Authors: Sarah Andrews

Earth Colors (13 page)

BOOK: Earth Colors

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The two of them walked into the tunnel together. Fred’s mind was already deep in the earth, reckoning the history of the rocks through which the tunnel was cut. Jenny’s was on the Krehbeil farm, reckoning what she’d have this Nigel fellow do for her there.

I HURRIED HOME FROM FRITZ’S HOUSE. NOW THAT I HAD AGREED to go east, I needed to make plans so I could use my time wisely.

I dug out the telephone number Tanya had given me and dialed. Noreen Babcock answered on the second ring. “Trace Evidence,” she announced. “Babcock speaking.”

I took a deep breath and jumped in. “Hi, my name is Em Hansen. I was an associate of the late Tom Latimer, and I—”

“Of course, Em,” she said, her voice softer now but no less authoritative. “Tanya phoned. You were with Tom when it happened. I’ve been hoping you’d call.”

I opened and closed my mouth several times but felt like I had something caught in my throat. Perhaps it was my heart. Finally I managed a whispered, “Yes.”

“Even though he left the Bureau before his death, he was still our colleague, and when a colleague falls in action, it’s …”

“Thank you,” I said.

“So, now, please tell me there’s something I can do for you.”

“Well, I’ve been asked to work on an art forgery case, and I want to make a master’s thesis out of it. That would mean that I’d need to get the details and procedures exactly right, and next week I’m flying to the D.C. area, and—”

“Next week? Then we’ve got to step on it. Let me see … . I’ve got time Tuesday, late afternoon. But you need to write a letter to our security clearance unit. They don’t call us the Bureau for nothing. And you aren’t going to believe what his name is. Do you have a fax? There’s not time to
dink around with the mails. Everything that gets mailed to us goes through the antiterrorism unit, and that can take months. They even stamp my post cards OPENED AND INSPECTED. Got a pen? Ready for the name and phone number?”

She gave me full instructions on how to make my visit sound essential but nonthreatening, instructed me to check with her Wednesday if I hadn’t heard back from Mr. Covert (she was right, I couldn’t believe that name), and said she had to ring off, citing a backlog of glass shards she had to identify from drive-by shootings.

I cranked the requisite letter out of the computer and shoved it through Tom’s old fax machine, feeling a bit cocky.
That was easy,
I told myself.
Who else can I hit up for information?

My eyes came to rest on
Artists’ Pigments,
volume 1, and I thought,
I’ll be in Washington; why not ask?
So I turned to the computer, surfed the Web, found a general information number for the National Gallery of Art, and again dialed the phone. “Hello,” I told the person who answered. “I have some questions regarding certain books published by the National Gallery. May I speak with someone who can put me in touch with the authors?”

“I’ll transfer you,” the voice on the phone said. “I’m not sure who you need to speak with, but let me try … .” After being transferred to the gallery’s bookstore, publications, and the research library, I was put through to a receptionist who mellifluously announced, “Conservation.”

I repeated my question a fifth time.

“Is there anyone in particular with whom you wish to speak?”

After repeating my story that many times to people who had no real interest in it, my guard was down, so I answered too candidly.

“Uh—anyone who can tell me about the pigments used by Frederic Remington.” I immediately wanted to take back my words. I had ridden too close to the fence that distinguished a curious citizen from a private eye doing a bad job of keeping a client’s confidences, but as my dad used to say, once you’re on the horse, it’s important to keep on riding.

“I’ll put you through to Emmett Jones,” the receptionist replied.

“Jones,” the next voice said.

Trying to pull away from that fence, I said, “I’m a graduate student in geology with an interest in artists’ pigments. I’ll be in Washington next week, and—” here I paused for a split second, panicked, and sank to
embroidering the truth—“I’m working with a colleague at the FBI, and she suggested I contact you regarding a specific line of evidence.”

Mr. Jones said he would be pleased to assist. We set a time on Tuesday morning.

Next, I went online and found a number for the Pennsylvania Geologic Survey. When I asked for a specialist on mining, I was told that Fred Petridge was my man, but that he was out in the field. The receptionist said that he would be in all the following week. I left a message asking for an appointment on Monday.

It was nearing time to run up to the U to attend a class, but I figured there was time to stop by an art-supply store on the way to school if I mooched Faye’s car, so I opened the phone book, found the address of the one nearest my trajectory, picked up my books, and headed on over there.

I hadn’t been inside a whole lot of shops like that, and was bewildered by the variety of supplies that were available. I walked past aisles that displayed pencils and chalks, pastels, acrylics, and watercolors, and stopped at a rack of oil colors.

The object of my desire was Hooker’s green, the color that predominated in Remington’s nocturnes in general and in Tert’s painting in particular. I wanted to see what it looked like straight from the tube, not mixed with the other colors that grayed it down. I had come just far enough with the project to know that the colors on the plates in the art books from the library were not the precise hues that Remington had dipped from his palette. Remington had used linen canvas with a gesso ground, and had built up his colors in layers ranging from thick, painterly impasto to sly layers of glazes, a far cry from a microscopically thin layer of printer’s inks on glossy paper.

But as I searched through the dizzying assortment of tubes in the store, I did not find Hooker’s green. I knew that new colors had been added to the artists’ palette since Remington’s time, but had the old ones been discarded? Thinking that Remington might have mixed some of his own paints, I asked the man at the counter where he kept the dry pigments.

“That’s a specialty supply item,” he said. “There’s a place in San Francisco where you can order them, and several places on the Internet.”

Perplexed, I went on up to the U.

I was on my way back out of the geology building after class an hour later when I ran into Molly Chang, my advisor.

“Ah, Hansen,” she said. “Just the enigma I was hoping to run into. Come into my office.”

I gritted my teeth and followed her. “What’s up?” I inquired.

“What’s up? You mean ‘Doc?’ What’s up is that you’re almost done with your coursework, so when are you going to start a thesis project?”

“Well, I …”

“Come on, it’s almost spring break. You could be out next week scouting a mapping area at least, or come to my field area with me and look at some of the work I’ve been doing. You never know, you might get inspired. Or are you still kidding me and yourself that you’re going to do a forensics project?”

I grinned weakly. “Well, Molly, that’s what I’ve always liked about you: You come right to the point.”

“As my husband likes to say, ‘When push comes to shove, Molly does both.’”

Well, I knew how to push back. I said, “Actually, I’ll be working on a consulting job in forensic geology next week back in Pennsylvania.”

“Oh?” she said, looking dubious. “What?”

The gauntlet was thrown. Answering her challenge, I said, “I’m supposed to look at the pigments in a painting and decide whether it’s a forgery or not. I have appointments with a forensic geologist at the FBI, a conservator at the National Gallery of Art, and a mineral pigment mining specialist at the Pennsylvania Geologic Survey.”

Molly gave me a wry smile. “Sounds like a thesis project to me.”

“No, wait!”

“You’ll need to do some X-ray diffraction work, and maybe some thin sections. I tell you what: You relate this to economic geology and you just might have something. Surely there’s something about the mining and refinement processes that would have a bearing on pigments. So what’s the painting? I have an interest in art, you know.” She gestured around the walls of her office.

An arrow of panic shot through me. Staring at me from her walls were prints by Maynard Dixon, Thomas Moran, George Catlin, and other Western artists. I had noticed them before, but had always considered them decoration, not avocation. I said, “Listen, Molly, making a thesis project out of this kind of work sounds like great idea, except for one problem: The results of this investigation are proprietary. As in, no public reporting.”

Molly’s dark eyes turned to flint. “You’re a good huckster, Hansen; with all your contacts,
surely
you can get your hands on something in the public domain.”

“I have a line on a few Russells,” I said, trying to sound confident, but immediately wished I hadn’t spoken. Could I really depend on Tert’s promise that I could see other paintings?

She leaned back in her swivel chair and stared up at a poster from a show at the Smithsonian Institution. It featured a portrait of an Indian chief. She said, “Take Catlin, for instance. The Renwick Gallery there in D.C. has a bunch of his works. And he was an interesting guy. He trained in law first, and he knew some geology.”

“That’s a Catlin?” I asked. It was robust and sophisticated portraiture, a far cry from his landscapes.

“Yes. So you could ask yourself, What pigments did he use? Look at that guy in the poster: His skin tone has to be some iron oxide or another, and that dark-red war paint … what do you think, some manganese in with the ol’ Fe
₂O
₃? It looks like desert varnish to me.”

My mind spiraled backward to my first meeting with Tert, back at the Whitney Gallery in Cody. He had commented on the pigments Catlin had used.
No, not at the gallery,
I remembered,
it was when he met me up by the badlands …

Unbidden, a piece of the Tert Krehbeil puzzle turned itself upside down and laughed at me. For the first time since the stress and shuffle of those first days, I had time to wonder how he had happened upon me on that hillside. With grim certainty, I saw that Faye must have phoned him.
Go on out there and check her out. Follow her; she’ll be driving my car … .

Molly gave me a strange look, and I realized that I was pulling fiercely on my lower lip. I moved quickly to cover my emotions. “Sure, Catlin would be a good choice for research,” I said in my most intellectual tone. “He was working long before most of the modern synthetic pigments came on the market. And he dates back to the 1830s, before the advent of the collapsible paint tube, so maybe he was carrying his paint in little leather bladders with a bit of bone to prick through to the paint. Messy. And maybe that means he had to make his own paints. Yeah, come to think of it, where would he have gotten his colors?”

“Maybe he brought them from home. Do you know where Catlin was from?”

“No.” I didn’t care. Anything to deflect the conversation from my client’s interests.

“A town called Wyoming, Pennsylvania. And Pennsylvania has a little bit of economic geology in its history. Such as America’s first oil wells, and all that coal.”

“What are you thinking, Molly?”

She offered a sardonic laugh. “You’re going to see a pigment mining specialist at the Pennsylvania Survey. I like the way your mind works. Maybe Catlin got his pigments locally, or even dug the stuff up in the backyard. Go see if you can match the impurities.” She turned in her chair and slapped her desktop, indicating that our meeting was over. “Call me if you need to discuss your sampling technique. And get your ass in gear. I want you out of here by Christmas.”

TIME SEEMED TO WHIZ BY IN THE FEW DAYS LEFT BEFORE FRITZ and I would be departing for the East. I had no time to worry about anything that had been bothering me—not the ranch, not Jack, not even how little I was seeing of Faye and the baby. I had phone calls to make, interviews to line up. I had to finish schoolwork, pack a duffel bag, line up a rental car, and figure out where I was going to stay. Luckily, most of that was settled when I finally got up the nerve to talk to Faye about my plans.

“Where in Pennsylvania does Tert’s mother live?” I inquired, as I opened a highway-map atlas on the kitchen table.

“Just outside of Lancaster,” she replied. “They have a farm. Why?”

“Lancaster is right here,” I said, stabbing an index finger into the southeast quadrant of the state. And Middletown is … right here. Not far at all. Maybe a half-hour drive.”

“What’s in Middletown?”

“The state geological survey. I’ve been talking to a guy who knows a lot about mining in Pennsylvania.”

“You just
happen
to be talking to a guy in Pennsylvania,” she said. She was busy feeding Sloane Renee some mashed banana. Sloane kept turning her head just as the spoon got in range, resulting in a smear of goo across one cheek or the other.

“Yeah. Tert said that the rest of his paintings were at his mother’s. It would help if I could see them. So I can get my damned thesis done.”

“Oh? Does this mean you’re planning a trip east?”

“Yes. I’m going to talk to an old colleague of Tom’s at the FBI about the analytical work for Tert’s painting. Strictly confidential. Tert’s name
and the work won’t enter the conversation. The labs are in Quantico, Virginia, just outside of D.C.”

“When is all this happening?”

“Next week. Know of any good, cheap places to stay in D.C.?”

Faye said, “I shudder at the thought of what you call a good, cheap place to stay. But you could call my great uncle. He has some sort of club there, and I think they have rooms. But wait, how are you going to get an affordable flight at the last minute? Surely Em Hansen is not going to pay top dollar.”

“I have that covered,” I said. I looked up and we made eye contact for the first time that day. She looked pettish, and that rather pleased me.
Perhaps she’ll miss me,
I thought. “Your idea about making a thesis project out of Tert’s job is a good one,” I said. “You’re right. I need to get this degree finished. Life goes on, you know?”

Faye smiled brightly. “I’m glad to hear you say that. I’ve been wondering if you had a plan for what you’re going to do next.”

“What do you mean, ‘next’?”

“You know, when you’ve finished your degree, and you’re ready to move on.”

Move on?
…

“I’m so glad to have helped by getting you this job,” she said.

This wasn’t going as I had planned. This was all meant as a lead-in to getting her into that plane with Fritz. “Want to come along?” I blurted.

Faye’s eyes hardened. “No way! I shudder twice at the thought of going through all that security screening at the airport. And with the baby? Don’t even think it. You’re not getting me on a commercial flight. When I get my plane back in the air, we’ll talk. But until then, I’m staying on the ground. And going into Washington? Are you mad? We’re probably still at Code Orange with all this mess in the Middle East. What’s
that
going to be like? I hear Washington is like an armed camp. Men with automatic rifles standing guard on the Capitol steps.”

Things were going from bad to worse. Faye did not want to think about the reason airport security had become so strict—terrorism, and the wars surrounding it—and not just for the reasons that made us all tremble at the thought. Faye had paid a price most of us only visited in our nightmares: The fight against terrorism had put her husband in an early grave. I said, “It’s not like that. I’m going with Fritz Calder in his plane, and we’re flying
into the General Aviation Terminal in Baltimore. We’d go for free. You’d have the chance to get back in the saddle without doing all the flight planning and stuff right out of the chute.”

She gave me a wry look. “I’m not sure I like your choice of metaphors. Is his plane a bucking bronco or something?”

“Uh, no. It’s a centerline thrust twin.”

“A push-me-pull-you … interesting … .” Faye got up and began to pace.

I watched silently, letting her work off her upset. Finally she ran out of steam, turned, and bit her lip. “Pressurized?”

“Yes. Seats six, I think he said.”

“How fast?”

“Cruises at two-hundred-twenty knots.” I fought to repress a smile. She was going for it. “Not as fast as your plane, but c’mon, the baby’s car seat would fit quite nicely, and Fritz seems quite hungry for a copilot. I mean, I’m only single-engine–rated, and if he hit weather, well, I’m hardly instrument rated. We’ll be flying out of the private terminal here in Salt Lake and landing at the private terminal in Baltimore. You won’t have to get wanded or take your shoes off either direction.”

Faye snorted. “General Aviation, the only civilized way to fly in America.”

“Amen. You can’t hijack your own aircraft, and you know all your passengers personally. There’s no higher form of security.”

Faye glanced at me out of the corners of her eyes. “You’re sure it’s okay with Fritz if you bring a friend or two?”

“I asked him if you and the baby could come, and he said, ‘The more the merrier.’” I couldn’t suppress a grin.

Faye smiled, too, and said, “Well, I do owe a visit to some relatives who live not far from Baltimore. They haven’t seen the baby.” I heard a slight ring of obfuscation in her voice, but hoped that it was merely an attempt to seem cool about the trip.

It was decided that she and the baby would head north to visit relatives while I headed south into Washington. And she phoned her great uncle in D.C., who said he’d be most pleased to make a reservation for me at his club. When I heard the nightly fee for the guest room I gasped, but apparently it was cheap for anywhere near that town. I got on the Internet and found a list of much more reasonable places to stay in Pennsylvania.

So everything was settled, and very early on Sunday morning we rode to the airport with Fritz. The plane was hangared not far from where Faye used to keep her twin, so it was a bittersweet moment for her. It was a sweet-looking craft, all smooth with modern lines that spoke of computer-assisted design. As Fritz took Faye with him on his walk-around, I loaded the gear and the baby, taking the backseat next to Sloane so that Faye could sit up front with someone I trusted she would soon find much more fascinating than Mr. Self-Obsessed Gray Eyes Who Cons Geologists Into Thinking He Knows Nothing About Pigments. Fritz and Faye climbed aboard, did the run-up, talked to the tower, taxied, lined up, and we took to the air.

It was a cool, crisp morning, and the air was like silk. The ragged summits of the Rocky Mountains caught the sun with the sensual pride of a maiden showing off her charms, and I watched them roll past with pleasure, thinking that for the first time in a long time, I was doing something right.

After a while, Faye switched seats with me so she could nurse the baby, and I put on the headphones and talked to Fritz. It was the kind of chat one gets into on long trips, and the headphones we wore added their odd form of intimacy. I got to asking about his child and his ex-wife. “Didn’t she like being a military wife?” I inquired. “I know it can be stressful.”

“
Like
it?” He shook his head. “Being a military wife is what she wanted. Our marriage started to crumble when I
left
the military.”

“I don’t understand. Usually it’s the other way around.”

“She’s the daughter of a high-ranking officer,” he explained. “That’s why she’s been in Germany. Her dad’s over there.”

“So she wanted you to make a career out of it, too.”

“Yup-per …”

This got my attention, because I was still trying to figure out how I felt about Jack’s return to active duty, not to mention why he was still a reservist after all these years. “But you trained in jets. That’s a big commitment. Didn’t you plan to stay in?”

“Yes, that was the plan, as far as I’d thought it through.”

“Then why’d you change your mind?”

He shifted uncomfortably in his seat. “Well, I was flying in Desert Storm, the first Gulf War.”

“And?”

He didn’t answer.

After half a minute, I said, “I’m sorry, this time I really am prying.”

“No, it’s okay,” he said, though the look on his face suggested otherwise. “I need to talk about it. It’s just hard. The thing was, I did all that training to fly those jets, but it was because I wanted to
fly
. I never thought my skills would be needed, not really. I was pretty naïve, or selfish, or …”

“So you didn’t want to fight. Or drop bombs. Or whatever it was.”

He shook his head. “Oh, I thought I was good for it. You tell yourself that you’ll be able to do what’s asked of you if the time ever comes.”

I noted that he had reflexively switched from “I” to the more impersonal “you,” an Americanism that pops up when a speaker wishes to distance himself from something that makes him nervous. “What happened? Did you refuse to fly?”

“No.” He left that word hanging by itself for a while, and then added, “I flew out and dropped my bombs just as I had trained to do, and the automatic cameras took their pictures. Then, that evening, as my superiors were going over the tapes, I … realized … I mean, for the first time
really
understood, could really
feel
,”—he thumped his heart—“that it wasn’t all just a video game.”

I glanced sideways at him. His grip on the control wheel had tightened to the point where his knuckles had blanched. “I admire that, Fritz. It must be a great temptation to rationalize it and feel nothing.”

“Oh, I felt something all right.”

I let him decide how much more he wanted to say.

He took a deep breath, then said, “I went out the next day and did it again. And the next day and the next. I was lucky: Most of the time I was bombing places where there were no people. And then the war was over.

“I don’t like war, Em. I don’t approve of it. I don’t see it as a solution. Oh, don’t get me wrong—I know there are times when it’s important to fight—but on reflection, I did not think this was one of them. But as soon as I started thinking that, I knew I wasn’t a soldier anymore.”

“Perhaps that’s when you began being a warrior,” I said.

He glanced my way, surprised. Then he smiled and shook his head. “I wish I could see it in those terms. Anyway, things were plenty clear to my wife. She’d signed up for a life as an officer’s wife, someone her dad could approve of, and here I was taking the exit into civilian life. Our marriage was doomed from there.”

“I’m sorry.”

“I’m not. Not anymore. It was hard to stay mad when I realized that I was the one who changed the agreement. I just hope she doesn’t find some poor sucker who wants her and my son to live on the other side of the globe.”

“Got ya.”

I let the subject drop. The plane cruised at two-hundred-twenty knots and we had about seventeen-hundred nautical miles to go, so with one refueling in Greenfield, Iowa (“It’s the cheapest avgas,” Fritz told me, to which I replied, “A man after my own heart”), and two hours’ time change, we were on the ground in Baltimore by the middle of the afternoon. Faye and Fritz seemed to have a nice chat as we tore along over the Great Plains into increasingly humid air, and she again took the controls while the baby slept peacefully in my arms. I watched as the ground turned from brown to green beneath us and lost the wrinkly hide of the Pennsylvanian Appalachians under a cloud cover. I knew we were approaching Baltimore only as I heard Fritz ask flight control for vectors so he could make his approach through the soup.

Once on the ground, we loaded into three different rental cars that were waiting for us at the general aviation terminal, confirmed plans to meet on Friday morning for the flight home, and prepared to scurry off in our various directions.

Fritz gave the baby a kiss and was the first to leave, citing a dinner meeting with one of his money people. For my part, scurrying off first involved helping Faye cinch the baby’s car seat into the center of the backseat of a midsized Chevy. Then I sat with the baby awhile while Faye heaved her various diaper bags and cold packs carrying juices and applesauce into the trunk.

“Hey, little one,” I said, giving Sloane a finger on which to teethe. “Auntie Emmy’s gonna go do some work, but I’ll see you in five days. Four and a half, really. I’ll miss you more than you can imagine.” I bent forward and kissed her on the crown of her head.

Faye climbed into the driver’s seat and indicated she was ready to go.

“Do you want to give me a number where you’re staying?” I asked. “I mean, I don’t know exactly where you guys’ll be … if you need me or anything.”

BOOK: Earth Colors

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