Blue Smoke and Murder

4

SEPTEMBER 11

LATE AFTERNOON

Jill drove past the ruins of the ranch house and the burned skeleton of the barn. She didn’t stop. She would later, when she’d had more time to absorb the reality of her great-aunt’s death. Modesty Breck had seemed to be one of those people who just got harder and leaner, not old so much as ageless. Like the land itself, spare and unrelenting. Something you always respected yet always took for granted.

No guilt trip, Jill told herself firmly. After Mom died, the old witch barely put up with having me live in the original homestead cabin over the ridge from the ranch house.

Modesty was a woman who liked her own space. A lot of it. Solitude and hard work were her chosen gods.

She died the way she wanted to live. Alone. So lose the guilt.

Easier said than done.

Dust and grit flew beneath the little Honda SUV’s tires as the eight-year-old vehicle bounced and rattled over the rough dirt road. No one had been here since the last monsoon rains had pounded the dry land. There wasn’t any other sign of life except for the occasional coyote and rabbit tracks preserved in dried mud on the road’s low spots. Water had washed away everything else, even the tire tracks leading to the ranch house where Modesty had died.

When Jill topped the steep ridge, she saw the original homestead cabin lying sheltered in a small valley, built right on top of the spring that had attracted her Breck ancestors in the 1840s. When Jill and her mother had moved from-fled, actually-Utah, they had lived with Modesty in the “new” ranch house just long enough to fix up the homestead cabin.

As a young girl, Jill had loved climbing the red cliffs and spires that were the rear wall of the cabin. As an adult, she hadn’t been back in six years.

The closer Jill drove to the cabin, the more relieved she felt.

At least I won’t have to waste money on a motel while I take care of whatever needs to be done with Modesty’s estate.

Some of the chinking had fallen out between the weathered logs and a shutter hung drunkenly over half of the kitchen window, but the rest looked just as she remembered-old, small, oddly comforting. A piece of history that had survived past its time.

All Modesty’s lawyer had told Jill over the phone was that her great-aunt had died in the fire that burned the ranch house and outbuildings down to their rock foundations. Jill had stayed with her job on the river until she found a replacement guide. It had taken three weeks. The lawyer had assured her there was no reason to rush back. Modesty’s remains had been cremated and scattered according to her will, and the stock didn’t need tending because every last animal had been sold for back taxes. The lawyer had already filed for an exemption on further taxes due to the ranch house and barn burning down.

Taxes. God.

How much could an all-but-abandoned ranch be worth?

Jill parked in the overgrown yard, climbed out, and stretched before she went to wrestle with the old padlock that secured the front door. Not that there was much to steal-worn cowhide chairs, an old plank kitchen table, and bunk beds whose “springs” consisted of rope strung between two-by-fours.

Despite its rust-pitted appearance, the padlock opened easily to her key. Modesty must have oiled the lock recently. Or maybe she’d rented the cabin out to someone for a time. Cash was always welcome on a bare-bones Western ranch.

Inside, the cabin was surprisingly clean. Jill wouldn’t have to camp out in the yard while she put the place in order. There was even a covered bucket of water near the ancient long-handled pump in the kitchen. She lifted the bucket to prime the pump, then stopped when she saw the neat rectangle of folded paper that had been tucked beneath.

Her name was written across the paper in Modesty’s elegant, archaic handwriting.

Jill set the bucket aside and unfolded the paper. An odd sensation prickled over her arms.

She was reading a note from the dead.

GO TO YOUR OLD HIDING PLACE.

LIFE ISN’T AS SAFE AS IT SEEMS TO THE YOUNG.

“Well, that’s weird,” she said. “Wonder if the old bat was senile? God knows her sister was no model of sanity.”

But Grandmother Justine was a long-dead family legend, and Great-aunt Modesty had always had a death grip on reality.

Jill tucked the paper into the hip pocket of her jeans, primed the pump, and smiled as clean water gushed into the old iron sink. With the supplies she had picked up in Page, she was set for several weeks. After that…well she’d worry about what came next when she knew how long she’d have to stay at the ranch. She didn’t have any idea of what went into settling someone’s estate.

With a sigh, she opened the cranky shutters on the east side of the two-room cabin, letting in the late-afternoon air while she unloaded the Honda and made coffee on the camp stove she’d brought. She took a mug of coffee into the front yard to enjoy the sound of the wind moving through the huge old cottonwood. The tree was one of the things she had truly missed after leaving the Arizona Strip.

The massive cottonwood had taken root near the spring long before any Brecks ever arrived in Arizona Territory. As a child, she had used the tree for a living ladder to climb partway up the cliff. The rest of the cliff she had climbed the hard way, when she was older.

“I suppose you’ll die someday, too, old friend,” Jill said, tracing one of the deep ridges in the cottonwood’s bark with her fingertip. “I won’t be alive to see it. You’ve got a few hundred more years in you than I do.”

Modesty’s note echoed back like a ghostly agreement.

Life isn’t as safe as it seems to the young.

“Oh, all right,” she said, annoyed by the cryptic message. “I’ll do it.”

Irritating people was something Modesty had raised to an art. Jill should be too old to have her buttons pushed so easily.

But she wasn’t.

Muttering under her breath, she grabbed a flashlight from her backpack and looked around the cabin. There was an obvious root cellar outside. In the days before electricity came to the rural West, root cellars and springhouses had been as close to refrigeration as it got. Sometimes she had hidden in the root cellar.

But her favorite hideaway was inside the cabin, at the back of the pantry, where a handmade cupboard pulled away to reveal a rough opening. Behind the cupboard was a six-foot-square room. The space had been hammered from the sandstone cliff that was the back wall of the cabin. In the days before banks and police, when Indians and outlaws roamed the land freely, the hidey-hole had kept safe everything of value to the Brecks-including their own lives when raiders came.

She ran her fingers behind the third shelf, slid aside a concealed wooden bolt, and tugged on the edge of the cupboard. The tin-backed cupboard creaked and protested when the concealed door swung open. As a girl, Jill had always felt a delicious shiver of secrecy when she crawled into the small space and hid among the burlap bags of rice and beans and sugar.

She switched on the flashlight and looked inside. Instead of supplies, she found Grandmother Justine’s ancient, battered steamer trunk. It was big enough to put a small pony inside. Once it had held her grandmother’s art supplies.

Curious as to what the trunk held now, Jill tugged the lid open. The leather hinges were so old they were almost frayed through. She propped the lid against the rock wall and shined the light inside.

No crusted brushes or hardened oils or color-splotched palettes. Instead, there were six rectangular parcels, standing on their sides like giant filing cards. Each parcel was wrapped in oilcloth.

Jill felt a surprising sense of relief that everything hadn’t turned to fire and ashes. Something remained of Modesty’s heritage.

And her own.

I hope these packages are what I think they are. Even if they got me in some of the worst trouble of my life.

Modesty really smacked me when she found me looking at them. How old was I? Ten? Eleven?

Whatever, she was spitting mad.

Now Modesty was dead and the paintings were Jill’s. She could look at them all she wanted. No more sneaking peeks at the forbidden fruit while Modesty and her mother were working cattle, mending fence, or opening and closing irrigation ditches for the little orchard, the big garden, and the pastures growing winter hay.

Carefully Jill took the packages out and leaned them against the stone wall. Only then did she notice the leather portfolio. She knew from the time before her mother died that the portfolio was filled with old photos and papers-the homestead filing, proof of water rights, wedding invitations, birth and death announcements. All the things that people collected on the way through life.

“Good. That should take care of any questions the lawyer might have.”

Ignoring the portfolio, she eagerly took the large parcels inside the cabin. When she unwrapped the first, she found it was indeed two paintings. They were vivid, wild yet disciplined, intensely realized. Grinning, she unwrapped all the packages with the greed of a child at Christmas.

She hadn’t seen the paintings since the time Modesty found her admiring them in a storage place in the attic of her great-aunt’s house. She’d smacked Jill silly, smacked her some more, then marched her grandniece back to the homestead and told her mother that the child wasn’t welcome at the ranch house anymore unless her mother was along.

“Years ago,” Jill said with a bittersweet smile at how things had changed. She propped the paintings against the wall, marveling at their clean, unsentimental, yet profoundly emotional effect. “I wonder why Modesty didn’t want me looking at them. But then, she was a quirky, cranky bitch.”

It felt good to say it aloud. Her mother had always told Jill that she should be grateful that Modesty had taken them in when they had no other safe place to go.

Life isn’t as safe as it seems to the young.

“Okay, can’t argue that,” Jill muttered. “But I was a kid, and I loved these paintings at first sight.”

The Western landscapes were as big and wide and untamed as the land itself. The paintings captured the power of mountains, the bite of a snow wind, the sweep of the big sky, and the utter freedom of living on your own terms in a land that was rarely generous.

When she was a child, the paintings had enchanted her.

When she was an adult with degrees in art history and fine art, the paintings impressed her.

Now, as then, she felt a deep kinship with the painter, who had captured Jill’s own spirit in oils. Maybe it was simply that all the landscapes had human figures in them-small in most cases, dwarfed in every case by the wild land-and somehow female.

Jill hadn’t noticed that when she was a child. She did now, and wondered at it.

“Wait. Weren’t there thirteen paintings?”

Frowning, she went back to the trunk. Nothing was left in it but the scarred leather portfolio. She pulled it out and looked inside. No painting, but there was a letter addressed to Modesty Breck. It had been postmarked a week before Modesty died, and bore the return address of an art gallery in Park City, Utah, outside of Salt Lake City. Apparently her great-aunt had felt the letter was worthy of being added to the family mementos.

Jill unfolded the heavy embossed stationery from the Art of the Historic West gallery and began reading.

Dear Ms. Breck:

Thank you for sending us the painting that you say has been in your family for so long. It is an interesting genre work. However, it is not signed. Therefore the painting cannot be attributed, despite your suggestion that it may be the work of a noted Western artist.

We are not able to agree with your suggestion that the painting has great monetary value, although we are sure that it has great sentimental value to your family. We have conferred with other experts on Western landscape painting and they share our belief that the work, while pleasing and well rendered, has only a limited resale value.

Under normal circumstances we would return the painting to you with this letter, but the canvas seems to have been misplaced. We believe it happened after it was in the custody of the second appraiser, and are earnestly endeavoring to locate and return it.

In the meantime, we have contacted their insurance carrier and our own and are awaiting instructions on how to proceed. We will contact you again as soon as we can resolve this matter. We are sorry for any minor inconvenience this may cause you.

Should you wish, we are presently prepared to make you an offer of cash compensation for what may be the permanent loss of the work. Judging by the limited market for unsigned landscapes with unproven provenance, of this approximate age, we believe the sum of $2,000 represents more than a fair settlement.

Please advise us if you are willing to accept this offer along with our sincere apologies and best wishes.

The letter was signed Ford Hillhouse. Jill read the letter again, this time translating the words into plain English.

Modesty had sent one of the canvases to a high-end art gallery for appraisal and got a polite sneer in return.

Jill knew enough about art and appraisals to recognize that when it came to putting a price on something, the lack of a painter’s signature was usually crippling. Artists signed works. Anything unsigned was automatically suspect. Without a definitive way to identify the painter, the work became a kind of aesthetic orphan.

Or, in real English, barely worth the canvas it was painted on.

Jill remembered her mother saying that there was a long, unhappy story behind the paintings, which were the work of a great artist. Then her mother had said never, ever, to speak about the paintings again or Modesty would kick them off the ranch forever.

“Well, I kept up my silent end of the family bargain,” Jill said to the paintings. “Why did Modesty suddenly decide to pull one of these out of the attic and shove it into the public light?”

The answer came as soon as the question was asked.

Money.

Those back taxes the lawyer mentioned. Modesty would have known that selling the breeding stock for tax money meant the end of the ranch.

Frowning, Jill thought about the gallery’s letter.

Modesty sent one painting to an appraiser, who sent it to unnamed “others,” and then she was told the unsigned painting was essentially worthless. And lost, by the way. So sorry.

Why would someone offer two thousand dollars for a worthless painting?

Simple. The painting isn’t worthless.

Or is it just that the insurance people don’t want a court hassle over a missing painting of problematic value?

“Probably a cheap way to avoid an expensive lawsuit,” she told herself.

Or not.

Jill looked at the other paintings. She really didn’t like what she was thinking.

Modesty wouldn’t have lugged the paintings, the leather portfolio, and the old steamer trunk to the homestead cabin unless she was worried about the safety of the paintings.

Or she was crazy.

Life isn’t as safe as it seems to the young.

Jill had a hard time thinking of her great-aunt as crazy. Snake mean? Sure. Hard as a whetstone? No problem. Man-hater? Definitely. Crazy?

Like a fox.

She looked at her watch. By the time she drove into town, the lawyer would have closed his office, the county records would be locked for the night, and the sheriff would be eating dinner at the Rimrock Café. He wouldn’t take well to being interrupted by anything less urgent than life and death.

Modesty’s death didn’t qualify. It was yesterday’s news.

“Looks like life isn’t real safe for the old, either,” Jill said to the paintings.

Silence answered.

Yet something had made Modesty move the paintings and family papers out of the ranch house. Within days or weeks of shifting the trunk, she’d died in a household accident while filling the old fuel stove in the middle of a cold night.

And the painting she’d sent out for appraisal was missing.

Unhappily, Jill looked from painting to painting, each breathtaking, each unsigned.

Why would a “great artist,” according to my mother, not sign paintings?

Why did Modesty keep the paintings secret so long?

No matter how long Jill looked at the canvases, they didn’t have answers for her. They simply murmured to her of the lonely grandeur of living in the demanding freedom of the West.

Modesty’s life.

Modesty’s death.

Jill looked at her watch again. She’d see the lawyer and sheriff in Blessing tomorrow. In fifteen minutes the rate on her costly satellite phone connection would go down, a reflection of local business hours.

She took her digital camera out of her backpack, hesitated over the paintings, and finally chose the three smallest. After taking several pictures, she pulled out her computer and downloaded the best images. Quickly she searched the Net for high-end Western art galleries within a day’s drive. She chose Fine Western Arts in Snowbird, owned by Ramsey Worthington. Worthington had several galleries, all in high-end Western resorts. Plus he was the owner of the Best of the West, an auction house that was setting up to be the new Sotheby’s.

If the ads could be believed.

After deliberating about who had the next-snottiest ad, she chose Vision Quest Gallery in Taos, owned by William Shilling. He’d been in business for thirty years at one location, which spoke well of his client list. She chose three more galleries almost at random. All of them were heavy on the Western theme, cowboys and Indians, hardships and manly hunts.

As for the Art of the Historic West gallery in Park City, forget it. They had already lost one of her grandmother’s paintings. That was why Jill was using the JPEGs instead of the paintings as her calling cards.

She didn’t want any more of her heritage getting “misplaced.”