Earth Colors Read online

  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.

  5

  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 sa
y, “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.

  6

  I LEFT THE MUSEUM WITHOUT SAYING ANYTHING TO EITHER OF them, and when Faye and I next met—at the hotel, where I had gone to hide—I allowed as how I needed to get back to Salt Lake City as soon as possible.

  “That’s just fine,” she said, “because Tert offered Sloane and me a ride back with him. It just happens he’s going that way.”

  This was not what I had in mind at all. I said, “Tert? His name is really Tert?”

  “Yes, Tert Krehbeil. Tert for ‘Tercius,’ as in Latin for ‘the third.’”

  I could not stop myself from making a very unpleasant face. I had pegged Gray Eyes as a preppie and had had my usual phobic reaction to that, but a preppie with a preppie nickname and a preppie pedigree was a thousand times worse.

  Returning a disapproving glance to my reaction, Faye said, “So, yes, it would be a convenience if you would drive my car home.”

  Convenience. Now I’m a convenience. I said, “But I thought the client was old.”

  Now she laughed. “Well, yes, the artworks do belong to an old man. Or, more accurately, a dead man. They belong to the estate of Tert’s father, Krehbeil Secundus. In fact, they were purchased by the great scion of the family, ol’ Primus.”

  “You’re making this up.”

  She declared rather stiffly, “East Coast nicknames were often quite fanciful. Do you have a problem with that?”

  “No …” But I have a problem with my best friend consorting with people who make me break out in hives.

  Faye closed her eyes and put a hand to her forehead as if she had a headache. “Listen, I didn’t realize at first when Hector contacted me that he was talking about his brother and not his father. I didn’t even know his father had passed away. It’s been that long since I’ve heard from Hector.”

  The thought of three Krehbeils all lined up—Primus, Secundus, and Tercius—had jammed unpleasantly in my brain. I wondered if they all had eyes as cold and gray as ice. “I suppose he’s good-looking,” I said, “but isn’t he kind of … remote?”

  Faye straightened her spine and gave me a look. It was a look that said everything: It said, You’re jealous. It said, You don’t want me to be happy. It said, Go to hell.

  So I drove home wondering what kind of lightning had just struck my not-so-safe little world. Wondered, in fact, if it was indeed still my home. Since Tom’s death, I had been staying at Faye’s, first to nurse her through the final weeks of her pregnancy, then to help her as she adjusted to the new life she had brought forth. Somehow, weeks had become months. I had been chief cook and bottle washer, marketer, and devoted nanny. Now I was just chauffeur.

  It’s about a nine-hour drive between Cody and Salt Lake City by the route I took, so by the time I got back there, I was sufficiently tired that all I wanted to do was eat about five peanut butter–and–jelly quesadillas and go to bed, which is exactly what I did.

  I did not sleep well, and awoke early. In the first pale fingers of daylight, I got up and began doing a few chores before starting to study for my classes. By daylight, the night’s self-pity dissolved into acute embarrassment at having reacted so strongly. Faye was right; I should want her to be happy. I was just jealous because Jack had been gone so long.

  And yet I had real misgivings about this man Tert Krehbeil. There was something about him that genuinely gave me the creeps, and it wasn’t just the clash between our backgrounds.

  As I went to plug in my cell phone to charge it up, I realize
d it was Faye’s. I had forgotten to give it back to her after her hurry to meet her … friend. I reached deeper into my duffel bag and found my own phone, which meant Faye had neither one. I couldn’t call her. I felt very much alone.

  I stared at the phone in frustration, recalling the call from Hector the actor, the man who had brokered the connections between Faye and his brother Tert. I dug through Faye’s desk for her address book, found a phone number for Hector and dialed. I knew better than to rely on the opinions of a drunk, but I wanted to know what Faye was getting mixed up in, and I told myself he might be able tell me something about his brother that would put my anxieties to rest. In fact, you’re so put out that you want to hear something awful, I told myself as the call began to ring through.

  A groggy voice answered on the other end. “Hello?”

  “Oh, I’m sorry,” I said. “I thought this might be an East Coast number. I’ll call back at a more reasonable hour.”

  “No. Wait. It is a reasonable hour here. I’m the one who isn’t reasonable. Who did you say you were?”

  “Em Hansen. Hello, Hector.”

  There was a pause. “Well, Em Hansen, I have absolutely no idea who you are, so if you’ll forgive me—”

  “Wait, don’t hang up. I’m Faye Carter’s roommate.”

  There was another pause, then, “Ohhhhhh …”

  “You phoned Faye a couple of days ago, and I answered.”

  “Did I? I don’t recall. I must have been bombed.”

  “Yes, you were quite magnificently blotto.”

  “I am so sorry. Will you forgive me?”

  “Certainly.”

  “Well then, if I was my usual excruciating self, to what do I owe the kindness of this call?”

  “I’m trying to help Faye with a few things. Er, you are Tert Krehbeil’s brother?”