Wild Ride: A Changing Gears Novel (5 page)

Her phone rang as Alex was swilling with mouthwash for the third time. She’d brushed her teeth, even brushed her tongue, and flossed as though it were a competitive sport.

She’d kissed a man with blood on his hands. Oh, God. Right now, she wanted nothing more than a hot, hot bath to wash every bit of her that had been in any kind of contact with Duncan Forbes, or even thought about coming into contact with him.

But it seemed bubbles and soothing aromatherapy would have to wait.
She grabbed the phone before her recorded message kicked in, assuming it was the police. “Hello?” She hoped it was Tom. It would be easiest to tell him about the blood on Duncan Forbes’s hands.

A deep, racking sob was her only answer.

Oh, no.
She wished with fierce desperation that she’d left the phone ringing. Not today. Not now.

The sob ended on a series of hiccups, like a stone skipped across water.

Knowing she couldn’t hang up, and that the call was going to be a long one, she headed for her bedroom to take off her clothes. “Gillian?” As though she had to ask. Who else ever phoned in mid-sob?

“Eric wants to get back together.”

Dead bodies could litter Swiftcurrent like fallen autumn leaves and they wouldn’t divert Gillian from her personal crisis—whatever that week’s crisis happened to be.

With anyone else, an estranged husband wanting to get back together might be considered good news. But with her cousin, everything was disaster and heartache. Good news, bad news, it didn’t matter. Had the drugs done this to her or had her overwrought personality drawn her to the drugs?

Alex realized a full minute had passed without anything but sobbing and hiccup noises passing across the phone line. Clearly, something was required from her. She ought to be more sympathetic; the woman’s husband had left her, but over the years, Alex’s stock of sympathy had worn thin. Gillian brought most of her problems on herself.

“Oh, really?” was about all she could manage.

For once, she’d like someone to lean on. Someone close enough she could call and say, I had a shitty day. Found a dead body and it went downhill from there. But there was no one. That’s why she’d made such an error in judgment and gone to lunch with a man who had another’s blood on his hands.
She shuddered.

She slipped off her skirt. Tom would most likely agree with her that the obvious cause of Forbes getting blood on him was from flipping the body. She was pretty sure there was a test that showed if a person had fired a gun. Had they done it on Duncan Forbes? Or did they need a reason to test him for gunpowder residue? She’d seen that on many a crime show. It was amazing how much evidence a killer left behind. Surely, she hadn’t kissed a murderer.

Had she?

“So what do you think I should do?”

Alex forced her concentration back to the phone call. “About Eric wanting to get back together?”

“Ye-e-es,” Gillian wailed.

Hope flickered, but not brightly, at the thought that her ditzy cousin might be reunited with the man who’d kept her more or less stable for almost a decade. It wasn’t a beacon of hope, more like a twenty-five-watt bulb on its way out. Eric had surprisingly turned out to be the one strong influence in Gill’s messed-up life. It was only once he’d left, after seven years of marriage, that Gillian had taken to calling Alex. Prior to that, their relationship had been rocky at best. They were cousins, but classic good girl/bad girl opposites.

She jammed the phone between her ear and shoulder while she freed her hands to pull off her pantyhose. “Did he tell you he wants to get back together?” Or was it a cocaine mirage. The irony of Gill and Eric’s relationship was that drugs had brought them together and, when Eric cleaned up and Gill didn’t, had driven them apart.

She pulled on the stretchy black pants she used for yoga,spread the toes of her bare feet in relief after having had them squished in dress shoes all day, and peeled the blouse over her head.

“I’m so confused,” her cousin sniffled on the other end of the phone. “I’m not good on my own. I’m not strong like you.”

Yeah, well, she was tired of being strong. Tired of being leaned on. “Take him back, then.”

“I can’t. Look—do you think we could go to a movie or something one night?”

All of a sudden, Alex saw Gill as she’d been before she ran away to L.A. in her senior year. She’d been so pretty and carefree. She could have any guy she wanted with her luscious body and wild-child ways, and mostly she’d had them. She’d developed a crush on Tom Perkins, Alex remembered now. One of those violent teenage crushes, but he hadn’t been interested. He was probably the only man who ever said no to Gill.

It must have been seeing him today, and now hearing from her cousin, that brought that memory back. She bet Gill didn’t even remember that intense teenage crush.

Then Gillian left home. She left a note saying she was going to L.A. to find work as an actress.

What she’d found was drugs.

And Eric.

“Look, Gill. Make yourself some tea or something. Of course we can go to a movie. I’m pretty tied up this week. How about one night next week?” Tomorrow, her cousin would probably forget they’d ever had this conversation.

Poor Gillian—when she wasn’t driving Alex insane, she was pathetic. When they’d been younger, Alex had actually been sort of jealous of her gorgeous, sexually confident, utterly wild cousin. Now that she’d outgrown her own insecurities and come into the woman she was meant to be, she no longer felt intimidated by the easy sexuality of her cousin. Her lack of discipline and her chemical dependencies had messed up her life so badly that now Alex felt sorry for her.

“Can I come over tonight? I need to talk to you about something.”

Right. They had decisions to make about the estate and she’d cry some more about Eric. But not tonight. Alex wasn’t up to it. “I’m really beat. I had a rough day. Can we make it tomorrow?”

There was a pause, and a soft, “Sure.” The one word contained a touch of hurt, and guilt mixed with the frustration that gushed from deep inside.

When they ended the call, she picked up the phone again and called the non-emergency police line. It wasn’t quite five and Raeanne was still at her desk. “Can you get Tom to call me when he gets a minute?”

“Oh, my gosh. He’s pretty busy with the murder investigation right now.”
Raeanne was as excited as a gossip columnist in the middle of a juicy scandal. “You poor thing. I couldn’t believe it was you who found the dead body!”

“Yes. It was me.” And she really didn’t want to gossip about her discovery. “Ask Tom to call my cell number when he gets time.”

Having done her duty, she pulled out her mat and did an hour of yoga stretches to bring peace and serenity. It was an abject failure, but she couldn’t blame the yoga. She didn’t think much short of temporary amnesia could bring peace and serenity tonight.

The walls of her apartment were closing in on her. She needed to do something to take her mind off her troubles. If she lived in a big city, she’d have more friends her own age and a whole lot more things to do and places to go. Instead, for fun and excitement, she called Myrna, the circulation clerk, to tell her not to come in tomorrow and spent fifteen minutes talking about the murder.

That done, she couldn’t relax enough for that hot bath she’d promised herself. She was too jumpy yet. She pulled up Jack Johnson and Adele on her iPod and decided to rearrange the linen closet. But she discovered, on opening the door, that it was perfectly ordered. She’d cleaned it out only a couple of weeks ago.

Her next stop was the kitchen. She was still full from lunch, so she poured herself a glass of milk and washed an apple, then peeled it in one long, tidy swirl and sliced the fruit into four precise quadrants which she placed on a plate. It wasn’t really enough for a balanced meal, so she cut four slices of cheese and buttered a slice of whole wheat bread.

A meal didn’t have to be large, but she liked to think it contained all the required food groups.

While she ate at her kitchen table, using a pretty blue linen napkin and a matching place mat—because she was also a big believer that a single woman needn’t live like a slob—she flicked on the TV to catch the news.

The murder was, predictably, the top story. Tom was interviewed, looking solid and impassive and giving out no information but that an unidentified man had been found dead in the library. An investigation was under way.

He didn’t comment on anything, right down to who had discovered the body, for which she was thankful. There was the usual plea for anyone with information to come forward. The camera crew had caught the body being hauled away. A dark lump tied to a stretcher.

Tidying her dinner dishes took all of a minute and a half. She wiped down all her cabinets and the counters. Managed to impose a tiny measure of order in a world of chaos by swapping the cinnamon and the cardamom in her spice rack, which had somehow got switched out of their normal alphabetical order. Then she brewed a pot of chamomile tea, which was supposed to be calming.

She had a couple of children’s books she wanted to read so she could classify them properly, but her mind wouldn’t settle. And the tea didn’t calm or soothe her tonight. Her mind dashed in a disorganized fashion from the dead man to Gillian’s call and, most often of all, to the kiss Forbes planted on her.

It had been steamy and erotic and she’d responded with all the passion of a woman starved for steamy and erotic. Worse. She’d kissed a man with blood on his hands.

She rose so fast the calming, soothing chamomile tea splashed
everywhere. She had to get out of here.

Before she’d finished gathering her keys and purse, she knew where she was going. To her grandparents’ house. Foolish it might be, but her instinct was to run home—or, as she’d told Duncan Forbes, to the only home she’d ever really known.

She’d been helping her grandfather with his memoirs when he died. Fortunately, he’d preferred talking to writing, and he’d completed the telling of his life story on tape up to his official retirement five years earlier.

The book wouldn’t get written if she didn’t carry on. It was her monument to him. Of course, the memoirs of an ordinary man who’d lived an ordinary life weren’t going to be the stuff of bestseller lists, but his passion for art meant he’d actually known and supported some of the better known artists of the 20th century. He had stories and anecdotes that were worth preserving and sharing.

She’d already decided to donate a copy to the city’s archives whether they wanted the book or not. She’d also have one copy bound and indexed in the library system. Franklin Forrest would have gotten such a kick out of that.

She could have brought all his papers and the tapes to her own home, but she’d left them at his house. She convinced herself it was because he had a bigger desk and a larger study than she did, but in truth, she still felt his presence in the house where he’d lived since returning to the States after the war and marrying.

Her mother and her aunt had grown up in that house. Her cousin had grown up there, and, in many ways, Alex had also grown up in the old Victorian.

Once she’d moved permanently to Swiftcurrent, her grandpa had hired her to help him on weekends and in the summer. In his poky, dusty antiques and art shop, she’d learned more about art than she’d ever learned touring the greatest galleries of the world. She’d inherited her grandfather’s passion. Not that she could paint or draw, as he did, but her organizational skills were superb. She cataloged, recorded, and filed. It was in working for her grandfather’s store that she discovered her true calling. She was a born librarian.

She pulled on a black hoodie and ran lightly down the stairs and out the back door of her apartment building to the parking lot.

Soon she was driving through the quiet roads to her grandparent’s house. As she drove past the central municipal building, she shuddered, thinking of the body now resting in a steel cubicle in the morgue.

As she headed out of the downtown core, she quickly hit leafy side streets named for presidents. She pulled into the gravel drive of the two-story shingled house on Lincoln Street, its original yellow paint faded to pale butter, moss clinging to the roof edge like bushy eyebrows. She felt the familiar pang of loss. It had been almost two months—when would she grow accustomed to her grandfather’s death?

In a gesture of self-comfort, she rubbed the gold necklace he’d given her for her twenty-first birthday. It was in the shape of a key. The key to your heart, he’d said, and she always wore it on a chain exactly long enough so it did rest near her heart. How she missed him. Of course, at ninety-two death shouldn’t have been a shock, but they’d talked so often of his one hundredth birthday party, she’d begun to believe he’d live that long.

Sighing, she stepped out of the car. She and Gillian, his two beneficiaries, were going to have to make some decisions about what to sell and what to keep.

Strangers would soon be living in this wonderful house where all her best memories were stored. The house cried out for a family, for kids to climb the apple and cherry trees, a dog and laughter and backyard barbecues—not something a spinster librarian or a chemical-dependent, recently separated woman could provide. Besides, Alex would be leaving Swiftcurrent soon.

Her feet crunched on gravel as she approached the quiet house.

If there was one thing Duncan hated it was being made a fool of, and somebody was doing a fine job. What the hell was going on? This backwater might look like Mayberry RFD but it had the undercurrents of a Stephen King novel.

He drove slowly through the unfamiliar, barely paved roads, squinting at street signs as they were briefly illuminated by the headlights of his tan midsize rental car. The town didn’t seem to have a map and he couldn’t ask for directions to the deceased Franklin Forrest’s home. Not when his purpose in going there was to engage in some quiet breaking and entering.
Everyone who’d questioned Alexandra Forrest today had wanted to know if she recognized the dead man. To each of them, including him, she’d denied ever seeing the stiff before.

Perkins had asked if he’d known the man, not if he recognized him, which had saved him from having to lie to the cops. He knew what the stolid sergeant would soon discover.

The stiff, Jerzy Plotnik, was a small-time drug dealer, thief and fence. He wouldn’t have come to Duncan’s attention except that he sometimes worked for an on-the-surface-reputable art dealer in L.A. who also dealt, far more lucratively, in high-level, black-market art. The kind of deals Mendes brokered were never heard of at Sotheby’s or Christie’s, and the treasures that changed hands usually ended up in a secret vault.

It couldn’t be coincidence that Duncan Forbes and Jerzy Plotnik had both ended up in Swiftcurrent, Oregon, at the same time. It had to be the Van Gogh.

But why was Plotnik dead? A guy who’d hung on the fringes of organized crime, Jerzy was a small eel swimming with piranhas, but as long as he was useful, there was no reason to get rid of him.

Jerzy had either tried to double-cross his boss, Hector Mendes, or he’d screwed up.

Duncan wished he could buy into Alex’s theory that the murder was a random act of violence, and the placing of the body in Swiftcurrent’s library a coincidence. But Duncan believed Jerzy Plotnik’s corpse had been planted in Alexandra Forrest’s path for a reason.

If Duncan’s Uncle Simon had heard the rumor about the Van Gogh, it was likely Mendes had heard the same whispers.

That could explain how Plotnik ended up in Swiftcurrent, but not how he ended up dead, who killed him, or how Alex fit into all this.

He had a feeling the librarian in sex kitten’s clothing was playing him for a fool and he didn’t like it.

Beneath his anger, excitement bubbled. His left foot was doing a kind of tap dance against the floor as he drove. For it occurred to Duncan that maybe more than a rumor was hidden in this seemingly tranquil backwater.

What if the painting itself was here?

Grandpa wouldn’t take a priceless Van Gogh to the grave with him. If he’d managed to acquire the painting and had plans to sell it, he’d have had an accomplice, and who better than the lovely granddaughter?

Shit, but she’d played him, with her lush body and prissy attitude. As his headlights cut tunnels of light through the darkness, his eyes narrowed on a sign in dire need of repainting. Madison Lane crossed Harding Drive. Duncan was no historian, but he had a feeling Jefferson Avenue, where Franklin Forrest had lived, must be close.

It was a long shot that the painting would be hanging on the living room wall in the house, but in his career Duncan had seen crooks do stupider things. Even if the painting wasn’t there, he could get the lay of the land. See if there were any clues.

He didn’t think Alex could be on to him, at least not yet. She believed him to be exactly what he was—a professor working on a book. He’d made no secret that his attraction to her was sexual. At first he’d hoped she might remember some of her grandfather’s stories from the war. Perhaps through those he could piece together where Forrest’s good friend Louis Vendome had hidden the painting.

He, like most art historians, had imagined the painting still safely hidden from the Nazis, the young man who’d hidden it killed before he could reveal its hiding place. That was the best-case scenario. Seventy years on, treasures were still discovered in mine shafts and disused cellars, the owners having no way of reclaiming their property.

There was also the possibility that the painting, one of Van Gogh’s last, had been accidentally destroyed, lost, or looted. He’d hoped maybe Franklin would have left a diary or a journal, letters home, something that would lead Duncan another small step on his journey to solve the mystery of the missing Van Gogh. The family who’d owned it had contacted him almost a decade ago when he’d had his fifteen minutes in the sunshine of celebrity for a big find.

He’d tracked an old master “purchased” by the Nazis in the late 1930s, when they’d forced wealthy Jewish families to sell their treasures for ridiculous prices. He’d finally found the Rubens tucked away in an obscure American gallery. He’d helped prove its provenance and then returned the painting to the industrialist’s descendants. Duncan wasn’t much of a crusader, but there was a certain satisfaction in righting the wrongs of history.

His arrangement with such clients was that he’d take a fee if he found the art. Some quests were successful, but many weren’t, and often it took years of patient investigation, dealing with uncooperative governments, criminals of one sort and another and galleries who turned a blind eye to shady dealings in the war years.

He also helped solve more recent thefts, such as the Van Dyke portrait he’d restored last year to the English marquis from whose ancestral home it had been lifted.

Solving puzzles—that was partly what drew him to his work. He also loved the cloak-and-dagger intrigue, and the occasional heart-pounding danger. And he didn’t mind the fat fees he collected.

Duncan’s own family connections to crime had advantages. He might walk on the right side of the law, but he used the skills passed on by his larcenous forbears. He’d broken into the secret vault in Bermuda where the pilfered Van Dyke was hidden and stolen it back.

He shifted a little, as the remembered adventure caused a twinge in his thigh. He’d been shot on his way out of the villa at a dead run, the canvas tucked under his arm.

Was the Van Gogh landscape going to be as easy to return to its rightful owners? After ten years of blank walls and dead ends, instinct told him he was closing in on
Olive Trees with Farmhouse
.

There was a solution that no one connected with the story had ever considered. Franklin, the American art student and friend of Louis Vendome, had stolen the painting for himself and brought it home as though it were a worthless print from the Louvre gift shop.

Duncan had a black-and-white photo of the piece, painted in the last year of Van Gogh’s life, when he’d created masterpiece after masterpiece with manic frenzy, as though he’d known his days were numbered.

The photograph, taken before color photography was invented, was vague with age, the blacks shifting to gray. The very grayness of the indistinct photo spurred him on. He itched to see the original in all its colorful, summer-in-the-south-of-France glory.

Depending on its condition, that painting would be worth tens of millions.

He sighed as he discovered Washington Place was a dead end and made a U-turn. He was going to have to stay close to Alex, not only in hopes of finding out what she knew about the Van Gogh, but to protect her as best he could from whoever had killed Jerzy Plotnik.

Sex was the quickest and most pleasurable path to get close to her. He’d have preferred it if she were innocent, but he wasn’t going to fool himself. He’d sleep with that woman because she turned him inside out.

When he held her in his arms, tasted her mouth, and felt the promise of ecstasy in her willing body, he didn’t care how entangled she was in stolen goods. In fact, he thought with a wry twist of his mouth, a larcenous looker was exactly the kind of woman his family would most approve.

Jefferson Avenue turned out to be missing its street sign, but fortunately someone had commissioned a painted metal plaque and the address: 273 Jefferson Avenue. A couple of houses over, and there was 245.

Duncan drove slowly past, but the big old Victorian had that uninhabited look that all the lawn services and timer lights in the world couldn’t disguise.

No cars in the gravel drive. One light burning in the upstairs hall, no doubt on a timer. A newsprint flyer had suffered rain and wind damage. Its damp sheets clung, with a few wet leaves, to the front steps.

He drove around a couple of streets, found a lane that let him see into the back. Open drapes. Nothing stirring. On either side the neighbors were safely ensconced behind closed blinds and drawn drapes, most likely watching TV.

He parked a couple of blocks over under a spreading, leafy tree and made his way back. He wore black Levis, hooded sweatshirt, and sneakers. Having learned from the best, he didn’t skulk around the back but walked boldly up the front path and knocked on the door. No one answered. No one challenged him and the lock didn’t remotely test his lock-picking skills. He wasn’t further tested by an alarm system, since there wasn’t one.

Feeling vaguely disappointed that his B&E skills hadn’t been stretched, he shut the front door quietly behind him and stood still for a moment, listening.

The house was silent. It smelled shut up: of stale air, dust, and a little bit of old man.

“Where did you put the Van Gogh, you sly old bastard?” Duncan muttered.

But only silence as dense as the grave answered him.

From within his black jacket he pulled out a penlight. As he played the tiny beam around him, he found he was in a hall so dark and somber he suspected the decor was original Victorian.

He turned to his right and started with the parlor, checking the pictures on the walls first. For all he knew, Franklin Forrest had displayed an original Van Gogh in his front room. A smile tugged at Duncan’s mouth. He had reluctant respect for a thief with that kind of balls.

But a quick tour showed him the art consisted of a few good Victorian prints and several works by artists who’d become very collectible. Forrest might be a thief, but he had an eye for art. Duncan would give him that.

A nice Edward Hopper boating scene held pride of place over the mantel. Duncan suspected Forrest’s wife had a different artistic aesthetic than her husband. An embroidered sampler with a schmaltzy saying surrounded by twining hearts hung over an overstuffed, high-back chair with an embroidered footstool placed in front of it. He noticed a few needle worked cushions placed on blue velvet arm chairs that appeared to be from the same hand.

Rapidly he checked behind the frames for a wall safe. Nothing. Shielding the light, he crept to the dining room. A decent still life—early-to-mid-eighteenth century—hung over a burled walnut buffet. No Impressionists. No wall safe.

He headed for the back of the main floor and discovered a TV room, a big old kitchen that looked like a set for a fifties family sitcom, and a den/library/gentleman’s study that smelled of pipe tobacco.

Duncan’s knee twitched. Here was where the old guy had spent most of his time. The room felt warmer, more lived in and less rigidly tidy.

He stepped inside and wished he dared turn on a light but knew he couldn’t risk it. This wasn’t a big city where nobody knew his neighbor’s name, much less cared if there was an unauthorized stranger in the house; this was Hicksville.

After a quick inspection of the walls and more decent art, but not the kind that would fetch millions – he headed for the big oak desk and slid open the top drawer. He heard a car crunch over the gravel drive and flicked off the penlight, muttering a curse.

Maybe it was someone turning around or something, but as he waited, backing stealthily to the wall, he heard a car door slam. By the time he heard a key scrape in the front door lock, he’d run out of time to leave. He dove behind an ancient leather couch, curious to discover who else was spending time in Franklin Forrest’s house.

Alex shut the door to her grandfather’s house and sadness joined her like
a pensive ghost. She didn’t shudder. She felt no fear. Her grandfather had died here in the house he’d loved exactly as he would have wanted.

She wished she could see her grandpa’s ghost. She’d love to see him one more time, to indulge in one of their rambling discussions, and she’d love his advice on what to do—about this house, her future, the mess of Gillian’s marriage. Though she couldn’t do that, of course, even if he were here. She, Gill, and Eric had all agreed to keep the marriage disaster from him. Eric was the son Franklin Forrest never had and he’d been so proud of him, it would have broken his heart to know Eric and his troubled granddaughter were no longer together. He would have worried about Gillian.

Now that was another legacy that had fallen to Alex—worrying about her wayward cousin. Although she wasn’t as soft as her grandfather. She was firmly in the pull-yourself-together camp of human psychology.

Even as she drew in a breath of stale air, she imagined the presence of a living, breathing man and, flipping on the hall light, went straight to her grandfather’s study, where she felt close to him and could work on his legacy.

She opened the desk drawer where the tapes were neatly stacked in chronological order. Franklin Forrest had dictated his memoirs onto tape and it was her job to transcribe the notes to computer. He’d only made it to the late 2000s in the story of his life, but by then, most of the significant events had already happened.

In the last month, in the sporadic hours she’d spent transcribing, she’d managed to get two tapes done—his account of his childhood and early years in Oregon. She reached automatically for the third, the next in line chronologically, and realized she didn’t have to be quite so rigid. She almost blinked at her own audacity, but she could rearrange computer files to her heart’s content. She decided to skip to the tape after the war years, knowing it contained his account of meeting and marrying her grandmother.

She slipped the cassette into the player and pushed “Play.” The creaky old man’s voice filled the room and a wave of grief hit her so suddenly she had to grab a tissue. It was silly. He’d lived a good long time and he hadn’t endured a lingering illness. He was probably enjoying an afternoon rest when he’d suffered a heart attack right here in this room. She should be so lucky.