Die in Plain Sight

by Elizabeth Lowell

About ten minutes after Ian hung up on the hotel desk, room service brought a lovely meal, compliments of the hotel. The food might as well have been dog chow for all the attention it got. Susa took a polite bite of everything, drank half a glass of the fine wine, and went to a comfortable chair where she sat staring at nothing. Sadness came off her in waves that were almost tangible. Every time Lacey looked at her, she wanted to cry.

  If Ian noticed, he didn’t let it get in his way. He addressed dinner with the speed and precision of a machine taking on fuel. “Eat,” he said to Lacey between bites. “You’ll need it.”

  Lacey ate what she could and pushed the plate away. She wanted to comfort Susa but didn’t know how, because she knew only too well that there was no replacement for lost paintings. Despite her own carefully indifferent front, she felt as though part of herself had been ripped out after the fire. If it hadn’t been for Susa’s gentle persistence in sorting through the water-and smoke-damaged paintings, Lacey would have thrown out everything in a rage of pain. But Susa had understood the emotions seething beneath the quiet. She had helped, and in helping, healed.

  Lacey wanted to do the same for her.

  “Well, the good news is that you won’t have to sweat your father’s or grandfather’s reputation,” Ian said, pouring himself more coffee and then going to work on Susa’s dinner.

  Lacey looked away from Susa’s still, unhappy face. “What are you talking about?” she asked, although she already knew. Guilt snaked through her because Ian had figured it out, too.

  “The paintings you were so worried about are gone.” His voice was matter-of-fact. “Your family’s home free.”

  The only thing that kept Lacey from clawing at Ian was the anger burning in his dark eyes. “I’d rather have Susa’s paintings back.”

  His fork hesitated. “What about your grandfather’s?”

  “Susa’s are original. Irreplaceable. Grandfather’s…” She shrugged. “Well, we all know what they were.”

  “Susa’s not mourning the loss of her paintings,” Ian said.

  “What?”

  “Are you, Susa?”

  Susa turned toward the table. Tears glittered in her eyes. “No. I’m mourning a past I can touch only through memory and art. Memory fades. Paintings don’t. The artist who painted Lacey’s three canvases was someone who lived and loved and wept and laughed and raged and put it all into landscapes of places that time and man have paved over. Art is all that’s left of what once was.” Tears magnified her beautiful eyes. “Now some of that art is gone. Some of me is gone with it.”

  “But they were only forgeries,” Lacey said hoarsely.

  Susa simply shook her head.

  Lacey’s conscience warred with her emotions. As usual, her conscience lost. Susa wasn’t family, but she felt like it to Lacey. She’d held Lacey when she finally wept in the stinking, dripping mess that had once been her studio. Then Susa had pushed up her sleeves and gently, relentlessly, forced Lacey to keep on sorting through her paintings.

  Seven of the canvases had been set aside for the November show. Susa’s expertise and real enthusiasm had moved Lacey from the dripping ruins of the present to a future bright with possibility.

  It was a gift Lacey could return.

  “How would you like to take a trip with me to a storage unit?”

  Savoy Ranch

  Friday night

  38

  Ward Forrest pinched the bridge of his nose and cursed the years that had made him need glasses to read print that had once been as plain as a whale in a parking lot. Even the fire in the hearth, which usually soothed him, was making his eyes hurt.

  “We can do this tomorrow,” Savoy said.

  “No.” Ward settled the reading glasses back on his nose and picked up the legal papers once more. “I can’t believe that bitch wants to screw more land out of us for the same amount of stock in New Horizons.”

  Savoy didn’t bother to answer. “Bitch” was the nicest thing Ward had called Angelique White tonight. “She senses weakness and wants to know how bad it is.”

  “You think I don’t know that?” Ward retorted. “If I didn’t need her cash, I’d tell her to piss up a rope.”

  Honey Bear’s tail thumped against Ward’s ankles. He nudged the dog with his foot. The tail thumped faster.

  “But we do need her cash,” Savoy said for the tenth time in an hour, “especially after that settlement with Concerned Citizens for Sane Development. Besides, it’s a good business fit. New Horizons has cash and no land. We have land we can’t sell or develop without costly court battles, and no one is willing to lend money at a rate that would turn a profit for us.”

  “You’re preaching to the choir.”

  “I’ll leave that to Angelique. Are you going to sign this ‘agreement to agree’ tonight or do you want to sit on it for a while?”

  “Damn that bitch anyway,” Ward said bitterly. “If she hadn’t dragged her feet about developing, a lot of this would already be done.”

  “What bitch are you talking about now?”

  “Your mother. Always whining about her precious land and then spending money hand over fist like it grew on trees. Should’ve been born a frigging queen.”

  Savoy’s fingers tightened on the contract he was reading. “My mother, your wife.”

  “Don’t remind me.”

  “Then don’t remind me,” Savoy said in a clipped voice, standing up. He flexed fingers that weren’t as supple as they once had been and ached every time the wind turned cold. Unlike his father, he felt every year of his age, even if he didn’t look it. “I can’t touch the past and I’m sick of hearing about it.”

  “Huh. Well, the past sure as hell can touch you, so you might open up your damned ears and learn something.”

  Only if you have something new to say, Savoy thought.

  But he knew better than to speak it aloud. That would just lead to a shouting match. He didn’t need that. More important, the future didn’t need that. The future needed Ward’s agreement, no matter how reluctant, on the New Horizons deal. The longer Ward delayed, the more likely it was that something would come spectacularly and publicly unstuck in the family, and Angelique would bolt all over again.

  “Are you going to restore Bliss’s credit?” Savoy asked, his voice carefully neutral.

  “Has she agreed to quit fighting me over the ranch?”

  Savoy managed not to flinch. Sooner or later Ward would see the new clause Angelique’s lawyers had appended to the deal. Then his father would throw a shit fit.

  According to the “agreement to agree,” the merger couldn’t go through without Bliss’s written approval.

  “I don’t know. What does Rory say about it?” Savoy asked.

  “They’re getting married again.”

  “Really? When?”

  “Couple of days.”

  Savoy shrugged. “He might as well. He’s your son in everything but name.”

  “Not if he takes Bliss’s side in this.”

  “Does he know that?”

  “He knows.” Ward’s finger stabbed at the sheet he was reading. “What the hell is this? Since when does this merger need an eighty percent agreement of all private shareholders in Savoy Enterprises!”

  Savoy pinched his nose in an unconscious echo of his father. In some cases, headaches were indeed catching. “Since Angelique realized how deeply Bliss is against developing certain portions of the ranch, Angelique doesn’t want ‘to be a source of familial discord.’”

  “How the hell did she find out?”

  “Jesus, Dad, the woman would have to live under a rock not to know Bliss’s stand on developing the ranch. Radio, TV, newspapers—take your pick. They’ve all featured our dirty laundry at one time or another, and Blissy makes a wonderful poor little rich girl.”

  Ward hurled his drink into the fire, glass and all. The explosion of sound sent Honey Bear scrambling for a calmer place to sleep.

  “That bitch Bliss has twenty-four ho
urs to sign this deal,” Ward said to the fire. “Then I’m going to the lawyers. All she’ll inherit from me will be ten dollars and my sincere hope that she roasts in hell. Tell her, Savvy. Tell her tonight.”

  Savoy gathered the papers and left without a word. He’d seen his father mad before, but not like this. Not since his mother was alive. Cold, not hot.

  Blissy, what have you done now?

  Corona del Mar

  Friday night

  39

  Turn left, turn right, run in circles, repeat sequence,” Ian muttered.

  Susa ignored him.

  Lacey didn’t, but she didn’t say anything, either. She could see his reflection in the rearview mirror. His eyes were darker than night. His mouth was flat. She knew he was irritated that she wouldn’t tell him why the trip to the storage unit was necessary, but she couldn’t help it. The paintings would speak for themselves. They would have to. She didn’t know how to explain them, and she didn’t feel like answering all the questions they would raise if she told everyone about them before they got there.

  Too late for second thoughts now, she told herself.

  Hoping she was doing the right thing, she pulled the cashmere coat her parents had brought closer around her. It was a lot warmer than the velvet-patch coat, but not nearly as colorful. Black was pretty much black, and she preferred bright.

  Ian checked the mirrors. His faithful escort had gotten careless. Instead of running a streetlight to stay on Ian’s bumper, the deputies had stopped two blocks back like good little citizens.

  Ian didn’t feel like a good little citizen. He opened the gap between the two cars, pushed the next light, and turned right into a residential area without signaling. Then he put the accelerator on the floor and did the rocket-sled routine for two blocks, turned left, shot down two more blocks, whipped onto another side street, and shut down the car.

  “Well, that achieved target heart rate,” Susa said dryly. “Tired of being followed?”

  “Yeah.” His tone didn’t encourage comments.

  “Any particular reason?” Susa asked.

  “No.”

  “Ah.”

  Silence descended in the car.

  “What do you mean, ‘Ah’?” he asked finally.

  “Ah, as in, ah, of course, testosterone,” Susa said.

  Ian didn’t argue the point as he watched the deputies cruise through an intersection one block over. He knew it was petty of him to feel good about losing them, but there it was. He felt good.

  The deputies didn’t reappear. After a few minutes Ian started up the truck again and cut over to a road that would loop around to Corona del Mar.

  Lacey began giving instructions again. “Turn right at the next light.”

  Finally they came to an area where small businesses struggled to survive, motels became cheap apartments, and storage yards for the rich and overstocked thrived.

  “There,” Lacey said. “Universal Storage, on the left. Just pull up to the gate. I’ll enter the code.”

  Lacey got out, punched in her private code, and got back in before Ian drove through the electronic gate. Bright lights illuminated six rows of storage units, each row two units tall.

  “Shayla’s brother-in-law owns the place,” Lacey said. “We get a couple of units for free, unless he needs them. Then Lost Treasures Found gets crammed to the ceiling again.”

  Susa glanced around curiously and didn’t ask any questions.

  Ian grunted. So far Lacey had been willing to talk about everything but why she’d decided to take a late-night jaunt to a storage unit. “Why the big mystery?” he asked.

  “Number one-twenty” was all she said, pointing to the right. “Second row of buildings, first story. You can park right in front of the freight elevator.”

  No one else was around, which wasn’t surprising. Most people had better things to do late on a Friday night than check out the contents of their storage unit. Lacey winced at the thought of how many weekend nights she’d spent doing just that. She hadn’t realized how predictable—okay, boring—her social life had become until Ian appeared and put the moon and stars back in her nights.

  She wondered how long it would last. If he was mad at her now, she couldn’t imagine what he’d be like when he saw the contents of number 120.

  Ian looked around the designated parking area, rejected it, and went farther down the row to a point where the truck couldn’t be spotted from the street.

  Lacey walked up the row, looked at the wide storage door that opened like a garage door, and pulled out the key that would open the padlock. The closer she got to the paintings, the more she wondered if she was doing the right thing.

  And the more she was afraid she wasn’t.

  “If you chicken out after all this,” Ian said conversationally, “I’m going to pry that key out of your paint-stained little fingers and go in alone.”

  Her chin came up in a “You and who else, big boy” gesture that made him smile despite his irritation. He tugged at the lock of her hair that never stayed in place.

  She didn’t know whether to smile or smack his hand.

  Susa snickered.

  Lacey opened the padlock, stuck it in her coat pocket, and tugged up on the door. Most of the units had rolling doors that shrieked like Halloween. Hers didn’t. The sound of metal on metal made her teeth ache. That was why the door rose up with hardly a sound. She kept it as well oiled as a bodybuilder’s pecs. Saying a silent prayer that she was doing the right thing, she flipped on the light and stepped aside.

  It was a big unit. A quarter of it was packed with shelves and racks of items waiting to be needed at Lost Treasures Found. The rest was Grandfather Quinn’s paintings and closed cupboards lining the far wall. The racks for the paintings were so closely packed that it was all a person could do to squeeze between the rows.

  Ignoring the shop goods, Susa looked at the unframed paintings that were stacked in racks along the walls and aisles, leaning against the racks, and wrapped in paper and piled on or under cheap tables. Then she made a startled sound and turned the nearest painting toward the light. A hillside waist-deep in golden grass, green eucalyptus with pale bark peeling in graceful ribbons, a wild sky alive with rain and wind…

  “My God,” she breathed. “Another Marten.”

  “No. Another David Quinn,” Lacey said. “A roomful of them, as a matter of fact.”

  Susa shook her head like a woman coming out of one dream and into a deeper dream.

  “I saw him paint that one,” Lacey said, pointing to the canvas Susa was holding.

  “En plein air? Or was it painted in his studio from a field study?” Susa asked.

  “Studio and field study.”

  “Where is it?”

  “The field study?” Lacey asked.

  “Yes.”

  Lacey frowned and looked around the unit. “I don’t know. It might not have survived. Like you, Grandpa destroyed paintings all the time.”

  “Probably a good idea in his case,” Ian said. “If the original is gone, it’s harder to prove forgery.”

  Lacey flinched and didn’t disagree.

  “How could anyone destroy an original Marten?” Susa asked. Then, quickly, “Never mind. That was my heart talking, not my brain. But still…”

  “I didn’t bring you here to make you feel bad all over again,” Lacey said. “I just wanted to prove to you that you didn’t have to mourn those three stolen paintings. They weren’t Martens. They were Quinns, and there are a lot more where they came from. And maybe, just maybe, an original Marten or two or three is waiting to be discovered somewhere in the hundreds of paintings I inherited. Since I was raised with the paintings, I don’t think I’d be able to tell the difference between original or forgery. But maybe you can separate the wheat from the Wheaties.”

  “Or Rarities could,” Ian said. “It’s what they do and they’re damned good at it.”

  “Sure. Send them the whole bloody lot,” Lacey said unhappily,
“but don’t ask me to pay for it. I can’t.”

  “I can,” Susa said. She glanced around. “Looks like another triage job,” she said, mentally rolling up her sleeves. “Let’s get to work.”

  Newport Beach

  Friday night

  40

  You lost them twenty minutes ago?” Rory repeated into his cell phone. He looked at his watch. Almost nine o’clock. He hadn’t been with Bliss long enough to kiss her properly and already something had gone wrong.