Palatino for the Painter

by Jessa Archer

  “You weren’t the only one. Everyone said I was her favorite, and my papers still looked like a battlefield.”

  “Well, okay then,” he said, pushing himself out of his chair. “Time for a little payback. Even if the paintings are absolutely perfect, we have to come up with at least one negative thing to say. For old times’ sake.”

  “You are so bad, Ed Shelton. I am not going to speak ill of the dead. Or…at least, not of dead people I actually liked.”

  He clucked his tongue. “Fine,” he teased. “Leave all of the hard work for me.”

  Someone, probably Kenneth McBride, had sealed the carton with packing tape since I’d seen it in the garage. I pried the edge loose and unwrapped the box. The first painting I pulled out was the one with the weeping willow that I’d seen the day before. I laid it flat on my desk, and Ed stared down at it with obvious interest.

  “Okay, this whole saying-something-negative thing might be a little tougher than I thought,” he said. “This is good. But…I’m going to go with the fact that she got the color of the tree wrong.”

  I snorted. “Don’t tell me you’re one of those purists who thinks every tree has to be painted green.”

  “Nope. I like expressionism as much as the next guy. I’ve got a Van Gogh print in my bedroom.”

  “Really?”

  He grinned at the hint of skepticism in my voice. “Maybe. Guess you’ll have to check it out one day. Is it really that hard to believe, though? You were expecting what? A black velvet painting of Elvis? Or maybe dogs playing poker?”

  I blushed. “No. I didn’t think that at all.”

  “You lie like a dog, Ruth Townsend,” he said, laughing. “I’ll have you know that I am a complicated man. I have many layers. However, in this case, our dearly departed English teacher was clearly painting a very specific tree, not simply one that sprouted from her imagination. I drove past it last week, and it was not blue.”

  I peered more closely at the canvas. “Okay, you lost me.”

  He pointed to the top of the painting. Off in the distance, behind the tree, was a structure—blurry but still recognizable.

  “That’s the old Torrance place,” I said. “I haven’t driven out that way since I moved back. Is it still standing?”

  The Torrance House had once been a bed and breakfast, with a back deck that overlooked the river. It was upscale, and not the sort of place I’d ever been while in high school, although I knew a guy who waited tables there. And a lot of kids, Wren included, had picked up occasional jobs as servers for weddings and special events.

  “The house and the tree are still standing,” Ed said, “although I suspect both of them are nearing the end. That willow was full grown when I was a kid, and they don’t usually last more than seventy years or so.”

  He propped the canvas, which was about four feet square, against the wall behind my desk. “And that’s really the only even remotely negative thing I can come up with. You do the next one.”

  I narrowed my eyes at him teasingly, although I hadn’t looked at the other paintings, and they might not be nearly as good as that one. Cassie had seen them, but Ed had called with the news from the river just as she’d been about to show me the rest.

  When I pulled the second one out of the box, my heart leapt into my throat.

  “Lover’s Leap.” The words were barely a croak.

  Ed took the picture from me, which was probably a good thing since it was starting to give me a very bad vibe. I stepped back a few paces and sank down into my chair.

  “You’re right,” Ed said. “Only…it’s different up there now. Like I mentioned yesterday, we put a metal barrier up during my first term as sheriff. That would have been…late nineties, most likely.”

  The painting depicted a small gravel lot with a rope strung across the left side where the land ended and the night sky began. On the right side of the canvas, however, the rope was broken, with the loose end curled on the gravel like a dark snake. Beyond the rope, the river was tranquil and placid beneath the gaze of a full moon. Everything was illuminated by a ghostly white light.

  “Okay,” I told him. “I found something negative to say. This painting is creeping me out.”

  The bell over the door rang at that instant and, as if to prove my point, I jumped hard enough to bump my chair into the desk. It was Wren, carrying a plate of something. This didn’t surprise me. When Wren is nervous or upset, she bakes. I love her way too much to ever hope for her to be sad or worried, but I’m practical enough to admit that her habit is something of a silver lining for her friends when she’s feeling down.

  “You’re just in time for our art show,” I said lightly.

  Wren set the platter, which smelled like her cream cheese brownies, on top of one of the other desks and then joined us. She was frowning slightly, probably because she could tell that something had me on edge.

  “What’s up?” she asked, sitting on one of the other desks.

  “Look at that.” I nodded toward the canvas. “Tell me what you see.”

  She tilted her auburn curls to the right. “It’s definitely the Freedom River. Probably somewhere—” There was a long silence, and then she looked back at me. “That’s Lover’s Leap. I didn’t look very closely when Cassie showed it to me yesterday, mostly because I really hadn’t thought about that place in years. But now that it’s fresh on my mind, it’s pretty obvious. And I guess I know why you looked so shaken when I walked in. It’s kind of…creepy, given what we’ve just learned.”

  Even though the picture gave me the shivers, I leaned in closer to examine it. “That’s where we were parked yesterday,” I said, pointing to a tiny spot on the other side, far below the cliff, with its seventy-foot drop to the river below. But my eye was drawn to something else. Something in the water.

  The river wasn’t as calm as I had originally thought. Near the middle, a hint of green shone just below the surface right where Tanya’s car had been found.

  I reached out and tapped the green spot, even though I really didn’t want to touch the canvas. At this point, I didn’t even want to look at it anymore. “Please tell me that’s not what I think it is.”

  Ed let out a slow whistle. “Okay. Exactly how you did you end up with these paintings?”

  “The box was in Lucy McBride’s garage,” Wren said. “With Ruth’s name on the side.”

  “But neither of you knew that before you went to the estate sale, right?” Ed asked.

  “No,” I told him. “I didn’t have any reason to think she would have left me anything. The last time I spoke to her was at my parents’ funeral, as she signed the guestbook. We had a nice conversation, but I still got the feeling that she considered me a disappointment for going into journalism. She asked if I was still working for that newspaper, in a rather dismissive tone.”

  Wren said, “I don’t think Ruth was even planning to go to the estate sale, but I was kind of curious, so I dragged her along.”

  We all sat there silently for a moment, and then I pulled the last two canvases out of the box. These were both smaller, maybe half the size of the first two, and both of them looked rushed. The brush strokes were less smooth, and the effect was more of a rough sketch. You could tell they were by the same artist, and they still showed considerable skill, but they lacked the careful composition and execution of the two larger pieces.

  The first one was on a black background. In the center was a misshapen dark-red circle—so dark, in fact, that the color would have been barely distinguishable against the background if not for the thin corona of light at its edge.

  “Looks kind of like an eclipse,” Ed said.

  Wren nodded, meeting my eyes. “A total eclipse. And I think maybe that’s supposed to be a heart. Not…like a valentine, but an actual heart.”

  She was right. It seemed like kind of an odd interpretation. An eclipse of the sun was something that blotted out the sun, so technically the heart should have been in the background. But that wouldn�
��t have made a very striking image.

  The final canvas looked more like a sketch than a finished painting. The focal point was a silhouette of two men against a purple backdrop. One was holding something in his hand—a stick, or maybe it was a knife?—and the other had a red logo of some sort on his back. It looked sort of like an animal’s head, but it was smudged. I pressed my finger against the red splotch. It was still slightly sticky, and my finger came away with a trace of red, almost like I’d pricked myself.

  I could make out the basic outline of the Torrance House and the willow tree in the background. Two other crudely drawn figures, one small and one large, were sprawled on the ground. One of the men still on his feet had his foot aimed to plant a kick near the center of the larger of the two figures on the ground.

  “Wren?” Ed said. “What’s the matter?”

  I had been looking at the canvas, so I didn’t notice her expression change. She was staring at the painting too, but with something close to horror. With a shaky hand, she pointed to the shape in the background. “That’s the Torrance House, isn’t it?”

  “Looks like it to me,” Ed told her. “Why? Does that mean something to you?”

  “Yeah. It’s where two guys very nearly killed my brother back in 1987.”

  ✰ Chapter Nine ✰

  I stared at Wren, mouth open. “James was in the hospital. I knew that. But…you told me he was in an accident.”

  “No.” Wren looked down at her hands, clearly uncomfortable. “I never told you that. The secret wasn’t mine to share, but the one thing I told Gran was that I wouldn’t lie to you or Tanya.”

  She gave a bitter laugh. “Turned out I didn’t have to worry about telling Tanya anything at all. But I left it vague when I told you. I let you assume it was an accident. And you were so busy trying to figure out what happened with Tanya that you didn’t push.”

  “Wait a minute,” Ed said. “I was a deputy, starting in 1984. I don’t remember ever hearing about an assault over at Torrance House that year.”

  “Because we didn’t report it,” Wren said. “Gran swore it wouldn’t make any difference. She was worried about retaliation. So was my dad. That’s why James went to stay with Gran’s sister in Chattanooga the next fall. Finished his last two years of school over there.”

  Wren and James had been raised by their dad, who was an Army medic. That was one reason Wren decided to enlist after high school. But the situation in Panama, where her dad was stationed, wasn’t entirely stable, and he’d decided it might be a good idea for Wren and her brother to be in one location for high school. That’s why they’d moved in with Gran, their dad’s mom, the year Wren began ninth grade.

  “I’ll tell you what I remember,” Wren said. “It’s not breaking any promises at this point, because like I said, I told her I wouldn’t lie if you asked. Anyway, as you already know, it was the same night Tanya disappeared. You and I were at that party down at Jolly’s. Some July Fourth thing someone threw together last minute. Do you remember how lame it was?”

  I closed my eyes and let my mind drift backward. “Yes. No one brought ice, and we had to drink hot beer. Only a handful of us showed up. We were waiting on Tanya, otherwise we’d have bailed earlier.”

  Wren nodded. “We were going ghost hunting or something like that. I was supposed to work that night. There was a big Fourth of July thing at Torrance House. But I didn’t really need the money, since I had my enlistment bonus coming, and there weren’t too many more nights that the three of us would have to spend together. So I asked the manager if James could take the shift. He didn’t care, as long as he had enough bodies on hand to pass out the shrimp and chardonnay. Anyway, Tanya never showed up at the party, so we went home. I remember dropping you off and then pulling up in front of my house. It was way late, and the house was dark, which didn’t surprise me. Gran never lasted much later than ten o’clock, and having worked the parties at Torrance before, I figured James just came home and fell into bed. Cell phones would have been a huge help that night. When I got inside, I saw Gran had left a note on the fridge. James was in the hospital. I left right then and drove to Maryville, only to find they’d taken him to Knoxville.”

  She sighed and took a deep breath. “Gran was in there with him, so it was half an hour after I got to Knoxville before I knew what happened. Someone rang the doorbell, and she found James on the porch, barely conscious. Gran took one look at him and they headed to the hospital.”

  “How bad were his injuries?” Ed asked.

  “Broken arm. Several broken ribs, and other injuries. Some internal bleeding. They were most worried about how long he’d been unconscious, though. He said he’d blacked out totally. No drugs in his system. Some alcohol—a few of the servers had apparently finished off some of the open bottles of wine during cleanup. That earned James a lengthy lecture from Dad when we finally reached him down in Panama, but it was definitely not enough to cause him to black out. He said that tree was the last thing he remembered seeing.”

  Ed shook his head. “I still don’t get why the hospital didn’t call it in. That’s assault.”

  “He told them he was hiking with friends. Fell. Finally managed to work his way back to the house.”

  “And they believed it?” I said.

  She shrugged. “Probably not. But they didn’t bother to question it officially.”

  “Someone should have called it in, Wren,” Ed said. “We might have been able to track who did it. And we would have tried. The sheriff before me wasn’t a bad guy at all.”

  “I know, Ed. But I wasn’t the one making the decisions. And…I don’t know that I’d have decided any differently if I had been. It wasn’t the first time James had run into problems. Two guys roughed him up the first year we moved to town. James reported it to the principal, like he was supposed to. And the principal and teachers went on and on about was how it was just boys being boys. That the other boys were in the wrong, but it could have been anybody they targeted. Didn’t have anything to do with the color of James’s skin. But we knew that wasn’t true. Gran pressed the point as far as she could without losing her job, and then…she backed off. James didn’t run with a rough crowd. He never got into trouble. His GPA was almost perfect.” She chuckled. “Heck of a lot better than mine. And in the end, Chattanooga was a better place for him anyway. I doubt he’d ever have gotten his scholarship if he’d stayed at a tiny school like Thistlewood.”

  “Did he ever remember who attacked him?” I asked.

  “He said he didn’t, back then. I haven’t asked him about it in recent years. It’s not the kind of thing that makes for pleasant conversation with his wife and kids.”

  Even though I was a little afraid to ask the next question, I had to know. “Did you believe him? When he said he didn’t remember?”

  “I don’t know,” she admitted. “At first I thought he was telling the truth. Over time, though? I wondered. He saw what happened with that first fight. I think it’s entirely possible that he was scared. Maybe he was protecting the identity of his attackers, not for their sake but for ours.”

  As she spoke, a phone rang. All three of us reached for our cell phones before we realized it was the office landline.

  “I thought that was just on your desk as a decoration,” Ed said.

  Truthfully, I was surprised, too. Most of the classified purchases, ad buys, and other business was handled online. I’d received three or four calls on the office phone since I bought the place, and two were wrong numbers.

  I answered. “Thistlewood Star. Ruth Townsend.”

  There was a pause on the other end. I could hear breathing but that was all.

  “Hello?”

  “Ruth?” It was a man’s voice, vaguely familiar. “Is this Ruth?”

  “Yes.” I was tempted to point out that I’d just identified myself, so of course this was Ruth. Instead I just asked, “Who’s this?”

  Another pause. I was growing impatient. “Hello?”

 
; “It’s Bud. Bud Blackburn.”

  I started to ask why he was calling, then I realized they must have identified Tanya’s remains. I shivered, even though I’d known the news was coming eventually.

  “Hi, Bud. Are you okay?”

  “Can you come to the house?” His voice was deep but oddly childish.

  “Sure. What’s wrong?”

  He sniffled, and that’s when I realized that he was crying. Now the pauses on the other end made sense.

  “Bud? What’s going on?”

  What he said next wasn’t anything I’d expected.

  “It’s my mom, Ruth. She’s dead.”

  ✰ Chapter Ten ✰

  When someone calls and asks you to come over because a family member has passed away, you tend to assume that they dialed 911 first. But when I pulled to a stop in front of the Blackburn house, I found the driveway empty except for the old truck that had been there the previous day. Bud’s, I assumed. No first responders, no sirens and lights, no curious neighbors standing on the sidewalk.

  That’s when it occurred to me that Mrs. Blackburn had already been taken away. Bud hadn’t said when she died. There was no reason that he would have called me immediately. It’s not like I was close to his mother. In fact, she had come quite close to telling me where to go and precisely how to get there the day before.

  And now she was dead. It didn’t seem possible. I had just seen her. She was upset, sure, but she’d seemed healthy enough. As I raised my hand to knock, I half expected to see her standing in the doorway again, as she had been the day before.

  I knocked on the door four times. Waited and listened, but all I could hear were the birds chirping. It was a bit cooler this morning, with a few clouds in the sky, but the weather feed on the Star’s website this morning predicted it would be hot and muggy by mid-afternoon. I knocked again and was about to give up when the lock clicked and the door creaked open. Bud looked even worse than he had the day before. His black T-shirt was inside out, he hadn’t shaved, and his face was ghostly pale except for dark pockets below his eyes.