1 Portrait of a Gossip

by Melanie Jackson

  Portrait of a Gossip

  by

  Melanie Jackson

  Version 1.1 – April, 2012

  Published by Brian Jackson at KDP

  Copyright © 2012 by Melanie Jackson

  Discover other titles by Melanie Jackson at www.melaniejackson.com

  This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents either are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events or locals or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

  All rights reserved, including the right of reproduction in whole or in part in any form.

  Chapter 1

  Juliet Henry thought it good that she hadn’t killed herself the night before since the day had turned out so lovely. Not that there had been anything deliberate about her near demise, but she shouldn’t have been out driving in that beastly storm when flash floods were a possibility. Now she would have to have someone clean the mud out of her car before she could use it again. Her neighbors had had better sense than to try to get down to White Oaks for the opening of the new gallery, and that included the featured artist, Raphael James, whose paintings were in the finest galleries in San Francisco and New York. He didn’t need to display at the White Oaks Emporium. This was just noblesse oblige, throwing the local dog a bone. A very nice bone that Juliet had wanted to see.

  On the upside, the storm had scoured the sky blue. There wasn’t a cloud anywhere and the limitless light was as clear on earth as it was in heaven, or so she believed. Only the hawks would know for certain and they weren’t talking. If she decided to paint it she would have to break out the ultramarine blue she usually reserved for lupines.

  Harvey Allen’s alleged feline, Marley, had fallen asleep on the stack-stone wall about six feet from her easel in a patch of early sun. Possibly he was gathering strength for his second effort to lure her into feeding him. He was covered in soft white petals fallen from the aging apple tree, the last holdouts that had resisted the storm but were ready to give themselves up to the sun and intermittent, gasping breeze of morning as it climbed up the draw. Only a few tufts of orange fur sticking out of the white fluff suggested that the largish lump was in fact a cat and not another rock.

  Come to think of it, Marley’s presence so early in the morning was a little odd. Neither Harvey nor Marley were early risers, though at least Marley never presented himself in public with bloodshot eyes and breath smelling of whisky when he deigned to join the other residents.

  The relationship between the man and the cat was not an expected one, and Juliet had decided that Harvey fed the cat so that he could be seen to have some redeeming feature, and of course Marley was in it for the food. But is seemed obvious to her that the relationship lacked emotional conviction on both sides and Marley would move house if he got a better offer.

  She had thought of making that offer though she had never owned a cat. Marley was fond enough of Juliet, or at least her tuna fish sandwiches which she packed on days when she was painting, to not be put off by the smell of turpentine or her favorite Siena red paint. Though Juliet was likewise warmhearted toward Marley and enjoyed his company when she worked, she had no fondness for his human landlord and therefore withheld offers of adoption which would cause rancor and perhaps retaliatory snooping.

  Her low opinions of Harvey Allen’s morals and personality were not unique, though he had not aroused her to speechless fury as he had so many of her neighbors. Perhaps because she hadn’t been there long enough for him to discover anything about her.

  There were things to discover though, and she knew that he might manage the feat someday no matter how discreet she was. Harvey was a professional gossip.

  Normally he would not have been allowed inside their little artists’ colony, but Harvey Allen had decided to write a book. No one was sure what it was about; a collection of his Elvis sightings or alien abduction stories from the rags he wrote for was one guess. It didn’t much matter what he was writing about. By becoming a book author, Harvey had the right to rent one of the small studios and move into the artists’ compound known as Bartholomew’s Wood.

  He was a fly in the otherwise perfectly smooth ointment of her new life. And, in spite of his presence, Juliet remained steadfast in her conviction that this was the right place for her to be. It was a marriage of old-fashioned values and basic modern comforts.

  Juliet shook her head, uncapped her paint, and began mixing colors. The tricky part was not accurately mixing the red earth tones all around her. It was doing it in a way that wasn’t flat and cliché. She liked representational art, but had her desire simply been to document what was there, she would have used a camera. Which she still had. Several of them, most small and undetectable to the average eye. They were a souvenir from her days at the very private, very secret think tank of the NSA and a boss who gave her “toys” for her birthday instead of flowers.

  There had been both relief and frustration when she took early retirement. Juliet was good at solving puzzles, and her boss knew it, but many of her coworkers were uncomfortable around the woman who could “see over horizons.”

  Juliet preferred to think of her gift as having moments of forensic intuition. There was much less melodrama that way. But however you described it, she had had a talent for seeing what was below the surface situation, noticing patterns, seeing the anomalies. The lies. Most people don’t want to be around someone who could look through their lies, especially the ones they told themselves in moments of rationalization.

  Of course, there are others for whom lying is a coping mechanism, a gospel even. Lying on admission forms, lying on résumés, lying to the IRS. Hell, lying on their online dating profiles while lying to their spouses about being busy working overtime. And almost nobody—except the wronged spouse—was shocked when it happened. The consensus these days was that everyone lied—large companies, large churches, small countries, politicians of every stripe. Lying wasn’t a big deal anymore, not a deadly sin.

  And these minor lies had to be sorted through to find the really important lies—the ones masking persons whose hidden plots were of political or religious violence. And it wasn’t easy to disprove the work of a master deceiver once it was accepted as established truth. Big lies had to be found, traced, and discredited in one news cycle.

  There had been unrelenting pressure. Every day was like spinning plates. Even if you were good, eventually something would crash and then there was a terrible mess and pointing fingers, because in her division there was no acknowledgment of the reality that sometimes shit just happened.

  A squirrel dashed by, leaping from the apple tree to one of the white oaks a good eight feet away. He looked like a little old man in a tatty fur coat running after a bus. Clearly he was bent on death but managed to make the leap anyway. More blossoms fell as he scrambled away down a laden branch. The petal mound shifted and Marley lifted his head to look at the squirrel’s fleeing tail. It was an exceptionally broad head, almost bulldog-like, and his eyes might have been called malevolent. They might equally have been called gold by someone less imaginative.

  “Good morning again,” Juliet said. “You are up and about at an early hour.”

  The cat said nothing, just closed his eyes and rested his heavy head back on the wall.

  “Reeow.”

  “What were you doing last night—haunting some speakeasy? Carousing with lady cats of low morals?” Juliet asked.

  It was not surprising that speakeasies should come to mind. Yesterday was everywhere around her. No new buildings had gone in since the 1930s and some were older than that. The wiring had been replaced a few years ago along with the weather stripping at the insistence of the fire marshal
because while everyone liked the authentic 1930s architecture, no one liked seventy-year-old wiring. Juliet had also installed a water softener. The well water used by the compound was very hard and left lime deposits in the toilet and also in one’s hair and laundry, which was unacceptable. If she wished to bathe with pumice she would purchase some.

  The bungalows were of a strange design, built with small living spaces so that there was room for a large studio where the artists might work. Few windows were installed in the bedrooms and kitchen. The glass was all reserved for the working spaces. They were staggered so the view was obstructed and each house was built so that the roof of the lower one came no higher than the floor of the home above it. From the parking lot at the base of the colony, the Wood was just a huddle of shake roofs, poking out of the trees and boulders. From above, it looked like a ski slope that some intrepid snowboarder could negotiate with ease.

  The compound had also been fenced in the 60s to keep out the deer, and the mountain lions that followed them. Or so the official story went. Juliet suspected it had really been fenced to keep out people who weren’t artists, i.e. the rest of the world, which had discovered the nearby town of White Oaks and were using it to tune in and turn on. There had also been an accident up on the promontory when a turned on person fell into the river.

  Established in the early 20s, the compound was built on the side of a mountain in one of the geologic folds that was usually clear of fog, but which was unfit for logging or agriculture and therefore could be had cheaply back in the day. Later the locals fought plans for development in the courts and legislature and had won most of their battles. They liked trees in their forests and fish in their streams and air that didn’t smell like anything manmade. White Oaks and environs would not be getting any high-rise urban developments. Consequently, what homes there were had become quite valuable and Juliet was fortunate to be accepted into the art colony where bungalows were rented at rates that starving artists could afford.

  The mountain village was terraced and stitched together by a switchback trail where clumps of lupines grew, bursting blue for a few weeks and then fading to a tawny mountain lion color. That was what Juliet was painting that morning, the flowers almost unbearably showy and yet lovely for being completely accidental in their placement.

  A man stepped out of his cottage and admired the day, doing a modified sun salutation while holding a cane. Seeing Juliet on the terrace above him he raised a hand in greeting.

  “Good morning, Mickey,” she called to the graying scarecrow whose height made him easily identifiable even at distances.

  The first terrace of bungalows was reserved—in theory—for the elderly, or tenants with physical infirmities. One of the current residents was Mickey Shaw, a potter who used a cane but was otherwise quite stable and hearty and always affable.

  “Good morning, Juliet. Capturing God’s splendor?” Mickey was also religious, or at least spiritual. Juliet did not mistake painting for High Mass, but knew that it brought her closer to the Divine than anything else did and didn’t begrudge him his higher feelings or occasional joint of marijuana.

  “It would be a shame to waste such a day,” she agreed politely, without discussing whether it was God’s or Nature’s splendor she was attempting to paint.

  “Greeting cards, or t-shirts?” Mickey asked, knowing that she supported herself with a couple small commercial endeavors. Unlike some, he did not sneer at work that put food on the table. He had minimal ego. Like Juliet, he took his work as an artist seriously, but never himself.

  “Both.” If she was lucky. The local souvenir shops would probably take both once she transferred the design onto her computer and then onto greeting cards and wearable textiles, like sweatshirts, t-shirts, and aprons.

  “Carry on then,” he said and raised his hand again. “I need to get some coffee in me. These days I’m no good without it.”

  It did not surprise Juliet when Raphael James emerged soon after. He was using his lightweight, manual wheelchair that morning, meaning that he had no intention of leaving the colony. Raphael painted mainly watercolors which he sold for ridiculous amounts of money in galleries all over the west coast, but he also did religious paintings in the style of his namesake. While other artists might lust after Fulbright or Guggenheim grants, Raphael James did not. He did not have Blue Periods, or Red Periods, and he did not show scorn for lesser artists. He did not use gimmicks to gain attention, fostered no cults of personality. Great artists could make their way in the world without them. The idea that he would need any help to achieve his goals was met with silent disdain. Juliet wondered if he had been that way before the wheelchair. She suspected that he had, and any pity she might have felt for his limited mobility was blasted away like dry leaves before a storm wind the first time she met him. There was something a little frightening about true greatness.

  What baffled her was why he—and the other really successful artists—chose to live in this colony. It wasn’t convenient for those with physical handicaps and surely the privacy it offered was not enough incentive. Maybe it all came down to superstition. Many artists would do anything to keep their muses happy. Juliet wouldn’t know about that. Divinity had not condescended to visit her yet. She did comfortable art that anybody could live with and sold it at comfortable prices.

  Raphael was not inclined to shouting, which he considered vulgar, but he did wave at Juliet, who waggled a paintbrush in return. As usual, he seemed distracted and one got the feeling that whatever thoughts he was entertaining, it would be best not to disturb them. She would only speak if spoken to.

  Resigned to having people in her peripheral vision for a time, she tried to ignore Carrie Simmons, the rubber stamp designer who also did lovely charcoal drawings, as she sped by in her walker, an affectation that Juliet was certain she didn’t need but had adopted so that she could have one of the first terrace cottages. Carrie didn’t care for exercise. She also saw life, at least the part that was witnessed by others, as performance art with her in the starring role. Blonde, plump, a vacuous version of Jayne Mansfield, and because of all the time she had devoted to perfecting herself cosmetically and surgically, she would be pretty even on the back end of life. That she was a talented designer, no one could argue, but Juliet suspected that she was also quite stupid when it came to reading people. Or maybe she read them and simply didn’t care what they thought because her needs and desires always came first.

  Juliet had tried to see the good in her, but seemed to have a genetic inability to like people of this kind. She would have been hard-pressed to explain this antipathy to anyone else though, since Carrie was generally liked and her habits considered amusing rather than annoying.

  Juliet’s stomach rumbled and she supposed that she could join her neighbors in the community dining room where the caretaker, Robbie Sykes, always laid out a kind of coffee bar and continental breakfast. But the light was so perfect and the morning still so refreshingly cool that Juliet opted to keep working.

  Jake Holmes limped by. Since he was usually dashing about, preparing for some marathon or hiking expedition, Juliet had to assume he had injured himself. He didn’t see her and she didn’t call to him.

  The last person to make an appearance was the redheaded Dr. Darby O’Hara. Darby walked without aid, but her clubbed feet made her slow and ungainly. The retired veterinarian’s upper body was well developed because she was a sculptor who worked in both wood and stone. She was often called in to do restoration work in historic houses. She liked the work but always stipulated that she needed to have time to work alone. She was no more interested in expressions of pity than Raphael was.

  “Good morning,” Darby called in her low, almost masculine voice when she noticed Juliet perched on her stone. She was wearing a bright yellow sweater that looked like it had had a head-on collision with a parrot. The sheep who had donated the wool would never recognize it. The poncho-sweater was one of Rose Campion’s expensive creations which the artist her
self would never wear, preferring to dress like a pale shadow.

  “Good morning,” Juliet agreed and then shook her head as Darby clomped away. There was talent in the compound and drive enough for a hundred artists, but so many of them were aging and the other half gone to wrack and ruin. She was on the young side of the bell curve and she’d seen half a century.

  Marley stirred again and this time decided that he should rise and investigate Juliet’s painting. He poised a paw above the corner where the paint was wet.

  “Get your fur in that and you’ll be sorry,” she warned as the cat peered around the edge of the prepared canvas to stare at her. “In fact, shouldn’t you be getting home for your breakfast? Surely Harvey is up by now.”

  Unless Harvey was drunk again and wasn’t up to feeding his cat. That could be the case. His lights had been on all night. She had noticed them going on quite early the day before. In fact, for a while it had looked like there were two porch lights on, but that was probably just an illusion caused by the panes of glass in the studio window. There was a second bungalow up there, but a falling tree limb had damaged the porch roof and it hadn’t been used for years.

  Marley mewed, doing his best to look starved and pitiful.

  “It won’t work,” Juliet said. But it did actually work. And since Harvey’s house was only about fifty feet above her and he kept Marley’s kibble in a plastic trash can outside the front door, Juliet decided to take a break and get her feline friend some breakfast. She stuck her brush in a jar of turpentine.

  “Coming?” she asked the cat, who at first seemed uninterested but then decided that, yes, perhaps he was interested enough to bestir himself.

  Chapter 2

  All along the steep, winding way, blue and white lupines edged the steep path, swaying sometimes as the wind pattering along behind her batted at them and pulled on Marley’s plumelike tail. The trail had steps of sorts, uneven stone ledges and outcroppings with minimal dressing, cracked in places and spaced at odd heights. Juliet’s gaze was sensibly directed downward at her feet until she heard a deep caw almost directly overhead.