Earth Colors

by Sarah Andrews

  “Yeah.”

  “Same treatment I got. Tough customer.”

  “No kidding.”

  Nigel had wandered over and was now rubbing up against Jenny like a bear scratching itself on a tree. “So …”

  “Why don’t you come by my office tomorrow, Nigel? We could discuss your GIS,” said Jenny, making it sound like an invitation to cover her with whipped cream. To me she said, “Did you get anything out of him before he bailed?”

  “He said he was on his way to a theater in a pub. In Mount Joy.”

  She laughed. “Bube’s? That’s not a theater, that’s a brewery.”

  “Perhaps he’s already drunk.”

  Still trying to worm his way into the occasion, Nigel said, “My kind of boy.”

  I said, “Really, Nigel?”

  Jenny grabbed Nigel’s arm. “It could be a double date. Me and Em, and you and Hector.”

  “I think I’ll go for the conference in your office instead,” he said reasonably, and wandered off toward his Mini.

  I told Jenny, “We could meet there for dinner.”

  “Fine,” she said. “Seven o’clock?”

  THE CAMERON ESTATE Inn turned out to be a swanky bed-and-breakfast tucked into the rolling farmlands about three miles from anywhere anyone would accuse of being a town or a highway. It was quite lovely. A three-story brick job, it featured sweeping porches facing out onto a sloped lawn that led down to a narrow brook.

  The innkeeper assigned me to a nice room on the second floor: I mean really nice; it was as capacious as my room in Washington had been tight. It must have been one of the master bedrooms back when the Cameron family held forth at that address shortly after the Civil War. Someone—Cameron’s granddaughter, the brochures advised me—had spent a midsized fortune tarting up the place after some years of demise, and now the innkeepers were going at it advertising period antiques and things called duvets. My room had a walloping four-poster bed with more cushy pillows than any ten friends and I could have lounged upon. I stood in the middle of the room trying to decide what to do with all this luxury.

  I had expected to find Agent Wardlaw skulking around the place, but he was not in evidence. No bland federal sedan lurked in the parking lot. No jerk with dark glasses decorated the front porch. And there were no messages for me at the check-in desk.

  I let down my guard a quarter-inch. That opened me to a fresh flood of worries about Baby Sloane. Would Faye follow my advice? Should I call her?

  I tried my best to shove these anxieties out of my mind. I would find Hector and get him to tell me why he thought Tert was implicated in Aunt Winnie’s death, and then I’d call Faye and tell her to phone her old pal Hector if she didn’t believe me.

  I placed my duffel lavishly on the special luggage rack and dug out a clean pair of blue jeans and a clean shirt. Then I availed myself of the bathtub for a quick soak and got spruced up as best I could, running a comb through my hair one more time for good measure. Then I hopped up onto the bed and gave it a test flop. Very nice. But I was restless. I had given myself plenty of time, figuring to listen to the missed call that registered on my cell phone. I hoped it was Faye, but presumed that it wasn’t. Maybe it was Agent Wardlaw. Maybe it was a wrong number.

  I lay back and felt depression settle all around me. This whole trip was not going well, not really. I was gathering loads of information, but it was not lining itself up with flashing arrows pointing toward a master’s thesis. And, aside from my chat with Emmett Jones, I was kidding myself if I thought I was doing anything that justified spending Tert’s money. It was weird to find myself worrying about pleasing a client I suspected of murder.

  I tried to sort the information into two groups. Group one was miscellaneous information that might help me get my master’s. Subgroup A was information about artists’ pigments: chemistry, history, and possible sources. Subgroup B was techniques: analytical and evaluative, meaning machines to use and how to look at the results. This was all fine and good, but techniques would do me no good unless I really thought I could do something with Tert’s paint chips, which was Job A, or focused on one particular artist or work for a thesis, which was Job B. I had totally missed seeing a Catlin portrait, and I was running out of days to zip back down to D.C. and try again, little that the idea even appealed next to all my worry about Faye and the baby. And the idea of using the Krehbeils’ fabled art collection had surely fizzled.

  Which led me to Group Two, which was, of course, all things Krehbeil. I had lots of dirt on them now, more than I could have hoped to gather in a few scant days, and in fact more than I cared to know about them in a personal sense. They were a proud family rooted in a tradition of contrariness, and they were having a few problems with their cash flow, except for Tert. Indeed, there seemed to be an uneven distribution of wealth among them, and little happiness. The only one who had dollars in his pockets was under scrutiny by the FBI, an agency that took an interest in people only when they busted federal law or crossed state lines with their mischief.

  And Faye had gotten herself mixed up in this, and taken the baby into it.

  I hopped off the sumptuous bed like I had been bitten by a rattlesnake, jumped into my shoes, grabbed my jacket, and headed out the door.

  That put me on the front porch with half an hour to burn.

  I wandered down toward the brook, hoping that the great out-of-doors would soothe me as it so often did. The creek lured me off through a grove of trees. I followed it, listening to the birds find their perches for the night, and came across a wide pool edged in stone. The spring rose just below a steep hillside. At the top of the hill stood an old church.

  I waited in the gathering darkness at the foot of the pool, hoping that an idea might emerge with the waters.

  After a moment, I realized I was not alone. A woman had appeared on the stone steps that led down from the churchyard. I watched her approach.

  “Good evening,” she said, as she reached the edge of the pool. “I was just up visiting the church. It’s quite famous. It had a patriot tree where all the parishioners took a pledge. Have you seen it?” she asked, making the kind of effusive chat one sometimes makes to a total stranger.

  “No,” I said politely. “How interesting.”

  “Yes, and there’s a graveyard. The stones are really old. I’m from California, and we don’t have graves going back that far. Except the Indians, of course, but they didn’t leave headstones. Much more civilized, I suppose. But still, you’re a Euro-American like me, so perhaps you understand. Three hundred years seems so old.”

  I smiled. “Are you staying at the inn?” I inquired.

  “Yes. Isn’t it lovely? Where I come from, there are no houses that old. There’s so much history here. Generations and generations. We quite forget all of this in California.”

  “I suppose.”

  “Just imagine being able to visit the graves of your ancestors. Your grandparents, and their parents, and their parents’ parents. That’s what it’s like up there in that yard.”

  “Wow.”

  “And yet I had to laugh when I read that plaque commemorating the oath all the parishioners took. It seemed so naïve, somehow. Loyalty and all of that. How times have changed. Wars between peoples aren’t so simple anymore.”

  “Hmm.”

  “Well, I suppose I have to go. My husband will be wondering where I’ve gotten off to. It’s time to go to dinner, and I don’t want to turn an ankle moving up through the darkness.”

  “Right.”

  “Nice talking to you.”

  “You, too.”

  She moved off through the trees.

  I stood a while longer, watching the reflection of the darkening sky on the waters. Loyalty. Wars. Traditions. Death and dying. Graves.

  And suddenly it hit me: Mrs. Krehbeil’s illness was the key to the whole Krehbeil puzzle.

  The question became, How could I prove what was making her sick?

  24

  BUB
E’S BREW PUB WAS AN OLD BRICK BUILDING ON THE MAIN drag of the not-at-all bustling metropolis of Mount Joy, Pennsylvania. The town appeared to be a secondary hub built around the farming trades. A railroad ran through it, forming a slot through the heart of the central district. Bube’s was prominent within what Mount Joy had for a semi-industrial neighborhood. It was a very old brewery. It had the ten-foot-tall oak barrels to prove it.

  “I’m supposed to meet a party here,” I told the hostess who greeted me inside the big wooden doors.

  She looked at her clipboard and said something that was lost under a loud whooping from the bar. Somewhere, somebody was doing something clever with a basketball, and a number of young fellahs were sounding pretty excited about it.

  I said, “We’re here to meet a party who’s … in the theater.”

  “Oh. Then you’d be downstairs.”

  She led me through the dark, lofty reaches of the barrel room to the top of a flight of wooden steps, the kind of rough-hewn staircase that has treads but no risers. The stairs led down—I mean way down. It went down at least two stories into the earth. Far below, I could hear music and raucous laughter, and I could just make out the rough form of a stone floor. A limestone floor, I noted. Is this what Hector meant? Oh well, in for a Jenny, in for a pound, I told myself, and started down.

  At the foot of the stairs, I stepped into a cavern in the living rock. The low ceiling arched above me. Running the length of the room were wooden tables and benches, arranged in a U that opened to a curtained passageway at the far end of the cavern. On the benches were twenty or thirty men and women howling with mirth and swilling from tankards filled with beer. Clearly, they’d been at it awhile. At the near end of the cavern sat two minstrels—there was no other word for it; they were dressed in tights and funny slippers with curling toes, and they sat on low stools and were playing lutes. Candles burned all around them, wax dripping down the natural ledges in the rock.

  I glanced up and down, trying to understand what I had just walked into. The chief waitress—or head harlot, I wasn’t sure which was more appropriate—was dressed in full skirts and a peasant blouse gathered in close to her ribs by a tight vest emphasizing her comely breasts. Her blonde hair hung to her waist. Addressing the crowd was a man dressed as an Elizabethan street beggar, a study in burlap rags and grease-paint dirt. He held forth with a steady harangue designed to loosen the diners from their usual senses of propriety. They were dressed in modern clothing, but were drinking out of what appeared to be pewter tankards and eating their salads off of what appeared to be pewter platters. I hoped for their sakes that the metal in those implements was in fact something modern—aluminum or tin, perhaps—instead of pewter, which had fallen out of favor because it contained lead.

  One of the diners at the near table stumbled to his feet. “Hey, here you are!” He said. “We were wondering if you were coming!”

  I wasn’t quite sure how to volley this. “Uh—”

  Sloshing his tankard, he said, “You’re Sylvia Piorkowski from Cleveland, right?”

  “Uh, no … .”

  He roared with laughter. “No worry! You join us anyway. If you’re not Sylvia from Cleveland, then you’re somebody else from somewhere else, right?”

  “Must be. Or last time I checked.”

  “Well, then, you take Sylvia’s seat.”

  “Well, that’s quite a temptation, but I have to meet Jenny.”

  As if on cue, Jenny popped off of the bottom step behind me. “Em,” she said. “Where are we?”

  “In Cincinnati, it would appear. How’d you find me?”

  “I described you, and the hostess said you were down here. How did you get here?”

  “Same thing. I asked for you.”

  Another man was on his feet. “Oh, great, you’re both here now. Hey, everybody, we’re all here now!”

  “Hurrah!” shouted a chorus of looped Midwesterners. “May the hangings begin!”

  Jenny and I looked at each other and shrugged. “Do you think we ought to go upstairs while our necks are still short?” she asked.

  “Give it a moment,” I replied. “I have a funny feeling about this.”

  The velvet curtains at the far end of the cavern split open, and more waiters in medieval garb stepped through it, pushing carts with food. One carried a baron of beef. My mouth started to water.

  “Wonder what it costs to join them?” I asked Jenny.

  “Sit down!” roared the woman to my right. “You’re gonna get us in trouble with the Feastmaster!”

  “Who’s that?” I asked, bending near her to hear over the jollity.

  The man to my left yanked me onto the bench next to him. “Get down! Here he comes now!” he bellowed, about bursting my eardrum. Another man got hold of Jenny and pulled her onto a bench between himself and me.

  I stuck a thumb into my ringing ear and looked up just in time to see the curtains swish open around another man in tights. This one was about six feet tall and very chesty, especially with all the padding in the black velvet doublet he wore under his black velvet cape, and inside the black tights covering his otherwise not-very-shapely legs. His hair was greased back with brilliantine, and his eyes were liberally outlined with makeup, like a spoof of a bad production of Cleopatra Queen of the Nile. Around his neck, he wore a pewter boar’s-head that brandished tusks the size of carrots. Under his arm he carried a heavy, leather-bound book. Staring glassily to the far end of the room in a splendor of affect that would have put Sir Laurence Olivier to shame, he pronounced, “I am thy Feastmaster, and this”—he held high his volume—“is The Book!”

  “The Book!” howled the assembled masses, raising their tankards high.

  “Oh. My. God,” whispered Jenny, in the brief of silence that punctuated this explosive call and response. “This is nuts!”

  I said, “No, Jenny, it’s crazier than you think. Do you know who that is?’”

  “Who?”

  “The Feastmaster.”

  “Some nut who flunked out of theater school. I don’t know, how’m I supposed to know him?”

  “That’s Hector, Jenny. I know the voice. Not to mention the sense of drama.” The heavy makeup could not eclipse the color of his eyes. They were a cool, pale gray, just like his brother’s.

  “Prithee quiet, ladies,” the Feastmaster ordered of us. “For thou art unsettling the nerves of those who wouldst consume my feast.”

  “He’s talking to us, Em.”

  “Yes, Jenny, he’s looking right at us, too.”

  “Don’t let him get away.”

  “He’s not going anywhere, Jenny. This is his finest hour.”

  “Omigosh.”

  “Wench!” cried the Feastmaster. “Giveth thee names to these who wouldst speak when told of silence!”

  The bosomy woman with the long blonde hair came over to us and planted her fists on her hips. She pointed at Jenny. “This one be Purple Claws,” she said, and of me, she declared, “and this one shall hereby be known as Blue Jeans!”

  “Be it so!” roared the Feastmaster.

  “Purple Claws!” howled the merrymakers, pounding their tankards on the table. “Blue Jeans!”

  The Feastmaster drew himself up in a vampish impression of a Veronica Lake pinup and began to sing, falsetto, “I dream of Brownie with the light blue-oo jeans … .”

  The man next to me just missed my shoulder in a last-ditch effort to avoid laughing himself clean off the bench. He lay on the floor with his legs still up beside me, gasping for breath. His friends shrieked and pointed at him.

  Jenny twisted her lips into an evaluative look as she viewed the upended male. “Darwin was right,” she said.

  Over the next hour and a half, we were treated to a fine repast and the very finest in in-your-face dinner theater. The Wench and the Beggar played tag team down the rows of increasingly jolly Ohioans, giving shoulder and neck rubs for tips while the Feastmaster coached the women on the fine art of lying across the men’s laps
and reaching for proffered grapes with their tongues. I watched in fascination, feeling like little more than a voyeur until the man next to me slung an arm around me and purchased the attentions of the Beggar for me. I wasn’t sure I wanted anyone with that much dirt on his hands to touch me, but as he moved up behind me and extended a hand to either side of my face, I realized that the palms were freshly washed and smooth with scented oils. He spoke to me softly and touched me with utmost kindness and care, and told me to rest against him. For the first time since Jack had left, I leaned against a man and relaxed.

  When all was said and done and the drunkest of the drunk had slopped back up the steps to the main level, the actors who had played our heckling Wench, the Beggar and Feastmaster joined the crowd at the hostess’s station. After one or two last rounds of hugging and singing and final swapping of jokes and slipping of tips, the Ohioans got their coats and began to depart. One man came by and pressed a hug on me and said how glad he was that I’d been able to make it and to please not be such a stranger. I assured him that I’d see him back in Ohio and sent him on his way out the door.

  The Wench patted Hector on the back. “You did great tonight,” she said. “I hope you stand in for Gary another time.”

  Hector bowed with a dramatic flourish which caught the Wench’s hand to his lips for an eloquent but chaste kiss. “Would that he need not fall ill that I could be of assistance, madam.”

  Jenny whispered into my ear. “Working for heritage has never been like this.”

  “Now’s when we really get to work,” I assured her. “And I think the outrageous approach is in order.”

  I stepped forward and slipped my arm through Hector’s. “Oh Feastmaster,” I crooned, “prithee let a lonesome wench purchase you a drink.”

  Hector rolled his expressive gray eyes and cocked a hip, sending the message that he was thirsty but not my kind of guy. “I never turn down a drink,” he said. “The bar’s right over here.”

  WE WERE QUICKLY settled and, in the time-honored fashion of those who are truly devoted to being hammered, Hector was soon drunk. After that, it was no trouble at all getting him to talk about his family. All I had to ask was, “Are there more talented artisans like you in your family?”