Paige MacKenzie Mysteries Box Set

by Deborah Garner

  Paige smiled as she fell off to sleep. Two dilemmas, one solution. Clive had enough inventory to supply a few New York jewelers, which could prompt them into purchasing ads. And the sales would help get him started rebuilding the café.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-EIGHT

  Betty smoothed the front of her apron, a bright, cotton print of intertwined roses and daisies. Catching a glimpse of herself in the mirror next to the sink, she could see the subtle glow in her reflection. How long had it been since she'd bothered with makeup? A long time. But Mist had encouraged her to add a touch of rouge to her cheeks that morning, and she was glad she had. She felt younger and more alive than she'd felt in a long time.

  Betty circled the crowded kitchen table, reaching between shoulders to refill mugs with freshly brewed coffee. She’d tried to shoo the enthusiastic crowd into the parlor where there was more room, but the animated participants in the conversation weren’t about to leave the cozy kitchen.

  Paige sat on a bar stool at one end of the counter, a fresh bandage on her forehead and an expression far more alert than the one she'd worn the day before. Clive sat beside her, his hands wrapped around the steaming beverage. He did a quick double take after Betty filled his mug.

  Across from them, Jake leaned forward, the smooth, tan skin of his hands and wrists blending in with the wooden countertop. Oblivious to chatter around him, he was focused on several papers and photographs.

  Mist stood a few feet away, serene in a flowing, embroidered dress in aqua tones. Her hair fell loosely around her shoulders, one side held back behind her ear with a branch of dried lavender. To her immediate right sat the most unlikely of the morning visitors to the hotel kitchen. Having been gently coaxed inside by Mist for the second day in a row, Hollister kept his eyes fixed on an untouched mug of coffee.

  “Explain it again, Jake,” Clive said. “Who is this Smithsonian guy?”

  “He's a friend of Professor Lambert, the art appraiser we consulted in Cody,” Jake explained. “Lambert called him to get another opinion on the underdrawings that were found when your painting was analyzed.”

  Jake swiveled a photograph around to face Clive, pointing to the markings the infrared light had revealed. Clive shook his head. “I saw these before, but they still just look like scribbles to me.”

  “Well, in a way, that's all they are,” Jake agreed. “But this is where it gets interesting.” He turned a second photograph toward Clive and then a third. “In this second photo you see a similar 'squiggle,' as you call it. This photograph is from a painting that the Smithsonian expert has. He's been trying to identify the artist who painted it for years. He has a buyer for it.”

  “Well, that's great,” Clive said. “But what does that have to do with me?”

  “Look at the two photos closely. You see how the markings are identical? These were painted by the same artist and both disguised as Silas Wheeling's work.” Jake waited while Clive compared the two images. “That means the buyer who wants to buy the painting at the Smithsonian also wants to buy yours.”

  “Great,” Clive said. “Sell it. Get a few hundred for it, and we'll put it toward rebuilding the café.”

  Jake smiled. “I think you're looking at more than a few hundred, Clive. According to the Smithsonian expert, these paintings are worth about five thousand each, at least.”

  Clive looked dumbfounded. “They're just paintings! My truck isn't even worth that much.”

  “That's the truth,” Betty quipped. Her comment received a round of laughter and a well-earned smirk from Clive.

  “It has to do with the technique,” Mist pointed out. “The lightness of the brush strokes, the complementary use of colors, the general feeling the pieces achieve – those all make a difference in the value. At first glance, many paintings look similar. But if you step closer, the details are different. And if you step away, the overall effect is unique.”

  “Well, sell it, then!” Clive lifted his coffee mug in the air as if to make a toast, then brought it to his mouth and emptied it in one gulp. “Let's get this little lady's new café started first thing in the spring.” He stood up, pushed the empty mug away and smiled at Mist.

  “Not so fast, Clive,” Jake said, grinning. “There's a little more to the story.” He winked at Paige, who responded with a knowing smile.

  “Now what?” Clive asked, sitting back down. “I should have known it wasn't that easy.” Betty poured him another mug full of coffee.

  This time Paige took over.

  “We took a closer look at the paintings we found in the tunnel. We'll need to send them out for analysis to be sure, but we think they'll come back with identical underdrawings. And a tiny sapphire hidden in each one, too.” She waited for the information to sink in. It only took a few seconds before Clive's eyes grew wide.

  “You think all those paintings are by the same artist?” Clive looked from face to face. Clearly, they all thought so.

  “Well, I'll be a doggone muskrat's grandpa!” Clive's mouth dropped open, but closed just as quickly. “Wait a minute,” he said. “I suppose the one I had in the gallery is mine, since I found it in the basement of my own building. But those other paintings were hidden away underground. Who do they belong to? Or do they belong to anyone?”

  “I think I know the answer to that,” Paige said. She left the kitchen, returning a few moments later with the partial diary. “I found this one of the first nights I was here. I believe it belonged to Silas Wheeler. The initials in the front are SW and the angry entries fit the personality you described to me, Clive.”

  Clive stood up and moved over by Paige, where he could see the diary. “SW...Yes, that is the way he signed his early paintings. But the ones I've seen have usually been signed SJW, especially those he had me selling to tourists.”

  “That’s because he was passing off someone else's work,” Paige filled in. “In the diary entries I found, Silas was enraged that his teacher, Charles Russell, never acknowledged his ability as an artist. Of course, we know from his paintings – the early ones, which were actually his – that he was a mediocre artist. He was thrilled to discover a student he could exploit.”

  “So you're saying he passed off his student's paintings as his own by adding his initials to the signature?” Betty looked appalled.

  “That's exactly what he did,” Paige said. “That's why the underdrawings show the curved mark under the letter 'J.' The real artist traced his initial before painting over it. Look at the photo from the infrared analysis of the piece from your gallery.”

  Jake pushed the photo from Lambert's analysis out to the middle of the table for everyone to see. It clearly showed the sketched “J” under the “SJW.”

  “My, oh my, that is a crying shame, I dare say,” Betty exclaimed. “Taking advantage of someone's talent like that.” She stood next to Clive, looking at the photo and shaking her head. “How did he manage to do that, anyway – steal all those paintings without the student knowing? That doesn't make sense.”

  “What makes sense to one person doesn't always make sense to another. Reality and perception are not always the same,” Mist said.

  “Here we go,” Clive whispered to no one in particular. Betty hushed him.

  Mist looked at Jake, who nodded. Anticipating Paige's confusion, Jake winked at her again. Paige sat back, knowing she'd missed a few pieces of the puzzle while dazed the previous day.

  Picking up the picture of the underdrawing, as well as the one Jake hadn't shown yet, Mist set them in front of Hollister, side by side. She stepped back and watched his gaze fall on the photos.

  Minutes passed with no response from the old man. Jake checked his watch. Paige drummed her fingers against the leg of her jeans. Clive cleared his throat; Betty elbowed him. Mist just waited.

  Hollister's face remained expressionless as he stared at the two photos. At one point he dropped his head and simply looked at the floor. Jake reached out to retrieve the pictures, but Mist motioned for him to wait. Another thirty
seconds went by before Hollister raised his head again, but when he did his eyes held a glimmer that hadn't been there before. Paige and the others were silent as they watched the old man raise a shaky arm toward the first photo and trace his finger along the letter “J.” And no one took so much as a shallow breath as he moved his arm to trace the same curved outline in the photo of the spilled sugar from the day before.

  Betty was the first to gasp. “No, it's not possible!” Her reaction was reflected in the faces of the others.

  “But the paint dated back sixty years or so when Lambert analyzed it,” Paige said, turning first toward Jake and then toward the others. “That would mean...” She paused, mid-sentence, recalling the passages in the diary, after which she took a good look at Hollister's aged, wrinkled hands and face. “Yes, that would be about right.”

  “Time is meaningless when searching for a part of your soul,” Mist offered as explanation. It all seemed to make sense to her. “We never stop looking when a part of us is lost.”

  Mist turned to face the old man, extending one arm toward him. She paused just inches away from his hand and waited for approval before touching him. Sensing permission in his eyes, she wrapped her hand around his gnarled fingers, covered it with her other hand and spoke.

  “Your name is Jonas,” Mist said, her words smooth and calm. “I don't know if you understand, but I do. We do.” Mist looked around the room, making sure to include the others in the conversation before returning to face the old man. “You have been searching for a part of you that was missing for a very long time. And now you have found it.”

  “All this time we've watched him and never knew he was trying to find anything,” Clive said. “Did he even know what he was looking for?”

  “It's not necessary to know what you're searching for in order to know you are searching. Or to find it,” Mist answered, releasing Hollister's hands. “Haven't you ever found something by chance, only to realize later you were looking for it all along?”

  Jake looked at Paige and smiled – a smile that was promptly returned. Betty blushed to match the color of her rouge and ran her hands across the front of her apron. Clive cleared his throat again and looked into his coffee mug. Hollister traced the letter “J” in one of the photos again.

  “I thought so,” Mist said, surveying the group. Extending her arms to the front, she rested her fingertips against the edge of the table. In her own unique way, she rested her case.

  “But, I still don't understand,” Betty murmured. She was too polite to demand more information in front of Hollister, but too curious not to want more explanation.

  Mist moved closer to Hollister and gently placed a hand on his shoulder as if to allow him to feel included in the discussion. She faced the rest of the group.

  “I am neither a doctor of the physical body nor a specialist in matters of mind and spirit,” Mist said. “All I can offer is my best guess, based upon my experience during this lifetime.”

  Clive felt a preventative nudge from Betty before he could react to Mist's implication that a person's earthly journey might not be limited to a single lifetime.

  “There was a student in one of my art classes in Santa Cruz,” Mist continued, “who had an amazing aptitude for drawing. All you had to do was put a pen in his hand, and the most elaborate sketches would emerge – entire cities, detailed right down to street numbers, for example. Or a night sky filled with constellations – not two or three, but forty or fifty – all drawn perfectly to scale. Yet, once he set the pen down, he retreated into a shell. His motor skills were impaired, and he didn't make eye contact with other students. Our professor explained the unusual contradictions in his behavior as a case of 'Savant Syndrome.'“

  “You mean like in that Dustin Hoffman movie?” Clive asked.

  “Yes, like in Rainman,” Mist answered.

  Clive scratched his head. “But that was about math, wasn't it? These are paintings.”

  Mist nodded. “In that particular movie, yes, the character's exceptional skill was math. But the syndrome itself can manifest in other areas like art or music.”

  Paige watched Hollister as Mist explained. His hand was tracing the photograph again, his eyes never wavering as the voices around him rose and fell.

  “In one of the diary entries,” Mist said, “Silas noted that it was easy to remove each painting when it was finished and replace it with a blank canvas. As you can see, when Hollister is drawing – or sketching, tracing, searching for pebbles or painting – he’s quite narrowly focused. He is oblivious to anything around him. Unfortunately, that explains why Silas was able to steal and hide his paintings.”

  Mist left the room and returned with the diary pages she’d found in the laundry room wall. The story came together as each person took turns reading Silas’s entries aloud. Mist started and then passed the diary to Paige. Clive read the last three entries aloud, and everyone in the room imagined his voice was Silas’s. Hollister was the only person in the room who wasn’t riveted.

  May 18, 1955

  I cannot tell if Jonas hears me when I speak. What a delight it is to have a student who doesn't chatter senselessly or talk back with the arrogance that goes with a preposterous ego. Oh how I tire of the self-absorption of many artists. Still, it makes it difficult to know what he does understand, though I assume most everything passes him by.

  August 2, 1955

  J. doesn't try to hold onto the paintings when he finishes them. I'm careful to place a new canvas on his easel as I'm removing a finished work. This way, his eyes are immediately focused on the blank surface. Even though I can't get inside his mind – not that I care what goes on in there, as long as what comes out is lucrative – he does have an expression of concentration when he looks at an empty canvas. Sometimes it can take hours for him to start. One time he sat an entire day, staring at the empty canvas on his easel, and never picked up a brush. He simply arrived, sat down, stared straight ahead for hours, stood up and left. Of course, those are lost days and they frustrate me.

  Nov. 17, 1955

  Tally: Landscapes (212 – 213) – 2, Tribal Conflicts (233 – 234) – 2, Covered Wagons (244 – 246)– 3, Horses – (261 – 262) - 2, Bison (286) – 1, Dust Storm (292) – 1, Wolves (257 – 258) – 2

  March 22, 1956

  Sold a Dust Storm painting (292) and have a possible sale for one of the horse pieces.

  July 10, 1956

  I found J. in the studio today, absorbed in a new painting. Marvelous! It is a campfire scene, with two rustic wagons in the background and half a dozen men in the foreground, busy with tasks. To one side, a wolf hovers, undetected, his neck low to the ground, his eyes aglow from the fire's reflection. A coffee pot has tipped over, the lid tumbling. A scarf angles out from the edge of a stick in the ground. I could almost feel the wind, looking at it. Such detail – this one will undoubtedly fetch a good price.

  October 22, 1956

  It is astounding, what this young man creates. And with such ease! The smooth transition between what his mind sees and what evolves on paper is quite remarkable. The results of his work should please me, but they don't. I feel only fury. Yet it is lucrative fury, so I continue to tolerate the insult that his talent stabs at me.

  May 5, 1957

  What a lucky break, having J. stumble into my life. The man's too dense to keep track of his own shadow. Stupid fool. He forgets each painting as soon as it's out of his sight, a perfect set-up for me. I can already see the dollar signs. Today, as I stored away one of his finished pieces, I could not resist throwing my head back and roaring with laughter, just at the thought of what the future holds for me.

  August 22, 1957

  Great news! The painting I sent out to Cody a few weeks ago has sold, bringing not only a pretty fee, but words of praise for its vibrant colors and sense of action. It is high time I received the validation I deserve. I'm quite proud of myself. I've sent several additional pieces. I feel confident they will do as well, if not better.r />
  April 23, 1958

  A disturbing thing happened today. J. seemed distracted, not fixated on his work, as he usually is. His eyes roamed the room, but focused on nothing in particular. I could tell he was searching. His gaze swept the ceiling, the floor, the tabletops, the windowsill, just about everywhere, though it never lingered. At one point he stood up, set his paintbrush down and crossed the room, stopping in front of a stack of shelves. He picked up an old, chipped coffee mug and looked inside it. He then did the same with another, and another. Eventually he returned to his painting and sat down calmly, as if he had never left the easel at all. It's the first I've seen of this behavior from him. It is probably nothing, yet it worries me.

  July 7, 1958

  I allowed J. to keep a painting today – a rather tame one, at that, nothing more than a landscape. It was a calculated move, designed to keep him from being curious about the storage of the others. I tell him he must not linger once a piece is finished. Out of sight, it frees the mind to dive into the next one. The completed works will stay completed, but the new ones will not come to exist if focus isn't maintained. I am doing him a favor by removing them. He believes me, silly boy. And why not? I almost believe myself.