A Butterfly in Flame (15 page)

Chapter Thirty-seven

So much of it showed traces of smoke and burning. Fred shouldered through dismal heaps of furniture: the carved rosewood love seat in pink plush, missing three legs; the chair constructed of longhorns; nightstand with cracked marble; and underfoot—well, underknee, because up here locomotion was possible only on all fours—the enamel bedpan missing large bites of enamel; the cracked glass urinal for the patient’s use; cane-bottomed chairs without their caning, and missing legs, arms or backs.

And throughout, the smell of burning. Most everything here had known the intimate touch of flame.

In the attic itself, its floors or rafters, there was no sign of burning. Just the smell, given the volatility of the building’s contents, was alarming. No, what must have happened, and it stood to reason—supposing that the Josephus Stilltons had been bigwigs in their day, they must have had a mansion that was appropriate to the exercise of whatever level of bigwiggery they professed. And there was presently no sign of such a mansion in all of Stillton. It must have burned, and its contents, rescued, have been shoved into the attic of this building to be sorted through some day.

Piles of books, frayed, scabbed and charred. Trunks—Fred pried one open and found clothes, as much as remained after the moths and rot. He eased open the second trap, above the figure modeling studio, to get more light. This made the crap easier to see, but it was still crap.

Wait. Picture frames. Yes. Frames.

Empty. Broken.

Fred kept looking, crawling through the dreck and dust. There was enough broken glass to make the crawling difficult. Here was a large supply of horsehair left behind when its covering—it had stuffed a large cushion—was devoured by moths who despised the taste of horse, and stuck to velvet.

Take the masked ball, the big scene at the end of—who knows—some nineteenth-century operetta—
Die Fledermaus
?—and collapse it, stage, sets, costumes, lights and all. Set fire to it then, and put it out. Pull out the people and anything of value. Make sure the firemen tramp through everything and stir the remains. Then sift and sort and shove all that remains into the attic, against a better day.

Die Fledermaus
? Maybe
The Fall of the House of Usher.

What was that, rain outside? Beating against the windows, drumming the roof in a sad pavane.

Nothing here. Nothing of value or interest.

No. Wait. Under the eaves at the far end. In the dusk, more trash—but it didn’t look right somehow. It was too flat. Fred crawled through the wreck until he reached the spot. It was not at all what it appeared to be—piled books, a trunk, split china crocks, a randy rocking horse with a missing ear, a spill of tattered clothing—but rather a painted screen of canvas hanging from halfway up the rafters, making an effective knee-wall ten feet long, on which these objects had been painted, as if for a stage set.

The canvas lifted easily and back of it were rolls piled one on another, that could be rugs. So infected had his search become by cumulative disappointment, as well as by the length of the rolls, that Fred immediately dismissed them as rugs that should, by now, have been eaten as badly as any of the other cloth up here in which an enterprising mouse or moth or mold could discover protein.

Except the rolls were canvas.

Canvas hidden with great cleverness and care.

***

Mrs. Halper handed Fred a note while looking with disfavor at the state of his clothing. Only this morning he had been freshly laundered and practically blown dry. “Detective Seymour wants you to call him,” she said.

“How urgent?”

“He waited half an hour and then left the note,” Mrs. Halper said.

What had to be a reporter—one of several adults standing in the entrance room—demanded, “Where does a person get a drink in this town?”

“The Stillton Café. I’ve told you. If you want something stronger, there’s Buster’s Provisions, but he closes at seven. What’s left is the Stillton Café.”

“Stillton Café has nothing but beer and wine I wouldn’t wash my socks in.”

“I’m glad to hear it,” Mrs. Halper reproved him.

“But you’ve got something in the kitchen, for sure,” the reporter insisted. “A bottle of Scotch?”

“I do, but no license to serve it,” Mrs. Halper said. “And not a great deal of patience either. The matter is closed.”

“State cop?” Fred asked, waving the paper he’d been given. “Detective Seymour?”

“The only police officers in this town are security from the academy. Which it looks like to me is this new President Harmony’s way of seeming important. Because we sure Lord never needed them in the old days. So he’s state. Has to be. Call him. He’ll tell you.”

Susan Muller came by, her arms filled with towels.

“Susan,” Fred said.

“Yes, Fred?”

“Just saying ‘Hi.’”

“Hi. Oh, and if I can’t make class tomorrow…”

“I’ll know where you are. So be there. See you then.”

***

Call Seymour first.

“You left town.”

“Not the area,” Fred said. “Errands in Rockport. Lunch. What can I do for you?”

“Monday night you stayed in Morgan Flower’s apartment. You moved out last night. How come?”

“Telephone,” Fred told him. “In the room here. I don’t carry a cell. I should but I don’t. The reason you know to find me here is I told the officers how to find me. What can I do for you?”

“Let’s do this in the morning,” Seymour said. “I’ve been on for twenty-four hours.”

“I’m in class at eight-thirty,” Fred said.

“Seven-thirty. There’s a place on Main Street. Bee’s Beehive. You know it?”

“All too well,” Fred said. “No, that’s not fair. I’m grateful to it. She opens at seven.”

“Seven-thirty,” Seymour said firmly.

***

“OK. I take back everything I didn’t say,” Fred told Clay. “It’s a spectacular find. I’m sure of it. I couldn’t really see it, but I’m sure.”

Was that the sound of Clayton chuckling? Surely not. That was as likely as Brooklyn Bridge rising into the air of its own volition.

“Say nothing,” Clay instructed. Then, “Tell me everything.”

Fred said, “The background will have to be confirmed. I have no doubt it can be fleshed out from local records. My conjecture is based on a quick reading of the evidence I’ve seen. My conclusions are partial, and subject to the fantasy that inevitably attaches to the thrill of discovery.”

Chapter Thirty-eight

“So I’ll separate conjecture from hard fact, and start with conjecture.”

“Must we?” Clay complained.

“Conjecture gives context. And it’s my story. So, here goes.

“By a certain date, let’s say 1870 or so, Josephus Stillton had real money. Maybe 1880. In order to prove it, he built his time’s equivalent of a McMansion. Running water, kitchens, ballroom, dining room, parlors, the works. Here in Stillton.

“Supposing that there was a Mrs. Josephus Stillton, she pushed him to make it nice, as well as making it big. She should have pushed him to make it of stone as well, but I guess she didn’t.”

Clay interrupted, “I fail to see the relevance…”

“For the ballroom, or for the dining room, he, she, or they ordered an extravagant decoration.”

“Yes? Yes? The painting?” Clay put in, in an agony of anticipation.

“No, not
a
painting. A mural. By one of the foremost artists of the day. Albert Bier…”

“No names! No names,” Clay pleaded. “Did you say a mural? Not fresco!”

“Fortunately not. I can’t imagine this guy ever painted fresco. If he—let’s call him AB—if he ever worked color into wet plaster, you’d sure have to prove it to me. No, in this case he worked on canvas cut to fit the walls.”

“Oh, God! And glued?”

“No. There we’re in luck. Stretched. The canvas was cut and stretched and tacked around the edges, and then I’m sure with the tacking edge covered by a molding that would also give the effect of a frame.

“Then the building burned.”

“But this is almost mortal anguish,” Clay pleaded.

“Hold on,” Fred said. “I should have mentioned that although the mansion is conjecture, the mural is fact. I’ve seen it. It wasn’t easy, and I could only see a sample. The subject is a panorama of the Wind River Valley in Wyoming, either at dawn or sunset. The panorama takes in, if I am correct, the full 360 degrees of startling landscape visible from a certain point on a plateau.”

“I am speechless, speechless!” Clay managed. “But, you say the building burned?”

“Yes, but not before the mural had been removed. Here again we enter the realm of conjecture. Suppose that by 1920 someone decided to replace the ballroom windows—or mirrors—with more modern equivalents. Or someone decided the room could be better used as a kitchen or nursing station. Or someone simply decided that the painting was too old-fashioned or too pink.”

“I know that pink,” Clay said. His breathing was quick.

“You are sitting?” Fred asked.

“Get on with it.”

“For whatever reason, the panels were carefully rolled and put for storage under the eaves of the garret of a large structure I teach in. I can’t guess what the building’s original purpose was, but it is presently used as studios. Then, when the mansion burned—understand, the mansion is just a guess…”

“Never mind. Never mind.”

“Who is Rosa Ludlow?” Fred demanded.

“He married her. Go on. Go on. The paintings. The mural. Describe it.”

“What I managed to see was under conditions of intense discomfort and difficulty, and I’ve managed to look at only a sampling of the complete work, as I told you. Odds are it’s all there, but I can’t be certain.

“The tallest rolls are eight feet high; the shorter ones either three or four. What I guess, the taller panels were stretched above wainscoting and chair rail that would have been between two and three feet in height. Windows or mirrors would grow upwards from the chair rail, and the three- or four-foot sections—mostly sky with vivid clouds—were stretched across those, as above the doorways.”

“Marvelous. Marvelous,” Clay said.

“Of course I was worried,” Fred said. “Nobody knows this or takes it into account. If a painting on canvas has to be rolled, the painted side should always be on the outside. Oil paint is willing to stretch, in reason. If it’s on the inside, it has to compress, and if the impasto is thick, it cracks.”

“I know this, for heavens’ sake,” Clay expostulated. “Why are you teaching your grandmother…”

“So I was worried because in all these rolls, the canvas was on the outside. People mean well. They think it’s a way to protect the paint. Then, with the heat and the dryness and the possibility of mice or leaks or squirrels…as I say, I was worried.”

“And?”

“On quick inspection, they look fine,” Fred said. “I’d feel better if I could really see them.

“Then, when the building burned, as I said before,” Fred continued. “I lost my sequence there for a minute. Everything broken or awful or ruined or simply unwanted that came from the wreck of the mansion, got shoved into the garret in front of the rolled mural that was being stored up there already, and time moved on.

“He married her?”

“Who? Who got married?”

“AB”

“Oh. Rosa Ludlow. She had been the wife of Fitz Hugh Ludlow, a writer. Also a dabbler in hashish and women on the side. There was a divorce. That’s all footnote…”

“As Macbeth said, didn’t he? The rest is footnote?” Fred said.

“Footnote to us,” Clayton explained. “To Rosa and to AB himself, we can hope that the marriage was main text, as was my own brief marriage—a shining chapter in the book of life.”

There was a significant pause as both men hung at the brink of the emotional chasm offered by Clay’s unexpected outburst of candor. It was a chasm as filled by dangerous color as was Bierstadt’s Wind River Valley itself.

Fred said, “The only way to be sure is to lay the whole thing out, puzzle it together. See if anything’s missing. You’d need a big space, like the floor of a gym.”

“Bring it to me,” Clay demanded.

Chapter Thirty-nine

The chasm of emotion that Clay had opened filled instantly with his utter unreasonableness. The only sensible response was disregard.

“At the moment that might not be practical,” Fred said.

He had covered his tracks as best he could, though he must have left trails and prints of his activities in the dust and the piles of displaced refuse. He was haunted, also, by the careful job someone had done—when?—of making a screen of camouflage in front of the stored rolls of canvas. When had that been done? How many years ago? And why? So far was he from making sense of it that he didn’t comment on it. Sufficient unto the day.

Below, in the studio, once he had rearranged the furniture, he had been sweeping the dust that had settled below the trap when a student entered—one he did not recognize—a male, stout and red-faced.

“I’ll do that,” he said. “It’s my job.”

“Just getting ready for tomorrow,” Fred said. “My class meets here. I’m Fred.”

“I know. You teach. I clean. I’m Rick.”

“Rick Murphy?”

“How do you know my name?”

“They give us a list. There’s only two Ricks. The other one’s in first year, and I’ve met him.”

“What they think is we’re going to wake the hell up at six in the morning and clean before classes start. Which, to hell with that. Gimme the broom, would you?”

“You’re fourth year,” Fred said. “If I remember correctly.”

Rick, sweeping, nodded.

“So you’re thinking about next year,” Fred said. “What’s your major? Concentration? What do they call it?”

“Your list doesn’t say?”

“There’s too much on the list. I’m amazed I remembered your name, what with all the rest of it.”

“Graphic design,” Rick Murphy said. He hadn’t stopped working, sweeping the area from which the furniture had been cleared, making a pile in which Fred’s incriminating attic dust was well mixed with empty cans, wadded paint rags, and scraps of paper. He dragged a black plastic barrel over from the corner and scooped the pile into it using a dented metal dustpan.

“Go to Boston, I guess,” Rick said. “I haven’t really thought about it.”

“Grad school?”

“I have to work,” Rick said. “Everyone’s so upset.”

Fred took a moment. “I don’t follow,” he said after he had tried and failed to find a connection between Rick’s two observations.

“Not that anyone liked the guy,” Rick said.

“Oh.” Rodney Somerfest.

“It’s like something that happens in the city. New York. I went to New York one time. Almost got killed. I stepped into the road. It was a taxi.”

“What was he doing around here?” Fred asked.

“You couldn’t pay me to go to New York again,” Rick said. “I almost got killed.” He started moving the horses Fred had stacked against the wall Meg Harrison had designated earlier, into the cleared area he had swept. “Being you’re here, how do you want these horses?” he asked.

Fred showed him. Concentric rings around the model’s platform. Tomorrow he’d use the platform for himself.

“Does anyone have a theory what happened?” Fred asked.

“Ran a red light. Or it was me,” Rick said.

“To Rodney Somerfest, I mean.”

“Everyone says he was killed. Or it was an accident.”

“If he was killed, what for?”

“I think he had money. Looked like it. His car and all.”

“He was robbed, is your thought?” Fred said.

“Nobody liked him. Still,” Rick concluded, “Still you can’t help being upset. And then cops asking questions and all. People say you’re friendly with Morgan Flower.”

“Nope,” Fred said.

“He’s another one.”

Fred waited long enough to allow Rick to flesh out the thought. But Rick evidently believed the thought was complete. He continued moving the horses. The easels stayed against the wall. “He’s another what?” Fred asked finally.

“Rich guy that acts like he pretends like he wouldn’t know what to do if he had a hundred bucks in his pocket.”

“What’s he want with a job here?” Fred asked. “If he’s rich already?”

“Rich as he is, he can do anything he wants. Like with that girl. Woman. Student. I had him last year. Writing about my problems. Well he’s got a problem now. The cops are all over his car.”

Rick started sweeping the area he had cleared of furniture. “Broke into it, I guess,” he said. Dusted it for prints. Looked everywhere. Then towed it.” He smiled as he swept.

“Does anyone know where they went?” Fred asked. “Suspect, I should say.”

“If they went to New York, look out!”

***

A good deal later, after he’d managed to discourage Clay from imagining the prospect of instant gratification, Fred was able to reach Molly.

“Sure,” she said, “there’s a trolley that runs right to the beach, but Prince Charles prefers the car. According to Mom. And her car’s here, as you know, since she gets someone to drive it down. And the bargain I had to make is, OK, we’ll take the car as long as I drive. Which also means I have to find somewhere to park. But that beats letting Mom drive. Anyway, Terry is thrilled to pick up after that dratted dog. It’s good practice for her. Teach her how to grow up to be a woman.

“Anyway. Morgan Flower. That was one of the names you gave me? Wait. Listen. Your message. Someone was killed? Be careful!”

“Someone died,” Fred said. “We don’t know how. Killed is a possibility.”

“Rodney Somerfest. You told me. I looked him up. The only Rodney Somerfest I could find is a car dealer in Concord, New Hampshire.”

“That’s him,” Fred said. “With a career change.”

“This other name you gave me. Morgan Flower. I can’t find anything. You can Google Morgan Flower until the cows come home. Nothing.”