Authors: Sarah Andrews

Earth Colors (5 page)

BOOK: Earth Colors

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He said, “And you do analytical work as well.”

“Yes …”

“I might have a job for you. Are you discreet?”

I gave him a dirty look. Who was he to question my integrity?

He turned his gaze on the badlands hills. “These are ochers, I suppose.”

“Huh?”

“Earth colors.” He made a gesture toward them, as if painting them with a sensuous brush. “The colors of the hills there.”

I stared at the multicolored bands of mud. “I suppose … .”

“You see, I am an art dealer. I handle very valuable work, and sometimes there is question as to its authenticity.”

“Forgeries.”

His gaze probed deeper. “This is work that has to be handled in the strictest confidence, so it would be convenient to have an analyst who isn’t even connected to the rest of the art world.”

“Well, I …”

“How’s your color sense?”

Sloane was beginning to twist around in the backpack. I said, “I’m not color-blind, if that’s what you mean.”

“The question for the artist is how to portray these colors. What would Remington have used?”

“I’m sure I have no idea.”

“You saw his paintings yesterday. He would have played the warms against the cools to show the harshness of the land.”

I said nothing.

He said, “He had magic on the tip of his brush. The Academicians never understood him; they thought his colors inharmonious. Imagine: They must never have seen the Western lands. Vivid, his effects of light and shadow. Contrast him, for example, with Catlin, whose landscapes are barely more than cartoons by comparison. Dead, naïve renderings of color. But Catlin’s portraits on the other hand …”

Sloane made a screech right in my ear.

I said, “If you’ll excuse me, I need to take my little friend here back to town.”

He pointed sharply at a middle band of color. “That purple: How would you paint that, do you think? It’s like the war paint in Catlin’s portraits.” Turning back to the west, he held out his hands, as if to wrestle the
far peaks of the Absarokas. His face hardened with frustration. “How would he portray those colors?”

Ever so casually, I began to load the baby the car. When I had put her safely into her seat and climbed in and locked the door, I turned and looked back.

The strange man was still there, lost in contemplation of the Western mountains.

Bone black is a pigment made by the charring of bones in closed retorts. It is blue-black in color and fairly smooth in texture.

—from the files of Fred Petridge

WARMTH HAD FOUND ITS WAY SLOWLY TO THE FARM THAT MORNING, and Deirdre’s hands were cold. She rubbed them against each other, cursing the dead numbness of her fingers. It did not suit her that she could no longer feel them. They and her feet were almost entirely without sensation now. But the lack of feeling had nothing to do with the temperature of the air. She made a clicking sound at the corner of her mouth. Foolish doctor couldn’t diagnose her problem, a fact which both enraged and pleased her. He called her symptoms “idiopathic,” probably thinking the term would impress her. Did he also think that she couldn’t read a dictionary?
Idiopathic
was just a five-dollar way of saying that they did not know what was causing it.

She looked around the room. Same tables and chairs she had known all her fifty years. Same books on the shelves, save for a few recent additions. The woodstove crackled as a log rolled, spitting sparks. She’d have to remonstrate her son for bringing in green wood again.

At dawn, she had sat in this same chair with a cup of coffee, watching the darkness beyond the windows change into the vague notion of trees at the foot of the lawn, and from that into a tracery of black lace, the leafless winter branches backed first by an icy indigo, then briefly a fiery red before the clouds swept in and closed the landscape into another harsh
winter day. It was a cold winter, the worst in recent memory for Pennsylvania. Now, at the foot of the lawn by the trees, the mists rose off the spring into dispirited gray air. A duck took off briefly and landed again, deciding to tarry in the perpetual warmth of the limestone-fed waters.

Easy living for you, duck
, Deirdre thought, and gave a humorless grunt. She would have had to admit a certain jealousy toward the bird if such insights were within her nature.

The clock in the kitchen struck ten, reminding her that it was time to heave herself onto the remoteness of her feet and mount the stairs, grasping the creaking banister with her dying hands, and head toward the room where her mother lay sleeping the residue of her life away. Time to deliver medicines and make her drink. Listen to the old woman sigh, and ask again where William was.
Precious William
. Well, she’d tell her again that she didn’t know. The feckless drifter had gone off somewhere with his dreams again, and God knew when he’d show his face around here once more. He got away with murder, that boy.

Boy.
He was almost forty now, and making plenty of money, judging by the car he drove, but Mother always gave him pocket money and begged him to make her another picture. His fantasies in paint were all over the walls in Mother’s room. Another failed artist in the family. Deirdre felt her stomach lurch with anger at the thought. She had been so sure he’d amount to nothing, but it seemed he was doing just fine with his damned business dealings. He was out there swinging deals while she stayed behind and looked after the ancients.

She swilled the last gulp of her coffee, grasped the arms of her chair, and pulled herself resolutely to a standing position. One foot in front of the other. Keep busy. Life goes on. Too much to do anyway. The running of the farm took a full twelve hours most days, between feeding and watering the animals, doing the books, and caring for her mother. And feeding her own brood. Getting them off to work. It made her blood boil that they did so little to help out around the place, but screaming at them seemed to get no results these days. They just crammed their breakfast in their mouths, hopped in their cars, and headed out into the bloody world each day. But she’d make quite certain that they were not as spoiled as precious William. Now that they were of age, she made them pay rent, and they ate their lunches and dinners away from home. Which was a filthy waste of money.
They could pay her to pack their lunches and come home for dinner, and save thousands of dollars each year!

The old wooden stairs creaked with her weight as Deirdre worked her way up to the second floor. At the upper landing, she found the black dog curled up on the braided rug with his nose stuffed under his tail. The animal looked up at her as she passed, raising his canine eyebrows in a quick display of submission. She considered kicking it, but did not; she might injure her toes, and with the numbness, wouldn’t even know it. Instead, Deirdre continued down the hall to her mother’s room and pushed open the door. The scent of illness hung in the unstirred air. “Mother?” she said. “Time for your meds.”

“William?”

Deirdre sighed angrily. “No, Mother, it’s me. William is out entertaining himself. I am here. Me. Your idiot daughter Deirdre.”

“Oh. Deirdre, sweetie. How nice of you to come by and see your old mama.”

“I didn’t come by, Mother. I live here.”

“Oh. Oh, of course. Silly me. I was just thinking of other things, I suppose. Will William be here for dinner?”

“How would I know, Mother? He hasn’t come by for weeks now, and I don’t suppose he’d condescend to tell me what his plans are. Come on, sit up and take your pills.”

“Certainly, dear.” The old woman did not move.

Deirdre leaned over and pulled the frail body of her mother up off the pillows, plumped them up, and settled her down again. It was a motion she had made countless times in the months since her mother had taken to her bed, and she was good at it. She took satisfaction in her expertise at care-taking, even though she’d been trained for better, more interesting work in her years at the university. But she reveled in effort, in the accomplishment of any task. The brute, forward motion of each day was integral to her self-definition.

And, in these moments, she felt a closeness to her mother that was all hers to enjoy. No one else had a piece of it, and it was real. She had earned it. She gently touched the corona of soft, thin hair above the old woman’s scalp and smoothed it back. “Here, Mother,” she said, putting the little cup that had the blue and yellow pills in it and the half-filled water glass into
her mother’s fragile hands. “Knock it back, gag them down. That’s the ticket.” She watched to make sure she didn’t drop them or spit one out. Then she took another vial out of her apron pocket and shook out a gelatin capsule. “And here’s your vitamins.”

The old woman smiled sweetly as she tipped the glass first for the prescription drugs, but she hesitated over the capsule. “Deirdre, darling, must I take these? They make my stomach hurt, and they are so difficult to swallow.”

“Yes, goddamn it!” Deirdre snapped, her composure shattering under the weight of her frustration. “How many times must I tell you? If you want to lie there and rot without even trying, you go right ahead!”

“Yes, dear,” said the old woman. She put the capsule into her mouth, once again tipped the glass to her dry lips, and swallowed. Her eyes darted this way and that, glazed to the world. She coughed, choking slightly on the capsule.

Deirdre’s hands jerked toward her mother’s mouth as she braced herself to catch the capsule, but it went down the ancient throat instead of coming back out. She took the glass from the trembling hands and set it down on the bedside table, then helped her mother settle back among the covers. When she was sure that her mother was once again asleep, Deirdre retraced her steps out to the hallway and closed the door.

Instead of heading back down the stairs right away, she went first to the window at the end of the hall and looked out across the fields. One hundred forty acres of the most productive soils in America, and she was going to keep it that way even if she had to drag every last member of her family by the hair to do it.

WHEN I GOT BACK TO THE HOTEL, FAYE WAS UP AND DRESSED AND filing her fingernails with an emery board. I had never seen her take preening past a vigorous brushing of her hair and the odd touch of lipstick, so I stopped for a moment and watched her. Faye was a tall and graceful woman, blessed with the kind of looks that make men stop and stare, but not the kind that is applied with dyes from a bottle or pigments immersed in pastes and lotions. Her beauty was bone deep, served up at the moment of conception, the external expression of lucky chromosomes and a radiant soul.

She looked up at me, then at Sloane. “Hey, baby, come to Mommy,” she said, holding out her hands to receive her child. She hugged the baby to her tightly and covered her fuzzy scalp with kisses.

“So what’s our plan?” I asked.

Faye looked adoringly into her daughter’s eyes but spoke to me. “Why don’t you head on down to the museum, and I’ll stay here awhile.”

“Aren’t you meeting with the client again?”

“Yes, but not until lunchtime. And I can take the baby with me. It’s okay, he likes children.”

I raised my eyebrows in surprise. Faye’s hard, cold hurry of the day before was nothing but a memory. I said, “So we’re staying another night … .”

Faye spoke tersely but politely, like a diner ordering from a menu. “Yes. I’ll need you to take Sloane most of the afternoon, please.” Still she kept her eyes firmly on her daughter.

“Certainly.” I waited for further comments, but none came.

It had been only eight months since Tom’s demise. Now Faye was primping for a meeting with an elderly man with money. Was this what single motherhood did to women? Did it make calculating pragmatists out of one’s formerly adventuresome chums?

I bit my lip, trying to be charitable, trying to rationalize what was happening.
After all
, I reminded myself,
Tom was almost old enough to be her father. Perhaps she has a thing for older men. And maybe this one can support her in the style to which she was accustomed, and she can enjoy all the conveniences of live-in help and … and I can …

My heart tightened into a knot. I had stuck around to help Faye with the baby. What if she didn’t need me anymore? I suddenly felt a bit faint.
I’d go on about my life
, I told myself firmly.
And about time! Faye won’t need a live-in baby-sitter forever. So how about this job, then?
I said, “Last night, you said something about a missing painting.”

Faye had lain down on the bed with the baby in a sitting position on her stomach, her knees up to form a backrest for Sloane. She glanced at me. Returning her gaze to her daughter, she said, “I was wondering when you’d bite on that.”

“Oh, come on. I asked last night, and again this morning.”

Faye had Sloane’s tiny hands in hers, and was dancing them back and forth. The baby laughed with delight.

I said, “Faye?”

She said, “A group of specialists at the gallery meet a couple of times each year with patrons who have paintings they believe to be by a certain Western artist. The specialists examine the works to decide whether they’re authentic or perhaps just wanna-bes, painted in the right era but by someone else.”

“Or forgeries.” I thought about the gray-eyed man. Did he know something about this?

Faye’s lips curled. “Sure, forgeries exist, I’m sure, and it was not uncommon to copy favorite paintings. But the story on this particular one is that it has been in the client’s family since it was painted. So the question becomes, if it isn’t an original, then where’d the real one go?”

“You mean someone might have swapped an original for a fake right under the owner’s nose.”

“That’s the concern. But it could have been done anytime over the last couple of decades.”

“Who’s the artist?”

“It’s a Remington.”

My stomach tightened. A Remington was high stakes, enough to kill for. And the way Faye was choosing to spring this information on me worried me.
Is this why she brought me up here? A little bait-and-switch of her own? Tell Emmy she needs a baby-sitter when what she really wants to do is pimp me as a detective?
I took a deep breath. “No,” I said.

“‘No’ what?”

“No, I’ve hung up my spurs.”

“Spurs?”

“The Sherlock Holmes kit. The magnifying glass and deerstalker hat. Whatever you want to call it. This cowgirl ain’t doin’ that nonsense no more, nohow.” To emphasize my vehemence, I made a slicing motion through the air.

Faye trained her now overly innocent eyes back on her fingernails. “How you do mix your metaphors, Em. But really, what nonsense. What gave you the idea I’d—”

“I know you, Faye!”

“And I know
you!
Who do you think you’re kidding? You’re getting a master’s in forensics. Or at least, you will if you ever get a thesis project. Hell, maybe you can use this. That way you’d even get your thesis paid for. That should please you. You sure are hung up about money these days!”

A surge of anger flashed through me, leaving in its wake a cold, shuddery feeling. I said, “Yes, I have every intention of staying in forensic work if I can just do it without the level of risk that’s damn near gotten me killed several times already.”

“Gotten
you
killed!” Faye spat.

She was thinking of Tom.

The shakiness increased. My ears began to ring and I became oddly faint. I sat down on the bed and propped my head on my hands, trying to get the ringing to leave my ears. Softly, I said, “It’s just too dangerous. A Remington could be worth hundreds of thousands of dollars.”

Faye’s lips went into a stiff, straight line. “Try millions of dollars, Em.”

It felt like Faye was miles away from me. “Well,” I said, “I’ll just go to the museum now.”

Or go home to the ranch
, said a little voice in my head.

Faye grabbed the visitor’s pass off the bedside table and threw it at me. It came half the distance and slewed onto the carpet.

As if watching myself from across the room, I registered pain that Faye was talking to me like this. I just wanted to leave, go, be by myself for a moment, not have her or the baby or any of these art people depending on me. I bent to pick up the pass. Bending brought some of the blood back into my head, but as I rose I still had to steady myself, which I covered by putting my hand on the doorknob.
I used to be able to handle stress
, I told myself.
I hate this; when am I going to get my life back? Frank went through this after Vietnam; he must have. I should have asked him how to handle it. It can’t still be happening to him or he wouldn’t be able to hold a job
.

As I turned the knob, I heard Faye say, “And when you come back from the museum, you’ll find us at the Irma.”

I turned and faced her, as if swimming in molasses. “That’s double or even triple the money.”

Faye made a sound in her throat that sounded like a growl. Baby Sloane lifted her face from her mother’s breast and stared at her, goggle-eyed.

I felt an urge to take the baby from her quick before the little tyke could learn such spendthrift habits. Which sent another jolt through me: I had no right to do that. Sloane was her baby, not mine.

I left the room and the hotel, and walked back out through the town toward the museum, trying to breathe deeply. As I passed the Irma, I stopped for a moment and stared, viewing it from the opposite sidewalk.

The door to Irma’s saloon swung open and a man sauntered out, lighting a cigarette. Beyond that door stood the Irma’s famous, ornately carved rosewood bar. My dad had taken me there once when I was a child, ordering a cup of coffee for himself and a chocolate shake for me. It had been an extra-special treat, because we were always so poor, getting by on secondhand pickup trucks and bailing-wire fixes. My mouth watered at the memory of that chocolate shake. I realized that the peanut butter sandwich I had eaten for breakfast had long since turned to ash in the blast furnace I called a stomach.

I turned and headed resolutely to the west, toward the museums. When I got there I headed back into the Whitney Gallery of Western Art. I had a brand new reason for looking at the Remingtons.

Gritting my teeth at the thought of anyone messing with one of my hero’s paintings, I studied his work. How could anyone possibly mimic his
style and techniques sufficiently to create a forgery good enough to effect a switch. I stopped by the painting of night, with the guard leaning on the Conestoga wagon. The odd, grayed green of the wagon bed and grass and the moonlit white of the canvas played games with the receptors in the backs of my eyes. Almost all of the man was rendered in shades of green. When I began to wonder how exactly the materials in the paints could be analyzed, I turned and headed out of the room.

I wandered disconsolately through the main part of the gallery to the Koerner studio. There, I paid homage to
Madonna of the Prairie
, then, feeling a bit better, headed around a corner to ogle a Bierstadt and a Moran, smiled at Rosa Bonheur’s lively portrait of good ol’ Buffalo Bill on his horse (no self-respecting equestrian should be painted any other way, and besides, the horse was a darn sight handsomer than he was), sighed over the rich colors in Maynard Dixon’s
The Medicine Robe
, and checked out an exhibit of genre paintings from the mid-1800s, which featured highly narrative tableaux from the days of the frontier. I was heading back toward the twentieth-century stuff when I passed the row of Catlin’s landscapes. What had the gray-eyed man said about them?

That they were cartoons, naïve …

I stopped in front of one that depicted an Indian chief standing on the roof of his mud-and-stick dwelling. He was shouting at the sky, while the rest of the tribe stood watching.
Rainmaking. Mandan
, it was titled. CIRCA 1855–1870. OIL ON PAPER. Catlin was one of the artist-explorers of the nineteenth century, those restless few that rode out with the early surveys of the West, or, as in Catlin’s case, rode out solo to discover the West on their own. He had painted the Mandan just before almost all of them died of diseases unwittingly brought to them by whites. I wanted to dismiss his work and keep on walking, but a growing sense of discomfort held me to the spot. Was I shouting at the sky?

Suddenly, my stomach cramped with hunger, wresting me from the downward spiral of my thoughts. I exited the gallery and headed in the direction of the museum coffee-shop.
A little food will clear my head
, I told myself.
What am I thinking, letting my blood sugar drop like this? Surely that’s all that’s really the matter
… .

I transited the lobby and turned left into the coffee shop. I was thus strolling toward an imagined greeting with a bagel and cream cheese when I saw Faye, seated at a table by the windows. With the baby. And the
gray-eyed man. He was holding Sloane Renee on his lap; she was eating something from his hands.

Faye turned her head and saw me. She rose and faced me. She spoke, her face designedly blank. “I believe you’ve already met, but let me formally introduce you,” she said. “This is Tert Krehbeil, my client and friend. Your client, too, if you want.”

Friend. Client.
He could be the latter, but not the former.

The three of them looked quite happy together, and quite natural.

They looked like a family. Complete in three; they didn’t need me.

BOOK: Earth Colors

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