Twelve O'Clock Tales

by Felice Picano

  “I told Ottilie all that. She appeared sad to hear my story, but was not particularly surprised. She told me that it only corroborated what she’d come to believe—that each painting she made commemorated some evil deed. I’d merely confirmed what she’d believed. I—and the affair concerning Herbert Lawrence’s wife.

  “Ottilie came back to the duplex with me that night. But when I returned home from the firm the following night, she’d moved out. It wasn’t my past dishonesty that had impelled her move, she assured me in a note she’d left. I’d been young, in a jam, she understood. But she couldn’t stop herself from painting those terrifying landscapes. She couldn’t. Even knowing they were terrible. She felt only half-alive away from her studio: only fully herself when working. She told me what I’d not known, how she’d lost most of her friends over the past two years, one by one, and each of them in the same way—by unconsciously, invariably, unintentionally ferreting out and then painting for them to see the scene of some awful secret each person possessed.

  “I tried to get Ottilie to see someone—a counselor, a psychologist, someone who would reason with her or help her. At the same time, I clearly could not in any way explain how she had painted that view of my family’s lodge, nor the utter eeriness of her being able to so pinpoint the time and date of my misdeed. Yet even as powerfully disturbing as that incident was, it wasn’t as important to me as Ottilie and I were. But she wouldn’t listen to me.

  “After a while she changed her studio phone number to an unlisted one. She stopped answering my letters. Sent them back unopened. That all happened less than six months ago.

  “When I received the postcard announcing Ottilie’s show, I thought Ottilie had changed her mind about us. I was wrong, of course. The mailing list was partly taken from her personal telephone/address book by the gallery assistant here. I couldn’t know that and of course I hoped for a reconciliation. In my wildest hopes, I thought perhaps now, with the painting series completed, perhaps Ottilie would somehow be fully purged of all the eeriness and we could start anew. I thought I’d come here not on opening night, when my appearance might only spoil her triumph, but the next night. That of course turned out to be one night too late. When I read of her death, I have to admit, some part of me wasn’t all that surprised. It seemed to me that success or not, she’d still committed herself to a course that could only end in suicide.”

  Eldridge had finished. I told him I disagreed with Detective Compson’s finding of self-inflicted death. I told him that, but didn’t tell him why I disagreed.

  “You don’t know how badly off Ottilie was,” Eldridge argued. “Even six months ago. Imagine how much worse it must have gotten for her?”

  It was true that I’d not seen her in that six-month period since she’d left Eldridge. In fact, I’d not seen her for a longer time before that, so he had me at a disadvantage.

  “Then leave it alone,” Eldridge pleaded. “Ottilie’s possibly better off now. Indeed,” he added, not all that cryptically, “perhaps all of us are better off now.”

  *

  I have to admit that after that conversation with Eldridge my faith wavered. Elements of his story seemed to reafirm what Auburn Anders had told Detective Compson: Ottilie believed there was some secret—some evil, Eldridge said—concealed in each of her imaginary landscapes. If she believed that, and if her beloved Anthony could not disprove it, others too might have given it credence. Possibly the Herbert Lawrences had—and whoever had poisoned Ottilie Chase.

  With that in mind, I decided to look up Lawrence. It’s true that in doing so, I completely misrepresented myself. I phoned and told him I was writing an obituary and appreciation of Ottilie for Art in America magazine, and needed a description of those paintings of hers for which no photographic slides existed. According to Ottilie’s own records, I told him, he once owned a work now considered lost. I asked if I could see Lawrence at his office that very afternoon. He tried to put me off, but when I hinted that what I was really looking for was information on the effect of Ottilie Chase’s work on others, he reluctantly agreed to see me.

  Nevertheless, as we sat in his office high over Park Avenue, Lawrence wasn’t very helpful at first. As the secretary pool outside his glass door emptied and the lights went on one by one along upper Park, Lawrence poured us both a drink and loosened up. Finally, he said:

  “I’m glad she’s dead. Chase and her damned painting destroyed my marriage. I still haven’t been able to put my life back together.”

  After that outburst, he didn’t need much prodding to go on. This is what he said:

  He’d been meeting a business associate for dinner in the neighborhood of the Anders Galley, and afterward, his friend suggested they look at the group show, as an old school friend was one of the artists represented. Lawrence himself wasn’t at all interested in art, although his associate claimed to be a collector of sorts. But once inside the gallery, Lawrence had immediately been arrested by a particular landscape.

  It wasn’t very large, he said, yet its use of color, paint, and he guessed perspective too, lent it an amazing sense of depth. The landscape wasn’t at all extraordinary—a rocky bluff into which a small gray brick building seemed almost hidden, surrounded by a scrub pine forest. A majestic ridge of high, scraggy, snowless mountains loomed over the scene, reminding Lawrence of the Rocky Mountains in that area of Colorado where he and his wife had grown up. Their twentieth wedding anniversary would be in a week, and Lawrence told me he was one of those men who never knew what gift to get his wife. He thought this would be a winner: She’d be delighted both by the novelty of the present and by the reminder of Colorado, which she always said she missed. Lawrence’s colleague told him that Ottilie Chase was a well-known and well-respected artist: The work should also be a good investment. That clinched it. Lawrence bought the landscape.

  A week later, when Judith Lawrence pulled off the brown paper wrappings in their house, she stared wordless at the painting for a long time. She then turned to Herbert and said, “How could you?” and fled the room. Lawrence heard her cry herself to sleep in their locked bedroom. He was astonished, and—naturally enough—disappointed by her reaction. He was even more surprised when sometime in the middle of the night, he heard—from the den, where he’d bedded down—Judith creep back into the living room. He waited as she lighted a lamp, pulled away the wrapping he’d had hastily gathered together, and then sat staring silently for a long time at the landscape.

  When Lawrence got up enough courage to sidle up to her, his wife rejected his caresses—not angrily, but sadly, coldly. In an equally cold voice, she told him that now that he knew everything there was to know about her, he must be happy. When he said he had no idea what she was talking about, she asked surely he knew what the painting depicted? He said he had no idea. He’d chosen it because it reminded him of home. That surprised her, but she said it no longer made any difference. She would tell him what was painted, what he’d brought into their home and into their marriage.

  She reminded Lawrence of the time before they’d married. They’d lived in Colorado Springs, she the daughter of a miner who’d died in a mine accident and of a woman who’d become bitter with loss and poverty—and with having to bring up two small daughters, Judith and her sister Lil. In contrast, Lawrence was from one of the wealthiest families in town. He’d gone to college in the East, he’d driven a foreign sports car when they met and associated with Denver socialites.

  Her mother had pinned all her hopes on Lil marrying well, and when Herbert Lawrence had begun dating the lovely girl, her mother was pleased. But Lil was independent to the point of rebellion—and she was promiscuous. She didn’t care for Herbert as much as she did for what he could buy her. While he was away, she went out with other men: low men, miners, tramps, almost anyone who wanted her. Her mother continually warned her that word would reach the Lawrence family. Lil didn’t seem to care. Desperate, her mother confided in Judith.

  The crisis arrived when Lil bec
ame pregnant by an unknown man. Instead of allowing herself to have an abortion, Lil said she would flaunt her state in the Lawrence house, say it was Herbert’s child, force the marriage to occur, and thus find out what a fool in love Lawrence actually was. This was too much for her mother. She hatched a plan and had her other daughter, Judith, aid her. They would pretend they were taking Lil to a rest home where she might have the child in privacy. But the place they actually took her to was a private sanitarium located in the foothills of the Rockies—the very same building that seemed to grow out of the rock itself in Ottilie Chase’s very accurate depiction. The very last sight Judith ever had of her sister was of Lil screaming, suddenly realizing what was happening and trying to flee from the two burly men who’d finally had to knock her out to get her into the straitjacket. Lil hadn’t been insane when she’d gone into that asylum in the rocks, but according to Judith’s mother, after losing the child prematurely, and after remaining incarcerated so long, her mind had snapped. Her mother had become guilty and visited, but she’d died years before, and since then no one had visited Lil.

  Judith and her mother had meanwhile fabricated a boating accident in which Lil had supposedly drowned. No one had reason to disbelieve them. Certainly not Herbert. It was at the memorial service for Lil that Lawrence again met Judith. At first, they spoke only of Lil. But soon that topic was dropped, and as they grew closer, it was never again raised. He married Judith a year later; he’d come to love her, to see Lil’s best qualities and none of her worst in her sister. In fact, he’d come to love Judith far more than he’d believed he could ever care for Lil, whose constancy he’d always been unsure of. Lawrence admitted that to Judith, in front of the damning landscape, in an attempt to win her back.

  His wife didn’t, or couldn’t, believe him. Her secret was out and it was a terrible one. In her own mind, she’d pretended that Lil was dead. Now the seriousness of her betrayal and decades-long perfidy was upon her, right there, painted and titled with the very date her poor sister had been dragged into a living death. Judith would somehow have to make amends. Despite Herbert’s protests, she filed for separation and returned to Colorado. She had the helpless harridan that Lil had become released into her custody and she resettled in Colorado Springs to care for her.

  When Herbert Lawrence still thought he’d be able to change his wife’s mind, he’d called Auburn and tried to sell back the landscape. When it became clear that even that would make no difference to his wife, Lawrence had flown into a rage and destroyed the painting. Since then, he’d gone to Colorado himself, trying to win back his wife. Unfortunately, once out of the asylum, Lil had lasted only a few months and had died in her sister’s care. His shocked wife had taken her sister’s place in the asylum.

  *

  Herbert Lawrence’s unhappy tale so perfectly supported Anthony Eldridge’s that I was now convinced that I possessed a motive for Ottilie Chase’s murder. Luckily for them, Eldridge and Lawrence, who would have been the most natural suspects, both had airtight alibis for the night of the vernissage.

  What I now had to do was to find a third crime, a crime that exactly fit the painting that Ottilie had last grasped—then, most likely, I’d find her murderer. Once the exhibit, at last, ended, my painting had been taken down and brought home. Now If I could only convince the others, Auburn Anders, Susan Vight, and most crucially Detective Compson, that the landscape must hold the answer.

  Whether I could convince them or not, it wasn’t going to be easy. All I really had was a date—August 13, 1999—and the depiction of a locale neither I nor anyone else who’d seen it seemed to recognize.

  Here, Ottilie’s tremendous skill in tempera proved useful. For there did exist something like a clue within the painting itself, although I needed a high-powered magnifying glass and patient hours of deciphering to get at it.

  I mentioned before that the painting showed a body of still water surrounded by land. It could have been a bay, an inlet, or a lake—or rather one end of a lake—with an island just left of center. What I didn’t mention was that Ottilie depicted not a barren, totally isolated area, but a populated one. While the painting itself was absent of human life, and unearthly still, various houses on stilts were barely visible within the pine-tree cover that grew right down to the water-lapped shingle: houses in what I could only call North American style, wooden, and with small decks, large windows, some with tottering outdoors stairways down to the water. It wasn’t a style of architecture as distinguishable as, say, Cape Cod or Eyebrow, but it definitely felt to me like New England, or at least the northeastern U.S. Each house possessed its own jetty, little slatted docks for the most part that floated atop the water. At the end of most of these, held stationary with anchors, I suppose, were little boats: motor launches, collapsed-sail catamarans, rowboats, dories. One boat in the foreground was more detailed than the others as it was closer to the viewer. Inside this dinghy lay an enameled box, yellow lettering upon its side. After hours of minute discernment, I finally made out:

  SEBAS O

  ail & tack

  “Sail & Tackle” seemed to be the most likely explanation for the second line of the two. But what was the word, or words, or—I most hoped—name, only partly revealed in the first line? Not Sebastian nor Sebastopol. But more like Sebasoon or Sebassox, or…

  By now I was half-obsessed with my theory and so I spent weeks poring over gazetteers and map indexes in libraries; I even went to D.C. and checked out the Smithsonian’s cartological wing. It was there that I at last discovered the single place in the U.S. that could possibly be the name on the tackle box—Sebascodegan Island, located in the northeast quadrant of Casco Bay, a hundred miles or so north of Portland, Maine.

  According to U.S. Department of the Interior Geological Survey Map, AMS-7070IVSW—Series V & II—there was no lake big enough nearby to be the one painted, but instead there was a large enough inlet known as Quahog Bay, surrounded by a dozen coves and dotted with islands, several of which looked large enough on the map to be the one depicted.

  The following weekend, I took color photos of the painting until I got one I deemed most accurate. I had it enlarged and took it with me in a rented car up to Maine.

  I found Sebascodegan Island easily enough, but that word means “large” in the local Indian dialect, and the island was huge. So was the inland bay it enclosed. I drove miles along public and private—often deserted—dirt roads, circumnavigating the island, until I found what seemed to be near the correct spot, on the easternmost side of the island. It had to be that side, I reasoned, because the sun had been setting opposite the site from which the scene had been viewed—or in Ottilie’s case, imagined.

  To my surprise, I also found that the island pictured in her landscape was not one of the two—Ben Island or Snow Island—shown on the map I’d used, but instead two smaller, low-lying islets, unnamed on the map, which from only one angle seemed to cohere into a single isle. The dome-shaped copse of trees also become an evident landmark, not to be mistaken.

  I remained overnight in the area, in a guest house near Cundy’s Harbor, an unremarkable, poverty-blighted local fishing village. The next morning I rented a canoe, which I strapped atop the car roof. When I’d reached the land’s-end point from which I’d already determined the painting must have been (mentally) composed, I took down the canoe and began to explore the two little islands by water.

  Luckily it was mid-September and most of the summer and weekend homes were already closed up. Luckily, I say, as both small isles seemed much used by local picnickers during the summer. Would I, could I, find evidence here of a crime committed two years before?

  I didn’t on my first try, but I did on my second, more thorough attempt. It was found inside a clump of trees, the very spot Ottilie’s hand had appeared to point toward during her death throes. Within the trees lay a half dozen used condoms, and a blue tampon case, among the litter at the bottom of a deep little gully. My evidence, however—unlike the rest of the ju
nk—was older and had once been a man’s leather wallet. It was once waterlogged too, I guess during high tide, and so quite moldy, and it had also been partly chewed at by some small animal. Virtually all its contents were so disintegrated as to be unreadable. However, plastic seems to possess a half-life only somewhat shorter than that of plutonium, and so after rooting about in the mess with a twig, I located a MasterCard made out to one Donald Horace Scott.

  Later that day, I informally interviewed the sheriff of the town of Brunswick, the nearest police precinct that included the little island. I told him I was a reporter for The Police Gazette (by now I’d become inured to such pretenses) and that I was writing an article on the unsolved crimes of New England. Did he have anything to tell my readers of? At first he said no. But I prompted him. What about the disappearance on August 13th, 1999, of Donald Horace Scott?

  He recalled that immediately, but he still couldn’t recall much, as he’d been on vacation at the time, he said, and someone else had handled the case. It was all written up, and I might read the police file if I wished.

  The contents of the manila folder were almost embarrassingly slender. A death certificate, a page of local testimony, and a preliminary finding of death by misadventure at sea.

  Scott had been seen by a real estate agent in the nearby hamlet of Cooks Corner. He’d been looking for a weekend cottage, he’d told the man. He’d also told the man that his girlfriend had grown up in the area, gone to camp out on Orr’s Island nearby, and loved the place. As far as the agent could tell, Scott had been alone when he picked up the key to the Glynn house, but the unnamed woman might easily have met up with him later—or she might have been totally fictitious.

  Scott never returned the key to the Glynn house, and a day later the real estate agent found it still lodged in the front door lock. The cottage didn’t look used, although the agent said he’d noticed a stubbed-out cigarette in the ashtray—the woman’s?—on a deal table facing the view of the inlet. The sheriff later found fresh tire marks, but no car at the house. Most odd to me, however, was the date of Scott’s disappearance given in the police records from the real estate agent’s testimony. It wasn’t August 13th, but August 11th. That two-day discrepancy baffled me at first; later on it gave me the strongest clue of all.