Ghost Sickness

by Amber Foxx

  Shelli took a key from a desk drawer and unlocked a room at the back of the gallery. Another parrot’s squawks greeted her as she brought the visitor in and closed the door behind them. “Do you mind if I let the other one out? They expect it around now. It’s their playtime together.”

  Ms. Clemens hesitated, looking back and forth at the two parrots. A hyacinth macaw stared at her from its cage. It was the biggest parrot Mae had ever seen, and its huge eyes, rimmed with bright yellow skin, made it appear to be staring. It made a shrill whistling noise followed by a series of beeps. The green parrot replied “G’day” with an Aussie accent and then said “Pretty lady,” sounding like Shelli.

  The visitor beamed. “Does he think I’m pretty? How nice. He is, too. But that blue one is ... I don’t know. Its beak looks dangerous.”

  “That’s Violet.” Shelli opened the macaw’s cage. “Her beak is powerful, but she doesn’t bite. She’s a sweet bird. Florencia’s very sick and had to give her up. Violet was with her for thirty years. It was hard for both of you, wasn’t it, Violet?”

  The blue parrot walked onto Shelli’s forearm and whistled again. Placido flew to a perch and said, “Kiss.”

  “He uses that word for everything. Preening, hugging, kissing,” Shelli explained while she cuddled the macaw to her chest and then kissed her on the head. “Violet can come over for a kiss in a minute. First she has to show the lady her picture.”

  She carried the bird—which Mae was sure had to be the stolen hyacinth—over to a wooden case where a set of framed photographs was displayed and set her there.

  Family pictures, portraying Florencia from childhood up through her teenage years and young adulthood, showed her with severe-looking people who had to be her brother and her parents. She often stood slightly apart from them and made a subtle mockery of the portrait with a pose like a fashion model or the hint of a funny face. The only photograph in which she didn’t appear to be distancing herself showed Florencia, young and pretty, arm in arm with a youthful Orville Geronimo, a huge blue parrot on her shoulder. The presumed Violet opened her massive gray beak and said, “Me.” Shelli must have been working on that. The bird didn’t seem to be much of a talker.

  “Well, she’s a smart thing, isn’t she?” Ms. Clemens said. “I hope she’s well trained with all this valuable art around.”

  The blue parrot flew to the perch in the middle of the room, where Placido snuggled up to preen her. “She is. They both are.”

  “You look a little like Florencia. Are you a relative?”

  “No. It’s the hair. You see a pueblo Indian woman with blue hair, it makes you think she looks like Florencia. I’m married to her nephew. I did the hair as a tribute, for getting the family back together. I wanted her to know how much I admired her, when we finally met.”

  Ms. Clemens walked around, peering closely at every display. The secret locked room was like a shrine to Florencia. The walls were hung with what must have been her childhood drawings and her adolescent works, as well as some more mature paintings.

  After a circuit of the room, the art shopper returned to the photo display, studied it again, then read aloud from a framed letter near the picture of the real Violet. “ ‘Dear Severus. As far as I’m concerned you can keep anything I left behind. I wasn’t that good an artist yet and you’d be a fool to sell any of it. I don’t think enough of that crap to want to sell it myself. Florencia.’ Goodness. She was hard on herself. The work she left behind—if that’s what you’ve got here—isn’t crap at all. Even her childhood drawings are fascinating. Was this written when she married Orville Geronimo?”

  “No, she wrote it the year she divorced him and moved to Truth or Consequences, but the paintings she was referring to date to the years before she married him. Teenaged works. Things she did on her college vacations when she was in Acoma. My father-in-law and his parents had hoped she might come back to the pueblo when she got divorced. But you seem to know her biography, so you know there was something of a rift in the family.”

  “Yes, yes.” The customer gave a dismissive sniff. “Does that letter mean you have some of her college work?”

  The birds flew between her and Shelli, heading to a corner full of parrot toys, where they began a game of tug-of-war with a piece of sisal.

  “Not her favorite pieces, but yes, quite a few. She was very productive during her summer breaks. The family ended up with things she didn’t like enough to take back to school with her.” Shelli walked to a series of portraits of pueblo clowns. “This is early college work. You can see elements of her future style, but it’s closer to realism.” Mae liked them better than what she’d seen in Florencia’s studio in her other vision. Shelli moved on to some O’Keefe-like rock formation studies. “These were done a couple of years later. You can see that these also aren’t quite the full-fledged Florencia Mirabal style, but there are stronger hints of her future in them.”

  “Would it be a problem for you if you ever sold any of them?”

  “Letitia should have explained that. She knows what this archive means to us.”

  “She made me think you might make an exception for a serious collector.”

  Shelli sighed and picked up Placido, who had lost the tug-of-war with the giant macaw. She gave him a soft hug and let him climb to her shoulder. “My husband’s aunt never expressly told her brother not to sell them, but she implied she’d prefer he didn’t. And we don’t want to diminish the collection too much. It’s an important record of her development, and it’s a family treasure, too. We’ve been working on a reconciliation with her—Kathy and David and I. She still won’t speak to Severus, though, so it’s private until we can work things out. But anyway, we hope to eventually get a museum set up, so once in a while we do sell one to help fund that project. We don’t publicize the sales. I’m sure you can appreciate why we’d rather people didn’t think we had a lot to sell. We need to keep the majority.”

  “You mean there are more?”

  “Yes. We rotate the display.”

  Ms. Clemens circled the room again and paused in front of a pair of paintings. Both showed the exact same scene, a stone stairway winding between steep rock walls. The perspective was slightly distorted, suggesting multiple parts of the twisting path seen from different angles. A shadow of someone’s legs and a foot lifted to take a step fell on the stairs, but no human figure was shown. One version of the painting was in shades of yellow, brown, and gold, the other in shades of blue. Shelli brought Placido up and asked him, “What color?”

  “Yellow,” said the parrot. “Blue.”

  “What a smart little fella,” the Southern woman cooed. “He knows his colors.”

  “Of course he does,” Shelli said, scratching Placido’s cheek. “He was raised in an art gallery. We’re parrot people, the whole family. That’s why Florencia asked us to take Violet.”

  “Blue,” said Placido. “Yellow.”

  “I think he likes those paintings. He has good taste. That’s so interesting that she did two views of the same place like that.”

  “Well, those were her student years,” Shelli replied. “She was still exploring her style.”

  “I think I’d like to buy the pair of them.”

  Shelli frowned. “Both?”

  “Yes. That’s what makes them—two studies of the old path to the mesa. I want both.”

  Shelli opened the door to the main gallery and asked, “Are you free, Kathy?”

  Her mother-in-law answered, “In a minute. Just let me finish with this sale.”

  Shelli closed the door again, sent Placido to play with the hyacinth, picked up a plastic bucket and put on a pair of household gloves. “Excuse my doing this, but I need to clean my babies’ cages while they’re out and about. She’ll take care of the sale shortly. Please, be discreet about where you got the paintings. We aren’t showing this room to just anyone, not until we get the museum open.”

  The customer agreed so readily, she seemed to have expected
the secrecy. Letitia must have prepared her.

  Mae closed the vision. Was this where the money was coming from? If Florencia hadn’t wanted her youthful works sold or displayed, there was some reason for secrecy, at least while she was alive.

  The family hadn’t reconciled with her, though, not even the partial reconnection Shelli had implied. Maybe they had tried and failed with the gift of Placido, but they’d had a plan B, something to make them seem to have succeeded. Passing off the stolen hyacinth as Violet made the effort look calculating. Shelli must have thought it was worth the risk of losing her job to provide such convincing “proof” of the artist’s reconnection with her family and support for the gallery.

  Why was it so important? Perhaps they’d wanted Florencia to fund the museum or donate additional works. No, there’d be no money in that, and it would have required a genuine end to the feud. Had she given some paintings to Reno and then he’d turned around and sold them? That wouldn’t be something he’d hide in his trailer though, or in Zak’s toolshed. He would only hide them if he’d stolen them.

  Chapter Twenty-Five

  Mae called Niall, hoping he would know if anything was missing.

  He answered his phone with a few coughs, listened to her question, and waited a moment before replying. “I don’t see how he could have taken any paintings. He’d have had to do it right under her nose, and she didn’t keep much of her of work around. Once it was finished, it was sold, or on display in Rio Bravo. There should be something in the studio—she dropped a hint she’d left something in progress—but she doesn’t want that opened yet.”

  “There was a lot of art in her bedroom. None of those paintings were hers?”

  “A few small ones, I think. Old things she didn’t want to sell.”

  “That’s exactly what I think he’d be stealing. I found out there’s a gallery that has a lot of things she left with her brother, and I think Reno might be adding more and selling them. Do you mind if we take a look? See if those early works are still there?”

  “All right. But I think they will be.”

  A brisk walk brought Mae to Florencia’s house in a few minutes, not much longer than it took Niall to drive. He was just getting out of his car when she arrived.

  As soon as they stepped through the front door, a steady beeping sounded. He punched a code into a keypad on the wall and the noise stopped. Florencia’s living room looked like a gallery now, with the furniture gone and only the art remaining. Mae noticed things she’d overlooked earlier, when she’d been stunned by the cowboy angel’s overpowering presence. Complex fields of lifelike flowers hung on either side of the winged, blue-eyed man. Another one of Niall’s sculptures, a disturbingly accurate junk-metal cockroach, crouched where the coffee table had been.

  “Everything’s okay here.” Niall led the way down the hall. “I didn’t go in her bedroom much. No real reason to. I hope I can tell if things are missing.”

  Mae opened the blinds in the empty room and tried to remember what the art had looked like. She’d been so busy with clothes and bedding and so worried about how Niall was coping, she hadn’t paid much attention to anything else, but she sensed that paintings might have been rearranged. Niall studied them a long time.

  “Are hers missing?” Mae asked.

  “Not as far as I can tell. Reno’s are gone for sure, though. His gifts to Florencia. But I can’t remember if they were here when we cleaned out or not. She could have made him take them back.”

  Mae’s neatly assembled mental jigsaw puzzle fell into a jumble. “Did she have anything she didn’t hang up? Does this house have an attic?”

  “Ayeh. Never been up there.” Niall led the way back into the hallway, and squinted at the door of a pull-down stairway in the ceiling. “Help yourself.”

  Mae tugged on the handle, and the stairway unfolded with a creak. She climbed up. If there were other old paintings and sketches Florencia didn’t want to sell, she might have thought so little of them she’d stored them here. After all, in her estimation, the ones she’d left with her brother had been “crap.”

  The only light came from two small windows at either end of the low-roofed space. A large bird cage sat near the stairs. A few quilts in dust-covered plastic zipper bags and a stack of equally dusty shoe boxes were the only other objects in the space. Mae imagined Reno offering to put the cage up here for Florencia and discovering paintings, which he later removed. Could he have handled the cage enough to leave a trace of his energy? There was only a slim chance, but it was worth a shot.

  The attic was stiflingly hot, so Mae brought the cage downstairs and explained to Niall what she wanted to do. She’d brought her crystals, hoping for an opportunity.

  “Go for it,” he said. “I hope you find out you’re wrong, though. I’ll go commune with the Cowboy Angel. Let me know when you’re done.”

  Mae sat on the bedroom floor with the cage and a clear quartz point, seeking traces of Reno. Nothing came to her but Florencia in her living room, removing a weak, trembling Violet from the cage. The bird wrapped her claws around Florencia’s wrist, but the artist had to prop the macaw against her bosom to keep her upright. She whispered to her, petting her neck, “My poor, poor baby. Don’t be scared,” and then shouted, “Reno. Drop everything. Violet’s sick. I have to get her to the vet.”

  Mae let go of the vision. The strong energy of that moment overrode anything else that had ever happened with the cage. She left it in the bedroom and joined Niall in his contemplation of Howe’s blue-eyed cowboy.

  He gestured to the painting with his chin. “Your father tells me I was this good-looking once upon a time.”

  “I guess you were, then. He wouldn’t lie to you.”

  “Did you find out anything about Reno?”

  “No, and there’s not much in the attic. Stuff looks like it hasn’t been touched for years. I don’t know if that’s all there is because she didn’t store much, or because things are missing.”

  “I’m not going to upset Flo by asking about it. But Daphne should know if there’s supposed to be anything valuable up there—as long as Flo remembered to tell her. I’m sure she’s got an inventory for her estate.”

  “Could you ask her?”

  “Remind me later. I need to think about it. I’m not sure I’m ready to accuse Reno yet. You done here now?”

  “I guess.” There was nothing left in the house with which to do a psychic journey other than Florencia’s art and her collection. The odds of learning about Reno through them were low, and the chances Mae would intrude on their creators high. All traces of Reno were gone. Or were they? “He wouldn’t have taken Violet’s memorial when he took his paintings, would he?”

  “I should hope not. That bird meant the world to Florencia. Violet outlasted all the people in her life. I’ve known her for twelve years. She had her parrot a lot longer than that. And she loved what Reno did to remember her by.”

  “I’d like to see it.”

  They left the house and crossed what passed for a yard, a patch of dirt spiked with prickly-stemmed wildflowers on the opposite side from where they’d parked the day they came to pack. A bright blue Mustang crouched under the detached carport. Mae had never realized the vehicle was there. Looking up the cliff from Main Street, she’d seen only the poles and roof above it. “What a sweet car. I bet she had fun driving it.”

  “She did. Fast enough to scare the bejesus out of you. If Reno hadn’t messed up, she probably would have left it to him. He could use it.”

  Florencia’s will. If Reno expected to be in it, would he have stolen from her? If he needed the money now, he might have, or if he was in doubt about being an heir.

  They reached the end of the yard. In the shade of an elm tree overhanging a neighbor’s fence stood a small stack of stones “Is that Violet’s memorial? Rocks?”

  “No, damn it.” Niall scowled. “There was more. Her favorite piece Reno ever painted. Beautiful little triptych on wood. I know she’ll neve
r come here to look at it again, but if he’s the one that took it, that’s heartless. It meant so much to her, she wanted to be buried with it.”

  “You think she still wants to, being that mad at him?”

  “She does. It’s as close as she can get to being buried with Violet.”

  Niall locked up the house and offered Mae a ride, but she declined and began walking toward home. Though she was feeling the effects of the morning’s workout, she needed to move in order to think, and she had a lot to think about.

  There was no way to give Jamie the good news without the bad. Placido was safe and in good hands, but when she told him where the parrot was, he would know that his friends had lied to him and stolen the birds. Telling Jamie about the gallery would mean telling him she’d learned more about the money-making secret, too, when he’d wanted her to leave it alone.

  She doubted she could. If Reno had stolen paintings, Florencia didn’t need them back or need the money, and yet there was that sense of violation, like when Niall discovered the art was missing from the parrot’s little grave.

  Uncertain what to do and who to tell, Mae asked herself who had the most at stake. Who had the most urgent need to know what she knew? The answer came without doubt: Misty. Mae paused before turning left on Marr and texted her. Learned more about Reno. Can I meet you somewhere?

  Misty replied. I’m at his place. Fixing the Rabbit.

  Is he there?

  Inside. Sleeping. Come on over.

  As Mae approached the old trailer, Misty looked up from the Rabbit’s engine, wiping her hands on a rag, and began to put tools away in a dented metal toolbox. She wore tight black shorts and a hot pink tank top, a matching pink baseball cap, and hot pink socks with her athletic shoes. A skateboard lay wheels-up in the dirt of the yard. Misty chomped on gum, blew a bubble and popped it. “I guess you know Reno took his tabletop home.”

  “Yeah. But I found another way.” Mae glanced at the windows. The blinds were down, and the window air conditioner was running. Reno probably wouldn’t wake up or hear them, but she didn’t want to take any chances. “Can we take a walk?”