Fine Art of Murder Page 20
“How am I supposed to know which ones are worth anything? Felicity, are you paying any attention at all?” Constance asked.
Felicity turned her attention back to Doc and Constance. “The auctioneers are marking what they think is a probable value on the placards attached to the item. Why don't you roam the house and see which ones have big dollar signs on them? Or better, ask for Roman MacAllister, he's the owner of the auction house, and he can probably take you directly to the more valuable items.”
“I'll do that,” she huffed off, speaking over her shoulder as she disappeared. “But the baby grand technically belongs to me and I better not get any grief.”
Doc's head was in his hands, his shoulders shaking slightly. Felicity feared he had been overcome by emotion brought on by Constance's nagging. She rose from the couch. Doc snorted and lifted his face. There were tears in the corner of his eye. He snorted again, hiccupped, and managed to stifle a guffaw.
“Having fun?” she asked.
“Charley predicted this. I just never thought….”
“Yeah, she's a piece of work, eh?” Felicity said.
Doc Jamison reached a gloved hand into his breast pocket and retrieved an envelope of cream parchment paper. It held the initials CED in the corner, curled in a neat script, her grandfather's personal stash of stationary. He handed it across the desk.
“Charley asked me to make sure you got this separately. Go on and read it.”
Felicity took a deep breath and blew it out between her lips, slid one finger under the flap and gently pulled the envelope open to the familiar scrawl.
My delightful Fe,
I have spent my life doing the “right” thing, or trying to, at any rate. It's easy to see the mistakes of youth when you wear an old man's clothes. Still, I would have done little, if anything, differently. Someday, may you understand that a decision made in a moment can limit the choices afforded us in later days.
You and your sister share the Donovan name and blood. It is difficult, but don't let her make it impossible. I have faith in you. There has been no way to even the distribution between you girls as I know material things mean so little to you. I can never express how much your company has meant to the heart of this old fool. Time, in so many ways, makes all men equal—each life holding a finite number of minutes in a boundless world of possibility. Yet, we find value within ourselves that match our spirit's highest calling, always.
Look beneath the surface for true value. You will know when you find it.
With much love,
Gramps
Felicity folded the sheet of paper and slid it back into the envelope. Her finger traced the flap.
“Why don't I help you get that painting down so you can get it home?” Doc asked.
“It doesn't matter if it stays here for a few days, though I cleared the place over the mantle where it used to sit. The cottage is ready to receive it back in its original home.”
“He loved that gatehouse. I never understood it.”
Felicity chuckled, “It was his escape from Grandma. She was hell on wheels and that was on a good day. He didn't bring all his things up to the big house until after she died. It was sad, really. I think he missed her, but didn't know how to show her he loved her when she was alive. Or maybe they had a special understanding, who knows. I was young still.”
“He worried about you spending so much time with him. Not getting out and having your own life. He loved it too, though. He loved you, Fe.”
Fe, Gramps's nickname for her. She winked at Doc and kicked the footstool over toward the mantel, stepping up for the painting. No time like the present. She would never spend another evening here with Charles Evan Donovan. She wiped the back of her hand across her eyes, squeezing the corners dry with her finger tips.
“Maybe I should leave it for now. I walked from the cottage.” Felicity said, eyeing her inheritance.
“Nonsense. I'll drive you down. Surely between the two of us, we can get it up on your mantle,” Doc declared.
They each took a corner, lifted it from the mantle, and began walking the long trek through the home to place it on the backseat of Doc's black Lexus sedan. Felicity hesitated and looked back toward the home. She wanted to say her goodbyes to the house, but it would have to wait until there were fewer people. It wasn't as if the Arts Foundation would keep her out. She was on good terms with their director. She needed to make a strong, clean break, but maybe not right now.
And then there was Constance to consider.
She took a deep breath and leaned into Doc's car, “Constance?”
“She won't even miss us.”
True. And, she knew where Felicity lived, if she cared to stop by.
She climbed into the Lexus and Doc drove them up to her cottage. They got out of the car and carefully maneuvered the painting from the backseat and walked it up her front steps.
“I don't remember this painting being so heavy. I helped move this once before, you know, many years ago,” Doc said.
“Not so heavy, twenty-five, thirty pounds. It's a nice frame, but it adds to the weight. Are you the one who ripped the canvas?” Felicity teased.
“Ha, nope, that was a bayonet.” Doc huffed, shifting up the last step and waiting while she opened the front door.
“Bayonet? I thought it was damaged during a move.”
“Bayonet? Did I say bayonet? I meant bassinet, isn't that what they call those baby things? Smacked right into the corner and tore the canvas,” Doc said.
Felicity laughed. Why hadn't Doc spent some of those evenings with her and Gramps? She might have gotten more out of the old war stories. Bayonet, bassinet, indeed. She set her corner on the floor and helped Doc prop it against the wall so she could assess the height and width to be sure she had cleared enough space.
“Gramps used to love those old war movies. Used to go on about The Monuments Men,” she commented, watching him discretely from the corner of her eye.
“That movie's a bunch of hooey,” Doc said, running a hanky across his forehead. “No Monuments Man would have talked about being a….”
“… Monuments Man. Yeah, so he said.” She nodded. “But he never said how he knew that. I have my suspicions, though.”
“Do you now, Missy?” Doc lifted his edge of the art piece and dropped his chin toward her. They lifted together and set it on the mantle, sliding it to the middle of the dark wood shelf. “In a few years, those suspicions won't mean anything to anybody. All those men, if they ever did exist, will be dead and buried. Don't you think?”
Felicity folded her arms across her chest and studied her grandfather's old friend. “You served with Gramps and Uncle Carleton in the same unit, right?”
“And?” he said, his face wrinkled, eyes twinkling. “Carleton would tell you the same thing old Charley would have told you.”
“Huh?”
“Things ain't always how they look. You remember that. I'm an old man. I believe some secrets are best left kept,” he slapped his hands together as if he was knocking dirt from his hands. “You give me a holler if you need anything. I'm going to check in with the boys at the house, then get on out of here, assuming they'll let me leave.”
“You can always stop back by for coffee if they tell you to stick around.”
She'd forgotten to clip roses, she thought, as she watched him park his Lexus next to the thick row of bushes. She closed the front door and retreated to her den. She studied the painting, patted her pockets, and withdrew the box cutter, placing it back on the coffee table. She unfolded the letter from Charles Evan Donovan and scanned it again.
Look beneath the surface for true value. You will know when you find it.
With much love,
Gramps
Felicity stepped back up on the stool and gripped both sides of the painting, wrestling it down from the mantel. She rested it on the floor and studied the paint, the way the light fell across the angles. She thought about words in the letter look beneath the s
urface. The echo of Doc Jamison's words resonating in her ear—heavier than I remembered it. She squinted at the old wound in the canvas expertly repaired by her grandfather years ago. She reflected on Doc's comment about the bayonet, wondering if the painting had become collateral damage during its rescue. This only made sense if the painting was authentic, of course.
She tilted the painting forward and looked at the thickness of the frame. The backing was a brown paper wrap. Felicity picked up the box cutter and carefully ran the blade down the edge of the back, separating the brown wrap from the edge of the wood frame. She delicately peeled down the paper wrap and jerked her head back in surprise. Probing with her fingers, she tore paper away dropping multiple tightly-wrapped bundles of one hundred dollar bills onto the floor.
A cream colored-parchment envelope lay amid the green bundles. Felicity looked nervously over her shoulder and reached for the envelope. She unfolded the contents and began to read.
My dearest Fe,
You wanted the story for years, but being stubborn and fearful of consequences, I could never bring myself to tell you. It doesn't matter so much now, I suppose. About the painting….
She neatly folded the parchment and slipped it back into the envelope. Well, Gramps, this certainly isn't information that should be left lying around. She leaned down and set the envelope carefully into the flames, watching as the fire burned away all evidence of the painting's history. The day would come when the painting would need to be restituted. For a while, though, it would be Gramps's legacy and would sit in honor over her fireplace as it had for most of the last fifty years. Time enough later for the painting to find its way home.
Still Life with Profile of Laval (1886)
B. K. Hart
The Indianapolis Museum of Art is full of treasures with unique and interesting backgrounds. In the case of Still Life with Profile of Laval from French painter Paul Gaugin, the masterpiece was not only saved as part of the Monuments Men's diligent work, but its rescue has been attributed to an Indiana native, Thomas Carr Howe Jr. The painting was acquired by IMA in 1998 with a generous contribution from the Lilly Endowment, and it now resides in the Jane H. Fortune gallery at the art museum.
Thomas Carr Howe Jr., an Indianapolis native, was born in 1904 in Kokomo. His father taught and served as Butler University president from 1907 to 1920. He tells the story of how the Gaugin masterpiece was retrieved in his book, Salt Mines and Castles: The Discovery and Restitution of Looted European Art, which was commissioned in 1946 by Bobbs-Merrill, an Indianapolis-based publishing company, and immortalizes Howe Jr.’s adventures in recovering looted art during WWII.
Still Life with Profile of Laval was retrieved during a solo mission in Bavaria where eighty-one cases of art were recovered from the Nazis. He was nearly thwarted in his mission by a Hungarian curator who had been charged with its safekeeping. However, Howe persevered and was able to get the painting to a central collecting point in Munich. The painting, looted from the famous Jewish Herzog Collection, was eventually restituted and returned to the widow of the Herzog heir.
The Making of a Masterpiece
C. A. Paddock
“She won't even see it coming,” a hoarse voice echoes in his head. And with that encouragement, he raises his Bowie knife and slashes through her midsection. As the steel blade again cuts through the air and down the side of her porcelain-like face, he howls his disgust at her.
“You destroyed us. You destroyed our perfect relationship. Now you will pay for what you've done to me! I gave you my all for months and months and what do you I get from you? Nothing. Nothing, that's what. You lead me on with your beauty and your charms and your teasing perfection. But you betrayed me with all of it!”
He lifts the knife with even more fervor and slices her over and over, carving out his anger and fear, until he stops suddenly and falls on his knees. His hand, so gnarled and cramped from holding the weapon, gives out and he drops the knife. He stares down at what he has done and knows that she would have screamed out, if she could have, because the pain had to be unbearable. He feels it himself, the small burning sensation that soon engulfs him in a full-fledged roar of flaming agony. He waits and listens, half-expecting to see her rise up and cry out.
The only sound he hears is the moan that escapes his lips.
It all started, this obsession of his, when he attended his new show at the Galeria Blanca in Chicago. The well-respected gallery was known for hosting the most evocative contemporary artists from the national and international art scene. Over the years, the gallery had included a few of his pieces in its shows, but this was the first time it held a solo exhibition for his celebrated art. The gallery had received so many requests from patrons to see more of his work. The curator had contacted him to arrange a special viewing of his newest creations, a mixed-media collection of artistic amalgams of oils, charcoal and film that exemplified his unique talent.
It was during the opening of this special viewing that he first saw her. He was leaning against a circular white pillar describing his creative process to a group of ardent listeners, new and long-time connoisseurs of his work, alike. He was telling them how he enters his dreams—waking and sleeping—to actualize his creations, when all of a sudden his eyes caught a narrow band of darkness across the crowded, open-space gallery. A glimpse that made him stop in midsentence to focus on its blackness.
As he concentrated on the vision, he witnessed its transformation into long, silky locks of hair, slipping across and down a perfect porcelain face. In that second, he beheld her features—her high forehead, the straight slope of her nose, the slight curl of her lip, the soft curve of her jaw, the slenderness of her neck. At the same time, she turned to the hanging on the wall of his depiction of a grandmother and child. She moved just enough so the spotlight on the work sparkled in her emerald eyes. She cocked her head and smiled while she examined the work, and after a moment, as if she had made an important connection in her mind, her eyes widened, her smile stretched open and her hair fell forward with an emphatic nod of her head.
She is the most beautiful woman I have ever seen! Look at her. She is smiling at my work. She gets it, she gets me! he declared to himself.
“She is perfect for you,” a low voice teased in his ear. And with that he knew he had found the muse for which he had been searching his entire life.
* * *
He took her back to his retreat outside of Nashville, Indiana. No matter where he traveled in the world or where his work was shown, be it Chicago, New York or London, he always returned to this hamlet where he felt most at home. Where he could create, to be a painter among painters, an artist among awarded and aspiring artists alike. It was a place where he could enter the local art store and buy his supplies without the stares or whispers.
When he needed inspiration, he could wander unacknowledged through the Friday evening farmers market in nearby Bean Blossom, listening to the music of local bluegrass bands and capturing moments of human expressions through his lens, all the while gathering the ingredients for his weekend meals. He could be himself in this quiet world. And he knew that this exotic, cosmopolitan woman could be herself here, too, in this idyllic town. He would make sure she would love this part of southern Indiana and become a beloved part of the community.
“I know this isn't the bustling excitement of the city you're used to, but you will learn to love it here,” he told her as he turned his ’70s wood-paneled Jeep Wagoneer off the narrow, gravel county road onto the smooth pebble lane of his property.
“There are five acres of land here, mostly wooded as you can see. All types of trees—maple, walnut, oak, sycamore, and, of course, pawpaw trees. Oh, they are so beautiful in the fall! You won't believe there could be anything more stunning in the world. Except you, my love, of course. I grew up here in all this splendor. And, just think, you will be living in it, too!”
He paused so she could take in the towering trees and entangled ferns, wildflowers and common brush
hugging the drive. A crunch, crunch, crunch sound of stone being mashed by rubber tires syncopated the moment.
“There used to be another eighty acres of farmland and woods when my grandfather owned it; but over the years, a little bit here and a little bit there was sold off to make ends meet. When my grandfather died, my grandmother sold off all but these five acres to pay for his funeral and help take care of me. After she died, I got it and redid the house. This is what is left,” he continued to tell her over a squawking engine belt as the truck climbed up a hill.
When they reached the clearing at the top, he put the Jeep into park, turned off the key, and spread his arms wide. “This is all yours now. We will be so happy living here. And the most important thing will be the wonderful works of art we will make together. With you at my side, I can finally create my masterpiece! I have waited so long for this, waited so long to find you. Let's not waste another minute sitting here.”
He hopped out and ran with her to his one-room, wood-sided home. It included a tiny living area and a large studio. A bed and nightstand, a sectional sofa, a closeted bath, a café table with two chairs, and a small stove and refrigerator were all that made up his living space. His work studio encompassed the rest of the immaculate room. White wood shelves housed cans and tubes of paint, neatly organized by color. A walnut cabinet held his cameras, lenses, tripods, and other photography equipment. A stack of unused, stretched canvas frames rested against a gray metal table covered with sketch pads and charcoal pencils.
“Isn't this grand! Our very own haven of inspiration and desire! You, mi cara, will make this place shine!” So enthused to have his muse with him finally, he set up his easel and canvas and began to sketch her outline.