St Kilda Consulting 04 - Blue Smoke and Murder

Dunstans, they were worth the kind of money even smart people killed for.
    “Modesty lived alone? No one else?” Zach finally managed.
    “Not after my mom died and I left.”
    “Alone, and she hid these. That’s crazy,” he muttered.
    “The wind out here can make you a little crazy sometimes.”
    He looked at the incredible paintings. “This is way past a little.”
    “Modesty didn’t have time or patience for art. She was too busy surviving.”
    With that, Jill unwrapped the last two paintings and placed them against the wall.
    “Holy, holy hell,” Zach said on a long gust of breath. If these are half as good as they look…
    Almost reverently he lifted one of the canvases at random and took it into the sunlight to study. The first impression was of fine brushwork and careful technique.
    And that mind-blowing, indefinable something called greatness.
    The painting showed the first tentacles of the modern West overtaking the Wild West. Tucked away against the base of a dry, rocky ridge, green bloomed, and with it a gas station that must have been startlingly new when the painting was made. Despite the intrusion of the new into the old—or perhaps because of it—the painting echoed with space and isolation and time. He turned the canvas over. indian springs.
    He picked up another painting at random. This one was a flawlessly executed Western landscape, basin and range country falling away from a lonely ridge. Below the ridge stood a cabin so small as to be insignificant against the sweep of the land. A human figure, a woman in a long red skirt and white blouse, carried a bucket of water from a spring.
    The figure was suggested as much as drawn, a few brushstrokes added to the starkly beautiful land, brushstrokes that whispered of the human cost of pioneering the lonely, dry inter-mountain West.
    “That’s one fine painting,” Zach said after a few minutes. “Of course, my opinion isn’t worth much more on the open market than yours.”
    “I was trained in fine art. Western genre painting was never mentioned.”
    “Yeah, I’ll bet. Europe, modernism, minimalism, or nothing at all. Except Georgia O’Keeffe, maybe, if you cornered a professor and peeled off thin strips of skin until he or she begged for mercy.”
    “Sounds like you took my courses,” Jill said.
    “My education was more informal, but the teacher was first class.” And a real son of a bitch along with it. Zach tilted the canvas so that sunlight raked over it from all angles, then flipped it over expertly to look at the back. “No signature. Again.”
    “None of them are signed.”
    He traded the canvas for another. A landscape again, just as technically brilliant and dynamic as the others, humming with time and space and distance, the thrill and exhilaration of testing yourself against an unknown, untamed land. Masculine long before Hemingway made a cult of it, and the hallmark of classic Western art.
    This time a few spare brushstrokes evoked a woman with her pale skirt whipping in the wind, her back to the artist as she looked out over the empty land and endless sky. Again, the figure was very small in the context of the painting, yet without the woman the canvas would have been far less powerful. In a subtle way, she was the focus that made the picture transcend simple representation of a landscape.
    Zach checked the back of the painting. A title had been painted in block letters on the canvas stretcher bar. enduring strength.
    “Amen,” he said softly.
    Jill looked over his arm. “That’s one of my favorites. The artist caught the heady isolation of this land perfectly.”
    “Are they all this good?” Zach asked, scanning the paintings against the far wall.
    “I don’t know what an expert would say, but I think so. They might not be to everybody’s taste, but nothing is.”
    “There’s taste and then there’s insight.”
    He held the painting up and studied it from edge to edge, back to front, and all sides. No signature.
    “I’ve seen a few Dunstans,” Zach said. Every day, day after day, but that was years ago. Of all Frost’s collection of fine Western art, and ofall the paintings that had passed through his galleries, the Dunstans had most appealed to Zach. Frost, too. The old man wouldn’t part with his two no matter what was offered.
    “And?” she asked impatiently.
    “These fit with my memories of Dunstan’s work. I don’t know how often he put figures in his landscapes, though.” Certainly not