The Odd Job (13 page)

The actual simon-pure, incontrovertible Romney that Romney himself had painted was in Kelling hands, as it had been ever since Ernestina had got into a hairtangle with Abigail Adams and been sent home with her doves and roses and a piece of Abigail’s mind. For two centuries the genuine portrait had hung over one Kelling mantelpiece or another, most lately in Sarah’s Aunt Emma’s spacious drawing room. The alleged Romney that was neither a Romney nor a Tawne had easily been reclaimed by the museum once a too-gullible art collector had been made to realize that this particular Ernestina was both stolen and bogus. The painting was back at the Wilkins now, and few visitors knew or cared that she was just one in a series of Ernestinas.

Regardless of its debatable provenance, Dolores had given the Tawne Romney her best shot, skimping neither the scrubbiest feather on the skinniest dove, the most wanly blushing petal on the sickliest rose, nor the calculating glint in Ernestina’s eye. She had worked hard on her subject, probably harder than Romney had done; a painter who’d preferred pretty young women as models and had managed to squeeze in nine thousand sittings in twenty years would hardly have taken time to dawdle over a subject so little to his taste as a middle-aged termagant from Boston, Massachusetts.

Dolores had produced a thoroughly professional duplicate, using the right pigments for the period on an old canvas of the right size that must have taken her ages to locate. Once the painting was done and dry, she’d imparted by dark and devious methods exactly the right patina of antiquity, dirty enough but not too dirty. She’d considered Ernestina one of her all-time greats, she’d been entitled to get some enjoyment out of having her work to herself at last. Poor soul, she’d paid for it dearly enough.

Dolores Agnew Tawne had really been a superb copyist, far too good to have been let run loose in a small museum where she’d had things pretty much under her own control. It was a marvel that someone so uniquely talented and so insurmountably gullible had been allowed to stay alive as long as she had. Why wasn’t Dolores murdered sooner?

What a shocking notion to be entertaining, here in this studio that had been Dolores’s home for so many years. But one did have to wonder how she’d survived that fantastic debacle seven years ago, had managed by sheer gall to keep her foothold at the Wilkins and promote herself, for all practical purposes, to being its curator.

One thing that Dolores had never done at the Wilkins, so far as Sarah knew, was to paint. Every stroke in that prodigious body of fakery had been laid on here in this studio, much of it done at night under special lamps, getting touched up in the morning’s light, and overlaid with enough tobacco-spit brown varnish to conceal any slight deviations from the original. But what had she done lately? The air here now wasn’t heavy with odors of oil and turpentine, the way it used to be. Even that half-finished canvas of a dead pheasant on a silver platter that Dolores had kept as a prop to hide what she was really up to from the few acquaintances who happened to wander in was missing. Had she given up painting entirely?

The tools of her trade were still here: the big easel, the battered wooden table beside it that held tubes of paint in orderly rows, a scraped-down palette, a jug of brushes. But there was no canvas on the easel, no preliminary sketches, not even a stick of charcoal. This wasn’t a working arrangement but a still life, a dead thing. The whole setup ought to be taken away and burned. Sarah turned her back on the easel and considered the rest of the studio.

Over by the staircase, Dolores had arranged a sort of living-room area with one comfortable easy chair and a rickety wrought-iron floor lamp beside it, a couple of wooden chairs with thinly padded seats that must once have belonged to somebody’s dining set, and a nondescript coffee table about which nothing much could be said except that it looked sturdy enough to hold a tea tray laden with plenty of chocolate marshmallow coconut puffs.

Sarah had a memory for detail. These chairs had been shabby the day she’d first visited the studio; another seven years of city grime had not improved them any. Nor had the glare from the oversized windows that had been such a boon to so many artists over the years, even though they were heavily coated with dust from the constant flow of traffic going on and off the turnpike. There was no way to keep them clean, neither the windows themselves nor the thin curtains that were used in studios to soften the light or let in more according to the artist’s need. Sarah remembered Dolores’s curtains as having been a queasy yellowish gray in contrast to the immaculate room. The curtains she was seeing now were almost chalk-white.

That was mildly interesting. These curtains couldn’t have been hung very long ago or they’d have been filthy from the smog. The fact that Dolores had gone to the bother and expense of putting them up suggested that she’d had no plans to move even though the rent must be fairly impressive by now.

Dolores had been a frugal woman; she’d have had to be on what the Wilkins paid her. She’d known it was hopeless to keep curtains clean here, she couldn’t need them as light-breakers if she wasn’t painting. As long as they weren’t actually falling apart, she’d have been more inclined to leave them alone. Did the fact that she’d so recently invested in a new set suggest that she’d been intending to get back to her easel? Had she already taken Elwyn Fleesom Turbot’s measure and realized that she wouldn’t be able to run him the way she’d ran the interim board? Could she have borne to fall back into being just another employee now that she’d had her taste of power? Had it actually penetrated her stubborn head that she might soon be out of a job, and had she been preparing to meet the crisis with her paintbrush at the ready?

Y
EARS AGO, BEFORE SHE’D
been recruited to the Wilkins by a far-seeing crook who’d been astute enough to recognize an almost unique talent going to waste, Dolores Agnew Tawne had been in some demand as a painter of meticulously rendered, deadly dull portraits of company executives and deceased relations, all done from photographs. Had it been in Dolores’s mind to work up a new clientele in that same field? Surely she wouldn’t have dared go back to copying old masters.

“Anything you want me for, Mrs. Bittersohn?”

“Oh.” Sarah had almost forgotten that Officer Drummond was with her, it was hardly fair to keep the man standing around with nothing to do. “I’m sorry. I’ve been trying to get my bearings, it’s so long since I’ve been here. Why don’t you sit down in that armchair and take a rest while I poke around? It shouldn’t take long.”

She found pretty much what she’d expected. Partitioned off from the big studio was a slit of a bedroom with space for no more than a single bed, a tallish but not very wide chest of drawers, and a narrow standing cupboard of enameled steel that held Dolores’s few beige or tan dresses and skirts, her sturdy tan working shoes and a slightly less utilitarian pair for dress-up, a robe, a nightgown, a pair of house slippers, and a couple of felt hats, one beige, one tan.

Off the bedroom was an even tinier kitchenette, barely more than a cubbyhole with a midget porcelain sink, a hot plate, a toaster oven, and a half-sized electric refrigerator doing extra duty as a food safe and a work surface. Some shelves above the sink held cups, saucers, plates, stainless-steel knives, forks, and spoons for four, a few cooking utensils, and a modest stock of groceries, including an unopened package of chocolate marshmallow coconut puffs. Sarah felt an insane impulse to have them buried with the woman who’d never gotten to eat them.

The studio had no bathroom facilities. Dolores had joked to Sarah once about having to go upstairs and across the hall in bathrobe and slippers with her soap and towel and hope that none of the neighbors would catch her in the altogether, taking a sponge bath and shampoo in a long black sink that had been installed for more art-related purposes. She’d lived that way for so long that she’d come to take such makeshifts as a matter of course.

Sarah wished she hadn’t thought about Dolores having to squat in the sink, she was not liking this invasion of a dead woman’s domain. Even though she had not only a right but a duty to be here, even though nobody was left to intrude upon, she still felt like an intruder. The mere thought of having to open that top dresser drawer was repugnant; she knew she was only staving off the moment of truth when she decided first to look for all those other paintings of Dolores’s that Max had returned after he’d retrieved the originals.

What had Dolores done with them? Not under the bed; all Sarah could see was a film of dust that had already begun to collect. Not in the studio, certainly not in that pocket-handkerchief of a kitchenette. They must be in the storage closet, there was nowhere else. Officer Drummond was by now comfortably asleep in the easy chair, she slipped past him and climbed the stairs on tiptoe.

There they were, all shapes and sizes, not in the elaborate frames that were by now back on the original paintings, but still on their wooden stretchers, stacked with their faces against the closet walls. She turned one around. It was blank. So was the next, and so were the rest, every single one of them. These were obviously old canvases, the sort Dolores had prowled the junk shops for at her wicked patron’s behest. Each had been sanded down to a smooth surface and primed with a fresh white ground. Dolores must have done this herself, but why?

One explanation might be that Dolores had gone back to picking up old canvases because she was not about to waste money on new ones, assuming she had in fact meant to resume painting. A pretty scene copied off a postcard might sell better if it was dressed up to look like an antique; an elderly artist who could be on the verge of losing her job had to think of these things. Dolores had always looked upon her work for the Wilkins as a sacred trust, even though it must have taken a good deal of denial to persuade herself that she wasn’t involved in anything fishy.

As to these canvases, Sarah was only guessing about what Dolores might have planned to do with them; but it was impossible to believe that they were copies that Max had returned to her. Dolores had been proud of her work, as well she deserved to be, considering how many years it had hoodwinked the art-seeking public. She’d never have scraped the canvases down and painted over them just to save a few dollars. Then where were her copies?

Aside from these enigmatic blanks, there was little of interest in the closet: a brown winter storm coat worn threadbare at the cuffs, a pair of old-fashioned stadium boots with a rip in the back of the left one, a tan raincoat that had also seen its best days, a faded brown umbrella that bulged on one side from a bent rib, a couple of paint-encrusted smocks, an ironing board and a heavy old electric iron, a collapsible wire shopping cart, a mop, a broom, a long-handled feather duster, a few cleaning supplies, some canned goods that there wouldn’t have been room for on the kitchenette’s crowded shelves, all the odds and ends that couldn’t be fitted in anywhere else. But not one finished painting.

Perhaps Dolores’s will would shed some light. Much as she still didn’t want to, Sarah went back downstairs. Officer Drummond was having a lovely snooze for himself; she slipped around behind him into the bedroom and eased open the top dresser drawer.

Yes, there was the will, lying on top of a carefully pressed and folded beige polyester blouse. Sarah sat down on the neatly made-up bed and began to read. Mr. Redfern’s prose style was all too evident, she plowed doggedly through the wherefores and hereupons until, to her horror, calamity struck.

“Oh, my God!”

Officer Drummond could not have been that deeply asleep, he came flying. “What’s the matter, Mrs. Bittersohn?”

“This ghastly will. It says here that Mrs. Tawne wanted to be cremated and have her ashes scattered among the flowers in the Wilkins Museum’s courtyard garden.”

“So?”

“Well, think of the consequences,” Sarah sputtered. “Can’t you imagine visitors strolling down the garden paths and suddenly coming upon bits and pieces of poor old Dolores poking up among the nasturtiums? I don’t know whether you’ve ever seen what comes back from the crematorium, Officer Drummond, but it’s not what you might think. My cousin Mabel has her father’s and mother’s ashes mixed together in a hideous china urn that she keeps on her dining-room mantelpiece. She insisted on showing them to me once and they were all gritty lumps and oddments of arm and leg bones. You could tell what they’d been. Some of them, anyway.”

“And she keeps that thing in her dining room?”

Sarah couldn’t blame Drummond for grinning. “Oh, yes, Cousin Mabel keeps everything. Goodness knows what will become of that urn when she dies. If she ever does. I only hope she doesn’t will it to me, she’s never liked me. But this last request of Dolores Tawne’s—I can understand why she put it in, though. The Wilkins had been pretty much her whole life for years and years, especially after her brother died. He seems to have been her only relative; I see she’s left everything to the Wilkins.”

“Including her bones.”

Drummond had had his laugh, Sarah didn’t think he was entitled to a second. “Yes, unfortunately,” she replied. “I’m already in trouble with the new chairman of trustees, the undertaker’s waiting to be told what to do with the body, and whoever owns this building will no doubt be after me to clear out the studio so that a new tenant can move in. I don’t suppose the trustees will want to be bothered about Mrs. Tawne’s effects. The furniture’s hardly worth carting away and there’s not much else except her clothes and a few groceries.”

Plus the paintings on the studio walls and that lot of primed canvases. Sarah was reminded of the brief lecture on art thievery that she’d delivered over the Turbots’ table and Lala’s less than amusing suggestion that her husband lift a few of the returned originals from the museum to be faked up and resold. She wished she’d kept her mouth shut. Maybe Dolores hadn’t been quite so noble as she’d presented herself to be, and maybe those fresh white grounds would come off without much coaxing if somebody needed a perfect secondhand copy in a hurry.