Artifacts

by Bailey Bradford

  “Yes. I looked at some articles. And he was a benefactor to the city’s cultural heritage. He donated to the San Antonio River Foundation.” Aldric gestured to where the river ran. “If it wasn’t for him, we wouldn’t have the River of Lights in December.”

  “All those lights in the trees and on the bridges?” It was pretty. Darrell had done a little reading up of his own after meeting Randa Buckman, but mainly about the family and Buck’s company, Amgine.

  “And in the water. He wanted those.” Aldric screwed his napkin into a ball. “So with the reflections, the water looks twice as bright as the banks. Like a trick.”

  “Or a joke.”

  Aldric nodded and helped himself to the last corner of Darrell’s protein bar. “And he made a lot of donations to the art museum. I thought I’d go look at what he gave them, see if I can understand what kind of man he was. Maybe it’ll help with the case. The vandalism and all that.”

  That being the supposed curse or haunting. Darrell didn’t have the heart to tell Aldric that the assault he’d suffered plus the graffiti to a mid-range antique store hardly constituted a priority case to the detective handling it for the SAPD. There’d been no high-value robbery, and Intrinsic Value was not what could be called a high-level target.

  “Or I could just go work in the store. It’s my Saturday off, but there’s always something to do there.” Aldric mumbled the last bit into the silence Darrell had left.

  “Or, who better than to help you be a detective than an actual police officer?” Darrell grinned, loving how Aldric’s shy smile in answer spread into a wide, joyous one that took over his face.

  “I was planning to walk there, along the path to the museum stretch. It’s pretty beside the river.” Aldric breathed on his glasses and rubbed the lenses with the hem of his Henley.

  “That so?” Darrell guided him as they left the food kiosk and turned so that they’d leave the residential complex by the exit that came out near the riverbank. He paused. “There’s a bike rental right here in the complex, two walkways along from mine, if you want to ride.”

  Again he surprised himself. He’d be packing them a little picnic next. Oh, wait. He’d kind of done that last night, right? Last night. He caught up with what he’d just suggested, after what he’d done last night. Aldric had taken his first cock. His virgin ass had been tight—and not to boast, but Darrell was a good size. The last thing the newly fucked Aldric needed was to sit on a narrow bike seat, for shit’s sake.

  “Or the kayak rental station is just over there,” he continued. “Do you kayak? I haven’t done it in a while. It’s great exercise.”

  “I like walking. You like sports, right?”

  “What gave me away, all the equipment in my apartment?”

  “And the trophies. I noticed them this morning.”

  Yeah, last night they’d been in too much of a rush to take in the finer points of his interior décor. “I grew up in a family of sports nuts. Competing was mandatory.” Mention of his family made him keep a look-out as they walked down the steps to the walkway alongside the river. Although it wasn’t likely any of them would be here, downtown, on a Saturday morning, and the thought of any of them anywhere near a museum was laughable.

  “You said your family was traditional. Military, you mentioned?”

  We’re at the ‘tell me about your family’ stage? Darrell considered brushing the question off like he would have with a hook-up, but Aldric wasn’t that. He wasn’t a one-and-done. The urge to answer him truthfully was impossible to fight off. “Yes. My father was a decorated Battlefield Airman in Special Reconnaissance, then was asked to help develop and run some of the training courses at Lackland. It’s his tenth year doing that now. My older brother followed in his footsteps, as hard as that is, as Chief—my father—has big shoes to fill. Well. That’s what we’ve been hearing ever since we were kids. Travis, my brother, he’s just joined the Night Stalkers. And my younger brother— Oh, you get the picture.”

  “So you’re the rebel.”

  “Not ‘the middle child’? The ‘odd one’?” He did the quote marks.

  “Family labels.” Aldric’s lips thinned. “Like, ‘afterthought’. Or ‘surprise baby’.”

  He gets it. Darrell nodded, quick and tight. So there was a generation gap and a half between Aldric and his parents? They must be a helluva lot older. And yet, Darrell would have bet Aldric could probably bring a guy home to them, as a boyfriend or significant other, something he’d never be able to. He hardened his heart and nodded at the fortress-like dark brown building up the grassy slope, on the landscaped lawn. Looks like a fort and was a former brewery. San Antonio in a nutshell.

  “I haven’t been here since a school trip,” he confessed as they walked in through the metal detector. A flash of his badge got him his gun and all the metal contents of his pockets back, unlike Aldric, who had to exchange his huge bunch of keys for a reclaim ticket. Darrell looked for the entrance desk. “And I can’t remember any of it.”

  “It’s probably changed since then, anyway. They get new artworks all the time.”

  “And new rooms,” Darrell said, spotting a sign for a space bearing the name Buckman Room. “Is all the stuff he gave in one place?”

  “No, I don’t think so. Look.” Aldric indicated the list of donors in the program he’d just bought. “Seems he’s given paintings to several collections. Want to go on a trail, find all the donations he made? It’s not canoeing or off-roading, but…” He’d ducked away before Darrell could protest that he wasn’t just some knuckle-dragging jock and he did in fact like culture.

  He might like it, but he didn’t think he understood it, or any kind of connection between the pictures the late Mr. Buckman had gifted the place. He and Aldric traipsed from nineteenth and twentieth century European art to American, and Darrell admitted defeat. The most he could come up with was that the art looked sort of three-dimensional.

  “You know how macho guys think it’s a sign of weakness to look at the instructions when they’re building something or putting something together?” he asked. “Call me a nerd, but I’d better see the specs on this.” He studied the relevant paragraph. “Oh, Jesus. I can’t even pronounce this.”

  “Me neither. But it’s explained, see?” Aldric pointed lower down the page and his finger brushed Darrell’s thumb. It felt good.

  “‘Deceive the eye’.” Darrell almost fist-pumped in triumph. “I thought three-D! ‘Realistic imagery creates optical illusions that depict objects existing in three dimensions.’”

  “It really does.” Aldric indicated the hundred-year-old painting of a street urchin levering himself out of a fallen-over wooden box, although Darrell couldn’t imagine why he was in there to begin with. The kid’s hands grasped the sides of the container, which was also the picture’s frame, and one foot stuck up, its toes poking out of the painting as he heaved himself up to make his escape. Or at least, they seemed to. The longer Darrell stared, the more details he marveled at.

  Now Darrell knew what he was looking for, spotting links between the donated artwork in the modern and contemporary exhibition halls was easier. He put out his hand to stop loose fifty-dollar bills from fluttering away from the roll that was pinned to a brown panel on the wall, only to feel stupid when that was a trick-the-eye painting too. The jumble of drink cans and snacks, jutting out from the wall and about to fall, didn’t fool him after that.

  “So let’s see the Buckman Room,” he suggested. “Buck sure liked tricks and puzzles.” And had been generous in donating so much to the museum and city in his later years, although Darrell would have put money on the guy being ruthless when he was younger, getting his business off the ground and making his fortune in a cutthroat field.

  “Yes. Seems— Oh, enigma!” Aldric stopped halfway down the stairs, and a woman tsked as she nearly banged into him. He colored. “The name of his company. It’s enigma, backward!”

  Darrell had to chuckle, more so when the Buckman spac
e had a painting taking up one wall of it. As in painted onto the wall, its doors, windows and hallway to another room all fake. The shelves and cupboards on it weren’t solid, either, or the objects hanging up on it or off it. He nudged Aldric to look at the table at one end of the room, with its pack of cards and mess of papers, ribbons and scissors apparently left lying around on it.

  Aldric laughed. “That’s a trick painting too, but on a tabletop? Huh, it looks so real, like we could touch the things. I nearly did, that bottle of wine hanging in the straw basket just there. I didn’t get at first that it was painted onto the wall.”

  Darrell checked it out. Yeah, it did look like it was jutting out of the shopping bag and spilling out down the wall. A woman leaped forward, a Kleenex in her hand to wipe up the ‘spill’, and blushed at having been fooled.

  “I guess I should get moving,” he said at last. “Not long until my shift.”

  They reached the door they’d entered when Aldric exclaimed. “I need my keys back. I had to hand them in. Nearly forgot. Won’t be a second.”

  “Sure…” Darrell’s attention was taken by a figure out in the garden. Well, two figures. One he knew personally. Mateo. What is he doing here? Enjoying the fountain or the abstract sculptures on the lawn, maybe? Darrell didn’t know him that well, as it turned out. But the guy with him was someone who Darrell recognized from photos he’d seen recently when looking into the Buckman family. Nick Buckman, Buck’s son by his first wife. His estranged son. Disowned was one description he’d come across. This was a weird coincidence, and Darrell didn’t like coincidences.

  “Mateo!” he called, knocking on the glass window then moving to the door. “Over here. It’s Darrell.” He thought Mateo glanced at him, then turned back to the dark-haired, intense-looking guy with him. Darrell was about to head out to the pair when a cough sounded behind him, and Aldric was there, his gaze directed where Darrell was staring.

  “Is everything okay?” he asked.

  “What? Yeah.” Mateo and Nick had moved, and Darrell couldn’t see them through the fountain’s spray or the group of people around it. “Yeah. Let’s go.”

  “Okay.”

  That word again. He’d told Aldric that everything was okay, but he wasn’t sure it was.

  Chapter Twelve

  Aldric had never liked Sundays and hated this one especially, having spent yesterday with Darrell. He’d never liked this crappy studio apartment either, and his time in Darrell’s place yesterday had made him dislike this one more. The space and light of that apartment complex filled his mind. Darrell had everything near at hand—open around the clock, probably—whereas Aldric trudged to use the old washing machine in the laundry room of the house the garage apartment belonged to, careful to keep to the times stipulated in his rental agreement.

  His next stop was the supermarket. Chores usually filled up a Sunday, but today he wanted time to himself to think about Darrell and sleeping with Darrell. He was sad when the throb in his ass, the reminder of having given himself to Darrell, ceased. His lack of sexual knowledge worried him. Not just the physical stuff, but the etiquette—if there was such a thing. Should he have left after they’d fucked? He had a small feeling Darrell might have preferred that. Did prefer that, as a rule. Aldric wished he had the confidence to think had preferred that in the past, that things were different now, with him in Darrell’s life, but he couldn’t. No matter how much he might want to.

  Back home again, he lay on the couch and thought some more. He couldn’t think his way into a relationship with Darrell, but he could try his best to make it happen. Look at how far he’d come. He’d asked Darrell out on a date, and Darrell had accepted. They’d spent the evening together, then the morning together the day after. And between the shared evening and the morning had been…the night.

  Aldric groaned at his renewed erection. His cock had filled at the most inconvenient times that morning—it seemed so many things reminded him of Darrell. The fresh detergent and fabric softener smell in the laundry room sparked memories of Darrell’s bedroom, with its rack of long-sleeved tees and jeans, the polo shirts and pants. The dough and sugar of the pastry counter in the store had brought back the scent and taste of the breakfast Danish Darrell had bought him. The museum program lying on his floor conjured up Darrell in all his crew-cut, broad-shouldered, freckled-nosed glory, his olive-green eyes alight with curiosity as they’d toured the rooms.

  Aldric sighed and raised the borrowed Henley to his nose again, inhaling deep. I’m in deep. I got it bad. His mind raced and plotted, and he didn’t dwell on that sexy Latino guy Darrell had called out to in the museum garden, seemingly eager to speak with. Nope, not going there. He focused instead on what Darrell would be doing now if they were together…and walked his fingers down his body to his dick as he imagined.

  * * * *

  Darrell was wondering why his father had asked for his help when he was perfectly capable of laying garden decking all by himself. At least being given the busy work to do meant that Darrell could let his mind chew over the case. It was a serious case now, deserving of more priority than it had gotten—at least, he thought so.

  Chief had already laid concrete pads on the site he’d squared off prior to Darrell’s arrival, so all Darrell had to do was cover the area in a layer of weed-control fabric. Seeing priceless works of art yesterday had made him wonder if some of the artifacts, particularly the puzzle boxes, could be valuable too. The owner and the other guy at the antique store had said those trinkets weren’t worth anything to most people, just collectors, and Randa had thought so too, happy to sell them off as a bulk lot. But what if her late husband had mixed one or more valuable ones in with the crap, maybe even on purpose, as a prank, and Randa had realized too late? Were there such things as expensive puzzles or keepsakes? Like ones made of precious gems or gold? Was that what Buck’s cast-off son had been doing at the museum, trying to find information about something along those lines?

  Darrell’s lack of culture or arts knowledge had never bothered him before, but it had since meeting Aldric. He wondered what Aldric was doing today. Visiting family? Sitting alone in his place, wondering what I’m doing? Touching himself as—

  “Son?”

  Darrell startled, then blushed. He ducked his head, hoping to avoid his father’s focus. “Yeah. Doing it.” He tipped the gravel onto the surface he’d covered and let his thoughts drift back to the case. It was far-reaching, he suspected—or maybe his feelings were. Were his feelings for Aldric, the victim of the initial assault that had started all this, mixing themselves into whatever this was? He should keep a closer eye on him. Pass by the store more often. Ask other cops to. “Done,” he told his father, setting the remaining gravel down. “So, cutting the deck boards, right?” Again, his father could do that.

  “Without laying squares of damp-proof course?” Chief raised an incredulous eyebrow.

  Excuse me for never having laid a deck in my life. “Planning on entertaining more?” he asked his father, curious as to why he was doing this now. While he couldn’t really see his father holding drinks parties in the garden, he could see him relaxing on a lounger there even less.

  “The feel of having a bigger usable living space adds to the value of the house. And the garden’s not needed now that there are no boys at home,” Chief said.

  Darrell didn’t remember the swing set around the side of the house, although there were photographs of Ryan in it. Chief had replaced it with a jungle gym slash mini assault course as soon as his boys could handle it. “Oh?”

  “Thinking of making that kitchen wall into a window wall, too. But the next project’s turning your room back into the extra bathroom.”

  “Turning…back?” He hadn’t known his small bedroom had been a bathroom. Travis and Ryan had shared the bigger bedroom, for all Darrell was closer in age to Travis and Ryan was the baby of the family. “Are you selling the place or something?” That could make sense, with Travis now Basic Mission Qualified, and
Ryan probably moving away once he’d finished training.

  His father shrugged. “So, son, been busy lately since we had dinner?”

  His father didn’t do idle chit chat, so his inquiry had Darrell on the alert. “A little, I guess. Why?”

  “You called up Leah’s friend Brianna yet? Since she saw you having lunch with a guy?”

  The one-two punch left Darrell winded. Which was he supposed to react to? Neither.

  “You remember Leo, from the base? His wife Jean’s got family in town and they were showing them around. They saw you at the art museum yesterday.”

  That Darrell, Chief’s son, had been voluntarily partaking of art and culture wasn’t exactly the problem, or the reason for the strange note in his father’s voice. What was coming next was. Darrell knew it by the frigid ball of fear in his gut.

  “With a guy? Was he the same one you were with in the week? You haven’t mentioned getting a new partner, so I doubt he’s some new cop you were partnered up with. So what’s going on, Darrell?”

  Darrell didn’t need a decoder ring to hear that as, “What’s wrong with you, Darrell? Your brothers are settled down with women, but you…” There’d be no “Where did I go wrong?” from his father. Chief wouldn’t countenance that he could be at fault. Not that there was any fault or wrongness, because there was nothing wrong with being gay or bi or trans, or anywhere on the rainbow.

  Darrell didn’t like the way his heart thudded, or the thickening in his throat that prevented him from speaking and saying anything his father didn’t want to hear. He also didn’t want to have this talk—the talk—here, like this. And not just because his father was around heavy tools that could double as weapons. Hell, for Chief, anything could double as a weapon, should he need one.

  “Going on?” he hedged. “What do you mean? What are you saying?”

  “You’ve never brought a girl home. Well, not since school.” His father had an excellent memory and strove for accuracy. “I accept that the military way of life is not for everyone, sure. Good as it would’ve been to have three for three boys of mine serving their country.”