Painted Truth

by Lise McClendon

  “Doppelgangers. Ghostly doubles.” I set the comic down on the table. I would read it later, add it to my collection. “I need to talk to you about Ray.”

  She tensed, pulling her knees up under the sweater. “What about him?”

  “His paintings. The ones you were showing in the Timberwolf.”

  “I know. They weren’t very good,” she said, frowning. “But I needed something big to help the business. Something that would attract a lot of attention. You should understand that, Alix. It was business.”

  “Is that why you took out the extra insurance?”

  Her eyes suddenly filled. She started to say something, then bit her lip, looking at the ceiling.

  “Talk to me. I can help you. I don’t think you meant to hurt that man in the Timberwolf. But if you don’t tell me what happened, I can’t help you.” I reached out and took her hand. “Please, Eden.”

  “I knew they weren’t Ray’s,” she choked, tears spilling down her cheeks. “But when he approached me I was so desperate. I never thought anybody would get hurt.”

  “The paintings were forgeries?”

  She nodded, brushing her cheek with her sweater sleeve. “You don’t know how I felt when they brought that man out of the gallery. I felt like I had killed him.”

  “Who set it up? The paintings, the fire. Who did it?”

  “Ray. He said he’d take care of everything. He was so nice to me. Took me places. Out to the park, to restaurants.”

  “Who did the paintings, then?” The phony art studio with the dried-up palette and brushes smeared with paint for appearance’ sake—it was a sad coincidence that Ray had died in there. His art was all a fake. It was already dead.

  “Somebody around here, I guess. He wouldn’t tell me.” Her face twisted. “I just wanted everything to be right again, Alix. Like when I started. All my money was gone. I just wanted to

  be a success. I could feel it just out of reach. Right out there but I couldn’t get it.” She hid her face in her hands and sobbed.

  I touched her shoulder. “Drink some tea, Eden. You’ll feel better.”

  She obeyed, then set down her cup with a look of horror. “Will they arrest me now?”

  “I don’t know. Arson is a felony, even if you aren’t the one who lights the match.”

  “Oh, God,” she cried, but the waterworks were depleted. She sat stunned, staring at the dried flower arrangement in the center of the round table, looking very small.

  “Try to help me, Eden. The FBI is making a case against me for Ray’s shooting.”

  She frowned. “What can I do?”

  “Tell me everything you remember about Ray Tantro.”

  THE SUN DAPPLED the asphalt in the Snake River Canyon, trickling through the trees to dry the dew. Minutes before I had been shaking out the kinks at the little store at Hoback Junction. The knot on my head from the tackle in the alley had gone down. The ankle was stiff but functional. The coffee was fresh and hot and just what I needed after sleeping in the backseat of the Saab Sister. I filled her tank and mine and headed south again.

  Eden and I had talked until four. Once we had determined both our necks were in a vise she talked readily, euphoric with confession. I left in the predawn, drove to Wilson to whistle at Valkyrie, give her a nose pat and a hug, then settle in with an army blanket in the backseat.

  Passing through Freedom, I wound now onto the high prairie of Star Valley. I turned at the stoplight and found the Fortney’s place already bustling. Children ran around in the picket-fenced yard in shorty pajamas and diapers, chewing on graham crackers and bananas. One swung fiercely on the swing set while two others chased around, squealing. Little Rosie stood watching it all, sucking on a cracker. When I knocked, the fourteen-year-old boy I had spoken to yesterday answered the door, wearing dirty white pants and a long-sleeved white shirt.

  “Is your father here? Alix Thorssen again.” I smiled apologetically. He left me standing in the open doorway. Wally showed up, tucking in his shirt.

  “Morning. I have some news about the painting. Gloria,” I said.

  “I’m on my way to work. Can it wait?” Wally glanced away as a girl skipped by behind him. “Things are a little crazy around here.”

  “Let me drive you in,” I said. “It’ll only take a minute.”

  It took Wally ten minutes to get out of the house, shouting orders at the older children, then grouping the small ones in the yard to admonish them about good behavior. When he reached the Saab at last, climbing in, he looked beat. His thin face was flushed and sweaty, as if he’d worked his shift already.

  “I think the deal’s a go,” I began, driving as slowly as I dared toward the cheese factory on the other side of town. It was a five-minute drive, tops.

  “I’ve been thinking about that.” Wally squirmed in the seat; his voice registered a tad higher than normal. He stared out the window at the passing houses, as if disinterested in twenty-five thousand dollars. His foot began to tap against the floor mat. “I can’t sell to…to a private buyer. I already offered it to the museum.”

  Something was going on. Wally refused to look at me, nervous tics shooting through his body. “You haven’t made any kind of deal with the museum. I haven’t appraised them yet. Let me handle the Met.”

  He shook his head fiercely. “No. Can’t sell to anybody else.”

  “I understand the ethics involved, Wally. But—”

  “That’s right,” he almost shouted. “Wouldn’t be ethical.”

  “All right. I understand.” I turned the corner as if ice, not cottonwood snow, covered the pavement. “I was going to ask for a letter of provenance from you for the private buyer. But the museum will need one too.”

  Wally’s foot stopped tapping. “What kind of letter?”

  “Provenance. That means where the artwork came from. Where you got it, how and when you got it, any authenticity you can provide on it.” His hands clutched his dented black lunch bucket.

  “I got ‘em from Ray. I told you.”

  “Mmm. And when was this? What year?”

  He paused, then said firmly, “Nineteen eighty-one and eighty-two. Ray was sick the year before and we took him in.”

  I looked in both directions of Main Street and eased the car into the traffic heading south. “When Ray was sick up in Casper, did you take him in?”

  “No. Aunt Esther took care of him.”

  “He had a liver problem?”

  Wally looked at his watch. “Can you hurry? I’m late enough already.”

  “Was he painting in ‘81 and ‘82?”

  “Not when he was sick. Listen, I was supposed to be at work ten minutes ago.” Wally looked a little frantic, like he might get fired or something. I accelerated a little for the last two blocks.

  “Wally, those paintings he gave you weren’t his.”

  He looked at me hard. “Weren’t his? You mean he stole ‘em?”

  “No, I mean somebody else painted them. Within the last year.”

  We were stopped in front of the factory. Wally’s hand shook as he reached for the door handle, swinging the door wide without getting out. “I don’t believe it.”

  “When did you get them, Wally?”

  He blinked hard. His Adam’s apple bobbed. “In ‘81 and ‘82,” he repeated.

  “Couldn’t have. They weren’t painted until last year. Where did you get them, Wally?”

  As if a rocket had fired under him, Wally jumped from the car, slamming the door behind him. I called to him through the open window. “Tell me who did them, Wally, and we can make a deal.”

  He walked stiffly in his dirty white uniform toward the factory entrance. The lunch bucket pulled down his left shoulder, bumped into his knee. As he opened the door he allowed himself a final look back, as if to make sure I was real.

  THE OLD HOUSE showed so many signs of age that it was easy to overlook its fine lines, the graceful porch with gingerbread trim, the fancy shingle work under the pitch of the roo
f. I sat in my car for a few minutes outside Esther Tantro’s farmhouse, letting my imagination add pots of flowers hanging under the porch overhang, flower beds bright and lush, fresh paint in cheerful shades brightening the siding and trim. I wondered if Esther had plans to do any of these things with the insurance money.

  I had stopped in town and made two phone calls. First I called the hospital in Casper, then made a quick call back to Maggie Barlow, my insurance agent friend. She had been scouring records and calling in favors to find out the results of Ray Tantro’s insurance claims. The insurance company had refused payment after the first death of Ray Tantro because it was ruled a suicide. Now, with the second, they were a little baffled but had made motions as if to pay up soon. The beneficiary, as I knew already, was Esther Tantro.

  I was parked in front of her weatherworn house, reading a comic book. I couldn’t imagine that Esther had killed her son for the insurance money. A well-meaning person, loving, full of sorrow. I thought of her in her sunbonnet in the apple orchard, dressed in gingham. Yet, grandmothers in tennis shoes had been known to push their nieces off cliffs.

  I closed the comic book and smoothed down the glossy cover with my hand. There was something so elemental about comics. The good and evil, the clear, bright colors, the endless fight to hold back the dark night. With my last breath I will fight. Death will come yet still I fight on, avenging my brethren, my name, my honor. The hero in his many incarnations, godlike yet fallible, prone to human foibles of greed, lust, vanity.

  Poor Thor had been thrown out of Asgard more than once because of his unruly habit of picking fights with somebody who didn’t pay him enough respect. Loki had banished him, giving his powers to a hapless human. Now Odin searched for his son, shouting at the human Thor: “Thou Art Naught but a Mortal Impostor!!!”

  I set the comic on the seat beside me. Esther Tantro had come down the back stairs wearing a pair of blue pedal pushers and a man’s plaid shirt, the sun hat shading her face. She hadn’t seen me, turning with a pair of green garden gloves in one hand toward the apple orchard uphill behind the house. I jumped from the car, pulling my father’s hunting jacket tight around me in the unexpected cool breeze. Overhead a storm was brewing, clouds darkening half the sky in the west, a violent purple morass.

  I reached her as she turned to walk around the orchard, bypassing the mess of fallen apples rotting on the ground. She heard me and turned, a startled look on her face as she brought up the pruning shears as if as a weapon. Her expression loosened as I stopped and tried to look harmless.

  “Mrs. Tantro. Gardening again?”

  She dropped her arm. “Shouldn’t run up on a person like that. Around here you might get yourself shot.” She turned back in the direction she was headed. I stepped up next to her. “Pruning some of my rosebushes today. I never got to planting my vegetable garden this year. That’s real gardening. Tomatoes, zucchini, and such.”

  “We can’t grow those in Jackson. I mean, if I had a garden, which I don’t,” I said. “It’s warmer here.”

  “A bit.” She looked around at the sky as the wind lifted her hat brim, flapping it. “Going to storm. Ray loved thunderstorms.”

  “Me too. The rain clattering on the roof.”

  We walked silently through yellowing grass, tall and wild. On the left the apple orchard petered out, the trees at the end of the row completely dead. The dead ones were grotesquely beautiful, twisted arms shivering in the wind, gray and barren. On the right the hill swelled, a few native juniper growing in a wash. The rest of the hill was open, covered with clumps of native grass and sagebrush burned in the August sun.

  Esther stopped and contemplated a row of sad rosebushes. There were ten or twelve of them in various fits of decline, thick stems cut neatly with spindly growth and dried buds hanging on. She kneeled down to the one nearest her. Of all the bushes it looked the healthiest, but she began snipping at it, whacking away its limbs.

  After a moment I sat down in the grass next to her. “Did you bury Ray up here?” I said, straining against the wind.

  Esther gave me a quick look, pursed her lips, and hacked off the biggest stem near the earth.

  “He must have died, what, about a year ago? The people at the hospital in Casper said he left AMA—against medical advice. You brought him home to die.”

  She sat back on her heels, her hands in her lap. The pruning tool slipped from her fingers. Her eyes that held so much sorrow already looked up the hill and filled with tears. A loud crack of thunder shook the hillside as the storm neared.

  “I did the best I could,” she whispered. I could barely hear her and leaned closer.

  “I’m sure you did. It was out of your hands.”

  “In God’s hands. He’s in God’s hands now.” Tears rolled down her cheeks and her lip quivered as she sighed. “I did the best I could.”

  “Did someone help you bury him? Up there on the hill?”

  “It was his favorite place. He would sit and watch the storms come in. I would call and call, afraid he was going to get hit by lightning. But he never did.”

  “Who helped you, Esther? Who buried him?”

  “Me and Wally. We buried him.”

  There had to be someone else. Wally didn’t paint those pictures. “And the man who called himself Ray Tantro? Did he help you?”

  “He talked to me. He knew Ray from somewhere, I guess.”

  “Did he paint the pictures they said were Ray’s?”

  “He was a cowboy. Ray had to tell him everything about art. He didn’t know anything. Ray was so weak by then, not eating. And that cowboy kept after him, asking Ray questions till he wore out.”

  She got up then, leaving the pruning shears on the ground, and began walking straight up the hill, her steps long and determined. I followed her, holding her elbow as she faltered when the path got rocky. The wind was vicious near the top, whipping and whirling, lifting Esther’s sun hat off her head and spinning it in the air high above us.

  The old woman stopped at the crest of the hill, at a small flat area where a spindly aspen tree grew, surrounded by sagebrush. The little tree bent to the ground in the wind, then popped up, tiny round leaves quivering. We stood high and exposed, small hills all around us. The thunder rumbled again, and like Esther years before, I worried about lightning.

  The sky was black now. Esther walked over to the small aspen and held the thin trunk in her gnarled hand. Her gray hair flying about her face, she gazed at the ground near its base. It had a different look than the surrounding grasses, with bare dirt and withered plant growth. This was where Ray was buried. The real Raymond Wayne Tantro. The one and only.

  The thunder boomed right overhead and rain spilled from the cloud. The Thunder God spoke. Mortals are not always who they seem. Three human beings had died as Ray Tantro, and all three were indisputably dead. Is the identification of a man so important? Does it make him more dead? The man in the cabin, the man I couldn’t stop thinking of as Ray Tantro, was just a cowboy who did a very good impersonation of somebody nobody knew.

  Now he and Ray had even more in common. They shared the same fate. But didn’t we all? Wasn’t that Thor’s message? I would never forget the face, the dead oceanic eyes, the fingers clinging to life. Who was that cowboy, the only Ray I knew?

  As the thunder rolled again, speaking of distant triumphs and mighty battles, its tears drenching me, Odin spoke.

  Thou Art but a Mortal Impostor.

  20

  WE SAT, DRIPPING, in Esther’s kitchen. She made tea, brought me a towel for my hair. My father’s jacket hung on the back of the chrome-and-vinyl chair, making puddles on the linoleum. Shivering, I scooted closer to the old woodstove as Esther fed it small splits of pine.

  On the way back to the house, I had to support Esther. All her strength evaporated at Ray’s grave, as if she had died, at least partially, with him. But her old house with its worn memories had comforted her through much pain and sorrow, and it worked its small miracles today.r />
  She made me a grilled cheese sandwich in a cast-iron skillet on the woodstove. Oozing with Star Valley cheddar, smeared with Star Valley butter, its sweet odor filled the large kitchen. Very little had been touched in the room since the 1940s. A small refrigerator with a huge chrome ornament like an early Plymouth hummed and rattled in the corner. Chrome-topped counters were scrubbed shiny. Chipped green cupboards screamed for attention. On the window over the sink hung apple-print cafe curtains with dusty red pom-poms.

  The woodstove stood alone across the kitchen from the table that offered a view of Esther’s fallow garden high with thistle. With its porcelain-faced warming ovens above the cooking surface, the stove was a relic that wouldn’t give up. A source of heat and food and comfort, a big black mother.

  Esther’s long gray hair was stringy and wet, pushed behind her ears. She didn’t seem to notice the way her pedal pushers were plastered to her legs, but she had taken off her socks and shoes. Her feet looked swollen. The big shirt steamed, dripping on the floor in a circle around her. I wondered if it had been Ray’s. She turned from the stove, skillet in mittened hand, and set it down on a tile on the table. With the spatula she cut off the crusts of the sandwich and set it on a battered white plate in front of me.

  “Thanks.” I saw no more sandwiches in the skillet. She returned to the stove with the skillet, then sat down to watch me eat. “Here, you have half.” I pushed the plate toward her.

  “No, no, I made it for you. It’s for you,” she said. She set her chin in her hand, elbow on the table, as if exhausted. “I miss cooking for Ray.”

  I took a bite. The gooey cheese coated my tongue. It was delicious and consoling, the way the best food is. Esther brought me lemonade in a big glass, then sipped her tea.

  “Why don’t you go change? You must be cold,” I offered.

  She shook her head. “I’m fine. Don’t worry about an old woman.”

  Her lined face with full cheeks and sad eyes drooped under her wet hair, making her look older. Outside the rain continued, beating against the roof in spurts, angry and loud.