked Carmen. “I love it.”
Carmen nodded. “Picked the color and painted it myself. My landlord let me do it in lieu of a month’s rent.”
It was an icy-clean turquoise with a shingle roof that was no particular color now, whatever it had been in the long-long ago. Like most of those homes, the only color accent was the front door, and Carmen had chosen coral, in a light tint so fresh it seemed creamy.
“Well, it looks like an ideal place,” I said, looking at the roomy studio and the beautiful view.
“It is,” she said in a sinking voice. “Grant loved it too, once he saw it. I kind of thought that once they moved into Tropical Breeze, he’d come check on my work more often. Maybe even join me. There’s plenty of room for two artists to work, and it’s closer than his old studio north of here. And he wanted an ocean view.”
“Palmetto Street doesn’t exactly have an ocean view.”
“Maida insisted on being in town. She wasn’t the kind of person who could thrive in a place like this, no matter what the view was like. She was definitely a people person, and in a disconnected place like this, you need to be able to keep yourself busy so you don’t go crazy. Left alone, Maida didn’t know what to do with herself. She needed an audience.”
Joy had walked ahead of us around the house and behind the studio, and now Carmen led the way in the same direction. The house itself, apparently, was not interesting to anybody. We headed straight for the studio and walked behind it.
There in the merciless tropical sun, looking hard and angry, was what I can only describe as a heavy-metal war machine, industrially ugly, with rows of big fat rivets. Its build suggested the kind of thing Medieval knights called a siege machine.
The word for it came to me out of some dim memory of a history book, and I said, “Trebuchet,” still staring up at the thing.
Joy looked at me sharply. “That’s what Grant said when he saw my drawings. I had to ask him what a trebuchet was, and when he explained it, I nearly smacked him. I’m calling it, The Armor Plating of Our Peace.”
“Uh . . . .” I stopped. I had no words.
Lily said, “Armor of . . . peace?”
Coming down to the level of the philistines around her, Joy explained. “It represents a visualization of the barriers within society that keep us protected, the things we take for granted in peacetime, without ever wondering how they work. This shows that they are intricate and powerful, if invisible, and if they break down, we can be crushed.”
“Oh, I get it,” I said bravely. “Like police and soldiers, and the rule of law.”
Carmen laughed. “That’s what I said,” she told me, and she looked away from Joy to keep her from seeing the smirk. I inferred that I had said something fatheaded.
“Like the empathy of our fellow human beings. It’s the most powerful force in the world,” Joy said impatiently. “It’s the collective soul of mankind. The love of a mother for her baby. Selflessness. Ironclad courage. Where do you see a war machine? There’s no catapult.”
“Somehow I never visualized love being bolted together with iron rivets.”
After I said that, she was done with me. She stomped off, digging a key out of her jeans pocket and opening the padlock on the studio door with shaking hands. She tried to slam it shut behind her, but the desiccated wood merely quivered on the hinges and looked like it was about to disintegrate.
I turned to Carmen and said, “Oops.”
“Don’t let it bother you. Joy’s a pretentious little bitch,” she said. “She only got that commission because her daddy knows somebody at the holding company that runs the mall. They’ll probably stick it in back of the parking lot and put a cell tower over it. She doesn’t even need the commission – at least, she doesn’t need the money. She should have left it for some starving artist out there who needed the job.”
“If you don’t like her, why are you sharing your studio with her?” Lily asked, coming in closer to whisper in our tight threesome.
“Rent, baby,” Carmen said. “She pays the rent, at least as long as she’s here working on that mess. Even though I’m tired of looking at it, I’m hoping this sucker is going to take a long, long time.”
“Well,” I said, “what I really came to see was your own work. Is it in there?” I asked, looking tentatively at the shack.
“Actually, while she’s been whacking at things with clawhammers in there, I’ve been working on the back porch of the house. It’s enclosed, and there’s plenty of light. And,” she added with a sidelong look, “it’s quieter. No welding or whining. Come on.”
* * *
“Oh,” I said, and I had to stop in my tracks. As unexpected as Joy’s monstrosity had been, Carmen’s paintings took me to the other extreme. For a woman who stomped around in whatever was at the end of the bed and a pair of flip-flops, Carmen was painting exquisite things.
“I’ve gone from one end of the spectrum to the other,” she told us, gazing at the various canvases and panels set around the lanai porch. “From Abstract Expressionism to almost a Kitchen Sink approach. Sort of Contemporary Impressionism. My father and I used to have big fights about the direction I was taking. It was like he was outraged that I was finding my own way and not copying him. He was here, looking over my work, a little while before he died, and we had a huge blowup. He just came in like a wildman and began verbally trashing everything I was doing. He said it was all derivative; he even said I was betraying him. But I can’t help myself. I keep going back to it. Whatever Grant wanted of me, I think it’s just . . . what I’ve got.” She shrugged. “I may as well go with it.”
“I think it’s brilliant,” I said.
“Oh, it’s tremendous,” Lily said. “Don’t try to force yourself to change.”
“A door,” I said, moving toward a canvas that had been set up against a support of the lanai screen. “Look what you’ve done with just a door.”
“An interesting juxtaposition of doors,” Carmen said. “It’s inside the house. One day the light was hitting them just right, and I dragged my easel inside and started painting like a savage. I had it down in less than two hours. It’s been accepted in a juried art show in Ocala. We’ll see how it does.”
“And what’s this?” Lily asked, looking at something laying flat on a worktable. It was a vision of an underwater world, rich with saturated blues and greens and full of wriggling lifeforms.
“Something for the tourists,” Carmen said with a shrug. “It’s a technique called ‘emerge,’ where 3-dimensional clay figures come through the surface of a painted background. These sell well in the tchotchke shops on St. George Street.”
“I can see why.”
“Adam likes them,” she said in a controlled voice. “He wants a couple for his new gallery. At least they’re not derivative. I haven’t seen anybody else doing anything like them.” Her tone suggested she was holding back, emotionally. Carmen, I realized, was not used to having encouragement.
I had wandered back to the painting of the doors. It held my attention in a strange way. “How much do you charge for something like this?” I asked timidly.
Coming back beside me, Carmen said, “I don’t think I can part with that one, even after the show. I have the subject right inside my own house, and it’s static – not something that’s going to die, like flowers – but no matter how I try, I’ll never capture it the same way again. You can never recreate a painting, really.”
My eye wandered over to a canvas with a juicy-looking handful of very red flowers in a transparent blue Mason jar. Unlike the door painting, it was just plain pretty. Drops of water sliding down the outside of the jar seemed real enough to touch. Carmen noticed me looking at it and offered it to me for fifty dollars.
“Sold,” I said. “Is the paint dry?”
“It’s acrylic. It’s been dry since about an hour after I painted it. You can take it with you.”
I paid her with two twenties and a ten, then picked it up – it was only ten inches square – and carried it with me as Carmen showed us the rest of the house.
It wasn’t awful and it wasn’t wonderful, and the first advice a real estate agent would have given was, “gut the kitchen.” But everything was in perfect working order, and good enough for somebody who had a different set of priorities.
We had reached the point where it was time to go, and we had all avoided the subject of Maida the whole time. Lily and I couldn’t leave without expressing our regrets, but before I could get just the right words, we had two interruptions: Joy came into the house, and Uncle Hank came in right behind her.