St Kilda Consulting 04 - Blue Smoke and Murder

in the vast majority of them. “The landscape is strong.” Try incredible. “At the very least, this is the work of a gifted artist.”
    “Then it should be worth something.”
    “Like I said, art is a funny business.” Zach shifted the canvas gently. “The lack of a signature makes it really difficult to attribute the paintings to anyone, much less to a cult icon like Dunstan. Did Modesty ever suggest that they were Dunstan’s work? Maybe they were field studies for larger studio works. Lots of artists don’t sign their studies.”
    “The most Modesty said about them was that her sister, Dunstan’s lover, called them ‘twenty-seven years of bad luck.’”
    “Isn’t that an old saying about broken mirrors, black cats, and such?”
    “I always wondered if it was the amount of time Justine knew Dunstan,” Jill said.
    “Was your mother Dunstan’s child?”
    Jill shrugged. “Nothing shows in the family Bible. My mother is entered as Maureen Breck, daughter of Justine Breck. No father mentioned. From the few times Mother and Modesty talked about my grandmother, I gather that my mother could have had one of several fathers.”
    “A real modern relationship,” Zach said dryly.
    “More like whenever Justine and Dunstan had a big blowup, she took another artist-lover for a time. She always came back to Dunstan, though. Until the last fight, when they ended up in jail.”
    “Drunk and disorderly?”
    “I’m told she tried to kill him.”
    Zach’s dark eyebrows rose. “Never piss off a Breck woman, huh?”
    “Keep it in mind,” Jill said, smiling slightly. “After she got out of jail, Justine lived on the ranch with her much-younger sister and her daughter.”
    “I remember reading somewhere that Dunstan hung himself in jail,” Zach said.
    “Like I said, don’t piss us off.”
    Zach smiled slightly. “You really do come from a long line of solitary, difficult women, don’t you?”
    Jill looked him in the eye. “You say that like it’s a bad thing.”
    He glanced at the canvas in his hand. “I wonder how the artist who painted this would have described it.”
    “Breck women pretty much march to their own drummer, do their own thing, and otherwise don’t take orders from anyone,” she said. “But I’ve never minded being alone, at least not until the other night.”
    He put aside the painting and began pacing along the lineup of canvases against the cabin wall. Even on the third round, each painting was more striking than the last.
    Incredible.
    “Anything you left out when we talked last night?” he asked, still looking at the paintings. “Names, telephone numbers, gallery owners, lost lovers, someplace to start looking for the connection between you and the trash artist in Mesquite? Because as it is now, we have to go with investigating the galleries, owners, and art salesmen. If the threat is coming from somewhere else, we’ll be barking up a whole forest of wrong trees.”
    Jill frowned at the paintings, thinking, then shook her head. “No help here.”
    “How about old boyfriends?”
    “Nope.”
    “You never had a boyfriend?”
    “I never had one who wasn’t relieved to say good-bye. As you pointed out, Breck women don’t take orders worth a damn.”
    “So it’s whips and leather in bed for you?”
    Her jaw dropped.
    “Never mind,” Zach said, trying not to laugh. “Question withdrawn. For now I’ll go with the art connections. If nothing pops, I’ll come back and question you some more.”
    “Come back?”
    “Yeah. I’m going to put you in a St. Kilda safe house and—”
    “No,” she cut in. “They’re my paintings. I’m staying with them.”
    “You’re too inno—um, transparent,” Zach amended quickly.
    “Meaning?”
    “I’m a better liar than you are.”
    “Well, that gives me all kinds of confidence,” she said ironically.
    “You don’t care for liars?”
    “No.”
    He nodded. “You make my case for me.”
    “What are you talking about?”
    “You run rivers for a living. You don’t like liars and don’t lie well enough to fool anyone.”
    “So what?”
    “So you’re safer not being with a professional liar, because you’ll have to lie right along with me.” He smiled gently at her bewildered look. “Don’t worry, you can trust St. Kilda with the paintings. We only lie to benefit our clients. Then we can churn out blue smoke with the best of ’em.”
    “Joe Faroe didn’t say anything about keeping me locked away