Blue Smoke and Murder

47

SEPTEMBER 15

11:07 P.M.

Garland Frost sat surrounded by paintings, brooding over the collection. Dunstan’s catalogue raisonné was open on the desk. As comparisons went, the photos were nearly useless, but it was all he had to work with besides his own two paintings.

The more he looked at the unsigned canvases and the catalogue raisonné and his two Dunstans, the more convinced he was that Jill Breck’s canvases were indeed Dunstan’s work. Despite the female figures, despite the Indian Springs painting with its now-quaint gas station, despite the lack of signatures.

The paintings simply had to be Dunstan’s work, or the work of a forger so brilliant that there was no meaningful difference between forgery and art.

An artist’s true signature was in the brushstrokes, the energy, the choice of colors, the feel of space or the lack of it, the feel of peace or the lack of it, all the thousands of small artistic decisions that added up to one uniquely Dunstan canvas.

These were Thomas Dunstans.

All Frost had to do was prove it.

Exhilaration bubbled through him, giving him the kind of charge that he thought he’d lost to age. But it was all there, all waiting, needing only the introduction of something worthy of interest into a life that had slowly gone stale.

He felt like waking up Zach and hugging him. But he suspected Zach wouldn’t welcome the interruption.

Smiling, Frost did what he’d done many times in the past few hours. He picked up each canvas in turn and examined it front, back, and sides. He was missing something important. He knew it.

He just didn’t know what it was.

With an impatient sound he opened the laptop that he used for research. He scanned again the mentions he had found of Dunstan, the old photos of his work, the learned words describing the indescribable.

“Idiots and fools,” Frost muttered. “Especially Lee Dunstan. Man no more knows art than horseshit knows heaven.”

Absently Garland ran his fingertips lightly over the side of the Indian Springs canvas, thinking about Dunstan and art and life and the unknown. When he realized that his fingertips returned to the same spot on the canvas stretcher again and again, he stopped, then repeated the light movement, this time conscious of what he was doing.

Definitely a different texture.

He flipped the canvas so that it was bottom side up to look at what he’d felt. It could have been just an extra-thick bit of paint that intrigued his fingertips, but he couldn’t be sure in this light. He took the canvas over to his desk, angled the bright light, and frowned over the bottom edge of the canvas wrapped around the stretcher, a part of the painting that wouldn’t show after the canvas was framed.

He switched to black light and turned off the desk lamp. He looked at the result for a minute, then began going over the bottom edge of each painting with the black light.

Halfway through the examination, he was grinning. By the time he was done, he was laughing with the sheer exuberance of having discovered something fresh and wonderful at a time in his life when everything had seemed old and flat.

“Zach, my boy, you’re going to kiss me on all four cheeks in the morning, and what’s more, you’ll thank me for the opportunity.”

Still grinning, Frost started nailing down the truth with some online research.