Rarities Unlimited 03 - Die in Plain Sight

standing and remember their own youth, their own time when the world was bright and untouched. It never was, of course. But it pleases us to think so. Turn right, Ian.”
    “Here?”
    “Yes.”
    “Glad this baby is a four-by-four,” he said. “Whatever ‘road’ was once here is more in your mind than on the ground. Hold on tight.”
    “To what?” Lacey asked.
    He smiled slowly. “Me.”
    “I want to paint you,” Lacey said before she thought about it.
    “Naked?” he asked instantly.
    “Your smile.”
    “Dang. Here I was going to get all hot and bothered at the thought of you making a tiger out of little-old-house-cat me.”
    Susa snickered. “Lawe is right. You should be under lock and key.”
    “I’d never speak ill of a son in the presence of his mother, but Lawe has it the wrong way around.” Ian downshifted and crept along the path that was little more than indentations in the grass where ruts used to be. “How that boy has stayed out of the clutches of some lucky woman is a wonder to me.”
    “And an inspiration?” Susa asked tartly.
    “Take the Fifth,” Lacey said. “It works for me when my mother is on a why-aren’t-you-married rip.”
    Ian grinned at Lacey. “Good idea. I’m pleading here, Susa.”
    “Lock and key,” Susa said. “Both of you.”
    Truck wheels spun on grass, then got down to dirt for better traction.
    “Hope that champagne is corked real good,” Ian said as the truck lurched.
    Lacey risked a look into the interior storage compartment behind the front bench seat. The fancy hamper supplied by the hotel was askew, but the ice chest was still in place.
    “Nothing’s bubbling out,” Lacey said.
    Ian concentrated on driving cross country over ruts that had filled in about the time he’d been born.
    “Just another few hundred yards,” Susa said. “If the spring hasn’t dried up, there should be some feral eucalyptus growing in Cross Country Canyon. More of a ravine, really. Narrow enough in parts for a good hunter to jump, which apparently is what the Savoy matriarch was doing when something went wrong and she died.”
    “There are worse ways to go,” Ian said.
    “I’m sure she would have agreed with you,” Susa said. “She’d outlived her husband and her only child, her daughter-in-law hated her, and her only granddaughter was as wild as the wind. The Savoy Curse.”
    “Too many dollars,” Ian said.
    “Not enough cents,” Lacey added innocently.
    He groaned at the pun.
    “I’m going to take you home with me,” Susa said, smiling at Lacey. “Don will love you. Stop about twenty yards up from here, Ian. There should be a level spot where we used to build campfires.”
    Ian parked the truck where Susa pointed. While he wouldn’t have pitched a tent there, it was level enough that he didn’t have to put rocks under the tires.
    “Let me help with that,” Ian said as Susa dragged her easel out of the pickup bed.
    She shooed his hands off like irritating flies. “You’d just be in the way.”
    He looked at Lacey. She was already heading out into the grass, her arms full and her eyes fixed on the view.
    While the women set up easels and small folding tables for their paints and brushes and palettes, Ian lowered the dusty tailgate and put out a five-star feast. Colorful little vegetables and piquant dips, meat pies in airy pastries, something that looked like tiny popovers and tasted like heaven, finger-size columns of bread smelling of herbs and cheese, adessert of brownies and lemon bars, and enough fine champagne to put them all on the wrong side of the law.
    “Anybody hungry?” he called out hopefully.
    Nothing answered but the wind.
    He took it as agreement. “So am I.”
    Reminding himself that he was working, not playing, he filled two hotel plates with an assortment of food and took it to the women. He started to add the linen napkins that had been provided, then looked up in time to see both women absently wipe their hands on their jeans.
    “Right. They’re wearing their napkins.”
    Susa barely nodded when he eased the food within reach on her paint table. When he set a plate near Lacey, she gave him a vague smile, a muttered word, and went back to painting. Same thing when he opened bottles of water and put them out— Hello, good-bye, do I know you?
    Ian left the champagne corked. No way he was going to waste Grande Dame on two women who wouldn’t know if he was feeding them pork rinds and home brew. Uncapping a second bottle of