Romancing the Brush: An Austin, Texas Art Mystery (The Michelle Hodge Series Book 3)

by Roslyn Woods

  “So Shell was left alone?”

  “I believe so, and the two men were not on good terms with each other at the time.”

  “So she would have left.”

  “Maybe that was why she left.”

  “I’ve gotta talk to Billie.”

  “Yes. I think I’d better talk to him, too.”

  Dean called Billie to ask when he had seen Shell last.

  “We saw her last night, but we’re in the middle of dealing with these people at the memorial right now—”

  “She’s missing, Billie!”

  “You don’t think she’s just avoiding you?” he asked. “She’s been in a lot of pain since you threw her out.”

  “Someone found her wallet at the HEB on Oltorf and Congress. Her car is here, Billie.”

  “Oh, Jesus!”

  “Yeah. We need to know the last minute you saw her.”

  “We?”

  “Gonzalez is here. They’re breaking into her car right now. It looks like all her stuff is here.”

  Billie told him the same thing Gonzalez had said about going to the station the night before, but there was more to tell. “When Leo and I got home, Shell had left us a note.”

  “What did it say?”

  “Just that she would see us at the memorial. And she thanked us, said she’d pick up Bitsy later. That was basically it. What do you think it means?”

  “We think she’s been abducted,” Dean answered, his voice rough. “I’ve gotta call Margie,” he added, and he hung up.

  Dean paced outside the HEB while he listened to Margie’s ringing phone. “Answer, damn it!”

  “Where are you?” Margie asked when she finally picked up. “You just left!”

  “I’m…I got a call. I’m at the HEB on Oltorf and Congress.”

  “Why? What’s going on?”

  “Margie…She’s gone. Someone’s taken her.”

  “Shell? Is this about Shell? What do you mean?”

  Dean was taking a deep breath and trying to process what had happened himself. “I got a call from the HEB. Someone turned in her wallet. So I came down here with Gonzalez and we found her car. Everything’s in it. Her purse. Her phone—”

  “Her phone? Are you sure? This doesn’t make sense!”

  “It does. Billie and Leonardo were fighting like you said. So she was probably going to get a hotel and she stopped at the store. Only she never got back to her car. She dropped her wallet because something happened to her.”

  “Oh no! Oh no! Donald! Donald…” her voice was trailing off and Dean could hear Donald asking questions, maybe trying to help his wife sit down, Dean couldn’t tell.

  “Hello Dean? What are you saying?” Donald was asking.

  Dean repeated what he had told Margie.

  “Should we come over there?” Donald asked.

  “No. They’re going to take her car for processing. I’m to stay here for a while and talk to them. Then I’ll come to you if you’ll be home. We need to get Billie and Leonardo over to your house, too. We all have to talk.”

  Chapter 36

  The first thing she was conscious of was the vague smell of turpentine. She drifted off again, noticing it now and again. The next thing she noticed was her arms. She would have liked to move them, but she was very little concerned at first. There was an odd peace about this place, a calm, and a warmth. She didn’t mind that it was dark. It was a soothing darkness, and she was thinking loving thoughts about everyone she knew.

  She continued to meander in and out of a vague awareness for quite a long time. When she did waken, finally, it was with the startling realization that she truly could not move her arms. She was, in fact, bound at the wrists to the metal frame of the cot on which she lay, and her ankles were bound together.

  When she realized she was restrained, alarm descended on her swiftly. She called out into the darkness. “Help! Someone help me!”

  There was only silence, and she lay struggling against her bonds for a long time in a panic. When she quit struggling, she lay on the bed exhausted and with her heart still racing and her breathing labored. How had she gotten here? Where was she? Her head was foggy. She could hardly remember her own name, and another half-hour of working at her bonds resulted in no loosening of the restraints, but the room where she lay began to come into focus.

  The sun is coming up, she thought.

  She could just see pale light coming in through long, vertical cracks in the walls, and she realized she must be in a building with wood siding. Maybe a shed or a warehouse. The cracks of light seemed to rise up much higher than the walls of a normal house. Not a shed, then. A warehouse, or a barn.

  She tried to remember again. The fog was lifting. My name is Shell Hodge. I live in Austin, Texas with my boyfriend, Dean. Only he’s not my boyfriend anymore. He sent me away. Where did he send me?

  There was a sound. She heard it again. A car door closing. First one door and then another. There must be people coming. She thought of calling to them, but she realized it was very likely that whomever she was hearing were the very people responsible for bringing her here. She closed her eyes and listened. In another half-minute she heard footsteps and a sort of clinking, like dangling keys hitting against a door, and metal on metal as a key was turned in a lock, and she opened her eyes. There was more light all at once. A door had opened. She could barely see it from where she lay, and in a few seconds she saw a man coming into the semi-darkness carrying something. He placed it on a table a few yards from her before he turned around.

  He was wearing a ski mask. Even in the shadows she could see it, and even though she was already terrified, the mask added to her alarm.

  “You woke up,” he said. His voice was deep, almost as deep as Dean’s, but he was shorter. “I was hoping you’d sleep longer.”

  Shell didn’t speak. She stared at the masked man with wide eyes, her heart racing.

  “Can you talk?” he asked.

  “Yes.” She could hardly hear her own voice. It came out husky and rough.

  “You’re going to get dehydrated, I think. I’ve brought you a Coke. I’m going to let you sit up. There’s a toilet over here in the corner and a sink. You can use that while I’m here.”

  He turned back toward the table and she could hear him opening the soda bottle and pouring the drink into a cup. Then he turned toward her again.

  “I don’t want you to be scared. I’m going to undo the duct tape so you can sit up. You’ll have to hold still so I don’t cut you. Okay?”

  “Okay,” she whispered. She still had no voice.

  He walked over to where she lay on the cot and bent over her with what looked like a box cutter. He cut through the tape on her ankles first and unwrapped them. Then he moved up to her left wrist and sliced through the tape right against the metal of the cot’s frame. It was quick. Her wrist was unwrapped and released. Then he walked around to the other side of the cot and did the same with her right wrist.

  “Can you sit up?” he asked after removing the last of the tape and standing up.

  “I think so,” she whispered, trying to sit up on the awkward bed.

  “Do you need help?” he asked.

  “No.” Somehow she managed to sit up.

  “Good,” he said. “You should pee if you can. I won’t be able to stay long.”

  “Where’s the toilet?” she asked, her voice still hoarse.

  “Yeah, it is kinda dark in here, isn’t it? It’s behind the table over there. I’ll guide you to it.” He came over to where she sat on the cot and helped her stand on her bare feet.

  Then he walked, gripping her elbow and guiding her to a little room with no door. She could barely see the toilet in there.

  “I won’t look,” he added and turned away.

  She had to feel her way to it, it was so dark. Her hand found the wash basin beside it, and she only took a minute before she stood up and rinsed her hands. There was no soap, no towel that she could see.

  Comin
g out of the little room she could see him doing something at the table. He looked up at her, but she could tell nothing from looking at that ski mask. When she was lying down he had looked taller. Now she saw that he was a little under medium height and solidly built. He had a strange protrusion under the mask at the back of his neck, probably a ponytail. Too bad the door was right behind him. She might have made a break for it, but running toward him seemed like a bad idea, and she was feeling wobbly.

  “Here’s your drink,” he said, handing her the Coke. There was no ice in the cup, but it was cool to the touch, and she was terribly thirsty. “You need to get some fluid into you.”

  She took a sip. It tasted fine, just very syrupy.

  “Why are you doing this?” she asked, finally finding her voice.

  “I’m not going to tell you the answer to that,” he said. “I don’t intend to hurt you, so you don’t need to worry. This will be over soon. I just need you to wait it out.”

  “I don’t understand.”

  “You don’t need to understand,” he answered. “Just drink your soda. I have to tape you up before I go, and you’re going to get thirsty if you don’t drink something now.”

  It wasn’t going to be hard to drink it down with a thirst like this, but she wanted to stall him, make him tell her something. “There has to be a reason for this.”

  “I didn’t say there wasn’t a reason,” he answered.

  “Have I done something wrong?” she asked.

  “You’re not going to get me to say more.”

  “I’m afraid,” she said. “I’m afraid of being left here. Can’t you just stay and talk to me?”

  “I can listen to you for a little while, if you want to talk. I can’t stay long.”

  “Yes, I want to talk,” she said. She was remembering something she had heard about kidnappers feeling their victims weren’t really people, and she wanted him to know she was a person. “I want you to know some things about me.”

  “Okay.”

  She didn’t know what to say. She just wanted to talk, and she was still influenced by whatever drug she had been given. “My father was killed when I was seventeen. It was terrible. I cried for weeks. His name was Sam. Samuel, actually.”

  “Hmm.”

  “Samuel Hodge. My mother, Eve, was brokenhearted, and she wasn’t really able to be there for me. Have you ever lost someone you loved?”

  “Yes.”

  “It’s awful, isn’t it? And no one gets it if they haven’t experienced it. They say nice things, but they don’t get it, do they? They think they imagine what you’re going through, but they don’t. They don’t.”

  “No, they don’t.”

  “But my mom finally got better. Enough that I was able to go away to school. I’d really been taking care of her since my dad died. I actually went a year to community college in Sacramento, even though I had an art scholarship, because I couldn’t leave her. So I forfeited my scholarship. But then I came to Austin and studied art and worked, and she helped me as much as she could. It wasn’t like I had to do it all myself. Then, when I graduated, she came and lived here, too. She was herself again, not the same as before, but better, and I loved having her here. We were really close. Almost like best friends, only closer. And then she got sick, and she died. So then I was completely alone. Do you know what it’s like to be completely alone?”

  “Yeah.”

  “It took me a long time to come out of the hole I was in after she died. I had one good friend, and she really helped me. She’s still my best friend, and she’s having a baby. She already calls me ‘Aunt Shell’ because she doesn’t really have a sister or mother either, so we’re sort of family for each other—”

  “Finish your drink,” he said.

  “Okay,” said Shell, and she swallowed half of it rather quickly.

  “Tell me about your art training,” he said.

  “Okay,” she answered, “but what do I call you?”

  “Call me...Jack.”

  “Okay. And you call me Shell. My name is Michelle, but nobody calls me that. It’s always been Shell.”

  “Not Shelly?” he asked.

  “No. My dad sometimes called me Shelly Bean, you know, like ‘jelly bean’? But that was just him, and even he called me Shell.”

  “Okay, Shell.”

  “So, Jack, why are you wearing that thing?”

  “For both of us. So we can both get out of this mess we’re in. Drink your soda.”

  She drank down the rest of it, suddenly feeling a strange wooziness coming over her.

  “You’re going to have to lie down on the cot.”

  “Okay, but I thought you wanted me to talk about studying art.”

  “Yeah. Tell me while I put the tape on.”

  “Just don’t do it too tight, because it really hurt before.”

  “It hurt?”

  “Yeah, it felt like blood wasn’t getting to my fingers.” She was making that up. She was hoping he would make the tape looser this time so she could get out of it.

  “Okay, I’ll make it a little looser. Tell me about your art training.”

  “Okay. I always liked to paint, and I was pretty good at it. So the scholarship really encouraged me, but then my dad died and…I’m feeling really weird.”

  “Yeah, that’s the medicine. It’ll help you sleep. It was in your Coke. Don’t worry. Nothing will hurt in a while.”

  Chapter 37

  By the time Shell’s car was being towed, it was already half-past three, and Gonzalez was busy getting the store’s surveillance video sent to the Austin Police Department. As this was happening, Dean was shadowing him and hearing about the direction the case was going to take.

  “I won’t be the officer in charge of this case, Maxwell,” Gonzalez said. “Detective Aquila from Missing Persons will be taking over. There’s overlap, maybe, with the Hall case, and I’ll consult with her, but you’re going to be dealing with both divisions as the search for Miss Hodge progresses.”

  “Right. Okay. Where is this detective? We should be hurrying!”

  “She and her partner are on their way, I’m sure. You’re probably going to need to talk to them, and then I recommend you go home and get some rest. You look beat.”

  “That’s really not likely to happen, Sergeant. I need to be helping to find Shell.”

  “Not in the shape you’re in.”

  “Right Sergeant! Would you go home and take a nap if your wife had been kidnapped?”

  Gonzalez stopped and turned toward Dean with his head tilted. “No,” he answered. “They’re not going to let you help. I can tell you that now.”

  Just then an unmarked car—exactly like the one Gonzalez drove—pulled up and parked just in front of Dean and Gonzalez where they stood in front of the HEB. The woman who got out looked to be in her mid-forties with an olive complexion and a head of black hair pulled into a thick knot at the back of her head. She wasn’t exactly in uniform, but her clothes looked almost like she was. She wore a khaki shirt and navy tie with navy slacks. Her partner wore something similar, but, even seated in the car, he looked a bit heavy. Detective Aquila was slim and wore her clothes well, even if she was all business.

  “Hello,” she said to Gonzalez, and the sergeant introduced her to Dean. She asked a few questions, mainly finding out what was being done with Shell’s car and asking to examine the wallet and hear the details the sergeant already knew.

  “Where were you last night, Mr. Maxwell?” she asked.

  “I was home.”

  “Was anyone with you?”

  “No, just my dog.”

  “I don’t get it. Why wasn’t your girlfriend with you?”

  “One of her partners at the gallery had been killed. She was staying with the other partners for a few days.”

  “And you last spoke to her?”

  “I saw her on Wednesday afternoon at the house.”

  “You talk to anyone on the phone last night?”

 
; “Yeah, my sister called at around six.”

  “Anyone call closer to the time Miss Hodge was last seen?”

  “No.”

  “Okay. I’m going to ask you to remain available.”

  “Right. I will,” said Dean. “What can I do to help?”

  “Stay available. Let us do our job.”

  Dean went directly to Margie and Donald’s house. Margie’s face was red from crying, and Donald looked awfully unhappy. This event wasn’t going to be good for Margie or the baby, but it was out of his control for the moment.

  “You okay?” asked Donald, looking at the face of his brother in-law.

  Dean shook his head. He was shaken, no doubt about that, and adrenaline was pumping through his system and making his heart race. He had no idea how to channel his energy productively.

  “Where are Billie and Leonardo?” he asked.

  “Coming soon, I think. We spoke to them before we left the memorial. Some of the people who came down from Dallas were meeting for a meal somewhere. Billie said he and Leonardo would come over here instead.”

  Just then the Escape pulled up behind Dean’s Jeep. Billie and Leonardo got out and hurried to the porch and up the steps. Dean opened the door and they came in full of questions. There was some talking as Dean got everyone up to date on Shell’s wallet and car, but there was little new to be told.

  “Does anyone know anything? Is there any connection we can figure out that leads to why someone would want to hurt Shell?” Billie asked.

  “Someone wanted to hurt Garrett,” said Leonardo. “Maybe it’s the same person.”

  “But who? Why? What possible motive could there be?” asked Margie.

  “I don’t know,” said Billie, “but since the gallery opened we’ve had a lot of problems. There was Thaddeus Dickson giving us trouble, wanting us out. I couldn’t figure out why he’d changed his mind about the lease. Today at the memorial I spoke with Mary Anne Jenson, the woman who owns the bakery next door to the gallery, and she told me Balcones Developers have bought the building she’s in. They want to build a high rise.”

  “Which would mean,” said Dean, “they want your building, too.”