Framed (2 page)

“Well, some of the grays would do,” Ginny replied. “But you know Jim. He just couldn’t make up his mind which black. Then he couldn’t decide on the margin size. We spent half an hour arguing whether it should be two and a half inches or two and three-quarters. Then it was the frame. Once that was settled, he got hung up on which glass to use!”

“You showed him the samples?” Elsie asked. She noticed the display of glass samples sitting next to the print—conservation, non-glare, and museum quality.

“Of course I showed him. Naturally, he loved the museum glass.”

“Naturally,” her employees chorused. They high-fived each other for their simultaneous response.

“Museum glass is practically invisible,” Elsie added.

“And three times as expensive,” Sue noted. In unison, she and Elsie rubbed their fingers together in the classic sign for money.

Ginny sat down, her pique at the customer fading. “You two are a regular comedy routine.” She chuckled. “What do you think he said then?”

“How much?” they chorused again, and giggled.

Sue thought he would have declined to use it, but Elsie disagreed. In her opinion, Jim Hatcher would have taken the expensive glass just for the snob appeal.

Ginny crowed. “You’re both wrong! He liked it so much he claimed he ordered it the last seven times he was in here!” Her annoyance flared up. “Now, don’t you think that if we’d sold him seven pieces of museum glass in the past, we’d remember it?”

“With our memories, maybe not,” Sue joked. “No, seriously, we haven’t ordered museum glass in months. It’s great stuff, but just too expensive for most people.”

Ginny looked at her two employees, the best team she’d had in her twenty years in the business. The three of them worked beautifully together, their strengths and weaknesses complementing and compensating for each other. Elsie, generous with her time and energy, tall and quiet but prone to rare and delightful outbreaks of silliness, always did a thorough job of thinking things through before she did them. Sue, more volatile, had a paradoxical ability to focus on a job at hand and get it done despite distractions. Ginny knew without vanity that she was a good businesswoman, with a flair for marketing that kept the customers coming in. Between them, Brush & Bevel almost always delivered framing orders on time and perfect, while attracting new business and generating repeat orders.

“So what are you going to do?” Elsie asked, sobering down from their giggles.

“You’re
not
going to change the glass on his previous orders,” Sue vowed. “Not without charging him for it.”

“Of course not. We’ll just wait a few days to let him think about it, then we’ll go over the glass with him again just to be sure he understands it. Don’t worry, I’ll handle him.”

“Good. I’d probably bite his head off.”

“You probably would.” Ginny chuckled, knowing Sue as well as she did. “Let me take care of him. I’ll tell him it looks perfect with the conservation clear.”

Sue snorted in derision. Elsie touched her finger to her nose and then stretched her arm straight out in front of herself, a gesture that recalled Pinocchio and the effects of his tall tales. “Nosy gals, that’s us.”

Ginny shook her head, smiling. “It’s not a lie. It does look perfect. I just have to convince him it does. I’ll pull up his old work orders to show he never ordered museum glass before.”

“Better you than me,” Sue conceded. “Call me when he comes in. I want to see how you manage this.”

The doorbell rang, and they looked up to see a stranger walk in. Elsie rolled up the train photo with its work order while Sue put away the mat and frame samples to clear the design table.

Ginny greeted the stranger. “Hello, how can I help you today?”

The woman, well-dressed and, judging by the expensive jewelry in her ears, having no reason to worry about money, shook Ginny’s proffered hand. “I’m Jenna Rudolph. I’ve just moved here from Boston, and this oil painting needs to be cleaned. My new neighbor recommended you.”

“Let’s see it.” Ginny gestured to the now-cleared table. “We do that kind of thing all the time.”

Jenna produced a paper-wrapped parcel from the large shopping bag she carried. “My husband bought this at an auction,” she explained. “It used to hang in a bar he liked when he was single, down on the Cape. Anyway, the bar went out of business and auctioned off a bunch of stuff, and my husband bought this. It’s filthy, what with all the smoke and such.”

As she spoke, she unwrapped it and laid it face down on the table. It was a stretched canvas, without a frame, the wire attached directly to the stretcher bars. The wooden bars were warped and showed signs of mold, and the canvas had loosened over time. “We can remount it,” Ginny began.

“Oh, I don’t know if it’s worth that,” Jenna objected. “I just want to get it cleaned, then we’ll see.” She turned the piece over.

It was a landscape, a small one. A few large rocks in the middle of a wood, the glimmer of a lake barely visible through the trees. Just off-center, partly screened by one of the rocks, a nude woman looked over her shoulder at the viewer. Her hand extended to the right. “I hate it,” Jenna said, “but Bob likes it. Can you finish it by the end of next week? It’s our anniversary.”

Ginny ignored her. Her eyes ate up the image, and her mouth hung open. Her words floated out on a long, soft breath. “My God. It’s a Jerry Berger.”

Chapter Three

Sue and Elsie peered over her shoulder. Of all the artists Brush & Bevel featured, Jerry Berger was their favorite. They never got tired of his work, of matting and framing his prints or admiring either of the two original canvasses the gallery housed, or the several at the Sullivan Museum in Mill Falls. Ginny worked for the Berger estate as the agent and publisher of his body of work, keeping it before the public and taking a cut of the profits. She couldn’t have run the gallery on what she earned from his work, but it was a nice chunk of change.

“Are you sure?” Sue touched the edge of the canvas with tentative reverence.

Ginny only nodded. She couldn’t trust her voice. Jerry had been a friend, too, long ago. She reached out for support to the very stepladder that had occasioned such hilarity a short time ago. “Oh, Jenna,” she sighed.

The woman took a chair on the opposite side of the table and looked at Ginny in surprise. “Is it valuable?”

Ginny looked up with tears in her eyes. Elsie pushed a chair behind her and she sank into it. “I don’t know yet,” she managed, after a brusque clearing of her throat. “He has a national reputation, and an unknown work by him could be extremely valuable. Especially this one. He completed only one other nude that I know of, and this one is much, much better.”

Sue repeated her question. “Are you sure this is his work? I mean, it looks like his, but then I’m not trained to recognize authorship.”

Elsie touched her arm. “This is his work all right.” She indicated the woman in the painting. “That’s Abby Bingham. She used to be a customer. She never modeled for anyone else. Oh, it was a long time ago! Jerry pestered her for a year ’til she finally agreed to sit for him. And then they died.”

Sue’s mouth made a round O and her eyes went wide. “That’s right! I didn’t work here then but I remember hearing about it. A murder/suicide, wasn’t it? In a snowstorm?”

Jenna gaped at them. “You mean this painting has a story? And it was just hanging in a bar? How the heck did that happen?”

Ginny wiped her eyes and found her voice. “I don’t know, but I’d really like to find out. Abby told me she was going to sit for him again, but I never heard any more about it. When they died—” Her voice dropped off.

Sue laid a hand on her boss’s shoulder. “Tell us the whole story, Ginny. I remember some of it, but Jenna doesn’t know it.”

A long moment passed while Ginny collected her thoughts. Then she began, “A long time ago, oh, twenty years at least, Jerry came in here with some of his paintings. He was better than average, so I arranged a show for him, sold some of his prints. We became friends. He kept getting better and better, and we found a better printer for his work. We had unveilings here, too. I remember when he showed
A Walk in the Rain
for the first time. It was stunning, the way he captured the sun just coming out at the end of a thunderstorm. That was the one that really earned him some attention. He won prizes for it. After that I didn’t see him as much, because he started to work with a regional publisher. But he would stop in now and then to show me a new painting, or we framed something for him. He was always so full of ideas, and so enthusiastic. Like a kid at Christmas every time he had a new work coming out.

“Then one day he came in when Abby was here. I don’t remember what she was doing, probably framing some art for her husband’s office. Jerry stared at her like he’d just seen the Mona Lisa or something. He was usually rather shy, but he just blurted it out, asking her to sit for him. She said no at first, her husband wouldn’t like it. Jerry told her to bring her husband along, he wouldn’t mind.

“Well, after about a year she agreed to model. Jerry showed me some of his drawings of her. He’d pose her as a Victorian lady, or in riding clothes, things like that. At first, he was just practicing his figure drawing. Later on, he got more daring, draping her in silk or brocade, until they worked their way to sheerer fabrics. I don’t think either one of them planned on nudes, but they gradually got more comfortable with each other, until one day he asked and she said yes.”

“Were they lovers?” Jenna asked, wide-eyed. “You always hear that about artists and their models.” Then she blushed.

“Oh, no! Jerry never had any interest in her as a woman. I think he thought of her as a doorway into another expression of art. He was getting bored with landscapes, you see, even though he was so good at them, and he wanted to move into something else. Which basically means figure painting. Abby had no interest in him either. He was—something she did, kind of an experiment. She was like that, always wanting to try new things. She couldn’t have kids, so she would adopt projects. I think Jerry was a project of hers. They got along fine, but they weren’t lovers. Not that I could ever tell, anyway.” She fell silent again.

“But they died,” Jenna prompted, absorbed in the story.

Ginny nodded. “Ten years ago last winter. They went missing during a snowstorm. The police went nuts trying to find them. At first, everyone assumed they had just run off together, but it wasn’t like that. Mike, her husband, really stirred things up, insisting something had happened. He forced the cops to look into it. He even came in here, didn’t he, Elsie?”

“Oh yes, I’ll never forget that day. I came in at nine as usual and went down to the workshop. When I came up here at ten to open the gallery, there he was, sitting there with a gun on his lap in the dark. ‘Where is she?’ he shouted. ‘You set her up with that artist, and now she’s gone off with him!’ I was afraid he was going to kill me!” Her eyes were dark with remembered fear.

“That was before I started working here,” Sue explained to Jenna. “Ginny got the alarms put on the door because of him.”

Ginny resumed the narrative. “It took the authorities about three weeks to find them. A hunter came across them in the snow.” She looked rather sick. “The coyotes had been at the bodies, but it looked like he killed her and then himself. Mike moved out west and never came back.”

She sighed and returned to the present. “All of which means you may have a gold mine on your hands, Jenna. Let us clean it up, verify it is what I think it is. There may even be a signature under all the grease and smoke. Would you feel better if we came up with an agreement about what happens then?”

Clearly, Ginny wanted to talk to Jenna in private, so Sue and Elsie excused themselves and went to the workshop down the stairs from the gallery. “I’d forgotten he killed himself,” Sue said.

“Don’t you believe it,” Elsie replied. “Jerry wouldn’t hurt a fly. That was no murder/suicide. It was a double murder.”

Chapter Four

Sue Bradley drove to work the next day with her windows wide open, singing at the top of her lungs. She thumped the steering wheel in time with Queen’s soaring guitars. The sun shone, the maples were in bloom, and the air was sweet with the scent of fresh-turned earth and new-mown grass. On a day like today—her song faltered and the sun dimmed.

Six years ago on a day like today, some nameless fool of a driver, fiddling with a radio perhaps, had drifted into oncoming traffic, jerked at the wheel, and gone his merry way down the road. An ordinary, careless act, one that happened daily on every highway. Except this time Peter, her own heart’s beloved, had swerved to avoid the fool and ended up in a ditch, then in an ambulance, and finally in the morgue. On a day like today, with a bright sun shining and the birds filling the air with song, her world had shattered.

Her mourning had been deep and intense. When she emerged from it a year later, she had made a determined list of her remaining blessings. Peter had left her comfortable, though far from rich. She had a fine son and a strong daughter, a cozy home—oh, so empty now!—and a job she loved. She was quite aware that Ginny and Elsie had carried her through the year. She was grateful for their understanding. They’d given her the demanding physical labor to keep her busy and tired out, and let her get on with her grieving. The pain she’d thought would never leave eased bit by bit until it was no more than a remembered sorrow. Yet at times it could still pierce her like a needle to the heart.

The fool had never been found. Sue didn’t care; what difference would it make? Peter would still be dead. She had trouble sometimes recalling his face, but now and then, she could feel his arms around her and hear his last words. “See you tonight. Love you.”

Sue squared her shoulders and wiped her eyes. It was still a beautiful day, and she had work to do. Best to focus on what lay ahead. She turned off the highway into the parking lot of the refurbished old mill building that housed Brush & Bevel.

Besides the art gallery, a number of other businesses occupied the ground floor: a deli known as The Silver Spoon, a restaurant called the Chowdah Bowl, and Jemmie’s Gems. Sue waved to the fishmonger’s driver delivering the catch of the day to the Bowl and exchanged pleasantries with one of Jemmie Demarais’ jewelers. Jemmie himself was a thorn in the side of all the other tenants of the building, including Brush & Bevel, but the men and women who did the jewelry design and production were nice enough.