St Kilda Consulting 04 - Blue Smoke and Murder

Grandmother Justine’s ancient, battered steamer trunk. It was big enough to put a small pony inside. Once it had held her grandmother’s art supplies.
    Curious as to what the trunk held now, Jill tugged the lid open. The leather hinges were so old they were almost frayed through. She propped the lid against the rock wall and shined the light inside.
    No crusted brushes or hardened oils or color-splotched palettes. Instead, there were six rectangular parcels, standing on their sides like giant filing cards. Each parcel was wrapped in oilcloth.
    Jill felt a surprising sense of relief that everything hadn’t turned to fire and ashes. Something remained of Modesty’s heritage.
    And her own.
    I hope these packages are what I think they are. Even if they got me in some of the worst trouble of my life.
    Modesty really smacked me when she found me looking at them. How old was I? Ten? Eleven?
    Whatever, she was spitting mad.
    Now Modesty was dead and the paintings were Jill’s. She could look at them all she wanted. No more sneaking peeks at the forbidden fruit while Modesty and her mother were working cattle, mending fence, or opening and closing irrigation ditches for the little orchard, the big garden, and the pastures growing winter hay.
    Carefully Jill took the packages out and leaned them against the stone wall. Only then did she notice the leather portfolio. She knew from the time before her mother died that the portfolio was filled with old photos and papers—the homestead filing, proof of water rights, wedding invitations, birth and death announcements. All the things that people collected on the way through life.
    “Good. That should take care of any questions the lawyer might have.”
    Ignoring the portfolio, she eagerly took the large parcels inside the cabin. When she unwrapped the first, she found it was indeed two paintings. They were vivid, wild yet disciplined, intensely realized. Grinning, she unwrapped all the packages with the greed of a child at Christmas.
    She hadn’t seen the paintings since the time Modesty found her admiring them in a storage place in the attic of her great-aunt’s house. She’d smacked Jill silly, smacked her some more, then marched her grandniece back to the homestead and told her mother that the child wasn’t welcome at the ranch house anymore unless her mother was along.
    “Years ago,” Jill said with a bittersweet smile at how things had changed. She propped the paintings against the wall, marveling at their clean, unsentimental, yet profoundly emotional effect. “I wonder why Modesty didn’t want me looking at them. But then, she was a quirky, cranky bitch.”
    It felt good to say it aloud. Her mother had always told Jill that she should be grateful that Modesty had taken them in when they had no other safe place to go.
    Life isn’t as safe as it seems to the young.
    “Okay, can’t argue that,” Jill muttered. “But I was a kid, and I loved these paintings at first sight.”
    The Western landscapes were as big and wide and untamed as the land itself. The paintings captured the power of mountains, thebite of a snow wind, the sweep of the big sky, and the utter freedom of living on your own terms in a land that was rarely generous.
    When she was a child, the paintings had enchanted her.
    When she was an adult with degrees in art history and fine art, the paintings impressed her.
    Now, as then, she felt a deep kinship with the painter, who had captured Jill’s own spirit in oils. Maybe it was simply that all the landscapes had human figures in them—small in most cases, dwarfed in every case by the wild land—and somehow female.
    Jill hadn’t noticed that when she was a child. She did now, and wondered at it.
    “Wait. Weren’t there thirteen paintings?”
    Frowning, she went back to the trunk. Nothing was left in it but the scarred leather portfolio. She pulled it out and looked inside. No painting, but there was a letter addressed to Modesty Breck. It had been postmarked a week before Modesty died, and bore the return address of an art gallery in Park City, Utah, outside of Salt Lake City. Apparently her great-aunt had felt the letter was worthy of being added to the family mementos.
    Jill unfolded the heavy embossed stationery from the Art of the Historic West gallery and began reading.
    Dear Ms. Breck:
    Thank you for sending us the painting that you say has been in your family for so long. It is an interesting genre work. However, it is not signed.