Die in Plain Sight

by Elizabeth Lowell

  The tires bit into a hard right curve, spitting dirt and gravel. Susa laughed like a girl and hung on to the “chicken bar” above the passenger window. Lacey didn’t have a chicken bar, so she braced herself against the dashboard and occasionally against the driver’s hard thigh. When she did, he gave her a pirate’s grin and gunned the truck just enough to make her hold on to him tighter.

  Sunlight spilled like glory through ghost-white naked sycamore branches in the canyon below. Mist was a silver whisper sighing through the trees, caressing every crease and hollow, shimmering with time and secrets.

  “Oh my,” Susa breathed. “It squeezes your heart, the beauty.”

  “Want to stop?” Ian asked.

  “If we stopped at every beautiful place we saw, we’d never make it to the top,” Susa said.

  “There are worse fates,” Lacey said.

  “Ah, but I know where we’re going,” Susa said, smiling. “It’s worth getting there. I can’t wait to capture it on canvas again. And fail miserably, again.”

  Lacey glanced at the artist who was a living legend and didn’t seem to know it. Or maybe she just didn’t care. “Have you been here before?” Lacey asked.

  “Yes, when I was much younger than you.”

  “I thought your biography said you were born in Sacramento, not around here.”

  “I was. But I was the wrong child for my parents, so I lied about my age, moved to a shack out in Laguna Canyon, and started painting. Those were the days—turpentine and starvation.” She laughed wryly. “I cleaned every house but my own to survive. I made a lot of friends, painted until I couldn’t see the canvas, and sat up all night solving the problems of the universe while drinking bad wine with other lost souls.”

  “Sounds like me. Parents and all.” Then Lacey added hurriedly, “Not that I’ll ever be nearly as good a painter as you.”

  Susa waved off the words. “It’s the pursuit that matters, not the labels people put on it. Although I’m quite human enough to prefer praise to brickbats and eating to starving,” she added, winking at the younger woman.

  Lacey grinned. “Me, too.”

  As Susa looked through the windshield at the canyon that had changed far less than she had through the decades, her face settled into lines that weren’t quite sad. “Time is the greatest mystery. Here and not here. Memory and regret. I took my first lover on a grassy knoll not far away, broke my heart over him, and then I went on to break other hearts. I painted at the feet of California Impressionists like Alfred R. Mitchell and Charles Fries, talked to men who studied under William Wendt and Edgar Payne, fell in love with a Lewis Marten painting, and wept when they told me he was dead.” She half smiled. “Where does the past go? Is there a cosmic museum filled with the beauty we’ve forgotten? It was all so urgent then, so misty now.”

  “How did Marten die?” Ian asked. “From what you’ve said, he must have been fairly young.”

  “He died in a studio fire, one of those pointless tragedies. He was mourning the death of Three Savoy, his patron and close friend, as well as a hard drinker whose car couldn’t drive itself. When Marten heard about the accident, he got drunk and went to his studio to paint out his grief. Alcohol, turpentine, and cigarettes.” She shook her head slowly, thinking of the wasted talent. “He fell asleep painting. The cigarette he was smoking dropped onto paint rags and touched off his studio. He never woke up. And his paintings…” She sighed. “All those extraordinary paintings burned.”

  “Three Savoy?” Ian asked. “I remember that name. My great-uncle worked as a deputy sheriff in Moreno County. Same for his son later on. They had some odd stories to tell.”

  Susa looked at Ian with new interest. “I’ll bet they did. It was wild in those days. Kind of an early version of the Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell policy. Everybody seems to think sin was invented in the hippie sixties, but I’m here to tell you that the good ol’ boys of Moreno County could have taught sin to the devil.”

  Ian snickered. “Yeah, that’s what my uncle said.” He put the truck into second and ground up a steep turn. “Three Savoy was what my great-grandmother used to call a rounder. Never met a bottle or a whore he didn’t like. Nobody mentioned that he was a painter.”

  “He wasn’t,” Susa said, hanging on to the chicken bar again. “Oh, he dabbled, but from the paintings I’ve seen, he was quite ordinary. I suspect he was more drawn to the life than to the art.”

  “He could afford it,” Ian said.

  “Oh, yes.” Susa laughed. “I used to wish I’d been born in time to run with Three’s crowd—great food and booze, no worries, no limits, just the untouched landscape to paint and like-minded friends to celebrate the night with.”

  Suddenly Lacey grabbed at the dashboard and said, “Hey, back up, you missed a pothole.”

  Ian hit the brakes and threw the truck into reverse.

  “No! I was kidding!” Lacey said, laughing even as she braced herself.

  “Are you saying I’m a bad driver?” he asked.

  “Would I say that to the man with his hands on a lethal weapon?”

  Automatically Ian started to check his shoulder holster, then realized she meant the steering wheel. “Relax,” he said, shifting into first gear and then rapidly into second. “I used to drive in dirt races when I was a kid in Bakersfield.”

  “Demolition derbies?” Lacey asked dryly.

  “How’d you guess?”

  Susa laughed.

  Lacey decided to ask the question that had been eating at her since shortly after she’d met Ian Lapstrake. “Would it be rude to ask why you’re carrying a gun? Yikes!” Lacey almost hit the roof as the truck swerved and hit a bump. “Do you shoot the cars you can’t demolish?”

  “He carries a gun because my husband is a worrier,” Susa said.

  Lacey opened her mouth, shook her head, and said, “I’m sure that makes sense to someone.”

  “Remember the ‘protect’ part of Buy, Sell, Appraise, Protect?” Ian asked.

  “Um, yeah.” She slanted him a sideways glance. “So you’re protecting a culturally significant work of art called Susa Donovan?”

  Susa laughed into her hands. “She’s got you, Ian. No matter what you say, one of us is going to hit you.”

  Ian grinned. And didn’t say a word.

  “What Ian is protecting is my paintings,” Susa said.

  “You bet,” he said earnestly. “That’s why I left them in a hotel room a sharp six-year-old could crack and came along to watch you smear oil paints on yourself.”

  “Um, I sense an area of disagreement,” Lacey said.

  “No shit,” Ian said. “But I can guaran-damn-tee that if my brief was to watch the paintings, you two would be out here alone or the paintings would be in a bank vault.”

  “I’m not going to waste painting time waiting for the banks to open,” Susa said patiently.

  “It’s always painting time for you,” Ian muttered.

  “So glad you understand. I knew you were smart.”

  Ian was too smart to say what he was thinking, so he shut up. No wonder the Donovan thought his wife needed a keeper. She did. The woman just didn’t think the way the rest of the world did.

  Lacey stared at Susa. “You left a million dollars in paintings in your hotel room?”

  The older woman shrugged. “They’re not worth anything until they’re sold.”

  “But—holy shit.”

  Susa just laughed. “The look on your face. I’ll be sure not to invite you to my annual burning.”

  “Your what?”

  “Every year I go through my paintings and decide what’s worth keeping and what isn’t.”

  “And you burn the rejects?” Ian asked, intrigued.

  “Right down to the staples holding canvas to stretcher,” Susa said cheerfully.

  Lacey put her hands over her ears. “I’m not listening to this and I’m sure not believing what I’m not hearing.”

  “How long have you painted, Jan?” Susa asked
.

  Guilt streaked through Lacey. She really wished she hadn’t promised her father anonymity. Lying to Susa about her identity was getting more and more uncomfortable.

  “Grandpa put a paintbrush in my hand before I was three,” Lacey said, grabbing the dashboard. “Dad swore I was going to be a housepainter, the way I covered everything in sight with paint. Including the cat.”

  “I’ve tied a few things to a cat’s tail in my time,” Ian said, “but I never painted one. What did you do, knock it out first?”

  “Nope. Canned tuna in one hand, brush in the other, and presto! One house tiger emerges from the boring cocoon of a formerly white Persian.”

  Susa laughed and gave Lacey a one-armed hug. “I hope your parents appreciated you. I always wanted more daughters than chance brought me.”

  Lacey’s smile faded as she thought of all the old arguments over her own painting, and the much newer ones over her grandfather’s work. “Oh, my parents and I bumped along okay. I wasn’t what they wanted, but they’ve gotten over it. Mostly.”

  “Consider yourself adopted,” Susa said. “Both my daughters are very creative, but neither of them would have thought to paint any of our cats.” Then Susa paused and looked thoughtful. “Well, let’s just say I never found out about it if they did.”

  The truck breasted the last curve. Ahead lay a rumpled bench of land sloping gently down to rocky sea bluffs a mile away. The ocean was the color of hammered silver beneath the clouds and sapphire where the sun stabbed through. The land was covered with grasses whose seed heads were already forming on the sunny slope, making the landscape a tossing, silver-tipped sea rippling beneath the restless wind. Ravines snaked down from the coastal hills in shades of dark green and shadows. A hawk soared overhead, impaled on sunlight and utterly free, shining like heaven.

  Lacey had never wanted so much to have brushes and canvas and time to paint.

  “Soon,” Susa said, patting the younger woman’s knee. “Almost there.”

  “Sorry. I didn’t mean to—”

  “You didn’t do anything but act like the painter you are,” Susa said. “Views like this make the hand and mind itch, don’t they? When the first painters arrived, the Pacific Coast Highway was a dirt wagon track along the top of the bluffs. Now it’s lane after lane of rolling steel. But the rest of the countryside here hasn’t changed. Wind and color, sun and sea and land. Those things outlive us.”

  “If they aren’t developed,” Lacey said.

  “Private property. Public need. Human greed.” Susa shrugged. “That hasn’t changed in all of history, and I don’t think it will start changing now. We do what we can to save the best of what remains.”

  “That’s why you’re doing the auction,” Lacey said. “To save this.”

  “I paint to save this. I’m doing the auction so that others might someday stand where we’re standing and remember their own youth, their own time when the world was bright and untouched. It never was, of course. But it pleases us to think so. Turn right, Ian.”

  “Here?”

  “Yes.”

  “Glad this baby is a four-by-four,” he said. “Whatever ‘road’ was once here is more in your mind than on the ground. Hold on tight.”

  “To what?” Lacey asked.

  He smiled slowly. “Me.”

  “I want to paint you,” Lacey said before she thought about it.

  “Naked?” he asked instantly.

  “Your smile.”

  “Dang. Here I was going to get all hot and bothered at the thought of you making a tiger out of little-old-house-cat me.”

  Susa snickered. “Lawe is right. You should be under lock and key.”

  “I’d never speak ill of a son in the presence of his mother, but Lawe has it the wrong way around.” Ian downshifted and crept along the path that was little more than indentations in the grass where ruts used to be. “How that boy has stayed out of the clutches of some lucky woman is a wonder to me.”

  “And an inspiration?” Susa asked tartly.

  “Take the Fifth,” Lacey said. “It works for me when my mother is on a why-aren’t-you-married rip.”

  Ian grinned at Lacey. “Good idea. I’m pleading here, Susa.”

  “Lock and key,” Susa said. “Both of you.”

  Truck wheels spun on grass, then got down to dirt for better traction.

  “Hope that champagne is corked real good,” Ian said as the truck lurched.

  Lacey risked a look into the interior storage compartment behind the front bench seat. The fancy hamper supplied by the hotel was askew, but the ice chest was still in place.

  “Nothing’s bubbling out,” Lacey said.

  Ian concentrated on driving cross country over ruts that had filled in about the time he’d been born.

  “Just another few hundred yards,” Susa said. “If the spring hasn’t dried up, there should be some feral eucalyptus growing in Cross Country Canyon. More of a ravine, really. Narrow enough in parts for a good hunter to jump, which apparently is what the Savoy matriarch was doing when something went wrong and she died.”

  “There are worse ways to go,” Ian said.

  “I’m sure she would have agreed with you,” Susa said. “She’d outlived her husband and her only child, her daughter-in-law hated her, and her only granddaughter was as wild as the wind. The Savoy Curse.”

  “Too many dollars,” Ian said.

  “Not enough cents,” Lacey added innocently.

  He groaned at the pun.

  “I’m going to take you home with me,” Susa said, smiling at Lacey. “Don will love you. Stop about twenty yards up from here, Ian. There should be a level spot where we used to build campfires.”

  Ian parked the truck where Susa pointed. While he wouldn’t have pitched a tent there, it was level enough that he didn’t have to put rocks under the tires.

  “Let me help with that,” Ian said as Susa dragged her easel out of the pickup bed.

  She shooed his hands off like irritating flies. “You’d just be in the way.”

  He looked at Lacey. She was already heading out into the grass, her arms full and her eyes fixed on the view.

  While the women set up easels and small folding tables for their paints and brushes and palettes, Ian lowered the dusty tailgate and put out a five-star feast. Colorful little vegetables and piquant dips, meat pies in airy pastries, something that looked like tiny popovers and tasted like heaven, finger-size columns of bread smelling of herbs and cheese, a dessert of brownies and lemon bars, and enough fine champagne to put them all on the wrong side of the law.

  “Anybody hungry?” he called out hopefully.

  Nothing answered but the wind.

  He took it as agreement. “So am I.”

  Reminding himself that he was working, not playing, he filled two hotel plates with an assortment of food and took it to the women. He started to add the linen napkins that had been provided, then looked up in time to see both women absently wipe their hands on their jeans.

  “Right. They’re wearing their napkins.”

  Susa barely nodded when he eased the food within reach on her paint table. When he set a plate near Lacey, she gave him a vague smile, a muttered word, and went back to painting. Same thing when he opened bottles of water and put them out—Hello, good-bye, do I know you?

  Ian left the champagne corked. No way he was going to waste Grande Dame on two women who wouldn’t know if he was feeding them pork rinds and home brew. Uncapping a second bottle of water for himself, he filled a third plate, leaned against the side of the truck, and ate with enough appreciation for himself and the women combined. As he ate, he catalogued the surrounding land with the eye of a man who had once jumped out of planes at night behind enemy lines. Then he’d jumped once too often and broke his right ankle in too many places to ever jump again.

  He couldn’t say that he missed it.

  No matter where he looked, nothing moved but the wind and a red-tail hawk looking for lunch. None of
the fleet of white vehicles showed on any of the dirt tracks that wound over hills and through valleys and canyons. No trespasser was running his dog in the open country. The cattle and farm machinery that had once cropped the hills were gone. He was alone with two beautiful women who didn’t even know he was alive.

  “Welcome to my life,” he muttered, shaking his head. “I really should get a dog or a cat to talk to. Or goldfish. They don’t care if you go off for a week at a time. Maybe some ivy or dandelions or something. Nope, you have to water plants. Where are pet rocks when you need them?”