St Kilda Consulting 04 - Blue Smoke and Murder

each other in the dark. The horse’s butt outlined in gold in the upper right-hand corner of the frame needed no explanation. It represented the buyer.
    At least the artist had a sense of humor, as well as a fine understanding of flow and line. Evoking an equine ass with a few spare strokes of the brush wasn’t easy. Like creating a fine haiku, it took a lot of training, work, talent, and intelligence to pull off. Painting a whole horse and making it work took all that, plus technique.
    Making the horse transcend the canvas took genius.
    But DeeDee only liked the kind of art that other people told her she should. The great painters of the American West didn’t have much traction in Manhattan. If you painted Paris scenes in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, it was art. If you painted WildWest scenes in America during the same time, it was called genre painting and generally ignored by East Coast museums and collectors. Thomas Moran—and lately, Frederic Remington—was the exception that proved the rule.
    “Now, what about dinner?” she asked Zach.
    What about it? Three leaves of lettuce and a carrot shaving doesn’t take much discussion.
    “This isn’t Manhattan, of course,” she said, frowning, “but there are still some decent restaurants.”
    “Sure you don’t want to try Tommy’s Burgers?” he asked hopefully. What was the point of getting close to L.A. if you didn’t eat at the original Tommy’s?
    She shuddered. “No. I thought our last night in Hollywood should be special.”
    Zach told himself she was making a joke. But he knew DeeDee didn’t have any sense of humor. He’d found that out within the first five minutes of his week-long assignment.
    How do you owe me, Faroe? Let me count the ways.

4
    NORTHERN ARIZONA
SEPTEMBER 11
LATE AFTERNOON
    J ill drove past the ruins of the ranch house and the burned skeleton of the barn. She didn’t stop. She would later, when she’d had more time to absorb the reality of her great-aunt’s death. Modesty Breck had seemed to be one of those people who just got harder and leaner, not old so much as ageless. Like the land itself, spare and unrelenting. Something you always respected yet always took for granted.
    No guilt trip, Jill told herself firmly. After Mom died, the old witch barely put up with having me live in the original homestead cabin over the ridge from the ranch house.
    Modesty was a woman who liked her own space. A lot of it. Solitude and hard work were her chosen gods.
    She died the way she wanted to live. Alone. So lose the guilt.
    Easier said than done.
    Dust and grit flew beneath the little Honda SUV’s tires as the eight-year-old vehicle bounced and rattled over the rough dirt road. No one had been here since the last monsoon rains had pounded the dry land. There wasn’t any other sign of life except for the occasional coyote and rabbit tracks preserved in dried mud on the road’s lowspots. Water had washed away everything else, even the tire tracks leading to the ranch house where Modesty had died.
    When Jill topped the steep ridge, she saw the original homestead cabin lying sheltered in a small valley, built right on top of the spring that had attracted her Breck ancestors in the 1840s. When Jill and her mother had moved from—fled, actually—Utah, they had lived with Modesty in the “new” ranch house just long enough to fix up the homestead cabin.
    As a young girl, Jill had loved climbing the red cliffs and spires that were the rear wall of the cabin. As an adult, she hadn’t been back in six years.
    The closer Jill drove to the cabin, the more relieved she felt.
    At least I won’t have to waste money on a motel while I take care of whatever needs to be done with Modesty’s estate.
    Some of the chinking had fallen out between the weathered logs and a shutter hung drunkenly over half of the kitchen window, but the rest looked just as she remembered—old, small, oddly comforting. A piece of history that had survived past its time.
    All Modesty’s lawyer had told Jill over the phone was that her great-aunt had died in the fire that burned the ranch house and outbuildings down to their rock foundations. Jill had stayed with her job on the river until she found a replacement guide. It had taken three weeks. The lawyer had assured her there was no reason to rush back. Modesty’s remains had been cremated and scattered according to her will, and the stock didn’t need tending because every last animal had been