A Fit of Tempera

by Mary Daheim

  Judith didn’t, except in the vaguest of laymen’s terms. She said nothing, and somewhat to her surprise, Renie also kept quiet. Indeed, Renie had sat down on the bottom step, her chin resting on her folded arms, and her attitude was one of detachment. Judith didn’t trust her cousin when she grew aloof. It was a sign that she was either cooking up something outrageous or wrestling with the demons of her explosive temper.

  “Now let’s get this straight,” Costello was saying as he jabbed a finger at Judith. “You two didn’t hear anything unusual? You didn’t see anything strange?”

  Judith shook her head. “Nothing, not even when we went over to Mrs. Lablatt’s with Iris. We were busy cleaning all afternoon. Mostly we were inside. We cut down the grass out here”—she made a sweeping gesture that took in the open area in front of the cabin—“but that was more like around three. Then we hauled everything out to the garbage hole in back of the house and went inside to fix drinks. We were here on the porch when Iris came by both times.”

  Costello turned to look back toward Riley’s place. Not only did the forest hide the house and the studio, but it muffled sound. Judith guessed that was what the undersheriff was probably trying to gauge.

  “There was quite a parade over there yesterday afternoon,” Costello noted. “The only ones you saw were the Hungarian and the girlfriend?”

  Judith nodded. “We saw Lazlo Gamm arrive in his copter. Riley introduced us and we left. Then we happened to meet Iris, but that’s only because she came through here on her way from the Green Mountain Inn. We wouldn’t have seen her at all if she’d gone by the road instead of the river.”

  But Costello was waving a hand and frowning. “No, no, I don’t mean that Takisaki dame. I’m talking about the other one. You know—the girl who can’t see so good. Lark Kimball.”

  Renie came to. But she still didn’t speak. Neither did Judith at first. “Now just a minute,” she finally said, floundering in confusion. “Lark was never here. Who said she was?”

  Costello looked smug. “She did. About three o’clock. Of course, she can’t tell time so easy. She came down to Riley’s with her father, but she didn’t go in. I guess they were having an artistic discussion, or whatever people like that do when they get together.”

  “Oh, good grief!” Renie jumped up from the porch step and stomped off toward the row of ferns that lined the path to the outhouse. It dawned on Judith that her cousin hadn’t dared to talk for fear of saying something acerbic that would enrage Costello. Renie had no patience with incompetents.

  “Let me get this straight,” Judith said, trying to ignore Renie’s pique and hoping that the undersheriff would do the same. “Lark Kimball came with her father to Riley’s studio. She didn’t go in. She claims to have come over here. But she didn’t. So where does a girl with impaired vision go on her own?”

  Costello uttered a knowing little chuckle. “You’d like to know the answer to that, wouldn’t you?” He stabbed a finger at Dabney Plummer. “Hut!” The lawmen tromped off on the path that led to Riley’s property.

  Renie was still standing with her back turned, feet planted firmly in the damp, dark earth. “Are they gone? Will they come again? Can they be recalled through a popular vote of the electorate?”

  “Okay, so Costello’s a moron and Plummer’s a mime.” Judith drew up alongside Renie. “That doesn’t explain Lark Kimball. But Riley’s drunken state might explain something else.”

  “Such as?” Renie moved her head just enough to look at Judith. “How the lame, the halt, and the blind could strangle Riley Tobias with picture-hanging wire?”

  Judith clapped Renie on the shoulder. “Right, coz.”

  Renie shrugged. “So what? We might know it, but Costello and Company won’t figure it out. They not only don’t have the right answers, they’re not even asking the right questions. We’ll be damned lucky if they don’t arrest us.”

  It was Judith’s turn to gaze off into space. “Lucky?” She tipped her head to one side, vaguely taking in the blossoms on the salmonberry bushes. “We can’t count on luck, coz. We’ve got to start doing some serious sleuthing.”

  “I thought we already were,” Renie countered.

  Judith headed back to the cabin. “We have been, but it hasn’t gotten us anywhere. Let’s put our bodies to work, along with our brains. We’ve got slightly more than twenty-four hours to figure out whodunit—and to finish cleaning this place up. Let’s hit the loft and then we’ll fill the woodbox. Maybe tomorrow we can tackle those downspouts. The Mortons might lend us a ladder that doesn’t weigh two tons.”

  The loft had a ladder of its own, but it was fixed in place, flush with the wall. The cousins ascended cautiously, abandoning the one-handed, one-footed antics of their youth. They found the double bed neatly made, covered with yet more blue plaid. The single window had matching curtains, and the small bureau, which was the only other piece of furniture, sported a runner of the same material. Except for sweeping, there wasn’t muchcleaning to do.

  “Should I check for mice under the bed?” Renie asked.

  “Go ahead,” Judith replied, whisking up dust bunnies. “See if the chamber pot is there. I didn’t find it anywhere else.”

  “It probably got stolen,” Renie said, getting down on her hands and knees. “We might consider it a pain in the butt—literally—but there are some who would call it an antique.” She used a yardstick to delve under the bed. “No pot, no mice. But there’s a box or something. It’s just out of reach.”

  “Maybe it’s the badminton set,” Judith said, batting away cobwebs with her broom. “Or the croquet stuff. Didn’t Cousin Sue take up archery for a while?”

  “Yeah, until she got Uncle Corky in the rear end while he was panning for gold in the river. She also shot my mother’s angel food cake.” Renie stretched, groaned, and gave a big heave. The object of her efforts skidded out on the other side of the bed, to land at Judith’s feet.

  Judith glanced down. “That’s not a box,” she began, then bent over for a closer look. “Hey, coz, it’s Clive’s notebook!”

  Renie struggled to stand up. “What? Let me see.” She scooted around the end of the bed to join Judith. Together, the cousins flipped through the loose-leafed pages. “I’ll be damned,” said Renie. “It’s a list of Riley’s paintings. I can’t make out the rest without my glasses.”

  Judith sat down on the bed, hearing the frame creak beneath her. Renie knelt on the floor while Judith perused the pages. “It seems to go back only to the first of the year. Here’s a sale to P. A. Kwan in Hong Kong last January—something called ‘Autumn Images,’ sold for forty thousand dollars, dimensions, mixed media, blah-blah. In March, A.—no other name given—bought ‘Spring Meadow,’ sixty grand, more details. Check this—‘Pending—D. and E. Dixon, “Spring River.”’ What do you think, coz?”

  Renie gave a little shake of her head. “Not much. We know Riley was selling a landscape to the Dixons. But who’s A.? And why do we care?”

  Paging through the rest of the notebook, Judith found nothing of interest. Gallery listings, art critics, and museum contacts seemed to make up the rest of Clive’s notes. “I guess we don’t care about this,” she admitted, closing the notebook. “At least not about the contents. But we do care about how it got here.”

  Climbing up onto the bed, Renie rubbed at her little chin. “Why was Clive in the loft? Why was he looking for Riley’s picture here before he found where we hid it? Is the answer obvious, or have I got cobwebs on my brain as well as on my pants?”

  Feeling the mattress sag under their weight, Judith frowned. “There’s only one way Clive could have known that we had that painting.” She gave Renie a perplexed look. “Somebody told him. The question, coz, is, who?”

  EIGHT

  THE COUSINS COULDN’T see any reason not to return Clive’s notebook. But they weren’t about to return to the Green Mountain Inn. They decided to wait until Clive showed up. They were convinced that he would, eventually.
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  “Was Clive looking for another painting in the loft?” Judith wondered aloud as she emptied the dustpan into the garbage. “Having found one Riley Tobias in the Murphy bed, did he think we had a second one up in the loft?”

  “Oh, great.” Renie groaned. “Is there more than one canvas missing from Riley’s inventory? Iris should know. She mentioned only the work the Dixons bought. But Riley wouldn’t have given us that painting. Do you think the cabin has been used as a regular stash of some kind?”

  Judith considered. “No. It wouldn’t be safe. We’ve been broken into. Riley hasn’t. Whatever this was, I think it must have been a temporary situation.”

  Renie twirled the broom and shook her head. “This is the damnedest mare’s nest. Absolutely nothing makes sense.”

  “Yes, it does.” Judith picked the axe up from the woodbox. “We have three separate things going here which may or may not be connected. Come on, let’s go chop wood while I explain. The saw’s under the house.”

  The previous day, Judith and Renie had collected a pile of blowdown from windstorms. Judith grabbed the axe and Renie took the saw. The vine maple would make decent kindling; the alder would provide excellent fires.

  “First,” Judith said, making sure Grandpa Grover’s venerable chopping block was secure, “there’s Riley’s murder. What’s the motive? Gain? Not directly, if his entire estate goes into that foundation he set up. But there must be insurance, which I would guess has Iris as the beneficiary. Maybe she gets the house and the studio, too. There’s another type of gain, though. Riley told us about it—he was referring to Ward Kimball, but he might as well have included himself.”

  “Ah.” Renie glanced up from the sawhorse. “You mean with regard to how an artist’s work goes up in value after he dies?”

  “Right.” Judith took a swing at a chunk of cedar that probably had been lying on the ground for at least four years. “Clive gets his percentage, which will now grow larger. Who knows how much inventory Riley—or Clive—has stashed away. Even if it’s just his private collection in the house and those dozen or so canvases in the studio, we’re looking at close to a million bucks.”

  “And if Clive gets a fifty-fifty split, that’s nice,” Renie noted, stopping to mop her brow. “It’s nice for Dewitt and Erica Dixon, too, since they paid seventy grand for a painting that now may skyrocket to twice its original price. It’s not a fortune, of course, but as a motive, profiteering is acceptable.”

  “Which brings us to Number Two,” Judith continued, wincing a bit at discovering muscles she hadn’t used for a while. “The Perambulating Painting. Riley gives us a picture that sounds as if it could be the one Dewitt Dixon bought for his wife. Now why does Riley do such a thing? The only answer I can come up with is because he doesn’t want his ex-wife to have it. Spite, maybe.”

  “So why not just refuse to sell it?” countered Renie.

  “You got me,” Judith admitted. “All this stuff about the painting is really baffling. Where does Lazlo Gamm fit in? Is it possible that he, too, wanted that painting? Why did he come back—or maybe stick around? Who is the lady in his life? Could he have been pursuing Iris? If so, why not put the make on her in town rather than under Riley’s nose up here?”

  “Maybe,” Renie suggested, “Lazlo is still here so he can comfort Iris in her time of need. But it doesn’t sound as if she’s seen him. Or cares.”

  “All of the above could be side issues,” Judith said. “Reason Number Three is much more up-front. There were two women in Riley’s life—three, if you count the ex-Mrs. Tobias. Lark could be fantasizing about Riley’s intentions, but she was definitely in love with him. As for Iris, she and Riley may never have married, but they’ve been together so long that the emotional tie is the same. Maybe Riley was bored. He could scarcely not find Lark enchanting. Like any man, he’d be flattered by her feelings whether he reciprocated or not. Iris might have been jealous.”

  Renie began piling the logs she had cut to fit into the stove. “And, conversely, Lark might have been jealous of Iris. Are you suggesting Riley was murdered as the third part of a triangle or that he was killed by an overly protective father?”

  Judith tucked the axe under her arm and gathered up the kindling. “Any of those are possible scenarios. It would depend on who thought Riley was doing what to whom.”

  “So in point of fact,” Renie mused as they carted firewood into the cabin, “we have several motives for murder: monetary gain, jealousy, paternal outrage, and possible theft. I’d cross off gain if I thought Riley was going to keep painting best-selling works for the next thirty years. But if you can believe Dewitt Dixon, his career was on the wane.”

  Judith nudged the Dutch door open with her foot. “You might not believe Dewitt, but you can believe all those empty bottles. I’m still curious about finding just one beer can. What happened to the rest? We know Riley had two, and we each had one. That can was the same brand as what we were drinking. Why throw a single can in with a bunch of bottles? And what did he do with the other three?”

  “When you’re sloshed, you’re not exactly rational,” Renie replied, stacking wood in the box by the stove.

  “True,” Judith allowed. “It’s probably not important. Still, I don’t remember Riley as a big drinker. But what if he had started guzzling in recent months? It happens. And maybe it affected his artistic output.”

  “I can nose around about that when we get home,” Renie said. “My pipeline in the art community is short, but I do have a couple of contacts who might know.”

  Having finished their chores as well as the airing of their current theories, the cousins decided to get ready to go fishing. It was going on five, and the sun would soon be off the river. Judith grimaced as she checked her watch. Twenty-four hours earlier, Riley Tobias had been alive. A great deal had happened since Iris Takisaki had come hurrying through the woods with her alarm about a prowler. Yet no one knew what had really happened. With a sigh, Judith approached the problem of getting at the family fishing tackle.

  The sofa was too soft to stand on, so Judith and Renie pulled it out from the wall. Placing a chair beneath the cupboard, Judith climbed up and opened the latch. Sure enough, there were four rods, a spare reel, several tins of leader, a container of lead, extra hooks, two creels, three cherry bobbers for steelheading—and a jar of unopened salmon eggs. Judith handed down two of the rods, one creel, and the salmon eggs, then leaped off the chair.

  “Bless somebody,” said Renie, examining the old bam-boo rods tied with thread in various bright colors. “These babies are all set up and ready to go. Look out, trout, here we come!”

  Judith returned the chair to the table. “Do you want to go down to the Big Bend or try it out in front?”

  Renie was going through the creel where she found some extra nylon leader, hooks, a small knife, and an almost-empty jar of spoiled salmon eggs. “This was Uncle Al’s, I think. Look—six Pre-computer tote tickets from the race track. They must have been losers.” She pitched the jar and the tickets in the trash.

  “Knowing Uncle Al, he probably had a few winners, too,” Judith remarked, shoving the sofa back against the wall. “He’s always been lucky. Did you know he got five of the six lottery numbers a couple of weeks—” She stopped, gazing at a gleaming object on the cracked linoleum. “Hey! Look at this! Is it familiar or what?”

  Renie scooted over to join Judith. Both cousins bent down, staring at the sleek silver cigarette case with the engraved initials “DDD.”

  “It’s Dewitt’s,” said Renie in a wondering tone. “I saw him use it yesterday at Riley’s house.”

  “But not at the Green Mountain Inn this morning,” Judith stated with certainty. “He had a pack of cigarettes with him there. Hmm.”

  Going over to the kitchen, Judith fetched the dustpan and scooped up the cigarette case. Carefully, she slid it onto the counter. Fingerprints probably weren’t important, but Judith was taking no chances. “We swept under the sofa yesterday aftern
oon, but, of course, that was before we ran into Dewitt at Riley’s.” She gave Renie a wry look. “Do we cross Clive off as the thief or do we give him an accomplice?”

  “Jeez.” Renie seemed bewildered. “How about this? Dewitt came here last night while we were down at Ward Kimball’s and making phone calls at the auto court. Clive let Dewitt in, and they found the canvas in the bed. No.” She shook her head vigorously. “Dewitt says he doesn’t have the painting. Clive has it, preparing the canvas for transport. Check that—the painting was wrapped and ready to go. Dewitt comes in after Clive has left with the canvas. Or maybe Dewitt comes in while Clive’s asleep and steals the canvas. How does Dewitt know it’s in the cabin? Why does he deny he has it?” Renie shook her head again.

  “Because Riley told Dewitt instead of Clive about giving me the painting?” Judith framed the question in a doubtful voice. “Because Dewitt’s pulling a scam?”

  Renie considered. “Maybe. We can’t be sure Riley told anybody he’d given the picture away. Lazlo Gamm might have guessed we were carrying one when he saw you carting off that big package. Did somebody else see us leave the studio with the painting in tow?”

  Frowning at the window that looked out toward Riley’s property, Judith gave a little shudder. “I feel as if those trees are full of eyes, watching us. Like the jungle.” She paused, then became more brisk. “Come on, let’s go fishing. I propose we go down to the Big Bend. There aren’t any decent riffles in this stretch of river, as you know perfectly well.”