by Anne George
Okay. I backed up and started over again. It was a picture of Mercy painting three pictures which seemed to be of Claire and the twins. Now, why would someone who had come in to tear the place up take the time to do this?
Okay again. It was a message. Mercy wanted the Needham girls dead. But Mercy, supposedly, was already dead, or dying, when this was painted. Wrong message. Or maybe Mercy had come out before the gallery opening and done this. It was possible but didn’t make much sense.
“I’m ready,” Claire called from the hall. “I’ll wait for you outside. I’ve got to get some fresh air.”
“I’m coming.” I reached into my purse, found an envelope, and did a crude sketch of the painting on the back of it. Very crude. I also scribbled a few notes such as “white flower” so I wouldn’t forget.
Claire was sitting on the steps when I came out. “What did you find in there?” she asked.
I told her about the picture and showed her my sketch. “It’s lost a lot in the translation,” I said. “Don’t you want to come look at it?”
She shivered. “I’ve seen more than enough. Lots more.”
“You’re right. You need to get some rest. The police will work on this.”
“I just hope they leave me alone. I don’t have a thing to tell them.” She locked the door and we started toward the car. “How’s your hand?”
“The aspirin’s making it feel better. I don’t think anything’s broken.”
“Well, thank goodness for that.” She tossed an overnight bag into the backseat.
“Claire?” I asked as she started the car. “When Officer Mitchell told us Mercy was dead, you said, ‘They finally got to Mercy.’ You remember that?”
“No, but I have a good idea what I was talking about. There are several people in Alabama who have made a very good living dealing in Outsider art. They buy it for nothing and take it to New York or Chicago. I know Mercy got several threatening calls. They were scared the artists would find out how much their work is really worth.”
“Threatening?”
“Not enough to scare Mercy. She just told them to go to hell. It probably didn’t amount to anything.”
“Probably not.” We rode along in silence for a few minutes. “Do you still have some of your husband’s work?” I asked.
“I have a lot of it. Someday he’ll have a showing at a gallery.”
“What was his name?” I asked.
“Fred. His name was Fred.”
“Fred,” I said. “His name was Fred.” Bonnie Blue, Frances Zata, Mary Alice, and I had just finished a wonderful chicken-and-tortellini salad, a take-out from Vincent’s Market, I thought, until Mary Alice gave the credit to Henry Lamont, her semi-son-in-law, donor to the UAB sperm bank and therefore possible father of her granddaughters, and soon to be graduate of the Jefferson State Junior College School of Culinary Arts.
“And just shot in cold blood driving down the interstate.” Frances shook her head. “I swear, that child’s had more than her share.”
Mary Alice got up, took the dinner plates, and brought in some tiny, flaky tarts and four small plates. “Raspberry,” she said. “Help yourself. Now, who wants regular and who wants decaf?”
“Decaf,” we chorused.
Bonnie Blue groaned as she bit into a tart. “Oh, my. These are so good they could make my feet stop hurting. Henry do these, too?”
“He did it all.”
“You tell Debbie I said marry that boy tomorrow if not sooner.” Bonnie Blue reached for another tart.
Sister’s house looked beautiful. We were eating at a small table she had set up in the den, if you can call such a huge room a den. Through French doors that opened onto a terrace overlooking the whole city, we could see two lighted Christmas trees.
“What are you trying to do?” I asked when I came in and saw them. “Denude the Alabama forests?” She ignored me.
A fire was crackling in the fireplace and the mantel was draped with greenery. She had even set the table with her good Christmas china.
“Where’s Santa?” I asked.
“In his workshop.” She smiled sweetly.
“With Tiffany?” She stepped on my heel.
The evening was what a holiday celebration should be. Good friends, good food, beautiful surroundings. Interesting gossip.
But my hand was throbbing. The Ace bandage called for an explanation so the trip to Claire’s town house was first on the agenda. It took a couple of glasses of wine—in my case, diet Coke—along with Norwegian crackers and a spicy pâté to get through the story.
Bonnie Blue was a wonderful listener. “Damn,” she said when I told about the stuffing ripped out of the sofa. “Damn,” she said at the “whore” above the bed and the gash in the door.
I raised my injured hand and showed how I had dashed at the door. “Damn,” she said admiringly.
“Supper,” Mary Alice said.
But Frances wasn’t ready to let Claire’s story go. “Tell me again about the small painting,” she said as we headed for the table.
“A woman who looks like Mercy Armistead. Long curly red hair. She’s painting three pictures. She’s in a field or something. There’s grass at her feet and she has on a blue robe. The women in the pictures have black hair and they’re lying down dressed in white gowns, holding a white flower, probably a lily. They’re lying on some kind of a platform or raft and there may be a castle in the background. I’ll show you after supper. I’ve got a sketch in my purse.”
“Damn,” Bonnie Blue said.
“I think it’s important. Anybody got any ideas?”
Three heads shaking no was my answer.
“Everybody finished their shopping?” Mary Alice asked brightly, passing the angel biscuits.
It was fifteen minutes later when Frances asked me about Claire’s husband.
“James said it like to have killed her, his death,” Bonnie Blue said.
“She told me today that Mercy and Thurman rescued her. Had her hospitalized.”
Bonnie Blue nodded. “Bless her heart. She’d had enough to throw anybody into depression.”
“She’s lucky she had them to intervene,” Frances said.
Mary Alice came in with the coffee. “What’s the story with Thurman and Claire, Bonnie Blue? You said he’s smitten with her. Did Mercy know it?”
Bonnie Blue reached for another tart. “Lord no, she didn’t know it. Thurman knew which side his bread was buttered on. Which side the money was on, anyway. Mercy’s daddy’s on his last leg and rich as Croesus, and her mama’s toddling on the brink. That Thurman’s no fool. Besides, my sister-in-law Yvonne says it was as much Claire after Thurman as vice versa.”
“Well, scratch Thurman’s motives for killing Mercy,” Sister said. “He lost out on her inheritance, didn’t he?”
“Is his heart very bad?” I asked.
“James says someday he may have to have an aortic valve replaced, but he’ll live to be an old man.”
“Just not a rich one.”
“Sure he will. He’ll find somebody else with money,” Frances said.
We all looked at her in surprise.
“Well, he will. I just hope Claire’s not counting on him too much. She’s been through enough.” She slapped her napkin down in a way that precluded any more discussion. I tried to remember the details of Frances’s divorce or of some subsequent affair, but they escaped me. There was a skunk in the woodpile somewhere, though.
“Y’all ready for bridge?” Mary Alice asked.
We played at the table where we had eaten supper. Bonnie Blue explained to us that she was just a country girl, not knowledgeable in the big-city game of bridge, and we should be patient with her, please. On the first hand, she opened with four no-trump, ended up with a bid of six hearts, and made seven.
“Should have chanced it,” she said. “I’m just too careful.”
That was the story of the bridge playing for the evening. When we were Bonnie Blue’s partner, it was
great. When we weren’t, we were covering our butts.
My hand began to ache badly, and I went into the kitchen to get some more aspirin. Bubba was lying on the counter on his heating pad, and he looked up and yawned. “You feeling okay now?” I asked. He stretched and went back to sleep. I poured a glass of water and looked over the city, wishing every animal such comfort on this chilly night. For some reason, Leota Wood’s coydog came to mind. I put the glass down and went back to the bridge table, where Bonnie Blue was laying down a five-club bid.
“Sister,” I said, “you were going to ask Bonnie Blue about Leota Wood.”
“What about her?” Bonnie Blue was writing another huge number on the score pad under “We.”
Mary Alice picked up the cards to shuffle them. “Well, yesterday afternoon, Mouse and I went out to get Bubba, my cat. He was at your brother’s clinic. Anyway, we went on down the road to Leota Wood’s because we wanted to see her quilts and figured her prices might be better there than at a gallery. And they were. We bought several.”
“I’m scared of that dog of hers,” Bonnie Blue said.
“She came out and got him and shut him up,” I turned to Frances. “He’s a coydog. Did you know there was such a thing? A combination of coyote and dog?”
“Well”—Mary Alice rapped the deck of cards against the table—“she’s got a whole room just crammed with Outsider art. I mean just crammed.”
“Sister thinks she’s a fence,” I added. “She thinks Ross Perry was on his way out there when he was killed and that they’re part of some kind of gang that’s stealing art.”
“Stealing’s what she’s doing, all right,” Bonnie Blue agreed. “But it’s not illegal. She goes down to somebody’s house and says, ‘I’ll give you ten dollars for that painting or that old wooden horse you carved’ knowing full well it’ll sell for hundreds in some gallery. Waves the bill in front of them, and they’re tickled to death. Say, ‘Sure, Leota. I got lots more you can have.’ Daddy’s still selling her stuff. See, he can see that ten-dollar bill in his hand. He can take it in the liquor store and buy him a bottle.” Bonnie Blue spread her hands out on the table. “Folks never had anything, that ten-dollar bird looks mighty good in their hand.”
“So Ross Perry could have been buying the stuff from her and taking it somewhere to sell for a good price,” Frances said.
“Most probably was. I doubt he was the only one, though.”
“Claire said Mercy had received threatening phone calls from people who didn’t want the artists to see what their work sold for in galleries,” I said.
Bonnie Blue shook her head. “You tell some of these folks that you could get a thousand dollars for their work in New York and they’d say, ‘I’ll just take the ten now, thank you, ma’am.’ I know Daddy would.”
“What about the younger artists?” Mary Alice asked.
“Just as bad. See, what they’re doing is fun. They don’t take it seriously. Don’t even think of it as art.”
“Maybe that’s the secret of its charm,” Sister said.
“Most probably. Anyway, that’s what all that stuff was doing in Miss Leota’s house. You can bet on it. Somebody’s getting ready to make a big Christmas haul.” Bonnie Blue picked up the cards Frances had dealt. “Two spades,” she said without even arranging her hand.
“Bonnie Blue,” Mary Alice said, turning over the score pad and picking up the pencil, “give me the first six numbers you think of between one and forty-nine.”
“Eight, fourteen, forty-three, twenty-nine, two, thirty-seven. Why?”
“Are you kidding? The Florida lottery’s up to thirty-six million this week. Halves?”
Bonnie Blue grinned. “Halves.”
We played for a couple of hours until Frances and Bonnie Blue said they had to call it a night since they had to work the next day.
“And you haven’t shown us the sketch of the picture,” Frances reminded me.
I got my purse and unfolded the sketch on the coffee table. I was amazed at how bad it was.
“What’s that bump?” Sister asked, pointing toward one of the reclining figures.
“It’s one of the women who looks like Claire that the woman who looks like Mercy is painting.”
“That’s a person?”
“It was just to remind myself of some of the details.”
Frances and Bonnie Blue were slightly kinder.
“I wish I could see it,” Frances said. “It sounds interesting.”
“Go back tomorrow and take a camera,” Bonnie Blue suggested.
We walked out into a clear, crisp December night. In spite of the lights of the city, the brightest stars were visible.
“There’s Orion,” Frances said, pointing to the three familiar stars almost directly overhead.
“I wonder,” Bonnie Blue said, “about the Star of Bethlehem. Don’t you? What it could have been?”
“Sure I wonder,” I said. “It must have been something amazing for the Wise Men to follow it like they did.”
Mary Alice had walked out to the driveway with us to pick up her paper. “Leaving their wives behind with the kids and dirty laundry,” she added.
“Perchance, verily, to each wife was alloteth a Tiffany.”
“Go home,” she said, swatting me with the rolled-up evening paper.
We exited, laughing.
Fred was sound asleep when I got home, but I was cold and my hand ached. I put on my nightgown and robe in the bathroom and tiptoed down the hall to curl up on the sofa with the afghan. I read Tony Hillerman for a while, something usually guaranteed to keep me awake, but as soon as I began to get warm, the Navajo Nation drifted away.
Ross Perry came and sat at the end of the sofa. I could see the broken capillaries on his face and the shadow of the fern that reminded me of Gorbachev’s birthmark. He leaned back and got comfortable. “Do you know what Claire has always reminded me of?” he asked. “The Lady of the Lake with a lily in her hand.”
I came straight up. The dream had been so vivid, I could still feel his weight against my feet.
“Yuck!” I sat up and pulled the afghan around me.
“What’s the matter?” Fred asked, standing in the door. “You okay?”
“I think I was just visited by Jacob Marley.”
“Maybe it was something you ate.”
“That’s what Scrooge thought.”
“Come to bed, honey. Is your hand hurting?”
I had broken down and told him how I had slammed the car door on it. His immediate sympathy made it hurt worse.
“It’s okay. I’ll be there in a few minutes.”
“Don’t get cold.”
I sat hunched in the afghan for a few minutes and then got up and took the sketch from my purse. A white flower clasped in her hand. A lily. A white flowing gown.
The Lady of the Lake had been part of the King Arthur legend. But what was the story? She could look at the world only through mirrors? And then she saw Lancelot pass by and turned to look at him?
Tennyson. Tennyson had written a poem about her. I got up, still wrapped in the afghan, shuffled to the bookshelf and pulled down Victorian Poetry. It took me just a few minutes to discover that there were two ladies who died for love of Lancelot, had themselves decked out in white robes with lilies in their hands and set adrift toward Camelot. One was Elaine, whose rejection by Lancelot caused a galloping case of medieval anorexia. She was placed by her family on a bier on a barge (God, how had Tennyson gotten away with that!) and sent to Lancelot with a note guaranteed to make him feel like dirt. The other, the Lady of Shalott, whose name just happened to rhyme with Camelot and Lancelot, was much more interesting. She was the one I had remembered, the one who was cursed to watch the world through a mirror. “Sick of shadows,” she turned to face the world, got her own self on the bier on the barge, and headed toward Camelot before she died. Nor did she carry any note. Pale, beautiful, both women drifted, lilies clasped in their hands. Neither woman was the Lady of t
he Lake who had forged Excalibur. But Ross Perry had been out of school almost as long as I had. Give him credit.
I looked at my sketch again. The three women in the paintings were definitely on biers on barges. And a castle was in the distance. And a redheaded woman was painting them. Who was she? Morgan Le Fey? And what did it mean?
Halfway through the third reading of “The Lady of Shalott,” it hit me. “Whoa,” I whispered. “Whoa.” It didn’t matter what the picture meant. It was who did it that was important. And that person could only have been Ross Perry. He was the one who thought of Claire this way. It was as if he had signed his name.
I went into the kitchen and put a cup of water in the microwave for coffee. By the time it dinged, I knew who had killed Mercy and why, why Claire’s town house had been vandalized, and why she had escaped death. There was one piece missing, but the police could handle that. I looked at the clock. Damn. It was too late to call Sister.
Seventeen
The phone’s ringing awoke me. “Good heavens, are you still asleep?” Mary Alice asked. “Who cut up Fred’s banana?”
“Fred can handle his own banana,” I grumbled. “What time is it? I couldn’t sleep last night.”
“It’s nine o’clock. I was just checking on your hand.”
I wiggled my fingers. “It’s swollen and aching. I hope it’s not broken.”
“Well, get some coffee. I’ll talk to you later.”
“No. Wait a minute.” I sat up and pushed my hair out of my face. “I need a haircut in the worst way.”
“Make an appointment. Don’t try Delta Hairlines, though. They’re booked up until New Year’s.”
“No. Listen. I know who killed Mercy Armistead.”
“Who?”
“Ross Perry.”
“Why?”
“They hated each other. It went back a long way. Remember, he wrote that awful review of her work, and she showed that movie he was in that’s supposed to be the worst one ever made. A movie her father made, incidentally, probably because Ross was still in love with Betty Bedsole even though she had dumped him. Plus, maybe he was buying and selling Outsider art and she was running up the prices he was having to pay.”