by Susan Dunlap
Reclusive artist? That didn’t seem out of character for the man who painted “Alaskan Mud Flats.” Kiernan took the envelope, bought a Coke, stopped in the restroom, and headed back to the Jeep. It was then that she noticed the envelope was sealed.
“Looks like Maureen Brant isn’t any too social either,” she muttered as she tore it open. Not so odd in a woman who was anxious to spend her last penny on revenge.
She started the engine and turned south, then east at the second turnoff, a narrow, windy road with the type of broken pavement that reminded her she was in earthquake country. The macadam ended a mile inland, but the dirt road continued four more miles, twisting like an old telephone cord. Jeep country! The piny aroma of the redwoods lent a coolness to the warm October noon. Kiernan slowed the Jeep and looked up, a hundred yards into the sky, to the tops of these trees that might have been fullgrown years before Columbus learned to sail. The priests at St. Brendan’s, the church of her childhood in Baltimore, had urged the catechism class to be in awe of God. She’d scorned the idea as much as she had the priests and the Church, but the sense of oneness with unmoving time had struck her the first time she’d seen a redwood.
This would be reason enough to explain why Garrett Brant never ventured out to the highway.
The Brants’ cabin, Maureen’s instructions said, would be behind a cluster of redwoods on a bluff off to the left.
When she saw it, she stopped dead.
Cabin was hardly the word for it. It was a two-story house clearly by Bernard Maybeck, the architect who’d designed the most striking buildings in the San Francisco area at the turn of the century. She hadn’t realized Maybeck had accepted commissions this far south of the city.
As Kiernan climbed the dirt-and-plank steps from the road to the bluff, she wondered what wealthy recluse had commissioned Maybeck to build this small chalet miles from a paved road. Back when it was built it would have been much more inaccessible than it was now. And the “cabin” had a swimming pool, cracked and empty, a depository for leaves.
The whole place had the look of neglect. The woman who opened the door could have been a personification of it. Maureen Brant’s dark-blond hair was streaked with gray, grown out of what must once have been a fashionable layered cut. Her skin was pale and puffy from alcohol, or middle age, or both. Her shoulders drooped, and her pale flowered shirt and yellow shorts seemed faded, but her eyes—hazel, flecked with brown—were intense and angry.
When Maureen Brant spoke, none of that anger was evident in her voice. “Come in. My husband’s in his studio out back. We can talk in the living room.” She led the way into a dark, paneled room with an enormous tiled fireplace, pre-Deco radiator covers intended more for beauty than transmission of heat, and faded, green-and-pink-flowered overstuffed sofas. Magazines had been straightened into piles on a rug that showed intermittent lines of vacuuming. The vacuum cleaner stood against one wall, still plugged in.
Maureen Brant sat down on the nearest couch, perching so close to the edge that the sofa cushion tilted precariously. Kiernan could picture her collecting the magazines, nervously tapping the edges into a pile, then, distracted by a piece of lint or the feathered leaf of a redwood on the rug, rushing out for the vacuum and taking symbolic swipes at the long-uncleaned carpet. Now she sat unmoving but for a thumb that rubbed back and forth across the reddened skin of her first finger.
Kiernan sat next to her. She was about to ask for a glass of water when Maureen blurted, “Robin Matucci killed her deckhand. It’s been less than two weeks. You can find evidence. And you can find her.”
“Slow down. You don’t know any of those things. Maybe they both just drowned.”
“I know she killed my husband.”
“Killed? Did you say he was—”
“Yes, he’s out there, painting from photographs he took before the accident.” Her thumb rubbed across the finger, pressing the raw skin white, drawing it taut as a scar. “He’s not dead, not in the medical sense. For me he’s dead. His work is dead. Our life is dead.”
Kiernan nodded. The woman’s voice echoed with the shaky cadence of despair.
“At first I thought Garrett would get better. It was a freak accident, the sliver of glass up his nose. It sounds like part of a standup comedy routine, doesn’t it? Who would think a little bit of windshield could wipe out his short-term memory? Drain the life from his work. Destroy our lives.” The thumb rubbed faster, harder.
Kiernan put her hand firmly on top of Maureen’s and held the thumb still. She pictured Olsen cackling, recalling her insistence that she couldn’t abide cases that amounted to holding client’s hands. Shaking off the thought, she said, “Just tell me what happened.”
More calmly, Maureen said, “It was almost a year after the accident before I realized he’d progressed as much as he was likely to. Do you know about his condition?”
“No.”
“There was a perforation of the mediodorsal nucleus of the thalamus in the brain. At first Garrett was very disoriented, but gradually he improved. I used to be a social worker, so I probably understood more than the average person. I should have known better, but still I assumed he’d recover. I couldn’t accept that he’d never be himself again. After I accepted he wasn’t going to change, that nothing was going to change, nothing could change, I realized what a devastating thing someone had done to me. I felt I was holding in an arsenal of hate. I needed to know who did this dreadful thing, who to hate. I was sure that when the police found the culprit and slammed him in jail, I could relax.”
Done to me. “And—” Kiernan encouraged.
“And then the statute of limitations ran out. Legally it’s not murder, you know, just hit and run. The statute is only three years and one day. It’s past, over. If the culprit walked into the Hall of Justice in San Francisco now, there would be nothing any of us could do. I couldn’t believe it. I barely dragged myself out of bed for days. Even Garrett noticed. It was only his needing me that made me get up at all. And even that … What difference does it make? I kept asking myself. The statute of limitations has run out.” For the first time, she looked directly at Kiernan, fury blazing in her eyes. Slowly, she said, “There is no statute of limitations for me.”
For me. “And now you know that his assailant was Robin Matucci?”
“When the police told me someone had died at the same time she disappeared, I was elated. Sounds awful, doesn’t it?” She hurried on. “I’ve lived alone too long now to bother with artifice. The man was a stranger to me. Carlos Delaney, those syllables don’t conjure up anything in my mind. Except a chance. She killed him, just like she killed Garrett.”
“You don’t know that.”
“I do!”
“You believe you do. It’s not the same.”
Maureen shrugged, then smiled suddenly. “No need to tell me I’m bitter and obsessed. I’m not oblivious, too.”
Kiernan returned the smile and released her hand.
“I’ve thought about the person who hit my husband every day and every night for three years. Anyone who would leave Garrett lying in the cold sand to die is exactly the sort who would push a man overboard.”
Kiernan shifted on the cushion. A breeze fluttered her collar; the room wasn’t cool, but the smell of redwood and eucalyptus made it seem so. “Let us assume that Robin Matucci did kill her deckhand. A murder at sea would be extremely difficult to prove. But if you’re intent on doing so, your best bet would be a detective who specializes in boating accidents. Private investigators have very specific specialties. I work on cases that require medical expertise.”
“That’s why I want you. There’s not much left of the boat. There was an engine fire, but that’s not unusual, the coast guard said. There wasn’t an explosion, though, nothing that could have killed anyone. The answers aren’t going to be in the boat, they’ll be in Delaney’s body. The coroner classified Delaney as a simple drowning. I want you to examine his body, to find something that proves she kill
ed him, so the police will have a reason to find and prosecute her.”
Kiernan shook her head. “There is no way I could make that promise, surely you know that. The coroner’s department has examined the body. If there was a bullet wound, a knife wound, or anything that clearly indicated murder, they would have found it.”
“But they weren’t looking for murder. A subtle method could have escaped them, right?”
Reluctantly, Kiernan nodded. “All things are possible. But this is a man who drowned in the Pacific. If he’s got bruises, they could just as easily have been caused by his fall overboard as from Matucci bludgeoning him. You’d need something very obvious to substantiate murder. The best I could realistically hope to find would be something that didn’t quite fit, like the hair stuck in your husband’s blood, something that doesn’t scream murder, but merely says things aren’t quite as they should be.”
Maureen Brant sank back against the sofa and smiled.
Kiernan held up a hand. “Suppose I did find such evidence, where would that leave you? Exactly where you are, sure Robin Matucci is a murderer, and with nothing you can do about it. The woman is dead, or at least missing.”
“But I’d know.”
Kiernan shrugged. “The thing is, Mrs. Brant, because of my medical background my fees are considerable. It doesn’t seem to me that you’d be getting your money’s worth, when half-a-dozen other detectives could—”
She sprang forward. “No!” It was more of a squeak than a word. “I don’t want someone else. Look, Garrett won a prize from the Arts of the Land Foundation. The last installment just came in. It would keep us for five years if we lived frugally. And we do. I can’t work. I can’t leave Garrett. We can live on the insurance and his Social Security.”
“But surely, a few luxuries now and then—”
“No!” Taking a breath, she said slowly, “It wouldn’t matter how much money I had, there is nothing I can buy. No matter how much easier it would make it for me, I cannot bring new things into the house. Garrett can’t stand it if I do. But that doesn’t matter. Because there is only one thing that will make a difference, and that is revenge. Find me a discrepancy in Delaney’s body.” The overlay of grief in Maureen’s voice was gone, leaving only a shrill tone of desperation.
Kiernan could feel her own shoulders tensing against the electric atmosphere. “I need a glass of water,” Kiernan said, starting toward an archway. “Is the kitchen through there?”
Despite the heat of the day, the kitchen was cold. The walls were paneled in the same mahogany as the living room, and the amber tile was old and grease-coated. A plastic water bottle stood on the sink. Kiernan shivered. What kind of life did Maureen Brant have, when even buying drinking water required half an hour’s trip? Kiernan drank less than enough to quench her thirst and walked back to the sofa. “I’m not the detective for this job.”
“Wait. Don’t decide now. You have to meet Garrett before you turn us down. Do you know about him?”
“Not much more than the facts of the accident.”
“Garrett’s works are landscapes,” Maureen said, tension and desperation in her voice. “But what he really evokes is the life of the community. There are no words for what he does. He couldn’t have explained it if I’d asked him. He worked entirely from impression, feeling. It was as if he distilled every aspect of people’s lives down to a single drop and then drenched the scene he chose to portray in that drop.” She laughed shrilly. “It’s so ironic. His gift was the ability to translate emotion into substance. That’s more or less what the area around the third ventricle of the brain does, the area of Garrett’s brain that she destroyed.” Maureen swallowed hard. “Sorry. I try not to think about the fact that he can never understand that subtlety again. His work was so moving. I’ve seen people in tears just looking at a painting of his. Now I wonder what he sees when he looks at his own work.”
Kiernan hesitated, feeling the same chill she had when she’d first seen “Alaskan Mud Flats.” A mere gust of the chill that must have been an unabating gale for Maureen Brant. How could a man with the ability to create that visceral foreboding from a picture of mud and water be denied new landscapes, new emotions to bring to life?
Emotion was not a box she liked to open. For her the draw of investigation was the puzzle, and the chance to make things right. But she asked, “What was Garrett like to live with before?” She held up a finger. “Think a moment. Time can improve on the truth.”
Maureen laughed. “No, I’m not going to tell you it was all good. He was gone months at a time, away painting. The two years before the accident he was in Alaska and only came down here six times. But that was okay. I was working. When you do social work you’re in the middle of people’s problems all day, and being alone at night is not a bad thing.” She looked down at the floor. A ray of sunlight hit the dust and she dragged her foot across the ellipse. “But it was Garrett you asked about, not me. What I’m telling you about him is how he was for a week at a time, which is all I saw of him those years.” Her eyelids half-closed as if she were looking inward at a remembered picture. “He was spontaneous, which meant there was always something or someone scattered in his wake. He could mesh with anyone and it made me jealous. Sometimes he could give the illusion of connecting, and he hurt people’s feelings when they found out it wasn’t quite genuine. He never once balanced a checkbook, paid the bills on time, or changed the oil in the car. But when he was with me he was with me totally. And when we made love the marrow of our bones were one.”
Kiernan sat stunned by the intensity of Maureen’s words, and by her own pang of jealousy for an intimacy she doubted she could ever let herself feel.
She forced her attention back to Maureen and was just about to speak when Maureen jumped up, opened a closet door and struggled to bring out three large canvases. Turning the first around, she said, “This was Garrett’s last painting before the accident. He painted it here. He had a photo of the scene, but he didn’t paint it from that. He would have been humiliated at such a suggestion in those days. Like painting by numbers, is what he’d have said. Look at the painting, see how alive it is?
It’s not a copy of a piece of scenery, it’s an expression of how it came together in his mind. The canvas was still drying the day he drove to San Francisco.”
It was the same painting Kiernan had seen in San Diego: “Alaskan Mud Flats.” Now, the mounds of brown seemed thicker, brighter, safer—milk chocolate wafers on a bed of dark chocolate pudding. But at the same time it seemed more ominous. Was danger conveyed in this harsh burnt yellow of the fading sun? Or was it in the faint blue-black lines lurking in the fluffy mounds of mud? She recalled the collective gasp from the crowd at the La Jolla gallery, when they had rounded a corner and come on the painting for the first time. But here, alone with it in the gloomy wooden house, the effect was not just menacing. It was unavoidable.
“Ironic, isn’t it? Garrett paints this canvas that shouts ‘Alaska is a siren that will kill you!’ But Alaska doesn’t kill him. He has to come back to San Francisco for that.”
When Kiernan didn’t reply, Maureen turned the other two canvases around. “He did these after the accident. The first was painted from memory. The second he did last week, from the photo.” The elements were the same: the browns of the mud, the blue-blacks of the suck holes, the gold of the setting sun. But the paintings evoked nothing.
“Now I’d like you to meet Garrett.”
5
KIERNAN FOLLOWED MAUREEN THROUGH a small, bare kitchen that held none of the gadgets Tchernak was so fond of—no microwave, no Cuisinart, no coffee grinder or rice cooker; no array of tempered steel knives worthy of a circus act.
Thirty yards behind the house stood what might once have been a barn, built in the Maybeck style. Dark wood, open beams.
Maureen put a hand on Kiernan’s arm. “Don’t tell Garrett why you’re here.” Before Kiernan could respond, Maureen called out her husband’s name.
In the moment before the studio door opened Kiernan tried to picture Garrett Brant. Would his artist’s eye sear beneath her skin, his smile disarm her? He’d be Maureen’s age, about forty. No—BakDat listed her as thirty-one. She just looked so much older, Kiernan realized with a shudder. Had the past three years worn Garrett down this much, too?
The man who opened the door showed no sign of prolonged stress. He could have been any healthy thirty-year-old. There was no hint of gray in his thick blond hair, and his tanned face was barely lined. He was thin, a runner’s type of thin, with a T-shirt sporting a picture from an old movie poster so faded Kiernan couldn’t read the title, and cutoffs that showed sinewy thighs and thick calf muscles. His expression was bemused. He caught Kiernan’s eye, stepped forward and extended a hand. “Hello, I’m Garrett Brant. How nice of you to come all the way out here to see us.”
“This is Kiernan O’Shaughnessy, Gar,” Maureen said.
“Kiernan! What a wonderful name, all stony stream and ferns and pines.” Clasping her hand with both of his, he asked, “Now where is it we know each other from?”
Kiernan found herself momentarily taken aback by his poised approach. “We haven’t met before.”
His smile barely faltered. Keeping hold of her hand, he turned toward the picture window. “Come in. Let me show you my view. I have a pleasant view of the redwoods. I’ve loved these redwoods ever since I was a child visiting here. I’ve been in Alaska for two years, so it’s nice to see so much California green, even though it looks as if it is going to be a dry summer.”
Kiernan almost said, “It’s October,” but caught herself. Instead she looked at Garrett’s view. Thick-boiled redwoods stood on either side of a fern-filled clearing. Their branches filtered the sunlight, dulling the sharp edges of the gray-green leaves, muting the rich forest colors so that the scene resembled a faded color-tinted photograph from the forties. Despite the nearness of the redwoods, there was a fair amount of light in the studio. Garrett’s easel stood near the back window.