“Wonderful,” I agreed. “Very colorful. Would Ms. Quentin happen to be here today, by any chance?”
“As a matter of fact, she is. In the office with a customer at the moment. Would you like a word with her?”
“Whenever it’s convenient.”
“Please wait. She should be available shortly.”
We waited about five minutes. The woman who came bustling in alone was on the backside of forty, all smiles and rouged cheeks, wearing an outfit as multihued as her paintings; slim and trim and poised in her movements, projecting an air of cheerful self-confidence. The only jarring note was dark red hair combed or uncombed, take your pick, in spiky juts and tangles. Kerry told me later that the haircut was fashionable among young people, both men and women, these days. My response to that was, “Why?”
We introduced ourselves. Were Kerry and I prospective buyers? No, we weren’t. That put a crimp in her smile, and when I told her I was employed by Nancy Mathias’s sister, it morphed all the way into a sad downturn. She didn’t ask what I did for Celeste Ogden and I didn’t volunteer the information. She said, “I was so sorry to read about Mrs. Mathias’s death. A terrible tragedy.”
Mrs. Mathias, not Nancy. “You didn’t know her well?”
“No, hardly at all. I wish I had.”
“I understand she bought some of your paintings shortly before her accident.”
“Actually, no, she didn’t.”
“But she did pay you a large sum of money. Ten thousand dollars.”
“ ‘Pay’ isn’t the right word. It was a gift, you see.”
“Oh? Pretty substantial gift.”
T. R. Quentin’s eyes brightened; the smile threatened to reestablish itself. “It absolutely floored me. It was like… I don’t know, winning a lottery prize. Manna from heaven.”
“How did it come about?”
“She called me one day at my studio. Out of the blue. Said she was a great admirer of my work and if we could meet, I’d find it well worth my time. Naturally I thought she intended to buy one of my paintings. So I invited her to come to the studio.”
“You’d never had any contact with her before?”
“None. She was a complete stranger.”
“Did she take you up on the invitation?”
“The following afternoon. She didn’t stay long, not more than twenty minutes. She had another appointment in the city, she said.”
“She happen to mention who the appointment was with?”
“No, she didn’t.”
“And she only stayed twenty minutes?”
“About that. We had coffee; she looked at my finished work; she asked a few discreet questions about my financial situation and my future goals. And then she wrote out that check. Well, I nearly fainted when I saw the amount. Every struggling artist dreams of a patron like Mrs. Mathias, but to have one actually appear, all of a sudden like that… well, I’m still in the pinch-me stage.”
“Did you ask her why she was giving you such a large amount?”
“Of course. She said it was the least she could do to help an artist who was going to be famous someday.” Color came into the woman’s cheeks, all but making the spots of rouge disappear, but it wasn’t the modest or humble type of blush. Nancy Mathias was not the only one who believed the “famous” prediction. “I offered to let her take any of my finished paintings she liked, more than one, but she refused. She simply shook my hand and wished me good fortune and walked out of my life as suddenly as she came into it.”
“Why did she refuse the offer, if she liked your work so much?”
“I don’t know. All she said was that she wouldn’t be able to enjoy the paintings.”
“Those her exact words?”
“I think it was something like, ‘I won’t be able to enjoy them where I’m going. Let others have the pleasure and the rewards.’ ”
“She didn’t indicate where it was she’d be going?”
“No, she didn’t. I thought it might be that she was planning to move to another state or another country-you know, change and downsize her life. But that’s just my impression.”
“How did she seem to you that day?”
“Seem? I’m not sure what you mean.”
“Her demeanor, her state of mind. Was she happy, sad?”
“Well… not happy. And not exactly sad. Preoccupied, as if she had other things weighing on her mind.”
“And you never saw her again?”
“No. I tried to call her the next day to thank her again-her phone number was on the check-but her machine picked up. I left a message, but she didn’t return the call. So naturally I didn’t bother her again.”
Naturally. She’d gotten all the golden eggs out of the goose that she was going to and had the intellect to know when to back off. Or maybe I was just being cynical. Give her the benefit of the doubt.
Kerry and I collected Emily and went on out to Post Street. “I saw a really cool painting in there,” the kid said. “It looks like a photograph of a stained-glass window, the kind with light shining through it, but it’s not; it was done with oils. It’d look great on our living room wall.”
“Would it?” Kerry said. “How much is it?”
“Only twenty-five hundred dollars.”
Only twenty-five hundred. Only. If my two ladies had their way, we’d be in hock up to our eyebrows and I’d be confronted with modern culture every time I walked into the condo. My idea of eye candy in the home? Pulp magazines and their lurid four-color covers, any day.
11
JAKE RUNYON
He had no good reason to make a two-hundred-mile round-trip drive to the Trinity Alps. No business doing it with a concussion that had already cost him a night in the hospital. If he’d sat down and thought it over carefully, he might have talked himself out of it. But he didn’t. He didn’t feel like going back to the motel in Gray’s Landing, hanging around there sweltering all day; he needed to be on the move. And why drive around aimlessly, going nowhere, when you had a specific place to check out?
Alone at the migrant camp, he got out his California map and pinpointed Lost Bar. It was a flyspeck on Highway 3, southeast of Weaverville, in the mountains some sixty miles east of Redding. Then, without thinking any more about it, he started driving.
Due north on Highway 5, then northwest from Redding on 299 and into the Trinity Alps. Scenic route. Twisty road, thick forest land, views of snow-crested peaks and a big lake from Buckhorn Summit, the winding trail of the Trinity River. Gold Rush country. The fever had struck up here, too, at about the same time as it had down at Sutter’s Milclass="underline" hard-rock miners, gold dredgers. Hillsides and backwaters were probably still honeycombed with hundred-and-fifty-year-old diggings. It was cooler at the higher elevations, a relief from the sticky heat of the valley; the air felt good in his lungs, streaming in against his face. The dull headache all but disappeared. More or less back to normal.
At a wide spot called Douglas City, a few miles below Weaverville, Highway 3 branched off to the southeast-a rougher county road that jiggled its way into the lower reaches of the Shasta-Trinity National Forest. Lost Bar lay in a small valley below Hayfork Summit, along the bank of Hayford Creek. Hayfork, Hayford-go figure the difference. Another wide spot. Maybe a dozen buildings, two-thirds of them old frame houses and newer mobile homes flanked by meadows and trees. Grocery store, Lost Bar Saloon, Brody’s Garage, and a pair of hollowed-out, collapsing ruins-one of redwood with BLACKSMITH burned into an ancient chain-hung sign, the other a smaller brick-and-mortar structure that bore the barely discernible words ASSAY OFFICE above its gaping entrance.
Runyon turned onto the apron in front of Brody’s Garage, stopped short of the single gas pump. The place was open; inside the big main door, a man in greasy overalls was working on something that looked like a tractor. The mechanic straightened and swung around, wiping his hands on a rag even greasier than his overalls, as Runyon approached. Late forties, early fifties, thin and bald except for a fringe of stringy brown hair above the ears. Eyes that jumped and darted this way and that, as if he were afflicted with some sort of optical anomaly.