Rarities Unlimited 03 - Die in Plain Sight

she let out a careful breath and turned to her paint table. Tables, actually. When she worked in the studio, she liked to spread out. The tables themselves were covered with dribs and drabs of old paint in every hue. The dinner plates she used as palettes were paint-free everywhere it mattered. Same for the brushes she chose.
    Ian watched as Lacey put out on a separate, smaller table something that smelled like turpentine, and brushes of all sizes in a surprising number of shapes. All of them had really long handles.
    “Why so many?” he asked.
    She gave him a wary look as she opened the paint drawer that was part of the table. “Sorry, my mind-reading skills are on holiday.”
    “Brushes. And shapes.”
    “One color per brush.”
    He waited.
    “Otherwise I’d be stopping to clean the brush every time I wanted a different color,” Lacey explained. “And I have a separate table for the solvent because I learned the hard way that I knock the stuff over if I keep it near my easel.”
    “Brush shapes?”
    “This one”—she lifted up a brush with pale bristles—“is flat on the edge with long bristles. I use it for medium or thinner paints.”
    “The others are for thick paints?”
    “No. This one is for thick paint.” She lifted up a brush with short hair and a flat edge. “It’s called a bright.”
    “What kind of bristle or fur or whatever?”
    “Chinese pig hair.” Lacey pulled over a smaller easel and set up the field study she’d done while painting with Susa.
    “Pig hair,” he repeated.
    “Also known as bristles to some folks. The actual breed of pig is called China White. If you want to get really hairy, there are subspecies of the pig favored by some artists.”
    “China, huh? Must be expensive to import.”
    “They’re more expensive than synthetic, yes, but the pigs they pluck for brushes no more come straight from China than the black Lab down the street came from Labrador.”
    “So you only use pig hair?”
    She shrugged. “If I was doing portraits or old master style, I’d use sable brushes, or badger, or mongoose.”
    “Mongoose? You’re pulling my leg.”
    “Nope.” She tested one brush thoughtfully. Clean, dry, ready to go.
    “But you’re happy with pig hair.”
    “For oils, yes.” She looked from the field study to the empty canvas. “Pig hair is stiffer than the other kinds, and oil paint is stiffer than other painting media. Also, pig hair flags—kind of frays—at the end of each shaft instead of coming to a point like fur.”
    “That’s good?”
    “Sure. Frayed shafts hold more paint, give more texture. Of course, texture also depends on the canvas and the binder in the paint and the paint itself.” Her voice was absent, her attention on the blank canvas. “I use poppyseed oil paints when I want heavy, fast-drying textures.”
    “Is that what you were painting with on the ranch?”
    Lacey nodded.
    “Are you using it now?” he persisted, enjoying hearing her talk without being wary of him.
    “Nope. Linseed oil.”
    He watched her uncap a big tube of white paint and smaller tubes of red, green, blue, and yellow. She squeezed the paints as separate globs down the edge of one plate.
    He looked at the plates set out on a table encrusted with more colors than he had words to describe. Yet she didn’t reach for any more tubes of paint.
    “You mix all your colors out of those five?”
    “Four,” she said absently, slapping the long-handled brush on her palm. “Technically, white isn’t a color. It’s the absence of any color, just as black is the presence of all colors.”
    “Where’s your black?”
    “Don’t use it. Chevreul’s law of color contrast.”
    “Come again?”
    She shifted, selected a few more brushes, and set them aside before she spoke. “Impressionism at its heart is just that—an impression of reality rather than a one-for-one representation. Impressionism is the art of tricking the eye into seeing shadows by using complementary colors to increase contrast rather than using the black shadows and the white light of the old masters.”
    “Old masters always looked just plain dingy to me.”
    “That’s the result of bad cleaning or no cleaning at all. Or bad art. There was a lot of that going around. Always has been. Always will be. Old doesn’t necessarily mean good.”
    “Not if what Susa slogged through Tuesday night was any indication.”
    Lacey smiled briefly, but the empty canvas was tugging at her.
    “Susa’s paints