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Rarities Unlimited 03 - Die in Plain Sight

Titel: Rarities Unlimited 03 - Die in Plain Sight Kostenlos Bücher Online Lesen
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didn’t come out of tubes,” Ian said.
    “She makes her own a lot of the time. So far I’m happy with the effect I get from prepared paints. When that changes…” Her voice died away as she went to work.
    He watched while she mixed colors in the center of the plate, added a drop of oil, mixed again, then added a touch more yellow, transformingthe bold colors at the edge of the plate into a pale, almost ghostly shade of blue.
    “Looks like you’re making your own paints to me,” he said.
    She made an absent did-you-say-something kind of sound.
    “Aren’t you?” he asked.
    “What?”
    “Making your own paints.”
    “Blending my own colors. Different thing.”
    He took her word for it.
    For a few moments there was only Etta James singing “Love’s Been Rough on Me” and the hushed sounds of brush stroking over canvas. The sky condensed on the canvas like a secret sigh. A different brush, a different mix of colors, and the ocean took form. A third brush, more mixing, and the green foreground took shape.
    He glanced from the smaller painting she had done at the ranch to the larger painting taking shape before his eyes. Same place, same colors, yet more subtle, somehow more contained. Field study versus studio painting. He could see the difference, yet he couldn’t say which appealed more to him. Each had its own vision, its own strength, its own reality.
    “Susa stretches her own canvases,” Ian said. “Do you?”
    “I used to.” She tucked the green brush under her chin and picked up the pale blue one again. “Grandfather insisted on it. His most cherished tool was the pliers he used for stretching. I still have them. Don’t use them. Don’t do my own sizing, either. The factories can do it better than I can. Quicker, too.” While she spoke, she put down her first brushes, squeezed more paint onto another plate, mixed swiftly with new brushes, and added the contrasting swaths of color that gave sky and ocean and grass a sense of three dimensions. “He’s the one who taught me to blend prepared paints, even though he made his own with a mortar, pestle, and a hunk of mineral.”
    Ian managed to follow the twists in her conversation—he hoped. “Your grandfather?” he asked cautiously.
    “Mmm.”
    “He was a painter?”
    “Mmm.”
    “Is that mmm-yes or mmm-no?”
    “Huh?”
    “Was your grandfather a painter?”
    Her brush jerked. With a hissed word she picked up a palette knife, scraped off the mistake, and told herself that she’d better pay attention to the conversation rather than her painting. She couldn’t clean up careless words as easily as careless paint.
    “Just mmm,” she said.
    “A dabbler?” Ian pressed.
    Their earlier conversation echoed in her ears. Does that mean you trust me?
    Yes.
    I’m holding you to that, Lacey January Marsh Quinn
    A threat.
    Definitely.
    Ian watched Lacey gnawing on the end of her brush and wondered why she was totally comfortable discussing painting yet flinched from discussing her grandfather who was also a painter—maybe. In any case, Ian decided with irritable satisfaction, at least he had her full attention now.
    “So, he was a dabbler?” Ian repeated.
    “You know how it is with art. One man’s Michelangelo is another man’s disaster.”
    She bent and mixed red and blue together to create a purple that would look like black shadows when placed next to the green of the foreground. She wielded the long-handled brushes with an ease oil painters had in common, because they needed the extra length to stand back and judge the result as they painted.
    After a few moments, Ian leaned back with a casual ease that had put more than one subject off guard. Interrogation was really a simple art. First you find out what people don’t want to talk about, and then you circle around and keep talking about it until something shakes loose. Waiting was the most important part of the art.
    “Was he a Michelangelo to you?” Ian asked finally.
    “Who?”
    “Your grandfather.”
    “He was Grandpa Rainbow. That’s all that mattered to me.”
    “Sounds like you were close.”
    “What do you mean?” she demanded, looking over her shoulder at Ian for the first time in twenty minutes.
    “He left you his favorite pair of pliers.” Ian smiled. “I don’t know how women feel about it, but that adds up to ‘close’ in any man’s book.”
    “He encouraged me to paint.” She turned back to the canvas as though ending the topic.
    Ian remembered

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