Dark Tort (31 page)

Ten minutes later I had heated up slices of ham left by a parishioner, a pan of macaroni and cheese—the ultimate comfort food— and placed these next to small dishes of chilled applesauce. It was the kind of not-quite-balanced meal we used to get in the school cafeteria when I was a kid, but I figured it would do. For Sally and her father, I set up the metal TV tables that had been part of the sparse furnishing the parish had done for the house. Colin slipped easily into his yellow chair-within-a-table, even called out gleefully when he saw the applesauce. I cut his ham and macaroni into bite-size pieces and served them. To my great surprise and satisfaction, they all, even Sally, ate hungrily.

I didn’t want to make them uncomfortable while they were enjoying their food, so I washed the two pots I’d dirtied, then cleaned out the refrigerator. I took out two of the church’s offerings as well as my casserole-cum-directions, and put all three into the Routts’ small freezer. By the time they were finished eating, I had the counters cleaned and the little dishwasher—but at least they had one, and built in, too—almost loaded. I put in their dishes and silverware, and figured it was time to talk.

With Colin settled in on the far side of the living room to watch Sesame Street on the portable TV, Sally, with some color in her cheeks and looking far less desolate, moved the two living-room chairs over by the spread-covered couch, so she and her father and I could visit.

“I haven’t found out much,” I warned them. “Just rumors at this point, that kind of thing.”

“Was there anything in the computer?” Sally asked.

“Sort of,” I said. “I know Julian called you to ask about this, and you said you hadn’t heard of it, but are you sure that Dusty didn’t have a friend-who-was-a-boy with the first or last name beginning with O?”

“Positive,” Sally said. “She had been going out with Vic Zaruski, but that had ended, I’m pretty sure.”

“Was he nice to her?” I asked. “I mean, did she ever complain that he was not nice to her?”

Sally shrugged. “She didn’t say one way or the other. Why?”

Before I could talk about the face slap, John Routt piped up: “I believe there was more affection on his side than there was on hers.”

“Did she tell you that?” I asked.

“No,” he said. “But when you’re blind you pick up a lot of nuances and attitudes from speech.”

I steeled myself for my next question. “Okay, there’s an attorney with whom Dusty was friends. They worked out together. Did she ever mention doing exercises or weights with someone, someone whom she might have cared for romantically?”

“She never mentioned anyone,” said Sally. “Who is this person?”

The less said about any specific attorney, the better, I figured. I didn’t want Sally going on an ill-conceived vigilante mission. “Just a guy,” I said, my tone light. “This next part is important. Did Dusty talk to you about working for Charlie Baker?”

“Oh yes, Charlie Baker,” Sally said. “She really did like him. He died, but I guess it wasn’t wholly unexpected.”

“No,” I said. “Anyway, she mentions a gift from Charlie. Then another time, just a couple of days before she was killed, one of Charlie Baker’s neighbors saw her carrying something out of his house, in a tube. A long tube, the kind someone might use to store paintings. Do you know anything about this?”

Sally shook her head, clearly frustrated that there was so much about her child she hadn’t known. But wait. The last entry in Dusty’s journal had said: “Now I can compare them.” I’d thought she meant boyfriends, but maybe she meant something else. I ran this by Sally.

“Compare what?” Sally asked, hooking her straggly hair behind her ear. “The only thing Dusty cared about was learning the law. I think her dream was to become a lawyer someday. But you can’t carry law books in a tube. And anyway, if she had taken anything, the police would have found it when they searched our house.”

“All right,” I said wearily. “I guess I’ll have to go down to Mile-High Paralegal Institute to see if she had a locker—”

“Wait,” said John Routt. “She might have left them with me.”

“Dad?” asked Sally Routt, clearly astonished.

“Let’s go into my room.” He stood and began tap-tapping his way down a short hall.

I remembered this room: it had been designed as a porch with a separate entrance. And it could have been used as a porch, if it hadn’t been assigned to Sally’s father, who’d come here after his wife died. The windows were the jalousie type, now tightly shut against the chill. The futon with its striped pillows was still there, as were the mismatched chairs and the small table with the saxophone on top. On summer evenings, John would open the windows and play the saxophone, and we lucky neighborhood folks could imagine we were outside a New York jazz club. In one corner was a space heater, its orange wires glowing brightly. I didn’t see anything that could fit into a tube.

“Are you facing the interior wall of the house?” John asked. “That’s where Dusty hung two things. She told me to take care of them, no matter what.”

I turned around. And there, suspended from hooks, were two paintings by Charlie Baker.

I stared at them. One was titled Trustworthy Chocolate Cake. It was an old recipe for an extraordinarily fudgy cake that I knew well. Like the Journey Cake recipe, it contained no eggs, and yet somehow, this recipe looked correct. Was I missing something? My sleep-deprived mind refused to provide an answer.

The other painting was for something Charlie called Plum Kuchen. In the fall, when those small, tart Italian plums are plentiful, I frequently made plum kuchen myself. I stared at the recipe. Here, as with the Journey Cake recipe, reading the ingredient list made me uneasy. Something just didn’t look right. I peered at the lower right-hand side of each painting, and there was Charlie Baker’s signature.

“Does this help?” John Routt asked into the air.

“It might,” I said, not wanting to discourage him.

“Our Dusty wouldn’t have stolen anything.”

“I know that. Do you mind if I use my cell phone?”

He replied that he didn’t, and he would leave me to conduct my call in private. ···

“I just finished practicing,” Meg Blatchford said, after I identified myself. She was panting.

“Meg, do you know if Charlie ever left an ingredient out of his recipes?”

Why should I have been surprised when she said, “Oh yes, always. Didn’t you know that?”

“No. Tell me.”

I could hear Meg clattering ice cubes into a glass. “Wait a sec,” she said, still gasping a bit. “All that pitching works up a thirst.” After a moment, she said, “You know, Charlie’s financial success came somewhat late in life for him. Because of that, he became anxious about his work. He . . . was always afraid of . . . imitators.”

“Imitators?”

“Yes, he was terrified that a guest or intruder would sneak into his studio while he was in another part of that big house, sleeping, or cooking, or whatever. He worried constantly that this unwelcome someone would steal the painting or paintings, before they went to the gallery. He told me once that he was even anxious about someone coming in and taking photos of his works in progress, so they could do an imitation or forgery.” Meg stopped to sip water. “But in case someone got the not-so-bright idea to try to sell forged or stolen works before Charlie set them up at the gallery that represented him, he did a little joke. A little joke that made him feel more secure.”

“What kind of little joke?”

“Well. When he hand-lettered the recipe under the painting, he would always leave out the very last ingredient. However! He always put it in the margin, to remind himself of what it was. When he got to the gallery to help set up his paintings, he would always go around and hand-letter the very last ingredient of each recipe. You remember my stew painting? Did you see the merry little sticks of butter running all around in the margin?”

“Sure,” I said, still puzzled.

“Well, if you look carefully at the very last ingredient that’s hand-lettered in there, it’s a stick of butter, that you put in for enrichment of the stew. Charlie was very old-fashioned in the area of cholesterol.”

I stared hard at the margin of Trustworthy Chocolate Cake. It was filled with cheerful little cups of water, prancing around the edge of the painting. And the last ingredient on the hand-lettered recipe was “1 cup water.”

What was missing from Charlie’s recipe for Plum Kuchen? All I had to do was look in the margin, right? And there were spoonfuls of sugar, cavorting happily all around the edge of the painting. Of course. You made the butter-rich batter, spread it into a springform pan, laid on the plums, and finally, sprinkled them with a couple of tablespoons of sugar before the lovely concoction went into the oven.

And what had been missing from the Journey Cake recipe? I asked myself. Baking soda, I realized just as quickly. Baking soda, baking soda, baking soda. Without eggs, you definitely need an acid and a base to make the cake rise. Julian and I had had the acid, which was the cider, but not the base, soda. My inner ear provided Arch saying “Duh, Mom.”

I thanked Meg, signed off, and again looked at the paintings. Trustworthy Chocolate Cake was a complete painting. Plum Kuchen was not complete. And the Journey Cake recipe, the one on the painting Nora had given her husband, had not been complete. “Now I can compare them,” Dusty had said in her journal. Indeed.

I punched in our home numbers, praying that Tom had returned from the sheriff’s department. When he answered, my shoulders slumped in relief.

“Tom,” I said breathlessly. “How did Vic do?”

“Okay, I suppose. Our guys took his statement and released him. We don’t have enough evidence to charge him. Yet.”

I swallowed. “Well, listen. I need you to drive over to the Routts’ house.”

“Wait,” my husband said. “I just saw Vic off, and now you want me to get in my car and drive across the street?”

“Yes,” I said, “I don’t want anyone to see what I’m taking out of this house and bringing to our house. I ...I think whoever killed Dusty may be having her house watched somehow. Or our house watched. That would explain why Vic was almost hit bringing the computer over.”

“I still haven’t told you about my line on that, by the way.”

“Tom! This isn’t like my bringing a casserole across the street, okay? Would you please just drive over?”

“I could get some cops to park at both ends of the street. Create a roadblock down on Main.”

“Are you going to make fun of me, or are you going to come help me smuggle some key evidence out of the Routts’ house?”

“Key evidence that you’re touching, no doubt.”

“In four seconds, I am walking out of this house.”

Tom said, “I can’t believe I’m doing this.”

I took the paintings down from the wall. They weren’t suspended from hooks, as I’d thought, but were attached with plastic clothes hangers. Once I had them both down, I started rolling them up, carefully, very, very carefully. But it was difficult, because something was making the paintings bulky...

On the backs of each of the paintings was a form, with several typed sheets attached. I probably shouldn’t have, but I delicately lifted the tape holding the papers in place.

The form began: “In the matter of the estate of.” And then someone had typed “Charles Baker.” I skimmed down to the title of the form itself: “Inventory.” Hmm.

While I was waiting for Tom, I scanned the rest of the first page, which contained a summary of “Schedule A (Real Estate),” “Schedule B (Stocks and Bonds),” and so on through “Schedule F (Miscellaneous Property).” One portion of the form was highlighted in yellow: “Decedent’s estates: Assets shall be listed and the fair market value given as of the date of the decedent’s death. The inventory shall be sent to interested persons who request it or the original inventory may be filed with the court . . .”

I frowned at the form taped to the back of the other painting, the one I now knew had an incomplete recipe. The form appeared to be the same as the first, with the same area highlighted. A four-page printout had been stapled to both forms. My eyes crossed trying to read the single-spaced typing. “Chairs, Sculptures, Crystal, China . . .” I just couldn’t do this with any kind of understanding right now. Which was a good thing, because that was when Tom’s sedan crunched over the gravel and ice in the Routts’ driveway.

To his credit, Tom did not grumble or complain when I crept out the back door of the Routts’ house carrying a large trash bag filled with my loot. I got into Tom’s sedan and began the arduous one-second trip across the street.

“Whatcha got there?” he asked, once we were inside.

“Charlie Baker paintings. Two of them. From Dusty’s journal, I think he gave her one of them, as a thank-you for the work she had done for him. I’m afraid the second one is unfinished.”

“Unfinished?”

“Yes, Charlie’s friend Meg said he never wrote down the last ingredient of his recipe until the very end, when the paintings were going to be sold at the gallery, or given to someone like Dusty. Some of the paintings that are floating around now have an ingredient missing. And get this—there are some inventory forms that the department will want to go over. Dusty had taped them to the backs of the paintings, so she was trying to keep them from somebody.”

Tom cocked an eyebrow. “Inventory forms taped to the backs of the paintings?”

“Don’t worry! I’m not going to keep them. I’ll leave figuring them out to the geniuses down at the department. But listen, I suspect that Nora Ellis bought an unfinished Charlie Baker painting, thinking it was a completed one. So I hope your guys can go talk to her—”