Die in Plain Sight

by Elizabeth Lowell

  I’m not here for a wardrobe critique, Lacey told herself. The paintings are on display, not me.

  And thank God her mother wasn’t in the auditorium. She would have been mortified by her daughter’s outfit. Appearance and the lack of a country-club husband were the two major reasons mother and daughter fought. Every time Lacey thought her mother had finally gotten used to the idea that the oldest of her three daughters wasn’t the cashmere-and-pearls type, she’d get another lecture on her pitiful fashion sense.

  Must you look like you just crawled out of a paint tube?

  Do you really style your hair with a hand mixer?

  If you can’t afford anything but garage-sale shoes, I’d be happy to take you shopping.

  “Lacey? Ms. Quinn? Hello? Anyone home?” Ian fanned his fingers in front of her face.

  “Oh. Sorry. Is it my turn?” Then she blinked and focused on the man who was talking to her, calling her by name. Hell. There goes Ms. January Marsh. “Ian, right? Neighbor Lapstrake?”

  “At your service. Susa will be finished with the two folks in front of you real quick. Why don’t you step up to the table and let me help you unwrap your paintings. Things will go faster that way.”

  When he reached for the paintings, her arms tightened protectively around the canvases.

  “I’ll be gentle,” he said gravely. “I promise.”

  The humor underlying his reassurance flustered Lacey. Or maybe it was the smile. She stuck out her lower lip and blew a stray curl away from her eyes.

  “Family treasures?” he asked, waiting for her to release the bundles.

  “No! I found them at a garage sale.”

  Again Ian smiled even as he wondered why the pretty lady with the summer-garden shirt and clear brown eyes was lying. All the “tells” were there—looking away, defensive posture, restlessness.

  “Whatever,” he said. “Take them over to the table and unwrap them. Unless you trust me to help?”

  Lacey felt like a fool. “Sorry. It’s just—” She blew fiercely at the curl that kept tickling the corner of her eye.

  With a motion too swift and impersonal for her to take offense, he tucked the stray curl back in place.

  “It’ll just come unsprung again,” she said. “I’m a walking fashion disaster.”

  “Good. I hate models.”

  Her quick smile changed her features, adding an electric element to her face that was both intelligence and intensity. “Here. Take the top one. I’ll handle the other two. And don’t mention my name to anyone, okay? If it turns out badly, I don’t want, um, the wrong publicity for my…um, shop. Just call me…” Hurriedly she tried to remember her e-mail pseudonym. “January,” she said, “January Marsh.”

  Ian barely managed not to laugh out loud. He didn’t know what game the lady was playing, but he was certain it had to be as innocent as she was. She couldn’t have lied successfully to save her life.

  “Okay, Ms. Marsh,” he said, pointing with his chin. “This way.”

  From behind Ian, where Susa was judging paintings, came a man’s rueful laughter. “A student exercise, huh?”

  “Straight from a You Can Too Paint book. The frame, however, is quite old.” It was quite awful, too, but Susa felt no need to point that out.

  “Oh, well, back under the bed with it.”

  “Actually, if you wouldn’t mind leaving me your name and address, I know a professor who is doing a study of painting books and their influence on the popular culture of their time. I’m sure he’d be fascinated by this painting and its history.”

  “Sure.” He ripped the business card off the back of the painting and handed it to her. “Here.”

  Susa tucked the card into a small file that sat next to her left hand and smiled expectantly at the next person, a middle-aged man who was sweating heavily in the overcrowded auditorium.

  “I think the lady was next,” he said, gesturing toward Lacey.

  “Go ahead,” Ian said as he wrestled with the generous tape job. “We’ll be a minute.”

  “Thank you!” The man hurried forward, clutching some paintings.

  Considering the man’s nervousness, Susa decided the offerings were probably his own work rather than that of an ancestor.

  “They’re very unusual,” Susa said, hoping that you didn’t go to hell for white lies, because she sure had told a lot of them tonight. “Clearly in the genre of modern studio art, which is unfortunate. The purpose of this”—she waved a hand at the crowded auditorium—“is to discover old plein air artists, not new studio artists.”

  “I’d be glad to donate the paintings for the auction,” the man said quickly, “like it said in the pamphlet.”

  Ian had already figured out where this interview would end. He signaled to one of Mr. Goodman’s assistants, all of them local artists. This one was a cat-slim male dressed entirely in shades of black except for an unusual gold earring clinging to his left ear. He trotted over eagerly.

  “That’s very generous of you,” Susa said to the hopeful studio artist. “One of the assistants will give you the forms.”

  “Would you help this man carry his paintings to the auction table?” Ian said. “We’re trying to move things along so Susa can have a break.”

  “For La Susa, I’d move mountains,” he said with a bow that would have done credit to an eighteenth-century French courtier.

  Ian covered his laugh with a cough.

  It took Susa less than four minutes to reject the next three paintings. Each one was a still life of the type beloved by middle-class Victorian women who believed that painting roses on china and playing the piano were the hallmarks of good breeding.

  “You want to take your break now?” Ian said, tugging at more of the stubborn tape. “Ms., uh…” He hesitated.

  “Marsh,” she supplied quickly.

  Ian smiled slightly. “Ms. Marsh has these things wrapped up like the lead in Revenge of the Mummies.”

  “You just have to know where the zipper is,” Lacey retorted, pulling a painting free with a flourish.

  Susa took one look at the canvas and felt years fly away. She was breathless, young, standing frozen in a violent storm of discovery as she looked at a Lewis Marten painting for the first time. Hand against her throat, she made a small sound of wonder and surprise.

  “Susa?” Ian said instantly. “What is it? Are you—”

  She held up her hand, cutting him off. “Where did you get this?” she demanded without looking away from the canvas.

  Lacey moved uneasily. “A garage sale.”

  Deftly Susa turned the unframed canvas over without touching the face of it. All she saw was an e-mail address and the words Sandy Cove. There was no artist’s title on the back. No date. But then, many artists didn’t date their work.

  “A garage sale,” Susa said. “Where? When?”

  “I, um, I don’t remember.”

  Susa pinned the younger woman with a clear hazel glance that seemed to look right through to her soul. “How can that be?”

  Lacey cleared her throat. “I go to twenty or thirty sales a month, so it’s hard to keep track.”

  “Do you have any more Martens?”

  “Martens?”

  “Paintings by Lewis Marten,” Susa said.

  “I don’t even have one. These are—” Lacey stopped just before she blurted out something about her grandfather. “There’s no name on the paintings, so I’m sure they don’t belong to anyone called Marten.” Especially as she’d watched her grandfather paint Sandy Cove, a fact that she wasn’t going to reveal.

  Susa flipped the painting back over and for the first time looked for an artist’s signature. Her arched eyebrows lifted when she found none. She tilted and turned the canvas to catch the light, looked at its back, and turned it faceup again, fascinated and bemused by seeing the past live again in her hands, a past brought to life by someone who had lived at the time when Painter’s Beach was called Sandy Cove.

  “Well, a rose is a r
ose is a rose and all that,” Susa said. “No matter that it isn’t signed, this was painted by an extremely talented plein air artist who worked in Lewis Marten’s time.” More likely, in his body.

  Lacey grinned. “I knew it!”

  “A garage sale. My God.” Susa laughed triumphantly. “My ancestors strike again.”

  “What?” Ian asked.

  “Long story,” she said, shaking her head. “Put it this way—I just knew I’d find something wonderful if I did the triage for the charity auction. But this—this is like pulling weeds and finding diamonds in the roots. Extraordinary.” She looked at Lacey and started laughing. “A garage sale! Lord, but life is sweet.” She held out her hand. “I’m Susa Donovan and I’m delighted you came here tonight, Ms.—”

  “January Marsh,” Ian said before Lacey could get over the shock of shaking hands with a painter whose name was often mentioned in the same breath as Georgia O’Keeffe.

  “Are the others like this?” Susa asked, releasing Lacey’s hand.

  At first Lacey was afraid that Susa had somehow read her mind and knew that there was a storage unit filled with hundreds of unframed canvases by her grandfather. Then Lacey realized that Susa was looking eagerly at the two other wrapped packages.

  “They’re all unsigned,” Lacey said carefully.

  “Well, open them up!”

  Ian smiled at Susa’s enthusiasm. “I’ve just about got this one out of its cocoon.”

  “Here,” Lacey said, leaning in over his right arm and pointing to a piece of red tape. “Yank on that and it will all come off. Mostly.”

  He yanked. Bubble wrap slithered down the canvas. Stately, elegant eucalyptus trees rose against a radiant slice of dawn.

  “Oh, my,” Susa murmured. She took the canvas and turned it slowly in a circle, letting light flood over the painting from all angles. “Superb. Just superb. Muscular, graceful, energetic, serene. Emotionally vivid, technically fluid. Everything you could ask of a plein air painter. And so very like Marten.”

  Ian looked from the canvas and Susa’s rapt face. “Should I know that name?”

  “Lewis Marten?” she asked.

  “Yes.”

  “No reason to, unless you have a doctorate in obscure California Impressionists. All anyone ever knew was that Marten was a teenage runaway who showed up in Laguna Beach before World War Two,” Susa said. “The local artist community took him in and then watched in amazement as a skinny child painted them right into the ground.”

  “Ouch,” Ian said.

  “Oh, they didn’t admit it aloud. There were some excellent painters around at the time and their egos weren’t tiny. But still, when you confront huge unself-conscious talent like this, it just takes the world away.”

  “That’s how I felt the first time I saw a painting by you,” Lacey said. “It…burned.”

  Susa glanced at Lacey, saw sincerity rather than flattery, and smiled. “Thank you. I love knowing that one of my paintings reached out and grabbed someone.”

  Lacey started to say that her grandfather had been a great fan of Susa’s paintings. Instead, she said, “Anyone who isn’t ‘grabbed’ by your work must be dead between the ears and the ribs.”

  “It would be lovely to think so,” Susa said dryly, “but I know better. After you cut away all the intricate intellectual rationalizations, art is a matter of taste. No single flavor works for everyone. Nor should it, despite what the critics and academics would have us believe.”

  “Don’t tell me you had problems with the critics and academics?” Lacey asked before she thought. Then she winced. “Oops. Sorry. I didn’t mean to be rude.”

  Susa was laughing too hard to hide it. “I came of painting age during the last hurrah of postmodern abstract minimalism. I painted ‘scenery.’ Believe me, I had a long procession of teachers, fellow artists, and critics telling me I was painting the wrong thing.”

  Lacey smiled. “I get some of that, too.”

  “I thought you were a painter,” Susa said with satisfaction.

  “How could you tell?”

  “Hands.”

  Lacey looked down. Sure enough, she hadn’t been able to get all the paint off her skin. “Mother would kill me.”

  Wordlessly Susa held out her own hands. Neatly trimmed nails, no manicure, scrubbed skin…and indelible, colorful shadows of the last oils she had used.

  “Don’t forget the chin,” Ian said.

  Both women looked at him.

  Gently he touched just under Susa’s chin, then Lacey’s. “Different colors, same place.”

  “When I’m in a hurry, I switch brushes and tuck the extra ones under my chin,” Lacey said, trying not to be embarrassed.

  “Me, too,” Susa said. “My husband teases me about it. Says it’s a good thing I’m so short that no one will ever see the bottom of my chin.” She gave Ian a measuring kind of look. “But you noticed.”

  “Lifetime of looking at pretty women,” he said blandly. “The prettier they are, the closer I look.”

  Lacey rolled her eyes.

  Susa just laughed. “With that kind of focus, you should have been a painter yourself.”

  “If you’d ever seen me draw, you’d bite your tongue clear through before you suggested that again.”

  She looked at his hands. Large. Competent. Callused. Clean. “Ah, well, you’re either called to paint or you aren’t. What’s in the last package? I feel like a kid at Christmas.”

  Lacey thought of the painting still shrouded in bubble wrap and wondered all over again if she had made the right choice. “It’s not like the others,” she said slowly.

  “Not the same painter?” Susa asked, disappointed.

  “Same painter. Different mood.”

  Susa waited for a moment, realized that Lacey was hesitating for some reason, and said, “Stop torturing me and unwrap it.”

  Mentally crossing her fingers, Lacey pulled the red tape and waited for Susa’s reaction to Scream Bloody Murder.

  But it was Ian who responded first. “Jesus Christ, is that what I think it is?”

  “Quiet,” Susa said. It was a voice her family rarely heard, but when they did, they shut up.

  So did Ian. He studied the painting and waited, wondering what was going on. He was no painter, but he knew a murder when he saw it in black and blue and red in front of him. What he didn’t know was who had killed, who had died, and why it had been painted.

  “Incredible. He’s fully mature in this one. Nothing blurred. Nothing hiding. Nothing bridled. Pure talent driven by even purer rage.” Susa let out a long breath. “It’s a vision of humanity that I wouldn’t be comfortable hanging in my home, yet as an artist I can only say, ‘Bravo!’ Were you planning on auctioning any of these, Ms. Marsh?”

  It took Lacey a moment to realize that she was Ms. Marsh. “I—I hadn’t thought that far ahead.”

  In fact, she was just realizing that she hadn’t truly thought beyond the instant when her belief in her grandfather would be vindicated. Now that it had happened, she was frantically wondering how she would manage to stay anonymous. She certainly hadn’t counted on being recognized by a customer from Lost Treasures Found who knew Susa Donovan.

  The only good news here—beyond Susa’s enthusiasm—was that no one had questioned the garage sale story. And if someone did, she’d stick to it and dare anyone to prove otherwise.

  “My advice would be to get a professional appraisal before you sell these paintings. Ian can put you in contact with an excellent house, Rarities Unlimited.”

  “He’s an unknown artist,” Lacey began, “so I don’t think—”

  “If he’s Lewis Marten,” Susa interrupted calmly, “and I believe he is, his paintings, if you are lucky enough to find one, start at three hundred thousand dollars.”

  “Holy shit.” Lacey heard her own words. “Ah, I mean…”

  “Holy shit indeed,” Susa said, laughing.

  Lacey looked at Ian. “Rarities Unlimited? Is that the company
I think it is, the one that works with museums and collectors around the world?”

  “Buy, sell, appraise, protect,” he said. “That’s us.”