Rarities Unlimited 03 - Die in Plain Sight

some of the conversations Lacey had had with Susa. “And your parents didn’t.”
    “Mom thought it was a messy, downscale way to spend time. As a hobby, she tolerated it. As an avocation? Nope.”
    “Maybe she’d had a bellyful of it while she was growing up with Grandpa Rainbow.”
    Absently Lacey shook her head, already succumbing to the lure of the canvas. “Mom came from lawyers and judges and politicians.” She switched brushes, blended colors. “Grandpa Rainbow is my father’s father.”
    “So your dad didn’t mind your painting?”
    Her mouth turned down in an unhappy line. “He didn’t get along with his father. I was the only one who understood my grandpa.”
    “And your grandpa was the only one who understood you.”
    It wasn’t a question, so she didn’t answer. She simply slid deeper into the world she was creating, arcs of color that suggested sky and ocean and land stirred by wind, a day both wild and serene within its wildness. The houses along the coast were quick dashes of cream beneath dark eucalyptus trees bowing to their mistress the wind.
    “What does your father do?” Ian asked after awhile.
    “Law. He’s up for a judicial appointment.”
    “Sounds like a good match for your mother.”
    Lacey smiled. “It is. Living with either one of them would make me nuts, but they do real well together. Go figure.”
    “Did your grandfather live with you?”
    “On and off.”
    “The way you paint, it must have been more on than off.”
    She tapped the end of a brush against her chin and considered the painting. Despite the distraction, it was coming along faster than any she’d done before. More free. More evocative. More swirls and less angular strokes. More…reckless. She liked it.
    Maybe she should have Ian breathing down her neck more often.
    “Was he around a lot?” Ian asked, trying it another way.
    “Who?”
    “Your grandfather,” Ian said companionably, despite the impulse to clench his teeth.
    He’d pried information out of more difficult subjects than Lacey by being the good cop. He’d hammered some out of others by being the bad cop. Whatever got the job done. Except he really didn’t want to badcop Lacey into telling him things for no better reason than his own curiosity about why a transparently honest woman invented a fake name and didn’t want to talk about her grandfather. Much better to keep casting the conversational lure until she rose to it freely. Then he would have proof of something that was only a gut certainty now.
    Lacey had no more found those three paintings at a garage sale than his mother had found him under a cabbage leaf.

Newport Beach
    Thursday night
26
    I an decided to be patient until Lacey was wholly lost in her painting before he brought up her grandfather again. Watching and waiting wasn’t exactly a hardship. Even the shapeless flannel rag she was wearing couldn’t hide the bare, feminine curve of her calves, the narrowness of her ankles, and the arch of her feet. He’d never considered feet particularly sexy before, but he found himself staring at hers. They seemed so naked .
    Outside, the chill wind pressed against windows and the old frame house shifted and groaned.
    “Aren’t your feet cold?” he asked finally, without meaning to. He should be talking about her grandfather.
    She started. “Um, yeah, now that you mention it.”
    “You have any slippers?”
    “Beside the bed.” She tilted her head toward the end of the room.
    He walked over, taking his time. The canvases propped up everywherekept pulling at him. Some were like the ones she’d painted at the ranch, smaller rectangles thick with paint and vivid with energy—field studies created in the heat of the moment of first discovery. Other paintings were bigger, more polished versions of the smaller scenes. Again, he couldn’t choose between the two methods. Each drew him in a different way.
    He finally spotted the slippers peeking out from beneath a pillow that had slipped off the bed. Black nose, eyes and ears, with pale curly wool everywhere else, the slippers looked like slightly tipsy lambs. Grinning, he picked them up and told himself he hadn’t seen the inviting disarray of the bed or smelled the fist-size candle that flickered silently on a small table nearby, infusing the air with spice and mystery.
    Think of your cousin’s kids or Lawe’s nieces wearing these silly slippers. Now hold that picture.
    It worked until Ian sat on his heels behind Lacey.